The Martian War

CHAPTER SEVEN


THE MARTIAN CYLINDER OPENS


FROM THE JOURNAL OF DR. MOREAU

Grand discoveries require careful documentation. I am a participant in events that will change the course of human history, and therefore I have determined to set down all that I have observed and pondered. History must remember what occurred in the Sahara, on the Atlantic steamer, and at Percival Lowell’s observatory in Arizona Territory.

If the impending Martian invasion is not thwarted, then this journal may be all that remains of our civilization. I will tell what happened, and how the human race failed in its time of greatest crisis. I am fully aware of my obligation to the truth.

After the silvery cylinder had torn a smoky line through the sky and crashed near our still-burning canals, Lowell and I rushed forward, awestruck and eager. We were impetuous men, and neither of us wasted time with undue caution. Hesitation results only in lost opportunities: that is a motto by which I choose to live my life. Now was not the time for us to be cowards.

A plume of dust curled into the air from the distant impact crater. “I hope the Martian ship did not explode when it struck the ground!” Lowell shouted.

“Impossible!” I replied over the rumble of the fire from the raw impact wound. “They would be too advanced to make such a foolish mistake.”

Both Lowell and I were accustomed to leading, not following, and so we climbed the lip of the fresh crater in tandem. Together, we gazed down at the steaming ruin.

Deep below, I could make out a silver cylinder with snub ends like a bullet. It was mirror-bright, dazzling our eyes, though the hull was stained from entering the atmosphere like a giant meteor. But this was no meteor: the cylinder was clearly formed by the hands of an intelligent race.

I confess that I had a more scientific curiosity than a diplomatic one. If the alien civilization had sent a spacecraft across interplanetary distances, then Martian technology was obviously far superior to anything our greatest industrial nations had developed. I was eager to learn what these creatures could teach me.

The heat from the pit rose in a tremendous wave, preventing us from approaching closer. We could only stand to observe for a few seconds. Lowell dropped back, coughing, but I remained hunched over, shielding my watering eyes, until I, too, had no choice but to stagger back. With savage disappointment, Lowell clenched his hands at his sides. “I have waited years for this moment. I can tolerate a few more hours—but not much longer.”

Impatient and frustrated, we retired to our shaded tents. We both felt as if our life’s work was coming to its climax. Lowell fetched toiletries, shaved with a basin of tepid water, then changed into a fine new suit and straightened his collar. All the while he kept his gaze intent on the still-glowing pit visible through the propped-open tent flap.

And the hours dragged on.

After eating a quickly prepared meal, we shared a celebratory brandy and a cigar. Lowell told me of his longstanding passion for Mars and his intention to use part of the family fortune to build an observatory dedicated to the study of the red planet. His young assistant, A.E. Douglass, had already been sent to scout appropriate locations in the American Southwest, Mexico, and even South America. Then he talked about his journeys as an ambassador to Japan and the insights he had gained from the Eastern mind and its philosophies.

Oh, our frivolous conversation seems so absurd now as I record it, and I cannot in good conscience set down all our inane thoughts on paper. Let us say that Percival Lowell and I were equally naive and optimistic, and I shall leave the matter at that.

Soon, we would have a chance to meet a real Martian face to face.

When evening cooled the desert, we set off again. I commanded the remaining Tuaregs to follow with crowbars and pickaxes from the trench excavations, as I thought the Martians might need assistance in opening their armored spacecraft. The superstitious natives accompanied us, though reluctantly.

Although their culture retained its belief in mysteries and demons, the Tuaregs had seen locomotives and white men coming in large ships. To them, a spaceship cylinder or a creature from Mars was no more fantastic.

Lowell was mulling over an appropriate speech to welcome the alien visitors, and I wondered if he had considered that the Martians were not likely to speak English. Still, Lowell had a knack for languages. On impulse, he reached into the pocket of his cream-colored jacket and withdrew the oxide-red spectacles I had given him, placing them over his eyes. Now he saw the world as a Martian would, the better to understand them.

When we finally stood on the crater rim, I could see a dull glow, but most of the cylinder had cooled. The immense object, larger than two railroad cars, made a ticking and crackling sound as its temperature continued to adjust to our environment.

Lowell noticed the hatch first, and excitement intensified his Bostonian accent. “Look there, Moreau! A circle protruding from the side of the cylinder.” Indeed, a rounded cap was moving like an immense screw, rising from the cylinder’s hull.

“Someone inside is trying to open it,” I said.

Before Lowell could say anything, I scrambled down the loose slope. The thin crust of vitrified sand broke beneath my feet, but I dug in my heels and skidded to a halt at the base of the crashed Martian projectile. Breathless, I gazed up at the curved cylinder, awestruck by its sheer size.

Lowell called from above, “Moreau! Are you all right?”

Without waiting, I reached forward, amazed that I could feel no heat radiating from the hull. Tentatively, I brought my hand closer and then, with brash resolve, touched it. The metal was still warm, but not unendurable. “It’s completely safe, Lowell.” He needed no further encouragement to join me.

Above, I heard a scraping sound, and the screw-hatch rotated visibly by a quarter of a turn, then gradually a quarter more. “Perhaps they are too weak to open it the rest of the way,” I said when Lowell stood panting beside me.

He bellowed to the desert workers gathered around the rim. “Come here and bring your crowbars! We must get this cylinder open.” He glared up them, his wavy pale hair ghostly under the starlight. “There will be no pay for anyone who hesitates.”

Three of the dark-clad workers disappeared from the edge, and Lowell and I never saw them again. Four other men—either braver or more desperate for money—came down brandishing their crowbars like weapons, though we meant for them to be used only as tools.

The screw-hatch turned slightly again, then stopped. The skittish Tuaregs backed off, but Lowell clapped his hands. “Go on, you brutes! See what you can do to help.”

The robed nomads clanged their bars against the hull, searching for some notch that would catch their bars. Eventually, as Lowell and I supervised, the men managed to get their bars into the hatch seam. Working together, grunting and cursing in their incomprehensible language, the natives dragged the hatch cover around. It finally began to turn freely.

Eager to see the first light from the open crack, I wanted to push forward. My own face should be the first human the aliens saw—or, at the very least, Percival Lowell’s. But the heavy screw made its last turn and fell off into the cooked sand. The Tuaregs scrambled back as hissing air gushed out like the steam from a tea kettle. Alien air, I thought, from the skies of Mars.

I saw only darkness inside the open hatch high up on the cylinder’s hull. When the venting atmosphere had faded to silence again, one of the Tuaregs pulled his face close to the opening.

Suddenly an enormous shape thrust itself forward from within the cylinder. It had slick leathery skin, huge eyes, and a Medusa’s cluster of tentacles. It made no sound as its appendages grabbed the Tuareg by his robes. The man screamed and thrashed, tearing his garments.

Despite their fear, the Tuareg’s companions protected their own. Howling, they drew curved swords from their dusty robes and lunged for the Martian beast. The tentacled thing loomed up, seemingly furious at us.

For the briefest instant, Lowell and I stood stunned and amazed. Such a creature was unlike anything I had imagined in all my biological studies. I reacted more quickly than Lowell when I saw the Tuaregs with murder in their eyes. “No swords! Do not harm it. It is a creature from another planet.”

With a swift stroke of his blade, one desert man slashed the fabric of his comrade’s robe, cutting him loose. The terrified victim tumbled to the sand and scrambled away. The other Tuaregs, glowering at me, seated their swords back in their belts and took up the crowbars as clubs. In a group, they rushed the open hatch and pummeled the Martian, which scuttled backward into its large ship.

The Tuaregs paused at the dark opening, none of them willing to venture inside. Lowell came close with the kerosene lamp he had brought. “Stand aside, but be ready to defend us.”

When I saw Lowell hesitate at the hatch opening, I snatched the lamp from him. This was no time for doubts and reservations. Without a thought for my own safety, I thrust the lamp into the cylinder’s interior.

The kerosene glow reflected from strange shapes and curves, objects no human had ever seen. Inside, the Martian squirmed away on its lumpy tentacles. It did not manage to avoid the light, but it did avoid us.

“It appears to be weak, perhaps injured,” I said when Lowell came up beside me. “It has backed off, so we can enter safely.”

Before Lowell could nod, I swung my leg over the lip of the hatch and climbed inside, pushing the lamp in front of me.

The Martian scuttled away without voicing any sound; I wondered whether it had vocal cords. Many animals on Earth were speechless, as I was aware from my vivisection experiments. Perhaps Martians were mute, or they communicated in another manner entirely.

I shouted back to Lowell, “Call some of the Tuaregs inside. Look there, the Martian is backed against that bulkhead. I want them to keep it at bay, so we can explore the rest of the ship. Maybe there are other survivors.” Lowell relayed the orders, and two Tuareg men reluctantly entered what must have seemed a demon’s lair to them.

With the known survivor accounted for, we ventured deeper inside, breathing the remnants of flat, dusty Martian air. I turned slowly around, shining the lamp inside the spaceship’s large open cavity. I saw a sight that I shall never forget.

The crashed spaceship was a charnel house. Inhuman bodies—fifteen, we later counted—were strewn about like rag dolls on the interior deck, no doubt jumbled from the violence of the cylinder’s impact. It seemed a tragedy to me that so few of them had survived the long and perilous voyage across interplanetary space. They had come so far … .

The dead creatures were slightly smaller than adult humans, the majority of them with whitish-gray skin and smooth shells on their body parts. These specimens clearly belonged to an entirely different phylum from the tentacled Martian.

Unlike a clipper ship or an ocean steamer, the Martian vessel did not contain a large cargo hold or numerous crates of supplies. The white-shelled aliens had been kept in a separate section of the vessel, like cattle in a corral. The advanced Martian—the creature with the soft body and the enormous brain—had apparently operated the controls, such as they were. The Martian projectile had apparently been launched from a giant cannon on the red planet, fired ballistically toward Earth, with only a few attitude-adjustment rockets to guide its course. Either these creatures were fools, or optimists. Either way, they had achieved their desire, and the cylinder had arrived at Earth.

Lowell, being more mechanically minded than myself, inspected the “bridge” of the cylinder, a strange curved affair that would never have been designed by the shipbuilders of the Royal Navy. He studied the levers and knobs designed for a race equipped with tentacles instead of manipulating digits. He could not decipher the Martian written language scribed onto the buttons and switches, nor could he comprehend the basis of the alien guidance system.

Since my background was in biology, I had other priorities, however. I knelt to perform a cursory study of the cadavers. They seemed oddly desiccated and shriveled, as if their bodily juices had been sucked away. Only mummified husks remained.

“Moreau! I’ve found a second large Martian.” In the reflected lamplight, I could see another of the brownish brain sacs—this one clearly dead, its tentacles clenched to itself like the legs of a poisoned beetle. It, too, had been desiccated, drained.

“The crash could not have killed them all. Not in this fashion.” Lowell pursed his lips. “I wonder if this Martian and these others died of some sickness. Or maybe they were murdered during the voyage.”

I was not, however, worried about those answers for the time being. My immediate delight was in knowing that I now had so many specimens to dissect.