Freddy and the Space Ship

by Walter R. Brooks

  Now of course everybody in the ship spun with it. But it didn’t seem to them that they were spinning; it seemed, when they looked out of the window, as if the whole universe was spinning around them. Stars and galaxies and constellations swept past, and then the sun, in a blaze of light, and then more stars. They seemed to be the center of a million whirling lights … and then Uncle Ben got to the controls, cut off the rocket Mrs. Peppercorn had fired and turned on one that stopped the spin.

  “Dear me,” said Mrs. Peppercorn, “that was a very pretty display. Rather like the fireworks that the Centerboro Chamber of Commerce shoot off on the Fourth. Though not, of course, as well managed.”

  “I expect these large scale things are rather harder to manage,” said Charles drily.

  Uncle Ben shook his head. “Hope we ain’t been thrown off our course. I kind of lost direction for a while.” He looked out of the window, then after peering for a while at the radar screen, made a few entries in his notebook. “If I ain’t miscalculated, Mars should be directly ahead,” he said. “Three more days in that case. We’ll see.”

  But the next day he pointed out the planet they were aiming to head off as it swung along on its orbit around the sun. It didn’t look as if it was moving, but they knew that it was really tearing along at terrific speed. Of course their speed was even greater, for they had to follow it hundreds of thousands of miles as it swung around the sun, in order to catch up with it, and land. It didn’t get much bigger for another forty-eight hours, and then all at once it began to grow. In an hour or two it grew from the size of the moon until it filled up half the window.

  “Where are the canals?” Freddy asked. “I thought there were canals on Mars.”

  “Looks sort of like the map of Europe,” said Georgie. “You know—where Spain sticks out on the southwest corner.”

  “Clouds, probably,” Uncle Ben said. “Stand by now. Going to turn the ship around and start braking with the big rocket for the landing.”

  This was a complicated operation, but Uncle Ben fired a steering rocket and the ship swung around so that its base was towards the planet. Then he fired the big rocket. And all at once they had weight again; the floor pressed up against them as it had on the take-off. Slowly Uncle Ben brought their speed down until they were going only a little faster than the planet. They couldn’t see their landing place through the window, which looked up now towards the sun; Uncle Ben had to judge his distance from the ground by his instruments. Then their weight decreased, and with a jarring thump they landed.

  CHAPTER

  7

  As soon as the rocket landed, they got into their space suits and prepared to explore their new world. There was no suit for Cousin Augustus, so he got inside Freddy’s. He sat on the pig’s shoulder so that he could look out through the wide plastic helmet. Since the atmosphere on Mars contains no oxygen, each suit had a small cylinder which would supply enough oxygen to last the wearer two days, and each suit had a Benjamin Bean Improved All-Purpose WalkieTalkie, so they could communicate with one another.

  When they were ready Uncle Ben unsealed the door and threw it open, and they looked out on a world that was all black and grey, a dead world. They had landed in what seemed to be a forest of black spikes, gnarled and twisted, many of them, into queer shapes. The ground was black—it was as if volcanic fires had seared and blasted everything which might once have been living. And over it all the rain poured down.

  They had decided that Mrs. Peppercorn, being the only lady in the group, should have the honor to be first to set foot on the new planet. A space suit is nearly as difficult to move around in as a diver’s suit, and as Mrs. Peppercorn insisted on putting her umbrella up as soon as she was through the door and starting down the ladder, they had a lot of trouble getting her down to the ground. “You don’t need an umbrella,” they said. “Your suit’s waterproof.”

  “If I’ve brought this umbrella all the way from Centerboro to Mars,” she said, “I’m certainly not going to leave it stand in a corner when it rains.”

  Finally they rigged a line under her arms and lowered her, and she started off with the umbrella held over her head.

  “Better stay near the ship,” Freddy called after her.

  She didn’t even turn around. “I want to have a chat with some of those educated spiders you told me about,” she said, and cackled with laughter as she stumped off among the black spikes.

  “Hope she don’t meet anything worse than educated spiders,” said Freddy. “But it’s no use trying to stop her.”

  “Are the Martians really like spiders, Freddy?” Cousin Augustus asked. He was hiccupping slightly from nervousness.

  “Nobody knows what they’re like,” said the pig. “They may be forty feet tall, or they may be like insects, or they may—oh, my goodness, they may be big snakes with wings, or sort of land octopuses with long tentacles and two foot beaks—”

  “Oh, stop it! Hic—stop it!” Cousin Augustus exclaimed. “I’m scared enough without you making all these horrid things up.”

  “Well, of course maybe Mars isn’t inhabited at all,” said the pig. “Maybe it’s all like this, a sort of burnt up desert. We may be the only living things on the whole darned planet.”

  “Maybe ‘tain’t Mars anyway,” said Uncle Ben. “Maybe we’re somewhere else. Venus. I dunno.” He was puzzled, for after Mrs. Peppercorn had put the ship into a spin Sunday night he had lost direction for a while, and hadn’t been quite certain just whereabouts in the solar system he was.

  However, after taking a sight on the sun, which was just about to set, and making some more calculations in his notebook, he said: “Must be Mars. Ain’t any other planets in this part of the sky except maybe Venus, and she’s closer to the sun than what our earth is, so she’d be hotter.”

  “She doesn’t spin as fast as the earth and Mars do either,” Freddy said, “so her day would last about two hundred fifty hours, instead of twenty-four. That means that in the hour since we’ve landed the sun wouldn’t have moved so you could notice it. But it’s a lot lower now than it was.”

  “That’s right,” Uncle Ben said. “I ought to thought of that. Yep, we’re on Mars all right. That’s a big relief to me. Ain’t no place to be losing your way, out in the middle of the solar system.”

  They walked around for a while as the daylight faded. There wasn’t much to see in the forest of black spikes. The thing to do, they decided, was to get the ship all ready for a sudden take-off, in case they were attacked by Martians; then to have a good night’s sleep, and do their exploring in the morning. They could see nothing of Mrs. Peppercorn, but Freddy spoke to her over his walkie-talkie and told her she’d better come back.

  “Oh, stop bothering me,” she said crossly. “I’m busy. Something going on here, and I want to see it.”

  “What is it?” he asked. “Shall we come?”

  “No. Stay where you are. I’m hiding behind a tree and watching.”

  “Behind a what?” Freddy exclaimed.

  “A tree!” she snapped. “T-r-e-e, tree! Good heavens, don’t you know what a tree is?”

  “Sure,” he said. “But if there are trees on Mars … What kind of tree?”

  “How do I know?” she demanded. “There ain’t any label on it. It’s got leaves and a trunk and there’s ants walking up and down it. One of ’em just bit me.”

  “Ants!” he said.

  “If you can’t do anything but repeat every word I say, I’m going to shut this talkie thing off,” she said angrily. “I want to see what this man is up to.”

  Freddy started to say: “Man!” and then stopped himself. “But there aren’t any men on Mars,” he said. “There can’t be.”

  “There’s one,” she said. “I’m looking at him. He’s walking along—sort of sneaky—and looking into the creek.”

  “There is one” she said.

  “Creek!” The word popped out before he thought.

  Mrs. Peppercorn made several remarks abou
t Freddy’s brains, and then she calmed down and told him that the man was some distance away, and that it had got so dark in among the trees that she couldn’t see him very clearly, but he had two legs and two arms and a head, and certainly looked like a man. He had something over his shoulder—a gun, or a shovel. “But there’s something following him, I don’t know what it is,” she said. “It walks along quite a ways behind him and it isn’t more’n a foot high. It’s got something over it, a dark cloth—maybe a kind of raincoat, with a hood. It’s got two legs, and it’s got big bright yellow shoes on.”

  “Wow!” Freddy exclaimed excitedly. “I wish you’d taken a camera. Must be a Martian. You hear that, Uncle Ben? Little man a foot high with big feet.”

  “He’s got kind of a beak, seems like,” said Mrs. Peppercorn. “Or else he’s got a big pipe in his mouth that sticks out under the hood.”

  Freddy asked if they were making noises of any kind.

  “Don’t be silly!” she said. “I don’t think they’re together; the little one’s watching the big one. Anyway you know you can’t hear anything inside these helmets. All nonsense, wearing the things, anyway. I’m going to take mine off—see if I can hear anything.”

  “No, no!” said Freddy. “You mustn’t! You won’t last two minutes if you do. This air on Mars isn’t like the air at home; it’s poisonous.”

  “Fiddlesticks!” she exclaimed. “Air’s air. And that man doesn’t wear a helmet.”

  “He isn’t a man, he’s a Martian,” said the pig. “Probably doesn’t need oxygen. Probably hasn’t even any lungs—” Freddy stopped, remembering suddenly that she couldn’t get the helmet off by herself anyway, since all the helmets were fastened by nuts, which had to be screwed down from the outside.

  “Oh!” she said suddenly. “He’s starting this way. Guess I better come back.”

  They watched, and pretty soon saw her come stumping along, still holding the umbrella over her head. The Martians evidently weren’t following her—at least there was no sign of them.

  When she had been helped back into the ship she told them that she had come, after a few minutes’ walk, to the end of the black spikes. Here were woods, with trees exactly like those on earth, through which a brook ran. There had been no signs of life, though, until the appearance of the man-like creature and its queer little companion. She thought the man one had caught sight of her; he had suddenly got behind a tree and started moving stealthily towards her.

  The explorers had thought it wise, in case they had to defend themselves, to bring along Mr. Bean’s shotgun, and a big old fashioned six-shooter that Freddy had taken away from Signor Zingo, the circus magician, two years earlier. They got these out and loaded them, and when they had eaten supper, Uncle Ben said he and Freddy would take turns standing watch while the others slept.

  It was during Freddy’s first watch, about nine o’clock, that the only suspicious incident occurred. It was a clear night, but of course the stars did not give much light. For a quarter of an hour Freddy thought he had seen movement of some kind among the stubs a little way off. Then he was sure of it. He couldn’t hear, inside the helmet, but there was a gadget that he could switch on so that he could hear outside noises. He turned the switch now, and at once he heard a faint rustling, as of someone creeping nearer. He snapped the gun to his shoulder and fired both barrels.

  As the boom of the gun died away, he heard what sounded like the thump of footsteps, running. He heard something else, too—a faint swishing sound in the air above his head, and then from the direction in which the footsteps had gone, first a couple of deep-toned hoots, and then a sort of yell. He knelt down at the foot of the ladder and hurriedly reloaded.

  The bang of the gun had waked everybody up, and after a few minutes he climbed into the ship to report. “I may have hit that man-like thing,” he said, “but I don’t think so. He’d have yelled when I hit him; he wouldn’t have waited nearly a minute. It wasn’t human, that yell!”

  “Maybe he was calling other Martians,” said Georgie. “Maybe they’ll attack at dawn, like the Indians.”

  Freddy told them about the sounds that had preceded the yell. “I’m sure that some big creature flew over my head,” he said. “Maybe it pounced on that man creature—that’s why he yelled. It was—golly, it must have been enormous, the swishing it made. Like one of those old dinosaurs, with wings.”

  “You said it hooted,” said Jinx. “Like an owl?”

  “If you can imagine an owl as big as an elephant,” said the pig. “It was deeper, like a steamboat whistle.”

  Cousin Augustus got the hiccups so badly at this point that Freddy had to stop talking for a while. He climbed down again and took up his post at the foot of the ladder. But nothing further happened that night.

  CHAPTER

  8

  The next morning it was sunny, and leaving Georgie in charge of the ship, the explorers set out. After ten minutes or so they came to the end of the forest of black spikes, and sure enough, there were trees and a brook, just as Mrs. Peppercorn had said, and beyond, green fields with what looked very much like earthly grass growing in them. There was no sign of the Martians. They went across the brook and spread out some of their trade goods—bright bead necklaces, and shiny pocket knives, and alarm clocks, and lengths of red cotton cloth—on the grass. Then they crossed back and hid among the trees and waited.

  They waited all morning and nothing happened.

  “Maybe they’re too scared of us,” said Jinx.

  “Well, we’re scared of them, so that makes it even,” Freddy said.

  “They’re probably like the Indians when they first saw white men,” Mrs. Peppercorn said. “You shouldn’t have shot at them. You ought to have gone out and shaken hands with them.”

  “Oh, yeah?” said Jinx. “I didn’t notice you exchanging any hugs and kisses with them last night.”

  “Anyway,” said Freddy, “maybe they’re more civilized than we are instead of less. Maybe we’re the Indians and they’re the white men.”

  “Atom guns,” said Uncle Ben. “Death rays.”

  “That’s right,” said Freddy. “Maybe they could just turn a little switch and bang! we’d all fall to pieces.”

  Mrs. Peppercorn was poking at the ground with the ferrule of her umbrella; suddenly she leaned down. “My land,” she said, “here’s a four leaf clover!” She picked it and held it up.

  “Funny,” said Uncle Ben. “Everything just like earth. Trees, clouds, clover—everything. Must be careful.”

  “That’s right,” Freddy said. “We mustn’t forget that it isn’t the earth. We mustn’t forget that this air isn’t really air at all, and probably the water in this brook isn’t really water, either. If we just—”

  He stopped suddenly, for Georgie’s excited voice came through—“Listen! Listen! Mrs. Wurzburger just phoned. There’s a flying saucer or some kind of space ship landed, just up north of the farm. She’s been out watching for invaders; that’s why she didn’t let us know before. It landed yesterday.”

  “Funny they’d land on earth the same day we land on Mars,” said Cousin Augustus.

  “Oh, pooh!” said Freddy. “She’s kidding us.”

  “No she isn’t,” Georgie said. “Mr. Bean saw it land. He’s posted some of the animals along the edge of the woods on guard duty, and he’s phoned the other farmers and the troopers and everybody.”

  “Are they looking for the ship?” Jinx asked.

  “They don’t dare. They don’t know what kind of weapons these other-world beings may have. Mr. Bean says, no shooting: try to keep everything friendly.”

  “Phooey!” Charles exclaimed. “Keep everything friendly indeed! That, my friends, is not a counsel that I would give, were I there!” He began to strut up and down. He hadn’t made a speech in some time, and this seemed like a good chance. “What! will they bow the knee to these invaders?—will they surrender the broad lands of Bean without a struggle? Not so would I do. Before I would see th
e homes of my friends ravaged and the torch put to my own ancestral henhouse—”

  “Oh, button your beak, rooster,” said Jinx irritably. “If you weren’t all done up in that plastic suit I’d put the torch to your ancestral tail feathers. You wouldn’t talk so big if you were there.”

  This was not strictly true. Charles always talked big. As a speechmaker he was in great demand, not only on the farm, but even in Centerboro, for Rotary and Chamber of Commerce dinners, and so on. Partly, of course, it was the novelty of being addressed by a rooster that made his human audiences applaud; but partly too it was his fiery eloquence. There was only one trouble with his speeches—nobody could remember afterwards what they had been about.

  He went on now at some length, disregarding Jinx’s remarks, about the defense of the homeland.

  From Charles’ own point of view, the great trouble with his speeches, particularly the patriotic ones, was that they had a much greater effect on him than on his hearers. Ordinarily he never picked fights, but after making one of his speeches he was so excited and warlike that he would pitch into any animal that so much as grinned at him.

  Freddy realized this. He didn’t want Charles inciting the others to attack the Martians; they were in danger enough without that. But before he could make any attempt to calm the rooster down, Jinx said excitedly: “Look! Look!” And down along what looked like a stone wall, two fields away, came walking the strange little creature with the big yellow shoes that Mrs. Peppercorn had described to them. It was alone, and had evidently not caught sight of them.

  Before they could stop him, Charles stepped out from their hiding place and began shouting defiance. The Martian, however, paid no attention—which was not surprising, since the rooster was doing all his shouting inside his helmet, and could be heard only by his shipmates.