Star of Ill-Omen

by Dennis Wheatley

  He no longer felt any pain in his lungs, but was cold and utterly miserable. Sitting up, slowly, profanely and with intense feeling, he began to curse Mars and all its inhabitants. Escobar, who was standing over him, still without a stitch of clothing on, gave his shoulder another shake, and said:

  ‘Pull yourself together, man! Swearing will not do you any good.’

  ‘You’re right,’ growled Kem. ‘All the same, I wish I had the means to blow this bloody planet to hell. While we were on our way here there was at least the hope that we’d meet with a decent reception. But this is worse than the Saucer. And the way they treated us! What in God’s name did those brutes think they were up to?’

  Escobar shivered, sat down and drew over himself some of the rough coverings under which he had been lying before he roused Kem. ‘I think that has quite a simple explanation and is unlikely to occur again. They were decontaminating us and all the things we brought with us, so that we should not give them any of the diseases we have brought from Earth.’

  ‘If that was the idea, I could have saved them the trouble by vouching for a clean bill of health.’

  ‘Oh no, you couldn’t. Any number of bacteria must have developed on Earth which do not exist here. We have become immunised to them by breathing in small quantities all our lives, but we probably carried enough to start a series of plagues that would have wiped out the entire population on Mars. Whole tribes of North American Indians perished from measles when the white settlers first brought it among them, and even the common cold can spell death to a race of savages that have never experienced it.’

  ‘If I had known that, and had the chance,’ said Kem viciously, I would have brought a few bottles containing bubonic, syphilis and T.B. in my luggage.’

  ‘We would be no better off if you had. In fact worse, for when the diseases became rampant we should certainly have caught them ourselves.’

  ‘I suppose so. Anyhow, what you say explains quite a lot. It is evidently why we were not allowed to land at an airport, but delivered in sealed bags. That, too, must be why the Saucer took fire a few minutes after we were thrown out. It would have been full of our germs, so they preferred to destroy it rather than risk infection. I wonder what happened to Gog and Magog.’

  They must have been burnt with it. I saw it burning as I dropped, but no sign of them. Their masks gave them 95 per cent protection from infection while they were with us, but they would have carried it on their bodies, so spread it among their people if they had landed; and they were much too big to come down that chute as we did, in some form of self-sealing sack.’

  ‘But what about the others? I mean the navigator and his pals; the intelligent ones whom we never saw, but who must have had their quarters on the deck below the magnet?’

  ‘They must have been burnt up, too. Any bacteria in the air of the Saucer would have travelled from the upper deck to the lower. They would have known that, and probably considered themselves contaminated.’

  ‘In that case, why didn’t they land and have themselves decontaminated in the same way as they decontaminated us?’

  ‘Probably because there was no aperature large enough for them to get through and make a parachute descent. The Saucers that have made forced landings on Earth are reported to have burnt themselves out; so it is reasonable to suppose that their crews are quite prepared to commit hara-kiri if they feel circumstances require it of them.

  ‘I couldn’t care less,’ muttered Kem bitterly. Then he looked over to a pile of the matting under which Carmen lay, and added: ‘How has Carmen come through our last little jollification? Have you looked at her yet?’

  ‘Yes. She is breathing quite normally and seems none the worse. I think she must have passed from unconsciousness into a sleep of exhaustion without coming round.’

  ‘That’s a mercy anyway. But I wish I had a Sten gun to use on some of these brutes. They could hardly have treated us worse if they had been trained by the old Gestapo. When we left the Saucer we seem to have jumped out of the frying-pan into the fire. What the hell are we to do?’

  ‘There is nothing that we can do,’ replied Escobar dully, ‘except await events.’

  Their short talk had taken a lot out of them, as they no longer had the oxygen flasks that had been attached to the sacks, and in the rarefied atmosphere they found it difficult to breathe. Every word meant an effort, and their hearts were labouring heavily. Too tired to discuss their miserable plight further, they settled down under their rough coverings, and tried to get to sleep. But they were so uncomfortable on the hard floor, and so cold, they could not get off, and lay there in the depths of depression, wishing they were dead.

  Dawn came with unexpected suddenness. One minute only starlight lit the big bare chamber with a chill radiance; two minutes later every crevice in its rock walls could be seen and a slanting shaft of sunlight crossed it from the high window. It roused them to face another day of fearsome possibilities, but as Escobar sat up he said with an attempt at cheerfulness:

  ‘Sunrise and sunset must always be like this on Mars. The refractive medium of the much thicker air on Earth brings some light to us earlier and causes it to linger later. But there are never any clouds to intercept the sunlight here, so at least we can always be certain of fine weather.’

  Carmen opened her eyes at that moment and said, ‘That is little comfort if it is always as cold as this.’

  Kem looked across at her and, with an effort, raised a smile. ‘So you’re awake. How are you feeling?’

  ‘Not too bad, considering what we’ve been through,’ she replied with a sigh. ‘I’ve been awake some time, and endeavouring to compose my mind so that I will be able to meet with some sort of dignity any fresh humiliations they may inflict on us. I’m sorry I made such an exhibition of myself last night.’

  ‘There’s no need to apologise. I thought it jolly brave of you to kick and bite that brute the way you did. Anyhow, it wouldn’t have been natural in any girl to stand still while she was being stripped.’

  ‘A Christian martyr would have done,’ replied Carmen quietly. ‘I should at least have tried to show indifference and fortitude, and in future I mean to do my utmost to follow the example set us by the blessed Saints.’

  ‘If your religion will enable you to do that,’ cut in Escobar, ‘I think that, after all, there must be a lot to be said for it. In any case your determination not to give way to hysteria, in a situation that would terrify most women out of their wits, does you great credit.’

  It was the first kind remark that he had made to his wife since they had left Earth, and evidently he was conscious of it, as he added: ‘I suppose you must always have hated me in secret for the way I blackmailed your father into making you marry me. I thought it possible at the time that you might revenge yourself on me by taking a lover; but I greatly under-estimated your strength of character. I had no idea that you were of the stuff of which martyrs are made—or that, if you once got the bit between your teeth, you would not stick at attempting to murder me.’

  ‘I’ve never loved you, Estévan,’ Carmen said gently, ‘but on the other hand, I have never hated you either; and I swear to you that I had no wish to harm you. I would do what I did again, if I had too; but I would have done it to anyone who had it in his power, as you had, to stop Kem getting away.’

  He nodded. ‘All right. I accept that. Perhaps I should have put the whole thing behind me sooner. Anyhow, we are so utterly cut off from our past now that nothing that happened in it should be allowed to have any bearing on the future. Had this proved a land of milk and honey, and you and Kem were about to take a honeymoon in it, I might still feel resentment—although perhaps illogically. But as things are, it would be selfish of me to play dog in the manger and pretend to any rights over you. I’m afraid we have a hard time ahead of us; so we had better regard ourselves as people who had never met before we were carried off; and if the two of you can comfort one another, that, at least, will be something to the goo
d.’

  ‘Thanks,’ said Kem, a little awkwardly. ‘That’s damn’ decent of you.’

  Carmen, however, shook her head, and replied in a solemn voice, ‘I am grateful for your forgiveness, Estévan, but, wherever one may go, a sacrament of the Church continues to be binding; so I shall continue to regard myself as your wife.’

  It was a strange conversation to be held soon after dawn by three people whose nakedness was covered only by some coarse fibre mats, but their circumstances were without parallel in human experience.

  For a while, partly owing to their laboured breathing, they fell silent; but not for long. The great door of the chamber, which was made of several thicknesses of wattlelike material, was thrust open, and the two giants who had stripped them the previous night came in. Slung in a sheet between them they carried with ease all the captives’ belongings; and as they spread the sheet out on the ground Kem was quick to notice that among them were a few other items.

  Ignoring the clothes and Carmen’s cases, one of the monsters picked out a flat object, which appeared to consist of a number of tubes of different lengths that had been graduated and welded together, so that they resembled a large ‘Pipes of Pan’. He gave it to Escobar, who examined it a little suspiciously, then shook it. The faint noise resulting gave him the clue: the pipes contained water, and the quantity held varied in accordance with the size of each. Evidentally it was a type of flask that had been designed to ensure that its user should practise maximum economy, by opening for each drink only the pipe containing the quantity nearest to his requirements, while those still sealed continued to be protected from evaporation.

  When the three captives had drunk from it, the other giant knelt down, opened a great fist, and held out to them a palm full of beans.

  Estévan swore, and Kem’s round face went red with rage. Having eaten nothing else for seven weeks, the very sight of the beans made him choke with fury. To have had to put up with them, and nothing else, as an emergency ration during the voyage, had been bad enough; but the thought that they might be the Martians’ normal and only food, which meant that he would get nothing but beans to eat for the rest of his life, seemed beyond endurance.

  It was Carmen who showed good sense by stretching out her hand, taking one and saying: ‘Come on. I know they are horrid, and we are all sick to death of them; but we must eat to keep up our strength.’

  A little shamefacedly the two men took their shares of the beans and chewed them glumly. Then the giants pointed to the pile of clothes and indicated that they should get dressed.

  Again Carmen set the example. With a glance at the two men she said: ‘I’m sure you won’t mind looking the other way for a minute or two. I don’t mind them seeing me. After all, they are only animals.’ Then she pushed aside the fibre mats in which she had wrapped herself and stood up in all her splendid nudity, like another Aphrodite rising from the waves of Homer’s wine-dark sea.

  When she had dressed the others followed suit, and as Escobar pulled his clothes on he commented: ‘You may regard these people as animals, and I think you are right; but they must receive their orders from a far superior type of being. Do you realise that every single thing we brought with us has been most carefully examined during the night?’

  It was only then Kem noticed that, although everything appeared to have been returned to them intact, that was not actually the case. The scents and ointments in some of Carmen’s bottles were slightly less than when he last remembered seeing them; so evidently samples had been taken of them all. A button was missing from one of his trousers, one of the metal tags from his shoe-laces had gone, and every single piece of material had had a snippet cut from its edge, presumably for analysis.

  ‘I suppose,’ he said, ‘that’s why they collected all the gear they could reach through the windows of Carmen’s room. Not with any idea of providing us with a few comforts on the voyage, but because they wanted to find out all they could about the things we use.’

  ‘Anyhow, thank goodness they’ve let me have my fur coat back,’ Carmen put in. ‘Without it I’d freeze to death.’

  ‘It is still early yet,’ Escobar sought to console her; ‘but it will warm up soon. Before midday you will probably be more comfortable without a coat. I have no idea what part of Mars we are on, or what the season is here now; but owing to the lack of cloud, and thinness of the atmosphere, parts of the planet must have a daytime temperature not far off that of the South of France in summer.’

  The effort to dress had been considerable and they were breathing heavily again; so they all saved their breath and forbore to comment when the giants fixed transparent protectors made of a mica-like substance over their eyes. The protectors were similar to, but smaller than, the ones the monsters wore themselves, and, as they had supposed, adhered to the forehead and cheeks by suction. They had hoped to be given oxygen flasks again, but now that they had been landed safely and could manage without them it seemed that to expend further oxygen simply to ease their breathing was considered to be an unnecessary extravagance.

  Now that they had been watered, fed and equipped, one of the giants pulled open the great door and beckoned them to follow him through it. They had, during the past few hours, been subject to so many fears that they felt fear no longer, but only an intense curiosity, as they supposed that they were at last to be taken before those great intelligences who ordered life on Mars, and so learn some of its secrets.

  The two men made way for Carmen as she stepped briskly forward; but her next step faltered, she gave a low cry of alarm, pointed, and stepped back.

  Following her pointing finger, they saw at once the thing that had scared her. In the corner near the door, unnoticed by them before, there was either a small animal or a huge insect. It was about four inches long and seemed to be a cross between a bee and a beetle. It had the horns of the latter reaching out from its head, but its body was covered with fur like that of a bumble bee. It made no move to attack them and stood there quite motionless; so, after a moment, Carmen plucked up her courage, and walked past it out into the tunnel.

  It was lit only by a dim daylight coming from the partly open doors of a row of rooms, all of which were on the same side of it as the one they had just left. As they followed the giant they took a quick look into several of them while passing, and saw that they differed in no way from that which they had occupied. The walls opposite the doors were broken only by single windows, and all of them were empty except for piles of rough matting littering the bare floors.

  A short distance down the tunnel they came to the broader chamber to which the trolley had brought them the previous night. Along its sides a number of similar trolleys were ranged and, taking hold of the front one, the giant pulled it out from the wall. As he did so they halted, expecting to be lifted on to it; but the second monster, who had been following them, now moved ahead and beckoned them over to an archway on the far side of the chamber from the sleeping rooms. The light there was so faint that they could at first see nothing beyond it; but as their sight became more accustomed to the semi-darkness they made out the features of a broad, lofty passage. On both sides, what at first appeared to be a four-foot-high step ran along the walls, but at intervals there were large holes in its flat top: they were long rows of giant earth closets.

  Inconvenient as they were to scramble up and perch upon, the captives were glad to take advantage of them, while the monster who had led them there waited in the archway. When they had done they returned to the big chamber, to find that the trolley now stood in its centre ready to move off. The giant who had pulled it from the walls was squatting on its deck grasping one of the control levers that stuck up from each of its ends. The other lifted them on to it and scrambled up behind them. The driver pushed his lever away from him. Instantly the balls beneath the deck began to revolve and the trolley ran forward.

  Through the semi-darkness of the tunnel, far away in the distance, they could see a square of light that could only be its entr
ance. As they rumbled towards it, Carmen said: ‘I didn’t like the look of that creature at all. I hope we are not going to meet more nasties like that.’

  ‘It was probably quite harmless.’ Kem shrugged. ‘In an underground place like this it is quite natural that there should be beetles, or something like them; and we must try to get accustomed to the fact that all insects or animals here will be three times the size of anything resembling them on Earth.’

  Escobar grunted. ‘You are right there. I only hope that they keep their dogs, if they have such pets, well under control.’

  The thought of coming face to face with an Alsatian as big as a donkey was certainly frightening, and Kem laughed a little nervously. ‘I’d rather take a chance on being able to make friends with an outsize dog than find myself cornered by a cat the size of a small panther. Anyhow, we had better keep clear of the deserts if we can. I have never particularly fancied myself unarmed against a lion, and to come round a rock on one as big as an elephant would give me a heart attack.’

  ‘I am going to have a heart attack anyway soon, unless I can get some oxygen,’ Escobar panted. ‘For anyone not used to it, the strain of living in a place several thousand feet above sea level is bad enough; but it is nothing compared with this.’

  As the trolley rolled out of the tunnel into the bright sunlight they got their first proper sight of a Martian landscape, and it did nothing to lighten their depression; for as far as they could see there stretched an endless plain broken only here and there by a low ridge of reddish rock. On looking back they saw that the place from which they had come was also a flat-topped ridge, and differed from those in the distance only in having a uniform row of windows cut in its one perpendicular side. It was a mile or more in length, so its rows of windows seemed to stretch away interminably, and were far too many to count. Apart from them and the tunnel entrance which pierced a mound at right angles to them, the place had no other features that would have indicated it to be an habitation, and Kem remarked: