A Honeymoon in Space
hemisphere. "Mars is getting very old, her seas are diminishing, and her
continents are increasing. Those canals are the remains of gulfs and
straits which have been widened and deepened and lengthened by human, or
I should say Martian, labour, partly, I've no doubt, for purposes of
navigation and partly to keep the inhabitants of the interior of the
continents within measurable distance of the sea. There's not the
slightest doubt about that. Then, you see, there are scarcely any
mountains to speak of so far, only ranges of low hills."
"And that means, I suppose," said Zaidie, "that they've all been worn
down as the mountains of the earth are being. I was reading Flammarion's
'End of the World' last night, and he, you know, describes the earth at
the last as just one big plain of land, no hills or mountains, no seas,
and only sluggish rivers draining into marshes.
"I suppose that is what they're coming to down yonder. Now, I wonder
what sort of civilisation we shall find. Perhaps we shan't find any at
all. Suppose all their civilisations have worn out and they are
degenerating into the same struggle for sheer existence those poor
creatures in the moon must have had."
"Or suppose," said Redgrave rather seriously, "we find that they have
passed the zenith of civilisation, and are dropping back into savagery,
but still have the use of weapons and means of destruction which we,
perhaps, have no notion of, and are inclined to use them? We'd better be
careful, dear."
"What do you mean, Lenox?" she said. "They wouldn't try to do us any
harm, would they? Why should they?"
"I don't say they would," he replied; "but still you never know. You
see, their ideas of right and wrong and hospitality and all that sort of
thing may be quite different to what we have on the earth. In fact, they
may not be men at all, but just a sort of monster with perhaps a
superhuman intellect with all sorts of extra-human ideas in it.
"Then there's another thing," he went on. "Suppose they fancied a trip
through Space, and thought that they had as good a right to the
_Astronef_ as we have? I daresay they've seen us by this time if they've
got telescopes, as no doubt they have, perhaps a good deal more powerful
than ours, and they may be getting ready to receive us now. I think I'll
get the guns in place before we go down, in case their moral ideas, as
dear old Hans Breitmann called them, are not quite the same as ours."
CHAPTER X
The words were hardly out of his mouth before Zaidie, who still had her
glasses to her eyes, and was looking down towards the great city whose
glazed roofs were flashing with a thousand tints in the pale crimson
sunlight, said with a little tremor in her voice:
"Look, Lenox, down there--don't you see something coming up? That little
black thing. Just look how fast it's coming up; it's quite distinct
already. It's a sort of flying-ship, only it has wings and, I think,
masts too. Yes, I can see three masts, and there's something glittering
on the tops of them. I wonder if they're coming to pay us a polite
morning call, or whether they're going to treat us like trespassers in
their atmosphere."
"There's no telling, but those things on the top of the masts look like
revolving helices," replied Redgrave, after a long look through his
telescope. "He's screwing himself up into the air. That shows that they
must either have stronger and lighter machinery than we have, or, as the
astronomers have thought, this atmosphere is denser than ours, and
therefore easier to fly in. Then, of course, things are only half their
earthly weight here.
"Well, whether it's peace or war, I suppose we may as well let them come
and reconnoitre. Then we shall see what kind of creatures they are. Ah,
there are a lot more of them, some coming from Brooklyn, too, as you
call it. Come up into the conning-tower, and I'll relieve Murgatroyd, so
that he can go and look after his engines. We shall have to give these
gentlemen a lesson in flying. Meanwhile, in case of accidents, we may as
well make ourselves as invulnerable as possible."
A few minutes later they were in the conning-tower again, watching the
approach of the Martian fleet through the thick windows of toughened
glass which enabled them to look in every direction except straight
down. The steel coverings had been drawn down over the glass dome of the
deck-chamber, and Murgatroyd had gone down to the engine-room. Fifty
feet ahead of them stretched out the long, shining spur, of which ten
feet were solid steel, a ram which no floating structure built by human
hands could have resisted.
Redgrave was standing with his hand on the steering-wheel, looking more
serious than he had done so far during the voyage. Zaidie stood beside
him with a powerful binocular telescope watching, with cheeks a little
paler than usual, the movements of the Martian air-ships. She counted
twenty-five vessels rising round them in a wide circle.
"I don't like the idea of a whole fleet coming up," said Redgrave, as he
watched them rising, and the ring narrowing round the still motionless
_Astronef_. "If they only wanted to know who and what we are, or to
leave their cards on us, as it were, and bid us welcome to the world,
one ship could have done that just as well as a fleet. This lot coming
up looks as if they wanted to get round and capture us."
"It does look like it," said Zaidie, with her glasses fixed on the
nearest of the vessels; "and now I can see they've guns too, something
like ours, and perhaps, as you said just now, they may have explosives
that we don't know anything about. Oh, Lenox, suppose they were able to
smash us up with a single shot."
"You needn't be afraid of that, dear," he said, putting his arm round
her shoulders. "Of course it's perfectly natural that they should look
upon us with a certain amount of suspicion, dropping like this on them
from the stars. Can you see anything like men on board them yet?"
"No, they're all closed in just as we are," she replied; "but they've
got conning-towers like this, and something like windows along the
sides. That's where the guns are, and the guns are moving. They're
pointing them at us. Lenox, I'm afraid they're going to shoot."
"Then we may as well spoil their aim," he said, pressing one of the
buttons on the signal-board three times, and then once more after a
little interval.
In obedience to the signal Murgatroyd turned on the repulsive force to
half power, and the _Astronef_ leapt up vertically a couple of thousand
feet. Then Redgrave pressed the button once and she stopped. Another
signal set the propellers in motion, and as she sprang forward across
the circle formed by the Martian air-ships, they looked down and saw
that the place which they had just left was occupied by a thick
greenish-yellow cloud.
"Look, Lenox, what on earth is that?" exclaimed Zaidie, pointing down to
it.
"What on Mars would be nearer the point, dear," he said, with what she
thought a somewhat vicious laugh. "That, I'm afraid, means anything but
a friendly reception for us. That cloud is one of two things--it's the
smoke of the explosion of twenty or thirty shells, or else it's made of
gases intended to either poison us or make us insensible, so that they
can take possession of the ship. In either case I should say that the
Martians are not what we should call gentlemen."
"I should think not," she said angrily. "They might at least have taken
us for friends till they had proved us enemies, which they wouldn't have
done. Nice sort of hospitality that, considering how far we've come, and
we can't shoot back, because we haven't got the ports open."
"And a very good thing too!" laughed Redgrave; "if we had had them open,
and that volley had caught us unawares, the _Astronef_ would probably
have been full of poisonous gases by this time, and your honeymoon,
dear, would have come to a somewhat untimely end. Ah, they're trying to
follow us! Well, now we'll see how high they can fly."
He sent another signal to Murgatroyd, and the _Astronef_, still beating
the Martian air with the fans of her propellers, and travelling forward
at about fifty miles an hour, rose in a slanting direction through a
dense bank of rosy-tinted clouds, which hung over the bigger of the two
cities--New York, as Zaidie had named it.
When they reached the golden-red sunlight above it the _Astronef_
stopped her ascent, and then, with half a turn of the steering-wheel,
her commander sent her sweeping round in a wide circle. A few minutes
later they saw the Martian fleet rise almost simultaneously through the
clouds. They seemed to hesitate a moment, and then the prow of every
vessel was directed towards the swiftly moving _Astronef_.
"Well, gentlemen," said Redgrave, "you evidently don't know anything
about Professor Rennick and the R. Force; and yet you ought to know that
we couldn't have come through Space without being able to get beyond
this little atmosphere of yours. Now let us see how fast you can fly."
Another signal went down to Murgatroyd, the whirling propellers became
two intersecting circles of light. The speed of the _Astronef_ increased
to a hundred-and-fifty miles an hour, and the Martian fleet began to
drop behind and trail out into a triangle like a flock of huge birds.
"That's lovely; we're leaving them!" exclaimed Zaidie, leaning forward
with the glasses to her eyes and tapping the floor of the conning-tower
with her foot as if she wanted to dance, "and their wings are working
faster than ever. They don't seem to have any screws."
"Probably because they've solved the problem of bird's flight," said
Redgrave. "They're not gaining on us, are they?"
"No, they're at about the same distance."
"Then we'll see how they can soar."
Another signal went down the tube. The _Astronef's_ propellers slowed
down and stopped, and the vessel began to rise swiftly towards the
zenith, which the sun was now approaching. The Martian fleet continued
the impossible chase until the limits of the navigable atmosphere, about
eight earth-miles above the surface, was reached. Here the air was
evidently too rarefied for their wings to act upon. They came to a
standstill, looking like links of a broken chain, their occupants no
doubt looking up with envious eyes upon the shining body of the
_Astronef_ glittering like a tiny star in the sunlight ten thousand feet
above them.
"Well, gentlemen," said Redgrave, after a swift glance round, "I think
we have shown you that we can fly faster and soar higher than you can.
Perhaps you'll be a bit more civil now. If you're not we shall have to
teach you manners."
"But you're not going to fight them all, dear, are you? Don't let us be
the first to bring war and bloodshed with us into another world."
"Don't trouble about that, little woman, it's here already," he replied,
a trifle savagely. "People don't have air-ships and guns which fire
shells or poison-bombs, or whatever they were, without knowing what war
is. From what I've seen, I should say these Martians have civilised
themselves out of all emotions, and, I daresay, have fought pitilessly
for the possession of the last habitable lands of the planet.
"They've preyed upon each other till only the fittest are left, and
those, I suppose, were the ones who invented the air-ships and finally
got possession of all that was worth having. Of course that would give
them the command of the planet, land and sea. In fact, if we are able to
make the personal acquaintance of the Martians, we shall probably find
them a set of over-civilised savages."
"That's a rather striking paradox, isn't it, dear?" said Zaidie,
slipping her hand through his arm; "but still it's not at all bad. You
mean, of course, that they may have civilised themselves out of all the