I WAS awakened by a slight shaking of my shoulder, and opened my eyes to see that both Whitley and Holland were sitting beside me, earnestly regarding me. When he saw that I was awake, Whitley spoke in a low whisper.
“Holland has a plan by which we can get out of here,” he told me, “and it sounds like a good one to me. But I will let him tell you.” And he motioned to his friend.
All attention now, I listened to Holland’s idea, a scheme that was so daring that it seemed to leave me breathless.
“It is simple enough,” he said, “but I think we three can swing it. As I told you, these slave-monsters, like the two that guard us, are controlled entirely by telepathy, and never receive a spoken command. They receive orders from any distance on thought-waves from their masters, and their brains retain those orders, and act on them, until they are erased by new ones, from those same masters. Now I have long experimented with them, throwing commands at them in my thoughts, and have found that they respond a little, though very little.
“The reason I can’t make them obey my orders totally is simply that my own power of telepathy is far beneath that of the Martians, and so the orders I give them are too weak to cause them to obey. Of course, the Martians don’t know that I, or you either, have any power or conception of telepathy at all, for if they did they would certainly never leave us in the sole care of these creatures.
“So this is my plan. If we all three concentrate on our two guards, who are somewhere in this building, and order them, by telepathy, to come and release us, I think that our accumulated thought-power will be enough to impress their brains with this order, and overrule the order given them by the Martians, to keep us confined. If we can just get them to open the door for us, you two can try to make your way to the tube down which you came, and get up to the crater. Then there is a million to one chance, as I said, that you can do something there to save the Earth.
“My idea is to wait until an hour before midnight, for then all of the Martians are going through their ceremonies in the great temple, and every one of them is in the temple at that time, so they will not be able to molest you, going through the city to the tube entrance. In the meantime, I will try to hold our two guards here by my command, thus giving you a chance to escape.”
“But we can’t leave you here!” both Whitley and I cried, nor would we consent to try his plan until he promised to let us take him with us. At last he gave in, and we planned to carry him to the tube with us.
It was then 7 o’clock in the evening, just twilight in the world above, but we knew the time only by our watches, for here it was day, as always. The hours before 11 I spent in desultory fashion, and regretted as I watched Whitley carefully cleaning his automatic, that my own had been lost as I was carried down into the crater. Why the Martians had not taken the weapon from him, I did not understand, but supposed that they had not conceived us as being able to make and use any very dangerous weapon. I was partly consoled for the loss of my pistol, though, when Holland produced from under his clothing two long, wicked-looking knives of Martian manufacture, which he said he had concealed for a long time. With one of these in my belt I felt armed, at least.
Slowly, dragging ever more slowly, the hours passed by, until it was a few minutes after 11 and we were listening intently for the chanting in the temple which would indicate that the Martians had gathered there, before ascending above.
Finally it came, a low, solemn chant that sounded through the dead city like a dirge, the same as that which we had heard in the crater, the deep, mournful hymn of the last few thousand of a mighty race. We could still hear outside the sound of the tireless slave-creatures going to and fro, but there was no sound of flapping wings, and we knew that the time for the trial of our mad plan had come.
So, at Holland’s whispered directions, we sat and silently concentrated our minds on the two creatures who guarded us, somewhere in the building. We sent the same message to them over and over, hurling it out in powerful mind-waves, ordering them to come and open the door, to release us. Yet no response came after five minutes of steady concentration, and we broke down and spoke to each other in despair.
But Holland kept at us, and said, “Don’t let a single thing get into your mind but the one thought, the one order that they are to release us. And when we get out, if we do get out, for God’s sake hold that thought in your mind as long as we are down here, for as soon as we stop sending them the order to let us go where we want, that moment the order of the Martians will assert itself in their minds and we shall have them rushing after us at once.”
So we again began our concentration, and though the minutes seemed flying now, that had dragged before, we let none of our despair creep into our thoughts but focused our minds on the two things that guarded us, bidding them to come and open the door, to let us go.
I saw the sweat standing out on Whitley’s forehead, and just as I thought that we all must break under the enormous strain we were undergoing we heard a soft pattering of feet at the farther end of the corridor, slowly approaching us. The things were coming at our order!
When we realized that, exultation rushed over us, and we bent all our mental force on the two, making our order imperious, impatient, commanding! And they came nearer and nearer until they were standing outside the door, when we instantly focused all our thoughts on them with the message that they must open the door and let us depart from the building.
For a moment, my heart was in my throat, then there was a grating sound as the bar was lifted, and the door swung open. At a sign from Holland, we reached and picked him from the floor, and carrying him between us, passed out the door, being careful to utter no sound and to keep our thoughts focused on the two monstrous guards, who stood aside from the open door.
With unsure, hesitating movements, the two things moved out of our path and allowed us to proceed down the corridor. We could still hear the chanting from the temple, but we knew that we had but little time left if we were to ascend to the crater before the Martians. At the point where we left the corridor and stepped into the street outside, we almost met disaster, for Whitley and I stumbled on the sill of the entrance and during the moment that we struggled to regain our balance, we completely forgot the two things behind us.
Instantly there was a flashing movement in the corridor, and a swift sound of padding feet as they raced down toward us! But when only a few feet away, they stopped, and seemed to regard us in a puzzled manner, unsure, perplexed. At the very last second we had thrown out our thought-command for them to halt, but it had been a close call. We knew now why Holland had warned us to keep our thoughts on the creatures until we had completely left this place.
So, carrying Holland up with us, we proceeded up the long street, still with our minds focused on the two guards in the building behind, bidding them stay there. We spoke no word as we walked along, and I regretted that we had not locked the things in our own cell, then conjectured that possibly Holland had not suggested it because of their own telepathic powers, by which they might have sent some warning to their masters of our escape. With a start, I realized that I was allowing my thoughts to wander, and again centered them on our unspoken command to our late guards.
All the way through the city we saw not one Martian, and it was evident that even as Holland had said, they were gathered in the temple for their own ceremonies. The chanting had ceased now, and I knew that it must be almost half past 11, leaving us less than a half-hour to get to the crater before the Martians.
As before, there were many of the slave creatures in the streets, but none offered to stop us, or even seemed to notice us. They seemed entirely unaware of our presence, for each had its own task to do, implanted in its brain by its Martian master, and each could perceive only its own particular business. After all, specialization has its drawbacks.
And now the long building in which lay the tube’s entrance came into view, and we hurried toward it, our hearts beating high with the success we had already achieved.
THERE was no one at all in the building, and I made directly for the switch in the wall. When I pressed it, the circle of the wall’s surface slid back, revealing behind it the long, hollow cylinder. It was the same down which we had come, for I had noticed that it was the nearest to the door of the building. How many of the tubes they had in operation, I did not know, but all along the long, low wall I saw the same kind of switches inset, doubtless controlling similar cylinders.
As we were just about to enter the cylinder, Holland pointed to a corner of the room and said, “We must have three of those before we go up. They may save us at the top.”
I looked in the direction he pointed and saw only a number of loose garments of a pale yellow material that were hanging on hooks in the wall. At my questioning look, Holland said, “They are really suits of armor, made by the Science Council for the protection of the guards of the disk. They will turn any kind of ray, and without them we have no chance of getting into the switch-box above. See, they are a complete covering.”
He extended one to show us the hood that fell over the face, and the way in which the robe buttoned to protect all of the body, though they were intended for the winged Martians and were far too roomy for us.
I hastily grasped three of them and we were reaching down to pick up Holland from the floor, when we heard a sound that sent a chill through our hearts. What was that, that soft, racing pattering that seemed to be rushing up the street outside, toward us?
There was a sudden wail from Holland. “The slave-monsters!” he cried. “We forgot them and they’re coming.” Then, as I made to pick him up and rush for the cylinder, “Too late!” he cried.
I had just time to draw my knife when the two creatures appeared in the doorway and rushed straight at us. I was thrown toward one side of the room by the impact of one of them hitting me, then, as I rolled about in its powerful grasp, I stabbed out savagely with the knife, plunging the long blade into the slimy body time after time.
Yet it seemed unaffected and if whirled me about the room as a child would a toy, and I had a momentary glimpse of Whitley, with arms and legs clasped around the other thing and stabbing it repeatedly in the back with the knife Holland had thrown to him, while the creature squirmed and tore under him with tremendous force.
I heard Holland crying, “Stab at the black spot!” But before I could again raise my blade it had been jerked out of my hand by a sudden blow on the arm and I rolled over on the floor with the monster, weaponless. The smooth, powerful arms were being coiled around my neck, and my frantic struggles were growing less, for I was being slowly choked to death. I heard a sudden savage yell from Holland, and the next instant the thing that held me gave a convulsive movement, while the limbs that were choking me loosened. I heard the thud of soft flesh hurled against the wall, then staggered to my feet and looked about me in horror.
A few yards away sat Dr. Whitley, his knife buried to the hilt in the oval dark spot of one of the monsters, which lay motionless beside him. And near by was the one I had struggled with, with a great gash in that same spot, and my knife lying near by. And Holland was lying crumpled up in one corner of the room, where that last tremendous convulsion of the thing that was choking me had hurled him, when he stabbed it in its only vulnerable spot, the seat of its queer intelligence.
We dropped beside him, and he opened his eyes slowly, then smiled.
“The end for me,” he said, still smiling. Then, seeing the tears that welled up in my eyes, he said, “Don’t cry, lad; do you think I wanted to live the way I am? Go on, go on up to the crater! Strike back from the disk——”
His voice stopped, with a sudden intake of breath, and he slumped down and lay silent. Across his body Whitley and I stared at each other and I saw the tears in my own eyes reflected in his. Yet he was the first of us two to rouse himself to what lay before us.
“We must hide these before we go,” he said, motioning to the bodies that lay around us.
So we gathered together the three bodies, and taking them outside the building, laid them on the farther side of the edifice, so that they would not be noticed by anyone entering the building. Already it was twenty minutes to 12, and I wondered if we had time to do anything, even if we could win to the crater’s bottom.
Hastily we entered the cylinder, not forgetting the yellow robes which had brought disaster on us, and once secure in two of the swinging seats, I gingerly pressed the studs as Holland had instructed us, snapping shut the circle of wall behind us and leaving us in darkness once more. Another stud pressed, and the cylinder tilted again to a steep slant, and when I snapped open the last switch, we pressed down against our seats with tremendous force, while all around the cylinder rose the humming shriek of wind we had noticed when we descended. As we rocketed up at unthinkable speed, I wondered if the cylinder stopped automatically when it reached the end of the tube, then concluded that it must have been so constructed, since there was no gauge or anything else in the cylinder to tell how near it was to the end.
I saw the radium dial of Dr. Whitley’s watch glowing in the darkness, and noted that it lacked but fifteen minutes of midnight, and from that I judged that we must be very near the surface, as it had taken us but five minutes to descend before, and we had already been in the tube almost that long. My judgment was correct, too, for even as I saw the little illuminated circle of the watch vanish, as he closed it, the humming wail outside diminished in volume to a whisper and finally died, and the cylinder came softly to rest in a horizontal position.
Instantly I had the end of it opened, and we stepped out into the same building we had entered on our trip down. Striding to the open door, we both stood for a single moment surveying the beauty of the night, a beauty a thousand times intensified to us by our hours of imprisonment in the underworld.
THE stars above were blazing in all their tropical splendor, but they were dimmed to tiny sparks by the immense blood-red disk of Mars, directly above our heads, a disk that was as large as the full moon’s, a tremendous crimson shield that was tipped at each of its ends by a circle of white, the realms of ice that cover the poles of Mars. Certainly in the twenty-four hours we had been underground the planet had increased tremendously in size, and I realized that it must have been falling toward us with even greater speed than the astronomers had calculated.
For only a second we gazed at it, then, clumsily wrapping ourselves in two of the yellow robes, we looped the hoods over our faces, and stole out toward the disk, seeing everything about us but dimly in the lurid light, and through the half-transparent material of the robes’ hoods.
We could see no living thing as we stealthily made our way to the disk, and evidently all of the Martians were still collected in the temple far below, but it lacked but ten minutes of midnight, and I knew that at almost any second they would be streaming up the tubes toward the crater. And it would be short shrift for us, then.
We hurried swiftly across the crater, until we stood in the shadow’ of a small building, near the pillar that upheld the square switchbox. From the slots and openings of that box, light streamed out, and ever and again the light was blocked by the two guardians inside crossing the openings. The globe on top of the box was not illumined, and we could see but little of the crater’s surface.
It was now or never, though, so with his pistol ready Dr. Whitley walked swiftly toward the pillar and I followed, with knife clutched tightly in my hand. The hooks set in the pillar’s sides were close enough together so that we could easily use them to climb up to the box at the top, and we started up the side, Whitley leading. Up and up we climbed, a prayer in our hearts, and were half-way up to the switchbox when a square section of the floor of that structure was suddenly jerked aside and a thin, cruel face looked down at us.
For a moment, I think, the Martian who looked down on us must have thought us two of his own kind, muffled up in the robes as we were, and while he hesitated, we had come to within ten feet of the box’s floor. Then he disappeared for a moment, and jerked back into view with a long metal tube that he pointed directly at us.
A blinding blue light sprang from the tube’s end toward us, and striking us, flowed over our garments like water over a raincoat. Had it not been for the yellow robes, we had been crumbled to a white smear of powder in an instant; but wrapped in them, we never felt the deadly ray. Before the Martian who held the tube could move back from the opening, Whitley’s automatic barked, and the creature slumped back into the switchbox with a bullet in his head.
Surmounting the last few hooks in the pillar, Whitley pulled himself up through the opening, and as I leaped after him I saw him close in battle with the other Martian. I wondered why he did not use the pistol on the creature, but a flashing glimpse of the intricate switchboards and machinery about us told me that he feared to fire lest his bullet loose some of the tremendous forces that were centered in this spot.
As he tossed back and forth in the little room with the Martian, I sprang behind and sank my knife deep between the creature’s shoulder, and was instantly knocked to one side by the wild beating of the thing’s great wings, that flapped for a moment convulsively as the creature fell in his death throes. Standing over the two dead Martians, we looked dumbly at each other, wild and disheveled, then turned to an examination of the apparatus that lined the sides of the little room.
From the center of the floor rose two thick cables, covered with a smooth, black insulation, that led to and disappeared behind a square switchboard on one side of the room. In the very center of this board were two large round knobs, each the size of a small orange, one of a vivid red color and the other bright green.
Whitley examined these closely, and said, “There is no doubt but that these are the switches that control the two rays. You remember what Holland said, the attractive ray is red and the repellent ray is green. I take it that the ray is turned on by pulling the knob out toward one, as they don’t seem to move in any other direction. The farther the knob is pulled out, the more powerful the ray sent out. At least I would think so.”
“But the time!” I cried. “How will we know when to send out the green ray? It can only be shot out at the exact moment when Mars’ south pole is crossing its path.”
“The bell, the bell,” he countered. “Didn’t you hear Holland say that the third stroke of the bell is the exact instant when the ray is to be turned on? And those bell-notes are sounded by other Martians, on the other side of the disk.”
“I remember now,” I told him; “yet what of the Martians while we are sending out the green ray? Surely they won't stand by and see us undo all their work without interfering? And they will be here almost any moment now!”
He watched me for a second without answering. “There is our stumbling block” he said, ‘‘and only you can overcome it, Allan.”
“I!” was my astonished exclamation.“What can I do?”
He explained swiftly. “If you could get to the top of the crater, by means of that big crack in the wall you mentioned, you could get down to the plane and fly back over the crater. I can send out the green ray at the proper time, and then I am sure that I can stand off the Martians for a time, at least. I have this, you know,” and he gestured to the metal tube on the floor, the container of the crumbling ray.
“At least I feel that I can hold them off until you and Rider can fly back over the crater, when you can drop enough bombs on the disk to put it out of commission. They don’t seem to know much of high explosive and its effects, and I think that I could use their moment of panic to descend from this box and get to the crater’s top. Then we can do our best to seal the entrances of the tubes with high explosives, and at the worst, we can leave the island and come back with aid to do it.”
I protested that I would not leave him, but the force of his reasoning overcame my objections, and I prepared to go, unwillingly enough. He scribbled a few words on a sheet torn from his note-book, then folded it and handed it to me, asking me to give it to the pilot, and I thrust it into my pocket.
Stepping over the dead Martians, I lowered myself through the opening in the floor, but when I was half-way through the opening, I stopped and extended a hand to Whitley, who shook it in a silent grasp. No words we said, but all the way down the pillar I could see his gentle face above, watching my progress. As I stepped to the ground, he waved his hand in a gesture of good-will and farewell, and then snapped shut the opening in the floor, evidently turning his attention to the things in the switchbox. And immediately I started to run across the surface of the crater toward the crack in its wall, expecting every moment to hear the sound of the Martians emerging from beneath, for it was almost midnight.
ACROSS the great crater I ran, and sobbed with relief when I reached its eastern wall. Along that wall I raced, until I stood at the lower end of a crack I had noticed, a colossal slanting crevice that reached to the very top of the volcanic pit. I was just starting up this, when the globe of blue light on top of the switchbox flashed out, illumining the crater with its thin wavering light. I knew that Whitley had turned it on, and I knew too that it was a sign that the Martians had reached the crater from their world far beneath, so I prayed that they might not notice me as I scrambled up the giant crack.
Up I went, clambering, climbing, bruising myself on the sharp lava, and I was half-way up the crater’s wall before the first bell-note rang out. It rolled up toward me in a thick wave of beating sound, and I half stopped for a second, to look behind.
The Martians were clustered thickly around the great disk, and I saw that they were evidently contemplating the huge, crimson planet that hung directly above. I glanced at it too, as I clawed my way upward, and in my heart prayed that Holland had been right in estimating the power of the green ray to throw the planet back.
Again the bell sounded, and by now I was very near the volcano’s top, though it was hard for me to judge my position. The chanting began, swelled out, and died away, and as it began again, my hands gripped the very top edge of the crater's wall, and I pulled myself up and lay for a minute, exhausted and breathless.
The third note of the great bell clanged, and I turned swiftly toward the crater, just in time to see a blinding shaft of green light stab out from the disk’s surface into the zenith, a column of emerald fire that was the essence of all green, as the red ray had been the seeming essence of that color. It was the defiance, the answer, of Dr. Whitley! And of the Earth!
There was no triumphant chanting now! A loud humming reached my ears, as of a hive of bees disturbed, angry, menacing. I could see the crowds of Martians swarming wildly about the pillar and the box it supported. As a number of them began to climb up the pillar, the blue ray of death flashed out from inside the box and cut a wide swath through their numbers, reducing those it touched to white powder in an instant!
I saw, too, why the hooks on the pillar had been used to enter the box, instead of the Martians’ wings, for several of the Martians who flew up toward the box ventured too close to the disk, and were instantly flashed into nothing by the green ray, the awful concentrated power of Earth’s southern pole!
I looked up at Mars and then shouted aloud with exultation, for on its white-tipped southern pole a tiny spot of brilliant green stood out like a dazzling emerald. Another glance at the hordes of Martians swarming about the pillar, and I remembered my own mission and turned and sped down the volcano’s slope toward the shore. I was half-way down the slope when the green ray snapped out behind me.
But I knew that its work was done! Dr. Whitley had flung the full force of the repellent ray against the nearing planet, and if we could destroy the disk now, there would be no danger of the Martians attracting it again with the opposite ray.
As I ran I could still hear the angry humming from the crater, and I hoped fervently that we could get back to the volcano in the plane soon enough to save Dr. Whitley.
I had almost reached the volcano’s bottom when a mighty convulsion shook the whole island to its foundations, throwing me violently to the ground, while a wave of scorching, stifling heat rolled down over me from the crater above.
I jumped to my feet and looked behind me, then stood petrified by the sight that met my eyes. For a vast fountain of green and crimson fire seemed to be shooting up from the crater’s interior, whirling, brilliant rays whose electric force I could feel even where I stood, and whose intense heat made it almost impossible for me to breathe.
A moment the crater continued thus, a whirlpool of released electricity, then the whole sides, the great walls of the crater crashed down into it, burying all in it under thousands of tons of rock. And I knew what had happened! I knew!
Whitley had turned on both the attractive and repellent rays at the same time, and even as Holland had predicted, the effect of that concentration of all Earth’s magnetic power in one spot, that colossal magnetic short-circuit, had been to snuff out all life in the crater like a moth in a candle, and to rend the volcano itself like an ant-hill.
I remembered the note Whitley had given me, and I opened and read it by the lurid red light of the planet above, and even as I had expected, it was written for me, and not the pilot.
“Dear Allan,” ran the hastily scribbled words, “when you read this I shall not be living, for I have resolved to wipe out these Martians once and for all in the way Holland suggested, for if I do not, they will surely continue to plot against the Earth. To accomplish this, I must die myself, but you need not, so I am sending you on a false errand for your own sake, since you would not leave me if you knew the truth. One man’s life is a small price to pay for the life of a world, and I pay it gladly. I have no time to write more. Good-bye, Allan!”
So the note, and as I read it the tears streamed down my face. And as I ran on down the slope, between the dark, giant statues, my tears were still falling and I saw but dimly through them the white, anxious face of Lieutenant Rider, as he ran toward me. Then, for me, came a merciful unconsciousness.
TODAY, at the very tip of the Golden Gate, there stands a colossal statue, the figure of a thin, kindly man who gazes ever south across the Pacific. Never a steamer passes out the bay but salutes it with screaming whistle; and when the great liners slip past, the gay chatter on deck halts, and there is a moment’s tearful silence that is a reverent memory of the man whose effigy it is. For he saved our world.
One hand of that statue is flung up toward the heavens in a superb gesture, as if pointing to the tiny, gleaming speck that is Mars at night, a Mars that we can hardly see now. And it was that hand that hurled the planet back into space, back so far that it fell into the attraction of Jupiter, and now circles that giant world forever as a moon, never again to be a menace to us.
Only today I stood at the foot of that great figure, the testimony of a world’s gratitude, and looked out over the gray ocean with it, seeing in my mind’s eye the lonely little island, and the strange world far beneath it, where three men strove against the creatures of hell who would have wrecked this Earth. Three men! One of them lies in the strange, dead city of the Martians, a city dead forever, now; and another, who is now the world’s greatest hero, rests beneath the shattered ruins of Rano Kao; and I, the last and least of the three, stand beneath the statue of my friend, thinking, remembering.
On Easter Island there are statues standing, too, but the last remnant of the race that carved them is gone now, buried in the same tomb as their destroyer. The long ages passed, the year, the day came that saw that race almost triumphant, almost supreme; then, at the last moment, their work, their evil plans, themselves, were dashed down to nothingness by the hand and heart and great soul of one man. But, not knowing this, the statues on the grassy slopes still gaze expectantly out to sea.