The Angry Planet (26 page)

Well, let me know what train
you will be arriving on and I shall see that McIntosh meets you at the station
with the trap, Yours Truly,

E
LSPETH
D
UTHIE.

An entry in Paul Adam’s
notebook:

. . . Well, it’s all over. In a
few days we will be finished with this tour, and then it will be Pitlochry and
a long rest. By Jove, a bit different from the last time we went to Pitlochry!
Uncle Steve has suggested that while we’re there we might all club together and
write a book—a chapter each, sort of thing, while it’s all fresh in our minds.
Not a bad idea, I must say—I won’t mind having a whack at an occasional
chapter. Funny, I never thought of myself as anything of a writer, but take
this notebook, for example. I started it as something to do on the journey out
to Mars, and now I’ve got used to the idea of jotting things down from time to
time—a sort of diary, like that chap Pepys they tell us about at school. Well,
this is the last entry I’m going to make in it—we’re almost back to normal now.
It will certainly be something to show my grand-children (that is, of course,
if I ever have any!).

Well, that’s the lot. I don’t
quite know how I ought to finish—maybe I should take a solemn oath that
everything contained herein is truth. I think it would be best just to say
cheerio, so that’s what I’ll do. This is the end of Paul Adam, his Notebook.

A letter from Michael Malone to
Mr. McIntosh, gamekeeper, Pitlochry:

Dear Mr. McIntosh,—Mrs. Duthie
will likely have told you that we are coming to Pitlochry in a few days. I’m
looking forward to seeing you again, but before I do there is something I have
got on my mind, and that is why I am writing this letter. I’ve had a guilty
conscience about it all the time we have been away on Mars, and I kept on
wishing I could get in touch with you somehow. Do you remember that just before
we left I borrowed one of your salmon gaffs—an extra big one it was. As a
matter of fact, this whole adventure would probably never have happened if you
hadn’t lent me the gaff. You see, we used it for climbing over the wall of the
stockade at Dr. McGillivray’s laboratory. And then, when the rocket started
off, there it was, still hanging on the wall, with the rope fixed on to it. So
I never had a chance to return it to you. I hope you didn’t need it too much
and that you weren’t angry with me.

I thought I would just drop you
this little note of apology before we met, so that maybe you wouldn’t feel too
sore about the gaff and not speak to me or something when we come to Pitlochry.

Hope your rheumatism is not
troubling you too much these days. Yours sincerely,

M
IKE
M
ALONE.

A letter from Hamish McIntosh,
gamekeeper, Pitlochry, to Michael Malone:

dear Mr. Mike,—i am not good at
the writing so this is to say do not wory about the gaff she was an old one
indeed when you come you can keep her as a suvener i am glad you are well i
found the gaff on the wall, when i was looking for you. i shall meet you with
the punny at the station i am not ofended about the gaff i remain your obedient
servant

H
AMISH
M
CINTOSH.

3.
Concluding Remarks by Stephen
MacFarlane.
There is one more thing to be said, and this I have kept
deliberately to the last, because it seems to me to be the one episode that
gathers up symbolically in itself the whole
evanescence
, as it were, of
our story. As I sit at my desk here writing, chewing over the cud of our
crowded reminiscences, this above all is the image that haunts me—even more
potently than the image of that first fight between the Beautiful People and
the Terrible Ones, I think, or the flaming mind’s-eye picture of the last great
battle in the Shining City.

In all our interviews with the
Press, with distinguished scientists, with representatives of the various film
companies and the B.B.C., the one thing we were invariably asked was, had we
brought with us any relics of Martian life. You who know by this time the
extraordinary and sudden circumstances under which we left the Angry Planet,
will realize that there was no time for us to collect anything—even a sample of
soil—to bring back with us. Had we been left to our own devices we would have
laden the
Albatross
with relics, as you can well imagine—it is
inconceivable that a scientist of Dr. McGillivray’s acumen would have omitted
to do this. He was, indeed, engaged, as I well know, in compiling a huge stock
of samples during the period while we were waiting for the Beautiful People to
assemble themselves to attack the Terrible Ones. In our tent by the dome there
were neatly labeled articles of every sort—leaves from the trees, small
specimens of the cactus plants, pieces of the glass-like substance the domes
were made of, even some seeds of the Beautiful People, and two very young
sprouts from the great nursery-cave among the hills—in short, every conceivable
thing likely to be of interest to enquiring minds on earth.

But our tent, and all its
contents—these were overwhelmed by the lava. Nothing at all was conveyed to the
Albatross
—all we had stored in it, against a possible sudden emergency,
was some water from the well.

Of our cameras, all but two
were destroyed by the lava—and when we reached earth, and set about having the
films in these two developed (they were of the 36-exposure-per-spool type, so
allowing for the few exposures not made, there would have been some 60 odd
photographs of the Martian scene available—a goodly number)—it was only to
find, to our chagrin, that some deleterious quality in the rare atmosphere of
Mars had rendered the sensitized emulsion quite useless—the films were
absolutely blank. Dr. McGillivray has written extensively and learnedly on this
unfortunate aspect of our adventure in the
Photographic Journal
—I
mention the circumstance here only by way of explaining why the obvious course
of illustrating these writings with actual authentic photographs has not been
taken. Another thing that was destroyed by the lava, incidentally, was our
portable recording equipment: but since, as we have said so often, there was no
actual sound on Mars—no speech—this apparatus had been entirely useless to us:
we did not make one single disc with it.

No, we had nothing to
show—absolutely nothing.

But—and here’s the rub—I can
hear you say: But Nuna—Nuna was in the rocket with them—Nuna was a specimen
better than any other—an actual Martian.

Nuna, alas, never reached earth
with us. Nuna exists no more—the body of Nuna has been disintegrated beyond all
hope of reconstruction—Nuna has vanished, has become an imperceptible dust,
scattered in the enormous wastes of space. It is the dissolution of Nuna—the
last glowing moment—that haunts me in the way I have already mentioned. Let me,
quite simply and detachedly, describe how it happened—let me set it out here as
the last scene of our book
.
 . . .

Nuna never recovered from the
shock of our start-off from Mars—this I have already given an account of: how he
was strapped to the floor of the cabin when we found that he had died. On the
third day of the journey, we began to notice a sickly heaviness in the
atmosphere of the
Albatross
. It intensified. On the fifth day it was so
potent as to fill us with nausea—and we could no longer disguise from ourselves
the fact that we all had realized secretly in our hearts but had been unwilling
to mention to each other: the body of the little Martian was decomposing—was,
in doing so, poisoning our precious air
.
 . . .

There was only one thing we
could possibly do. Mac and I, with heavy hearts, steeling ourselves to the
effort, unstrapped the frail limp body and took it to the inner door of the
cabin. Jacky and Paul turned away, so as not to have to watch us, but Mike kept
his face in our direction, though I could see that he was biting his lip, poor
boy. We opened the inner door and laid Nuna against the outer one. Mac had
contrived, at the outset, a device for getting rid of things from the rocket
while it was traveling in space, though there had been no occasion to use it on
the journey out. It consisted of a heavy spring between the inner and outer
walls of the
Albatross
that could be attached to the object to be
ejected and controlled in its release from the inside of the cabin once the
inner door had been closed and the outer door opened (the movement of the outer
door could also be controlled from inside the cabin while the ship was
traveling).

We set the spring in position,
and closed the inner door. Mac touched the lever that opened the outer door,
and then immediately set the spring in operation that would push Nuna into
space. Then, with a sigh, he closed the outer door again. Nuna was no longer
with us.

And now I come to the amazing
part. When I looked through the port-holes beside the doors, it was to see, to
my utter horror, that Nuna was still there—traveling alongside us a few yards
away from the
Albatross!

“Mac,” I gasped, “what has
happened? Look—look! He’s there—outside!”

Mac spoke quite softly and
simply. “Steve,” he said, “it can’t be otherwise. Don’t you realize, man, that
there isn’t any gravity in space—there is nothing to pull Nuna away from us. By
the process of inertia, any object we put out from the rocket while we travel
will travel with us—on and on—Nuna will go with us like that, where the spring
pushed him, until
—
”

“Until what, Mac?” I asked, as
he hesitated.

“Until we reach the atmosphere
belt of the earth. And then,” he lowered his voice still further, “well, Steve,
although he seems quite motionless, Nuna is traveling as fast as we are, and
you know what an incredible speed that is. You know what a shooting star is—a
particle of matter traveling in space that suddenly comes within the gravity
pull of earth, and then, as it shoots towards it, is made white-hot for a
moment by the friction of the atmosphere, then is burned up. Nuna is not
protected as the outer shell of the rocket is. When we reach the outer atmosphere
—”

“My heavens, Mac,” I said, “you
mean
 . . . 
? Oh, it’s horrible, it’s
horrible!”

But however we felt, the thing
had to be faced. If we had kept Nuna with us, the gases of his decomposition in
the strong air of the cabin would have poisoned us all. As it was, with no air
to continue the process of decay, he traveled there in space, a few yards away
from us, in the same state of preservation as when we put him out. It was
impossible to believe he was moving at all—he seemed motionless, just outside
the window, staring in at us, as it were, with his glazed jelly-fish eyes.

And so he remained. As our
journey neared its end I told myself I would not look through the port-hole to
watch the inevitable happen—and yet I knew, in my heart, that I would. When we
were within the gravity pull of earth, and were preparing for the landing, with
its bout of unconsciousness, I lay on the bed with my head on one side, staring
out at the still figure of the little Martian. My heart was beating, I
remember, and I trembled.

The end, when it came, was very
sudden. And it was—and it is the only word, in spite of all the unpleasant
associations of the thing—very beautiful too.

Mac looked at me significantly.

“It’s almost time, Steve,” he
said quietly.

And a moment of two after that,
it happened. For a diminutive fraction of a second the figure of Nuna glowed
absolutely incandescent—every fiber of his tendrils, his whole outline, burned
with unbelievable brilliance against the darkness of space. Only for a
flash—and
then
 . . .
he
was gone!
Where he had been, there was nothing.

Our last contact with Mars had
gone. Perhaps, on earth, some dreamer gazing skywards had seen, that night, a
brief trail of fire—a shooting star, as he would think, gone out of his
knowledge almost before he had time to register it
.
 . . .

As for us, we remained dazed
for a moment or two, looking at each other solemnly. And then the brief
unconsciousness came, as I have described it, and when we recovered from that,
it was all over
.
 . . .

(
A Note by the Editor of
MacFarlane’s Papers.
At this point the book sent to me by Stephen
MacFarlane comes to an end. There were, in his writing, several disjointed
notes that he intended shaping into a closing sequence—I have already referred,
earlier in this volume, to the incompleteness of the manuscripts with which I
was provided. These notes, unlike his earlier ones, are almost
unintelligible—it is quite impossible to reconstruct from them exactly how he
proposed to shape his last paragraphs. I have, therefore, not thought it worthwhile
to reprint them here. I leave the end of Chapter XII as above.