Black-Wing of Mars

by John Russell Fearn, Vargo Statten

Genres: Science Fiction; Sci-fi Action & Adventure; Space Opera

Synopsis

Max Harborn and his wife Eva, the first space explorers to visit Mars, discover an almost dead world of endless deserts. Lifeless, that is, except for a few curious Martian moths, paradoxically existing in the absence of vegetation and water. Two of the living moths are brought back to Earth, along with samples of rocks, sand, and atmosphere. But once back on Earth, the two moths, male and female, escape from captivity, and begin breeding at a prodigious rate. The alien grubs are capable of eating almost anything, and soon the world is imperilled by a horrifying destructive plague of the Martian moths...

Release date: March 31, 2015

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 92

Sample

Across the ochre wastes of Mars, those endless deserts with their arid watercourses, stirred a soft, cool breeze. It had the touch of death in it—thin, cruel, and utterly final.

Yet, though mighty civilisations had probably perished on Mars into Saharas of ferrous oxide and granulated rock, one beautiful creature still lived there—the Martian moth. Apparently it was not very prolific, for in all the time that Max and Eva Harborn had been upon the red planet—the first explorers to cross the 40-million mile gulf, they had seen only six of the great moths.

Two of them in particular remained very close to the space ship most of the time, possibly curious regarding the strangers from another planet. It was their very tameness which gave Max Harborn the idea of taking them back to Earth.

“After all, why not?” he asked his wife, a few hours before they were due to start the return trip to Earth. “We came here to get samples of everything we could find—rocks, sand, vegetation if any, and atmosphere. So why not living specimens? The only life there seems to be on this dying world.”

“Why not, indeed?” Eva Harborn agreed, and for a moment she and her husband stood beside the space machine’s bellying exterior and studied the two moths fluttering in the weak sunlight a few feet away.

The two Earth folk were still young—not yet out of their twenties—and reasonably good-looking. The space machine was not their invention: it was the product of an engineer by the name of Holt Laycross who, unfortunately, had died before seeing his creation under test. So to Max and Eva Harborn, renowned stratosphere jet pilots, had fallen the task of hurling the jet-projectile through space—and they had succeeded by pooling their daring and skill.

Eva was blonde, and plump in build, whilst her husband was dark and lean-jawed with an easy-going smile and the brow of a thinker. Both of them were general scientists with specific ability in astrophysics—which was why they had not enough specialised knowledge to know whether the Martian moths represented the actual life of the red planet, or whether they just fell into the usual order of lepidoptera.

“Anyhow,” Max said, as the moths fluttered nearer, “no harm in transplanting them back to home. They’ll have all the expert entomologists by the ears for beauty alone.”

Eva contemplated them. They had bodies four inches long, striped wasp-fashion in amber and scarlet, whilst their wing span was a good six inches, the wings themselves being ebony black. When the insects perched with wings folded, this gave them the appearance of tiny figures with black shawls wrapped about their shoulders.

“Are they moths or butterflies?” Eva asked finally. “I can’t tell the difference.”

“Moths!” Max was quite firm. “They haven’t got knotted antennae, which they would have if they were butterflies.”

“Then why do they appear by day? Moths—on Earth anyway—are nocturnal, and butterflies diurnal. One thing contradicts the other here.”

“Naturally they won’t be identical in habits to the Earth lepidoptera,” Max decided, shrugging. “These insects show up at night as well as day. Remember we noticed them the first night we spent here, with their eyes glowing, just like the Death’s Head moth back on Earth?”

Eva nodded slowly as she remembered, then as her husband motioned she crept back with him into the space ship, so they would not disturb the now settled insects; and presently they reappeared each with a gigantic butterfly-net.

In the ordinary way the moths would probably have escaped, but Eva and Max could leap enormous distances in the slight gravity of Mars, and on top of this both were young and agile. In a matter of minutes Max had “bagged” one moth and very soon after Eva snared the other.

“Not that I like doing it,” she confessed regarding the magnificent, weakly fluttering insects snared in the nets. “I think all wild things should be left free and that all zoos should be blown up—but since we’re supposed to be interplanetary explorers, I suppose we’d fail in our duty if we didn’t take them for examination.

“I wonder,” she added, when the airlock had been gained, “what they feed on? Far as I’ve seen there isn’t a single edible thing on the whole of Mars. Unless they live on sand, or air.”

“That’s a point, Eva, and a vital one.” Max stood thinking for a moment. “We can’t let them die on the way back home. Better get some sand and put it in the storage chamber with them—and we’ll also take a round trip of Mars before starting for home to see if there’s any vegetation we can dig up for them.”

So the moths were taken into the storage hold and there released. They fluttered in the dim lighting but made no attempt to escape as Max and the girl retreated cautiously and closed the door, making sure the shield at the base of it was flush with the floor so the insects could not escape under the edge.

“Not that it would matter,” Max said, returning to the control room. “They could only fly about the ship—but it’s better they stay put whilst we’re on our way. Now, let’s have a trip around this graveyard …”

Together they went through the itemised list of the samples they had obtained on the red planet, and also made a final check on their notes concerning atmospheric density, humidity and gravitation. When they were satisfied, Eva firmly secured the airlock. In another moment Max had the power plant in operation and the normal flying gear with which the vessel was equipped came into use.

Travelling at about two hundred miles an hour through the almost airless heights of the cloudless planet, Max kept a close watch on the deserts below while Eva surveyed from a rear window in case he missed anything.

But in no direction did anything unusual relieve the monotony. Deserts, deserts, and more deserts, all of the same ochre colour, without the merest sign of crumbled colonnades or eroded terraces which might have bespoken a one-time civilisation. Even the watercourses were dry, and the vegetation which had once lined them was nothing but chips and dust drifting occasionally in the thin wind.

“Nice, cheery sort of place,” Max commented at length. “I know quite a few astronomers back home who are going to be disgusted when they learn that the vaunted ‘canals of Mars’ are nothing but trenches edged with broken sticks.”

“Surely there must have been a civilisation at some time, though,” Eva said thoughtfully, her eyes following a dead watercourse until it vanished over the horizon. “Only intelligent beings could have gouged these watercourses, probably still some water is left at the Poles.”

But here again the testimony of Earthly astronomy proved wrong, for the so-called “icecaps” of Mars were actually only areas of lighter coloured sand, narrowing and expanding according to the seasonal winds, and not, as astronomers had so often stated, because the Martian polar oceans were freezing or thawing.

“No water,” Max said finally, as the space machine flew onwards to the night side of Mars. “Mars is dead. So what the moths feed on has me licked. Must be sand after all. Could be, I suppose, when you consider how Earth cattle eat grass. I only hope the months don’t die on the way home.”

To fly onwards into the Martian night was a complete waste of time, so Max switched on the jets, retracted the flying gear, and turned the vessel’s nose skywards. With an ever-mounting scream and a deadening pressure, the machine swept outwards from Mars and into the void, finally coming from the planet’s shadow into the naked blaze of the sun. The return journey across the infinite was well under way again—and as before Max took it in turns with his wife to sit at the controls.

Several times during the 120-hour trip they peeped in the storage-hold, to find the moths still alive, but with the pile of sand noticeably lower. The only answer was that they evidently did eat sand and existed entirely without water, unless their complex organism was such that they could extract all the moisture they needed from the air itself.

Whatever the explanation the two months were still very much alive when the space machine touched down at the Central London spaceport at the close of its epoch-making journey; and for the time being, in the turmoil which followed, Max and Eva completely forgot the moths, the various samples, and everything else. They were wined and dined by the Government, the Air Force, and the newly-formed World Interplanetary Association. Space, so far, had never been flown—and to have reached Mars and returned safely was an amazing achievement. For nearly a week the world’s Press and news services were full of the great Martian Expedition, and Max and Eva found themselves the idols of the world, and the possessors of countless money cheques in appreciation of their endeavours.

Then at last the clamour began to die down. The space ship was divested of its various samples, which were taken to the Physical Laboratories for analysis; and the moths were transferred to a special cage and then removed to Max and Eva’s country home in Surrey.

Here, just over a week after their return to Earth, they showed the moths for the first time to an expert—Morton Stone, one of the greatest British entomologists. With lens and forceps he examined each insect, Eva wincing as she watched him. But for all his apparently ruthless behaviour with the forceps he never once injured them, and eventually returned them unharmed to their cage of glass and plastic net.

“Very extraordinary specimens,” he said, musing. “They can hardly be classed in the same order as our own lepidoptera. Their digestive organs, for one thing, are utterly foreign to anything I have ever seen, and unlike the moths with which we are familiar, these are active both by day and night. Intelligent? No, I don’t think so. Do they represent a form of Martian life? Obviously yes, but they are not, and have not descended from, a higher form of life. In a word, they are not members of a Martian race of intellectuals.”

“We rather hoped they would be,” Max said, disappointed. “On the whole of Mars we could not find a trace of life of the human type, or the remains of any cities; that was why we thought these insects . . .