The Map of the Sky

by Félix J Palma

  “I thought as much. I have read many of his stories,” the doctor said, gazing at his illustrious patient with compassion. Then he turned to Reynolds. “Mr. Poe arrived at the hospital in a complete daze, unaware of who carried him here. Since then he has not stopped calling your name and insisting he is being pursued by a monster.”

  Reynolds nodded, smiling wistfully, as though accustomed to his friend’s ravings.

  “Did he say anything else?” he asked without looking at the doctor.

  “No, he simply repeats the same thing over and over.”

  As though confirming what the doctor had said, the gunner cried out once more: “It’s coming for us, Reynolds. The monster is coming for us . . .”

  The explorer gave a troubled sigh, then looked at the people gathered around Allan’s bed.

  “Could you leave me alone with him, gentlemen?” he ordered rather than asked. But then, seeing the doctor’s reluctance, he added, “It will only take a moment, Doctor. I would like to say good-bye to my friend in private.”

  “The patient hasn’t much longer to live,” protested the doctor.

  “In that case let’s not waste any more time,” Reynolds replied brusquely, looking straight at him.

  The young doctor nodded resignedly and asked the others to follow him.

  “We shall wait outside. Don’t be long.”

  When he was alone, Reynolds finally approached Allan’s bed.

  “I’m here, Allan,” he said, taking his hand.

  The gunner tried hard to focus, staring at him with glassy eyes.

  “It’s coming for us, Reynolds!” he cried once more. “It’s going to kill us . . . Oh dear God . . . It has come from Mars to kill us all!”

  “No, Allan, it’s over now,” Reynolds assured him in an anguished voice, casting a sidelong glance at the door. “We killed it. Don’t you remember? We did it, we defeated the monster.”

  Allan gazed about him distractedly, and Reynolds realized the gunner was not seeing the room in the hospital.

  “Where am I? I’m cold, Reynolds, so awfully cold . . .”

  Reynolds took off his coat and draped it over Allan’s frame, which was still lying on the ice, in temperatures of forty degrees below zero.

  “You’re going to get well, Allan, have no fear. You’ll get better and they will send you home. And you will be able to carry on writing. You will write many books, Allan, just wait and see.”

  “But I’m so cold, Reynolds . . . ,” the gunner murmured, a little calmer. “In fact I’ve always been cold. It comes from my soul, my friend.” The explorer nodded, tears in his eyes. The gunner seemed to have regained his sanity for a moment: his mind had somehow come back from the icy wastes and once more occupied that body shivering on a hospital bed. Allan’s increasing serenity made Reynolds uneasy. “I think that’s why I joined that accursed ship, just to find out whether anywhere in the world was colder than inside me.” The gunner gave a feeble laugh that turned into a dreadful coughing fit. Reynolds watched him convulsing on the bed, fearing the violent jolts would shatter his fragile bones. When they finally abated, Allan lay, mouth open, gulping for air that seemed to get stuck in some narrow duct in his body before it could reach his lungs.

  “Allan!” Reynolds cried, shaking him gently, as though afraid he might break. “Allan, please . . .”

  “I’m leaving you, my friend. I’m going to the place where the monsters dwell . . . ,” the gunner murmured in a faint whisper.

  Desperate, Reynolds watched Allan’s neck tense and his nose seem to grow horribly sharp. His lips were turning a dark shade of purple. He understood his friend was dying. Allan choked with a bitter sob, but managed to croak, “May God have mercy on my wretched soul . . .”

  “Have no fear, Allan. We killed it,” Reynolds repeated, stroking his friend’s brow with the tenderness of a mother trying to convince her child there are no monsters lurking in the dark. He realized that these would be the last words his friend ever heard. “There are no monsters where you are going. Not anymore.”

  Allan gave a feeble smile. Then he looked away, fixing his gaze somewhere on the ceiling, and left his tortured existence with a gentle sigh, almost of relief. Reynolds was surprised at how discreet death was: he had expected to see the gunner’s soul rise up from his body like a dove taking to the air. More out of bewilderment than politeness, he remained beside the bed for a few moments, still holding the gunner’s pale hand in his. Finally he laid it on Allan’s chest with the utmost care.

  “I hope you are at last able to rest in peace, my friend,” he said.

  He covered Allan’s face and left the room.

  “He’s dead,” he murmured as he walked past Doctor Moran and his students, who were standing outside the door. “But his work will be immortal.”

  As he found his way out of the hospital, Reynolds could not help wondering whether Edgar Allan Poe’s work would have been different had he not encountered the monster. No one could know, he said to himself with a shrug. On the steps of the hospital, the explorer stared at the radiant morning before him, the carriages jolting over the cobblestones, the hawkers’ cries, the people strolling up and down the pavements, all of them making up the vibrant symphony of life, and he let out a sigh. In the end, the monster from the stars had killed his friend. He had to acknowledge it had beaten them. Yet rather than filling him with hatred or fear, it merely served to strengthen his terrible feeling of loneliness. He was now the sole survivor of the Annawan, the only person who knew what had really happened in the Antarctic. Could he remain the sole guardian of that secret? Of course he could, he told himself, because he had no choice. Besides, what solace could it bring him now to share that secret with anyone else? And with whom could he share it? With his practical, adorable Josephine? Whom would it profit to know they were not the sole inhabitants of the universe? The coachman, the flower seller on the corner, the innkeeper unloading barrels on the far side of the street? No, none of them would be better off knowing that from the depths of the universe, intelligences greater than theirs were observing the Earth with greedy eyes, perhaps even now planning how to conquer it. As he had discovered, such information was worthless and only brought suffering to those who possessed it. Whatever had to happen would happen, he concluded with his relentless pragmatism, putting on his hat and descending the steps. He would not be the one to deprive the world of its innocent enjoyment of the astonishing beauty of a starry sky.

  But for the next nine years at least, the length of time in which Reynolds was able to check the news, the Martians did not revisit the Earth. Afterward, of course, Reynolds could not know what might happen. Perhaps his children or his grandchildren would see those strange flying machines descend from the sky. But that would no longer be his responsibility, nor that of Allan, MacReady, the brave Peters, or any of the shipmates who had lost their lives in the Antarctic attempting to kill the demon from the stars. It would fall to others to fight them. He and his companions had played their part. After his death, there would be no man left alive who, while his wife gazed up at the night sky straining to make out the constellations, would look down surreptitiously at the strange burn mark on his hand, afraid that if he stared into the abyss of space, something would stare back at him from the other side.

  What Reynolds could not know was that more than twenty years after his death, another expedition to the South Pole would stumble upon the burnt-out hull of the missing Annawan. They would find its charred remains ominously surrounded by skeletons, and at the foot of an enormous range of icebergs they would discover an amazing flying machine entombed in the snow. But the most astonishing discovery of all would be a strange creature buried in the ice, a creature unlike any they had ever seen on Earth, and which in their eagerness to examine they would transport back to London in the greatest secrecy, where Wells would discover it. For let us not forget that in this tale no mysterious sailor by the name of Griffin ever boarded the Annawan. And therefore, no one blasted th
e Martian to smithereens. The monster from the stars simply sank into the Antarctic ice, on a remote isle, which, after Jeremiah Reynolds’s marriage, would appear on the maps as Josephine Island.

  PART TWO

  IS THERE STILL A SMILE ON YOUR FACE, INTREPID READER, OR HAVE THE HORRORS OF THE FROZEN ANTARCTIC LEFT YOU QUAKING IN YOUR COMFORTABLE CHAIR?

  IF YOU YEARN FOR FURTHER ADVENTURES, I INVITE YOU TO PLUNGE WITH YOUR CUSTOMARY FEARLESSNESS INTO THE PAGES THAT FOLLOW, WHERE YOU WILL WITNESS A GENUINE MARTIAN INVASION. THIS TIME, I SHALL NOT ALERT YOU TO THE TERRIFYING EVENTS AWAITING YOU. BUT THIS MUCH I WILL SAY: IF YOU PAY ATTENTION YOU WILL GLIMPSE THE VERY BEST AND WORST OF HUMANITY.

  THOSE OF A SENSITIVE NATURE MAY PREFER A LESS DISTURBING KIND OF READING MATTER.

  “IT’S LUDICROUS OF YOU TO SUSPECT ME OF HAVING SOME CONNECTION TO THE MARTIANS SIMPLY BECAUSE I WROTE A NOVEL ANNOUNCING THEIR INVASION!” WELLS SUDDENLY DECLARED, AS IF TO HIMSELF.

  THE AUTHOR’S OUTBURST MADE THE INSPECTOR JUMP.

  “AS LUDICROUS AS SOMEONE RE-CREATING A MARTIAN INVASION TO WIN A WOMAN’S HEART?” HE RETORTED WITH A GRIN.

  XIV

  EMMA HARLOW WOULD HAVE LIKED THE MOON TO BE inhabited so that she could stroke the silky manes of the unicorns grazing in its meadows, contemplate the two-legged beavers building their dams, or be borne aloft by a man with bat’s wings, and gaze down upon the lunar surface dotted with thick forests, oceans, and purple quartz pyramids. However, on that radiant spring morning in 1898, Emma, like all her contemporaries, already knew that the Moon was uninhabited, thanks to a new generation of powerful telescopes, which, together with numerous other scientific inventions, had robbed the world of the magic it had once possessed. And yet, only sixty years before, fantastical creatures beyond Man’s wildest dreams had inhabited the Moon.

  In the summer of 1835, long before Emma had been born, a man had looked at the Moon and thought it might make a good repository for the magic that human beings needed to make life bearable, the magic that was being slowly but surely eroded by progress. Since no one could examine it and therefore prove otherwise, the Moon seemed like the perfect place for dreams, that powerful restorative of humanity. And who was this champion of dreams? He was Richard Adams Locke, an English gentleman who, after graduating from Cambridge, had moved to New York, where he became chief editor of the New York Sun. As regards his appearance, he had a pockmarked face, which scarcely deterred the ladies, who were attracted by his willowy, noble bearing. In addition, his eyes gave off a calm luminosity, a serene sparkle characteristic of those lofty spirits who invariably act as a guiding light to others. However, nothing could have been further from the truth. For Locke was not the sort of person whose eyes were windows onto his soul: concealed beneath the English gentleman’s benign, almost priestly appearance was a truly mischievous spirit. What did Locke see when he cast his majestically solemn gaze over the world? He saw Man’s folly, his astonishing inability to learn from his mistakes, the grotesque world he had built up around him, and, above all, his excessive zeal to imbue the most preposterous things in life with a transcendent meaning. And although Locke secretly delighted in all that, such collective madness also made his blood boil when he realized it was not very flattering to the species of which, unhappily, he was a member.

  He had left England for America convinced that after a difficult birth and a few faltering first steps, the United States had produced a nation guided by the light of reason and universal freedom. He had hoped it would represent the ultimate flowering of everything that the old, tired Europe had failed to achieve, even after the auspicious rupture brought about by the Enlightenment and the French Revolution. However, to his astonishment, he had found a country infected with religiosity, where the customary European superstitions flourished side by side with a host of newfangled ones. Was America discovered merely so that it could be turned into a pale imitation of England? Locke wondered, greatly troubled. For the new society seemed as convinced as the old one that everything visible to the naked eye bore the mark of God’s Creation. The imminent arrival of Halley’s comet was no exception: who but the Creator could organize a fireworks display of that magnitude in the September skies? And so, numerous telescopes had been set up in parks throughout New York, to enable everyone to admire God’s pyrotechnic manifestation of His own existence, to the delight of His faithful followers. Contradictory as it might sound, that faith lived side by side with a blind belief in progress and in scientists, with the result that anyone proposing the first crazy idea that came into his head was liable to be taken seriously. Such was the case with the Reverend Thomas Dick, whose works enjoyed great popularity in the United States around the time Locke first arrived there. In one of his most successful books, the Reverend had calculated that there were 21,891,974,404,480 inhabitants in the solar system, a number that may appear somewhat exaggerated, although perhaps less so if we take into account that according to the same calculation, the Moon alone had a population of 4,200 million. Those and other foolishnesses convinced Locke that the Americans were a people in dire need of being taught a lesson. And who was better placed to do that than he? Thus, Locke’s initial intention was less to care for the dreams of humanity than to teach his new neighbors a lesson, and to amuse himself as much as possible in the process. He decided to invent a sensational story, which would poke fun at this and the many other outrageous astronomical theories that had hitherto been published, thus obliging the American public to reflect upon the flimsiness of its beliefs. It would also boost sales of the Sun, the best platform for his scheme he could have hoped for, as the newspaper boasted a mass circulation, distributed as it was not through subscription but by an army of children who in exchange for a miserable cent went round the streets advertising its lurid headlines at the tops of their voices.

  And what might that story be? Locke was aware that a scientist by the name of John Herschel, son of William Herschel, the famous astronomer royal to the court of King George, was in South Africa that August carrying out astronomical observations. Two years earlier, he had set sail from England to the Cape of Good Hope with a battery of optical instruments, in order to set up an observatory and catalog the stars, nebulae, and other objects of the southern skies, in the hope of completing the survey of the northern heavens undertaken by his father. But there had been no news of the astronomer in two years, and from where he was now, communication with New York took at least two weeks. This would give Locke more than enough time to bombard the American public with a series of articles listing Herschel’s numerous alleged discoveries, without the astronomer knowing or being able to refute them.

  Locke immediately set to work, his usually solemn face wearing a playful grin, and on August 21 his first report appeared under the heading “Important Astronomical Discoveries.” The article announced that during a visit to New York, an erudite Scotsman had provided the Sun with a copy of the Edinburgh Journal of Science, which contained a fragment of the travel diary of Doctor Andrew Grant, a fictitious collaborator of Herschel’s. The first section of Locke’s article was taken up with a description of the wondrous telescope built by the astronomer, with its massive lens that could capture objects as small as eighteen inches on the Moon’s surface and project them onto the observatory wall. Thanks to Herschel’s brilliant invention, he and other astronomers had been able to study every planet in the solar system, and many others in adjacent ones. It had also enabled them to elaborate a convincing theory about comets and to solve almost every problem of mathematical astronomy. Having laid the groundwork, the subject of Locke’s second article was the Moon itself. On careful examination of its surface, the astronomers had been able to make out an area of dark green rock and what looked like a field of rose-colored poppies. While exploring Riccioli’s Mare Nubium, they had discovered beautiful white sandy beaches dotted with strange trees and purple quartz pyramids more than sixty feet tall. And then, as they continued peering through that extraordinary lens, they had noticed stra
nge stirrings of life. Astonished, they glimpsed the first animals. Herds of creatures resembling bison filled the Moon’s plains, and crowning its gentle hills, like watery blue etchings, were a few graceful unicorns. In his third article, taking the hoax to an extreme, Locke continued his zoological classification of lunar species. He described Herschel and Grant’s mixture of shock and fascination as they contemplated a dwarf reindeer, a horned bear, and even some charming two-legged beavers busily building wooden huts with plumes of smoke billowing from their tall chimneys.

  Thanks to Locke’s articles, sales of the Sun superseded those of the Times of London. However, he was not done yet. His fourth article contained the most surprising revelation of all: the astronomers had seen the Moon’s inhabitants, whom they named Homo vespertilio, or bat man. According to their description, these creatures were about three feet tall, covered in a coppery coat of fur, and equipped with membranous wings that reached from their shoulders to their knees. With their wings folded, they had the same elegant bearing as humans, and with them spread, they soared through the air like graceful ballerinas. Their faces were like those of the orangutan, except more intelligent looking, and their prominent lips moved as if they were speaking. The telescope showed them lazing happily in the grass, albeit in a manner that on Earth might have been deemed somewhat improper. And after that fabulous disclosure, which left readers of the Sun reeling, Locke prepared to deliver the final blow. In his last article, he described how, in the midst of that primitive Eden, Herschel had glimpsed what was unquestionably an enormous religious temple of polished sapphire with a roof of golden metal. What god did those creatures worship? But just as readers’ interest had reached its peak, the paper reported that owing to an unfortunate oversight on the part of the astronomers, what had come to be known as the Telescope of Marvels had been left pointing toward the Sun, and its rays, intensified by the enormous lens, had burnt a twenty-foot-wide hole in the floor of the observatory, rendering it useless.