Starcross Read Online Free Page A

of white sand, its lofty Gothick turrets reaching up through the asteroid’s thin atmosphere to touch the very tides of space.
    The train descended a last long incline, and came to a halt beside a station platform with a painted canopy, hanging baskets full of song flowers, and its name, STARCROSS HALT , picked out in white stones upon a bed of space thyme. I saw several liveried automata waiting on the platform to help us with our luggage, a three-legged water tower looking for all the world like one of those fighting machines the ancient Martians used to employ, and on a siding beyond it a small hand-car standing idle, with asteroid light glinting off its glass canopy. It was as pretty a station as you can imagine.

    Myrtle, however, was still dissatisfied. ‘Mr Titfer promised us sea bathing,’ she said fussily, as we made our way to the door. ‘And yet there is no sea.’
    I knew why she was so vexed. One of the big trunks which the auto-porter was heaving down on to the platform contained her new bathing costume, a very fashionable garment ordered straight from London, and I knew she had been looking forward to a little graceful swimming in it.
    ‘Perhaps the place is still under construction,’ Mother said. ‘I gather it is not unknown for these resort hotels to advertise themselves as their proprietors hope they will one day be, rather than as they really are.’
    ‘Perhaps Mr Titfer plans to import some sea from another, more watery sphere, and set it down in that dry depression in front of the promenade!’ I said, for I wellknew that all manner of things are possible in this great age of engineering and invention in which we live.
    We stood on the platform and looked towards the hotel. Behind us the train snorted and let out a single, shrill hoot before chuffing onward, past the station and on to a turntable where it would be spun about, ready to begin its journey back to Modesty. The station-master automaton who had waved it on its way turned and strode to where we stood, bowing low as he reached us.
    ‘Welcome to Starcross,’ he droned, and indicated a black metal carriage which waited nearby, with a pair of mechanical horses standing ready in the traces. ‘The steambrougham is available to convey you to the hotel, or …’

    ‘I think we will walk, thank you,’ replied Mother. ‘We are all decidedly stiff after our journey, aren’t we, children? I’m certain the exercise will do us good.’
    ‘But do you not think,’ asked Myrtle, as we left the station and started along a winding gravelled path towards the hotel, the porters following with our baggage, ‘that the hotel has a rather silent, almost abandoned look?’
    ‘Oh, that is easily explained,’ said Mother, opening her purse and waving a thick buff pamphlet which she extracted from it. ‘I have consulted Crevice, and I gather that here on Starcross it is the middle of the night.’ 9
    We walked through the starlight of that sealess sea front, looking down over the promenade rail at where the bathing machines stood drawn up in a hopeful line at the edge of that bone-dry bay. About one hundred yards from the shore lay a knoll planted with shrubs and trees, and here and there on the slopes around the hotel stood spinneys of Martianbirch, and other ornamental plantings. All else was drear, dead desolation. It was a melancholic vista, and I felt quite relieved when we turned our backs upon it and considered a more cheerful prospect: the entrance of the Grand Hotel, where gas lamps were ablaze, casting a gentle amber glow down the red-carpeted steps. We climbed those steps, Mother pushed open the glass doors marked ‘Reception’ and we entered into a fairyland of gold and marble and gleaming Martian crystal.

    Do you remember that poem which goes, ‘In Xanadu did Kubla Khan a sacred pleasure dome decree’? Well, Mr Khan would have been as sick as a dog if he could have seen Starcross,because his old pleasure dome could not have held a