The Martian War

CHAPTER NINE




THE DISSECTION OF INTERPLANETARY SPECIMENS


FROM THE JOURNAL OF DR. MOREAU

That night we stationed uneasy Tuareg guards around the crashed cylinder, containing the live Martian without provoking it overmuch. It was the only plan we could think of to keep the creature safe until Lowell and I decided what to do with it.

Two of the uneasy nomads retrieved a typical specimen of the desiccated pale creatures from inside the cylinder and transported it back to camp. I myself assisted in carrying the first dead Martian, brown-skinned and trailing limp tentacles. On the way, I grunted and strained like a burly carter. It was a long and strange procession as we delivered the pair of alien cadavers to our tents.

After supervising the trench-digging in the Sahara, I had been weary beyond anything I had experienced even in my most obsessive days of medical experimentation. But I now felt the adrenaline of heady accomplishment and the joyous possibility of making a discovery that would shatter the very precepts of science. Thus, I felt no need for sleep. Not now. My movements were frenetic, my breathing fast, and I knew I had to organize my priorities. I could think of so many remarkable things to do. Though there was no immediate time limit, I wanted to learn everything now.

I set up two large plank tables under the tent fabric and hung three kerosene lamps from the supports overhead. Fascinated, Lowell stood beside me, getting in the way. We spread the two specimens in the brightest pool of light, where I could properly dissect them.

I couldn’t wait to begin. I was about to become the first biologist to learn about extraterrestrial anatomy. My old colleague and rival, Thomas Huxley, would be so envious! Perhaps he would even regret his decision to oust me from London. But no, not Thomas. Huxley is as arrogant and set in his moral rectitude as I am in my willingness to pay the price to acquire new knowledge.

I devoted my surgical attentions to the lesser being first. By its fundamental external structure and, as I later saw, its arrangement of internal organs, the whitish creature seemed to derive from an utterly different Adam than the blobby, big-brained, tentacled Martians.

I bent closer to the corpse of the pale creature we had extracted from the crashed cylinder. With its pair of arms and legs, a head on a stalk-like neck, the whitish alien looked much more human than the tentacled Martian. Its overall appearance reminded me of a worker ant. Perhaps a Martian drone? The creature appeared flimsy, its limbs designed to survive gravity significantly lower than that on Earth—lower even than that on Mars, but I knew that couldn’t possibly be.

Its body was covered with a tough membrane, not quite skin, nor entirely a shell. Its spade-shaped head had a large, thick cranium that, when cracked open, revealed a rather disappointing nodule of brain matter, that seemed to be only a substation in a larger network of intellect. Or perhaps it was merely a stupid beast, like a cow. Huge dome-like eyes covered a quarter of its flat face. Probing with my fingers, I found a small mouth tucked under its chin, surrounded by tiny cilia or feelers. Obviously not a predator or even a scavenger. This creature’s mouth and digestive system seemed equipped to handle little more than jelly or gruel.

I decided to have a more detailed look inside the creature. With a surgical saw and pry blades, tweezers and probes, I cut open its skull and chestplate, whereupon a greenish-blue jelly oozed out. If this specimen had not been desiccated, would this ichor have run freely, like blood?

The pale creature had a surprisingly limited set of internal organs, which made me wonder just how high on the evolutionary ladder its ancestors had managed to climb. Its muscles slid like rods within exoskeletal tubes. I identified what I thought were the equivalents to heart and lungs, but the bulk of the specimen’s interior was devoted to a large nervous system that came to a nexus inside the skull with a small fleshy nodule embedded at the base of its skull—a rudimentary brain? It was certainly not a very large organ, so I supposed I wouldn’t be discussing higher mathematics with this creature, had it survived the crash. I concluded that this being was a lower form of life.

Lowell sat beside me, observing every moment of my work. With a sketch pad and a sharpened lead pencil, he deftly made detailed drawings of the creature’s physiology. I would have done the same after completing my initial study, but I was glad to have an objective and enthusiastic artist drawing what we both could see. Detailed records were the very bugaboo of science! Lowell had made enough superb sketches of the canals of Mars that I trusted his eye for detail. I could label the drawings later with my speculations about the functions of the organs and musculature.

I wondered if Lowell intended to publish these reports. He is a man with a large ego. After spending so much money to fund this expedition, he may want to claim the credit for himself, though I’ll insist on being included. This discovery alone will redeem me in the eyes of the scientific community.

Anxious to move on—there was so much to learn!—I let Lowell finish sketching the ant-like drone Martian while I moved to the larger specimen on the second dissection table.

The huge sac of brain was obviously more evolved, and thus superior to the lesser being. The superior Martian lay spread out in a shapeless hulk like a squashed spider. Oddly, the larger specimen was based on an entirely different evolutionary blueprint from a human being or the drone. How could they both have sprung from the same tree of life? Though this more highly evolved creature seemed less physically complex than its pale-skinned counterpart, it had a more impressive character, a majestic brain. The round dead eyes were glassy. What secrets had they seen?

First, I ran my hands over the smooth brownish skin. It was soft and pliable, a bit like the rubberized fabric of a mackintosh. I could sense no internal structural support, no bones or cartilage. Had it evolved beyond the need for a physically mobile form? The creature’s “body” itself was little more than a sac to contain the vital Martian thinking organ. Everything else seemed superfluous to its functioning.

I stretched out one of its boneless tentacles. Each appendage seemed loose and elastic, but with a potential strength like braided steel cables. Such a thing could have gripped a victim’s throat like a garrote—if it were a carnivore, of course.

As I continued my inspection, I wondered what sort of motivation lay behind this expedition to Earth. Peaceful contact with a fellow intelligent species? Did the Martian race intend to share their knowledge and culture with us?

Or were they planning something more sinister? Yes, even then I had my suspicions.

With my sharpest scalpel, I cut through the soft wet-leather skin and peeled back the head covering to expose the creamy contours of Martian brain tissue. Such an enormous organ! It would require a bucket to hold! As I stared, I mused about the thoughts that might have passed through such an enormous and intricate cerebrum. Another planet, another intellect.

In my numerous vivisections, I had studied the open brains of apes and pumas, as well as lesser specimens of dogs and cats. This Martian brain surpassed any I had ever seen before, even in human cadavers. The rills and valleys, the ridges and swirls provided a map of alien mental geography. It would have taken me a year just to note every subtle twist and curve, every branching line, every blood vessel.

I was immensely careful. While I had many of the drones stacked like cordwood inside the crashed cylinder, this superior Martian was my only opportunity to study the greater race—unless the other Martian died, of course. Opportunities abounded.

Lowell and I worked deep into the night.

Far out in the Sahara, the nights were incredibly dark. The stars shone so brightly they made my eyes ache.

The nervous Tuareg guards remained out at the crater, armed with metal rods but with strict instructions not to kill the remaining Martian. They sat by a small fire made from dried camel dung. The pungent character of the smoke was surpassed only by the stench of their own long-unwashed bodies.

After the Moon set an hour before dawn, the darkness grew deep and mysterious. The red planet hung near the horizon like an evil eye, accusing me for what I had done to the bodies of the dead Martians we took from the cylinder. While I rested on my cot, my mind was feverish with all I had learned. Although I had scrubbed my hands clean and disinfected them with alcohol, I still felt the aliens’ gelatinous secretions.

Then a frightened cry shattered the calm night. The words were indecipherable gibberish, but the tone was of alarm and excitement.

Off my cot in an instant, I pulled on boots and raced across the sands. My eyes were already adapted to the dark, and the starlight provided enough illumination. Lowell ran beside me. Neither of us asked questions, because we knew that we had no answers.

A faint orange glow still simmered from the crater. The three Tuareg guards shouted, waving their scimitars threateningly. One ran forward to clang his crowbar against the metal hull.

“What is all the fuss?” Lowell demanded.

Before the nomads could give a comprehensible answer, a ratcheting mechanical sound came from the half-buried cylinder. Standing on the rim, I watched as a segmented construction erected itself from an opening atop the spacecraft. It was an arm strung together with girders and connected with pulleys, made with salvaged components from inside the cylinder.

The towering appendage rose up like a questing probe. From its end depended a boxy device that appeared to be a camera fixed with a strange rotating lens. The segmented arm swiveled and bent, as if feeling its way, rising taller until it towered over all of us.

“Our captive Martian has been hard at work,” I said. “Who knows what it assembled while we performed our dissections?”

“Perhaps the creature is trying to communicate,” Lowell said.

I tried to imagine myself in the circumstances of our unusual visitor: it was the only survivor of a crashed ship, and as soon as it had emerged onto our world, the Tuaregs set upon it with weapons. “We should try to understand it. Such a superior being cannot possibly mean us any harm.”

The desert men brandished their crowbars and curved swords, as if the camera box-thing was the eye of a demon. The spinning lens brightened, and a throbbing sound pulsed from inside the cylinder. The segmented arm turned … as if searching for a target.

Lowell was more suspicious than I. “Moreau, that thing may be a weapon.”

As I looked at the contraption, I too thought it seemed threatening. Even as we retreated from the crater rim, Lowell instructed the Tuaregs to knock down the segmented yardarm. In particular, he told them to break the flashing, spinning lens that I surmised might serve as a remote eye for the Martian. Needing no further encouragement, the men surged forward.

The tentacled Martian hauled itself out of the upper opening twenty feet from the ground. I was amazed at the creature’s agility as it climbed the segmented girders and wires like a circus capuchin. Sparks sprayed from the rotating lens, and I felt a wave of growing heat.

Then the Tuaregs climbed up and battered the base of the metal arm with their crowbars, severing connections. The Martian flailed its tentacles as if in rage as it scrambled higher up the extended mechanical boom, which began to bend under its weight.

Unaccustomed to holding itself in the increased gravity of Earth, the heavy creature toppled. It looked like a gorged tick that had dropped off a dog’s ear.

The Tuaregs scrambled away in horror. But once the desperate Martian hit the sand, it lumbered off at an awkward galloping gait. The creature scurried with surprising speed across the soft sands and over the crater lip.

“Don’t let it escape!” I cried.

Smelling blood, the Tuaregs raced after the monster, brandishing their weapons and howling. Because of its soft musculature, the thing began to slow as it moved across the desert. The nomads surrounded it, keeping it at bay, jabbing with pointed blades. One man struck with the crowbar, clubbing the Martian, which reeled back, pathetically flailing its tentacles.

Lowell and I charged in among the men, knocking their blades aside. “Don’t injure it, you fools! Have you no idea how valuable this specimen is? Its mind is immeasurably superior to ours.”

The cornered Martian sidled back and forth, churning up the sands like an octopus cast onto shore. I searched for some way to communicate with this intelligent being, but could think of no frame of reference we shared.

Lowell and I devised a scheme by which the Tuaregs would shout and brandish their weapons and thereby herd the Martian back to camp. We would secure the creature within one of the tents and deprive it of anything that could be fashioned into a weapon for those powerful, tentacled arms.

We made our racket in front of the giant lumbering brain. The poor Martian must have been frightened and intimidated by the Tuareg brutes. Nevertheless, now was not the time for compassion. Compassion, I believe, has been the downfall of many scientists who are not willing to do what needs to be done.

Before long, the Martian seemed to understand where we wished it to go and that we had no immediate intention of killing it. As if with fearful resignation, it scuttled across the sands.

Once, in the London zoo, I had seen a heavy walrus attempt to move. The walrus might have been a sleek aquatic swimmer, but on dry land it was out of its element, padded with blubber and enormously ungainly. The Martian reminded me of that walrus, lurching across the sands toward our encampment.

Lowell had clearly come to a decision. He did not ask my advice or consult with me in any way … but then he rarely did. He was Percival Lowell, and he had paid for all of our work. Though I was our expedition’s only real scientist, Lowell held the purse strings.

Watching the Martian approach our tents, he brushed his moustache. “We must take him to civilization.”