Calc Starcross - End of the great starfish era

Starcross said:

On a lonely stretch of Martian beach, ever so many centuries before the birth of Christ, a number of ugly, transparent animals were squabbling over the carcass of a giant land starfish, which had been lately exploded by a maritime distress flare. A sudden vibration made them pause, tasting the air with their horrible feelers. They had no eyes,and so could not see the curious old machine which had appeared quite suddenly a little further along the curve of the bay. They had no ears, so could not hear the sound that came from within those massive galleries of ducts and whirligigs:

Tick...

Tick...

Tick...

Tick...

The explosion, according to learned gents who wander the Red Planet in sennet hats and gaiters, studying rocks and fossil sand clams, tore a crater the size of several asteroids in Mars's flank, and ripped a swathe of the planets atmosphere out into the aether, so ending the age of the great starfish in a most dreadful cataclysm.

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Starcross said:

Suddenly Mother said, 'Did you know, Art, that our destination used to be a part of Mars?'

'Do you mean Starcross?' I asked.

'The very same. The rest of the asteroids are nothing but leftovers: bits and bobs which I half meant to build into another world, but never quite got round to. But Starcross is a mighty fragment of the Red Planet, which was blasted out to hang among the other asteroids by some immense collision or eruption about one hundred million years ago.' 'You do not know which?' 'I do not know everything, Art, dear. I was living in the seas of Georgium Sidus at the time it happened. How you would laugh if you could see me as I was then, all gills and fins! It was only several millennia later, when I returned to Larklight, that I noticed the new asteroid, and the crater on Mars which told me whence it came. Look, I believe you can see that crater still!'

And she showed me a sort of dimple on the ruddy cheek of Mars, a gentle depression perhaps a thousand miles across, and quite impossible to connect with the immense catastrophe of which she'd spoken.

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Starcross said:

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 bonedry 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 Martian birch, and other ornamental plantings.

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