A Honeymoon in Space
emotions until they're just a set of cold, calculating, scientific
animals. After all they must be something of the sort, for I'm quite
sure we should not have done anything like that on earth if we'd had a
visitor from Mars. We shouldn't have got out cannons and shot at him
before we'd even made his acquaintance.
"Now, if he, or they, had dropped in America as we were going down
there, we should have received them with deputations, given them
banquets, which they might not have been able to eat, and speeches,
which they would not understand, and photographed them, and filled the
newspapers with everything that we could imagine about them, and then
put them in a palace car and hustled them round the country for
everybody to look at."
"And meanwhile," laughed Redgrave, "some of your smart engineers, I
suppose, would have gone over the vessel they had come in, found out how
she was worked, and taken out a dozen patents for her machinery."
"Very likely," replied Zaidie, with a saucy little toss of her chin;
"and why not? We like to learn things down there--and anyhow that would
be much more really civilised than shooting at them."
While this little conversation was going on, the _Astronef_ was dropping
rapidly into the midst of the Martian fleet, which had again arranged
itself in a circle. Zaidie soon made out through her glasses that the
guns were pointed upwards.
"Oh, that's your little game, is it!" said Redgrave, when she had told
him of this. "Well, if you want a fight, you can have it."
As he said this, his jaws came together, and Zaidie saw a look in his
eyes that she had never seen there before. He signalled rapidly two or
three times to Murgatroyd. The propellers began to whirl at their utmost
speed, and the _Astronef_, making a spiral downward course, swooped down
on to the Martian fleet with terrific velocity. Her last curve coincided
almost exactly with the circle occupied by the ships. Half-a-dozen
spouts of greenish flame came from the nearest vessel, and for a moment
the _Astronef_ was enveloped in a yellow mist.
"Evidently they don't know that we are air-tight, and they don't use
shot or shell. They've got past that. Their projectiles kill by poison
or suffocation. I daresay a volley like that would kill a regiment. Now
I'll give that fellow a lesson which he won't live to remember."
They swept through the poison-mist. Redgrave swung the wheel round. The
_Astronef_ dropped to the level of the ring of Martian vessels, which
had now got up speed again. Her steel ram was directed straight at the
vessel which had fired the last shot. Propelled at a speed of nearly two
hundred miles an hour, it took the strange-winged craft amidships. As
the shock came, Redgrave put his arm round Zaidie's waist and held her
close to him, otherwise she would have been flung against the forward
wall of the conning-tower.
The Martian vessel stopped and bent up. They saw human figures more than
half as large again as men inside her staring at them through the
windows in the sides. There were others at the breaches of the guns in
the act of turning the muzzles on the _Astronef_; but this was only a
momentary glimpse, for in a second the _Astronef's_ spur had pierced
her, the Martian air-ship broke in twain, and her two halves plunged
downwards through the rosy clouds.
"Keep her at full speed, Andrew," said Redgrave down the speaking-tube,
"and stand by to jump if we want to."
"All ready, my Lord!" came back up the tube.
The old Yorkshireman during the last few minutes had undergone a
transformation which he himself hardly understood. He recognised that
there was a fight going on, that it was a case of "burn, sink and
destroy," and the thousand-year-old Berserker awoke in him just, as a
matter of fact, it had done in his lordship.
"They can pick up the pieces down there, what there is left of them,"
said Redgrave, still holding Zaidie tight to his side with one hand and
working the wheel with the other, "and now we'll teach them another
lesson."
"What are you going to do, dear?" she said, looking up at him with
somewhat frightened eyes.
"You'll see in a moment," he said, between his shut teeth. "I don't care
whether these Martians are degenerate human beings or only animals; but
from my point of view the reception they have given us justifies any
kind of retaliation. If we'd had a single port-hole open during the
first volley you and I would have been dead by this time, and I'm not
going to stand anything like that without reprisals. They've declared
war on us, and killing in war isn't murder."
"Well, no, I suppose not," she said; "but it's the first fight I've been
in, and I don't like it. Still, they did receive us pretty meanly,
didn't they?"
"Meanly? If there was anything like a code of interplanetary morals or
manners one might call it absolutely caddish. I don't believe even Stead
himself could stand that--unless, of course, he wasn't here."
He sent another message to Murgatroyd. The _Astronef_ sprang a thousand
feet towards the zenith; another touch on the button, and she stopped
exactly over the biggest of the Martian air-ships; another, and she
dropped on to it like a stone and smashed it to fragments. Then she
stopped and mounted again above the broken circle of the fleet, while
the pieces of the air-ship and what was left of her crew plunged
downwards through the crimson clouds in a fall of nearly thirty thousand
feet.
Within the next few moments the rest of the Martian fleet had followed
it, sinking rapidly down through the clouds and scattering in all
directions.
"They seem to have had enough of it," laughed Redgrave, as the
_Astronef_, in obedience to another signal, began to drop towards the
surface of Mars. "Now we'll go down and see if they're in a more
reasonable frame of mind. At any rate we've won our first scrimmage,
dear."
"But it was rather brutal, Lenox, wasn't it?"
"When you are dealing with brutes, little woman, it is sometimes
necessary to be brutal."
"And you look a wee bit brutal right now," she replied, looking up at
him with something like a look of fear in her eyes. "I suppose that is
because you have just killed somebody--or somethings--whichever they
are."
"Do I, really?"
The hard-set jaw relaxed and his lips melted into a smile under his
moustache, and he bent down and kissed her.
"Well, what do you suppose I should have thought of them if _you_ had
had a whiff of that poison?"
"Yes, dear," she whispered in between the kisses, "I see now."
CHAPTER XI
The _Astronef_ dropped swiftly down through the crimson-tinged clouds,
and a few minutes later they saw that the rest of the fleet had
scattered in units in all directions, apparently with the intention of
getting as far as possible out of reach of that terrible ram. Only one
of them, the largest, which carried what looked like a flag of woven
gold at the top of its centre mast, remained in sight after a few
minutes. It was almost immediately below them when they had passed
through the clouds, and they could see it sinking straight down towards
the centre of what appeared to be the principal square of the bigger of
the two cities which Zaidie had named New York and Brooklyn.
"That fellow has gone to report, evidently," said Redgrave. "We'll
follow him just to see what he's up to, but I don't think we'd better
open the ports even then. There's no telling when they might give us a
whiff of that poison-mist, or whatever it is."
"But how are you going to talk to them, then, if they can talk?--I mean,
if they know any language that we do?"
"They're something like men, and so I suppose they understand the
language of signs, at any rate. Still, if you don't fancy it, we'll go
somewhere else."
"No, thanks," she said. "That's not my father's daughter. I haven't come
a hundred million miles from home to go away before the first act's
finished. We'll go down to see if we can make them understand."
By this time the _Astronef_ was hanging suspended over an enormous
square about half the size of Hyde Park. It was laid out just as a
terrestrial park would be, in grass land, flower-beds, and avenues, and
patches of trees, only the grass was a reddish yellow, the leaves of the
trees were like those of a beech in autumn, and the flowers were nearly
all a deep violet, or a bright emerald green.
As they descended they saw that the square, or Central Park, as Zaidie
at once christened it, was flanked by enormous blocks of buildings,
palaces built of a dazzlingly white stone, and topped by domed roofs and
lofty cupolas of glass.
"Isn't that just lovely!" she said, swinging her binoculars in every
direction. "Talk about your Park Lane and the houses round Central Park;
why, it's the Chicago Exposition, and the Paris one, and your Crystal
Palace, multiplied by about ten thousand, and all spread out just round
this one place. If we don't find these people nice, I guess we'd better
go back and build a fleet like this, and come and take it."
"There spoke the new American imperialism," laughed Redgrave. "Well,
we'll go and see what they're like first, shall we?"
The _Astronef_ dropped a little more slowly than the air-ship had done,
and remained suspended a hundred feet or so above her after she had
reached the ground. Swarms of human figures but of more than human
stature, clad in tunics and trousers or knickerbockers, came out of the
glass-domed palaces from all sides into the park. They were nearly all
of the same stature, and there appeared to be no difference whatever
between the sexes. Their dress was absolutely plain; there was no
attempt at ornament or decoration of any kind.
"If there are any of the Martian women among those people," said her
ladyship, "they've taken to rationals, and they've grown about as big as
the men."
"That's exactly what's happening on earth, you know, dear. I don't mean
about the rationals, but the women growing up, especially in America. I
come of a pretty long family----but, look!"
"Well, I only come to your ear," she said.
"And our descendants of ten thousand years hence----"
"Oh, don't bother about them!" she said. "Look; there's some one who
seems to want to communicate with us. Why, they're all bald! They
haven't got a hair among them--and what a size their heads are!"
"That's brains--too much brains, in fact. These people have lived too
long. I daresay they've ceased to be animals--civilised themselves out
of everything in the way of passions and emotions, and are just purely
intellectual beings, with as much human nature about them as Russian
diplomacy or those things we saw at the bottom of the Newton Crater. I
don't like the look of them."
The orderly swarms of figures, which were rapidly filling the park,
divided as he was speaking, making a broad lane from one of its
entrances to where the _Astronef_ was hanging above the air-ship. A
light four-wheeled vehicle, whose framework and wheels glittered like
burnished gold, sped towards them, driven by some invisible agency.
Its only occupant was a huge man, dressed in the universal costume,
saving only a scarlet sash in place of the cord-girdle which the others
wore round their waists. The vehicle stopped near the air-ship, over
which the _Astronef_ was hanging, and, as the figure dismounted, a door
opened in the side of the vessel and three other figures, similar both
in stature and attire, came out and entered into conversation with him.
"The Admiral of the Fleet is evidently making his report," said
Redgrave. "Meanwhile, the crowd seems to be taking a considerable amount
of interest in us."
"And very naturally, too!" replied Zaidie. "Don't you think we might go