A Honeymoon in Space
has only been dreamt of before, and here you are talking about moons and
planets as if they were railway stations."
"Well, if your Ladyship prefers it, we will call them undiscovered
islands and continents in the Ocean of Space. That does sound a little
bit better, doesn't it? Now I think I had better go down and see to my
engines."
When he had gone, Zaidie sat down to the telescope again and kept it
focussed on one of the little black spots travelling across the crescent
of Mars. Both it and the other spot rapidly grew larger, and the
features of the planet itself became more distinct. Soon even with her
unaided eyes she could make out the seas and continents and the
mysterious canals quite plainly through the clear, rosy atmosphere, and,
with the aid of the telescope, she could even see the glimmering
twilight which the inner moon threw upon the unlighted portion of the
planet's disc.
Deimos grew bigger and bigger, and in about half an hour the _Astronef_
grounded gently on what looked to Zaidie like a dimly lighted circular
plain, but which, when her eyes became accustomed to the light, was more
like the summit of a conical mountain. Redgrave raised the keel a little
from the surface again and steered towards a thin circle of light on the
tiny horizon.
As they crossed into the sunlit portion it became quite plain that
Deimos, at any rate, was as airless and lifeless as the moon. The
surface was composed of brown rock and red sand broken up into miniature
hills and valleys. There were a few traces of bygone volcanic action,
but it was evident that the internal fires of this tiny world must have
burnt themselves out very quickly.
"Not much to be seen here," said Redgrave, as he came up the
companion-way, "and I don't think it would be safe to go out. The
attraction is so weak here that we might find ourselves falling off with
very little exertion. Still, you may as well take a couple of
photographs of the surface, and then we'll be off to Phobos."
Zaidie got her apparatus to work, and when she had taken her slides down
to the dark-room, Redgrave turned the R. Force on very slightly and
Phobos began to sink away beneath them. The attraction of Mars now began
to make itself strongly felt, and the _Astronef_ dropped rapidly through
the eight thousand miles which separate the inner and outer satellites.
As they approached Phobos they saw that half the little disc was
brilliantly lighted by the same rays of the sun which were glowing on
the rapidly increasing crescent of Mars beneath them. By careful
manipulation of his engines Redgrave managed to meet the approaching
satellite with a hardly perceptible shock about the centre of its
lighted portion, that is to say the side turned towards the planet.
Mars now appeared as a gigantic rosy moon filling the whole vault of the
heavens above them. Their telescopes brought the three thousand seven
hundred and fifty miles down to about ten. The rapid motion of the tiny
satellite afforded them a spectacle which might be compared to the
rising of a moon glowing with rosy light and hundreds of times larger
than the earth. The speed of the vehicle of which they had taken
possession, something like four thousand two hundred miles an hour,
caused the surface of the planet to apparently sweep away from below
them, just as the earth seems to glide from under the car of a balloon.
Neither of them left the telescopes for more than a few minutes during
this aerial circumnavigation. Murgatroyd, outwardly impassive, but
inwardly filled with solemn fears for the fate of this impiously daring
voyage, brought them wine and sandwiches, and later on tea and toast and
more sandwiches; but they took no moment's heed of these, so absorbed
were they in the wonderful spectacle which was swiftly passing under
their eyes.
The main armament of the _Astronef_ consisted of four pneumatic guns,
which could be mounted on swivels, two ahead and two astern, which
carried a shell containing either one of two kinds of explosives
invented by her creator.
One of these was a solid, and burst on impact with an explosive force
equal to about twenty pounds of lyddite. The other consisted of two
liquids separated by a partition in the shell, and these, when mixed by
the breaking of the partition, burst into a volume of flame which could
not be extinguished by any known human means. It would burn even in a
vacuum, since it supplied its own elements of combustion. The guns would
throw these shells to a distance of about seven terrestrial miles. On
the upper deck there were also stands for a couple of light machine guns
capable of discharging seven hundred explosive bullets a minute.
Professor Rennick, although a man of peace, had little sympathy with the
laws of "civilised" warfare which permit men to be blown into rags of
flesh and splinters of bone by explosive shells of a pound weight and
upward, and only allow projectiles of less weight to be used against
"savages." There was no humbug about him. He believed that when war
_was_ necessary it had to _be_ war--and the sooner it was over the
better for everybody concerned.
The small arms consisted of a couple of heavy ten-bore elephant guns
carrying three-ounce melinite shells; a dozen rifles and fowling-pieces
of different makes of which three, a single and a double-barrelled rifle
and a double-barrelled shot-gun, belonged to her Ladyship, as well as a
dainty brace of revolvers, one of half a dozen braces of various
calibres which completed the minor armament of the _Astronef_.
The guns were got up and mounted while the attraction of the planet was
comparatively feeble, and the weapons themselves therefore of very
little weight. On the surface of the earth a score of men could not have
done the work, but on board the _Astronef_, suspended in Space, her crew
of three found the work easy. Zaidie herself picked up a Maxim and
carried it about as though it were a toy sewing-machine.
"Now I think we can go down," said Redgrave, when everything had been
put in position as far as possible. "I wonder whether we shall find the
atmosphere of Mars suitable for terrestrial lungs. It will be rather
awkward if it isn't."
A very slight exertion of repulsive force was sufficient to detach the
_Astronef_ from the body of Phobos. She dropped rapidly towards the
surface of the planet, and within three hours they saw the sunlight, for
the first time since they had left the earth, shining through an
unmistakable atmosphere, an atmosphere of a pale, rosy hue, instead of
the azure of the earthly skies. An angular observation showed that they
were within fifty miles of the surface of the undiscovered world.
"Well, we shall find air here of some sort, there's no doubt. We'll drop
a bit further and then Andrew shall start the propellers. They'll very
soon give us an idea of the density. Do you notice the change in the
temperature? That's the diffused rays instead of the direct ones. Twenty
miles! I think that will do. I'll stop her now and we'll prospect for a
landing place."
He went down to apply the repulsive force directly to the surface of
Mars, so as to check the descent, and then he put on his
breathing-dress, went into the exit-chamber, closed one door behind him,
opened the other and allowed it to fill with Martian air; then he shut
it again, opened his visor and took a cautious breath.
It may, perhaps, have been the idea that he, the first of all the sons
of Earth, was breathing the air of another world, or it might have been
some property peculiar to the Martian atmosphere, but he immediately
experienced a sensation such as usually follows the drinking of a glass
of champagne. He took another breath, and another, then he opened the
inner door and went back to the lower deck, saying to himself: "Well,
the air's all right if it is a bit champagney; rich in oxygen, I
suppose, with perhaps a trace of nitrous-oxide in it. Still, it's
certainly breathable, and that's the principal thing."
"It's all right, dear," he said as he reached the upper deck where
Zaidie was walking about round the sides of the glass dome gazing with
all her eyes at the strange scene of mingled cloud and sea and land
which spread for an immense distance on all sides of them. "I have
breathed the air of Mars, and even at this height it is distinctly
wholesome, though of course it's rather thin, and I had it mixed with
some of our own atmosphere. Still I think it will agree all right with
us lower down."
"Well, then," said Zaidie, "suppose we get below those clouds and see
what there really is to be seen."
"As there's a fairly big problem to be solved shortly I'll see to the
descent myself," he replied, going towards the stairway.
In a couple of minutes she saw the cloud-belt below them rising rapidly.
When Redgrave returned the _Astronef_ was plunging into a sea of rosy
mist.
"The clouds of Mars!" she exclaimed. "Fancy a world with pink clouds! I
wonder what there is on the other side."
The next moment they saw. Just below them at a distance of about five
earth-miles lay an irregularly triangular island, a detached portion of
the Continent of Huygens almost equally divided by the Martian Equator,
and lying with another almost similarly shaped island between the
fortieth and the fiftieth meridians of west longitude. The two islands
were divided by a broad, straight stretch of water about the width of
the English Channel between Folkestone and Boulogne. Instead of the
bright blue-green of terrestrial seas, this connecting link between the
great Northern and Southern Martian oceans had an orange tinge.
The land immediately beneath them was of a gently undulating character,
something like the Downs of South-Eastern England. No mountains were
visible in any direction. The lower portions, particularly along the
borders of the canals and the sea, were thickly dotted with towns and
cities, apparently of enormous extent. To the north of the Island
Continent there was a peninsula, which was covered with a vast
collection of buildings, which, with the broad streets and spacious
squares which divided them, must have covered an area of something like
two hundred square miles.
"There's the London of Mars!" said Redgrave, pointing down towards it;
"where the London of Earth will be in a few thousand years, close to the
Equator. And, you see, all those other towns and cities are crowded
round the canals! I daresay when we go across the northern and southern
temperate zones we shall find them in about the state that Siberia or
Antarctica are in."
"I daresay we shall," replied Zaidie; "Martian civilisation is crowding
towards the Equator, though I should call that place down there the
greater New York of Mars, and--see--there's Brooklyn just across the
canal. I wonder what they're thinking about us down there."
Phobos revolves from west to east almost along the plane of its
primary's equator. To left and right they saw the huge ice-caps of the
South and North Poles gleaming through the red atmosphere with a pale
sunset glimmer. Then came the great stretches of sea, often obscured by
vast banks of clouds, which, as the sunlight fell upon them, looked
strangely like earth-clouds at sunset.
Then, almost immediately underneath them, spread out the great land
areas of the equatorial region. The four continents of Halle, Galileo,
and Tycholand; then Huygens--which is to Mars what Europe, Asia, and
Africa are to the Earth, then Herschell and Copernicus. Nearly all of
these land masses were split up into semi-regular divisions by the
famous canals which have so long puzzled terrestrial observers.
"Well, there is one problem solved at any rate," said Redgrave, when,
after a journey of nearly four hours, they had crossed the western