The Martian War

CHAPTER TWELVE


THE CRYSTAL EGG


FROM THE JOURNAL OF DR. MOREAU

For days, we kept the stunned Martian confined within a swelteringly hot supply tent. I imagined that conditions on Mars were colder than here in Algeria, probably colder than most inhabited places on Earth. The creature must have been abjectly miserable, but we had no better alternative.

Lowell sent riders to follow the spur rail line to the nearest Tuareg settlements for additional assistance. At last, two of the nomads returned hauling a dismantled iron cage on two complaining camels. The sturdy iron bars, which the men said had once been used to hold a lion, would provide the perfect confinement for our Martian. Lowell paid each of the strutting men a gold piece, and they seemed well satisfied with their efforts.

We had a long trek from the crash site to the train tracks at the far end of the geometrical ditches. From there, we would use our own narrow-gauge cars to meet up with the main rail line north to Algiers and the coast, where we could acquire transportation by Mediterranean steamer.

Staring at the horizon of tan dunes, Lowell wore his red-lensed glasses. They had become quite an affectation for him. He had a gleam in his bright, hawkish eyes. “Because of our Martian visitor, Moreau, you and I will not be swept into the dustbin of history like so many others.”

Though I harbored no wish for endowments and museums to be named after me, I very much wanted to recapture the scientific respectability that Thomas Huxley had stripped from me. If the sun rose again on my career, perhaps my important prior work would not be so easily dismissed … .

Tuareg laborers worked to remove all fourteen of the remaining drone cadavers, which would be crated, preserved, and eventually shipped or sold to scientific institutions around the world. I insisted on maintaining watch so the nomads could not steal Martian artifacts to sell as trinkets in a market town.

The day’s heat turned the creature’s spacecraft into an oven, but despite the oppressive temperature, the men still had to carry kerosene lamps inside, as the cylinder had no windows or portholes. By the light of my own lamp, I searched for items of further scientific interest, studying the vessel’s smooth walls and flat deck. How had those giant intellects occupied themselves during the tedious months of travel? I doubted their inferior white drones would have offered much conversation. I had an amusing vision of the two enormous brains holding playing cards in their tentacles, challenging each other to a round of whist.

The Tuaregs lifted one desiccated drone body after another and carried them outside. I heard the nomads jabber in their language, then their words became hushed and furtive. Suspecting that the men were hiding something, I demanded, “What is it? Show me what you have found.” Though I knew perfectly well they could comprehend commands in English, they pretended not to understand me. “Show me what it is! The cylinder and all artifacts within it are the property of Percival Lowell.”

I finally grabbed one of the shrugging men by his loose robes, ready to beat him with a stick like an animal. As my colleagues will be quick to agree, I have little patience when someone stands in my way. The man saw this in my eyes, and his companions knew they would be searched and whipped. He reached into the folds of his robe and withdrew a perfectly polished crystal egg as large as my extended hand. I glared at him, and he surrendered it quickly.

“The law of your Mahomet requires that the hand of a thief be struck off with a sword. Isn’t that correct?” The man whimpered, while I happily held the crystal egg. “Fortunately for you, I have no patience for religious nonsense. But I do not abide thieves. You will all be searched at the end of the day. If we find anything that does not belong to you, I shall see that your heads are lopped off, not just your hands.”

I had no idea what sort of artifact the crystal egg might be, whether it was some bauble dug from the Martian deserts, or an unimaginably sophisticated piece of technology based on glass and silica. When I showed it to Lowell that night, he was just as amazed and mystified. “Perhaps the Martian knows.”

We opened the flap of the sealed supply tent, wary of an attack from the creature. But the Martian huddled in shadow, listless and weak. Lowell held up the crystal egg. “Can you identify this? Explain its function?”

The Martian’s tentacles twitched. Its saucer-like eyes were alien and expressionless, like a squid’s. Lowell snorted. “How can anything with a brain so large be incapable of communication?”

“They may communicate in a completely different manner. The skin on its head could be a tympanic membrane like a drumhead, or maybe they exude scents in a chemical language indecipherable to our primitive noses. Maybe he even forms words with his mind.”

Lowell bent closer to the captive alien. “We are your friends, fellow scientists. We sent the signal. We came to greet you.” He sighed. “I wish you’d give us some sign that you want to exchange information.” But the Martian was as inscrutable as a cigar store Indian, and we left it alone … .

The next day Lowell commanded his workers to break down the camp. Three men assembled the lion cage and a platform to set atop a camel’s back like a palanquin. The ornery beasts would carry the caged Martian to the rail line.

The iron cage was placed before the supply tent, its gate open. When the flap was lifted, the Tuaregs shouted and beat upon the fabric with their rods. The thumping noise and the ruckus chased the sluggish alien creature out into the desert sun. When the Martian saw the cage, it went wild and tried to escape. But the stern natives forcibly encouraged it into the confinement. They slammed shut the gate, then together lifted the heavy cage onto the palanquin platform. Even lashed down, it rested uneasily on the back of the camel.

Lowell left a few of the men to guard the empty crashed cylinder, while the rest of us set off to the rail line. It was a long and uncomfortable pilgrimage across the desert. The camel groaned as it plodded through the sands, while the Martian huddled in the cage, its tentacles wrapped around the bars as if testing the iron’s tensile strength. It might have been a powerful creature on Mars, but the thing was now overburdened by its own weight in Earth’s gravity.

At last, we reached the dead end of the narrow-gauge spur line Lowell had laid down to service his trench excavations. I had no doubt that desert bandits would soon blow up the line or steal the iron rails for salvage. It no longer mattered to me.

Tuaregs on horseback raced to where Lowell’s private locomotive and cargo cars waited. For more than a week, the train had relayed prison supervisors and French labor camp workers back to Algiers. Now, forewarned by the Tuareg riders, the bored engineer was able to stoke his furnaces and get up a head of steam by the time we crested the dunes. Our nomads lifted the heavy cage from the camel’s back and loaded it into one of the dim cargo cars. After Lowell paid them in gold, the desert men departed, anxious to be far from the hideous creature.

Lowell and I rode with the train’s engineer up front in the locomotive, confident that the Martian was secure in its cargo car. The dry wind felt pleasant on our faces as the chugging train spat steam and cinders into the air. Though the engineer was rather ignorant, we were glad enough to have the conversation of another man who spoke English.

We traveled northward for hours until we finally reached the nearest sub-Saharan rail line that intersected our narrow-gauge spur. Then we prepared to wait. Schedules in the desert mean little. Hours or dates printed in a timetable are only useless numbers. A train would arrive whenever it came by.

We spent the night out in the darkness, but the following dawn we heard the distant rhythmic shunting and saw the plume of steam and smoke. Lowell and I stood on either side of the tracks to flag the train down. The locomotive slowed, then hissed and wheezed to a stop.

We learned that it was traveling from Algiers to Marrakech. We were quite pleased with that destination, for from Marrakech we could catch another train northward to the port city of Casablanca.

Lowell seemed to have an inexhaustible supply of cash. He paid the conductor for space aboard one of the nearly empty boxcars, and we spent an hour loading the caged Martian, the crated alien cadavers, and our equipment from the camp.

The other passengers on the train, most of them wrapped in Arab garments, stared out the windows at us while we worked. They didn’t seem impatient, having no expectations for when they might arrive in Marrakech; they simply rode along, letting the day slip by without being marked off by the ticking of a pocket watch.

The train chugged off again, grinding slowly forward on the rails, and Lowell worked his way from one passenger car to another, searching for a lounge where he could relax. Since I had no interest in conversing with anyone, not even Lowell, I climbed into the cargo car, where I could sit beside the caged Martian.

As the train moved along, the rolling wheels vibrated beneath the car. Golden ribbons of sunlight penetrated the uneven slats in the boxcar walls. The Martian’s tentacles held on against the jostling of the train; it looked upon me with envious eyes, an indecipherable but seemingly malevolent stare. I watched it stir, trying to understand the language of its movements and reactions … .

From long years of practice, I had become adept at studying specimens that knew nothing but pain and fear. Sometimes their rudimentary brains comprehended their fates as I removed them from their cages and took them to the operating tables. Some struggled and slashed with claws or teeth. I’ve heard of animals caught in traps that become so desperate they gnaw off their own limbs.

Would this Martian do such a thing? Had it learned such terrible fear of me, the man who kept it in captivity?

For years working in university laboratories in London, I had pushed the limits of surgical techniques. My studies in vivisection and responses to pain expanded the limits of human knowledge. In exploring new methods of grafting from one species to another, I attempted to determine the plasticity of the animal form. In outward appearance, at least, I tried to fashion wild animals into creatures physically similar to human beings. With form, I hoped, would come function.

My dream had been to take a large animal with the potential for greater intelligence—a bear for instance, or a dog—and through deft manipulations with the scalpel, create a new species. I removed bestial teeth, enlarged the skull area to accommodate secondary brain tissue, reshaped paws into hands.

Because of the loud howls of my experimental subjects and the constant need for disposing of failed specimens, I was forced to do my work at night, in private. While I taught students at the Normal Academy during the day and performed seemingly innocuous experiments for the other schoolmasters to see, my real work went on in the quiet, late hours.

I came so close.

I remember bright lights shining down on the operating table, which glistened with red blood that leaked out of numerous incisions. I had flayed the skin from a baboon; while strapping its arms and legs to the table, I proceeded to cut it open so that I could add superior organs harvested from other animals. A formerly docile German shepherd dog lay whimpering on another operating table, still alive (I had removed several of its vital organs, and thus it could not survive long). I had also taken brain tissue and olfactory apparatus from a cat, and was attempting to splice them all into a singular hodgepodge being.

The baboon snarled and growled, the dog whined, and the cat let out hideous noises, but I was too intent on my work to understand how clearly the clamor could be heard far away down the halls. Before I knew it, Professor Thomas Huxley threw open the door to my surgery and stared aghast at what I was doing. “This is an abomination!” His bellow startled me, and my scalpel slipped, causing irreparable damage to the baboon’s medulla oblongata, thereby ruining the specimen.

Huxley, Darwin’s bulldog, a man supposedly unruffled by even the most challenging rhetoric, was struck speechless. Finally, he spluttered, “You are through at the Academy, Moreau! I will call the police, and I shall see that you go to prison for this … this nightmare of science.”

“Thomas, you don’t understand. Here, let me show you what I’m doing. The possibilities are—”

Huxley shocked me—and himself as well, I suppose— by vomiting on the floor. I found it rather disappointing, because this was a man who had performed a great deal of biological research and published numerous papers in respected journals.

“You are supposed to be a man of science and vision,” I said. “Will you not even listen?”

From his expression of revulsion, I knew what Huxley’s answer would be. Despite all of his challenges to religious-minded people whom he considered to be gullible fools, despite all of his admonishments to use logic instead of artificial morality and senseless sentimentality—T.H. Huxley was disgusted by what I had done.

He saw to it that I was immediately stripped of my position at the Academy. I was forced to flee the country and leave my work behind, simply in order to remain free of prison. In the ensuing scandal, I had no choice but to seek sponsors in foreign lands, visionary men who understood that potential breakthroughs can be purchased only through effort and pain. I was forced to work in isolated places: in Africa, on uninhabited islands in the Orient.

For all his eccentricities, my new friend Percival Lowell was a kindred spirit.

Peering through the bars in the lion’s cage, I could see a terrible, unearthly intelligence in the Martian’s eyes. Though the creature was weak and entirely at my mercy, it seemed to believe that it alone was in control.

I wondered for a moment if my own doomed experimental animals had felt the same way, just before I dissected them … .

When we finally reached the port of Casablanca, Lowell learned the names of officials susceptible to bribes, which forms he was required to fill out, and which fees must be paid. There was already a steamer in port bound for the United States, and he promptly booked us passage in separate cabins.

Knowing that seamen would be more curious than the nomadic and superstitious Tuaregs, we decided that the Martian’s presence should be kept quiet. The cage was covered with a tarpaulin, and Lowell explained that he was transporting a large animal captured in Africa, bound for the Boston zoo.

We found a place in the dark, cool cargo decks where the Martian’s cage would be left undisturbed. At first, the steamer captain showed little interest in what we were trying to smuggle, and then none at all after Lowell paid him an extra bribe to buy us more privacy.

I was glad to be bound for America. After so many years on the run, I looked forward to calm civilization. I wanted to go anyplace where I would find the freedom and facilities to perform all the experiments I had in mind. Though it was currently uncommunicative, the Martian would offer a wealth of opportunities—science, technology, philosophy—once I managed to break through the barrier of understanding.

Lowell and I found ourselves alone with the Martian in a small cargo room. We removed the covering tarpaulin and looked through the bars. “He will truly be a marvel when we get him to America,” Lowell said. “My family can help me make the appropriate scientific announcements.”

I was more concerned about the Martian’s declining health than about its possibilities for fame in Boston society. “I will be pleased merely to get it to a safe place. Perhaps it is suffering from one of our Earth germs, to which it has no immunity. Right now, it looks very sick.”