by Mike Ashley
Penokee: “But we have told you so often that we want to see you, and bring back a representative of your planet.”
Mars: “Well, if you insist--”
So much Graemantle had translated, when Glissman, who was listening to the rest, exclaimed, with a mild approach to a yell, and with eyes simply astounding in their resemblance to sunstroke spectacles: “Hurrah! They’re going to send us a missionary from Mars!”
III.
BEMIS’S NARRATIVE
It will be best to continue this narrative in Gerald Bemis’s own words —
This affair of the Mars telegraph and the proposed coming of a representative Kurol, or inhabitant of Mars, was sufficiently startling to make my advent into the twenty-second century, my resuscitation after three centuries of unconsciousness, a mere commonplace. The very strangeness and amazement of the first occurrence with which I thus came into contact made me feel, curiously enough, quite at home in this new period.
There was a slight reaction, however, so soon as I turned in to rest at the spacious but cozy inn attached to the magnetometer station of Penokee. Left to myself for a little, I found that an intense yearning overcame me for some visible token, some living link of connection with the remote past. It was all gone, was hopelessly dissolved into nothingness; of what use could it be to me any more, since I myself was still alive, in full possession of my faculties and with a vast present and future spread out before me? Yet, somehow, that vague, unreasonable longing rose up and enveloped me like a mist or fog, exhaled from some unfathomable gulf, through which I groped vainly for the touch of a familiar hand, or listened in despair for the tones of some human voice that I had known and held dear of old.
I listened. What was that? Close by the couch on which I had thrown myself a voice was sounding at that very moment. “Ah, Gerald, Gerald, I wish I had been kinder to you!”
I could hardly believe the truth; but it surely was the voice of Eva Pryor, echoing after death, through the emptiness of three hundred lost years, and greeting now my sense of hearing as vividly as ever.
“Eva!” I exclaimed, leaping up. But the illusion was soon broken. A phonograph stood by my couch; and the voice, I perceived, was nothing but an audible reminiscence. Still, how came the phonograph there? Who had planned this thing?
Just then Graemantle entered the room.
“So you are not asleep?” He said in a tone that meant more than the words.
“Would you like to see her?”
“Eva? Ah, Graemantle, think of it!” Said I. “To see her would be life!”
He smiled. “The old life, perhaps,” he remarked; “not the new. Are you sure the two will agree? However, you shall be gratified.”
“No shadows or make-believes!” I cautioned him. “No kinetoscope or vitascope. Give me the reality or nothing. But you cannot give it.”
“Wait a moment,” he interposed. “Be calm, and realize facts. You, Gerald Bemis, were not the only person vivificated at the end of the nineteenth century.”
For a moment my vanity suffered a blow. The distinction on which I prided myself, for which I had risked so much, was snatched away from me. But there came swiftly a more gracious thought. “I see, I see! You saved Eva Pryor from death also — saved her for me. How good of the society! It was nobly thoughtful and sympathetic!”
“No,” he answered gently. “Purely scientific. Our former committee did not want to risk everything on one specimen.”
“So I was a specimen?” I inquired, almost wishing that I had never entered the glass cylinder.
“Eva Pryor,” he went on, “was in such agony at your disappearance — for, of course, no one but the Society of Futurity knew what had become of you — that we were compelled to give her the secret under strict pledges and on condition that she, too, would be vivificated, with several other specimens, or candidates for futurity.”
“Then she is alive?” I asked, my pulse bounding.
“She is here!” Graemantle declared, in a resonant voice.
Instantly the room was filled with a soft, diffused electric light from unseen sources; and my mentor disappeared as though he had been a shadow. All my senses and my nerves, my heart, my eyes, seemed to thrill and to be filled with the thought of Eva. It was as though I had been with her only an hour before, gazing into her mysterious grey eyes, admiring the soft, rosy, apricot bloom on her cheeks, and wilting into abject despair at the indifference of her disdainfully smiling lips. And, as this picture of her came before me in thought, there she stood — her actual self-in the doorway, gazing at me wistfully!
We rushed together. I don’t know why; for our last conversation, thirty-six hundred months earlier, gave us no excuse for such an action. It was an instinctive rush, I suppose. I loved her, and she seemed to be possessed by a reflex supposition. We embraced, as the surviving members of our once young generation. But, alas! I realized at the critical instant, that for me it meant only this. My old love had gone with the old life and the nineteenth century.
On the other hand, there came upon me, with a tremendous shock, a perception of the fact that Eva, after this long interval, had developed towards me a genuine and ardent affection. Being a woman, she had the right to change her mind; but it had taken her three hundred years of suspended animation to do it; and, unfortunately, I at the same time had changed my mind, just the other way, which a man has no acknowledged right to do.
“Dear, dear Gerald,” she sighed, sobbed, laughed, all in one. “Isn’t it wonderful? We are united at last.”
“Yes, dear friend-dear Eva,” said I. She continued — “And I was so cruel, so heartless towards you.”
“But that is all over now,” I assured her. Then summoning my utmost fortitude, I added, “What does it matter what happened in that old century? We are in a new world. You offered to be a sister to me then. I promise to be a brother to you now — nothing more. So let us dismiss the bygones.”
Strangely enough she did not appreciate either the tragedy of the situation or the comedy of it, or the sarcasm of destiny, or the pathos involved — if for two people so far removed from their former lives, who were feeling uncommonly well and rested and comfortable, there could be any such thing as pathos. She simply recoiled from me, and looked angry.
“Dear Eva,” I persisted mildly, ignoring these symptoms, “I have done everything I can to satisfy you. When you rejected me, I put myself out of the way. Now that we have both reappeared, I efface myself as your lover. Let us go forward, hand in hand, as members of one family as children of the future, and common sense friends.”
Fortunately, at this moment Graemantle came back. “Good friends,” he said heartily, “I am delighted to have brought you together again!”
He had touched the right note. Eva’s lips curved into a correct expression as of pleasure, and she began at once to play her part of friend and sister, to my role of brother, with great skill and grace.
“I don’t know just how the Kurol or Mars missionary is coming,” Graemantle went on, “but we shall receive word soon. I sent for my ward, Electra, and my young friend Hammerfleet to assist us in receiving him. They have arrived, and I want to present them to you both.”
So saying he touched a lever by the wall; the entire side of the room swung open, and he ushered us into a spacious apartment the assembly-room of the inn where stood, beautifully draped in white with a single diamond of marvelous luster flashing from the rich dark hair above her forehead, a woman of the noblest stature and best proportioned form I had ever seen.
“This is Electra,” said our guardian; and turning to her: “You know our friends already, by name and record.”
She bowed graciously, and came forward with a smile so absolutely sincere that I could not recall having beheld the like of it before; and she took each of us by the hand in welcome. Then we discovered behind her a tall man, black bearded, almost forbidding in his gravity, but wonderfully handsome, and enveloped in the soft, pliable suit of silk, tinted wit
h prismatic, delicate colors, that everyone, apparently, wore nowadays. “Hammerfleet,” said Electra; and we were at once acquainted with him.
I learned afterwards that artificial silk was made in unlimited quantities by squirting nitrocellulose into a continuously worked vacuous space and then reducing it to cellulose by hot sulphydrate of ammonia and pressure, and had taken the place of cotton and woolen goods among the well-to-do.
At the moment, however, the only thought I could grasp was that Electra had impressed me deeply and tenderly. How could anyone help this with her? She was exquisite, serene, commanding, and absolutely without humbug.
It had been a surprise to me to find that I no longer loved Eva Pryor. It was not at all a surprise that I should be captivated by Electra. Charming though Eva was in her way, she had perhaps placed herself at a disadvantage by having insisted on keeping her nineteenth century costume. The angular slope and spread of her skirt, her unnatural wasp waist, the swollen sleeves, and the stiff, ungainly bulging of her corsage had a grotesque and even offensive effect. The extraordinary tangle, also, of artificial flowers, wings, and other rubbish that she carried on her head-for she still wore her hat — was as barbaric or savage as the head-dress, of some early Norse warrior or Red Indian chief.
To all this Electra presented a refreshing contrast of harmony, with grace and dignity and a style of dress modern, yet classic, womanly, yet suggesting the robes of a goddess.
I must have made my impulsive admiration for her very evident, for within a few minutes I was aware that Eva had grown sad and ill at ease, and that Hammerfleet was darting at me half-suppressed glances of anger and jealousy. “So the wind sits in that quarter,” I meditated, “and he’s in love with Electra!”
But the talk turned at once to the new anti-gravitation machine or Interstellar Express car. “There have been a number of them made,” remarked Graemantle; and proceeded to show us one in the house. “A good while ago there was discovered in the Hudson’s Bay country great masses of ore containing metal which yielded the spectroscopic line of Helium, a metal unknown before except as observed in the sun. Helium differed in some ways from all other metals, and we could make no use of it until one of our most brilliant scientific men — an African named Mwanga, for Africa is now largely civilized and enlightened — discovered that its molecules under certain treatment could be so arranged as to neutralize gravitation. He came near being carried into space himself while experimenting with a big piece of rearranged Helium that suddenly shot off through the air and was never seen again.
“However, we finally learned to regulate the thing. And now you see this car is furnished with a Helium screen, which, once put into the non-gravitating state, is adjusted and regulated by the voyager, who sits inside this small non-conducting chamber, well provided with stored oxygen for breathing. Of course, many experiments were made before Bronson’s last attempt to reach Mars.”
“But how,” I asked, “can a traveler subsist in so small a space through such a long journey?”
“Oh, it isn’t long,” was his answer. “It takes about five hours to reach the limit of the earth’s atmosphere. When that has been passed, the screen or shield is so adjusted that the car attains to a speed of one hundred thousand miles per second, there being no friction in vacuous spaces to retard its progress. Now, the whole distance to Mars being forty-eight million miles, it should take the stellar car, at the rate of one hundred thousand miles a second, only four hundred and eighty seconds to traverse it. Four hundred and eighty seconds are only eight minutes. But when the car reaches the atmosphere of Mars, the screen must be molecularly rearranged again, so as not to resist too greatly the attraction of that planet. The car must descend through the Mars atmosphere slowly, by ordinary flotation-shutter apparatus.”
(The shutter apparatus for sailing in the air and propelling ships was, I found, one of the most useful inventions of the age; and I shall describe it later.)
“To pierce through the Mars atmosphere, then, involves a delay of three hours more, So we have; for earth’s atmosphere, five hours; for Mars atmosphere, three hours; and the intermediate distance, eight minutes; that is, in all, eight hours and eight minutes.”
“Whew!” I exclaimed in amazement.
Graemantle laughed indulgently.
“And at what rate do your electric trains move?”
“About a hundred and fifty miles an hour.”
“Then it takes no longer to go to Mars by the stellar car than it takes to come from New York to Wisconsin?”
“No,” said he; “why should it? Time is only an idea. You thought you knew that before; but now you begin to realize it.”
“Still,” I objected, “the journey to Mars has not yet actually been accomplished.”
At this moment a small side door opened and Wraithe and Stanifex, who had just come to Penokee by the electric, and by walking balloon, entered. “Quite right,” remarked Stanifex, the doubter, who had heard my last words.
“Wait and see,” retorted Graemantle. “I still have confidence.”
The floor now opened, and some tables ascended noiselessly through a trap door, delicately set out with pleasing viands, most of which were new to me. Animal food was not present, and the articles of diet laid before us were chiefly vegetable nitrogenous products made by the fixature of nitrogen. Thus we had vegetable steaks, partridges, and so on, which contained all the nutriment of beef and bird without their heaviness, and were exceedingly palatable. Among the liquids we had a new sort of milk somewhat resembling koumiss, but with a daintier taste and a delicious fragrance; also sparkling colored water and a compound called “Life-brew,” which was as stimulating as wine, but more sustaining, and nonalcoholic. Alcoholic drinks, I learned, had gone out completely; not by law, but by common-sense, and were used only in medicine or for the punishment of criminals, in rare cases. There was nothing that malefactors dreaded more than a sentence to a month or two of rum, whisky, brandy, or even champagne diet.
I took no note of time, for my three-century sleep had made me almost proof against fatigue. Besides, I was told that the general system of living now, with the night made practically day by subdued and diffused electric “glow-worm” lighting, and with every known means in use of conserving energy and nerve force, had changed the old habit of sleeping and waking. People now rested frequently, nourished themselves scientifically, were able to be up and about at all hours of the night and day; and instead of working a long time at a stretch and then recuperating by exaggerated late night amusements or long periods of sleep, they intermingled brief times of work and play and slumber through the whole twenty-four hours.
Suddenly there came the rapid tinkling of an electric bell — soft and musical, as all sounds were, I noticed, in the new civilization; and Hammerfleet cried, “That’s from the Mars telegraph.”
We all hurried to the station, and there found this message: “Our missionary, Zorlin, started hours ago. Will be there with you immediately.”
It seemed no time at all before there was a rush and a thud outside the station, and Glissman announced that these sounds meant the arrival of a stellar car on the receiving platform. He was right. As we threw open the door, two strange figures came staggering in. One was a sinewy, blonde fellow, limp and tired, as though he had passed through about thirty-five thunderstorms.
“Bronson?” Exclaimed my friends, astounded.
“Yes, I’m here,” he affirmed. “And this is Zorlin.”
He pointed to his companion, the strangest resemblance of a man I had ever seen; of giant form, and with a face of overpowering intelligence, but at this instant crouching to the floor on hands and knees, half helpless.
“Your atmosphere is so heavy,” he said in fairly good English. “I can hardly bear it yet. But I will soon stand up.” He shook his vast head of hair and beard; then heaved a mighty breath, struggled to rise, and sank into a chair. This was our missionary.
IV.
THE NEW EARTH
>
When the travelers had been refreshed and revived we drew from Bronson an account of his interstellar adventures.
“As I came near Mars,” he said, alternately twirling and biting the ends of his long and warlike yellow moustache, “I was aware of strange rubbings alongside the car, and occasional shocks as of hammer-blows. Satan, I suppose, is called ‘the Old Boy,’ because a boy is the personification of mischief, and second only to Eve in making trouble. My first idea was that the Old Boy was having fun with me, by throwing stones. A rapid survey through my peep-holes showed me I was so far right — I was caught in a meteor-storm. Fortunately, though, the meteors over there do not shoot so recklessly as those that come near earth. They move with a velocity in accord with that of Mars, so that they drop through its atmosphere ‘as the gentle rain from heaven.’ But they gave me a pretty hard time of it; steering clear of them; and there may have been some magnetic stress accompanying their flight that carried me out of the way. At any rate, it was a long time before I could make a landing. But, with my automatic drag-net lowered from the bottom of the car, I managed to catch two small meteors, which I used as a combined anchor and rudder, in conjunction with the adjusted Helium screen, and finally reached terra-Martis long after the observers there had given me up. Once safely aground on the planet, I found Zorlin all ready to embark; and we decided to come right back.”
“But they had promised he would come without you,” Stanifex interposed. “How could he ever have done that?”
“Ask him,” Bronson suggested, pulling his moustache wide at both sides defiantly. “And can we talk English to him?
“Does he understand?” Electra asked.
“He has the most rapid intelligence I ever met,” answered Bronson. “I had to teach him most of the English language on the eight-hours home trip; and he took it all in like water, as fast as I could pour. That is what has fagged me out so.” And the stellar aeronaut helped himself to a vegetable chicken-breast, and swallowed a draught of “life-brew” at a gulp.
