Wonder of the Worlds

by Sesh Heri

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  I turned around and looked out through the pilothouse windows. The aerial conductors—those fancy flagpole things—were bent back and f lattened against the roof of the airship. “Oh, no!” Czito said.

  “It could be worse,” Tesla said. “They could have been broken off com- pletely. I think they can be bent back into position. I’ll have to go out there and work on them. What kind of atmosphere do we have out there?” Czito looked at a gauge on the control board, and said, “The atmospheric pressure is seven millibars, and there’s about ninety-five percent carbon diox- ide out there with small percentages of nitrogen, argon, oxygen, and water.” Tesla said, “Completely unbreathable. It’s practically a vacuum. I’ll have to go out in a pressure suit. Mark, open the switch for the main engine. Mr. Czito, come with me.” I opened the engine switch and Tesla and Czito went below to the lower deck. Tesla got into a pressure suit again. In a few minutes I heard a rush of air on the lower deck and a metallic mesh of gears. Then a clang sounded through- out the airship and we saw Tesla dressed in his pressure suit f loat out over the top of the airship. He landed on the ship’s roof and stood before one of the bent aerial conductors, and then he flew back to the airship’s door. “What’s he goin’ to do?” Houdini asked. I shrugged my shoulders. “Damned if I know. I just hope to hell he does something.”

  Once again I heard a metallic clang and mesh of gears below. In a minute Tesla came up the stairs of the pilothouse. He was still dressed in the pressure suit, but he had removed his helmet and knapsack. Czito came in behind him. Tesla said, “The conductors have sustained severe damage, but I think I can get them straightened back up and functioning again. I’m going to need some help. I want Mr. Czito to remain here in the ship. Mr. Ade? Would you care to accompany me outside?”

  “In one of those diving suits?” Ade asked. “All right. You’ll have to tell me what to do.” “Certainly,” Tesla said. “Come with me.” Tesla, Ade, and Czito started out. Houdini came up behind them. “What about me?” Houdini asked. “Don’t you need me to do something?” “Yes, Ehrich,” Tesla said, “I need you to remain inside.” Tesla turned and went down the steps, followed by Ade and Czito. “Aw,” Houdini said, scratching the back of his head. He looked over at me. “Mr. Tesla still thinks I’m a little kid,” Houdini said. “Well, I ain’t no little kid. I ain’t! Look at this!”

  Houdini took off his coat and rolled up his right sleeve all the way up his arm and pointed to a place on his shoulder. “Ya see that?” Houdini asked.

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  “No,” I said, “I don’t see anything.” “Right there,” Houdini said. “That little white scar.” “Maybe,” I said. “I guess, if you say so.”

  “It’s there. You could see it if you’d look closer. That’s a gunshot wound. I’ve been shot—shot and shot at.” “Do tell.”

  “I was running for my life.” “Why?” “Some people said I’d stolen some chickens.” “Had you?” “Not me. No. I never stole nothin’ my whole life. I was just passin’ through, just passin’ through, lookin’ at the scenery.” “What happened to the chickens?” “I have no idea. Somebody else must’ve pinched them. But they tried to lay it on me. Now tell me honestly, Mr. Clemens, don’t you think a fellow who can out-run a bullet is someone who can stand the test of danger?” “I should certainly think so. I wish I could out-run bullets like that. But perhaps it’s just as well. I might have gone down the wrong road and become a chicken thief—not that I’m saying you were a chicken thief—I just probably lack your forbearance.” “My what?”

  “Your strength of will.” “Oh.”

  I looked over at Lillie. She was looking out the pilothouse windows with an anxious look on her face. I turned back to Houdini. “So,” I said, “Houdini. That is an unusual name.”

  “It’s a stage name,” Houdini said. “My real name is Weiss, but I don’t use it anymore. I’m Houdini now. Houdini means ‘Like Houdin.’” “Houdin?” I asked. “You mean, the sculptor?”

  “I don’t know nothin’ about no sculptor. Houdin was the world’s first mod- ern magician. Robert Houdin.” Lillie looked over at us and said, “That is pronounced Robert-Houdin.”

  “Yes,” Houdini said, “that is the French way of saying his name—Ro-bear Hoo-dan. I know, I know. I know lots of languages: French, German, Hungar- ian, English.” “You’ve studied?” Lillie asked.

  “Oh, yes,” Houdini said. “And taught.” “And where was that?” she asked. “In my father’s college,” Houdini said. “Your father had a college?” I asked. “Yes,” Houdini said. “It was a small religious college. You wouldn’t have heard of it.”

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  “I see,” I said. “So you want to be like Houdin?”

  “Like and not like,” Houdini said. “I’m going to be greater than Houdin. Houdini is a master not just of magic, but all things mysterious. But in magic, Houdini is the King of Cards. For example: Houdini can do this.” The boy magician reached out in the air with his right hand with his right sleeve still rolled up to his shoulder. He wiggled his fingers, closed his hand into a fist, and when he opened it again—there was a deck of cards! He spread the cards out to form a fan, and then closed them up again, closed his hand over the deck, opened his hand—and the deck was gone!

  I said, “I’ve seen magicians and card sharps disappear one card, but never a whole deck!” “That’s a new wrinkle in the trick that is all Houdini. Nobody ever catches wise to where I get the deck.” “There they are!” Lillie gasped.

  Something of far greater interest than a card trick appeared outside the windows: it was Tesla and Ade f lying up over the airship, both of them dressed in air pressure suits. Ade waved to us in the pilothouse and we waved back. Tesla carried a box of tools in one hand, and he descended to the roof of the airship and stood up on it. Ade came down slowly and stood beside Tesla. They began bringing out a steel cable from the tool box and a metal device with a windlass attached to it. Ade walked back along the rooftop of the ship reeling out the steel cable, and then stopped. Tesla came up next to him, and the two of them attached the windlass to the roof of the ship. This done, Tesla took the loose end of the steel cable and brought it over to the top of the aerial conductor and attached the cable to it with a metal hook. Tesla waved his hand and Ade began winding up the windlass. The aerial conductor began being drawn and bent upward by the retracting steel cable. Tesla watched the place where the aerial conductor was mounted on the top of the ship and kept waving his hand at Ade who kept winding up the windlass. The aerial conductor continued to rise; it had reached an angle of about forty-five degrees. Ade stopped turning the windlass, and then started up again. In another minute, the aerial conductor stood straight up once again.

  Tesla removed the steel cable, flew over the rooftop with it, and attached the cable to the other aerial conductor. Ade began turning the windlass again until he had brought the second aerial conductor to its original upright posi- tion. Tesla removed the cable and f lew over to Ade. The two of them removed the windlass from the top of the ship, drew in the steel cable, and then f lew back to the door of the airship. “That was slick!” Houdini said.

  “Yes,” I said, “let’s hope it was slick enough to get the ship f lying again.” Again we heard a metallic clang, a meshing of gears and a rush of air. A few moments passed and then I heard the excited voice of George Ade. He

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  was saying something to Czito, but I couldn’t make out what it was. Lillie went down the steps of the pilothouse and went to the hatch on the upper deck and looked down through it. Czito came up through the hatch, followed by Ade still dressed in his pressure suit with his helmet and knapsack removed. “It’s amazing out there!” Ade said to Lillie. “You wouldn’t believe it! And that f lying machine of Mr. Tesla’s—it’s incredible!” Houdini said, “I wish Mr. Tesla would let me try it out!” “Mr. Houdini,” Lillie said. “Houdini—just Houdini! Didn’t I already tell ya?”

  “Mr. Houdini!” Lillie said
, “This is not a game! This is not a holiday! This is not one of your magic tricks!” Lillie went back up to the pilothouse.

  Houdini looked over at Ade, and asked, “What’d I say? What’d I say?” “Nothing,” Ade replied. “It was nothing you said.” Tesla came up through the hatch; he was also still dressed in his pressure suit. Tesla said, “I think the conductors will operate. Let’s give them a try, Mark.” We all came up into the pilothouse and I closed the switch for the main engine. The familiar undulating hum from the ship’s engines vibrated through- out the ship. I pulled the pilot’s wheel back and pressed the accelerator pedal.

  The airship shot up into the sky, and I could see the ice plain drop away. I looped the ship back around and we looked down at the site of our crash: a long trench—perhaps a quarter of a mile long—ending in a dark, gaping hole in the ice. No one said anything as we looked down. We searched the skies north, south, east, and west for some sign of the Martian airship, but there was none; we presumed that the Martians had left us for dead down there in the ice and gone on for wherever they were bound. Tesla believed it was somewhere underneath the surface of the planet. After I circled the ship about the crash site, I turned us north. In a short while, we left the ice field behind and began f lying back over that vast field of craters where we had nearly crashed. Now those craters seemed far less men- acing. I took us up a little higher, about five thousand feet. The craters seemed to flatten out at that height. The land itself seemed unvarying in its f latness. Below, we were f lying over a reddish field of volcanic rock broken up every- where with craters formed by some unknown process. At that time, I did not know whether the craters were volcanic cones or the impact holes created by the collision of asteroids. In a short while, Tesla would explain that they were the latter. I did not stop to speculate on geology, but sped over the planet’s surface, all the while watching the tracking machine, hoping to see its light bulb let out a single f lash. I pushed the airship forward at a speed of ten thousand miles an hour. Czito would give me course corrections just about every minute, for Tesla

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  wanted us to travel due north up the zero degree meridian of the planet. I followed the meridian in a sinuous trajectory, veering off course by no more than ten degrees at any point.

  After a few minutes we came upon a vast field of blackish-gray rock. This was unmistakably volcanic and reminded me of regions on the Island of Ha- waii, but this volcanic f loor stretched on and on for what seemed to be endless miles; it rolled and undulated to the horizon’s edge. Now the sky, which had been a pale blue, turned yellow-red again on the horizon. We were approaching another dust storm.

  “I’m afraid Schiaparelli will be disappointed,” Tesla said, looking down on the starboard side of the pilothouse. “Dawes’ Forked Bay is not a bay at all— only the end of this outcropping of rock.” Just as Tesla said that, we left the volcanic rock field behind and passed over a sandy desert that was colored gray, ochre, and rust-red. I watched the tracking machine; its light bulb remained dark. “Still no sign,” I said to Tesla, nodding at the tracking machine.

  Tesla said, “Continue on to the North Pole. Then shift sixty degrees longi- tude and return to the south.” We flew onward across the ruddy desert. A few more silent minutes passed— then: away off on the edge of the sand, in a soft, pinkish light, we saw several shapes that looked like the sharp roofs of tents, and George Ade said, “Look! Pyramids! Just like the pyramids of Egypt!” “Bring the ship about!” Tesla shouted with a sudden, tremendous excitement.

  I stopped the ship in mid-air, turned her around back to the south, and then stepped away from the wheel and joined everyone at the windows. We all looked down. The pyramids were about five thousand feet below us and rising up out of the desert sand off to the east. There were about seven of them grouped together in a kind of city plat. Some of them were immense and looked to be about a mile long on each of their sides. The others were probably about the size of the Great Pyramid at Giza, but they were dwarfed by the giants looming over them. Tesla took out the spyglass and looked through it. “Ruins,” Tesla said sadly. “They are all ruins.”

  Tesla gave the spyglass to Czito, went to the tracking machine, and pointed its steel rod downward in the direction of the pyramids. The light bulb on top of the tracking machine remained dark. “Nothing,” Tesla said in an empty, hollow voice. He looked over at Czito and asked, “What is our position?” Czito went over to the viewing glass on the control board and looked down at it. “We are at forty point six degrees north latitude, ten point four degrees west longitude,” Czito said.

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  Tesla stepped to the center of the pilothouse. He looked straight ahead, and did not say a word. He held this attitude for about a minute, and then I felt the urge to say something. “Tesla?” I asked, “Are you all right?” “Sh!” Czito whispered at me. “He’s thinking!”

  Tesla continued to stand there. One by one, Lillie West, George Ade, and Houdini turned to look at Tesla, and then we all looked back and forth at each other. Finally Czito said in a low tone, “Mr. Tesla is visualizing.”

  Another minute or two passed. Tesla did not move one muscle, did not blink one eyelid, did not twitch one hair on his mustache. It seemed that he had turned into a wax-works figure. Yet, somehow, uncannily, I sensed that his brain was rapidly processing great volumes of information. I asked Czito, “How long does this go on when he strikes one of these attitudes?”

  Czito said, “I have seen him stand like this without moving for a whole day and night without eating or drinking a thing.” “And what are we to do in the meantime?” I asked.

  “Wait,” Czito said, “wait. I do not advise disturbing him while he is in this state.” I went up to Tesla and tried to look up into his eyes and noticed that his pupils were dilated so that they looked very large and black. Houdini came up beside me and also looked up at Tesla. “I saw him go into one of these trances once when I delivered a telegram to him,” Houdini said. “I went away and came back two hours later, and he was still starin’.” Czito said. “All we can do is wait and hope he comes out of it soon.”

  We stood there a few moments longer, and then we all turned back to the windows to look down at the distant pyramids looming up from the sands below. And then, as I stood there studying the pyramids through the spyglass, Tesla finally came up for air. “Mr. Czito!” Tesla said, instantly coming out of his trance, “This is extraordinary ! We have come upon the ancient temple grounds of Khahera, the very place from which the planet derived its name, ‘Word-in-Flesh’. This place was carefully sited upon the surface of the Martian globe to produce a number of physical and spiritual effects. Mark, take us down toward those pyramids. I want a closer look.” I went over to the pilot’s wheel and steered us down toward the surface of the desert. As we descended toward the pyramids, the place opened up and spread out toward us. I took our airship down between the structures that lay ahead. The tallest pyramids were nearly half a mile high; at our 2,500 feet altitude, their tops were abreast the pilothouse windows. I slowed the airship

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  down so that we passed by the great stone masses at a walking pace. Tesla stood at the pilothouse windows studying the surface of the pyramids through the spyglass.

  These immense pyramids were somewhat similar to the Egyptian ones on Earth; but there were striking differences. Most notably, some of these pyra- mids appeared to have five sides. Like the Egyptian pyramids, these were constructed of stone blocks, but the sizes of these stone blocks were much greater than their earthly counterparts. I would estimate that the average size of the stone blocks making up the largest Martian pyramids was one hundred feet across! Some of the blocks were even larger. These blocks dwarfed the giant stone blocks of Baalbek on Earth. Unlike the Great Pyramid of Giza, these Martian pyramids still retained their outer casing. I cannot say of what kind of stone this outer casing consisted. At certain angles of viewing the stone of the pyramids took on an almost metallic sheen. The color of th
e stone itself was probably a dullish gray like the color of lead, but I cannot say for certain because most of the stone surfaces seemed to be almost entirely covered over with a thin layer of reddish-brown sand. In places where the sand was blown away these patchy areas revealed the dull-gray sheen of the stones underneath. Although these outer casings were intact on the pyramids, they were not with- out damage. Covering all the pyramids were countless pock markings of cra- ters large and small. The great drifts of sand massed along their bases and over their walls gave these structures the appearance of natural sandstone moun- tains. The bases of the pyramids were all buried in sand and the uneven desert f loor suggested that long ago none of the sand was there, but rather some kind of pavement, and no doubt that pavement was still there now, somewhere below the sand. I brought the airship down into the very midst of the Martian monuments. Directly below us in an open space between the pyramids lay a mound with four or five rectangular openings cut into it. I looked off the larboard bow of the airship and caught sight of an immense structure that had been severely damaged by some great force. I motioned for Tesla to look at it, and, when he turned to train his spyglass on it, everyone else turned to look larboard as well. This structure was not a pyramid exactly, but something similar; exactly what it was originally would be hard to say. The two sides of it that we could see had been exploded, collapsed, and then melted away be erosion. I could glimpse a crater on its eastern side. The outer casings had been torn away by some unimaginable force revealing here and there in deep crevices of over- hanging cliffs the interior structure with stone beams some fifty feet thick! We could look down through this vast structure of stone beams, and, except for its scale, imagine that we were looking down into the steel beam construction of a Chicago skyscraper.

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  Beyond the pyramids a few miles distant to the east lay a hill about a mile and a half long and perhaps 1,000 feet high. At first I paid no attention to it, but Tesla turned his spyglass to it and stood there looking at it. “Mark,” Tesla said, still looking through the spyglass, “take us out over that prominence.” I brought the airship on across the sandy plain at an altitude of about 2,000 feet. As we approached the hill, I noticed that the outline of its crest had an appearance that was vaguely similar to the reclining profile of a human face. I thought nothing of this; for I have seen many hills and moun- tains on Earth that looked like a face or an animal or some other recogniz- able thing. These kinds of features on Earth I always found to be a freak of geology, so I assumed this hill to be one more of these accidental formations. But as we drew closer to the hill, it became suddenly obvious that this was not the work of nature. This hill was a mile and a half long sculpture of a face. At just a little over 1,000 feet above the surface of this colossal sculpture we were so close to it that we could see the details of its stony eyes staring back up at us, the iris of the right eye shaped like a cone composed of facets. It seemed that this sculpture was made out of the same leaden gray material as the pyramids, and, like the pyramids, this sculpture was covered over with a thin layer of reddish-brown desert sand. The whole face of the colossus was scatter-shot with tiny craters and in many places its surface was broken with chasms, collapsed, and eroded. This colossal head was made wearing a hel- met that resembled to me the cap of a French Foreign Legionnaire without the bill; that is, it seemed to be a hat with a curtain hanging down on either side of the face, or maybe it wasn’t curtains, maybe it was long hair, or something else. There were carved details in the headdress which suggested that it was once encrusted with some kind of jewels—and what jewels they must have been, for they each would have been the size of a house—or perhaps a castle! The mouth of the figure seemed to have fangs rather than human-looking teeth. The expression of this colossus was fierce, and I found it unnerving to look eye to eye with the lifeless form. “Take us up higher,” Tesla said.