The Angry Planet by John Keir Cross

Author:John Keir Cross
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Published: 2011-07-25T21:37:47+00:00

CHAPTER VIII. THE FIGHT FOR THE “ALBATROSS,” by Stephen Macfarlane

AS I sit here quietly writing in Pitlochry, with the dark shapes of the hills before me, and above them the star-studded sky, I think of that first encounter of ours with the Terrible Ones on Mars as the one unreal episode in our entire fantastic adventure—unreal, I think, because it was so unutterably horrible—too horrible for one to want to remember it.

What caused the horror? Not altogether the appearance of the Terrible Ones, hideous though that was (the Beautiful People, after all, had accustomed us to strange appearances). No, it was the silence in which the battle was fought; there was no sound throughout the entire encounter—no actual sound, although our ears were full of a violent, edgy, ghostly screaming all the time. It was impossible to tell who was screaming—friend or foe; it was simply that all about us, through and through us, were running those deep and beastly thoughts of conflicts and pain and revenge and death. It was a nightmare—a nightmare in different terms from any nightmare I have ever known, or ever hope to know.

Paul has described how we heard the news that the Albatross was in danger early in the morning of our second Martian day, and how we armed ourselves and sped across the plain to the hollow where our space-ship lay. We had half-expected that the enemy, whatever it was, might come to meet us, or would at least be visible as we neared our destination. As it was, however, we crawled right to the top of the ridge without interruption, and were thus able for a few moments to gaze down on the Terrible Ones in the hollow before we were discovered—in much the same way as Malu and his companions had gazed down on us the morning before.

Our first impression was that the Albatross was surrounded by gigantic yellow-and-red spotted eggs—or that, in the night, some huge clammy toadstools—fungoids—had formed in the hollow. There was an odd score of the things, pulpy-seeming and glistening in the sunlight, each the size of a small ox. They were moving silently backwards and forwards along the tail part of the rocket (it lay, naturally, on a slope, with the nose high up in the air at an angle), and they seemed, as far as we could judge, to be feeling and nosing at it with long tube-like tentacle things that grew, writhing, out of their sides. One of the creatures had twined his tentacles round the flexible steel ladder, and was swinging it backwards and forwards. They seemed somehow like octopuses—bulbous and jelly-like—with unusually long and slender suckers.

As we stared, two of the things—the two nearest us—turned round in our direction, and it was then that the full hideousness of their appearance broke over us. They had faces! In the front part of their yellow, shell-like coverings there were unmistakable features; two bright protruding eyes—seemingly on short stalks, like crabs’ eyes—hard and unblinking, and beneath them two small, nostril-like cavities.

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