“I need you to talk to them,” the colonel said. “I don’t know how long we can keep them alive. We may never have another chance.”
* * *
The lieutenant had spoken of three Martians, but she saw only two.
“Taken for vivisection,” the colonel explained when she asked about it. “We’re keeping another alive to study. The third is yours.”
She felt a dull unease at the idea. Whatever else they were, the Martians were living, intelligent creatures. She pictured gleaming knives slicing flesh and muscle, the trapped being writhing in pain as it was slowly butchered. Then she remembered London and burned corpses in the streets, the choking fog of the black smoke, the rumors about what the Martians did to their captives. Let the doctors do what they want, she thought. It’s no more than those monsters deserve.
Seen through the broad window that looked onto the holding area, the Martians were gray-brown blobs, big as horses, sprawled on the white tiles of their pen like great leather sacks. They looked a little like the sketches she had seen, but no sketch could convey the sense of the living thing – the way the skin seemed to pulsate, the slow movements of the great black eyes, the febrile stirrings of the tentacles that fringed their triangular mouths. She felt a wave of revulsion.
She became aware that the colonel was watching her. “Well?”
She looked back at the Martians. One of them was watching her with eyes the size of footballs.
“I can try,” she said.
* * *
Before they let her into the room with the Martians, they made her put on a kind of diving suit, a pleated, cumbersome affair of waxed canvas and rubber. A soldier showed her how to put it on, then went out so that she could change in privacy. Ten minutes of struggling with the heavy garment left her almost exhausted, but at last she got it on and duck-waddled to the door to be let out.
With the suit came a helmet and an air hose. She felt a moment’s panic when they sealed the glass porthole in the front of the helmet. The clammy fabric of the suit seemed to tighten around her limbs and torso, the air inside growing thick and warm. Then the hose tautened and belched rubber-scented air into the interior and she could breathe again.
The antechamber to the Martians’ prison was closed off at each end by a metal hatch. A suited soldier spun the hand wheel to seal the hatch, then sprayed her down with carbolic acid to kill any microbes that might be clinging to the outside of her suit. When he was done, he handed her the sprayer and motioned her to do the same for him.
The thought that the whole process was for the protection of the Martians calmed her slightly. They were the vulnerable ones, not her. All she needed to do was open the faceplate of her suit and exhale. They would die then, not immediately, but probably within weeks. It was ironic to think that she was more a threat to them than they were to her.
The soldier was waiting for her, one hand on the wheel that opened the inner hatch. Through his glass faceplate she saw him raise his eyebrows. She nodded, the heavy helmet swaying on her shoulders.
“I’m ready,” she said.
* * *
At first, Rachel found the Martians less intimidating than she had expected. It was hard to be intimidated by something so plainly helpless, lying sluggish and bloated on the white tile, all but immobilized by Earth’s gravity. Rounded stubs that she guessed to be vestigial limbs strained feebly against the floor, incapable of moving them more than a few inches at a time.
Then she caught sight of their eyes and the impression of harmlessness vanished. The great orbs glittered with a malign intelligence, following her as she moved. The tentacles that flanked the triangular mouths twitched, flexing and uncoiling like a nest of snakes. She took a step backward.
The soldier was watching her, one hand on the club at his belt. On the other hip he carried a long bayonet in a sheath. She marveled for a moment at the idea of creatures who could fly between worlds being subdued by men with sticks and knives. She wondered if the Martians saw the irony too.
The colonel had given her a metal tablet and a pack of chinagraph pencils. She took a pencil between gauntleted fingers and painstakingly drew out one of the Martian symbols that she remembered. She thought the symbol might mean Mars. It seemed like a good starting point. The Martian watched her, its eyes swiveling to follow the motion of the pencil.
She finished the complex shape and held up the tablet. The Martian studied it briefly and then its eyes shifted away as if it had lost interest. Something like a clear eyelid slid down over the globes of its eyes, dulling their shine.
She wiped away the first symbol she had drawn and scrawled another in its place, one that she thought meant ‘machine’. She had given no real thought to the meaning of her first message. All she wanted was to establish some kind of communication, showing them that she could reproduce their writing. She held up the tablet again.
The Martian refused to look at it.
* * *
That night, Rachel walked on the beach, breathing down deep lungfuls of the cool, clean air. After a day in the suffocating confines of the suit, sucking oxygen through a rubber hose, the Scottish air was like an elixir.
Pebbles crunched behind her. She turned and recognized the young officer from the train.
He stopped a little distance from her. “How did it go?”
She shook her head. “I don’t think they want to talk to me. I wrote out all the symbols I knew. After the first few, they stopped paying attention.”
“Ah,” he said.
“Maybe we’re too far beneath them. As if we’re no cleverer than cows or sheep. Not worthy of their time.”
“If a sheep started writing out the alphabet, I’d certainly pay attention,” the soldier said. She laughed.
They stood in silence, looking up at the stars. It was a clear night and the blue-black sky was dusted with a thousand tiny dots of light.
“I wonder which is Mars,” she said. “Maybe that bright one?”
He followed her pointing finger.
“Too bright,” he said. “I don’t know what it is. Too high for Venus. Maybe Jupiter.”
“Oh.”
She wondered if the Martians were looking down on Earth and asking themselves why their plan had failed. Maybe they were already making new plans.
“Do you think they’ll try again?” she asked.
“If they do, we’ll be ready,” he said. “We can fight them with their own weapons now. We’ll track the cylinders and blow them up before the Martians inside can come out.” He shook his head. “Funny. They tried to conquer us and ended up giving us all their science. Things we would have taken a hundred years to invent. Flying machines, tripods. Now the whole world is changing.”
She yawned, suddenly exhausted.
“I should get some rest,” she said.
He bowed. “Good night, Miss Thompson. Sleep well.”
* * *
On the third day, the Martian responded.
Not knowing what else to do, she had kept on writing symbols. Certain combinations, she observed, seemed to arouse the Martian’s interest. Others produced a reaction that she could only describe as contempt: a turning away, a weary closing of that membranous eyelid. She tried to keep notes on which symbols seemed to fit together.
As she sketched one of the more promising pairs for the fifth time, the tentacles around the Martian’s mouth began to twitch in violent agitation. She stopped, startled.
“He wants you to give him the pencil,” the soldier said, his voice echoing muffled from within his helmet. One of the Martian’s tentacles coiled and uncoiled, beckoning.
Cautiously, she moved closer. She wiped the tablet clean and set it on the floor between them, then held out the pencil at arm’s length. The Martian reached out and took it from her with surprising delicacy. Gripping the pencil in its tentacles, it inched
forward a foot or two until it could reach the tablet, then began to write. When it was done, it set the pencil down and waited for her to take the tablet.
She picked it up. Half the surface was covered with tiny, precise glyphs.
The soldier peered over her shoulder. “What does it mean?”
“I have no idea,” Rachel said.
* * *
“They say you’re making progress,” the lieutenant said when they met on the beach that night. She suspected that their meetings were never accidental, that the young officer was timing his patrols to coincide with her nightly walks. She didn’t mind. He had never said or suggested anything improper and she found his attention flattering.
“Only a little,” she said.
It was slow going. She had a working vocabulary of ten or fifteen symbols, and only the shakiest sense of how to fit them together. Her biggest breakthrough had been identifying the marker that seemed to turn a statement into a question. She still had no idea how to read the answers.
“Colonel Porter said the smaller one might be getting sick.”
“Yes,” Rachel said.
It was difficult to describe a creature that scarcely moved as listless, but the smaller of the two Martians definitely seemed more subdued. Its tentacles moved only fitfully, and its skin had acquired a greenish sheen, with tiny droplets of moisture accumulating in the folds of flesh. Sometimes it made a low hooting sound that she thought might indicate distress.
“I suppose it takes some courage,” the soldier said. “To launch yourself out into space like that, not knowing how you’ll end up.”
Courage, Rachel thought. How like a man to see it that way. Men could never resist the appeal of the gallant enemy, even if the enemy in question was a bloated sack with tentacles for hands.
I do not care if they are brave, she thought. I do not care if they live or die. I only care whether they live long enough for me to learn to speak to them.
* * *
By the end of the week, both Martians were visibly sick.
MARS MAN DEATH, the large Martian printed on her tablet. The symbol for DEATH was one that it had taught her, miming collapse with movements of its tentacles. The glyph was annotated with a marker that she guessed indicated a future event.
Now that the end was inevitable, she no longer wore her suit. Unencumbered by the bulky gloves, she could write more quickly and precisely. She sat cross-legged on the floor, breathing in the rank, heavy scent of the Martian, feeling the febrile heat that radiated from its body.
I have so many questions, she thought. You cannot die until you have answered them.
She covered her tablet with lines of symbols, laboriously building sentences from the thirty or forty glyphs she had memorized, then adding a giant question marker to show they were all questions. The Martian shuffled forward to study what she had written. It took the sponge from her and wiped the tablet clean.
In place of her questions, it wrote a question of its own. Tentacles trembling, it sketched an asterisk, five intersecting lines that almost filled the tablet. Beside the star, it added the squiggle that signified a question.
Rachel stared at the tablet. She had no idea what it was asking.
It wiped the tablet clean. MARS MAN DEATH it wrote again.
* * *
“You’ll be leaving now?” the lieutenant said.
She nodded. Her trunk was already packed. She would take the train in the morning. If she caught the flying machine at Glasgow, she could be home by evening.
There was nothing more for her to do. Both Martians were dead, their bodies already beginning to putrefy. The big one had left her one final message, a tablet covered with a forest of tiny glyphs. She supposed she might find answers to her questions on it, if only she could make sense of the mass of unfamiliar symbols. But that was work she could do from London. There was no reason to stay in Mallaig.
She looked up at the sky again. The bright star she had seen before was a whitish smudge, blurred by cloud.
The lieutenant held out his hand. “Goodbye then, Miss Thompson.”
She took his hand and squeezed it gently. “Goodbye, lieutenant.”
* * *
Rachel crossed Whitehall carefully, slowing to avoid a gleaming electric car that shot past her like a tiny meteor. On the pavement, a newspaper seller’s placard declared in block letters ‘PROFS SAY COMET NO THREAT.’ She looked at it for a moment, shaking her head.
The committee room was dark and quiet, the wood-paneled walls decorated with plaques commemorating wars gone by. A whiskered general, shoulders heavy with gold braid, showed her to her seat.
“Perhaps you could summarize what you have learned for us, Miss Thompson.” The speaker was a civilian with a lean, saturnine face, an under-secretary for something or other.
She spread out her papers in front of her.
“I don’t have a complete transcription yet,” she said. “But I understand enough.”
The committee members were silent, waiting for her to continue.
“It wasn’t bacteria that killed the Martians,” she said.
The man opposite frowned. “I don’t see how that’s important.”
“They died from radiation,” she said. “From traveling in space. As they knew they would.”
One or two of the army officers shook their heads. “But if they knew they would die, why invade?” one asked.
“Because conquering Earth was never their goal.”
Someone made a snorting noise.
“Go on, Miss Thompson,” the dark man said.
“The Martians aren’t from Mars. Not originally. They came from another star.” She paused, but no one said anything. “They were fugitives, fleeing from an enemy that wanted to destroy them.”
“An enemy?”
“An enemy too powerful to fight. All they could do was hide. And the best way to hide their home on Mars was to build a decoy.”
The generals were both frowning now. The civilian leaned forward, his eyes narrowed.
“They came here to build a civilization from nothing,” Rachel continued. “To cover the planet with their machines. Make a target too tempting for the enemy to ignore, one that might trick them into overlooking their real target.” She thought of flying machines circling the globe, the fighting machines turned builders raising new cities on the ruins of the old. The Martians had died too soon to finish their task, but humanity had seized on their technology.
“The Martian asked me only one question. I didn’t understand it at the time.” She drew out the paper copy she had made, the scribbled asterisk with its question marker. She pushed it forward so that they could all see it. “‘Have you seen the star?’ That was the question.”
She turned her head and looked toward the window where the comet blazed, bright and malign in the heavens.
The Metal Monster
Prologue–Chapter IV
A. Merritt
Prologue
Before the narrative which follows was placed in my hands, I had never seen Dr. Walter T. Goodwin, its author.
When the manuscript revealing his adventures among the pre-historic ruins of the Nan-Matal in the Carolines (The Moon Pool) had been given me by the International Association of Science for editing and revision to meet the requirements of a popular presentation, Dr. Goodwin had left America. He had explained that he was still too shaken, too depressed, to be able to recall experiences that must inevitably carry with them freshened memories of those whom he loved so well and from whom, he felt, he was separated in all probability forever.
I had understood that he had gone to some remote part of Asia to pursue certain botanical studies, and it was therefore with the liveliest surprise and interest that I received a summons from the President of the Association to meet Dr. Goodwin at a designated place and hour.
Through my close study of the Moon Pool papers I had formed a mental image of their writer. I had read, too, those volumes of botanical research which have set him high above all other American scientists in this field, gleaning from their curious mingling of extremely technical observations and minutely accurate but extraordinarily poetic descriptions, hints to amplify my picture of him. It gratified me to find I had drawn a pretty good one.
The man to whom the President of the Association introduced me was sturdy, well-knit, a little under average height. He had a broad but rather low forehead that reminded me somewhat of the late electrical wizard Steinmetz. Under level black brows shone eyes of clear hazel, kindly, shrewd, a little wistful, lightly humorous; the eyes both of a doer and a dreamer.
Not more than forty I judged him to be. A close-trimmed, pointed beard did not hide the firm chin and the clean-cut mouth. His hair was thick and black and oddly sprinkled with white; small streaks and dots of gleaming silver that shone with a curiously metallic luster.
His right arm was closely bound to his breast. His manner as he greeted me was tinged with shyness. He extended his left hand in greeting, and as I clasped the fingers I was struck by their peculiar, pronounced, yet pleasant warmth; a sensation, indeed, curiously electric.
The Association’s President forced him gently back into his chair.
“Dr. Goodwin,” he said, turning to me, “is not entirely recovered as yet from certain consequences of his adventures. He will explain to you later what these are. In the meantime, Mr. Merritt, will you read this?”
I took the sheets he handed me, and as I read them felt the gaze of Dr. Goodwin full upon me, searching, weighing, estimating. When I raised my eyes from the letter I found in his a new expression. The shyness was gone; they were filled with complete friendliness. Evidently I had passed muster.
“You will accept, sir?” It was the president’s gravely courteous tone.
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