AN EPILOGUE by The Editor; With Some Concluding Remarks and a Final Salutation by Stephen Macfarlane
THERE IS LITTLE I need add in my own person (J.K.C. writing). The story has been told and is ended: it ended on the day when I heard of the landing of the Comet in Scotland, and hurried by air, with the young people’s parents (Mike’s mother and father were also back in Britain by this time), from London to distant Pitlochry. It was a slight miscalculation on Dr. Kalkenbrenner’s part, at the point of entering Earth’s atmosphere, which guided the great vessel toward Britain rather than America, as had been his first intention; and when it grew apparent that a landing in this island would be preferable to an attempt to regain the original course, Dr. Kalkenbrenner wisely chose the reaches of the kingdom least inhabited, so that the risk of danger to our populace should be reduced to a minimum. Thus, then, the Scottish Highlands; with, in the event, that happy coincidence of landfall in reasonable proximity to Pitlochry, the site of Dr. McGillivray’s original experimental laboratory.
It will not be necessary, I fancy, to dwell upon the delight with which the young explorers were greeted by their parents, nor to describe the scene of reunion with Mr. Borrowdale and Miss Hogarth which was happily enacted when Roderick Mackellar arrived in the Highlands from Glasgow, pursuant on the telegram I had dispatched to him from London. It was a jovial party indeed which sat down to a communal meal that evening in Pitlochry’s largest hotel. Will you believe me when I tell you that before the night was out, Dr. Kalkenbrenner and Mackellar were discussing the first tentative plans for a return journey to Mars?—in all seriousness, I assure you, with us others joining in in like spirit.
What shape that Fourth Expedition may take it is impossible as yet to foresee. It will suffice that while this book has been in active preparation, the distinguished American Scientist, back once more in his own country (with his ebullient niece), has been engaged in much research, not only into improvements on the design of his spaceship itself, but—as Mr. Borrowdale has already said—on methods likely to be of service in countering the dangers from the new types of Martian inhabitants met by the explorers. He is also, I am told, working on a full technical account of the first great voyage of the Comet.
Until that volume appears—and these are my own concluding words—this brief book, for all its sketchy imperfections, must remain as the only account extant of the adventures encountered by the members of the Third Expedition. It is my own profound regret, as editor of all the contributed papers, that there has not been among these pages any true fragment from the pen of Dr. McGillivray himself. All others have been represented. He, alas, has not. I voice, in saying so, I think, only a fraction of the great sorrow with which, through all the passing months, we have viewed—have been forced to view—the fact of his tragic death. He went out indeed, that day, into the depths of the Yellow Cloud, like Captain Oates: to sacrifice himself to save his friends. Both he and the Martian Malu must have known from the start the fate awaiting them; but both still went out “like very gallant gentlemen” to embark on the only course possible to them to help their colleagues win back to Earth.
I will say no more: there is only one man fit to add, as it were, an epitaph in remembrance of a great adventurer. That man is the comrade who was closer to him than any other. Mr. MacFarlane has already made contribution of a kind to these pages, in the shape of the transcribed messages constituting the early chapters of our book. Here, at the end, I have asked him to add some words entirely his own; and so I retire to permit him to do so. In them it will be disclosed how it was, after all, that Dr. McGillivray was able courageously to go out that day with Malu and, at the last desperate moment, release the travelers from the influence of the Vivores and so ensure their safety.
He had no weapons—nothing. The travelers have told me that they found even his pistol abandoned in the trailer, simultaneously with their discovery of his final enigmatic note.
And yet—and yet!—he did have a weapon: one single gigantic weapon. His use of it will be described now by his friend and helper through all the tribulations of his last sojourn upon distant Mars.
He had one weapon indeed. He had invented it himself, long before. It was the Albatross!
Mr. MacFarlane:
What I write first, in describing the last journey of my friend Andrew McGillivray, is conjecture only. Yet in my heart I know it to be truth. I see all things clearly from the moment when, blind as he was, with Malu, as gallant an adventurer as himself, to help him, he set out from the trailer during the confusion of our rescue of Miss Hogarth and the two young people.
I see them both go forward into the Cloud; and he is sustained by an exaltation arising out of his great sacrifice. It gives him strength—the inconceivable strength he needs to combat the immense influence of the creature into whose sphere he must advance.
How long the journey took that day I do not know. Time mattered little—yet in another sense time mattered much. Looking back, and in a calculation based on the length of our own journey across the plain and all that subsequently befell, I believe that his progress was slow. Physically, it must have been slow, in his blindness—he required Malu’s assistance for every step of the way. Mentally, it must have been slower still; for in another sense each step of the way must have been fought for most bitterly against the compelling power of Discophora as he neared the Albatross.
But he was sustained by his own faith, his own great strength of will. They conquered all things: he was inspired beyond all normal human ability by his tremendous purpose. He was able, in his exaltation, to resist Discophora in a way that neither of us had ever been able to resist before. I, who was with him in the early days of our subjection, who know the full power of that single creature in the Canal, I only have any conception of the gigantic effort it must have cost to reach the spaceship.
He did reach her—at last he did reach her; and set laboriously to mount within her, again each step a battle and a conquest. Perhaps, who knows, Discophora was able to send against him those few of the Terrible Ones who may have survived our own attack with the flame guns on the plain. If so, he must somehow have defeated them. Perhaps Malu, armed throughout with his deadly silica sword, was able to help.
But whatever befell, they won to the ship as she lay there in the great enclosure. And so she too approached the moment of her last journey—she who had traveled so far, accomplished so much: the first ship in all human history ever to reach the Angry Planet.
She lay on her underside, flat upon the floor of the extending forest. We had had no time when, long, long before, we had dragged her across the plain, to erect beneath her, as we had intended, such an improvised launching ramp as we had built at the time of her first sojourn on Mars; and it will be recalled that, unlike the Comet, the Albatross required a launching ramp from which to leap forward into space.
I see my friend in the little cabin we both had known so well, had lived in for so long; and it must have been, this moment, the very moment when we ourselves, so many, many miles away, were setting forward in the tractor on our journey to the Comet.
What his thoughts were I have no far knowledge. He had little time, perhaps, for thought at all, beyond the mighty thought of what he intended to do. Somehow, through a last incalculable effort of will, he was able to achieve what he and I had often talked of trying to achieve in our more lucid moments during captivity—yet had always, in our thralldom, been prevented from achieving.
As the Albatross lay on the forest floor, the forward tuyère nozzles pointed straight toward the marshy lair of the great Brain. In a conflict of intelligences far, far more bitter in such a moment than anything that we were experiencing on the plain, my friend reached out his hand to the control lever which would release a blasting of rocket fuel from those tuyères in the great ship’s prow. He wrenched the lever down; and I hear the immense explosive rush of sound there must have been as that deadly sword of pure flame leaped out to scorch and annihilate our enemy. I hear, in nightmare, the shrill but silent scream of agony which must have filled the minds of our two lost friends as the monster before them shriveled and perished. I experience, with them, the great wave of desperate relief which must have swept over them when at last, after so long, so long, the thralldom ended and the whole vast Canal before them veritably died at the moment of its mighty Brain’s own death.
And now there still remained the last bright flaming voyage of the dying ship. They knew, our two friends knew, as they lingered there before her control panel, that she would never again plunge into open space: without a launching ramp she could not. But, in the driving impulse from the great reserves of her fuel-tanks, she could sear and scorch her way across the very surface of the plain, ripping herself open in the intolerable friction, destroying herself utterly in a wild out bursting of explosive effort.
With Malu again to guide, and in the freedom—the temporary freedom only—from control (for shortly he would again be subjected to the very concerted influence to which we, so far away, were being subjected), the master of the spaceship set to guiding her in a vast sweeping white-hot arc to where he knew the Comet lay. He guided her on the plain in exactly the way in which he was accustomed to guide her in space: by controlling the jetting force from the various tuyères in her prow, her stern, along her silvery sides.
Within, as they plunged and slithered forward at a speed beyond all imagining, the heat must have been an insufferable agony. Such a journey could not last—could not, could not; and none knew it better than he did. But it could last long enough—just long enough—and upon that, at the end of all, he counted.
So then, as I stood by the doorway of the Comet, my eyes upon the vast extending scene below, I saw him at the end of all indeed—and realized on the instant what his plan from the first had been; as I have, in this brief final account, described it. My ears were filled with the great rushing explosion of the Albatross’ mighty engines in that last great death plunge. I saw her searing fiery track across the plain—saw her plunge, plunge, plunge into the very heart below us of the deadly intelligences holding us from our own leap into space. She circled in a sparkling crescent through the growths beneath, ripped almost to pieces at the last, her hulk incandescent, life within her no longer possible—shriveled and destroyed as surely as she was shriveling and destroying the pulsing Brains controlling us.
And all, all burst at the end, burst up to the very sky in a gigantic rose of flame mingling with the flame from our own hot blast as the influence broke that held us back—as the great Brains, screaming, died beneath us and released us. All, all perished as we soared above the final immense convulsion, as the Albatross, and all within her, shattered to a million white-hot fragments.
My friend, my friend! I have looked out through many silent nights to that small dying star where you and your brave companion lie. I shall return—never fear. Someday, some distant day I shall return; if only to mark, before I die, your lonely gallant grave.