CHAPTER X. CAPTURED! by Michael Malone

(N.B. It says Michael up above and everybody knows I really prefer Mike, but somehow Michael looks better than Mike when it comes to putting it down on paper like that at the top of a bit of writing, you see. So I don’t mind it for once.)

Well, now, here goes. I’m no writer—as a matter of fact I always get low marks for composition at school—and besides, it takes so long to write a great huge thing like a chapter in a book, and it hurts your hand after the first three or four pages.

I’ll begin at the point where I jumped across the hollow to have a whack at old What’s-his-name when he was getting ready to squash Nuna and break Malu in two. Well, the next thing I knew was being swung up into the air and then we were over the top of the ridge and tearing across the plain like mad. There’s no doubt about it we moved at some speed all right—the Doc and Uncle Steve and Co. just didn’t have a look-in, even notwithstanding (I asked Jacky about this word and she says it’s all right to use it here)—notwithstanding the way they could jump about on Mars. I saw them left right behind as we went tearing over the sand, and then I lost sight of them altogether, it was so joggly being carried away up in the air. Besides, I was being held very tight. I felt my head swimming, and then in the end I lost consciousness altogether.

When I came to, we were among some hills and had slowed down our pace a bit. I was a bit groggy, I must say—I was sickish from the joggling and so on. We went along through some trees, and then we plunged into the mouth of a big cave. It was dark almost immediately, and very, very warm—there was quite a draught of hot wind coming along in our faces. We went down-hill for a longish time, and then suddenly it began to get quite light again and the tunnel opened out into a great big cavern—oh, huge. There was a sort of twilight in this cavern—I didn’t know where the light was coming from at first, but I found out later that there were shafts run up from the roof into the open air, and some light filtered through them. But oh the heat in this place!—and even worse than the heat was the smell. This cavern was full of great monsters like the ones that had been in the hollow, and I’m sure the smell came from them—in fact, I know it did, for any time there were a lot of the things together there was always this smell. It was a sort of flat, horrid smell—it was like when you’re walking through damp woods and you stumble on one of those big ugly yellow toadstool things and it breaks, and then there’s a sudden nasty smell like this one I’m talking about.

Old What’s-his-name put me down—well, chucked me down, rather—and there I was, in the middle of all those ugly great things—hundreds of them—all staring at me and sometimes prodding at me with their feelers. Uncle Steve has described them, so you can imagine I didn’t feel too good. The one that had been carrying me—the one I call old What’s-his-name—he pushed me along with his feelers through the crowd, and suddenly I was in front of a sort of mound, like the one The Center lay on back in the glass city, and on it there was a huge thing like a toadstool—one of the Terrible Ones, but much bigger than any of the ones I’d seen so far, and absolutely dead white and sort of clammy-looking. He was horrible—the inside of his jaws wasn’t red, the way the jaws of the others were, but a pale kind of pink, like the underside of a mushroom.

Well, he looked at me for a long time, and then I realized that he was speaking to me. It was the same sort of thing as went on among the B.P.—you know, thinking it in your head kind of thing—but there was something different about it. I don’t know what—it isn’t at all easy to describe, but it was a sort of coldish thin voice you heard and there was a sense of badness in you all the time it was going on—it was almost as if the thought had a smell, if you know what I mean, like that awful decayed sort of smell I’ve been talking about.

So this big white fellow said to me:

“What thing are you? Why were you with the Enemy?”

(I found out later that these things always referred to the B.P. as the Enemy.)

So I said:

“I’m a human being, if you want to know—I don’t suppose you’ll have any idea what that means, but it’s what I am all the same. And I come from the earth, which is millions and millions of miles away. I don’t expect you’ll understand that either, but I came from there with some friends of mine in the Albatross—and, if you want to know what the Albatross is, well that’s out on the plain, and your friends were nosing about at it.”

Well, he must have understood me a bit, because he said:

“What is the thing you call Albatross? What is its function? Our foraging party found it, as they have told me, when exploring on the plain.”

“It’s no use me trying to explain it all,” I said, sort of bored (Jacky says “resigned” is a better word.) “You wouldn’t really understand. The Albatross is a space-ship—for flying through space. And I can’t tell you any more than that—maybe the Doctor could, but he isn’t here.”

There was a pause, and a sort of disturbance among all the things round about. And then the big one said, starting off on another tack:

“Did you come from the city of the Enemy?”

“Yes,” I said, “if you want to know, I did.”

And then a strange thing happened. They laughed—all those great hulking ugly things laughed! It was one of the most terrible things I’ve ever come across. You see, you somehow didn’t imagine Martians laughing—laughing’s something you do, it makes a noise, you know. And we hadn’t had any experience of the B.P. laughing—it somehow didn’t seem possible to laugh when you did all your talking and so on by thinking. But here they were—laughing. They didn’t move—there wasn’t any change in their faces. But in my head were those hundreds of thin, sort of snaky voices, all in a sort of nasty chuckling. And the big one said:

“In a little time the city will be no more. We are almost ready to attack it—it will be no more, and the Enemy will be broken. They cannot stand against us—in the past we have been too small in number. But now we have joined together—all of us who used to fight among ourselves. And we shall swallow them up!”

And they laughed again—on and on, for a long time. I felt disgusted with them, and frightened too, I don’t mind saying. And besides, I was still a bit sickish from the journey, and then there was the heat, and the awful smell of them, too.

*     *     *     *     *     *

(These asterisks across a page mean passage of time—I learned that at school once. So I’m putting them in here, quite professional-like. In this case they also mean that the Author got a bit fed-up with writing for the minute—and he was hungry too, so he stopped and had some of Mrs. Duthie’s pancakes. On we go then—and being professional again, I’m going to start this new part of the chapter in what my English master at school calls the “historic present.”)

I am in a small cave just off the main cavern. It’s quite darkish, and the heat is terrible. There’s one of the great things that captured me lying across the entrance to the cave, so I can’t get out. He just lies there like a great lump, but sometimes he turns round and stares at me with those eyes of his, sort of on stalks—he just stares. Once or twice I try saying something to him—what do they think they’re going to do with me, and all that—but he never answers. Twice some others of the things come for me and take me to the big toadstool chap, and he asks me some questions—who I am and where I come from—all that sort of thing all over again. The second time, after I’d done my best to explain about earth, and so on, I decide it’s my turn to ask him some questions. I reckon that by now almost two days have passed—I was able to tell, anyway, that I’d spent one night in the place, by the way the cavern got dark, as I could see from my smelly little cave. I had had some sleep but they hadn’t made any attempt to feed me—what was worse, they hadn’t given me anything to drink, and what with the awful steamy heat in the cavern I needed some water pretty badly.

So I said to him—the big chap—that I was hungry and thirsty. At first he didn’t seem to get the idea, but then after a time he did, and he and the others laughed again in that rotten way I mentioned before. And he says to me, how would I stop my hunger? Well, that was a poser—I just didn’t know what to say to that. I thought of saying to them, what did they eat?—maybe I could eat the same; and then I remembered the B.P. and thought that if these chaps had the same sort of habits, that wouldn’t be much good. And then suddenly I remembered the Doc saying something about the leaves on the big trees—how he was going to try them for food for us. And I thought, well—I might as well take a chance. If they’re poisonous, that’s just too bad—even dead I couldn’t be much worse off than I am now, I thought, and if you’re dead you aren’t hungry—at least, I don’t think you are—it doesn’t seem likely, anyhow. So I said it was leaves I ate. They just couldn’t get the idea. It seemed to be the word “eat” that was the difficulty—they could understand being hungry, and they could understand stopping hunger by taking something in, but actual eating, with your mouth (I pointed to my mouth and tried to explain with signs)—they couldn’t understand that at all (I found out afterwards, by the way, that they did feed the same way as the B.P.—from plants, through little feelers, so that explains that). Anyhow, in the end I said, sort of desperately, that if they didn’t let me have some leaves from the trees outside, I would die. And if they didn’t let me have some water to drink I’d die.

And then they said—drink?—what was that?

Honestly! I felt like bashing their great silly faces in!

In the end I thought the idea of well, or spring, very hard in my head—I tried to get a picture of a well in my mind and project it (that’s the word the Doc uses for this business of thinking things to people). And after a time it seemed to click. Old What’s-his-name pushed me with his feelers down to the far end of the cavern and into a little sort of alcove. And there there was a small slow spring oozing out of the rock—only a very tiny trickle, but it was enough. I licked at it with my tongue while they all stood staring at me. It was horrible—quite warm, and it had a flat, sort of limey taste, but it was water, you know, and oh boy, did I need water!

Well, the next thing was the leaves. When I’d finished drinking, old What’s-his-name prodded me back to the Big White Chief, and I found that while we’d been away he’d sent one of his chaps up to the open air for some leaves—there was a pile of them on the ground in front of him. So I picked up one of them and had a nibble at it—and I thought to myself, well, Mike, old chap, maybe this is the end of you, and if it is, well, Three Cheers for Old England and God Save the King. But it wasn’t the end of me after all. The leaves had a sweetish, mushy sort of taste, like sleepy pears, in a way, and nothing happened—they didn’t seem in the least bit poisonous. So I tucked into them good, and then I felt a little better (still a bit hungry, of course—fruit and leaves and things are all very well, you know, but not a patch on a big plate of bacon and eggs, for instance). All the time I was eating, all those huge things just stood around and stared at me again—it was uncanny. I suppose they were quite curious and interested to see me busy at it in such a different way from them, but you see they didn’t show they were curious or interested. They didn’t have any kind of facial expression. Paul has said somewhere that that was one of the queerest and most uncomfortable things about the folk on Mars—this business of no facial expression: and it was even worse with these smelly toadstool fellows than with the B.P., because, you see, the Terrible Ones had more recognizable actual faces than the B.P. had, and so you expected some sort of smile or sneer or surprise or something on them.

Well, that was the eating and drinking problem solved, at least—not very satisfactorily, but well enough to get by. Old What’s-his-name pushed me back to my little cave, and the guard flopped down with a soggy sort of thud in the entrance to it again. After this, every day they brought me a fresh bundle of leaves into the cave, and twice a day I was led down to the little well at the far end of the cavern so that I could get a drink.

And so the time passed—the “days and nights slipped into one another,” as they say in books. I slept or dozed a lot—I expect it was the heat. Altogether I felt pretty rotten, I must say—I used to have bad dreams—and in the gloom of the cave I sometimes didn’t even know if I was asleep or awake while I was having them. Oh, all sorts of things—too long to write about here. Besides, I doubt if I could write about them; nightmares are beastly things-—it isn’t so much what happens in them (sometimes you can’t even remember that next day) it’s the atmosphere of them, somehow. There was one I remember particularly—some sort of huge beast (it was a dragon, actually—it came from a picture in a school reader I once had) had caught me up in its jaws and was going to bite through me. It never got to the point in the dream where it did bite through me, but I could feel its hot breath all round my middle, and it was that that was the real nastiness of the dream. Ugh! I hate to think of it, even now.

Mind you, all the time the one thought that was uppermost in my mind was to work out some sort of plan of escape. Apart from just wanting, for my own sake, to get away from the Terrible Ones, there was another thing that was beginning to worry me quite a lot. Every now and again—on an average about once a day—I was led out to the mound in the cavern to be cross-questioned by the Big White Chief. He was always on at me about the earth, what it was like, and all that, but what he seemed to me to be really after was somehow to taunt me about the attack he and his followers were planning on the city of the B.P. They all seemed to get some sort of queer comic pleasure just from telling me about it, and boasting what they were going to do; they would laugh and laugh in that beastly mirthless way. As far as I could gather, as those conversations went on, the attack wasn’t very far off. Foraging parties went out almost every day to spy out the land. It seemed to me that their plans were pretty nearly complete—the Big White Chief actually told me once that they were waiting for some “special fighters” to come in from some far-off caves, and then they’d set off through the hills to have their whack at Malu and Co. Well, as I saw it, if only I could escape and warn the B.P. of just how dangerous the situation was, it would be a good thing all round. I was worried about the Doc and Uncle Steve and Paul and Jacky, to say nothing of the B.P. themselves. There were hundreds and hundreds of these great nasty things in the cavern, and the Big White Chief had told me there were thousands more, in other caves close at hand.

The problem was how to escape? All the time I was in my own little cave, the guard was slumped across the entrance, and when I was in the cavern it was always crammed to overflowing with the monsters. To make any sort of dash for it would be right out of the question—I wouldn’t get more than a few yards. Even if, by a miracle, I got into the passage-way leading down to the cavern, they would overtake me in no time—I remembered from the time of my capture just how fast they could move.

Well, I brooded and brooded. And it wasn’t for a very long time that I began to see a faint glimmering chance of how it might be done. When I did think of it I could have kicked myself, because in a way it was so simple—I should have thought of it right away. It’s funny, you get used to things you know—I’d got so used to sitting still in that little cave, and walking about with ordinary steps in the cavern, that I had almost forgotten I was on Mars and could jump. Yes, jump—and jump pretty high at that! Thinking along those lines I suddenly remembered something else; and I decided that next time I went out to have a chat with the Big White Chief I would keep my eyes skinned—just to see if it was all going to be possible.

But it wasn’t for another couple of days that I was called out to an interview—and I’ve got a feeling it wasn’t meant to be an interview! Before this, though, something rather curious happened.

One morning, the guard at my cave mouth shuffled aside and three of the Terrible Ones came in. They were different from any of the creatures I’d seen so far; they were much smaller, to begin with, and they were lighter in color—not yellow-and-red in spots the way old What’s-his-name was, but almost white, like the B.W. Chief. For a long time these three chaps just stood staring at me, then they moved quite close and began to feel all over me with their tentacles. It was a horrible sensation—little soft, gentle pattings and strokings. I edged away from them as far as I could, but they followed me right over to the wall.

Quite suddenly they stopped and stood back and stared at me again for a time. Then one of them picked up a tree leaf from the pile that had been brought to me that morning and held it out to me. He said:

“Eat!”

I thought it was a bit odd—especially the word “eat,” since that was the word I’d had difficulty over with the Terrible Ones at the beginning. But I was feeling pretty peckish anyway, so I ate the leaf as they had asked me. And while I was chewing it, blest if these things didn’t come close up to me, and one of them put out two of his feelers and pried my mouth open! Then they all three peered down my throat for a time. I didn’t like it in the least little bit, but what could I do? When I raised my arms to take the feelers away from my mouth, one of the other ones wrapped his tentacles round me and there I was—pinioned—and they were as strong as horses, those things.

Well, after a time they went away, but they came in the evening and went through the whole performance again. This time, after I had eaten a leaf, one of them took one up himself and put it between the two great pink jaws he had. Slowly—very very slowly—the jaws closed. He stayed with them closed for a time, and then, just as slowly, he opened them. The leaf fell out on to the ground, a little bit crushed but otherwise none the worse (which isn’t surprising, considering these things had no teeth inside their jaws only the little soft knobs—sort of taste-buds, as Uncle Steve has called them a couple of chapters back).

Next morning these three chaps appeared again, and then, the following morning early, they turned up with old What’s-his-name, who immediately set about prodding me out of the cave. I was being taken to the Big White Chief.

As we went across the cavern I realized that old What’s-his-name was speaking to me.

“There is one more day,” he said, “one more day, and then the city of the Enemy will be no more. This night we shall set out, and to-morrow we shall fall upon them and destroy them.” Then he paused, and added: “And you shall not be there to see.”

I didn’t like the sound of this at all. What did he mean? Was it just that I was to be left in the cave, and so wouldn’t actually see the attack, or was there something else behind it all? I must say I felt a bit uneasy. There was another thing too. All about us as we moved among the monsters, there was a sort of tension in the air—it was as if they were kind of expectant about something. And they were bad—they were just plain bad; there was just a sort of nastiness in the whole atmosphere.

We reached the mound where the Big White Chief lay. And now the sense of danger and badness was so great that I could hardly bear it. Old What’s-his-name, instead of stopping me about ten feet away from the mound, as he usually did during an interview, started pushing me very slowly towards it. And it seemed to me that the huge pink jaws of the big fellow were open just a little bit wider than usual.

It was all a bit too much for me. And I decided not to postpone my plan of escape any longer but to have a whack at it there and then.

I had remembered, you see, when I recollected I could jump, that just above the Big White Chief’s mound there was one of the long light-shafts that led down into the cavern from the open air. It was about twenty feet from the ground, in the sloping roof. I had noticed, during my interviews, that the walls of it were rocky and irregular—there was just a chance that, with my reduced Martian weight, I’d be able to find enough foot-hold to scramble through it to the surface.

I was barely a yard from the jaws when a sudden panic came over me and gave me just that necessary spurt to act. With all my energy I jumped. The height was too great for me to cover in one leap—I had realized that from the beginning. But you see, there was the Big White Chief, on his mound, and he was a good ten feet high.

The first jump landed right on top of his shell. Just for a moment I felt my feet sinking into his soft pulpy flesh, and then I jumped again—straight for the shaft entrance. It was now or never. I scrambled and scratched desperately for knobs and crannies to cling to, jumping and pushing all the time sort of hysterically. A little way up, the shaft bent over in a slope, and that helped a lot. Somehow—I don’t know how—I managed it. How long the shaft was, or what time it took to get through it, I just haven’t the faintest idea. All I do know is that after a nightmare of heaving and struggling I was out in the open air, on a hillside, panting and gasping and feeling dizzy in the head.

I was free—absolutely alone under the blue sky. And so far there was no sign of any sort of pursuit.

I was free—absolutely alone under the blue sky

Well, that’s really the bulk of the story—there isn’t very much more to it than that.

When I got through the top of the shaft I made immediately downhill a little for the shelter of some trees. Just as I reached them I saw a bunch of the Terrible Ones come pouring over the hillside from the cave entrance below. They snuffled and peered round the shaft for a while, then they all stopped and stared in a direction a little to my right. That gave me the idea that that was probably the direction of the B.P.’s city—the monsters would have assumed that I was making for it, and so were looking for me along that line. It was the way I certainly took as soon as they dispersed from the shaft and went down the hillside again.

Traveling through the mountains wasn’t at all easy. The forests were very thick in places, with strange plants in them—clumps of tall grasses, for instance, very fibrous and twiney, with an unpleasant sticky surface. There were sudden ravines that you came on most unexpectedly—some of these I was able to jump, others were just too wide, and so I had to scramble down them, cross the floor, and then scramble up the other side. Once or twice I came across foraging parties of Terrible Ones in the early part of the journey—on one occasion I had to jump up and hide among the thick foliage of a tree while a group of them passed right underneath. And, of course, to crown all, I was very anxious and worried as I traveled—as I saw it, it was up to me to get word to the B.P. as soon as possible that they were going to be attacked. Would I make the city in time?—was I, after all, going in the right direction?

Well, the day went on, and then, in the evening, when I was beginning to think that it was all no good, and that I must be miles and miles away from Doctor Mac and the rest, I suddenly rounded a shoulder and saw, shining beneath me, the glass city! And barely a quarter of a mile away, drawing water at a little well, were Uncle Steve and Paul! I let out a yell and rushed down the hillside towards them.

And there we are—this is where I came in, so to speak. This is the point that Uncle Steve had reached in his chapter about what happened while I was in the hands of the Terrible Ones. I’ll leave it to him again to describe what happened the day after my escape, when the great ugly brutes attacked us—for they carried out their plan, as old What’s-his-name had told it to me; they marched from their caves during the night, and in the morning—But I’ll leave it to Uncle Steve, as I said. For my part, I’m glad this long chapter of mine is over. It’s taken such a bally long time to write—and yet I suppose you’ll only take ten minutes or so to read it. Who’d be an author—it’s such a fag!

Well, I hope I haven’t bored you too much. It was a bit of a nightmare, eh?—all those toadstooly chaps. Still, in a way, I’m glad it happened to me—it’s given me something to tell the fellows at school. Of course, I was lucky enough to escape and all that—well, if I hadn’t, I wouldn’t have had anything to tell—or rather, I’d have had a lot to tell, only I wouldn’t have been here to tell it. So that’s that.

Well, cheerio, and all the best

Yours sincerely,

MIKE MALONE.

(A Note on Chapter 10 by Dr. McGillivray. When I read the manuscript of the chapter you have just perused, I asked my young friend’s permission to add a brief postscript to it. I had two reason for doing so: first, to congratulate him on having written a most patient and edifying account of his adventure, and second, to offer, in all humility, an explanation for a part of that adventure that seems to me to need clarifying.

I refer to the strange episode of the examining of young Malone by the three lighter-colored monsters.

My interpretation of the whole incident is this:—You will recall, from my paper on the nature of the Martians, that I am of the opinion that the creatures called the Terrible Ones evolved from plants similar in type to the insect-eating plants of our own planet. I deduced from this, if you remember, that at one time there had been animal—or at least insect—life on Mars. As it died out, the Terrible Ones adapted themselves accordingly, keeping their big jaw petals as lingering relics of the days when they had subsisted on flesh (that they were just a little more than vestigial ornaments we have seen from Michael’s description of how they could open and close them).

Now it seems to me that it is just conceivable that lingering somewhere in the deep race-memories of the Terrible Ones, there was a dim, imperfect recollection of their carnivorous days. The sight of Michael eating probably brought this memory to the surface (there is a certain superficial resemblance between mouth eating and the digestive processes of fly-catching plants). The three examiners I take to have been scientists or priests—the equivalent among the Terrible Ones of the Beautiful People’s Wiser Ones sect. They were examining Michael to see what he was made of—if he was flesh!

And I firmly believe that in the end they decided he was of that substance their ancestors had consumed. I believe they decided to try to consume him themselves!—or have him consumed by their leader. What superstitious and mystic intentions of sacrifice for victory might have lain behind the whole idea I do not know—as I have said, one of the things I most want to explore is this whole spiritual aspect of the inhabitants of Mars.

At any rate, if I am right—and I am certain that I am—it seems clear that if Michael had not contrived to escape when he did, he would have been submitted to the truly ghastly fate of being digested alive in the jaws of the great creature on the mound!

Let us be thankful that through his youthful energy and resourcefulness he managed to get away in time.—A.McG.)