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Authors: John Keir Cross
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people could save MacFarlane and
McGillivray? But we knew that the desperate message would never have
come unless indeed, in some alien manner connected with the unutterable
strangeness of life on the Angry Planet, it was the only way.
We trusted MacFarlane; and therefore
we had to act—somehow we had to act—so that the travelers might be saved from
whatever monstrous creatures menaced them—of whose nature we had no true
conception.
And MacFarlane had given us the hint
himself as to how the impossible journey might be achieved a third time in
human history.
Dr. Kalkenbrenner.
CHAPTER VI. THE COMET: A
Contribution by Paul Adam
WELL,
it’s my turn. I don’t know why—they always seem to saddle me with tricky
chapters, with a lot happening in them, and the thing is, of course, that I’m
not a writer at all, really. Still, maybe that’s just as well—I can get on with
things without bothering about descriptions and atmosphere and “style” and all
that. The way I do it is to try to imagine I’m simply writing you a letter and
telling you out straight. So here goes:
Dear
Reader: I’d better start, I think, at the point when we were all stuck there in
Scotland when Uncle Steve’s messages broke off.
You
can imagine the excitement. We didn’t understand things in the slightest bit
(it’s maybe just as well, in view of all that happened afterward); all we knew
was that somehow we had to get back to Mars—Jacky and me, that is, and Mike,
who was in America. And the only hope was to contact Dr. Kalkenbrenner, for we
knew he’d been working on a rocket too, and it might be almost ready for the
trip.
I
can’t begin to tell you the tremendous amount of to-ing and fro-ing that went
on. J.K.C. went into a kind of frenzy. He wrote letters and sent them whizzing
across to America, and the place was thick with cablegrams and telegrams, and
talk about the telephone!—I got to the stage when I was hearing it in my sleep.
Calls to our mother and father, calls to travel agencies to book flight
passages for all of us to go to the U.S.A., trans-Atlantic calls to Mike’s
mother and father and Dr. Kalkenbrenner himself that must have cost a fortune.
And,
of course, the pay-off was when J.K.C. did finally contact Dr. K., that he knew
a great deal about it all already! For as you know, there was old Mike, in his
usual way, spilling the beans and nosing in! We’d known he was in America, of
course, but not that he’d actually reached Chicago and had looked up Dr. K. (he
would!) and was right in the thick of it all.
Well,
to cut a long story short, as they say in books (although this is a book, so I
might as well say it), we got everything taped as far as we could in Scotland,
and then we set off for the south—the whole crowd of us.
And
in London we met our own mother and father, who had come up specially, and
there were tremendous scenes in a big hotel.
“No,
no,” said poor old Mum, “my children my poor children! etcetera—I can’t let
them go all that dreadful distance again, and so on, oh dear, I shall worry
terribly, I worry if they go off for an afternoon by the sea themselves. Oh
dear, to think of them all the way up there on Mars, etcetera.”
“But
what about Mr. MacFarlane?” says J.K.C.
“Yes,
what about him?” I chime in myself, and Jacky doesn’t say very much at all, for
although she wants to come, of course, there’s another part of her that doesn’t
want to leave Mother either, and she’s almost in tears too. . . .
Anyway,
talk, talk, talk, and in the end, with Father joining in on our side, it’s all
agreed—although maybe not just quite as easily as perhaps I’ve made it seem: it
was, in fact, a real fight to get permission.
“Only,”
says Mother, “I do hope they are looked after this time. Miss Hogarth, do
please promise that you will go too to look after them—they need the Woman’s
Touch.”
And
of course Katey was all for going—had been from the start; and
McGillivray? But we knew that the desperate message would never have
come unless indeed, in some alien manner connected with the unutterable
strangeness of life on the Angry Planet, it was the only way.
We trusted MacFarlane; and therefore
we had to act—somehow we had to act—so that the travelers might be saved from
whatever monstrous creatures menaced them—of whose nature we had no true
conception.
And MacFarlane had given us the hint
himself as to how the impossible journey might be achieved a third time in
human history.
Dr. Kalkenbrenner.
CHAPTER VI. THE COMET: A
Contribution by Paul Adam
WELL,
it’s my turn. I don’t know why—they always seem to saddle me with tricky
chapters, with a lot happening in them, and the thing is, of course, that I’m
not a writer at all, really. Still, maybe that’s just as well—I can get on with
things without bothering about descriptions and atmosphere and “style” and all
that. The way I do it is to try to imagine I’m simply writing you a letter and
telling you out straight. So here goes:
Dear
Reader: I’d better start, I think, at the point when we were all stuck there in
Scotland when Uncle Steve’s messages broke off.
You
can imagine the excitement. We didn’t understand things in the slightest bit
(it’s maybe just as well, in view of all that happened afterward); all we knew
was that somehow we had to get back to Mars—Jacky and me, that is, and Mike,
who was in America. And the only hope was to contact Dr. Kalkenbrenner, for we
knew he’d been working on a rocket too, and it might be almost ready for the
trip.
I
can’t begin to tell you the tremendous amount of to-ing and fro-ing that went
on. J.K.C. went into a kind of frenzy. He wrote letters and sent them whizzing
across to America, and the place was thick with cablegrams and telegrams, and
talk about the telephone!—I got to the stage when I was hearing it in my sleep.
Calls to our mother and father, calls to travel agencies to book flight
passages for all of us to go to the U.S.A., trans-Atlantic calls to Mike’s
mother and father and Dr. Kalkenbrenner himself that must have cost a fortune.
And,
of course, the pay-off was when J.K.C. did finally contact Dr. K., that he knew
a great deal about it all already! For as you know, there was old Mike, in his
usual way, spilling the beans and nosing in! We’d known he was in America, of
course, but not that he’d actually reached Chicago and had looked up Dr. K. (he
would!) and was right in the thick of it all.
Well,
to cut a long story short, as they say in books (although this is a book, so I
might as well say it), we got everything taped as far as we could in Scotland,
and then we set off for the south—the whole crowd of us.
And
in London we met our own mother and father, who had come up specially, and
there were tremendous scenes in a big hotel.
“No,
no,” said poor old Mum, “my children my poor children! etcetera—I can’t let
them go all that dreadful distance again, and so on, oh dear, I shall worry
terribly, I worry if they go off for an afternoon by the sea themselves. Oh
dear, to think of them all the way up there on Mars, etcetera.”
“But
what about Mr. MacFarlane?” says J.K.C.
“Yes,
what about him?” I chime in myself, and Jacky doesn’t say very much at all, for
although she wants to come, of course, there’s another part of her that doesn’t
want to leave Mother either, and she’s almost in tears too. . . .
Anyway,
talk, talk, talk, and in the end, with Father joining in on our side, it’s all
agreed—although maybe not just quite as easily as perhaps I’ve made it seem: it
was, in fact, a real fight to get permission.
“Only,”
says Mother, “I do hope they are looked after this time. Miss Hogarth, do
please promise that you will go too to look after them—they need the Woman’s
Touch.”
And
of course Katey was all for going—had been from the start; and
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