SURELY a circus is no sane place to look for a Martian—particularly a little one-elephant show like “Professor Von Tempski’s Mammoth Museum of Art, Wonder, and Talent.” And yet, there it was—blazened in huge crimson letters on a field of sulfurous yellow, “THE MAN FROM MARS (fifty cents).” Having a normal curiosity, I stopped for a second look. A Martian has the reputation of being rather a rara avis, at least in Kansas.
The show was staked out on the fair grounds just south of the city line—one battered show-tent, a small menagerie, a double line of weather-worn wagons and side-shows, and, wonder of wonders, the palace of “THE MAN FROM MARS”. I, for one, had never seen its like in a circus of this or any other size. For one thing, it smacked of imagination of a high order.
It was more permanent than the other side-shows on the lane, as well as bigger—built with reasonable stability on a sort of wheeled floor or chassis — literally palatial when compared to its tawdry neighbors. The style was modernistic — futuristic even—and colorful as such an attraction must needs be, but colored with something like taste and sanity in soft, well-blended tones that gave an effect like nothing earthly that I knew of.
Above the door hung a painting of Mars—remarkably done from the scientific angle — with the grey-green of the Syrtis Major thrusting down into the rose and salmon of the great disk, and a southern ice-cap gleaming wanly at the top. Over its entire face ran a fine tracery of lines—“Schiaparelli’s “canali”, Lowell’s “canals”—more than I had seen on any published sketch. Drawn by its incongruity, I stepped closer, then was brought rudely back to reality by the hoarse yawp of the barker.
“Absolutely the most stoopenjus spectakle known to mankind! Unequaled by the wizzudry of modern science! Ladies an’ gennlemun—a living, breathing, speaking man from the planet Mars! A castaway from another world! The exiled prince of another race—lost in the endless sea of empty space—drawn by mysterious forces to our own little world, an’ persuaded to entertain the intelligent citizens of this great state an’ nation with examples of the life an’ wonders of another world! Ladies an’ gennlemun, it is a priv’lige none should miss—the spectakle of this century—unequaled in the hist’ry of this mighty Universe, an’, ladies an’ gennlemun, all for the little fee of fifty cents, four bits, one half of a dollah! Come one, come all! This reemarkubble spectakle commences in the short time of ten minutes! Only ten short minutes before this great pufformmance, ladies an’ gennlemun, an’ remembah—only fifty cents, one half of a dollah! Right this way for the stoopenjus pufformance!”
Behind the barker’s stand and the ticket box was a great canvas drop, inscribed with a series of names “renowned to the world of science” as the blurb ran—endorsing the magnificence and scientific worth of the man from Mars. Most of them were literally peppered with degrees, at least fifty percent unknown to earthly education. They may have been from Martian universities. Not a few I had noticed adorning the back pages of cheap magazines—advertising quack cures, love philtres, and the like. But down in the lower corner, seeming to cringe beneath the mass of “wisdom” above it, was a name that brought me to with a rude jolt—Harvey Henderson, B.S. I slammed down my four bits, grabbed the ticket, and shouldered through the gaping crowd of farmers into the tent.
There were few there—a dozen or so of the more serious and the more foolish—and I was able to look about me freely. The interior of the place in no way belied the promise of the outside. Here too the decoration was colorful but quiet, ornate but sane, and here the touch of scientific authority was even more evident.
There were a number of remarkable paintings of the planets, including our own, transparencies of queer, monstrous machines, lit dimly from behind, inscriptions in an unknown script—and everywhere the play of tint and raw color, shaded and blended, that made the place worthy of a gallery of modern art. The tent was oval, and halfway across cut a thick curtain, before which the rough plank seats were placed. The crowd was still filing in and gaping wisely at the decorations, and I was able to secure a fairly smooth seat directly in front of the low stage.
Slowly the place filled, and now there was evidence of stealthy motion behind the curtain. We need not wait long now. Soon someone, something, would step from behind the drape and stand revealed—a man from Mars. The name of Harvey Henderson assured me of that. Inside of minutes, seconds, I would see him—“the spectackle of the century”—the man from Mars.
The lights waned and died. The whispering of the audience sank, ceased. Now a faint music was playing, behind the curtain—soft and full of overtones like the theremins I had heard once—music of the electrons. And softly the curtain parted and drew aside.
A great gilded chair stood on a raised dais in the center of the stage. Above it hung a sphere of blue light, beside it stood a table with queer-shaped glass and metal instruments—cathode tubes, Tesla globes, and the like, many of them unfamiliar to me. And on the throne itself, hunched down in its gilded depths, was the man from Mars.
A sort of keen disappointment ran over me at the sight of him—regret raised, I suppose, by the fantasies of science fiction, by weird tales of ruling monsters. For this Martian was so palpably, so pathetically human. He was so much like what logic predicted and imagination scorned, a Martian of the masses, formed for the common people—a thin body with, huge chest, swathed in dull red robes, spindling legs and arms with bony, protruding joints; large, delicate hands and small feet, and a huge head. But for a cursory glance at the general effect, that magnificent head seized everyone’s attention. It was half again as large as our own, a smooth pink dome rising above a bulging brow and tiny, wrinkled face. The ears were large and protruding. Face and scalp were hairless, and seemed like the gullying of an eroded dune. A little, full mouth was pursed under a slightly hooked nose, and above, sunk deep beneath massive hairless brows, were his eyes!
Those eyes! I shall never forget that first impression of two prisoned souls—staring from a mummied mask, a face long dead. For the contrast was so enormous as to seize the breath. The general effect was grotesque and ugly, but in those two great eyes was all the beauty of another world—living, vibrant, ageless beauty, with a sort of grave wisdom and penetration that seemed to gaze through and beyond you—beyond the world itself. In that moment I knew that this was beyond all doubt a Martian.
BUT the show had begun, silently, without aid or interference from the barker, who lounged in the rear of the tent, as intent as ourselves upon the performance. Long, tapered fingers danced over a keyboard fixed to the chair-arm, playing a queer mechanical tune of little muffled clickings. From beyond, a low cart ran out, rubber-tired, bearing an instrument that I recognized as a variant of the common theremin. Soft music was drifting from its speaker. Again, and a second cart appeared, with a large plate-glass tank of colorless liquid, water, apparently, for goldfish were swimming about in it.
And now the hands were playing a witch’s dance on the ivory keys, leaping faster than the eye could follow, here, there, weaving a pattern of wizardry and wonder. The instruments beside the throne rose as on wings into thin air, swept forward, grouped above the forestage. A pause, and then a group of three high voltage discharge tubes, neon, mercury, and one I do not know, began to blaze with color, leaping, pulsing color, far beyond any earthly art. The thin-stalked bulb of a cathode ray surged to the fore, hung for an instant, then began its weird glow as its hurtling rays ionized the air. A little half-sphere of some dark mineral darted up before the window of the tube, into the path of the rays.
Instantly it blazed with blue flame, vivid, blinding, scintillant with dancing sparks of orange-red—yet those of us who sat, dazzled, within arm’s reach of it, felt no heat from it, only the odd plucking sensation that tells of great latent electrical forces stored in the atmosphere. More, the ray died, and the discharge tubes, yet the cold blue flame burned on alone, undiminished, swinging in slow, small circles above our heads, until a scurry of keys bore it from sight.
And now came the great marvel of the entire program. A second tank appeared, with fish, like the first. The Tesla globes swam out, ten inch spheres of brass, poised perhaps ten feet apart, and silent lightning began to play between them, lacework of pale electric flame that danced without the customary crackle of a high-tension spark. And the flame began to sing—soft, weird music like the voice of the theremin. To its low tune, the water of the twin tanks began to rise, draw away from the sides, mount into a rounded cone that slowly elongated until it tore loose from the glass with a little sigh, leaving the fish in perhaps six inches of water at the bottom of the tank. And now the cones or spindles bulked into two spheres of water, floating free above us, swinging slowly about each other to the rhythm of the flame-song. Nearer they swung, and nearer, then met and merged in a single great globe of water, a dozen feet in diameter, drifting unsupported above our upturned faces.
Perhaps the play of color and the low music hypnotized us. Perhaps the giant globe was of thin glass, hung from invisible wires. Perhaps—many things. I tell only what I saw.
The sphere was becoming opaque, milky, and now vague forms and pictures were appearing on its surface—familiar forms. It was a map of the Earth that hung before us, slowing spinning, colored with the bright glare of polar ice, the blue of seas, the green and rose of forest and desert, dappled with drifting clouds, strung with mountain ranges like pearls across the face of the land—our Earth, seen from outside, from open space!
It faded as it came, and a new world spun in its stead—rose-red, with capping of white and a tracery of fine green lines over its entire face, running from red of desert waste to cool green of vegetation, from southern ice to northern snows, everywhere, curving in great circles across the planet—Mars. Here was no cloud-drift, no blue and sparkle of seas, but another, slower change, speeded by the wizardry of thought—the wax and wane of seasons over the face of the planet.
Slowly the green glow of spring flowed down from the southern pole, advancing along the thin tracery of the “canals”, freshening the drab hues of the Syrtis, down to the equator and up once more to the northern pole, then back, and forth again—the flow of water, of life on another world. Then it was gone, and the sphere shone clear.
Visions were coming, deep within it now—time-worn rubble of red rock and red sand speeding through its still depths, giving place to mountainous ramparts of clear blue ice, to long level plains swathed deep with stiff, woolly green moss, to narrow crevices, canyons thrusting into the planet’s heart, rimmed with the dense green moss.
And for an instant we gazed into one of these great gashes in the plateau, found it a series of steep, short terraces, stepping down and down into a dim blue murk, with thin crustings of vegetation and crowded files of queer, squat stone huts, flat and angular, with oval openings in the walls. Swiftly we dropped past terrace after terrace, the cliff walls crowding in, the blue haze thickening, until there came a faint glimpse of a widening floor, flanged out from the chasm, and a maze of stone and metal looming from the valley floor—one glimpse, no more, for the walls rushed down, the desert wastes dropped away swiftly beneath us, and Mars swam alone, dwindling in black space—Mars, then the silver of Earth, then darkness. The curtain fell, the lights came up, and we filed in hushed wonder toward the door.
As I turned, outside, to leave, a hand fell on my shoulder, the husky voice of the barker was in my ear.
“Hey, he wants to see you, inside—the guy that runs it. Go back here, longside of the six-legged calf. He’ll be waitin’. An’ say, talk it up a little, will ya? We ain’t too prosperous.”
Wondering, I went back—alongside of the six-legged calf—to a flap in the rear of the tent, pushed it open. I was back-stage, the throne and all the rest of the paraphernalia before me, the form of the Martian slumped wearily in the scant comfort of its gilded seat. A man—a human—was bending over him. At the tinkle of the bell on the tent-flap, he swung around, advanced to meet me, a grin broadening on his features—Harvey Henderson!
“Well, you old dingbat, how’d you like the show?” he chuckled. “Quite some elaborate hocus-pocus, not?”
“Man, Harvey, it’s big!” I gasped. “It’s bigger than anything I ever even dreamed of. No wonder they can charge fifty cents and get away with it!”
“Yes, it’s a great show, all right. But I wish I’d never seen it—or him. It can’t last, Hank, and I’m afraid the breakup will come pretty soon. He’s getting sick of it all, and I’m not the one to blame him!”
“He—? Oh, you mean the Martian—the man from Mars.”
“YES, the man from Mars. Funny that he I should run into this, after all he had learned to expect—funny, and kind of pitiful, too. I just wanted to see you again, Hank—let you know I was here. There’s one more show before the big ruckus outside. I’ll see you after, unless you’d rather gape at old Minnie, our solo pachyderm, and our sick camel.” He sighed.
“There isn’t so much difference, to them, between a moth-eaten camel or a toothless lion and—him. And he feels it, a lot stronger than I do. It can’t last. But there’s no time for that now—see you while the big affair is on. Tell Steve—he’s the barker—that I said so.”
So I went, to come back after the big show had drained the crowd from the lane of side-shows, and the parade was forming beyond the messtent. The Martian still crouched in his great throne, but now all the apparatus of the sideshow was drawn aside, and the throne turned with its back to the closed curtain, facing a lighted oil stove with something simmering in a saucepan on top. Harvey was scattering crumbs for the fish in the twin tanks.
“Ah, there you are,” he said, strained relief in his voice. “I was afraid you had skipped out on me, and I’m due to need help before the day is out. After the show tonight—well, anything can happen. He is fed up.”
“But what have you been doing since I saw you last? And where did—he—come from—how did he ever get here, of all places?”
“I’ll tell you, all in good time. But right now you had better meet him—he has had you on his mind since you came in after the show. I guess he senses a kindred spirit.”
Harvey turned and looked deep into the great eyes that had been staring at us. His lips moved, ever so slightly, as they used to when he put forth great mental effort. As in reply, the form on the throne stiffened, lunged forward and rose to its feet, moved toward me, laboredly. The eyes caught mine, held them, seemed to swim into my very being and search my inner self, questing for some thought or emotion vital to him who was their master. A delicate hand took mine—rough and dry, lifeless, like a mummy’s. At this close range, his face was of the same coarse texture, unlike any flesh that I had ever seen. The Martian sensed my thoughts, for something like a twinkle appeared in his eyes—something kindly and appreciative of humor. Harvey sensed it too, and chuckled at my bewilderment.
“I have a shock for you, Hank,” he said. “Try to bear up, old man. I hate to disillusion you.”
He fumbled at the nape of the Martian’s neck, pressed sharply. There was a little metallic click, a faint whir, and the Martian’s body collapsed slowly, like a deflated balloon, into a crumpled heap of red cloth and wire-framed pseudo-flesh. Only his head remained, suspended in midair, with a three foot cylinder of faintly violet opaque crystal dangling beneath it. Another click, and the great cranium split, just behind the ears. Harvey laid the halves carefully aside and stood back. The Martian—the real “man from Mars”—floated before me, watching me.
A squat three-foot cylinder of violet crystal, just over two feet in diameter, rose unbroken to a transparent hemisphere of glass or quartz, like the lens of a flashlight. It housed the head of the Martian—a head much like the mock skull that had hidden it. There was the small, pursed mouth and fine nose, the bald, broad brow and vault, the great eyes—but the protruding ears were gone, and the seamed skin of face and forehead.
Everything was smooth, smooth and very pale and white, almost bleached in appearance, while the ears seemed to be replaced by a shallow cup in the side of the head. Above and about the Martian’s head, inside the crystal globe, was suspended a network of very fine silver filaments, with cables like spider-web running down into the hidden interior of the purple cylinder. For a moment we stared at each other, then Harvey broke the silence.
“He can’t make sounds in our audible range,” he told me, “but he has a power, telepathy of some sort, by which to express himself. It is a crude method, at best, with us, but I am getting able to identify a few of the more abstract mental impressions—less of the picture-thinking necessary. That sort of thing fags him terribly—like finger-language to me, I suppose—and what it does to me is a caution! But I can talk back at just him a little, when he strains to get me. It’s plenty tough work. I’m afraid you won’t be carrying on much of a conversation with him, Hank. I’ll have to do for both of us. I’ve had plenty of practice in the last five years.”
“Five years?” I wondered. “Wasn’t it pretty, close to five years ago that I saw you last, at the alumni banquet? Then you just dropped out of things entirely, all at once. I guess you’re still listed among the missing in the directory. What happened to you?”
“He happened,” Harvey replied with a smile. “It was just a week after that dinner that he landed, as I reckon it, and two days later I came across him. Since then—well, we’ve had plenty to do. Time went by pretty fast. I’ll tell you about it all.
“You see, he landed in some sort of a spaceship—I haven’t figured just what, yet—and when he was out on an exploring trip he ran across a farmer who promptly locked him up in the silo as a menace to the natural world of Genesis.
“That’s where I came in. You know I was selling crop insurance, and I wanted a look at this fellow’s silo before I’d say anything definite. I saw the Martian, heard what the farmer knew about him, and my curiosity took a big jump. He had sort of attached himself to me, too—felt that he stood a better chance of establishing communication, I guess—and it wasn’t long before he did get his first message across.
“I was sitting in the barn door, with him beside me, when all at once my Eversharp hopped out of my pocket and began to scurry over a piece of new pine flooring. It drew a picture—a map of the Earth—then hovered over it sort of questioning me. I knew what was causing the thing—I’d seen him move a pitchfork once—and I caught the idea. I sketched North America, then the United States in large scale, and put a cross on the place where we were.
“That was just the start. Pretty soon I caught the telepathy idea—it takes two to make it work—and it wasn’t long before I had the story roughly pieced out. Whereupon I threw up my insurance job and hired out as general valet and watchdog to the Martian.
“He wasn’t the first to come, though we have never found any of the others. All went well until he hit the Heaviside layer, then he lost control and fell. His car is deep in some sidehill in west Kansas, if nobody has dug it up, and we’re going to find it.
“THAT’S about all there is to tell. The farmer hit on the idea of selling him to the circus, and I came along as the only one who could talk to him. Between us we set up this show, and it has been making a good bit of cash for the circus, but they’re not satisfied. They’ve seen what his electro-magnetic control of space curvature can do in the way of moving things, and they want to have him hoist the elephant in the main show, or something of the sort. It won’t be long before they fire the roustabouts and have him doing all the heavy work around here! They don’t seem to realize what a mental strain it is on him to do all that levitation and what-not! They treat him worse than a truck-horse! We fixed up this mechanical man to fit around him and give him more sex-appeal, or something, as per the management’s orders, and as a result I’ve had to fake some of the things he could do straight, without the insulation, but there can be too much of anything! We don’t stand for much more!”
“But what can you do?” I wanted to know.
“That’s where you come in, Hank. Between us, we’ll get him out, and somehow find that space-car of his, then—au revoir. I’m not afraid that there will be any general invasion if he gets home safely. He realizes that he has picked poor specimens of humanity for a general sample, but he’s none too enthusiastic about bringing down his wife and kids and settling here permanently, which I guess was the idea in the first place.
“Last year we fixed up a new suit for him and saw some of the bigger cities that we passed near, and from what I know and can guess, he will stick pretty close to Mars when he gets back, and what’s more, he’ll sort of encourage that sort of thing as a general practice. It’s too bad, too, for we are pretty good friends. Well, Hank, how about it? Do we swindle old Prof. Von Tempski out of his man from Mars?”
“We do that!” I answered without hesitation. “I have a car outside, too. It may come in handy. And believe me, if a man like this Martian has been treated as you say, we owe him whatever we can do to help him out! Humanity must seem to be pretty small potatoes as far as he is concerned, and it’s up to us to change his mind if we can, and prove that men here aren’t all boors and savages! From the point of view of relative progress, I guess we’re just that, but we needn’t run clear back to the beasts! Sure I’m with you!”
The light in the Martian’s eyes told me that he understood. I felt that whether we succeeded or not, his opinion of mankind in general had been raised a bit, and that he would be content with our efforts.
Matters came to a head directly. Indeed, it seemed almost as if my coming had been the signal for trouble. As I came down past the six-legged calf, just before the evening performance, I nearly rammed head-on into a big, beefy German whom I recognized by his mustaches as Von Tempski, the owner of the show. He jerked past me and stamped off toward the big top, lashing the air furiously with his ring-master’s whip. I knew at once that something was brewing, and Harvey’s first words were no surprise.
“It’s happened, Hank!” he growled. “We’ve simply got to get him clear tonight or chalk up a total failure. Von Tempski was in here a moment ago, and he’s going to go the limit!”
“I know. I saw him. But what can he do against the Martian?”
“More than you’d think, Hank,” Harvey answered bitterly. “I’ll tell you the whole thing and you can judge for yourself. He wants the Martian to wind up the big show tonight—juggle most of the menagerie, or something of the sort. I told him it wouldn’t go—that it was entirely a matter of mental control of enormous forces locked up in that crystal cylinder, and that no mind can heft an entire circus and not break. I tried to show him what would happen if that force should get out of control, there is that crowded tent! I told him it would be sheer slaughter!
“But he’s pig-headed—thick! He has insurance! He can take a chance! Sure, he can—but how about us? How about the Martian? Hank, we’ve got to get going, now. I said we needed time to rest, and that he musn’t come near us until just before our call to go on. We have till then. We’ve got to hurry!”
“Right you are, Harvey,” I told him. “I’ll bring the car up back of the tent, and you can slip out.” I opened the flaps, stopped. “Come here quick,” I whispered. “And keep quiet.”
He poked his head through the flaps beside me. All the flood-lights were on, making the grounds as bright as day. Lined up before the tent were three husky teamsters, with them a dapper, fish-faced individual who was puffing on a big cigar. He had some electrical apparatus set upon soap-boxes—a Wimshurst static machine and a dozen big condensers. I turned my head. Behind the tent were two more of the bruisers and another string of condensers.
Harvey was muttering in my ear. “That’s Dugan, the manager. It was his idea in the first place. He doesn’t like me, or I him! Look at what he has there—a static machine! Damn him, he has us tied! Even the smallest electric field knots the Martian all up—paralyses his control completely. He’ll be helpless, I tell you! And what can we two do against those five bruisers from the tent gang? He’s licked us without half trying, Hank!”
His voice was rising, almost to a hoarse scream, and I saw Dugan and the teamsters turn and stare in our direction. Dugan laid down his cigar on the edge of a box and began to spin the handle of the Wimshurst machine, building up his field. He jockied the contacts and a fat blue spark crackled between them. I felt Harvey wince. Then something hard and cold shoved past us—the Martian. He hung just inside the shadow of the calf-tent, staring inscrutably at the four figures in front. For a moment he floated there, then whirled, took in the situation in our rear, and shoved past us again into the tent. We turned to watch him.
The Martian was darting here and there among his apparatus, evidently with some definite project in mind. Harvey knew what it was, too, for he gave a little yelp of glee and ran forward to help the Martian, who spun around to face him. There were a few brief seconds of that uncanny mental conversation, then Harvey came running back.
“We’re all O.K.,” he burst out. “Just keep an eye open out there and we’ll be right with you. Sabe?”
“Right!” I replied, stepping outside.
DUGAN and his men were still there, between us and the car. Dugan was looking at his watch. There was little time to waste—the big show was very nearly over. Inside there were stifled thuds and little metallic clickings, then the flaps opened and Harvey stuck his head through.
“Listen,” he whispered, “we’ve got to fox ’em. No question—just you do what I tell you and it’ll all work out later. You go right on out to the car, now, and when I whistle give her all she’s got along the south road. Get me? Don’t worry now about where you’re going—here’s a map, but don’t look at it until you’re well clear of town. Now get going!”
I strode down the narrow aisle between the two tents. The four men saw me coming, tensed for trouble. Dugan stepped forward and blocked my path.
“Just a minute, young fella!” he growled. “Where you goin’, an’ when? Ain’t you goin’ to stick around for the grand finale tonight?”
“I am not!” I answered. “No show for me. Henderson is trying to get the Martian all set, but I’ve got another date. See you again.”
The teamsters had closed in, but at a shrug from Dugan they drew aside, and I walked slowly over to the car, started it, then sat back monkeying with the spark lever. All the time I kept a weather eye on the tent and what was happening there. First Harvey stepped out, started toward us, then bent to tie a shoelace. A second form burst from the flaps and streaked back toward the two men in the rear—the artificial, manlike husk of the Martian. Even in the shadow of the alley I could see that legs and arms dangled limply, and guessed the plan of action. Almost at once, facts bore me out.
Dugan yelled something at his guards in the rear, then tore forward himself. The thin, bigheaded body of the seeming Martian sped straight on, and over the row of condensers, regardless of the barring electric field. Dugan sensed something off color, stopped short, then leapt forward again with a curse as Harvey followed the Martian.
Now came the climax of the whole plan. Out of the public entrance to the tent flashed a squat cylinder of glowing purple crystal, six little globes of vivid blue fire circling it like tiny satellites. The teamsters stood aghast, staring openmouthed. They had never seen the real Martian. But Dugan had, and with the whoop of a maddened Comanche he came fearing down the narrow alley, bellowing unintelligible orders at his-men. In a little streak of blue flame one of the spheres flew to meet him, burst in his face with a dazzling glare of white light, blinding him. With an agonized yell he staggered forward, tripped over one of the guy-ropes of the calf-tent, and lay groveling, rubbing his seared eyes with his fists and whimpering like a scared pup.
I turned my face away just in time. The white flame blazed, three times, then again with double force. I looked around again. Dugan and his bruisers were writhing about like so many decapitated hens, bellowing in sheer panic. The Wimshurst machine was a twisted wreck beside shattered condensers, and the squat form of the Martian was speeding toward my car, its halo of blue moons gone.
As he popped into the car beside me, Harvey’s shrill whistle split the air beyond the tents and the clamor of a starting Ford followed. I spun about, “on a dime,” as the saying goes, and tore down the lane of side-shows toward the south gate at thirty an hour, steadily picking up speed. I could hear Harvey going north in his old bus, and as I passed the big tent I noticed that Von Tempski and two ring-hands were running toward the entrance. Evidently we would be chased.
But Harvey had cared for that. The half-dozen hands, including old Von Tempski, who poured out into the lane of side-shows, saw his old Ford, with the form of the Martian stiff beside him, careen through the gate and burn up the road to the north. Perhaps, if Dugan’s bellowing had made coherent English, they might not have fallen into the trap, but they bit, hard, and we had no pursuers. The way the car was running, I could have stood a few.
Aside from making sure that he was safely beside me, I took little or no notice of the Martian. I could not speak his mental lingo, could not share any emotions he may have had, and as far as I was concerned he was just so much dead weight on the springs. Once out of town, I took a look at the map that Harvey had given me—a road-map, with an arrow pointing to a filling station about thirty miles to the south and west. Evidently the farmer who had so fortunately acquired the Martian had become one of the many—a “tourists welcome, free crank-case service”. It was certainly going to make the place a lot easier to find.
NOW I must explain what happened that night, in a semi-technical manner. In the first place, since it was a circus day, a thunderstorm was coming up, and the overcast sky was already showing flickers of distant lightning. It didn’t bother me in the least—in fact, I rather relished a wild ride along unknown, darkened roads, to the accompaniment of heavenly fire and the shattering drum of thunder. No, I was not at all bothered, but to the Martian it must have been sheer hell!
Any sort of electrical disturbance within fairly close range raised merry Cain with his nervous system. I gather that there are few electrical storms on Mars. The Wimshurst machine had him stopped, and even the disturbance from the engine must have given him his bad moments, but now the atmosphere was supercharged with electricity and pouring it into him with every passing second. He must have been utterly paralyzed before half the ride was over. Harvey told me later that it was the apparatus inside his crystalline shell that made him function as such a perfect lightning-rod. After experiencing one severe discharge during a bad storm, Harvey got in the habit of grounding him as effectively as possible whenever a storm even threatened. Of course, I didn’t know that.
Anyway, here was the Martian draining high-tension juice from the air—there was plenty of it to spare, for we passed right through the heart of the storm—and storing it up in himself and the car. I never before realized the insulating power of automobile tires. We rode pretty high, and the roads were smooth for the most part, so we didn’t discharge to the earth—not for quite a while. And the potential difference between us and the air was much too low for any considerable leakage. The storm itself was of short duration, and the moon was beginning to show itself as I turned into the last lap of our trip—five miles, a railroad crossing, five miles more, and we were there.
We were doing a good fifty on the up-grade to the crossing. It was not a new or smooth one, and we hit it with a tremendous jolt that clashed the rear springs and brought the back end of the car within about five inches of the rails. Five inches was plenty!
It must all have happened in a split second, but I sensed every bit of it! First came a brilliant glare of blue electric fire and a crackling discharge! It was followed by a dull boom as the gas tank went up! Thirdly, the Martian beside me began to blaze with a dazzling white radiance that mounted and mounted in brilliance to a blinding peak, then went out in a smash of shattering glass! The car took the ditch like a greyhound, nosed into the silt and soft, wet clay of the bank, telescoped, and the Martian and I went on through the windshield! I hit in the mud—messy but safe. He landed with a crash that shattered his cylinder and left him fully exposed to the unfamiliar, unfriendly conditions of the minor planet, Earth. There was a sudden flare as the car began to burn, a second blaze of assorted, gyrating stars, and then the deepest, softest blackness imaginable.
I don’t know what eventually brought me to. The car had practically burned out, only its warped and crumpled skeleton left with a few dull ashes beneath. It must have burned fiercely, for my face was blistered where I lay, some twenty feet from it. The sky was clear, and against its pale glow was silhouetted the slowly swinging form of the crossing bell, tolling out its monotonous warning. At the same moment I saw the lights of an approaching car, burning up the wet pavement toward us. This brought me to my feet with a start, and I stood swaying dizzily. Had Von Tempski finally found our trail? Were we to be caught at last?
I never have known. Down the track sounded the warning whistle of the train and the car stopped with a screech of brakes and tires as bars dropped across the road and the train, a long freight, began its interminable crossing.
There was no time to lose—we must escape, and soon! But where was the Martian? The moon answered me, throwing up an iridescent gleam from a chaos of shattered crystal. Just beyond me he lay, on the moss of the ditch-bottom, his crystalline shelter broken. For a moment I stood aghast at the change! For the Martian was entirely different from the domed cylinder that I had come to know! I had realized that it was but a covering, a protective shield against the alien conditions of Earth, but the reality of the creature within staggered me!
There was the same hairless head and blanched face, without the silver filaments and quartz dome, but beneath began a creature beyond my wildest imagination. The head was human, but in the body was no taint of humanity. Directly beneath began a long, tapering cone of dead-white flesh, neckless, with a spatulate lower end like the body of some sea-slug. And to add to the weird effect, from just beneath the tiny chin sprang a tangle of fine grey filaments, like little ashen tendrils, writhing feebly.
He was not yet dead! The moving tentacles and the agonized pleading of his great eyes told me that. The pressing atmosphere of Earth must be sheer torture to his unprotected body. And now, down the track, came the lights and clatter of the caboose. The crossing gates began to rise. The warning bell stopped. We had only seconds to spare! Bending, I scooped up the limp body of the Martian and ducked into the woods beyond the embankment, just as the car bumped over the crossing, stopped beside the wreck, and three or four men leaped from it.
I ran blindly through the woods for perhaps five minutes. At the edge of a cornfield I stopped for breath and to listen for pursuit. The moon was high, and by its dim light I looked down at the creature I held in my arms. It was surprisingly warm—warmer than we, for that matter—for all its slug-like shape. All over the smooth flesh were long scratches from the broken crystal and the tearing undergrowth, and the blood that oozed from them was as red as my own. Above all, its head was human—it was human! Those great eyes were pleading with me again, trying vainly to beat through my dullness, to speak!
I could all but sense the agonized thoughts that battered at the portals of my brain. He wanted to tell me something, something vital! I felt a tugging at my arm, something thin and warm twining about it—the tiny grey tentacles of the Martian. They were trying to pull his body higher, toward my shoulder, where a sizable gash had opened. For a moment I stood puzzled, then in an instant, like a flood from the innermost recesses of my brain, the truth swept through me, and I raised him in my arms.
THOSE grey filaments were nerve fibers. Eagerly they played over the gash in my arm, probed it, dug into the exposed flesh. There was a moment of burning pain when I nearly dropped him, as nerve met ruptured nerve and made contact. Then the pain vanished, and new messages were leaping through my brain, the thoughts of the Martian, poured into me through the connected nerves of my arm. They were vague and incoherent, for I had not Harvey’s skill and practice in interpretation and the Martian could not waste time in sheer picture language. None the less, I received pictures, sensations, even emotions surging through my faltering brain, and I knew that they likewise surged in that little human head and three-foot slab of flabby flesh.
I sensed the breaking of the crystal cylinder, felt the instant rush of the atmosphere piling pound upon pound of pressure upon the weak form, and the rough soil of the ditch gouging the tender flesh. I received the varied sensations of our flight, the lashing boughs and chill wind, but there was more—a calling of some sort that I could not quite comprehend. One thing was clear enough. He wanted to leave here—to go somewhere and go fast. And I guessed that he meant the farm that had been our destination.
I turned back toward the road. Instantly came a flood of negation—protest—and I stopped. Not there, then, but—where? I suppose my unspoken questioning passed over the grey network to the Martian’s brain, for at once there came a sleepiness, a sort of creeping numbness over my whole body, and I felt my limbs crumpling up. As before, the truth found me, and I let myself go limp. But my arms did not unclasp, my knees did not collapse. Without hesitation my body turned and stalked off through the corn. The Martian had taken over control!
That last stage of our strange journey was the most uncanny of all experiences. I had none of the sensations of walking, of holding the dead weight of the Martian, of the obstructions that met our course. I, the detached, mental I, was utterly apart from the thing that had been my body. I floated through empty air, borne aloft by an automaton, a robot, or by the Martian.
Fatigue is largely mental, and the brain that ruled every sensation and motion of my body was the brain of the man from Mars. Beneath my isolated head, the body of an alien creature, spurred by a mind not of Earth, was performing feats of strength and agility that were beyond the utmost daring of the me of an hour ago. Madly we raced through meadows and pastures, hurdled fences in full flight, plunged to our necks in bogs and streams and smashed blindly through the underbrush of second-growth woodlots—straight across the open countryside in a breakneck, bee-line race to an unknown goal.
My arms did not tire under the Martian’s weight, nor did I feel the twigs that lashed us, except when they whipped across my face. To all intents and purposes I was dead, possessed, from the neck down, and the rest of me rode the wind. Yet brain and mind were alive, observing this insane cross-country dash, and by all the gods, they were enjoying it! Perhaps, had l thought of the time to come, when I must regain control of my will and my sensations, I would not have been quite so gleeful, but the thrill was beyond all tempering of reason. We flung at a never-changing pace across farm after farm, and I defy any man to produce a sensation to equal it!
At last we burst out of a swamp, raced across a hayfield, took a low fence, and arrived at what looked to me like a small hill of raw earth. In my new objective role, I watched my erstwhile hands strap the Martian to my back with my best suspenders, then plunge into the earth of the hillside and begin scrabbling and tearing away at it like a dog on the trail of a mole. Apparently there was something in that hill that we—I—wanted, and that in a hurry. Idly, I watched me, eagerly awaiting the results of my hands’ wild burrowing, the head of the Martian staring as eagerly across my shoulder.
The layer of soil was thin, four feet or less in depth, and beneath lay a great hulk of some flame-scarred, pitted metal. Now I knew. This was the space-ship of the Martian, left hidden at some distance from the farm where Harvey had come upon him. Instead of following the leisurely windings of the road, we had come straight across the face of Kansas to this mound of new earth, beneath which something was calling, calling through miles of space to the Martian. At the circus, the distance had been too great to hear it, but as we drew nearer through the night the voice of that which lay hidden there rang stronger, grew until it rang through and through the brain of this man from the planet Mars and summoned him, and me, to it.
THE earth had hidden a narrow port in the side of the ship. As the last weed-grown clod fell away, I was whirling its grips with a sure knowledge of its mechanism, unscrewing it, casting it aside. I clambered into the gap, bending low, crawled on hands and knees through utter darkness, to a second, sliding valve that closed behind us, and on into an open space where I could stand erect and fumble low on the wall for a stud or switch of some sort, then turn it. A glare of light sprang into being. We were within the Martian space-ship!
Try as I will, I can never visualize any of the details of the welter of apparatus that surrounded me. Perhaps a seal of silence was set upon my memory before the Martian quit me. I have only the impression of the interior of a great enameled globe, its interior a mass of silent machinery—great bus-bars running to ray tubes beyond my wildest dream of size, dial after dial and key-board on key-board, mighty engines of propulsion and destruction, and in the center a round screen of ground glass set about with studs and levers—some sort of a control panel. But against the far wall rested a huge tank of bluish crystal, half full of a milky liquid. My body darted to it, my hands threw off hermetic seals with frantic haste, and over my shoulder the Martian craned anxiously.
Floating half-submerged in the liquid, its tiny lips blue, its eyes closed, lay a miniature replica of the man from Mars! My hands lifted it gently to the face beside my own, then bore it swiftly and surely across the sphere to another cabinet, bathed in the roseate light of twin tubes, laid it there on a cushion of some soft blue fabric, and began the expert manipulation of the finely graduated dials set above the machine, regulating warmth, oxygen, moisture. For minutes, long minutes, our two heads stared down at the little form, lying so still and white against the blue cushion. Then its tiny filaments began to stir, flickering over its cold deathly white body, its lips flushed crimson once more and its eyes opened, looked wonderingly about it, fell on us.
For a moment they examined us with a wisdom ill befitting a baby of any breed or planet, faltered, returned. A faint appeal began to swim in them. In response, my hands played again over the dials. Mechanical fingers appeared from the side of the cabinet, proffered a capsule of some colorless liquid, which the infant swallowed. Evidently it was not yet old enough for the coarser diet of the adult Martian. Again it observed us wisely, then its eyes closed and it slept.
We were across the room now, examining the tank. The milky stuff was draining away, exposing a net of fine wires strung all along the sides of the tank. The Martian studied them from over my shoulder, tugged at them here and there with my hands, let a few of its grey filaments play over them. Then he examined the instrument-board beside the tank, minutely, testing every dial and key with exploring, penetrating filaments.
I began to understand, now. This was an incubator of some sort, set to control and delay the strangely artificial “birth” of the infant Martian at such a time as Earth should be ready to receive it. Its delicate apparatus had failed to function correctly, had developed and nearly killed the baby Martian before its mental cries brought aid from afar. My musings were interrupted rudely as my hands ripped a valve from the piping, hurled it to the metal floor with an angry clang, while my feet mashed it to a tangle of metal and fabric. Evidently Martians have tempers as well as men of Earth.
Now we were opening a sort of closet in the wall, taking out one of the crystal cylinders such as the Martian had worn before. My hands lifted him from my back, lowered him carefully into the wire-lined tube, his head and a few thin filaments alone protruding from the top. One by one the grey threads withdrew. Little by little there swept over me an anguish of tortured mind and body such as I never want to know again. The last fine neural filament slipped into the tube, and as the full sense of my cruelly lashed body swept over me in one huge wave of knifing agony, I fell back on the floor, senseless.
Martians are human, despite their unearthly bodily form. He cared for me while I lay unconscious from the strain in the body that he had borrowed and so cruelly used. After a few days he ventured near the farm that was to have been our destination, found Harvey there, waiting anxiously for news of us. And as soon as my senses returned, he removed me to the outer world and delivered me to Harvey, a bruised and battered wreck of what I had been, yet strengthening fast under the healing rays and medicines of another race and planet.
For an instant before he reentered the sphere, he hovered over me. The crystal helmet tipped back and two fine nerve-threads flickered forth, sought the yet unhealed gash in my arm. A brief message—a single picture—then the connection was broken, the dome shut, the man from Mars vanished into the darkness of the airlock. Harvey drew me back to the edge of the marsh, where we crouched, waiting.
The port was closed, sealed from within. Now deep within the hill, began a rumbling, a throbbing as of great hidden engines, and of a sudden came a great burst of coruscating golden light, a crash of rushing air, a hail of falling clods, and the Martian space-ship was gone forever.
One thing rests untold. What was it that prompted the Martian to again endure the torturing pressure of Earth’s atmosphere for that one moment when the connection was made and a thought, a message, flashed through my brain? What was that message? There is more than one answer.
Harvey was never allowed within the spaceship. His scientific knowledge might have made him dangerous to the peace of mind of Mars. As for me, that one moment of contact wiped all detailed memory of the ship’s mechanisms from my brain. Only generalities remain, and with them that last picture that was impressed indelibly upon my memory as the Martian sensed the unconscious, unexpressed puzzlement in my mind. In that brief instant I envisioned an earthly mother, and in her arms a laughing child, and I knew the answer to the riddle that had been stirring my thoughts for many days. “The Man from Mars” was a woman!