The Martian War

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE


THE MASTER MINDS OF MARS

Held in the excavation site at the Martian pole, Wells stood close to Jane and waited for their fates to be decided. Towering guardian tripods marched about the giant ice quarry, their heat-ray projectors raised ominously; smaller two-legged Martian walking machines, each of which carried a single Martian like a man astride an iron ostrich, clanked back and forth. It was the first Wells and his companions had seen of the hideous creatures Moreau had described in his journal.

“It looks like a bloated bag of brain covered with oilskin,” Jane cried. “And the eyes! Look at the eyes! I wish I could make a sketch of it. Have you ever seen anything so hideous?”

“One cannot apply human standards of beauty to an alien world,” Huxley pointed out.

“Even so,” Jane said, “they are still extraordinarily ugly.”

Unable to tear his gaze from the approaching bird-like contrivances, Wells countered, “Knowing what these Martians have done to the Selenite utopia and what they mean to do on Earth, I find their minds particularly loathsome, regardless of their physical appearance.”

Four of the small walking contrivances clomped up to the captives, extruding electrical tentacles from the machine core. Inside the transparent control dome, the Martian driver activated controls: the whips lashed, and sparks cracked; Huxley hissed in pain from a sudden jolt that left a red weal on his cheek.

Fearful but desperate to do something, Wells tried to interpose himself to protect the old man, but Huxley stopped him. “Don’t do anything foolishly futile, Mr. Wells. I believe they’re attempting to herd us.” He gestured toward a steep ramp that descended to the canal levels. “We may as well be on our way.”

In the water below, anchored barges and bubble-topped floating craft rested in the numerous feeder channels that led into the primary network of canals. Martian walking machines moved along the docks, loading and arranging cargo.

The static whips cracked again, and Wells took a jolt in the shoulder. “Bloody hell, we’re going!” He kept himself where he could take the blows instead of Jane, but once they started walking, the Martians did not strike again.

“Apparently, they assume we’re docile, like the Selenites,” Jane said.

“Personally, I want to go meet one of their representatives,” Huxley said. “It’s the only way we may accomplish our mission.”

When the strange procession reached the docks on the frigid canals, two Martians, looking like overfed spiders, crawled out of the control domes of their walking contrivances and scuttled down a ramp into a bubble-topped floating craft. The remaining pair of guardian walkers clanked back and forth in front of the captives, cracking their static whips to drive the humans toward the boat.

“Professor, we can’t go far from our sphere,” Wells said with increasing anxiety. “The Martians will dismantle it in that hangar, and then we’ll never get back home.”

Huxley gave him a stoic look. “Ah, young man, we came here to save our Earth. Before we can devise a plan, we require a great deal more information about the Martian society.”

“There’s only one way to find out what we need to know,” Jane said. She was the first to step aboard the domed boat, and the two men followed. “The human race is at stake.”

The vessel’s interior was made of a strange, smooth metal. It boasted no furnishings except for sturdy platforms designed to accommodate the shapeless and bulky Martians, but the three sat on them anyway. Once the prisoners were inside, the faceted domes clicked into place, sealing them in. Mechanical anchors disengaged from the docks, and the floating craft lurched forward into the swift current.

Back at the docks, guardian walkers stood observing them as the domed boat departed. Then they clanked away, static whips lashing at hapless Selenite slaves.

“I know we replenished ourselves just before landing, but I do wish we’d brought some food supplies from the sphere,” Huxley said, wrapping his striped bathrobe tighter around his chest. “A bottle of beer and some dried meat would certainly restore my energy right now.” Wells searched in his pockets and found some forgotten old biscuits he had taken from the supplies in the cavorite sphere; he shared the food around, but it only served to whet their appetites.

As the domed boat rushed down the main canal, the three stared out at the rubble of ancient cities worn to bare geometric silhouettes. Abandoned towers stretched into the gray-green sky, silent and barren. Scavenger birds, practically the only animal form they noticed, circled about the ruins. The current of thawed antarctic water swept them through oasis intersections where lush plant life abounded in stark contrast to the dry red deserts all around. Large-eyed creatures ducked into the shelter of vegetation.

“A living civilization was born here, matured, and is now dying,” Huxley lamented. “At one glorious time, this landscape could have been covered with plants and forests, but it’s now entirely played out, drained dry.” He shook his head. “Did the Martians mine the nutrients out of the soil, cut down all the trees? No wonder they need to go someplace fresh and new. Like Earth.”

Contemplating the factory smokestacks around London, the dirty industries, the constantly belching furnaces and the sluggish, polluted waters of the Thames, Wells wondered what the Earth itself would look like in a few thousand years.

The bubble-topped boat finally approached a huge metropolis whose buildings rose in dagger-like points and spheres. The primary construction materials were a type of glass or crystal, but considering the loads placed on them, it must have been stronger than forged steel. Wells thought the skyline looked like a cluster of minarets created by a blind glassblower.

Whirling antennae spun about on the tops of tall structures— perhaps a form of weather forecasting? Mirrors and prisms rotated, flashing the dim sunshine into sharp beams like a spotlight. He saw trapezoidal gates and long sloping ramps, walkways that spiraled around and up the highest spires. No doubt with their slumping bodies and tentacular appendages, the Martians would not have been able to negotiate stairs or ladders.

“From its very grandeur, I would guess this metropolis is the Martian capital.” As the vessel slowed, Huxley combed his fingers through his sideburns and hair in an attempt to make himself look presentable. “Where else would they take emissaries from another planet?” He fretted over his rumpled lounging shirt, trousers, and slippers. “I do wish I had brought more formal clothes.”

Wells tried to console him. “No matter how sophisticated the Martian telescopes may be, Professor, I doubt they care about the latest fashions in London.”

From a control dome above the boat, the unseen Martian pilot guided the vessel into an apparatus that closed like lips and locked the floating craft against the metal-plated dock. When the hemispherical covers opened, Huxley stood first. “Ah then, we are … here.” Wells took Jane’s hand and, stepping into the yellowish artificial illumination of the Martian metropolis, they waited for what might happen next. Would they be received as ambassadors, or as spies and saboteurs?

A trio of small walking contrivances met the prisoners at the dock gate. Riding inside the control seats, the inhuman creatures stared at them with cold hunger. Crackling metallic bullwhips snapped out, shooting sparks, and by now the three needed no encouragement.

“I do not choose to meet the Martian leaders as a downtrodden prisoner or a captured enemy.” Huxley squared his shoulders, then marched briskly and proudly along the sleek-looking and streamlined street. “I prefer to think of myself as a visiting emissary, regardless of how these creatures treat me.” Wells copied the older man’s demeanor, taking Jane’s arm. The three strolled along as if they were invited guests, ignoring the crackling whips behind them.

They listened to the hum of machinery in the air. Liquid lines of blue electricity flowed up the sides of buildings in some form of circulatory system for the alien metropolis. Rotating faceted crystal spheres spun rainbows from the tops of towers. But the city had no babble of conversation, no drone of voices, no bustle of living people or daily business. The Martians were an eerily silent race, moving about with secret thoughts and sinister plans.

At the center of the metropolis several intersecting canals flowed in a frothing, churning rush. Towering over this nexus stood a prominent Martian building, like a scientific cathedral of mathematically precise swooping towers, embedded domes, and laboratory spires.

“Note the unique architectural style, which takes into account the lower gravity of Mars and the different ores and stone available for construction,” Huxley said.

Wells drank it all in with his eyes, hoping that someday he’d be able to describe such marvels in prose: how the Pall Mall Gazette would pay for an eyewitness account of the civilization of Mars! If he, Jane, and the professor ever got safely home, he would sell his memoirs, perhaps even demand an increase in his pay rate.

Inside what he thought of as the scientific cathedral, tunnels and tubes rose upward like wild beanstalks made of transparent substances softer and more flexible than glass. Bubbling fluids spewed into large cylinders, before being pumped downward by heavy pistons. Standing inside the nave of the wondrous structure, Wells could imagine they were inside a giant machine, like a life-support system for the Martian culture.

The small walking contrivances herded them through a reception chamber and up a long textured ramp like an alluvial fan to a flat platform, like a sacrificial altar in one of the newly discovered Mayan ziggurats of Central America. There, in a shallow circular pool with a golden rim, three hideous Martians floated in a honey-colored bath of nutrients, soaking in the syrupy substance. The trio of Martian brains—Wells ironically thought to call them the “heads of state”—regarded the humans in silence. Their thin tentacles stirred the nutrient bath.

After invisibly conferring amongst themselves, the trio of master minds wallowed to the edge of their communal pool and climbed with rolling, flopping motions out onto the wet floor of the dais. The ungainly Martians crawled to three empty walking contrivances at the opposite edge of the dais, and used tentacles to heave their swollen brain-bodies into the open control domes. After the master minds had seated themselves at the controls and closed the dome covers tightly, the walkers activated. Heavy legs clomped toward where the three humans stood waiting.

“Not much for conversation, are they?” Wells muttered.

The alien council members marched the three captives up a winding ramp to a laboratory spire that looked out over the Martian metropolis. After Wells and his friends were unceremoniously dropped onto the smooth floor, the three walkers strode over to a set of high silver pillars, that reminded Wells of perches for pet vultures. The Martian master minds slid out of the walking contrivances and rested heavily atop the pedestals, like a tribunal.

Huxley was most interested in the laboratory around them. Aquarium tanks contained ghoulish specimens of odd life forms floating in preservation solutions. One entire wall was devoted to representatives of Selenite castes, all studied, dissected, and then placed in specimen bottles like the invertebrates and fish Huxley himself had collected on the Rattlesnake.

Jane, though, turned her attention to the trays of gleaming tools and probes. Three tables rested in the middle of the room, etched with channels and sloping funnels to drain away unwanted fluids. “What will they do to us, H.G.? Or is it as obvious as I think?”

The old professor’s gaze was dark and sharp. “It seems clear enough that they mean to dissect us, young lady.” His shoulders sagged. “After all, it is what I would have done with new and interesting specimens.”

A door slid open at the rear of the laboratory dome to admit a new Martian walker—this one far more frightening than the others they had seen. Wells immediately thought of it as the Grand Inquisitor. The new machine bristled with robotic arms, claws, syringes, and probes. The Martian riding like an imp on its back had numerous controls at its disposal. Electrical fluids pulsed along its outer skeleton, trailed by flashing lights and hissing hydrodynamic pulleys.

The Grand Inquisitor faced the three Martian master minds on their pedestals, then strode over to the three humans, who clung together. Scanners roamed up and down, measuring, assessing, and recording images of their bodies. “Painless so far,” Jane said.

After studying them for some moments, the Grand Inquisitor lurched forward and reached out a set of four limbs for Jane. Wells pushed her aside. “Leave her alone. Take me first.”

“H.G., don’t!”

The Grand Inquisitor was perfectly satisfied to take Wells as the first specimen. The ominous walker hauled him to one of the three dissection tables. With a flurry of arms, claws, and sharp scalpels, the analytical machine poked and stroked and studied him, gaining tactile records as well as visual ones.

Though he tried not to show it, Wells was terrified. He squirmed and was seized by a fit of coughing, which the Grand Inquisitor seemed to regard as an attack, a show of futile resistance, or an abortive attempt at communication.

Huxley pleaded with the three alien leaders, attempting to appeal to their reason. He formed triangles and circles with his fingers to demonstrate simple mathematical relationships that the Martians might understand. He tried to express the concept of pi, then the Pythagorean Theorem.

The master minds remained entirely preoccupied with Wells, leaning forward to peer at him helpless on their analytical table. They observed every moment in complete silence.

Two large-bore syringes plunged into the soft skin of his neck, and Wells writhed in agony. Jane threw herself forward, but Huxley restrained her. Through his fog of pain, Wells called in a strained voice, “Don’t interfere, Jane—you’ll put yourself in danger too.”

Samples of his blood flowed into the syringes and through tubes back into analytical compartments. With a horrible sliding and clicking sound, two more sets of metallic hands rose from the interrogation machine. Wells strained to see, but the long needles in his neck prevented him from struggling. Twelve sharp robotic fingers extended into his field of view, each one terminating in a needle that glistened with a droplet of white fluid.

Again Wells tried to squirm away. Like sharp stingers, the Inquisitor’s new needle-hands brushed his scalp, the contours of his skull, as if looking for something. Then with a sudden sharp movement—and a torrent of excruciating pain—the needles plunged into his skull, drilling deep.

Wells peeled his lips back in a grimace. At first he struggled and thrashed, but then he forced himself to remain still, heroically surrendering to the Martian’s analysis for the sake of Jane and Professor Huxley. Although his own brain was much smaller than the Martians’ superior organs, he hoped that if they could obtain the data they required from him, then the evil master minds wouldn’t need to torture his friends. Cold tears trickled out of the corners of his eyes, and he shuddered, his whole body spasming.

The needles dug deeper, through the skull and into gray matter, stimulating thoughts, dreams. Visions surged through his optic nerves, though his eyes were shut. Without any volition of his own, information surged out of his brain as if he were a book being casually skimmed by the Grand Inquisitor.

In a flash before his eyes, Wells saw glimpses of his youth, his brothers and parents … breaking his leg when he was a boy, reading books and discovering the joy of stories. The drudgery of working in a draper’s shop with other abused apprentices. His disappointing love and marriage to Isabel, and then meeting Jane … his love for her, the wonders and happiness they had together.

But the Martian was not interested in such thoughts. This was not an attempt to establish communication. This was the interrogation of a prisoner of war.

The silver fingers dug deeper yet, uncovering information about politics and warfare, the technology available to the British Empire and to the Germans: siege machines and ironclads, explosives, rifles, cannons. More and more thoughts were drained from his deepest brain, inspected, and recorded for later analysis by Martian invasion planners.

Realizing the crucial information he was revealing, Wells struggled. “No!” He tried to clamp his memories away, fighting the sharp probings of the deep needles. No matter how he resisted, the Grand Inquisitor’s apparatus was able to steal all it needed to know about Earth’s defensive abilities.

Finally the silver spikes withdrew from his brain and skull, and Wells collapsed like an invertebrate to the cold dissection table. His frustration and disgust at what he had unwittingly divulged made him feel even weaker. The Grand Inquisitor retracted its surgical and analytical limbs into storage cylinders mounted like gun barrels on the sides of its dome-turret, then clanked away.

“H.G., are you all right?” Jane rushed to his side and helped him to his feet. “What have they done to you?”

Tears still streamed out of his blue eyes, and he hung his head. “They know everything, Jane. Everything. We have no way to fight them.”

Huxley inspected his wounds, the small needle punctures, and nodded with faint satisfaction. “I believe you will heal, Wells.”

Jane held him close to her. “I thought they were going to kill you, H.G.”

“It’s worse, Jane. They let me remain alive, knowing that I myself doomed the human race to slavery and defeat.”