THE WARNING FROM MERCURY.
I am Guy Palisse (the message began). Ten years ago--I suppose it
must be that long--I left the Earth in what popularly was called a
Moon-rocket. Any scientific institution will know of me. Whoever finds
this message, I beg you to turn it over at once to some recognized
scientific society.
Particularly I want this to be delivered to the Bolton Society for
Astronomical Research, in New York City of the United States of
America. Dr. Norton Grenfell will remember me. And I want my dear
sister notified that I am alive. Her name is Rowena Palisse. I left her
in care of Professor and Mrs. James White. They can be located in New
York. Or, during the summer months, at the White Summer Camp for Girls,
near Quogg, Maine.
I am preparing this quickly, unexpectedly. At first I thought I would
use my cylinder to send an appeal for help, because we have been in
trouble here. But just as I was ready to start the writing of this
message I have learned strange terrible things which far outweigh our
own personal trouble. The Earth is menaced! Earth's women--particularly
the young girls--are in deadly danger! Here on Mercury these young
girls of the Light Country whom I am vainly trying to aid have
unwittingly been the partial cause of the menace threatening the girls
of Earth. And we learned it a few hours ago.
So my message is a warning! I pray it may reach you in time.
I fear that I cannot leave Mercury, though I may perhaps make the
effort. My rocket is demolished. A week ago I would have said that
there was no interplanetary vehicle on Mercury. I know now that there
is one! But I have not access to it.
I want to give you a picture of what is here--what has happened to me.
These two worlds, the Earth and Mercury, so many million miles apart,
are now strangely linked with crossing, interwoven destinies! When you
understand conditions and events here, the menace threatening you will
be clearer--you will know better how to deal with it.
I have no time to write in terms you would wholly comprehend. So I must
leave much to your imagination.
Ten years I have been here. Until the recent crisis--the whirl of
events which I will try now to sketch for you--I had taken my place
among the people of the Hill City, capital of what is called the Light
Country. They thought I was a god, miraculously appearing from the
heavens. But the scientists, the learned men, the government, soon
accepted me for what I am.
As you know, my age was eighteen when I left the earth. I am about
twenty-eight now. Time seems different here. I have lost count of
Earth-days, months and years. There are no days and nights in the Light
Country. It is in a zone of half-light. Always the same brightness,
except for the weather.
There is generally a pall of gray cloud masses overhead. But
occasionally there are the black storms, when we have inky night such
as there sometimes is on earth. Fearsome things, these black storms.
They last the extent of two or three Earth-days. Sometimes longer. I
shall have much to say of one of them; it has played so large a part in
the events which have brought us now into these dire straits.
* * * * *
My life for the first years was quiet in the Hill City. I worked for
the government, as does every one. The men of learning were much
interested in what I had to say of Earth. I taught them English. They
learned it readily, with their curiously retentive minds, capable of
learning far more quickly than is normal to us of Earth.
I told them all I could of our civilization, our science, our weapons
of war. And finally I was installed in the government laboratories.
They were very primitive at first. But I helped make them less so. My
rocket was smashed. I have worked to reconstruct it; and to devise
other methods of gravity nullification. And I planned and built a
projectile-cylinder by which I might communicate with Earth.
Slow, patient work, for ten years. The laboratories were established in
subterranean rooms beneath the palace of the ruler of the Light Country.
I must be brief; there seems so much to tell you! I can give you
so inadequate a picture. Around the Hill City is a barren waste of
metallic coppery hills. Jagged spires, cañon like gashes filed by some
Titan metal-worker in mountains of metal. Bleak landscape! For leagues
there is no blade of vegetation. No soil, save a metallic dust, worn by
the rain and wind. Pools of water from the rain lie glistening in all
the hollows.
A landscape fantastic. It looks like nothing of Earth, nor of the Moon.
This is the Light Country, the best region of Mercury. It is not all
quite so forbidding. There are oases--valleys where rock which was
not metallic has been worn into a soil. In them, with the abundant
rainfall, and the heavy humid heat, there is always a luxuriant,
tropical vegetation. Great spindly shafts of trees, flimsy and porous,
and air vines, with giant, spreading leaves and vivid, exotic flowers.
Quite a contrast to the naked copper hills!
In such a valley the capital, the Hill City, was built. It occupies the
bottom and the inner sides of a huge bowl-like depression in the great
metal plateau surrounding it. The level floor is perhaps five miles
across.
The level streets, tree-lined, are really roads rather than streets.
There is no congestion of houses. Fertile fields of soil lie around the
homes--each tilled by its controller. The low houses are built of the
prevalent copper. There are gardens, trees, and always a profusion of
brilliant flowers.
The outskirts of the city lie upon the surrounding inner slopes of the
bowl. Boulevards, like concentric rings, circle the fifteen-mile area.
And there are other streets running like spokes of a wheel from the
valley floor up to the thousand-foot height of the upper circular rim.
And an artificial reservoir-lake is beside the palace, in the center of
the valley floor.
Such is the Hill City. Its people, inhabitants of this Light Country
zone, are generally smaller than Earth people. The men average perhaps
five feet. They are often heavy-set, squat fellows, with wide shoulders
and thick chests, but of lesser strength than an Earth-man, so that
though the gravity here is something less than half that of Earth, they
move about much as you do.
But it is not so with me here! On Earth I weigh about a hundred and
forty pounds. That is seventy pounds or less, here on Mercury. I can
run with twelve-foot strides, and leap some thirty or forty feet. The
Mercutian men were afraid of me at first, but they are used to it now.
* * * * *
I shall never forget my first meeting with Tama. Like all Mercutian
women she is winged with those sleek feathered wings which are the
cause now of our disaster.
I am not one to attempt an explanation of the purpose of an all-wise
Creator in thus endowing the females of this world. I think perhaps
there is a logical justice to it. The male is created to pursue, to
capture, to enslave the female. At least, it was so on Earth throughout
the history of mankind.
But the women here are by nature given the means to be free. They
are slight of body, small in stature--I suppose an average height at
maturity would be four feet six inches--with a Mercutian weight of
forty pounds or less. Winged from the shoulder with a ten-foot spread,
they fly like an albatross.
They are free by nature. But man could not let it rest like that. At
marriage, to insure submission to the will of her husband, the wings
are clipped so that she may no longer fly. A cruel mutilation, an
intolerable humiliation.
But for generations the virgins at marriage were forced to it,
in surrender to man's conceit, the masculine desire for physical
superiority and dominance. The virgins submitted, but always with a
smoldering rebellion. I sensed that even when I first came here--a
growing rebellion on the part of the women against this mutilation.
It was always unexpressed. But I saw, with the passing years, how
it was growing constantly stronger; a smoldering hate against this
man-made law. A few of the young men, perhaps, were always in sympathy
with the virgins. But not one had ever dared publicly proclaim that he
wanted to take for mate a woman with wings unclipped. I suppose it was
partly personal pride--the fear of ridicule from other men; and partly
because the laws of the country made such a union illegal, its parties
moral outlaws, and its children illegitimate, to be put to death unless
the mother's wings were clipped.
The rebelliousness of the virgins intensified for generations. Then,
just about a year ago, a leader arose to fire them into deeds--a young
virgin, inspired with the desire to right this wrong.
A Joan of Arc? A warrior? Ah, yes, I have already seen her as that. And
destined to be a martyr? I pray God it may not be so.
This leader is Tama. I met her first a year ago. She was then about
twenty years old. I think I loved her from the beginning, though we
have never spoken of love. From the moment I met her, she was obviously
one who fought against the possibility of love, because to her it
represented mutilation.
There were always men who wanted her in marriage. Roc was one of them,
a young Mercutian newly risen to power in the Hill City Government. A
sort of captain of the army, and chief of police--it is all one here.
* * * * *
Roc hated me from the first--and the hate was mutual. But I taught him
English, and for years answered all his avid questions concerning our
Earth.
I wish that I had not. And I wish that I had had the curiosity to
inquire more closely into Roc's personal history. He never spoke of his
family. But there were tales concerning him. I understood vaguely that
some fifteen years ago--five years before I reached here--Roc's father
had lived in the Hill City. They said he was a gigantic fellow, named
Croat; a clever man, versed in science, but an unscrupulous scoundrel.
Roc was only a boy at the time his father Croat tried to seize the
Light Country Government. Roc's father raised an army. It contained all
the criminals at hand; adventurers; and slaves of the barbarous Cold
Country, that rims the dark side of the planet.
But Croat was defeated. Sent away into exile. It was said he was still
living in the Cold Country--a leader among those benighted ignorant
savages, and surrounded by all the other criminals who have been
banished from the Light Country.
The boy Roc remained in the Hill City, and in these passing years rose
to a position of trust in the Hill City Government. He never spoke of
his father. How could we know that they were secretly meeting? Slowly,
carefully they were planning this thing which has now burst upon us;
but no one ever guessed that the crafty Roc was always merely a tool of
the unseen, almost forgotten rebel Croat!
I taught Tama English--and taught it to Toh, her twin brother, so that
now they speak it fluently. I told them about our Earth. And I recall
how Tama very strangely smiled at me.
"It seems to me, Guy, that the women of your world have had a history
and a struggle not so very different from ours."
I come now to that momentous night just a short time ago when Tama
told me her purpose; and with her brother Toh I became embroiled in
the tumultuous events destined so quickly to sweep us into desperate
plight. And now they force me to send this warning to you of Earth.