A Honeymoon in Space
The Martian looked at her with a little light in his big blue eyes, and
two faint little spots of red just under them, and said:
"Anger! Yes, I remember, that is what we called brain-heat. Our teachers
found it to be madness and it was abolished. It was not convenient. The
air-ships were not convenient to you, so you abolished them. The folk,
too, that you abolished with those things," pointing to the guns, "they
were not convenient. If you hadn't done that they would have abolished
you. There is no more to say."
"What brutes," said Zaidie, turning away from him, her head thrown back
and her lips curling in unutterable disgust. "Well, if these people have
civilised themselves along the same lines that we are doing, thinking
the same things and speaking something like the same speech, thank God
we shall be dead before our civilisation reaches a stage like this.
That's not a man. It's only a machine of flesh and bone and nerves, and
I suppose it has blood of some sort."
A beautiful woman always looks most beautiful when she is just a little
angry. Redgrave had never seen Zaidie look quite so lovely as she did
just then. The Martian, whose ancestors had for generations forgotten
what human emotion was like, only saw in her anger a miracle which made
her a thousand times more beautiful than before, and as he looked upon
her glowing cheeks and gleaming eyes some instinct insensibly
transmitted through many generations awoke to sudden life in some unused
corner of his brain.
His pale clear eyes lit up with something like a glow of human passion.
The pink spots under his eyes spread downwards over his cheeks. Some
half-articulate sounds came from between his thin lips. Then they were
drawn back and showed his smooth, toothless gums. He took a couple of
long, swift strides towards her, and then bent forward, towering over
her with long, outstretched arms, huge, hideous, and half-human.
Zaidie sprang backwards as he came towards her, her right hand went up,
and, just as Redgrave levelled his revolver, and Murgatroyd, true to the
old Berserk instinct, took a rifle by the barrel and swung the stock
above his head, Zaidie pulled her trigger. The bullet cut a clean hole
through the smooth, hairless skull of the Martian. A dark, red spot came
just between his eyes, his huge frame shrank together and collapsed in a
heap on the deck.
"Oh, I've killed him! God forgive me, killed a man!" she whispered, as
her hand fell to her side, and the revolver dropped from her fingers.
"But, Lenox, do you really think it was a man?"
"That thing a man!" he replied between his clenched teeth. "He wanted
you, and spoke English of a sort, so there was something human about
him, but anyhow he's better dead. Here, Andrew, open that door again and
help me to heave this thing overboard. Then I think we'd better be off
before we have the rest of the fleet with their poison guns round us.
Zaidie, I think you'd better go to your room for the present. Take a nip
of cognac and then lie down, and mind you keep the door tight shut.
There's no telling what these animals might do if they had a chance, and
just now it's my business and Andrew's to see that they don't."
Though she would much rather have remained on deck to see anything more
that might happen, she saw that he was really in earnest, and so like a
wise wife who commands by obeying, she obeyed, and went below.
Then the dead body of the Martian was tumbled out of the side door. The
windows through which the guns had been fired were hermetically closed,
and a few minutes later the _Astronef_ vanished from the surface of
Mars, to remain a memory and a marvel to the dwindling generations of
the worn-out world which is as this may be in the far-off days that are
to come.
CHAPTER XII
"How very different Venus looks now to what it does from the earth,"
said Zaidie, a couple of mornings later, by earth-time, as she took her
eye away from the telescope through which she had been examining an
enormous golden crescent which spanned the dark vault of Space ahead of
and slightly below the _Astronef_.
"Yes," replied Redgrave, "she looks----"
"How do you know that she is a she?" said Zaidie, getting up and laying
a hand on his shoulder as he sat at his own telescope. "Of course I know
what you mean, that according to our own ideas on earth, it is the
planet or the world which has been supposed for ages to, as it were,
shine upon the lovers of earth with the light reflected from
the--the--well, I suppose you know what I mean."
"Seeing that you are the most perfect terrestrial incarnation of the
said goddess that I have seen yet," he replied, slipping his arm round
her waist and pulling her down on to his knees, "I don't think that that
is quite the view you ought to take. Surely if Venus ever had a
daughter----"
"Oh, nonsense! After we've travelled all these millions of miles
together do you really expect me to believe stuff like that?"
"My dear girl-graduate," he said, tightening his grip round her waist a
little, "you know perfectly well that if we had travelled beyond the
limits of the Solar System, if we had outsailed old Halley's Comet
itself, and dived into the uttermost depths of Space outside the Milky
Way, you and I would still be a man and a woman, and, being, as may be
presumed, more or less in love with each other----"
"Less indeed!" said Zaidie; "you're speaking for yourself, I hope."
And then when she had partially disengaged herself and sat up straight,
she said between her laughs----
"Really, Lenox, you're quite absurd for a person who has been married as
long as you have, I don't mean in time, but in Space. Was it a thousand
years or a couple of hundred million miles ago that we were married?
Really I am getting my ideas of time and space quite mixed up.
"But never mind that! What I was going to say is that, according to all
the authorities which your girl-graduate has been reading since we left
Mars, Venus--oh, doesn't she look just gorgeous, and our old friend the
Sun behind there blazing out of darkness like one of the furnaces at
Pittsburg--I beg your pardon, Lenox, I'm afraid I'm getting quite
provincial. I suppose we're considerably more than a hundred million
miles away?"
"Yes, dear; we're about a hundred and fifty millions, and at that
distance, if you'll excuse me saying so, even the United States would
seem almost like a province, wouldn't they?"
"Well, yes; that's just where distance doesn't lend enchantment to the
view, I suppose."
"But what was it you were going to say before that----"
"The interlude, eh? Well, before the interlude you were accusing me of
being a graduate as well as a girl. Of course I can't help that, but
what I was going to say was----"
"If you are going to talk science, dear, perhaps we'd better sit on
different chairs. I may have been married for a hundred and fifty
million miles, but the honeymoon isn't half way through yet, you know."
Then there was another interlude of a few seconds' duration. When Zaidie
was seated beside her own telescope again, she said, after another
glance at the splendid crescent which, as the _Astronef_ approached at a
speed of over forty miles a second, increased in size and distinctness
every moment:
"What I mean is this. All the authorities are agreed that on Venus, her
axis of revolution being so very much inclined to the plane of her
orbit, the seasons are so severe that half the year its temperate zone
and its tropics have a summer about twice as hot as ours and the other
half they have a winter twice as cold as our coldest. I'm afraid, after
all, we shall find the Love-Star a world of salamanders and seals;
things that can live in a furnace and bask on an iceberg; and when we
get back home it will be our painful duty, as the first explorers of the
fields of Space, to dispel another dearly-cherished popular delusion."
"I'm not so very sure about that," said Lenox, glancing from the rapidly
growing crescent, to the sweet, smiling face beside him. "Don't you see
something very different there to what we saw either on the Moon or
Mars? Now just go back to your telescope and let us take an
observation."
"Well," said Zaidie, rising, "as our trip is, partly at least, in the
interests of science, I will;" and then when she had got her own
telescope into focus again--for the distance between the _Astronef_ and
the new world they were about to visit was rapidly lessening--she took a
long look through it, and said:
"Yes, I think I see what you mean. The outer edge of the crescent is
bright, but it gets greyer and dimmer towards the inside of the curve.
Of course Venus has an atmosphere. So had Mars; but this must be very
dense. There's a sort of halo all round it. Just fancy that splendid
thing being the little black spot we saw going across the face of the
Sun a few days ago! It makes one feel rather small, doesn't it?"
"That is one of the things which a woman says when she doesn't want to
be answered; but, apart from that, you were saying----"
"What a very unpleasant person you can be when you like! I was going to
say that on the Moon we saw nothing but black and white, light and
darkness. There was no atmosphere, except in those awful places I don't
want to think about. Then, as we got near Mars, we saw a pinky
atmosphere, but not very dense; but this, you see, is a sort of
pearl-grey white shading from silver to black. You notice how much paler
it grows as we get nearer. But look--what are those tiny bright spots?
There are hundreds of them."
"Do you remember as we were leaving the Earth, how bright the mountain
ranges looked; how plainly we could see the Rockies and the Andes?"
"Oh, yes, I see; they're mountains; thirty-seven miles high, some of
them, they say; and the rest of the silver-grey will be clouds, I
suppose. Fancy living under clouds like those."
"Only another case of the adaptation of life to natural conditions, I
expect. When we get there I daresay we shall find that these clouds are
just what make it possible for the inhabitants of Venus to stand the
extremes of heat and cold. Given elevations three or four times as high
as the Himalayas, it would be quite possible for them to choose their
temperature by shifting their altitude.
"But I think it's about time to drop theory and see to the practice," he
continued, getting up from his chair and going to the signal board in
the conning-tower. "Whatever the planet Venus may be like, we don't want
to charge it at the rate of sixty miles a second. That's about the speed
now, considering how fast she's travelling towards us."
"And considering that, whether it is a nice world or not it's nearly as
big as the Earth, I guess we should get rather the worst of the charge,"
laughed Zaidie as she went back to her telescope.
Redgrave sent a signal down to Murgatroyd to reverse engines, as it
were, or, in other words, to direct the "R. Force" against the planet,
from which they were now only a couple of hundred thousand miles
distant. The next moment the sun and stars seemed to halt in their
courses. The great golden-grey crescent, which had been increasing in
size every moment, appeared to remain stationary, and then, when he was
satisfied that the engines were developing the Force properly, he sent
another signal down, and the _Astronef_ began to descend.
The half-disc of Venus seemed to fall below them, and in a few minutes
they could see it from the upper deck spreading out like a huge
semi-circular plain of light ahead and on both sides of them. The
_Astronef_ was falling at the rate of about a thousand miles a minute
towards the centre of the half-crescent, and every moment the brilliant
spots above the cloud-surface grew in size and brightness.