The Red Journey Back (6 page)

The Cloud
swept on—for hours and many hours. But at last I had an impression that it was
thinning a little—the very lessening of the pressure of the evil thoughts was
an indication that the storm was passing.

Rapidly I set
to exploring our clothing store for some kind of protective garments. I found
waterproofs and thick hip-boots—an asbestos helmet, even, and a complete suit
of a similar fireproof material packed by Mac in case we should ever encounter
another volcanic eruption on the Angry Planet.

I swathed myself—wore
also my oxygen mask with the gas itself switched off from the cylinder—found
fireproof gloves and bound my head around with cloths.

And by this
time, indeed, the yellowness outside had almost gone. I was able to
distinguish, beyond the slight saucer in which the spaceship lay, a vast
extending plain of the Martian type familiar to us: a great level stretch of
reddish sandy soil with distant mountain ranges beyond—high, conelike
mountains, since in their formation in the far depths of Martian history the
planet’s gravity pull was less than Earth’s, and so threw the ranges more
narrowly upward.

I saw even the
tall clustering shapes of the old familiar cactuslike plants, in their groups
of varying sizes, the long fleshy fingers upstretched to the sky; and at the
spectacle much of my fear departed. They were veritably like a glimpse of home.

I waited a
little longer. On the plain outside there still hovered an occasional drifting
wisp of Cloud, speeding low-lyingly. One or two of the big cactus plants were
yellowly tinged for a moment; but gradually the clinging spores seemed to
detach themselves and make off. The same had happened to the thinning film of
them which had clung to our rocket windows—as if they were spies, indeed,
peering inward—exploring the mysteries of the strange shape on the plain.

So at
last—very cautiously at first, lest there might be a trap, lest even some
poisonous effect from the Cloud still lingered—I prepared to leave the rocket.
I lowered myself slowly down the small metallic rope ladder, my free hand ready
at the oxygen-control switch of my mask, if there should be any breathing
difficulty. But all was well. On the ground I very gently exposed for a moment
a small skin area at my wrist—waited for any sign of irritation—then joyously,
when I felt no effect at all, took off both gloves and ventured to remove my
mask altogether.

For a moment I
stayed silent, then called out, “Mac—Mac—where are you, Mac?”

And my voice
went thinly, dispersingly, across the vast silent plain.

I called
again, took a step forward—and found myself instantly rolling clumsily over the
shifting red soil a good twenty feet from the rocket. I had forgotten again the
weaker gravitational pull! (The actual ratio to the Earth’s gravity pull is in
the nature
of .38),
as I remember from our previous
experiments: thus, a man weighing
150
pounds on Earth would weigh only 57 on Mars, yet be muscularly equipped to move
his full 150. . . .

I steadied
myself—called again—ventured farther and farther from the rocket in the
direction I assumed Mac might have taken when he seemed to have been snatched
into the Cloud.

Then suddenly,
as I stumbled forward, still unaccustomed a little to the different
gravitational conditions, I became aware—more and more powerfully aware—of a
strange
urge
to change direction, to move obliquely to the right. It was
as if I knew, entirely confidently, that I would find him there; and, at the
very moment of turning in my tracks, the solution broke over me: the plants—the
clustering groups of the cactus plants on all sides—
they
were guiding me!

We had landed
on a different part of the planet, many, many miles from the site of our
previous landing. In spite of all our careful calculations, our attempt to
revisit the home territory of the Malu group of the Beautiful People, that had
been inevitable. But nevertheless, as we afterward discovered, the plants here
knew us—or knew of us; for we had grown, it seemed, in the interval between the
two trips, to some kind of
legend
among these strange sentient
creatures: we were the “strangers from across the skies”—the friends of the
plant masters, the Beautiful People.

You will know
that the static, leathery cactus plants of the Martian plains are too primitive
to be capable of coherent
thought
. From them, either to us or
to the Beautiful Ones, there come only general impulses of a telepathic
nature—broad messages of danger, of discovery, of disturbance and the like. The
Beautiful People themselves are much more highly developed. They had, in the
distant past, uprooted themselves from the enchaining soil—and so are capable
of movement on the clustering tendrils at the base of their slender trunks, in
a broad resemblance to walking or shuffling. They had also developed their
original sensitivity to light. (Many Earth plants are noticeably sensitive to
light—the sunflower, for an example—and many can move on detached root
tendrils—the iris, the convolvulus, even the humble vegetable marrow.) So,
after many years of evolution, certain cellular areas near the “flower” on the
top of the Martian trunk stem have become virtually “eyes.” And the smaller
side tendrils, like the snaky “arms” of an octopus, have been developed so as
to be able to grasp and hold external objects, like weapons. Thus, the
Beautiful People have a physical resemblance, although only distantly, to the
human frame itself; and, like us, they have a tradition, a
science
—they have a whole way of life not without its alien
beauty. . . .

But this is an
unwarranted digression. Now, under the impulse of the crude directions from the
more primitive cactus plants, I leaped and ran joyously across the plain; and
found my friend at last—broken, sick unto the very death.

I thought at
first that he
was
dead when I saw him huddled in the shelter of one of the
taller plant clusters. I had the impression, as I leaped forward, that he had
positively been sheltered there—had been caught in his flight in the Cloud by
the great writhing fingerlike leaves of this group of Martian plants, and so
had fallen to the ground and been protected from the evil onslaught of the yellow
spores. And this I later found to be correct. . . .

I carried him
back to the
Albatross
—it was an easy enough task with my increased strength
and his diminished weight.

I tended
him—brought him back to life. For many, many days—I lost all count—he lay
motionless in the little cabin, staring sightlessly straight ahead. Once or
twice he talked incoherently, and in a soft, barely audible voice. And as time
went on I formed the impression that he was reliving a kind of dream, a kind of
communicated
vision
which had come into his mind as he had been swept along
enwrapped in the evil spore cloud. The one word that kept recurring was:
Discophora.
Over and over again he muttered it, shudderingly. It
was as if a coherent picture of some kind had built itself up within his head,
communicated by the trillions of hurrying spores—for they too, like all else on
Mars, perhaps had certain broad telepathic powers. He might even have “seen,”
in his mind’s eye, something of the source of emanation of the Cloud itself.

“Discophora—discophora . . .”

And one
day—suddenly—it recurred to me that as a scientific man he always thought and
spoke in scientific terms. We had even joked about it in the past—his habit of
referring even to the simple rabbit of the Pitlochry Hills as
lepus
cuniculus,
for example.

Hastily I
searched through his small library of scientific books in the cabin.

I found it—yet
it made little sense, except for one small particular.

Discophora:
the common jellyfish; a hydromedusan or some similar coelenterate; sea-jelly;
sunfish. They consist of a whitish, translucent, jellylike substance. Their
tentacles bear stinging cells,
the
effect of which is to benumb, if not kill, any living creature which they
touch. . . .

It made little
sense indeed—except for that one strange particular. Before me, on the mattress
on which he had slept during the long interplanetary
journey, was a living creature indeed benumbed—blinded—stunned to mental
helplessness by some deadly stinging agency. And I remembered my own brief physical
sufferings from the flying particles before I managed to close the cabin doors. . . .

I shuddered
and set the book aside. And for a moment it was as if I too had a sudden
vision, conveyed to me perhaps from the obsessed mind in the cabin with me, of
a gigantic nightmare white jelly, swaying and quivering against a dark tortuous
background of . . . of what?

One word more
Mac uttered in those first days of his illness. One day he raised himself
suddenly, his blinded eyes staring in sudden awe and terror—but with a strange
triumph in them too, a triumph I had seen in his healthy eyes many times before
when he had made some startling, half-instinctive discovery.

“The Brain,”
he cried. “Discophora! The Brain—the
Brain
!”

There is no
way in which I can describe the potent menace he managed to convey in his tone.

The time went
on. We had enough food in the cabin for many months if necessary. Gradually, as
the days passed, my patient came back to physical health at least, if not yet
full mental awareness. But there were signs of improvement even in this
direction too.

I seldom
ventured outside the rocket—there was no purpose in doing so until Mac should
be capable of full movement with me. You who listen to me across the
interminable void can have no
far
notion of the desolate loneliness of those long, long weeks of utter isolation.
I was alone in an alien world with a sick, a desperately sick man. The very
silence was a source of nightmare—I longed even for one of the rare Martian
storms to break it, for at least an eruption, however dangerous, from one of
the great volcanoes in the distant mountain ranges.

It was at this
time, while I mooned haplessly in the little cabin, that I formed the first
wild idea perhaps to make contact with you, my dear John, on distant Earth. The
notion was not so fantastic as it may at first appear. It was something that
Mac had been contemplating quite seriously, even at the time of our first
Martian visit. In the course of his researches among the foothills, he had
discovered vast seams of a curious kind of mineral deposit which he suspected
to be radioactive in a manner not known upon Earth—in no way dangerously, as in
the case of atomic
radioactivity.
 . . .
It is not possible—or even necessary—for me to explain more in the course of
the present narrative; we can discuss it later—we may even, if we ever meet
again (God grant that it may be so!), be able to talk about it face to face.
For the moment, the fact remains that we have achieved contact, as you know; at
our end here, through the agency of one of those very exposed mineral seams I
have mentioned—a great directional aerial, as it were, beaming our messages to
you—and picked up by its equivalent, your friend Mackellar’s airstrip.