CHAPTER XI
The _Astronef_ dropped swiftly down through the crimson-tinged clouds,and a few minutes later they saw that the rest of the fleet hadscattered in units in all directions, apparently with the intention ofgetting as far as possible out of reach of that terrible ram. Only oneof them, the largest, which carried what looked like a flag of wovengold at the top of its centre mast, remained in sight after a fewminutes. It was almost immediately below them when they had passedthrough the clouds, and they could see it sinking straight down towardsthe centre of what appeared to be the principal square of the bigger ofthe two cities which Zaidie had named New York and Brooklyn.
"That fellow has gone to report, evidently," said Redgrave. "We'llfollow him just to see what he's up to, but I don't think we'd betteropen the ports even then. There's no telling when they might give us awhiff of that poison-mist, or whatever it is."
"But how are you going to talk to them, then, if they can talk?--I mean,if they know any language that we do?"
"They're something like men, and so I suppose they understand thelanguage of signs, at any rate. Still, if you don't fancy it, we'll gosomewhere else."
"No, thanks," she said. "That's not my father's daughter. I haven't comea hundred million miles from home to go away before the first act'sfinished. We'll go down to see if we can make them understand."
By this time the _Astronef_ was hanging suspended over an enormoussquare about half the size of Hyde Park. It was laid out just as aterrestrial park would be, in grass land, flower-beds, and avenues, andpatches of trees, only the grass was a reddish yellow, the leaves of thetrees were like those of a beech in autumn, and the flowers were nearlyall a deep violet, or a bright emerald green.
As they descended they saw that the square, or Central Park, as Zaidieat once christened it, was flanked by enormous blocks of buildings,palaces built of a dazzlingly white stone, and topped by domed roofs andlofty cupolas of glass.
"Isn't that just lovely!" she said, swinging her binoculars in everydirection. "Talk about your Park Lane and the houses round Central Park;why, it's the Chicago Exposition, and the Paris one, and your CrystalPalace, multiplied by about ten thousand, and all spread out just roundthis one place. If we don't find these people nice, I guess we'd bettergo back and build a fleet like this, and come and take it."
"There spoke the new American imperialism," laughed Redgrave. "Well,we'll go and see what they're like first, shall we?"
The _Astronef_ dropped a little more slowly than the air-ship had done,and remained suspended a hundred feet or so above her after she hadreached the ground. Swarms of human figures but of more than humanstature, clad in tunics and trousers or knickerbockers, came out of theglass-domed palaces from all sides into the park. They were nearly allof the same stature, and there appeared to be no difference whateverbetween the sexes. Their dress was absolutely plain; there was noattempt at ornament or decoration of any kind.
"If there are any of the Martian women among those people," said herladyship, "they've taken to rationals, and they've grown about as big asthe men."
"That's exactly what's happening on earth, you know, dear. I don't meanabout the rationals, but the women growing up, especially in America. Icome of a pretty long family----but, look!"
"Well, I only come to your ear," she said.
"And our descendants of ten thousand years hence----"
"Oh, don't bother about them!" she said. "Look; there's some one whoseems to want to communicate with us. Why, they're all bald! Theyhaven't got a hair among them--and what a size their heads are!"
"That's brains--too much brains, in fact. These people have lived toolong. I daresay they've ceased to be animals--civilised themselves outof everything in the way of passions and emotions, and are just purelyintellectual beings, with as much human nature about them as Russiandiplomacy or those things we saw at the bottom of the Newton Crater. Idon't like the look of them."
The orderly swarms of figures, which were rapidly filling the park,divided as he was speaking, making a broad lane from one of itsentrances to where the _Astronef_ was hanging above the air-ship. Alight four-wheeled vehicle, whose framework and wheels glittered likeburnished gold, sped towards them, driven by some invisible agency.
Its only occupant was a huge man, dressed in the universal costume,saving only a scarlet sash in place of the cord-girdle which the otherswore round their waists. The vehicle stopped near the air-ship, overwhich the _Astronef_ was hanging, and, as the figure dismounted, a dooropened in the side of the vessel and three other figures, similar bothin stature and attire, came out and entered into conversation with him.
"The Admiral of the Fleet is evidently making his report," saidRedgrave. "Meanwhile, the crowd seems to be taking a considerable amountof interest in us."
"And very naturally, too!" replied Zaidie. "Don't you think we might godown now and see if we can make ourselves understood in any way? You canhave the guns ready in case of accidents, but I don't think they'll tryand hurt us now. Look, the gentleman with the red sash is making signs."
"I think we can go down now all right," replied Redgrave, "because it'squite certain they can't use the poison-guns on us without killingthemselves as well. Still, we may as well have our own ready. Andrew,get that port Maxim ready. I hope we shan't want it, but we may. I don'tquite like the look of these people."
"They're very ugly, aren't they?" said Zaidie; "and really you can'ttell which are men and which are women. I suppose they've civilisedthemselves out of everything that's nice, and are just scientific andutilitarian and everything that's horrid."
"I shouldn't wonder. They look to me as if they've just got commonsense, as we call it, and hadn't any other sense; but, at any rate, ifthey don't behave themselves, we shall be able to teach them manners ofa sort, though we may possibly have done that to some extent already."
As he said this Redgrave went into the conning-tower, and the _Astronef_moved from above the air-ship, and dropped gently into the crimson grassabout a hundred feet from her. Then the ports were opened, the guns,which Murgatroyd had loaded, were swung into position, and they armedthemselves with a brace of revolvers each, in case of accident.
"What delicious air this is!" said her ladyship, as the ports wereopened and she took her first breath of the Martian atmosphere. "It'sever so much nicer than ours. Oh, Lenox, it's just like breathingchampagne."
Redgrave looked at her with an admiration which was tempered by a suddenapprehension. Even in his eyes she had never seemed so lovely before.Her cheeks were glowing and her eyes were gleaming with a brightnessthat was almost feverish, and he was himself sensible of a strangefeeling of exultation, both mental and physical, as his lungs filledwith the Martian air.
"Oxygen," he said, shortly, "and too much of it! Or I shouldn't wonderif it was something like nitrous-oxide--you know, laughing gas."
"Don't!" she laughed; "it may be very nice to breathe, but it remindsone of other things which aren't a bit nice. Still, if it is anything ofthat sort it might account for these people having lived so fast. I knowI feel just now as if I was living at the rate of thirty-six hours aday, and so, I suppose, the fewer hours we stop here the better."
"Exactly!" said Redgrave, with another glance of apprehension at her."Now, there's his Royal Highness, or whatever he is, coming. How are wegoing to talk to him? Are you all ready, Andrew?"
"Yes, my Lord, all ready," replied the old Yorkshireman, dropping hishuge, hairy hand on the breech of the Maxim.
"Very well, then, shoot the moment you see them doing anythingsuspicious, and don't let any one except his Royal Highness come nearerthan a hundred yards."
As he said this Redgrave went to the door, from which the gangway stepshad been lowered, and, in reply to a singularly expressive gesture fromthe huge Martian, who seemed to stand nearly nine feet high, he beckonedto him to come up on to the deck.
As he mounted the steps the crowd closed round the _Astronef_ and theMartian air-ship; but, as though in obedie
nce to orders which hadalready been given, they kept at a respectful distance of a little overa hundred yards away from the strange vessel which had wrought suchhavoc with their fleet. When the Martian reached the deck, Redgrave heldout his hand and the giant recoiled, as a man on earth might have doneif, instead of the open palm, he had seen a clenched hand gripping aknife.
"Take care, Lenox," exclaimed Zaidie, taking a couple of steps towardshim, with her right hand on the butt of one of her revolvers. Themovement brought her close to the open door, and in full view of thecrowd outside.
If a seraph had come on earth and presented itself thus before a throngof human beings, there might have happened some such miracle as waswrought when the swarm of Martians beheld the strange beauty of thisradiant daughter of the earth.
As it seemed to the space-voyagers, when they discussed it afterwards,ages of purely utilitarian civilisation had brought all conditions ofMartian life up--or down--to the same level. There was no apparentdifference between the males and females in stature; their faces wereall the same, with features of mathematical regularity, pale skin,bloodless cheeks, and an expression, if such it could be called, utterlydevoid of emotion.
But still these creatures were human, or at least their forefathers hadbeen. Hearts beat in their breasts, blood of a sort still flowed throughtheir veins, and so the magic of this marvellous vision instantly awokethe long-slumbering elementary instincts of a bygone age. A low murmurran through the vast throng, a murmur half-human, half-brutish, whichswiftly rose to a hoarse screaming roar.
"Look out, my Lord! Quick! Shut the door, they're coming! It's herladyship they want; she must look like an angel from Heaven to them.Shall I fire?"
"Yes," said Redgrave, gripping the lever, and bringing the door down."Zaidie, if this fellow moves put a bullet through him. I'm going totalk to that air-ship before he gets his poison-guns to work."
As the last word left his lips Murgatroyd put his thumb on the spring onthe Maxim. A roar such as Martian ears had never heard before resoundedthrough the vast square, and was flung back with a thousand echoes fromthe walls of the huge palaces on every side. A stream of smoke and flamepoured out of the little port-hole, and then the onward-swarming throngseemed to stop, and the front ranks of it began to sink down silently inlong rows.
Then through the roaring rattle of the Maxim sounded the deep, sharpbang of Redgrave's gun, as he sent ten pounds weight of Rennickite, ashe had christened it, into the Martian air-ship. There was the roar ofan explosion which shook the air for miles around. A blaze of greenishflame and a huge cloud of steamy smoke showed that the projectile haddone its work, and, when the smoke drifted away, the spot on which theair-ship had lain was only a deep, red, jagged gash in the ground. Therewas not even a fragment of the ship to be seen.
This done, Redgrave went and turned the starboard Maxim on to anotherswarm which was approaching the _Astronef_ from that side. When he hadgot the range he swung the gun slowly from side to side. The movingthrong stopped, as the other one had done, and sank down to the redgrass, now dyed with a deeper red.
Meanwhile, Zaidie had been holding the Martian at something more thanarm's length with her revolver. He seemed to understand perfectly that,if she pulled the trigger, the revolver would do something like what theMaxims had done. He appeared to take no notice whatever either of thedestruction of the air-ship or of the slaughter that was going on aroundthe _Astronef_. His big, pale blue eyes were fixed upon her face. Theyseemed to be devouring a loveliness such as they had never seen before.A dim, pinky flush stole for the first time into his waxy cheeks, andsomething like a light of human passion came into his eyes.
Then, to the utter astonishment of both Redgrave and Zaidie, he saidslowly and deliberately, and with only just enough tinge of emotion inhis voice to make Redgrave want to shoot him:
"Beautiful. Perfect. More perfect than ours. I want it. Give Palace andGarden of Eternal Summer for it. Two thousand work-slaves and fifty----"
"And I'll see you damned first, sir, whoever you are!" said Redgrave,clapping his hand on to the butt of his revolver, and forgetting for themoment that he was speaking in another world than his own. "What thedevil do you mean, sir, by insulting my wife----?"
"Insulting. Wife. What is that? We have no words like those."
"But you speak English," exclaimed Zaidie, going a little nearer to him,but still keeping the muzzle of her revolver pointing up to his hairlesshead. "No, Lenox, don't be afraid about me, and don't get angry. Can'tyou see that this person hasn't got any temper? I suppose it wascivilised out of his ancestors ages ago. He doesn't know what a wife oran insult is. He just looks upon me as a desirable piece of property tobe bought, and I daresay he offered you a very handsome price. Now,don't look so savage, because you know bargains like that have been madeeven on our dear old virtuous Mother Earth. For instance, if you hadn'tmet us in the middle of the Atlantic----"
"That'll do, Zaidie," Redgrave interrupted almost roughly. "That's notexactly the question, but I see what you mean, and it was a bit silly ofme to get angry."
"Silly? Angry? What do those words mean?" said the Martian in his slow,passionless, mechanical voice. "Who are you? Whence come you?"
"I'll answer the last part first," said Redgrave. "We come from theearth, the planet which you see after sunset and before sunrise."
"Yes, the Silver Star," said the Martian without any note of wonder orsurprise in his voice. "Are all the dwellers there like the gods andangels our children read about in the old legends?"
"Gods and angels!" laughed Zaidie. "There, Lenox, there's a complimentfor you. I really think we ought to be as civil to his Royal Highnessafter that as possible." Then she went on, addressing the Martian, "No,we are not all gods and angels on earth. There are no gods and very fewangels. In fact there are none except those which exist in the fancy ofcertain prejudiced persons. But that doesn't matter, at least not justnow," she continued with American directness. "What we want to know justnow is, why you speak English, and what sort of a world this Mars is?"
The Martian evidently only understood the most direct essentials of herspeech. He saw that she asked two questions, and he answered them.
"Speak English?" he replied, with a little shake of his huge head. "Weknow not English, but there is no other speech. There is only ours.Cycles ago there were other speeches here, but those who spoke them werekilled. It was inconvenient. One speech for a world is best."
"I see what he means," said Redgrave, looking towards Zaidie. "TheMartian people have developed along practically the same lines as we aredoing, but they have done it faster and got a long way ahead of us. Weare finding out that the speech we call English is the shortest and mostconvenient. The Martians found it out long ago and killed everybody whospoke anything else. After all, what we call speech is only thetranslation of thoughts into sounds. These people have been thinking forages with the same sort of brains as ours, and they've translated theirthoughts into the same sounds. What we call English they, I daresay,call Martian, and that's all there is in it that I can see."
"Of course," laughed Zaidie. "Wonderful until you know how, eh? Likemost things. Still I must say that our friend here speaks Englishsomething like a phonograph, and if he'll excuse me saying so, which ofcourse he will, he doesn't seem to have much more human nature abouthim."
"I'm not quite so sure on that point," said Redgrave, "but----"
"Oh, never mind about that now!" she interrupted, and then, turningtowards the Martian, who had been listening intently as though he wastrying to make sense out of what they had been saying, she went onspeaking slowly and very plainly----
"Tell me, sir, if you please, do you know what 'angry' means? Are younot angry with us for destroying your air-ships up there in the clouds,and the one that came down, and for shooting all those people of yours?"
The Martian looked at her with a little light in his big blue eyes, andtwo faint little spots of red just under them, and said:
"Anger! Yes,
I remember, that is what we called brain-heat. Our teachersfound it to be madness and it was abolished. It was not convenient. Theair-ships were not convenient to you, so you abolished them. The folk,too, that you abolished with those things," pointing to the guns, "theywere not convenient. If you hadn't done that they would have abolishedyou. There is no more to say."
"What brutes," said Zaidie, turning away from him, her head thrown backand her lips curling in unutterable disgust. "Well, if these people havecivilised themselves along the same lines that we are doing, thinkingthe same things and speaking something like the same speech, thank Godwe shall be dead before our civilisation reaches a stage like this.That's not a man. It's only a machine of flesh and bone and nerves, andI suppose it has blood of some sort."
A beautiful woman always looks most beautiful when she is just a littleangry. Redgrave had never seen Zaidie look quite so lovely as she didjust then. The Martian, whose ancestors had for generations forgottenwhat human emotion was like, only saw in her anger a miracle which madeher a thousand times more beautiful than before, and as he looked uponher glowing cheeks and gleaming eyes some instinct insensiblytransmitted through many generations awoke to sudden life in some unusedcorner of his brain.
His pale clear eyes lit up with something like a glow of human passion.The pink spots under his eyes spread downwards over his cheeks. Somehalf-articulate sounds came from between his thin lips. Then they weredrawn back and showed his smooth, toothless gums. He took a couple oflong, swift strides towards her, and then bent forward, towering overher with long, outstretched arms, huge, hideous, and half-human.
Zaidie sprang backwards as he came towards her, her right hand went up,and, just as Redgrave levelled his revolver, and Murgatroyd, true to theold Berserk instinct, took a rifle by the barrel and swung the stockabove his head, Zaidie pulled her trigger. The bullet cut a clean holethrough the smooth, hairless skull of the Martian. A dark, red spot camejust between his eyes, his huge frame shrank together and collapsed in aheap on the deck.
"Oh, I've killed him! God forgive me, killed a man!" she whispered, asher hand fell to her side, and the revolver dropped from her fingers."But, Lenox, do you really think it was a man?"
"That thing a man!" he replied between his clenched teeth. "He wantedyou, and spoke English of a sort, so there was something human abouthim, but anyhow he's better dead. Here, Andrew, open that door again andhelp me to heave this thing overboard. Then I think we'd better be offbefore we have the rest of the fleet with their poison guns round us.Zaidie, I think you'd better go to your room for the present. Take a nipof cognac and then lie down, and mind you keep the door tight shut.There's no telling what these animals might do if they had a chance, andjust now it's my business and Andrew's to see that they don't."
Though she would much rather have remained on deck to see anything morethat might happen, she saw that he was really in earnest, and so like awise wife who commands by obeying, she obeyed, and went below.
Then the dead body of the Martian was tumbled out of the side door. Thewindows through which the guns had been fired were hermetically closed,and a few minutes later the _Astronef_ vanished from the surface ofMars, to remain a memory and a marvel to the dwindling generations ofthe worn-out world which is as this may be in the far-off days that areto come.
A Honeymoon in Space Page 12
