A Honeymoon in Space
"Ah! there's another of them, smaller, not so strongly formed. That
thing's mate, I suppose--female of the species. Ugh! I wonder how many
hundred of thousands of years it will take for _our_ descendants to come
to that."
"I hope our dear old earth will hit something else and be smashed to
atoms before that happens!" exclaimed Zaidie, whose curiosity had now
partly overcome her horror. "Look, it's trying to catch something!"
The larger of the two creatures had groped its way to the edge of the
sluggish, oily water and dropped, or rather rolled, quietly into it. It
was evidently cold-blooded, or nearly so, for no warm-blooded animal
would have taken to such water so naturally. Presently the other dropped
in too, and both disappeared for some moments. Then, in the midst of a
violent commotion in the water a few yards away, they rose to the
surface of the water, the larger with a wriggling, eel-like fish between
its jaws.
They both groped their way towards the edge, and had just reached it and
were pulling themselves out when a hideous shape rose out of the water
behind them. It was like the head of an octopus joined to the body of a
boa-constrictor, but head and neck were both of the same ghastly, livid
grey as the other two creatures. It was evidently blind, too, for it
took no notice of the brilliant glare of the searchlight, but it moved
rapidly towards the two scrambling forms, its long white feelers
trembling out in all directions. Then one of them touched the smaller of
the two shapes. Instantly the rest shot out and closed round it, and
with scarcely a struggle it was dragged beneath the water and vanished.
Zaidie uttered a little low scream and covered her face again, and
Redgrave said:
"The same old brutal law you see, life preying upon life even on a dying
world, a world that is more than half dead itself. Well, I think we've
seen enough of this place. I suppose those are about the only types of
life we should meet anywhere, and I don't want to know much more about
them. I vote we go and see what the invisible hemisphere is like."
"I have had all I want of this side," said Zaidie, looking away from the
scene of the hideous tragedy, "so the sooner we go, the better I shall
like it."
A few minutes later the _Astronef_ was again rising towards the stars
with her searchlights still flashing down into the Valley of Expiring
Life, which had seemed to them even worse than the Valley of Death. As
he followed the rays with a pair of powerful field glasses, Redgrave
fancied that he saw huge, dim shapes moving about the stunted shrubbery
and through the slimy pools of the stagnant rivers, and once or twice he
got a glimpse of what might well have been the ruins of towns and
cities, but the gloom soon became too deep and dense for the
searchlights to pierce and he was glad when the _Astronef_ soared up
into the brilliant sunlight once more. Even the ghastly wilderness of
the lunar landscape was welcome after the nameless horrors of that
hideous abyss.
After a couple of hours' rapid travelling, Redgrave pointed down to a
comparatively small, deep crater, and said:
"There, that is Malapert. It is almost exactly at the south pole of the
moon, and there," he went on, pointing ahead, "is the horizon of the
hemisphere which no earthborn eyes have ever seen."
"Except ours," said Zaidie somewhat inconsequently, "and I wonder what
_we_ shall see."
"Probably something very like what we have seen on this side," replied
Redgrave, and as the event proved, he was right.
Contrary to many ingenious speculations which have been indulged in by
both scientist and romancer, they found that the hemisphere, which for
countless ages had never been turned towards the earth, was almost an
exact replica of the visible one. Fully three-fourths of it was
brilliantly illuminated by the sun, and what they saw through their
glasses was practically the same as what they had beheld on the
earthward side; huge groups of enormous craters and ringed mountains,
long, irregular chains crowned with sharp, splintery peaks, and between
these vast, deeply depressed areas, ranging in colour from dazzling
white to grey-brown, marking the beds of the vanished lunar seas.
As they crossed one of these, Redgrave allowed the _Astronef_ to sink to
within a few thousand feet of the surface, and then he and Zaidie swept
it with their telescopes. Their chance search was rewarded by something
they had not seen in the sea-beds of the other hemisphere.
These depressions were far deeper than the others, evidently many
thousands of feet below the average surface, but the sun's rays were
blazing full into this one, and, dotted round its slopes at varying
elevations, they made out little patches which seemed to differ from the
general surface.
"I wonder if those are the remains of cities," said Zaidie. "Isn't it
possible that the old peoples of the moon might have built their cities
along the seas just as we do, and that their descendants may have
followed the waters as they retreated, I mean as they either dried up or
disappeared into the centre?"
"Very probable indeed, dearest of philosophers," he said, picking her up
with one arm and kissing the smiling lips which had just uttered this
most reasonable deduction. "Now we'll go down and see."
He diminished the vertically repulsive force a little, and the
_Astronef_ dropped slantingly towards the bed of what might once have
been the Pacific of the Moon.
When they were within about a couple of thousand feet of the surface it
became perfectly plain that Zaidie was correct in her hypothesis. The
vast sea floor was thickly strewn with the ruins of countless cities and
towns, which had been inhabited by an equally countless series of
generations of men and women, who had perhaps lived and loved in the
days when our own world was a glowing mass of molten rock, surrounded by
the envelope of vapours which has since condensed to form our oceans.
They dropped still lower and ran diagonally across the ocean-bed, and as
they did so Zaidie's proposition was more and more completely confirmed,
for they saw that the towns and cities which stood highest were the most
dilapidated, and that the buildings had evidently been torn and crumbled
away by the action of wind and water, snow and ice.
The nearer they approached to the central and deepest depression, the
better preserved and the simpler the buildings became, until down in the
lowest depths they found a collection of low-built square edifices,
scarcely better than huts, which had clustered round the little lake
into which, ages before, the ocean had dwindled. But where the lake had
been there was now only a shallow depression covered with grey sand and
brown rock.
Into this they descended and touched the lunar surface for the last
time. A couple of hours' excursion among the houses proved that they had
been the last refuge of the last descendants of a dying race, a race
which had socially degenerated just as the succession of cities had done
architecturally, age by age, as the long-drawn struggle for mere
existence had become keener and keener until the two last essentials,
air and water, had failed--and then the end had come.
The streets, like the square of the great Temple of Tycho, were strewn
with myriads and myriads of bones, and there were myriads more scattered
round what had once been the shores of the dwindling lake. Here, as
elsewhere, there was not a sign or a record of any kind--carving or
sculpture. If there were any such on the surface of the moon they had
not discovered them. The buildings which they had seen evidently
belonged to the decadent period during which the dwindling remnants of
the Selenites asked only to eat and drink and breathe.
Inside the great Pyramid of the City of Tycho they might, perhaps, have
found something--some stone or tablet which bore the mark of the
artist's hand; elsewhere, perhaps, they might have found cities reared
by older races, which might have rivalled the creations of Egypt and
Babylon, but they had neither time nor inclination to look for these.
All that they had seen of the Dead World had only sickened and saddened
them. The untravelled regions of Space peopled by living worlds more
akin to their own were before them. The red disc of Mars was glowing in
the zenith among the diamond-white clusters which gemmed the black sky
behind him.
More than a hundred millions of miles had to be traversed before they
would be able to set foot on his surface, and so, after one last look
round the Valley of Death about them, Redgrave turned on the full energy
of the repulsive force in a vertical direction, and the _Astronef_ leapt
upwards in a straight line for her new destination. The Unknown
Hemisphere spread out in a vast plain beneath them, the blazing sun rose
on their left, and the brilliant silver orb of the earth on their right,
and so, full of wonder and yet without regret, they bade farewell to the
World that Had Been.
CHAPTER IX
The earth and the moon had been left more than a hundred million miles
behind in the depths of Space, and the _Astronef_ had crossed this
immense gap in eleven days and a few hours; but this apparently
inconceivable speed was not altogether due to the powers of the
Space-Navigator, for her commander had taken advantage of the passage of
the planet along its orbit towards that of the earth. Hence, while the
_Astronef_ was approaching Mars with ever-increasing speed, Mars was
travelling towards the _Astronef_ at the rate of sixteen miles a second.
The great silver disc of the earth had diminished until it looked only a
little larger than Venus appears to human eyes. In fact the planet Terra
is to the inhabitants of Mars what Venus is to us, the Star of the
Morning and the Evening.
Breakfast on the morning of the twelfth day--or, since there is neither
day nor night in Space, it would be more correct to say the twelfth
period of twenty-four earth-hours as measured by the chronometers--was
just over, and Redgrave was standing with Zaidie in the forward end of
the deck-chamber, looking downwards at a vast crescent of rosy light
which stretched out over an arc of more than ninety degrees. Two tiny
black spots were travelling towards each other across it.
"Ah," she said, going towards one of the telescopes, "there are the
moons. I was reading my Gulliver last night. I wonder what the old Dean
would have given to be here, and see how true his guess was. Are we
going to land on them?"
"I don't see why we shouldn't," he said. "I think we might find them
convenient stopping places; besides, you know this isn't only a
pleasure-trip. We have to add as much as we can to the sum of human
knowledge, and so of course we shall have to find out whether the moons
of Mars have atmospheres and inhabitants."
"What, people living on those wee things!" she laughed. "Why they're
only about thirty or forty miles round, aren't they?"
"About," he said, "but then that's just one of the points I want to
solve; and as for life, it doesn't always mean people, you know. We are
only a few hundred miles away from Deimos, the outer one, and he is
twelve thousand five hundred miles from Mars. I vote we drop on him
first and let him carry us towards Phobos. And then when we've examined
him we'll pay a visit to his brother and take a trip round Mars on him.
Phobos does the journey in about seven hours and a half, and as he's
only three thousand seven hundred miles above the surface, we ought to
get a very good view of our next stopping-place."
"That ought to be quite delightful," said Zaidie. "But how commonplace
you are getting, Lenox. That's so like you Englishmen. We are doing what