But ironically time – always a fascinating subject for speculation by him – was running out for this typical English gentleman. Amiable, erudite, astringently humorous on occasion, he was, in the same way that the gentle Boris Kar-loff portrayed his film monsters, able to depict the nightmares of humanity with frightening realism, made the more deadly by his masterly precision of detail. To his great gift for story-telling he brought a lively intellect and a fertile imagination.
I am glad to be numbered among the many, many thousands of his readers whose ‘sense of wonder’ has been satisfactorily indulged by a writer whose gift to posterity is the compulsive readability of his stories of which this present volume is an essential part.
— LESLIE FLOOD
“Father, here, quickly,” Joan's voice called down the long corridor. Dr. Falkner, who was writing, checked himself in mid-sentence at the sound of his daughter's urgency.
“Father,” she called again.
“Coming,” he shouted as he hastily levered himself out of his easy-chair.
“This way,” he added for the benefit of his two companions.
Joan was standing at the open door of the laboratory.
“It's gone,” she said.
“What do you mean?” he inquired brusquely as he brushed past her into the room. “Run away?”
“No, not that,” Joan's dark curls fell forward as her head shook. “Look there.”
He followed the line of her pointing finger to the corner of the room.
A pool of liquid metal was seeping into a widening circle. In the middle there rose an elongated, silvery mound which seemed to melt and run even as he looked. Speechlessly he watched the central mass flow out into the surrounding fluid, pushing the edges gradually farther and farther across the floor.
Then the mound was gone – nothing lay before him but a shapeless spread of glittering silver like a miniature lake of mercury.
For some moments the doctor seemed unable to speak. At length he recovered himself sufficiently to ask hoarsely:
“That – that was it?”
Joan nodded.
“It was recognizable when I first saw it,” she said.
Angrily he turned upon her.
“How did it happen? Who did it?” he demanded.
“I don't know,” the girl answered, her voice trembling a little as she spoke. “As soon as I got back to the house I came in here just to see that it was all right. It wasn't in the usual corner and as I looked around I caught sight of it over here – melting. I shouted for you as soon as I realized what was happening.”
One of the doctor's companions stepped from the background.
“This,” he inquired, “is – was the machine you were telling us about?”
There was a touch of a sneer in his voice as he put the question and indicated the quivering liquid with the toe of one shoe.
“Yes,” the doctor admitted slowly. “That was it.”
“And, therefore, you can offer no proof of the talk you were handing out to us?” added the other man.
“We've got film records,” Joan began tentatively. “They're pretty good...”
The second man brushed her words aside.
“Oh yes,” he asked sarcastically. “I've seen pictures of New York as it's going to look in a couple of hundred years, but that don't mean that anyone went there to take 'em. There's a whole lot of things that can be done with movies,” he insinuated.
Joan flushed, but kept silent. The doctor paid no attention. His brief flash of anger had subsided to leave him gazing at the remains before him.
“Who can have done it?” he repeated half to himself.
His daughter hesitated for a moment before she suggested :
“I think – I think it must have done it itself.”
“An accident? – I wonder,” murmured the doctor.
“No – no, not quite that,” she amended. “I think it was – lonely,' the last word came out with a defiant rush.
There was a pause.
“Well, can you beat that?” said one of the others at last. “Lonely – a lonely machine: that's a good one. And I suppose you're trying to feed us that it committed suicide, Miss? Well, it wouldn't surprise me any; nothing would, after the story your father gave us.”
He turned on his heel and added to his companion:
“Come on. I guess someone'll be turnin' this place into a sanitarium soon – we'd better not be here when it happens.”
With a laugh the two went out, leaving father and daughter to stare helplessly at the residue of a vanished machine.
At length Joan sighed and moved away. As she raised her eyes, she became aware of a pile of paper on the corner of a bench. She did not remember how it came to be there and crossed with idle curiosity to examine it.
The doctor was aroused from his reverie by the note of excitement in her voice.
“Look here, Father,” she called sharply.
“What's that?” he asked, catching sight of the wad of sheets in her hand.
As he came closer he could see that the top one was covered with strange characters.
“What on earth...?” he began.
Joan's voice was curt with his stupidity.
“Don't you see?” she cried. “It's written this for us.”
The doctor brightened for a moment; then the expression of gloom returned to his face.
“But how can we...?”
“The thing wasn't a fool – it must have learned enough of our language to put a key in somewhere to all this weird stuff, even if it couldn't write the whole thing in English. Look, this might be it, it looks even queerer than the rest.”
Several weeks of hard work followed for Joan in her efforts to decipher the curious document, but she held on with painstaking labour until she was able to lay the complete text before her father. That evening he picked up the pile of typed sheets and read steadily, without interruption, to the end...
ARRIVAL
As we slowed to the end of our journey, Banuff began to show signs of excitement.
“Look,” he called to me. “The third planet, at last.”
I crossed to stand beside him and together we gazed down upon a stranger scene than any other fourth planet eyes have ever seen.
Though we were still high above the surface, there was plenty to cause us astonishment.
In place of our own homely red vegetation, we beheld a brilliant green. The whole land seemed to be covered with it. Anywhere it clung and thrived as though it needed no water. On the fourth planet, which the third planet men call Mars, the vegetation grows only in or around the canals, but here we could not even see any canals. The only sign of irrigation was one bright streak of water in the distance, twisting senselessly over the countryside – a symbolic warning of the incredible world we had reached.
Here and there our attention was attracted by outcroppings of various strange rocks amid all this green. Great masses of stone which sent up plumes of black smoke.
“The internal fires must be very near the surface of this world,” Banuff said, looking doubtfully at the rising vapours.
“See in how many places the smoke breaks out. I should doubt whether it has been possible for animal life to evolve on such a planet. It is possible yet that the ground may be too hot for us – or rather for me.”
There was a regret in his tone. The manner in which he voiced the last sentence stirred my sympathy. There are so many disadvantages in human construction which do not occur in us machines, and I knew that he was eager to obtain first-hand knowledge of the third planet.