Sleepers Of Mars

‘Not a sound now came from the speakers. As though in a dream, the sightseers trailed slowly into the enclosure. Suggestion? Hypnotism? Heaven knows. But in they flocked, solemnfaced, vacant-eyed; old men, young men, women and girls alike—even the dogs joined the procession. It was as though some pied piper led the way. Then, when the last had entered, the police and the guards followed.

‘In the darkness of the theatre, Mary gripped my arm.

“‘Now I begin to understand what you mean by their power,’ she whispered.

‘As the last guard entered, the entrances snapped shut. Simultaneously, a few yards from the great “transporter,” a dwarf appeared on a one-man “traveller.” Mary grew tense, and another gasp rustled through the audience—it was the first time any of them had looked upon one of those men of the far future. He jumped from his machine and ran towards the enclosed crowd, whose apathetic eyes appeared not to notice him.

‘In a corner of the transporter, we saw for the first time that a small cabin was divided off from the main bulk. We saw him enter it; we saw him turn the dials, saw his hand upon the lever and—nothing. Nothing before us but the empty plain and a little one-man traveller.

‘The picture continued: there was more to come. For five minutes the audience sat in silence or whispered speculation. Then, as suddenly as it had gone, the machine was back again. But, save for the dwarf in his cabin, it was empty….

‘The world was roused at last. No type was big enough for the newspapers, no terms weighty enough for the radio announcers. The casualties—as they were determined to call them—at the sixty-odd stations came well on towards the 200,000 mark. The old cry went up—something ought to be done. The prestige of governments was at stake. The vermin must be wiped out!

‘The members of the Investigation Committee were hastily summoned, and this time received a better, though no more profitable, hearing. A stern-faced official faced me across a broad desk. His manner suspected me of complicity; his method savoured of third degree.

‘ “What we want to know first is, where’s this base of theirs?”

‘ “I’ve told you as near as I can. All I know is that we seemed to go south-south-east from the Algerian coast, as far as I could tell by the Sun. We went that way for about three hours, so if you know the speed of the ship, it ought to give you a rough idea of the district.”

“You must’ve seen some landmarks, at the height you were.”

‘Precious lot of landmarks in that desert—and as we didn’t know beforehand where we were likely to be going, nobody happened to have a pocket-map of the Sahara on him.”

‘ “No need to get fresh. We’ve got to get a line on this business, somehow, and it’ll be better for you if you help us all you can.”

‘ “Well,” I said, “I’ll tell you this. If you ever find that base you’ll have to thank luck, not cross-questioning.”

‘ “What’re you getting at?”

‘ “Just this. Not one of us has any idea where this place is, or what makes it different from any other place that has a lot of sand; but even if you get there, it’s pretty good odds against you seeing the building. Do you seriously think that a gang who can hypnotise a crowd of three or four thousand people into at overgrown bird-cage can’t stop a few pilots from seeing them?”

The man snorted. “When one of our pilots knows where they are–- he began.

‘ “—then there’ll be one less pilot in the force,” I finished for him.

‘Of course, they got none of the information they wanted from us—we hadn’t it. Even then, I had begun to realise that if we knew a whole lot we’d still be as helpless as sheep against men.

‘Italian, French, English and German planes scoured the desert, failed to find a trace of the dwarfs’ lair and brought home their bombs. A report of the position of the base reached Tripoli. Through hurry, the Italian officers in charge omitted to verify the information. Their rocket-shells destroyed a French desert fort. Feeling already ran high against France, who was thought in some circles to be in league with the dwarfs. Undoubtedly, they were on French territory.

‘A French pilot made matters no better by announcing his destruction of the dwarfs’ cylindrical flyer at approximately the same moment that the Germans reported that one of their airships had been bombed by a French plane. Notes began to pass between countries, and the threat of war added fuel to the excitement. It was then that someone at the Suez English base made an inventory, with the startling results that five days of profitless searching showed twelve English airships and nearly a hundred planes unaccounted for.

‘The French, German, Italian and Egyptian authorities investigated, and revealed a similar state of affairs in their own air forces. The fate of all those craft remained a mystery. Solo searching over the desert became less popular, with the result that, instead of single machines disappearing, whole flights vanished together.

‘It fell to an Italian pilot to do the world the worst possible service with the best possible intentions.