The Story

Aboard the liner St. Louis, officers spot a black shape crossing the face of the sun — a craft moving with clear, deliberate intelligence. It resolves into the Astronef, Lord Redgrave's own vessel. He boards and warns Captain Hawkins bluntly: Britain, France, and Russia stand on the very edge of war.

Redgrave finds Zaidie Rennick aboard, chaperoned by the dignified Mrs. Van Stuyler, bound for London to marry the wastrel Marquis of Byfleet. He never stopped loving her; the news strikes him like a blow, and by the time he leaves the liner, he has already decided this wedding will not happen.

Redgrave invites Zaidie and her chaperon aboard the Astronef for coffee — a courtesy that turns into a kidnapping. The ship lifts vertically and races west long before the liner reaches the English Channel, and Zaidie realizes, with a shock, that she has been carried beyond the reach of any earthly law.

Furious at first, Zaidie softens over breakfast the next morning: she confesses she never truly stopped loving Redgrave, and accepts his proposal on the spot, laughing through her shock. Mrs. Van Stuyler, scandalized but thoroughly outmatched by events, gives her blessing rather than the objection she surely meant to raise.

To cool Europe's war fever, Redgrave stages a demonstration for the liner Deutschland: the Astronef soars past sixty thousand feet on repulsive force alone, hull sealed, crew breathing bottled air in the airless dark. No warship on Earth could follow her there, and every government watching takes note.

Landing quietly near the White House, Redgrave delivers his brother's secret Anglo-American treaty into Lord Pauncefote's hands. Meanwhile Mrs. Van Stuyler charms the President with an easy cover story about eloping newlyweds, buying Redgrave the hours he needs before anyone in Washington asks the ship's real business.

That night the Astronef's lamp flashes across the sky, "Vote for sound men and sound money," as her signal read, and telegraph wires carry it coast to coast. A London editorial warns that one such ship could crown a single despot over the whole earth — and the warning alone freezes the armies mid-march.

Touring America, the Astronef flashes messages of peace from city to city while the re-elected President toasts her as a symbol of Anglo-Saxon unity. Zaidie's wealthy uncle Rennick blesses the marriage with a million-dollar cheque, then rides along as the ship skims past Niagara Falls at a hundred fifty miles an hour.

As the newlyweds finally lift off for the Moon, the Astronef flashes one last farewell over New York and receives an answering signal, "No war. Dual Alliance climbs down," as the reply read. Earth's crisis has passed without a shot fired, and the true honeymoon can now begin.

Redgrave seals every hatch, switches the ship over to her own bottled air, and drives the repulsive force to full power. Weightless, silent, and utterly alone, the Astronef coasts across the black gulf between worlds, Earth shrinking behind them into a blue coin in the dark.

Inside a vast pyramid on the crater Tycho, they find nothing but ancient bones, airless cold, and darkness — no way to breathe, so they retreat at once. Redgrave flies the ship south instead, down into Newton crater, five thousand feet below the Moon's ruined, sunlit surface.

Deep in the crater, Redgrave briefly cracks his faceplate, and the freezing air burns his skin like fire. Below, blind, grey-skinned Lunarians fish a shallow marsh — until a tentacled predator drags one of them under. Sickened, Redgrave orders the Astronef away from the Moon's dying floor.

On the Moon's hidden far side, they find a dead sea-bed strewn with the bones of the last Selenites — no art, no writings, no trace of what they once knew, only silence and dust. Redgrave decides the Moon has nothing left to teach the living, so Mars becomes their next port.

Eleven long days later Mars finally fills the window. Racing around tiny Phobos at four thousand miles an hour, Redgrave and Zaidie photograph unmistakable canals, gleaming cities, and white polar caps — plain proof that someone down there still builds, still lives, still watches the sky above them.

Zaidie dreads what kind of people carved those canals across a whole dying planet. Redgrave, taking no chances this time, arms the Astronef with Maxim guns, pneumatic cannon, and melinite shells before he takes her down into the thin Martian air to find out the truth.

Twenty-five Martian warships rise silently to ring the Astronef, every gun leveled at her hull. Redgrave orders full ascent rather than fight first — but as the ship climbs for open sky, the Martian fleet answers his restraint with a volley of choking poison gas.

Calling the attack caddish, Redgrave outclimbs the whole fleet until Martian wings fail in the thin high air, then dives at two hundred miles an hour and rams the flagship clean in two with the Astronef's steel spur. A second warship dies under her crushing drop; the rest scatter and run.

Descending to a Martian city, they are met by a giant, hairless Admiral in a scarlet sash. The city's very air is intoxicating — half oxygen, half nitrous oxide — and Redgrave and Zaidie stand giddy on the gangway as a crowd of towering, sexless Martians presses closer to see the strangers.

When the Martian Leader lunges at Zaidie with open, appalling desire, she draws her pistol and shoots him dead where he stands on the gangway. Redgrave and Murgatroyd fling the body clear, slam the hatch, and blast off before the rest of the poison-gas fleet can close in.

Fleeing to Venus at last, they find a world drowned in cloud from pole to pole, its one lone snow peak rising thirty-seven miles into clear, thin air. The Astronef lands on that single frozen summit, high above an endless silver sea of vapor rolling far below them.

Ten sinless days pass among a gentle people who know no jealousy, anger, or property — a true, undefended Eden. But Zaidie insists they leave before their own restless human nature contaminates such innocence, and Redgrave, reluctant but persuaded, finally agrees to turn the ship for home.

What it means

Descending through the clouds, they enter a luminous, shadowless twilight land of golden plants and gentle, singing, winged Bird-Folk. Zaidie sings an old Earth song for them, and the whole flock answers back in perfect, delighted, musical mimicry — a language built entirely of melody.

Between the Martian Leader's grasping cruelty and the Bird-Folk's gentle, jealousy-free grace, the honeymoon becomes a mirror held up to Earth itself: power without restraint always corrupts, but a people who have truly outgrown anger and greed have built the one paradise worth protecting — and worth leaving untouched.

🎧 Read-along audio is being prepared — text-only for now.