A Honeymoon in Space by George Chetwynd Griffith (best affordable ebook reader txt) 📖

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 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