The Red Journey Back (20 page)

“They
control,” began Dr. McGillivray. “These creatures can
control.
They
controlled
us
, against every instinct in us. They made us welcome you as
we did, with no hint of danger to you. We tried—God knows we tried to warn you!
But we were bewitched—the old word is the best one. We were possessed by
them—the Martian telepathic principle was carried to its last conclusion.”

“Yet
you broke the spell at last,” said Kalkenbrenner quietly—and I saw that he
realized to the full, from his own instinctive guess at the nature of the
enemy, exactly how much effort of will power it had cost.

McGillivray
nodded and smiled a little ruefully, his blind eyes turned slightly away.

“We
had to. We simply had to. I fought with every ounce of control until I could
make that one short speech as
myself
and tell you to pay no heed to all we had said, to restrain us somehow, to bind
us—destroy us if necessary.”

“As
the good Archie Borrowdale almost did,” said MacFarlane, also with a rueful
smile, fingering a bruise on his jaw where I had been compelled to strike him. “Still,
it was the only way—and there are no hard feelings, Borrowdale—and no fear of a
return bout, I hope! They had me even worse than they had the Doctor. I managed
to get the door shut, so that they couldn’t send in that devilish Cloud; but it
was all I could do—they had me again a moment later and made me attack you,
until you mercifully knocked me out. Thank heaven you did—otherwise, if I’d had
a chance, I’d have opened the door again—that was what they wanted to make me
do. You would have been all right, in those suits of yours, but it might have
been the end after all for poor old Mac and me.
 . . .
”

“We
had no remote suggestion during the first trip that there were such creatures,”
McGillivray continued. “You young people know that—we met only the Beautiful
People and the Terrible Ones. Malu has told me that far back in Martian
history, as it has been remembered by such rulers as himself and the Center,
there were shadowy legends and recollections of the Creeping Canals, the deadly
long lines of them spreading across the planet’s surface; and that in the
Canals were creatures of some kind, even stronger in their power of enmity than
the Terrible Ones. The Terrible Ones were enemies indeed—we also know that; but
they were plants like the Beautiful People themselves, and could be dealt with
in combat—could be hacked and destroyed by means of the long silica swords
perfected by Malu and his friends. These other beings were different
altogether: they caused no physical harm to the plant-folk—but they enslaved
them mentally. That is why, long, long ago, the various groups of the Beautiful
People tended to migrate northward and, without ever fully knowing why, to
confine themselves to certain well-defined tracts of territory. The legendary
Canal Creatures were known to concentrate mainly in the south, once they had
made their initial journeys from the polar caps, as I shall explain later. But
you see, when the volcano destroyed Malu’s settlement, at the end of our first
Martian visit, his people were forced to travel, as we told you in the
messages; and they traveled south, farther and farther south, in search of
uninhabited bubble houses. What they did not fully understand, until almost too
late, was that the bubble houses they did eventually find were empty only
because they bordered on one of the deadly Canal zones.”

“But
they escaped?” said Paul, half-questioningly. And it was Malu who answered—the “voice”
came into my head as he reclined strangely in the trailer with us, close to
Jacqueline.

“My
people went north as the great Canal crept forward toward the hills and the
spaceship,” he said. “It was better so, in order to preserve our young ones.
Where they are I know not—except that I have understood, from the plain plants,
that they are far away and in safety. I alone remained to help my friends; for
the people you know as Discophora are not able to control such as Malu, Prince
of the Beautiful People, in so great a measure as they can control such as you
from across the skies.”

“It’s
true indeed,” nodded McGillivray. “They can control Malu, of course—they can
control the Beautiful People just as you saw they had controlled a group of the
Terrible Ones, to act as their slaves or soldiers, as it were; but to nothing
like the extent they can control us—and for a very good reason, as you shall
hear. It meant that they forced us to lock Malu up when you were approaching.
With him concealed in that way, they were able to influence him just
sufficiently for his thoughts not to reach you. It was when Jacky suddenly and
intensely
thought
of Malu in the
Albatross
that his thoughts were able to break through, and so gave
me
the
strength to
speak.
 . . .
It
seems so strange—so complex a mechanism, and difficult indeed to explain. You
must only take it that that is how the influence of these creatures operates.
Someday we may know more about them and so be able to comprehend how their
telepathic impulses do work in practice. In the meantime, as far as Discophora
is concerned—” It was Paul, the practical Paul, who interrupted quietly at this
stage, to ask the question which indeed engaged us all—which had lain behind
all other questions as the great jigsaw fitted together.

“In
the meantime, sir,” he said, leaning forward a little toward the sightless man,
“what
is
Discophora? What are the Creeping Canals?”

Dr.
McGillivray hesitated for a long, long moment before he replied.

“In
a word—” he said very gravely, “in a word, boy, and in so far as I understand
the great inscrutable mystery of Martian nature, they are
 . . .
Survivors!”

And
on the instant, in my own questing mind, one more small fragment of the jigsaw
fitted. Again I remembered the airstrip messages—the first, the only occasion,
on which MacFarlane had tried to tell us something of the nature of the enemy
attacking the
Albatross
.
I remembered the distorted reception that night—how, imperfectly, we had picked
on one word and had used it ever afterward, ourselves, to describe the whole
phenomenon. The Vivores! That one word, so compelling and mysterious—so
suggestive indeed of living beings vastly, vastly different from ourselves in
all their aspects. The
Vivores
 . . . 
! The
imperfect translation, amid the interference, of the word which had truly been
sent to us across space: the
Survivors
!

And
Dr. Kalkenbrenner, himself after all a scientist, his mind operating along the
same lines as McGillivray’s, nodded seriously.

“Yes—yes,”
he said. “I guessed—I almost guessed. I had a notion from the start, but too
instinctive and shadowy a notion to warrant expression. Survivors
 . . .
from
the ancient days of Martian prehistory—”

“When
there was indeed an animal as well as a plant life upon the planet,” went on McGillivray.
“We knew, even on the last trip, that it must have been so, thousands, possibly
millions of years ago. We knew that the Terrible Ones were descendants of a
species of plant, like our insect-eating plants on Earth, which had lived on
flesh.
 . . .
Someday, long, long ago, there must have been animal life to provide the
forebears of the Terrible Ones with such food. As the countless ages went on,
it died away, this animal life—as the reptiles died on Earth, the great hordes
of the diplodoci, the pterodactyls, the dinosaurs. All, all perished—evolved to
a point of development where they became extinct. The plants like the Terrible
Ones adjusted themselves to the new conditions—contrived a method of survival
which made them independent.
 . . .
I merely
sketch it all, of course—I cover, in these few words, a million years and more.
I only speculate that indeed it happened—although there is, as I see it, no
other possible answer to Discophora.”

“And
what were these
 . . .
animals
who once lived on Mars?” asked Jacky hesitantly. “What were they like, sir?”

“Some
of them, I believe,” said McGillivray slowly, “some of them, my dear, were very
like ourselves. Perhaps not in physical appearance, although that too is
possible; but at least in that they had brains—most powerful brains. It was
long ago, long, long ago. What I tell you now is only a gigantic guess I have
made, I sketch a mighty vision I have
had; but I feel it
to be near the truth, and I see it thus:

“There
were, in those far times, among all other animals on Mars, some animals as
highly civilized as we are upon Earth. What the nature of that civilization was
it is impossible to say—there may be traces of it somewhere, somewhere: we
shall someday see. But these beings, whatever they looked like, had intelligence
to a high degree. They evolved, as the centuries went on—as we on Earth evolved
as our centuries went on. They, however, developed their intelligences to a
pitch where their bodies shrank and dwindled, where their nobler feelings, if
they had ever had any, decayed and died. They became thinkers—only
thinkers
. The power of their brains was such
that they could control all other sentient beings near to them. But their
bodies were so emaciated, as the centuries marched past, that in a purely physical
way they could hardly survive. They fell victim to creatures stronger than
themselves, despite the power of their brains. They solved a million problems
by
thinking
—and
at last, and inevitably, they solved this one. Do not necessarily believe what
I say—only take it as a speculation; but reflect whether there
is
any other answer to the problems with
which we are now confronted.

“You
know that as Mars, as the very planet itself began to die, there was an
inevitable drying up of the surface. Moisture grew scarce and scarcer—and
moisture is necessary for the survival of animal life. The plants solved the
problem by developing as our terrestrial cacti have developed—with fleshy
leaves and long, long tuberous roots, capable of finding sparse moisture in the
depths of the desert soil. Malu and his people feed
through
these cactus plants, as we know. But
for animal life there was no hope without more moisture than that; and so the
creatures we know as the Discophora—those few who had survived all other
ravages of nature—had to turn their great intelligences toward this single
vital issue.

“In
the centuries long gone by, when Mars was as lush, as fertile, as tropical
Earth is, there was, as I conceive it, a species of gigantic marsh plants, rich
and fecund—something equivalent, I should fancy, to our homely
alisma plantago
.”
(He smiled for a moment at his own
incurable habit of using Latin names for common objects.) “These massive water-plantains,
as tall as trees upon Earth, came under the cultural control of the last
intelligent survivors of Martian animal life. You will know how we, in our
human way, have cultivated many plants for our own vital purposes—have evolved
the useful cabbage from the small ornamental cliff plant
brassica
, for an example. In similar ways, the
old Martians cultivated
alisma
plantago
. They developed two characteristics
of the plant to fantastic extents: first, its ability to find moisture; second,
its extraordinary reproductive capacity. In its natural state
alisma
, as we might call it for brevity,
reproduced itself at the speed of our own little garden plant known as mother-of-millions.
Under the guidance of the Martians, this ability was intensified even further:
the yellow seeds, or spores, of the plant were multiplied by careful selective
breeding—the plant itself was trained to eject these spores in cloudy millions.
More—more than that even.
Alisma
,
like all Martian plants, was equipped with crude thinking abilities. It was a
simple enough matter for the old Martians, with their powerful intelligences,
to control the activities of primitive
alisma;
and this had several results. As the years went on, not only did the Martians
produce a
blend
, as I might call it, of flying spores which were not
only seeds but tiny stinging cells, as a protection no doubt against any other
surviving animal life at the time, but they also equipped these very seeds with
some small intelligence—not in their own right, but so that they could
carry messages
for the Martians themselves as they
sped through the
air
 . . . 
!