CHAPTER XI. ATTACK, by Stephen Macfarlane
The Assyrian came down like a wolf on the fold,
And his cohorts were gleaming in purple and gold . . .
IT FALLS to me now to describe the last tragic day of our sojourn on Mars. It is impossible not to feel sad in writing of it, as the spectacle rises in my mind’s eye of the crude destruction of so many hundreds of the Beautiful People. We had not been with them for long—little more than a week of our earth time; but somehow, in that space, they had endeared themselves to us. Their way of thinking, their whole approach to life—these things were utterly charming and simple. Paul has used the word “innocent” in describing them, and that indeed does seem the only suitable adjective. Their unthinking benevolence (which one felt all the time one was with them), their acceptance of things—these were characteristics that made a profound impression on us. Why they called themselves “the Beautiful People” it is impossible to say—it was things like their definition of such an epithet as “beautiful” that we were on the brink of exploring when we had to leave. But that they were beautiful—in our sense of the word—there was no doubt at all in our minds.
And so many of them were annihilated!—utterly swamped and destroyed! It has often seemed to me strange that we arrived on Mars so shortly before the desolating of the Shining City. If we had set out, for instance, when we first intended to, how different our impressions would have been, with no Beautiful People to welcome us—perhaps only a few remnants of the Terrible Ones, lurking in the hill caverns or among the ruins of the glass domes. No doubt eventually we would have found our way to one of the other cities, deeper among the mountains. But that would have taken a long time—the shape of our visit would have been totally different.
For a brief spell we lived in a pastoral and delightful way; and then, in one day—one morning—we saw that sister world of ours live up to its name of the Angry Planet.
We stayed awake right through the night of Mike’s reappearance. We sat quietly in the tent after he had finished the account of his adventures, the Doctor and I smoking endless pipefuls of tobacco, the boys feeding a low smoldering fire we had built for comfort in the sand. Jacky, I remember, sang softly to herself. There was something unutterably strange in the thin plaintive sound of her voice going drifting among the quiet domes and losing itself in the hills. She sang many songs—the old ones we have all been accustomed to since our cradles—songs that are so familiar that we forget that someone once actually wrote them: songs like Barbara Allen, John Peel, Swanee River, and Sally in our Alley. But over and over again she came back to a song that was her own favorite—the haunting old nursery song:—
The Owl and the Pussycat went to sea
In a beautiful pea-green boat.
They took some honey,
And plenty of money
Wrapped up in a five-pound note . . .
All the time, in the light from the two moons, we were aware of the still shapes of Malu’s warriors all round us. The females and the ordinary males had gone into the domes as usual to spend the night, but the warriors were awake and on guard, standing in silent groups with their long crystal swords outstretched in readiness. The atmosphere was full of a sense of expectancy—the tension was unbearable. Malu, close to us, seemed to lean forward slightly as he strove to catch a message from the plants ringed all round the city that the danger was close.
The night passed. The moons grew dim and sank out of sight behind the hills. Now the landscape was flooded with the gray twilight of the Martian dawn, and presently the sun rose over the horizon—exactly as we had seen it on the first morning of all. The sky grew clear and blue, the warmth came back to our slightly chilled limbs.
Mike yawned and rose to stretch himself.
“Well, it seems as if I was mistaken,” he said. “Either that or they’ve come to the conclusion that I’ll have warned everybody and so called off the attack. I vote we have something to eat, and then—”
He got no further. At that moment there came a sudden stiffening in the ranks of the warriors. And we, in our nervousness—our feeling for the community in which, for better or worse, we found ourselves—heard in our heads, swamping every other thought in them, the insistent message:
“Danger—danger—danger! The path by the store cave—danger!”
It was our only experience of The Voice. It came to us, I am sure, because in that moment we were exceptionally highly strung and sensitive. And because too, in a mystic sense, we had that day become part of the Beautiful People.
Malu and the warriors turned and stared towards the hills at the point where Mike had appeared the evening before, and we too—all five of us—strained our eyes in that direction. For a long time nothing happened, and then, suddenly, there was a movement among the trees. And a moment later there came into view a huge white shape, sickly in the sunlight—a monstrous swaying toadstool, it seemed.
A huge white shape—a monstrous swaying toadstool
“The Big White Chief!” yelled Mike. “It’s the Big White Chief himself! And there’s old What’s-his-name beside him—I can tell him by that whack that Nuna gave him in the side!”
Surely enough, beside the white monster, there now appeared one of the Terrible Ones, his bright yellow-and-red coloring standing out vividly against the sandstone brown of the hillside and the somber green of the trees. And presently another appeared, and another, and another, until there was a closely-packed wall of them, staring down at us.
“My heavens!” muttered Mac at my side, “what beasts they seem—what unutterable beasts! It’s impossible to believe they’re plants, Steve—cabbages!”
“What are we going to do, Mac?” I asked. “There are hundreds of them—we hardly seem to have a chance.”
“We can’t do anything but defend ourselves,” he said grimly.
“With what?” I demanded. “Our guns don’t seem any good.”
“No, our guns are no good—bullets are too small for these things—they’re plants, and haven’t any one set of vital organs. The only way to destroy them is to shear away the tissue, the way we saw Malu and Nuna do. We’ll have to arm ourselves with swords, Steve.”
“But the children, Mac?—what are we going to do with them? We can’t expose them to this danger.”
“We’ll have to make for the rocket,” he said. “Jacky and the two boys can go up into that, and you and I will stay at the foot of the ladder, to help Malu as much as we can. We’ll have to rely on the warriors—and the only thing is, they’re not quite so helpless as they look beside these monstrous things, as we saw out on the plain.”
He spoke grimly, and his jaw was set. I was finding hidden depths in this quiet and reticent character!
We moved towards Malu, and I explained briefly to the children as we went what our plans were. We had just reached the central group of warriors, and were choosing swords from the great pile that lay near them, when suddenly there was a wave of movement all along the enemy line high up on the hillside. At an incredible speed the front rank of the monsters rushed down towards the city, their tendrils flailing. And behind them came other ranks, dividing in two streams on either side of the white leader. There was no end to them—they came up in masses through the trees and poured towards us like a liquid, their pulpy bodies glistening in the sunlight. It was a terrible, a freezing sight.
Malu’s warriors stood motionless. And then, at the moment when the enemy reached the foot of the slope, the front line of them—arranged in a huge arc before the outermost domes of the city—rushed forward and joined battle with the advancing monsters. From where we stood, we saw nothing but a mêlée of flashing swords, of writhing tendrils, of green and yellow-and-red bodies. And as in the fight for the Albatross, our heads were full of a high, terrifying screaming.
This first phase of the battle lasted no more than a few seconds. The impact of the onrushing monsters was too great for Malu’s slender fighters. They went down beneath the wave, struggling valiantly but uselessly. The enemy advanced into the city—and still, behind the front ranks, more and more of them poured down the hillside, the white swaying leader moving more slowly in their midst, a ponderous and implacable Juggernaut.
On the level ground within the city the monsters slowed their pace. Moreover, they had now encountered Malu’s second line of defense—a thick wall of warriors packed tightly among the outer domes. The very density of this line withstood the shock of the attack, powerful as it was. For a moment the antagonists seemed interlocked—it was body to body—then suddenly the various statuesque groups of the fighters disintegrated, and the scene became violent and contorted, with warriors leaping high into the air to deliver the death blows to the monsters, and the monsters in their turn striving to get their tentacles round the slender trunks of the Beautiful People.
All the time, females and non-fighting males were pouring out from the domes on all sides of us. They ran, in panic-stricken herds, behind the central group of warriors. We, in our position, were in danger of being jostled and crushed by them as they fled.
“Make for the Albatross,” yelled Mac in my ear. “It’s all we can do!”
I nodded, and seized Jacky by the hand. Then, signaling the boys to follow, I started to struggle through the seething mass of the Martians.
The Albatross lay on the little plateau above the city—fortunately for us, in the opposite direction from the point where the Terrible Ones had appeared. We heaved and fought our way past the domes, occasionally jumping high over the heads of the Beautiful People when we encountered a knot of them too compact in their panic to be broken through. Eventually we reached a point where the crowd was thinner, and then, in great strides, we leapt forward and started to mount the slope towards the plateau.
When we were halfway up we saw a sight that made our hearts sink. The rear ranks of the Terrible Ones, on the opposite slope, were no longer pouring into the city. They were splitting into two huge arcs and were moving round the city. In a few moments we would be caught, as it were, in the jaws of a gigantic pair of pincers!
Malu saw the danger. It would be fatal if the enemy once got into a position to attack on all sides—to pour into the city as if into a saucer. With part of the central group of warriors, the leader of the Beautiful People started to rush to the point where we ourselves were standing.
“Get to the rocket,” yelled Mac. “Steve—for the Lord’s sake!—we must get to the rocket!”
We jumped forward, and in a moment we were on the plateau, with the whole confused and terrifying scene spread out below us. Mac sprang to the swinging ladder and swarmed to the top of it to unlock the door. Then he descended again, and at the moment when Malu’s group and the first of the Terrible Ones to circle the city joined in furious conflict on the slope just beneath us, Jacky hastened up the ladder and disappeared into the safety of the Albatross.
“You next, Paul,” I shouted.
“Not me,” yelled Paul, “I want to stay. I haven’t had a whack at these brutes yet!”
“Don’t be a fool,” cried Mac. “This isn’t any time for heroics, boy—get into the Albatross when you’re told.”
Before any of us could say another word there came a sudden pause in all the seething activity in the city below. We looked down—and there, in the very center of the scene of conflict, we saw a sight the memory of which haunts me terribly to this day.
Out of the vast dome in the middle of the city had crawled the creature we knew as The Center. He stood with his flaming crown a stab of vivid color even among the violent colorings of that scene, and he held in his front tendrils a huge crystal sword—a twelve-foot streak of light, like a great electric spark, as it glistened in the sun. Facing him—towering above him—was the white and evil shape of the leader of the Terrible Ones.
The two great creatures faced each other. And on all sides the battle seemed to die, as deadly enemies paused in their struggles to watch the symbolic duel being fought. The fleeing crowds stopped dead and turned to stare.
For a moment there was no movement. Then suddenly, with an energy that seemed out of all proportion to his bulk and flabbiness, The Center jumped. High into the air he soared, and as he fell he brought down his sword with terrible force straight across the face of the great thing facing him. One of the huge pink jaws fell clean away, and into our thoughts, even from that distance, there came a scream, icy and penetrating, of rage and pain and sheer malevolence.
The Center, with surprising agility, slewed sideways to avoid the tentacles that now shot out from the side of the white monster to encircle him. He shuffled and gathered his feet-tendrils for another leap, but before he could execute it successfully, the white monster, with another beastly scream, slithered in a pulpy heap from before him.
Too late The Center tried to adjust his aim. He lost his balance and stumbled. And in that moment the white monster acted. It was his turn to leap. He hurled his enormous bulk into the air, soaring like a monstrous and obscene bird. And he fell with a terrible squelching thud, horrible to our physical ears in all the silence of the scene, full on top of The Center.
And then, before any more movement could be made—before any of the contestants could resume the struggle—there came another sound—another actual sound, in our ears. Muffled and terrible in that supreme moment, it was a vast rumbling explosion. And all around us the ground shook and trembled, so that we had, in a sudden panic, to cling to each other for support.
Simultaneously the sky, which up to now had been blue and pellucid above the scene, grew suddenly dark, and a great gust or wave of heat seemed to rush in the air all round us. And from the top of the biggest of the mountains which overhung the city there poured a sudden fountain of flame.
“My heavens!” yelled Mac, white and staggered in the unexpected gloom, “it’s an eruption! Lord help us, Steve—the volcano!—the volcano!”
I did not answer. My eyes were fixed in horror and fascination on the slope down which the Terrible Ones had rushed to attack us. Pouring down it now, swift and menacing, was a seething, glowing tide of lava. And all round us were falling vast smoking boulders—some of them thudding among the bodies of the close-packed Martians, some crashing through the great glass domes, leaving huge jagged holes in the curved surfaces, through which poured volumes of smoke—presumably from the deep-dug heating shafts that led now, not to gentle subterranean draughts of warm air, but to a raging inferno of molten rock.
I saw once, in Italy, a live volcano: but there was nothing in its slow eruption that could compare with the violent agony of this great hot sore in the body of the Angry Planet.
How to describe the terrible scene that followed? The lava, sizzling and bubbling as if it were alive, poured into the doomed city. As it lapped round the bases of the great domes, one by one they seemed to melt and sink into nothingness—immense shining bubbles, red in the reflected light, subsiding and vanishing in the tide. Contorted figures, caught in the molten fingers of this implacable beast—Beautiful People and Terrible Ones alike—poised for a moment in a brief agony, and then sank into the stream. The dreadful liquid crept and oozed over the entire floor of the city—the saucer of the valley became a seething cauldron—a vast and terrible witch’s brew.
All this—this first part of the eruption—lasted only a few seconds. When it was over, the second phase began. Enormous tremors shook the earth, and the boulders began to fall more densely. Beneath us, on the slope leading up to the plateau, were some hundreds of Martians who had escaped from the lava—warriors and Terrible Ones, females and non-fighting males of the Beautiful People; and they all were struggling, as well as the heaving earth would permit them, to clamber up to where we ourselves stood by the Albatross. The awful thing was, that even now the lust to destroy in the Terrible Ones had not been satiated; even while struggling to save themselves they rushed among the Beautiful People, wrapping their tentacles round their slender trunks and either breaking them in two or casting them down into the hissing lava at the foot of the slope. Even as I looked at the scene, I saw one small hapless creature being swung high into the air and then cast far out in an arc to fall into the tide—and I recognized her, with a stab, as Dilli, the little female whom we had met when first entering the city.
Enormous tremors shook the earth
“Steve,” yelled Mac, “we’ll have to get into the rocket. We’ll be hit by one of those boulders—we’ll be destroyed. Get the boys up the ladder—and hurry!”
I nodded. Paul and Mike had heard him too, and in an instant Paul had started to mount. Mike followed, and, when he was half-way up, I jumped on to the lower rungs myself.
As I climbed, a boulder shot past me—I felt the terrible heat of it in my face, and heard the thud as it buried itself in the sand of the plateau. I looked down. Mac was just mounting the ladder—the boulder had missed him by inches.
“Mac,” I yelled, “are you all right?”
“Yes,” came his answer. “Hurry, Steve—hurry or we’re lost!”
I jumped the last few feet and staggered into the cabin. Jacky, white-faced, was crouching on one of the beds. Paul and Mike stood by the doorway, staring at the ghastly scene below. The whole rocket was vibrating beneath the trembling of the ground—it was a miracle that the improvised cradle on which it rested had not collapsed long before.
The Doctor swung himself over the lip of the doorway. His face was pale, his hair flew wild, his eyes stared in horror.
“Oh my heavens,” he groaned, “this is dreadful—dreadful! These poor creatures! . . .”
“What are we going to do, Mac,” I cried, shouting at the top of my voice to be heard above the crash of the explosions. “Are we going to go back to earth?”
“There’s nothing else we can do,” he moaned. “I hadn’t wanted to, yet. There’s so much to do here—so much work! But we’re lost if we don’t go—there isn’t any other way to escape. We must pray that this ghastly shaking hasn’t changed the direction of the cradle.”
“Mac,” I yelled, “couldn’t we expend only a little fuel—enough to take us into the stratosphere—and then stop and land somewhere else where there isn’t any danger?”
“You know as well as I do that that isn’t possible, Steve—the Albatross can’t be controlled for short flights—once we start we’re into space, and once we’re in space we’ve got to travel on till we reach earth—if we ever do reach earth. It’s the one——”
He got no further. At this moment there was an explosion louder than any we had heard so far—it was as if the entire mountain were blowing up. As I staggered under the terrific impact I saw that the whole scene was suffused with a red and angry glare—an immense spout of flame shot skywards from the big mountain-top.
And immediately after the crash there was a yell from Mike.
“Nuna—Nuna,” he cried, “I’m coming—hold on!”
And he was over the side of the rocket again, scrambling down the ladder. In horror the Doctor and I rushed to the doorway and stared out. Below us, hideous in the glare, a dreadful scene of conflict was in progress. Nuna and one or two others of the warriors had reached the plateau, and swarming on to it after them were some half-dozen of the Terrible Ones. One of these—a gigantic creature with an entire jaw and an eye missing—had twined his tentacles round Nuna’s trunk, and in the implacable way we knew, was bending him back and back to break him.
It was this the quixotic Mike had seen—he was rushing to try to save Nuna, as once before he had rushed to try to save Nuna.
“Mike—Mike—comeback!” I yelled. “It’s useless, Mike—it’s useless!”
But he paid no attention—I doubt if he even heard me. With his sword flashing red he was across the plateau in one great leap. Once—twice—the red blade flashed—the first time it severed the long cruel tentacles, leaving Nuna free to stagger backwards and collapse in a heap a few yards from the foot of the ladder; the second time it bit deep into the shell of the monster. With the haft sticking out of him like the haft of Excalibur from the anvil, he reeled to the edge of the plateau and went tumbling into the lake of lava.
Mike in an instant leapt back, and, catching Nuna round the trunk, dragged him desperately to the foot of the ladder. Somehow he got the slender limp form over his shoulder and started to climb—we, above, staring down at him in a helpless amazement. The whole episode had taken only a few seconds—we had hardly had time to recover from the first shock of Mike’s sudden action.
Mike, struggling and breathless, was half-way up the ladder. And now—final horror—we saw that under the pressure of the last huge spurt of flame, the lava was being forced into the air and was falling over the entire scene as a fine deadly rain—the volcano had become a veritable fountain of lava. And simultaneously with our noticing this, we saw that one of the Terrible Ones had reached the foot of the ladder and was gathering himself for a spring—a spring that would carry him full on to Mike’s back and drag him down to a certain death.
It was Jacky that woke us from our fascinated immobility.
“Pull,” she screamed, “pull the ladder! Uncle Steve—save him, save him!”
The Doctor and I jerked into action. We seized the end of the ladder and, exerting a desperate strength, pulled it towards us. Thank heaven for the weaker force of gravity on Mars! Our first great heave brought Mike and Nuna to the door. Paul and Mac grasped them and dragged them into the cabin. I stood back a little, the ladder still in my hand—and suddenly it ripped out of my grasp, searing and tearing the flesh of my palms. The monster below had jumped!
We looked over the side. The hideous thing had not been dislodged by the jerk of the falling ladder. He clung with his tentacles and feet-tendrils to the rungs—and slowly, inexorably, he was mounting the swaying steel cables towards us.
“Mac,” I cried, “is there no way to release the ladder—does it unfasten?”
“No,” he shouted. “It’s fixed securely—I never thought there’d be any need for it to be detachable. Oh my heavens!—my heavens!”
“Shut the doors,” I yelled. “We can start even if the monster is hanging on.”
“The weight will pull us out of direction. Steve, we’ve got to get rid of it—we’ve got to!”
Wildly he pulled the revolver from his belt. He fired six shots into the face of the thing below—six clean round holes appeared in the pulpy flesh. But still the creature mounted.
Then suddenly the end came. We saw something hurtle through the air in a great leap and land on the back of the monster. It was Malu!—Malu, who had seen our danger and has rushed to save us!
For a moment the two Martians clung together on the swaying ladder. But Malu’s sword had bitten deeply into the Terrible One as he leapt, and the great flabby creature loosened his grip. As they fell to the plateau a message flashed into our heads—with one superlative effort, Malu—our first friend on that strange and terrible world—projected a last thought to us in that high dramatic moment. Not one of us but heard it clearly, cutting through every other thought in our crowded brains:
“Farewell, strangers—good journey! Remember Malu the Warrior—Malu the Tall, Prince of the Beautiful People. . . .”
We slammed the doors. Mike, his face and clothes burned by some of the rain of lava that had fallen on him, had collapsed in a heap on the floor of the cabin beside the still form of Nuna—but he was smiling happily, unconscious as he was. Jacky was sobbing—Paul stood dazed beside her.
Mac staggered to the control panel. He raised his hand to touch the lever that would launch us into space again. I looked through one of the lower port-holes for a last glimpse at the terrible scene. I saw, in that moment, that Malu had disentangled himself from the creature of the ladder—he stood swaying on the plateau, his sword swinging. Even as I stared I saw two more of the monsters advancing towards him menacingly. He was indomitable as he faced them. . . .
The Doctor pressed the lever. There was a rushing, explosive sound, drowning all else. The scene faded from my view—I knew no more than I know now of the fate of Malu. Did he escape?—or was he swamped by the monsters that rushed to overwhelm him?
For a moment a red mist swirled about the portholes. Then I felt myself losing consciousness. As I sank into oblivion my last thought was that even in these few seconds we were hundreds and hundreds of miles away from the Angry Planet. . . .