The Red Journey Back (10 page)

We
have not dared to move from the ship. Malu now with us—but Malu is able to move
outside on occasions, through the double air-lock door, for the yellow spores
have no effect upon him other than in an attempt to control him mentally. The
others gone—the city in the hills abandoned. Only Malu and ourselves
 . . .
only—The Creeping Canal! The dark green, viscid line approaching across the
plain, nearer and nearer! They control—
they
control
it: the Vivores
 . . . 
!

The
Canal—the long serpentine line of it, the waving traveling swamp
 . . .
closer
and closer and finally surrounding us. And at last, the first of
Them
.
. . the swamp now all around, all around, and we dare not move from the cabin.
As it has been this past ten days while I have struggled to continue contact
with you. I dare not relax, dare not. They control—
they
can control
 . . . 
!

I
saw the first—some days ago I saw the first. There, in the swamp surrounding,
in the hot steam of it
 . . .
white, monstrous.
Discophora!
The great white monstrous jelly—and waiting, waiting for us, waiting for us,
waiting
 . . .

I
will not—
will not!
—the
children, the children
 . . .
!

(Message broken, and nothing for four
nights; then some further disjointed gibberish, quite unintelligible; and at
last, suddenly clear, one final desperate cry across the silent void of space,
the broken, helpless message as I have already described it in my own first
chapter:)

. . .
 
Save us—in heaven’s name try to
save us! There is one way—one way only. We are lost—you must save us.
Somehow—come somehow. Bring the children—the three children. It is the only way
to save us. I cannot, cannot, cannot explain. Only bring the children, somehow.
That will save us, that alone.
It does not matter how long. We
are safe, safe, for many months, years perhaps. But we will perish at the last
if you do not bring them. Do not ask why. Find some way—some way.
Kalkenbrenner—try perhaps Kalkenbrenner. Bring Paul and Jacqueline and Michael.
Ask no questions—no time, no time to answer; but
bring those three to Mars or
we are lost
 . . .
 
!

Then silence. From that moment onward,
silence absolute. Never again did our small receiver by the airstrip chatter
its thin rare messages from across the void.

In the chill of the early dawn we
regarded each other, white-faced—Mackellar and Archie, Katey and myself, the
two young people who had joined us and attended the few final sessions when the
broken messages were coming through.

We
regarded each other, the silence filled by the low sullen roar of the Atlantic
beyond the moonlit airstrip. Our thoughts were full of indefinable nightmare—a
sense of intolerable danger to our friends so many millions of miles away. And
of resolution. We did not understand—how could we?—what
could
it mean that
only the presence of the three young people could save MacFarlane and
McGillivray? But we knew that the desperate message would never
have
come unless indeed, in some alien manner connected with the unutterable
strangeness of life on the Angry Planet, it was the only way.

We trusted MacFarlane; and therefore
we had to act—somehow we had to act—so that the travelers might be saved from
whatever monstrous creatures menaced them—of whose nature we had no true
conception.

And MacFarlane had given us the hint
himself as to how the impossible journey might be achieved a third time in
human history.

Dr. Kalkenbrenner.

WELL,
it’s my turn. I don’t know why—they always seem to saddle me with tricky
chapters, with a lot happening in them, and the thing is, of course, that I’m
not a writer at all, really. Still, maybe that’s just as well—I can get on with
things without bothering about descriptions and atmosphere and “style” and all
that. The way I do it is to try to imagine I’m simply writing you a letter and
telling you out straight. So here goes:

Dear
Reader: I’d better start, I think, at the point when we were all stuck there in
Scotland when Uncle Steve’s messages broke off.

You
can imagine the excitement. We didn’t understand things in the slightest bit
(it’s maybe just as well, in view of all that happened afterward); all we knew
was that somehow we had to get back to Mars—Jacky and me, that is, and Mike,
who was in America. And the only hope was to contact Dr. Kalkenbrenner, for we
knew he’d been working on a rocket too, and it might be almost ready for the
trip.

I
can’t begin to tell you the tremendous amount of to-ing and fro-ing that went
on. J.K.C. went into a kind of frenzy. He wrote letters and sent them whizzing
across to America, and the place was thick with cablegrams and telegrams, and
talk about the telephone!—I got to the stage when I was hearing it in my sleep.
Calls to our mother and father, calls to travel agencies to book flight
passages for all of us to go to the U.S.A., trans-Atlantic calls to Mike’s
mother and father and Dr. Kalkenbrenner himself that must have cost a fortune.

And,
of course, the pay-off was when J.K.C. did finally contact Dr. K., that he knew
a great deal about it all already! For as you know, there was old Mike, in his
usual way, spilling the beans and nosing in! We’d known he was in America, of
course, but not that he’d actually reached Chicago and had looked up Dr. K. (he
would!) and was right in the thick of it all.

Well,
to cut a long story short, as they say in books (although this is a book, so I
might as well say it), we got everything taped as far as we could in Scotland,
and then we set off for the south—the whole crowd of us.

And
in London we met our own mother and father, who had come up specially, and
there were tremendous scenes in a big hotel.

“No,
no,” said poor old Mum, “my children my poor children! etcetera—I can’t let
them go all that dreadful distance again, and so on, oh dear, I shall worry
terribly, I worry if they go off for an afternoon by the sea themselves. Oh
dear, to think of them all the way up there on Mars, etcetera.”

“But
what about Mr. MacFarlane?” says J.K.C.

“Yes,
what about him?” I chime in myself, and Jacky doesn’t say very much at all, for
although she wants to come, of course, there’s another part of her that doesn’t
want to leave Mother either, and she’s almost in tears too.
 . . .

Anyway,
talk, talk, talk, and in the end, with Father joining in on our side, it’s all
agreed—although maybe not just quite as easily as perhaps I’ve made it seem: it
was, in fact, a real fight to get permission.

“Only,”
says Mother, “I do hope they are looked after this time. Miss Hogarth, do
please promise that you will go too to look after them—they need the Woman’s
Touch.”

And
of course Katey was all for going—had been from the start; and she nodded; and
then all three women (I mean Katey and Mother and Jacky) dissolved into floods
of tears, floods and floods of them, and all us men went off to the lounge and
had something to drink.

Now
of course it’ll maybe seem crazy, but even though we’d been to Mars and through
all those marvels, Jacky and I were really just as excited at the notion of
flying to America! We’d never been, you see; and there was Mike, nearly two
years younger than me, and
he’d
been—we could just picture him boasting and swaggering about the place thinking
he’d put one over on us.

So
wham!—off we go: zoom!

I
wish I’d time to tell you all about this part of it—I mean the flight to
America, and America itself. But it isn’t part of the story, really, so I’ll
have to keep that for another time. Suffice it to say etc., etc. (as they put
it in books), that we got there without any trouble—that is, the whole bunch of
us except Mr. Mackellar, for he wasn’t coming. We had to leave him behind in
England for he was all tied up with the airstrip job for the Government. The
last we saw of him he was standing on the runway with Mum and Dad as we went
out to the big American plane at Northolt, and he was positively stuffing
himself with snuff, clouds and clouds of it, and offering some to Dad and Mum,
and Dad was even absent-mindedly taking some and then sneezing like mad, but I
think it was just a good excuse to pretend that that was why there was just a
hint of tears in his eyes, and I don’t mind confessing (off the record) that I
could have done with a small pinch of snuff myself for the same reason.

Ah
well.

We
got there—I mean America—and we met Dr. Kalkenbrenner, and there was Mike,
beside him, strutting about like a young peacock! You’d think he’d invented Dr.
Kalkenbrenner. (It’s an awfully long and queer name to write down every time,
and I refuse to be as vulgar as Mike and call him “old Kalkers,” so I’ll simply
say “Dr. K.” from now on and you’ll know who I mean. His other names were “Marius
Berkeley,” so taking it all in all he was a bit of a mouthful—but a really
decent chap all the same: about forty-five, and very tall and distinguished-looking,
with a little pointed beard and a deep voice and a nice friendly smile. We took
back all we had ever thought about him in the days when he wasn’t “on our side”
after we came back from Mars last time.
 . . .
)