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 the repulsive force to
half power, and the _Astronef_ leapt up vertically a couple of thousand
feet. Then Redgrave pressed the button once and she stopped. Another
signal set the propellers in motion, and as she sprang forward across
the circle formed by the Martian air-ships, they looked down and saw
that the place which they had just left was occupied by a thick
greenish-yellow cloud.
"Look, Lenox, what on earth is that?" exclaimed Zaidie, pointing down to
it.
"What on Mars would be nearer the point, dear," he said, with what she
thought a somewhat vicious laugh. "That, I'm afraid, means anything but
a friendly reception for us. That cloud is one of two things--it's the
smoke of the explosion of twenty or thirty shells, or else it's made of
gases intended to either poison us or make us insensible, so that they
can take possession of the ship. In either case I should say that the
Martians are not what we should call gentlemen."
"I should think not," she said angrily. "They might at least have taken
us for friends till they had proved us enemies, which they wouldn't have
done. Nice sort of hospitality that, considering how far we've come, and
we can't shoot back, because we haven't got the ports open."
"And a very good thing too!" laughed Redgrave; "if we had had them open,
and that volley had caught us unawares, the _Astronef_ would probably
have been full of poisonous gases by this time, and your honeymoon,
dear, would have come to a somewhat untimely end. Ah, they're trying to
follow us! Well, now we'll see how high they can fly."
He sent another signal to Murgatroyd, and the _Astronef_, still beating
the Martian air with the fans of her propellers, and travelling forward
at about fifty miles an hour, rose in a slanting direction through a
dense bank of rosy-tinted clouds, which hung over the bigger of the two
cities--New York, as Zaidie had named it.
When they reached the golden-red sunlight above it the _Astronef_
stopped her ascent, and then, with half a turn of the steering-wheel,
her commander sent her sweeping round in a wide circle. A few minutes
later they saw the Martian fleet rise almost simultaneously through the
clouds. They seemed to hesitate a moment, and then the prow of every
vessel was directed towards the swiftly moving _Astronef_.
"Well, gentlemen," said Redgrave, "you evidently don't know anything
about Professor Rennick and the R. Force; and yet you ought to know that
we couldn't have come through Space without being able to get beyond
this little atmosphere of yours. Now let us see how fast you can fly."
Another signal went down to Murgatroyd, the whirling propellers became
two intersecting circles of light. The speed of the _Astronef_ increased
to a hundred-and-fifty miles an hour, and the Martian fleet began to
drop behind and trail out into a triangle like a flock of huge birds.
"That's lovely; we're leaving them!" exclaimed Zaidie, leaning forward
with the glasses to her eyes and tapping the floor of the conning-tower
with her foot as if she wanted to dance, "and their wings are working
faster than ever. They don't seem to have any screws."
"Probably because they've solved the problem of bird's flight," said
Redgrave. "They're not gaining on us, are they?"
"No, they're at about the same distance."
"Then we'll see how they can soar."
Another signal went down the tube. The _Astronef's_ propellers slowed
down and stopped, and the vessel began to rise swiftly towards the
zenith, which the sun was now approaching. The Martian fleet continued
the impossible chase until the limits of the navigable atmosphere, about
eight earth-miles above the surface, was reached. Here the air was
evidently too rarefied for their wings to act upon. They came to a
standstill, looking like links of a broken chain, their occupants no
doubt looking up with envious eyes upon the shining body of the
_Astronef_ glittering like a tiny star in the sunlight ten thousand feet
above them.
"Well, gentlemen," said Redgrave, after a swift glance round, "I think
we have shown you that we can fly faster and soar higher than you can.
Perhaps you'll be a bit more civil now. If you're not we shall have to
teach you manners."
"But you're not going to fight them all, dear, are you? Don't let us be
the first to bring war and bloodshed with us into another world."
"Don't trouble about that, little woman, it's here already," he replied,
a trifle savagely. "People don't have air-ships and guns which fire
shells or poison-bombs, or whatever they were, without knowing what war
is. From what I've seen, I should say these Martians have civilised
themselves out of all emotions, and, I daresay, have fought pitilessly
for the possession of the last habitable lands of the planet.
"They've preyed upon each other till only the fittest are left, and
those, I suppose, were the ones who invented the air-ships and finally
got possession of all that was worth having. Of course that would give
them the command of the planet, land and sea. In fact, if we are able to
make the personal acquaintance of the Martians, we shall probably find
them a set of over-civilised savages."
"That's a rather striking paradox, isn't it, dear?" said Zaidie,
slipping her hand through his arm; "but still it's not at all bad. You
mean, of course, that they may have civilised themselves out of all the
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.
[Illustration: _It took the strange-winged craft amidships._]
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."