The Angry Planet

THE ANGRY
PLANET

AN
AUTHENTIC FIRST-HAND ACCOUNT

OF A
JOURNEY TO MARS IN THE SPACE-SHIP

Albatross,

COMPILED
FROM NOTES AND RECORDS BY

VARIOUS
MEMBERS OF THE EXPEDITION,

AND
NOW ASSEMBLED AND EDITED FOR

PUBLICATION
BY

JOHN KEIR
CROSS

FROM MANUSCRIPTS MADE AVAILABLE BY

Stephen
MacFarlane

THE ILLUSTRATIONS ARE BY

Robin Jacques

COWARD-MCCANN
INC

NEW YORK

COPYRIGHT,
1945, BY

PETER LUNN (PUBLISHERS) LIMITED,
LONDON

COPYRIGHT, 1946, BY COWARD-MCCANN,
INC.

Tenth
Impression

Typography by Robert Josephy

MANUFACTURED IN THE UNITED STATES OF
AMERICA

a collaborative eBook

Typography converted to
Palatino Linotype

TO AUDREY

THE STORY

THE ANGRY PLANET

Full Page Illustrations

CHAPTER I. AN INTRODUCTION
by Stephen MacFarlane

CHAPTER II. A HOLIDAY IN SCOTLAND,
by Paul Adam

CHAPTER III. ON ROCKETS AND SPACE-SHIPS
by Andrew McGillivray

CHAPTER IV. A JOURNEY THROUGH SPACE,
by Various Hands

CHAPTER V. A MARTIAN LANDSCAPE
by Jacqueline Adam

CHAPTER VI. THE MEN OF MARS
by Stephen Macfarlane

CHAPTER VII. FIRST SIGNS OF AN ENEMY,
by Paul Adam

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

CHAPTER IX. ALARUMS AND EXCURSIONS

Part 1. A THEORY OF MARTIAN LIFE
by Stephen MacFarlane

Part 2. A THEORY OF MARTIAN LIFE
by Andrew McGillivray,
F.R.S., Ph.D.

CHAPTER X. CAPTURED!
by Michael Malone

CHAPTER XI. ATTACK,
by Stephen Macfarlane

CHAPTER XII. THE RETURN TO EARTH,
by Various Hands

AN EPILOGUE,
by John Keir Cross

THE END

IMPORTANT

Editor’s Note on the Illustrations

Originally we had meant to
illustrate this book with real photographs—Dr. McGillivray took several good
cameras to Mars with him. He, Mr. MacFarlane, and the children, all used a lot
of film in snapping the Martians, their houses, cities, landscapes, and so on.
But there must have been something in the chemical composition of the rarefied
air on Mars that was deleterious to the emulsion on the negatives, for when the
photographs were developed on earth after the journey, we found that they were
either completely blank or so misty that any reproduction of them was out of
the question. However, Mr. Robin Jacques, the artist who has done all the
drawings in this book, worked most carefully from descriptions supplied by the
Albatross
travelers. And they
all agree that his pictures are true representations of what they saw during
their fantastic adventures in the strange, romantic and terrible places they
visited so many millions of miles away.

J.K.C
.

Living creatures—individuals—Martians!

McIntosh, the gamekeeper

A floating game near the
ceiling

What we saw was awe-inspiring
and strange

Mike was swung up into the
air, kicking and shouting furiously

I was free—absolutely alone
under the blue sky

A huge white shape—a
monstrous swaying toadstool

Enormous tremors shook
the earth

We landed the
Albatross
in Northern France

MOST of the civilized world knows by this time the
main outline of the story of the remarkable flight to the planet Mars made by
Dr. McGillivray, of Aberdeen, Scotland, in his space-ship
Albatross
.
This book, however, is the first publication to put forth any sort of
description of the extraordinary adventures that befell Dr. McGillivray’s party
on what has been called “the Angry Planet.” Naturally, Dr. McGillivray has
published various articles in the scientific journals (he is now engaged on the
compilation of a full-length book that will describe in detail his innumerable
valuable findings). But he—being a scientist (and I know he will not mind my
saying this)—is inclined in his works to pay little attention to what may be
called the human side of things. So we have put together this book. It
ignores—or at any rate only covers sketchily—the scientific aspect of the
adventure, and concerns itself almost entirely with what happened before and
during the flight, and on Mars itself.

Students of the Press will remember the world-wide
sensation caused by the news, after Dr. McGillivray’s return to earth, that
there had been three stowaways on the
Albatross
during its visit to
Mars—two boys and a girl. The Doctor’s daring achievement in bridging some 35
million miles of space was spectacular enough, heaven knows: but to think that
three young people—schoolchildren—had gone through the unique experience with
him, and he had not even known of their presence in the
Albatross
till
the space-ship was well away from the earth—that was news indeed! The children
were fêted, filmed, interviewed, asked to speak on the radio, and presented to
every Lord Mayor in the country (or so it seemed to them). By this time the
shouting and the tumult have died a little, which is a good thing, for the
children were heartily sick of all the fuss and were glad to get back to
normal. Not that things in their own minds ever got out of perspective—they
were, all three of them, too sensible to get swollen heads over the affair. But
after their fantastic adventures on Mars they needed a rest in which to collect
their thoughts. They have now had that rest—and, in one sense, this book proves
that they have collected their thoughts; for, as you will see, they—the
children—have helped to write it.

Perhaps I should, at this point, introduce myself. My
name is Stephen MacFarlane, and I am (as perhaps some of you may know) a
writer. I am also the uncle of one of the adventurous children—the youngest
one, Mike Malone. The other two were (and, of course, still are) his cousins,
Paul and Jacqueline Adam. Being Mike’s cousins they are, in a sense, also
related to me, although so distantly that we have never bothered to work it all
out properly. They call me Uncle Steve, of course, but I like to think that this
is mainly because uncle is a term of affection!

When Dr. McGillivray—my very good friend—began
experimenting some years ago with rockets and spaceships, I was his only
confidant. He is, as is well known, a reticent man, wrapped up in his
scientific studies. His Doctor’s degree comes from his having graduated in
Philosophy at the University of St. Andrews. He is still quite a young man—in
his early forties. But, as I have said, he was shy to a degree of disclosing
any of his thoughts to outsiders—I was his only real friend. The history of our
friendship is an interesting one, which, alas, I have no time to tell here. It
will be sufficient to say that I valued his confidence deeply. When he told me
that he was experimenting with rockets, that he believed strongly that he would
someday design one capable of carrying passengers on stratosphere flights—that
he even visualized rocket flights to the moon and the planets as a possibility,
I was enormously excited. It was a subject I was intensely interested in myself.
I had always believed in the possibility of life on other planets—life
different from life as we knew it, perhaps, but still life. So I encouraged the
Doctor with my enthusiasm, and even made over most of my savings to him so that
he could go on with his experiments.

That was our chief trouble—money. The cost of the
experiments was prodigious. It was a matter, you see—putting it briefly—of
finding a fuel. The designing of an interplanetary rocket ship was,
comparatively speaking, easy enough—though, as you can imagine, there were
countless factors to be considered: weight, resistance to pressure and
friction, how to produce oxygen for breathing, and so on. But all these things
were easy of solution compared with the immense problem of finding a fuel—a fuel
powerful enough to carry us right through the stratosphere and to give us
enough impetus to take us to the gravity belt of the particular planet we
proposed visiting: yet a fuel light enough and compact enough to allow of us
storing sufficient of it in the rocket to be able to make a return flight to
earth.