Steampunk Prime_ A Vintage Steampunk Reader - Mike Ashley [54]
Thus, by other variations, and by years of toil, an alphabet and a mutual language was worked out. “And at last,” Graemantle informed the newcomer, with a glow of triumph, “from the position in space which our invisible correspondents told us they occupied, we learned that we were talking with the inhabitants of the planet Mars!”
At this instant Glissman’s whole demeanor changed. “A message!” He shouted exultantly, and rushed toward the magnetometer.
The needle trembled and moved. Bemis heard a faint “Thud! Thud!” on the telegraphic instrument.
It was the voice of Mars talking to earth.
The messages that now began to come slowly from that planet were spelled or thumped out by a dot-and-dash system; but Bemis could not understand them until they were translated for him by Graemantle, since they were in a language unknown to him.
The first sentence ran: “Bronson not arrived. Must be lost.”
Bronson, it appeared, was a daring aeronaut, who had made the attempt to fly to Mars in a newly invented “antigravitation machine,” known as the Interstellar Express. He was now some ten or twelve hours overdue.
The reply from Penokee was: “Why do you think he is lost?”
Mars answered: “Local meteors frequent in the path of travel. Our telescopes think he collided. Great regret in Kuro.”
(“What’s Kuro?” Bemis asked. “Their own name for their planet,” Glissman replied.)
From Penokee: “Shall we send off another man?”
Answer from Mars: “Laughter in Kuro.”
(Bemis remarked indignantly, but in an undervoice, as though the Mars people might hear him: “How can they laugh, immediately after Bronson’s death in space?” But Graemantle reminded him: “Isn’t that the way of the world? It seems to you shocking only because it comes from a distance, abruptly.”)
Penokee: “Why laughter?”
Mars: “Because personal communication is so useless compared with that of the abstract intellect or spirit.”
Penokee: “But we have told you so often that we want to see you, and bring back a representative of your planet.”
Mars: “Well, if you insist--”
So much Graemantle had translated, when Glissman, who was listening to the rest, exclaimed, with a mild approach to a yell, and with eyes simply astounding in their resemblance to sunstroke spectacles: “Hurrah! They’re going to send us a missionary from Mars!”
III.
BEMIS’S NARRATIVE
It will be best to continue this narrative in Gerald Bemis’s own words —
This affair of the Mars telegraph and the proposed coming of a representative Kurol, or inhabitant of Mars, was sufficiently startling to make my advent into the twenty-second century, my resuscitation after three centuries of unconsciousness, a mere commonplace. The very strangeness and amazement of the first occurrence with which I thus came into contact made me feel, curiously enough, quite at home in this new period.
There was a slight reaction, however, so soon as I turned in to rest at the spacious but cozy inn attached to the magnetometer station of Penokee. Left to myself for a little, I found that an intense yearning overcame me for some visible token, some living link of connection with the remote past. It was all gone, was hopelessly dissolved into nothingness; of what use could it be to me any more, since I myself was still alive, in full possession of my faculties and with a vast present and future spread out before me? Yet, somehow, that vague, unreasonable longing rose up and enveloped me like a mist or fog, exhaled from some unfathomable gulf, through which I groped vainly for the touch of a familiar hand, or listened in despair for the tones of some human voice that I had known and held dear of old.
I listened. What was that? Close by the couch on which I had thrown myself a voice was sounding at that very moment. “Ah, Gerald, Gerald, I wish I had been kinder to you!”
I could hardly believe the truth; but it surely was the voice of Eva Pryor, echoing after death, through the emptiness of three hundred lost years, and greeting now my sense of hearing as vividly as ever.
“Eva!” I exclaimed, leaping