The Martian War (24 page)

In the coolness of dawn, with light just beginning to edge the San Francisco Peaks, Lowell started his motorcar while I unlocked the outbuilding. By now, the Martian understood that we were its friends and allies, that it would get no better treatment if it broke out of its confinement and ran loose across the wild countryside. But the lock kept curiosity seekers out.

Construction work continued at the observatory site and, knowing how tight the schedule was, the workers did not dare risk Lowell’s impatience. So close to dawn, however, the men had not yet come up from their camps, and we guided the cumbersome Martian to the humming motorcar without incident.

The creature perched in the vehicle’s back seat, its tentacles exploring the upholstery and framework. Lowell pulled up the fabric rain covering in order to hide the Martian, then engaged the clutch and put the car into gear, whereupon we rolled off downhill, clattering and popping.

No doubt the sounds woke many lumberjacks and train workers trying to sleep off hangovers in saloons and boarding houses. But Lowell never had a care for how his activities inconvenienced other people; the man wasn’t arrogant, so much as oblivious.

I looked through the thin windscreen, watching the dark pines rush by as we continued at a speed of well over twenty miles per hour. I feared my teeth would be jarred loose, but Lowell seemed confident in his vehicle. The Martian’s large
eyes stared at the terrain with fascination. Perhaps the dry rocks and parched landscape reminded it of Mars … .

Flagstaff fell behind, as did the ponderosa forests. The rising sun cast long shadows across the flat scrubland, and Lowell followed wagon roads and horse tracks. He had put several rolled-up maps beside him on the seat, though he rarely consulted them.

As we drove along, Lowell was in high spirits. He had packed a picnic lunch, including some bottles of water and one of wine. I hoped the Martian would not require any nourishment during our journey, for I had not brought along the blood-drawing apparatus.

Lowell chattered at great length about human society, our various countries and governments, our industries and inventors and artists. With a detached sadness and scorn, he discussed human conflicts and the political disagreements that led to wars. The Martian listened intently, but did not communicate with us, as if such things were greatly beneath its intellect. To be fair, I doubted either Lowell or I would have been interested in, for example, the tribal dances of primitive people.

Lowell gestured out the left side of the Benz car. “North of Flagstaff, half a day’s journey away, is a canyon so grand and vast it is considered one of the wonders of the world.”

Our telescopes have studied your geography, and I have no interest in canyons,
the Martian communicated.
Mars has canyons far superior to any minor scratch on Earth.

Lowell frowned as if his hospitality had been rebuffed. “Nevertheless, we humans consider it quite magnificent.” He sounded deflated.

The Martian’s behavior had grown more confrontational of late. I wondered what made the creature so irritable. Of course, it was all alone on this planet, its cylinder crashed, its companion killed. It had been beaten, taken prisoner, hauled across the globe under less-than-pleasant circumstances. Though we had tried to be accommodating, surely this was not what the Martian explorers had expected.

The day grew warmer until I felt we would be broiled out in the open. At least the dry heat seemed less miserable than the humid, insect-infested miasmas of sweltering tropical islands where I had been forced to work after fleeing London. I searched the flat sands dotted with sage and mesquite, but could see no object that might be of interest to an extraterrestrial visitor. “So where are we going, Lowell?”

“You can just see it in the distance.” We hit a rut and bounced, but he pointed without slowing the vehicle. I discerned a distinct raised landmark, the lip of a symmetrical mesa. “It is known to the locals, a most perplexing and scientifically interesting landmark: a perfectly symmetrical depression, a strange crater. I thought our visitor might find it interesting.”

The dirt roads soon dwindled into mere paths used by Navajo shepherds or rugged white settlers. I reserved my own opinion about the crater. This seemed a long journey just to look at a hole in the ground, and I was about to say as much when the motor car broke down. The engine shuddered, coughed, and then hemorrhaged steam.

Lowell shifted his gears and attempted to start the engine again without bothering to ascertain the problem. When this proved unsuccessful, he hurled insults at the machine,
as if he could command it just as he issued orders to his underlings. But the engine lay still.

We were far from commonly traveled roads, far from the rail line. In the past hour, we had seen no towns, encampments, or isolated homesteads. We couldn’t simply wait and hope for rescue. It would be a long time before someone found us.

“I didn’t plan for this part,” Lowell said petulantly.

I raised and rejected possible solutions in my mind. Perhaps I could find a shepherd or a prospector; another alternative would be to head straight north until I encountered the railroad tracks, where I could flag down the next train. But I would have to walk for untold miles across this rough terrain, which was filled with rattlesnakes and scorpions, during the most intense heat of the afternoon.

In the meantime, what if the Martian grew ill? What a pathetic end for such a priceless specimen.

For the moment, I withheld my recriminations, but if we escaped this predicament I intended to have words with Lowell in private.

The Martian stirred, as if understanding the problem. It raised tentacles to detach the weather covering and, with a mighty heave, crawled over the motorcar’s door. It dropped to the ground and began questing around with ungainly movements. Its every move seemed sinister and frightening. The Martian was an intimidating thing, as large as a bear, and its tentacles could easily snap our necks. We were all alone and defenseless if the beast should turn on us. However, the creature ignored us and used its tentacles to fold back the hood and probe inside the motorcar’s engine.

“What is it doing?” Lowell asked.

“It’s curious,” I said.

“What if it damages the engine?”

I pointed out that neither of us had any hope of fixing it. Though he took pride in his motorcar, Lowell himself knew very little about how the vehicle functioned. My own expertise lay in biology and surgery; I knew nothing about engines.

I had a sudden inspiration. “Lowell, don’t you have a small kit of tools in the rear of the motorcar? Give them to the Martian.”

Lowell resisted the idea, then realized that we had little to lose. Though it did not comment, the Martian accepted the tools with apparent scorn, as if we had just handed it stone knives and bear skins. But it quickly determined the purpose of each tool, then attacked the engine, dismantling pieces, rerouting hoses, connecting filters.

The Martian applied itself with amazing intensity, rebuilding and redesigning the Benz engine according to some incomprehensible plan. I was reminded of my own efforts in vivisection, grafting organs, stretching the plasticity of living creatures.

The Martian did the same with the engine. Lowell and I sat in the minimal shade of the car. The desert air was hot and oppressive. The whole idea of an alien acting as our road mechanic seemed ridiculous, but the creature displayed an extraordinary technical aptitude, and was able to use our tools to construct a functional, if unorthodox, propulsion system.

When the Martian finished its ministrations, the
motorcar’s engine started easily. And although the pistons purred and vibrated at a higher pitch than before, it seemed smoother, faster.

“Bravo!” Lowell brushed dust from his jacket as he stood. He hesitated, as if considering whether he should pat the Martian’s back or somehow extend his appreciation. In our minds, the Martian said,
We go again.

“Of course.” Lowell climbed behind the driver’s controls, and after the Martian had settled itself in the rear seat again, we were off toward the unusual landmark ahead.

* * *

My skepticism about the crater vanished as we approached the base of the rim’s sudden and steep uplift. Our faint, rocky road petered out into a scattered maze of trails and footpaths.

When we had driven as far as we could go, Lowell locked the brakes. Snatching our picnic basket, he set his hat firmly on his head. “We will have to walk the rest of the way to the top. I look forward to your opinions and your reactions.”

The Martian must have made a strange sight as it crawled out of the motorcar and followed us with an odd, lurching gait. We switchbacked right and left, ascending steeply. I could see the desert all around us, but I do not enjoy frivolous sightseeing. I hoped Lowell had not gotten it into his mind to convert our Martian ambassador into a simple tourist.

But when we finally reached the top of the crater, the sight robbed me of my breath. The change was abrupt and
startling. The ground dropped away into a huge open bowl. I could see layers of strata like the rings of a cut-down tree, tan and reddish rock exposed as if a giant scoop had removed a perfectly round divot from the Earth’s skin. The interior was speckled with juniper and sage all the way to the bottom.

Lowell set down our picnic basket. “Speculators have called this the remnant of a long-extinct volcano, but I have seen Sunset Crater and others here in Arizona. Personally, I believe it is the scar left by a tremendous heavenly impact, similar to the craters visible on the Moon.”

The Martian remained on the rim, tentacles waving, its large round eyes studying the site. When the creature finally responded, its comment did nothing to dispel my uneasiness about its worsening mood and attitude.
Greater dangers than this can come from space.

Lowell asked what it meant, but the Martian would say no more.

T
.H. Huxley was left alone in the laboratory spire with the three Martian master minds. Even though the Martians intended to invade Earth, destroy human civilization, and enslave mankind, the professor could not help but find them fascinating. They were as far from human beings on the evolutionary ladder as he himself was from the jellyfish he’d studied aboard the
Rattlesnake.

He was deeply concerned about young Wells and Miss Robbins, not to mention his own fate. He supposed that these large-brained creatures intended to dissect him and perform a symphony of exotic and excruciating tests. In a detached way, he could understand the Martian curiosity, but he found it
immensely bothersome to be a specimen instead of a colleague.

Since his younger days, Huxley had advanced his scientific knowledge by studying the works of other researchers. When those answers did not satisfy him, he embarked on his own journeys of discovery. By the age of fifteen, he had been apprenticed to his brother-in-law—a doctor—and later won a free scholarship to the Charing Cross Hospital’s medical school. By twenty, Huxley had joined the Royal Navy’s medical service. It was just the beginning of a life of scientific investigations.

Though he professed to be an agnostic—in fact, he had invented the term for popular use—Huxley felt that these Martians were
evil.

From the Grand Lunar he already knew how the Martians had swept from the red planet, conquered the Moon, and raided all the healthy Selenites, stealing them to be slaves on another world. The Martians had exploited the drones, forcing them to reproduce, then to run all the burdens of their high-technology civilization. Huxley was sure, from what he had seen, that the Martians could no longer survive without their slaves.

But what had driven them to such a dire situation? What had the Martians done before stealing the Selenites? He did not know what sort of catastrophe had created the environmental disaster on Mars, but he had a deep-seated suspicion that the rapacious Martians with their short-sighted consumption and their urge to conquer and destroy had brought the tragedy upon themselves.

Perhaps other breeds of Martian had once lived on the red planet, creatures secondary to the bloated master minds. The superior Martians could have enslaved them first, exploited them, then driven them to extinction. Their industry could have
caused the ecosystem to collapse, forcing the Martians to take extravagant gestures for their own survival. And for that, they required a vast pool of laborers. Hence, the lunar invasion.

And now, perhaps, the Selenite drones were no longer adequate for the Martians’ new plans. They had to look elsewhere, deeper into the Solar System.

Huxley doubted these desperate creatures would reconsider their impending invasion of Earth, but nevertheless he held out hope, for combat never seemed a viable solution. He would hear what the master minds had to say, if they deigned to communicate with him at all.

From Wells’s brain, the master minds had apparently extracted a general understanding of the human race, its temperament and biology; therefore, the creatures were aware of the work Huxley had done. No doubt, they found the old scientist much more valuable as a knowledgeable resource than as a manual laborer.

He thrust his chin forward and addressed the three alien leaders perched before him on their pedestals. “Go on, then— what do you have to show me?”

The nearest Martian reached its tentacles into a concealed alcove in its podium and removed a transparent ovoid object, a crystal egg like the one Moreau had described in his journal. “Ah, that is your observation and communication device!”

The Martian twisted the curved object so that images formed and flowed within, then held it out. Huxley saw that the crystal egg contained thousands of tiny facets, like the segments of a fly’s eye, each one tuned to a specific “channel” that could connect to sister crystal eggs.

Squinting into the strange lens, he witnessed scenes of Martian cities, canals, and industries, and hordes of Selenite workers completing gargantuan construction projects, like Israelite slaves forced to build Egyptian pyramids. The Martian master mind rotated the egg so that Huxley could see many views of the world. For an instant, he caught a glimpse of Wells and Miss Robbins standing together, dirty and sweating on a work line, but still alive and apparently unharmed.