Just as the acceleration was reaching the point where I felt I could no longer stand it,even inside the protective grasp of the tube, I saw that Amelia’s eyes had closed and that inside her tube she appeared to have fallen unconscious. I shouted out to her, but in the din of our firing there was no hope that she would hear me. The pressure and noise were each now intolerable, and I felt a lightness in my brain and a darkness occluding my sight. As my vision failed, and the roaring became a dull muttering in the background, the pressure abruptly ceased.
The folds of the fabric loosened, and I stumbled forward out of the tube. Amelia, similarly released, fell unconscious to the metal floor. I leant over her, slapping her cheeks gently… and it was not for several moments that I realized that at last we had been flung headlong into the ether of space.
Chapter Seventeen
A HOMEWARD QUEST
i
So began the voyage which, in optimism, I had expected to take but a day or two, but which in actuality took nearer sixty days, as near as we could tell. They were two long months; for short periods it was an exciting experience, at other times it became terrifying, but for most of the sixty days it was a journey of the most maddening dullness.
I will not, then, delay this narrative with an account of our daily lives, but indicate those events which most exercised us at the time.
Thinking back over the experience, I recall the flight with mixed feelings. It was not an enjoyable journey in any sense of the word, but it was not without its better sides.
One of these was that Amelia and I were alone together in an environment which provided privacy, intimacy and a certain security, even if it was not the most usual of situations. It is not germane to this narrative to describe what occurred between us—even in these modern times, I feel I should not breach the trusts which we then established—but it would be true to say that I came to know her, and she to know me, in ways and to depths I had never before suspected were possible.
Moreover, the length of the journey itself had a purgatory effect on our outlooks. We had indeed become tainted by Mars, and even I, less involved than Amelia, had felt a conflict of loyalties as we blasted away from the revolution-torn city. But, surrounded as we were by a Martian artifact, and kept alive by Martian food and Martian air, as the days passed and Earth grew nearer, the conflicts faded and we became of single purpose once more. The invasion the monsters schemed was all too real; if we could not help avert such an invasion then we could never again call ourselves human.
But already my synopsis of this incredible journey through space is once more taking my narrative ahead of its natural order.
I have mentioned that certain incidents during the voyage were exciting or terrifying, and the first of these occurred shortly after we were released from the pressure-tubes, and found ourselves in command of a space ironclad.
ii
When I had revived Amelia from her faint, and ensured that neither she nor I had suffered any ill-effects during the rigours of the blast, I went first to the controls to see where we were headed. Such was the ferocity of our firing that I was sure we were about to hurtle into Earth at any moment!
I turned the knob that illuminated the main panel—as my guides had shown me—but to my disappointment nothing could be seen except for a few faint points of light. These, I later realized, were stars. After experimenting for several minutes, and achieving no more than marginally increasing the brilliance of the picture, I turned my attention to one of the smaller panels. This displayed the view behind the craft.
Here the picture was more satisfactory, for it showed a view of the world we had just left. So close to Mars were we still that it filled the entire paneclass="underline" a chiaroscuro of light and shadow, mottled yellows and reds and browns. When my eyes adjusted to the scale of what I was seeing I found I could pick out certain features of the landscape, the most prominent of which was the immense volcano, standing out from the deserts like a malignant carbuncle. Bulging around its summit was a gigantic white cloud; at first I took this to be the volcano’s own discharge, but later I thought that this must be the cloud of water-vapour that had thrust us on our way.
The city we had left was invisible—it lay presumably beneath the spreading white cloud—and there were few features I could definitely identify. The canals were clearly visible, or at least they became visible by virtue of the banks of weed that proliferated alongside them.
I stared at the view for some time, realizing that for all the force of our departure we had neither travelled very far nor were now moving with much velocity. Indeed, the only apparent movement was the image of the land itself, which was rotating slowly in the panel.
While I was watching this, Amelia called out to me:
“Edward, shall we have some food?”
I turned away from the panel, and said: “Yes, I’m hun…”
I did not complete my sentence, for Amelia was nowhere in sight.
“I’m down here, Edward.”
I stared down the sloping floor of the compartment, but there was no sign of her. Then I heard her laughing, and looked up in the direction of the sound. Amelia was there… upside-down on the ceiling!
“What are you doing?” I shouted, aghast. “You’ll fall and hurt yourself!”
“Don’t be silly. It’s perfectly safe. Come down here and you’ll see for yourself.”
To demonstrate, she executed a little jump … and landed, feet first, on the ceiling.
“I cannot go down if you are. above me,” I said pedantically.
“It is you who is above me,” she said. Then, surprising me, she walked across the ceiling, down the curving wall, and was soon by my side. “Come with me, and I’ll show you.”
She took my hand, and I went with her. I trod carefully at first, bracing myself against falling, but the gradient did not increase, and after a few moments I glanced back at my controls and saw to my surprise that they now seemed to be against the wall. We walked on, soon coming to the place where the food had been stored, and where Amelia had been. Now when I looked back at the controls they appeared to be on the ceiling above us.
During the course of our voyage, we grew used to this effect created by the spinning of the ship about its axis, but it was a novel experience. Until this moment we had taken it for granted, so accustomed were we to the lightness of the Martian gravity, and the craft was being rotated so as to simulate this.
(Later in the voyage, I found a way of increasing the rate of spin, with the intention of readying our bodies for the greater weight of Earth.)
For the first few days this phenomenon was a considerable novelty to us. The shape of the compartment itself lent peculiar effects. As one moved further up the sloping floor (or ceiling) towards the nose of the craft, so one approached the central axis of the ship and apparent gravity was less. Amelia and I often passed the time by exercising in this strange ambience: by going to the apex of the compartment and kicking oneself away, one could float across much of the space before drifting gently to the floor.