Chapter X

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.”