"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.
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