Then, before supper, I was passing the kitchens and happened to overhear Mrs Huddersfield, the new housekeeper, tell the butler to ‘look into the crystal’, referring to our fresh stock of Waterford glassware, a scant instant before Polly, the new undermaid, exclaimed ‘egg!’ in answer to a question about the secret ingredient of the face paste which keeps her complexion clear. To my ears, these separate voices melded to produce a single sentence, the madman’s ‘look into the crystal egg’.
Lady Caroline is at her sister’s. I dined alone, unable to concentrate on supper. Every detail of the business on the Strand resurfaced in my mind.
I was shocked out of my reverie only by the sweetness of dessert — and looked down into a crystal bowl to see a quivering scarlet blancmange, with a curiously eye-like glacé cherry at its summit. In its colour, the dish reminded me of the planet Mars, and, in its movement, the somehow unnatural hump of the strangely spoken police constable.
Only then did I remember the paperweight snatched out from the grasp of the odious Ogilvy yesterday.
A mass of crystal, in the shape of an egg!
A crystal egg! Could the madman of the Strand have been referring to this item of bric-a-brac?
Unable to finish my dessert for thinking.
September 7: Still later. A great discovery!
After supper, I repaired to my study, where I keep my collection of antique and exotic optical and astronomical equipment: telescopes, sextants, orreries and the like. Signor Galvani’s men have disturbed them greatly while seeing to the electrification of the room.
A new reflecting telescope arrived this morning, a bulky cabinet affair on trestles, with an aperture where a separate lens must presumably be attached. It is an unfamiliar design — a presentation, in honour of my achievements in mapping the night skies, from an august body who call themselves the Red Planet League. I have had my secretary respond with an autographed photograph and a note of thanks. Entering the study, I saw at once that the workmen had mistaken this gift for a species of lamp, and wired it up to the mains. I would be inclined to chide Galvani most severely, had this error not nudged me on the path to discovery.
I unwrapped the supposed paperweight and made close examination of it under the steady illumination of the electric lamps. Cave, the vendor, had mentioned an ‘inner light’ — a phenomenon I soon discovered for myself. It is a trick of the optics, of course — if held up to the light, the interior of the crystal egg coruscates, seeming to hold multiple refractions and reflections.
By accident, when Polly reached into the room and turned off the lights at the wall switch, I discovered the crystal had the unusual property of retaining luminosity even when the light source was gone. I did not measure the time of glow-decay, because the undermaid was fussing and apologising for not seeing I was still in my study when she plunged me into darkness. She whimpered that these newfangled inventions were not like proper gas. I fear Lady Caroline’s ‘indoor lightning’ theory has infected the servants with irrational terror.
‘What’s that egg?’ exclaimed the maid, meaning my crystal. ‘And why’s it lit up?’
I ventured to explain something of the laws of refraction, but saw my learning was wasted on this simple soul. Nevertheless, it is to Polly that I owe my next, most extraordinary discovery. She picked up the crystal egg, rather boldly for a person in her position I might say.
‘Doesn’t it go here, sir?’ she said, slipping the egg into an aperture of the Red Planet League’s reflecting telescope. It was a perfect fit. Before I could chide her, Polly had fiddled with a switch which triggered an incandescent lamp inside the cabinet — projecting a beam through the crystal, which diffracted out into the room. Suddenly, the opposite wall was covered by a swirling, swarming red cloud. Polly yelped, and fled — but I hadn’t the heart to pursue and chastise her.
I was transfixed by the pictures on the wall.
Yes, pictures! Pictures that move! With a faint flicker, accompanied by a definite whirring from inside the reflecting telescope. I had never before seen the like.
At once it came to me that my crystal egg was in fact a crystal lens. When light passed through it just so, the crystal egg — by some means as yet undetermined by science — transmitted images from its interior.
The process was astounding, but I was more overwhelmed by the picture. It was as if I were looking out of a window which floated high over a ruddy desert far from Greenwich. Faintly visible above the horizon were familiar stars, skewed in the sky — as observed not from our home world, but from a body which must be considered (on a cosmic scale) our near neighbour. I perceived the tiny blue-green circle of Earth, and knew with utter certainty that this window looked out onto the plains of Mars.
The Red Planet.
All the tiny incidents of the last two days impelled me, inch by inch, towards this discovery.
I knew the subject of my next lecture, my next book. Indeed, the remainder of my career could be devoted to this. I am Master of Mars. No other can come close. Og must have had some inkling, but this is to be Stent’s triumph — not Ogilvy’s. From henceforth, this acreage of red dust will be Stent’s Plain. In the distance, I saw slumped, worn hills, more ancient than the sharper peaked mountains of Earth — the Caroline Range! A deep channel grooves across the landscape, flowing with a thick, red, boiling mud — Polly’s Canal, to commemorate the child whose unknowing hand urged me to this discovery! Nearby, a gaping pit was scraped raw like a bloody gouge in the Marsian soil. I named this Victoria Regina Chasm in honour of the gracious lady who has bestowed so many honours on my name.
Inside VR Chasm, something stirred. My heart stopped, I am sure, for long, long seconds. Pads like large leaves, a richer scarlet than the crimson of the desert dirt, flopped over the rim and anchored in the soil. These were the tips of sinewy tentacles, which held fast and contracted as a Marsian being hauled itself out of its hole.
What manner of men might inhabit the Red Planet? Not men at all, it seems — but creatures beyond classification.
I saw its bulging, filmed-over eyes. Its beak-like mouth. Its mess of limbs. Its swelling carapace.
The thinner atmosphere of Mars and a colder, drier climate have shaped that planet’s ruling species differently from us. I had no doubt that I was looking at a Man of Mars, not a brute animal. All around were signs of an intelligent species, a civilisation perhaps older than our own.
There were structures — a Marsian factory, perhaps, or a school. The Marsian hauled itself across metal frames, fighting the pull of its planet, and came closer to the window.
I confess to a moment of stark, irrational fear. As I could see the Marsian, could it see me? Did the crystal egg have a twin on Mars?
With no earthly object for comparison, it was difficult to get a sense of scale. The Marsian could be the size of a puppy or an elephant.
It wriggled closer to the ‘window’. Its features grew gigantic on the study wall. I could see the wallpaper, the bookshelves and pictures through its phantasmal image. Then, suddenly, it shut off. There was a flapping sound, and a brief burst of bright, blank light — that died too, along with the incandescent bulb inside the Red Planet League’s reflecting telescope.