The Martians Read online

  “I suppose we should go higher.” Roger sighed. “Although I thought I saw him back when we brought the wagon down here, and I doubt he'd go back up.”

  Suddenly Eileen's earphones crackled. "Pss ftunk bdzz," and it was clear again. “Ckk ssss ger, lo! ckk.”

  “Sounds like he may have indeed gone high,” Roger said with satisfaction, and, Eileen noticed, just a touch of relief. “Hey, John! Nobleton! Do you read us?”

  “Ckk sssssssss yeah, hey! sssss kuh sssss.”

  “We read you badly, John! Keep moving, keep talking! Are you all—”

  “Roger! ckk. Hey, Roger!”

  “John! We read you, are you all right?”

  “. . .sssss not exactly sure where I am.”

  “Are you all right?”

  “Yes! Just lost.”

  “Well not anymore, we hope. Tell us what you see.”

  “Nothing!”

  So began the long process of locating him and bringing him back. Eileen ranged left and right on her own, helping to get a fix on John, who had been instructed to stay still and keep talking.

  “You won't believe it.” John's voice was entirely free of fear; in fact, he sounded elated. “You won't believe it, Eileen, Roger. crk! Just before the storm hit I was way off down a tributary to the south, and I found...”

  “Found what?”

  “Well . . . I've found some things I'm sure must be fossils. I swear! A whole rock formation of them!”

  “Oh yeah?”

  “No seriously, I've got some with me. Very small shells, like little sea snails, or crustacea. Miniature nautiloids, like. They just couldn't be anything else. I have a couple in my pocket, but there's a whole wall of them back there! I figure if I just left I wouldn't be able to find the same canyon ever again, what with this storm, so I built a duck trail on the way back over to the main canyon, if that's where I am. So it took me a while to get back in radio clear.”

  “What color are they?” Ivan asked from below.

  “You down there, be quiet,” Roger ordered. “We're still trying to find him.”

  “We'll be able to get back to the site. Eileen, can you believe it? We'll all be—Hey!”

  “It's just me,” Roger said.

  “Ah! You gave me a start, there.”

  Eileen smiled as she imagined John startled by the ghostlike appearance of the lanky, suited Roger. Soon enough Roger had led John downcanyon to Eileen, and after John hugged her, they proceeded down the canyon to Dr. Mitsumu, who again led them up the slope to the tent, which rested at a sharper angle than Eileen had recalled.

  Once inside, the reunited group chattered for an hour concerning their adventure, while Roger showered and got the wagon on an even keel, and John revealed the objects he had brought back with him:

  Small shell-shaped rocks, some held in crusts of sandstone. Each shell had a spiral swirl on its inside surface, and they were mottled red and black. By and large they were black.

  They were unlike any rocks Eileen had ever seen; they looked exactly like the few Terran shells she had seen in school. Seeing them there in John's hand, she caught her breath. Life on Mars; even if only fossil traces of it, life on Mars. She took one of the shells from John and stared and stared at it. It very well could be....

  They had to arrange their cots across the slope of the tent floor and prop them level with clothes and other domestic objects from the wagon. Long after they were settled they discussed John's discovery, and Eileen found herself more and more excited by the idea of it. The sand pelting the tent soundlessly only made its presence known by the complete absence of stars. She stared at the faint curved reflection of them all on the dome's surface, and thought of it. The Clayborne Expedition, in the history books. And Martian life. . . . The others talked and talked.

  “So we'll go there tomorrow, right?” John asked Roger. The tilt of the tent made it impossible for Roger to set up his bedroom.

  “Or as soon as the storm ends, sure.” Roger had only glanced at the shells, shaking his head and muttering, “I don't know, don't get your hopes up too high.” Eileen wondered about that. “We'll follow that duck trail of yours, if we can.” Perhaps he was jealous of John now?

  On and on they talked. Yet the hunt had taken it out of Eileen; to the sound of their voices she suddenly fell asleep.

  She woke up when her cot gave way and spilled her down the floor; before she could stop herself, she had rolled over Mrs. Mitsumu and John. She got off John quickly and saw Roger over at the wagon, smiling down at the gauges. Her cot had been by the wagon; had he yanked out some crucial item of clothing? There was something of the prankster in the man. . .

  The commotion woke the rest of the sleepers. Immediately the conversation returned to the matter of John's discovery, and Roger agreed that their supplies were sufficient to allow a trip back upcanyon. And the storm had stopped; dust coated their dome, and was piled half a centimeter high on its uphill side, but they could see that the sky was clear. So after breakfast they suited up, more awkward than ever on the tilted floor, and emerged from their shelter.

  The distance back up to where they had met John was much shorter than it had seemed to Eileen in the storm. All of their tracks had been covered, even the sometimes deep treadmarks of the wagon. John led the way, leaping upward in giant bounds that were almost out of his control.

  “There's the gendarme where we found you,” Roger said from below, pointing to the spine on their right for John's benefit. John waited for them, talking nervously all the while. “There's the first duck,” he told them. “I see it way over there, but with all the sand, it looks almost like any other mound. This could be hard.”

  “We'll find them,” Roger assured him.

  When they had all joined John, they began to traverse the canyons to the south, each one a deep multifingered trench in the slope of Mars facing Olympus Mons. John had very little sense of where he had been, except that he had not gone much above or below the level they were on. Some of the ducks were hard to spot, but Roger had quite a facility for it, and the others spotted some as well. More than once none of them saw it, and they had to trek off in nine slightly different directions, casting about in hopes of running into it. Each time someone would cry, “Here it is,” as if they were children hunting Easter eggs, and they would convene and search again. Only once were they unable to locate the next duck, and then Roger pumped John's memory of his hike; after all, as Ivan pointed out, it had been the full light of day when he walked to the site. A crestfallen John admitted that, each little red canyon looking so much like the next one, he couldn't really recall where he had gone from there.

  “Well, but there's the next duck,” Roger said with surprise, pointing at a little niche indicating a side ravine. And after they had reached the niche John cried, “This is it! Right down this ravine, in the wall itself. And some of them have fallen.”

  The common band was a babble of voices as they dropped into the steep-sided ravine one by one. Eileen stepped down through the narrow entrance and confronted the nearly vertical south wall. There, embedded in hard sandstone, were thousands of tiny black stone snail shells. The bottom of the ravine was covered with them; all of them were close to the same size, with holes that opened into the hollow interior of the shells. Many of them were broken, and inspecting some fragments, Eileen saw the spiral ribbing that so often characterized life. Her earphones rang with the excited voices of her companions. Roger had climbed the canyon wall and was inspecting a particular section, his faceplate only centimeters from stone. “See what I mean?” John was asking. “Martian snails! It's like those fossil bacterial mats they talk about, only further advanced. Back when Mars had surface water and an atmosphere, life did begin. It just didn't have time to get very far.”

  “Nobleton snails,” Cheryl said, and they laughed. Eileen picked up fragment after fragment, her excitement growing. They were all very similar. She was taxing her suit's cooling system, starting to sweat. She examined a well-pres
erved specimen carefully, pulling it out of the rock to do so. The common band was distractingly noisy, and she was about to turn it off when Roger's voice said slowly, “Uh-ohh. . . . Hey, people. Hey.”

  When it was silent he said hesitantly, “I hate to spoil the party, but . . . these little things aren't fossils.”

  “What?”

  “What do you mean?” John and Ivan challenged. “How do you know?”

  “Well, there are a couple reasons,” Roger said. Everyone was still now, and watching him. “First, I believe that fossils are created by a process that requires millions of years of water seepage, and Mars never had that.”

  “So we think now,” Ivan objected. “But it may not be so, because it's certain that there was water on Mars all along. And after all, here are these things.”

  “Well . . .” Eileen could tell he was deciding to let that argument pass. “Maybe you're right, but a better reason is, I think I know what these are. They're lava pellets—bubble pellets, I've heard them called—although I've never seen ones this small. Little lava bombs from one of the Olympus Mons eruptions. A sort of spray.”

  Everyone stared at the objects in their hands.

  “See, when lava pellets land hot in a certain sort of sand, they sink right through it and melt the sand fast, releasing gas that forms the bubble, and these glassy interiors. When the pellet is spinning, you get these spiral chambers. So I've heard, anyway. It must have happened on a flat plain long ago, and when the whole plain tilted and started falling down this slope, these layers broke up and were buried by later deposits.”

  “I don't believe that's necessarily so,” John declared, while the others looked at the wall. But even he sounded pretty convinced to Eileen.

  “Of course we'll have to take some back to be sure,” Roger agreed in a soothing tone.

  “Why didn't you tell us this last night?” Eileen asked.

  “Well, I couldn't tell till I had seen the rock they were in. But this is lava-sprayed sandstone, they call it. That's why it's so hard in its upper layers. But you're an areologist, right?” He wasn't mocking. “Don't they look like they're made of lava?”

  Eileen nodded, reluctantly. “Looks like it.”

  “Well, lava doesn't make fossils.”

  Half an hour later a dispirited group was stretched out over the duck trail, straggling along in silence. John and Ivan trailed far behind, weighted down by several kilos of lava pellets. Pseudofossils, as both areologists and geologists called them. Roger was ahead, talking with the Mitsumus, attempting to cheer them all up, Eileen guessed. She felt bad about not identifying the rock the previous night. She felt more depressed than she could easily account for, and it made her angry. Everything was so empty out here, so meaningless, so without form. . .

  “Once I thought I had found traces of aliens,” Roger was saying. “I was off by myself around the other side of Olympus, hiking canyons as usual, except I was by myself. I was crossing really broken fretted terrain, when suddenly I came across a trail duck. Stones never stack up by themselves. Now the Explorer's Society keeps a record of every single hike and expedition, you know, and I had checked before and I knew I was in fresh territory, just like we are now. No humans had ever been in that part of the badlands, as far as the Society knew. Yet here was this duck. And I started finding other ones right away. Set not in a straight line, but zigzagging, tacking like. And little. Tiny piles of flat rock, four or five high. Like they were set up by little aliens who saw best out of the sides of their eyes.”

  “You must have been astounded,” Mrs. Mitsumu said.

  “Exactly. But, you know—there were three possibilities. It was a natural rock formation—extremely unlikely, but it could be that breadloaf formations had slid onto their sides and then been eroded into separate pieces, still stacked on each other. Or they were set up by aliens. Also unlikely, in my opinion. Or someone had hiked through there without reporting it, and had played a game, maybe, for someone later to find. To me, that was the most likely explanation. But for a while there . . .”

  “You must have been disappointed,” said Mrs. Mitsumu.

  “Oh no,” Roger replied easily. “More entertained than anything, I think.”

  Eileen stared at the form of their guide, far ahead with the others. He truly didn't care that John's discovery had not been the remnants of life, she judged. In that way he was different, unlike John or Ivan, unlike herself; for she felt his obviously correct explanation of the little shells as a loss larger than she ever would have guessed. She wanted life out there as badly as John or Ivan or any of the rest of them did, she realized. All those books she had read, when studying literature. . . . That was why she had not let herself remember that igneous rock would never be involved with fossilization. If only life had once existed here—snails, lichen, bacteria, anything—it would somehow take away some of this landscape's awful barrenness.

  And if Mars itself could not provide, it became necessary to supply it—to do whatever was necessary to make life possible on its desolate surface, to transform it as soon as possible, to give it life. Now she understood the connection between the two main topics of evening conversation in their isolated camps: terraforming, and the discovery of extinct Martian life-forms; and the conversations took place all over the planet, less intently than out here in the canyons, perhaps, but still, all her life Eileen had been hoping for this discovery, had believed in it.

  She pulled the half dozen lava pellets she had saved from one of her suit pockets and stared at them. Abruptly, bitterly, she tossed them aside, and they floated out into the rust waste. They would never find remnants of Martian life; no one ever would. She knew that was true in every cell of her. All the so-called discoveries, all the Martians in her books—they were all part of a simple case of projection, nothing more. Humans wanted Martians, that was all there was to it. But there were not, and never had been, any canal-builders; no lamppost creatures with heat-beam eyes, no brilliant lizards or grasshoppers, no manta ray intelligences, no angels and no devils; there were no four-armed races battling in blue jungles, no big-headed skinny thirsty folk, no sloe-eyed dusky beauties dying for Terran sperm, no wise little Bleekmen wandering stunned in the desert, no golden-eyed golden-skinned telepaths, no doppelgänger race—not a funhouse mirror image of any kind; there weren't any ruined adobe palaces, no dried-oasis castles, no mysterious cliff dwellings packed like a museum, no hologrammatic towers waiting to drive humans mad, no intricate canal systems with their locks all filled with sand, no not a single canal; there were not even any mosses creeping down from the polar caps every summer, nor any rabbitlike animals living far underground; no plastic windmill-creatures, no lichen capable of casting dangerous electrical fields, no lichen of any kind; no algae in the hot springs, no microbes in the soil, no microbacteria in the regolith, no stromatolites, no nanobacteria in the deep bedrock . . . no primeval soup.

  All so many dreams. Mars was a dead planet. Eileen scuffed the freeze-dried dirt and watched through damp eyes as the pinkish sand lofted away from her boot. All dead. That was her home: dead Mars. Not even dead, which implied a life and a dying. Just . . . nothing. A red void.

  They turned down the main canyon. Far below was their tent, looking like it would slide down its slope any instant. Now there was a sign of life. Eileen grinned bleakly behind her faceplate. Outside her suit it was forty degrees below zero, and the air was not air.

  Roger was hurrying down the canyon ahead of them, no doubt to turn on the air and heat in the tent, or pull the wagon out to move it all downcanyon. In the alien gravity she had lived in all her life, he dropped down the great trench as in a dream, not bounding gazelle-like in the manner of John or Doran, but just on the straightest line, the most efficient path, in a sort of boulder ballet all the more graceful for being so simple. Eileen liked that. Now there, she thought, is a man reconciled to the absolute deadness of Mars. It seemed his home, his landscape. An old line occurred to her: “We have met the enemy,
and he is us.” And then something from Bradbury: “The Martians were there . . . Timothy and Robert and Michael and Mom and Dad.”

  She pondered the idea as she followed Clayborne down their canyon, trying to imitate that stride.

  "But there was life on Mars.” That evening she watched him. Ivan and Doran talked to Cheryl; John sulked on his cot. Roger chatted with the Mitsumus, who liked him. At sunset when they showered (they had moved the tent to another fine flat site) he walked over to his paneled cubicle naked, and the flat onyx bracelet he wore around his left wrist suddenly seemed to Eileen the most beautiful ornamentation. She realized she was glancing at him in the same way John and the doctor looked at her—only differently—and she blushed.

  After dinner the others were quiet, returning to their cots. Roger continued telling the Mitsumus and Eileen stories. She had never heard him talk so much. He was still sarcastic with her, but that wasn't what his smile was saying. She watched him move . . . and sighed, exasperated with herself; wasn't this just what she had come out here to get away from? Did she really need or want this feeling again, this quickening interest?

  “They still can't decide if there's some ultrasmall nanobacteria down in the bedrock. The arguments go back and forth in the scientific journals all the time. Could be down there, so small we can't even see it. There's been reports of drilling contamination. . . . But I don't think so.”

  Yet he certainly was different from the men she had known in recent years. After everyone had gone to bed, she concentrated on that difference, that quality; he was . . . Martian. He was that alien life, and she wanted him in a way she had never wanted her other lovers. Mrs. Mitsumu had been smiling at them, as if she saw something going on, something she had seen developing long before, when the two of them were always at odds. . . . Earth girl lusts for virile Martian; she laughed at herself, but there it was. Still constructing stories to populate this planet, still falling in love, despite herself. And she wanted to do something about it. She had always lived by Eulert's saying: If you don't act on it, it wasn't a true feeling. It had gotten her in trouble too, but she was forgetting that. And tomorrow they would be at the little outpost that was their destination, and the chance would be gone. For an hour she thought about it, evaluating the looks he had given her that evening. How did you evaluate an alien's glances? Ah, but he was human—just adapted to Mars in a way she wished she could be—and there had been something in his eyes very human, very understandable. Around her the black hills loomed against the black sky, the double star hung overhead, that home she had never set foot on. It was a lonely place.