A Wizard of Mars, New Millennium Edition (26 page)

Darryl started to laugh.

The sound made Kit realize that Darryl had been unusually quiet for the last few minutes. Now, though, he pointed out past where the bat-creature had been. “Will you get a load of 
that?
”

Kit’s eyes went wide as he looked where Darryl pointed. Running toward them across the crimson sand, under the carmine sky, were human beings. They wore space suits, but not modern ones: these looked like crude versions of a jet pilot’s pressure suit. And bizarrely, they didn’t seem to be affected by Mars’s lighter gravity. They ran as if they were still on Earth.

Darryl was still laughing as the spacemen— there was no other way to think of beings so retro-looking— got closer. They slowed, took stance, and fired again, but not at the bat-rat-whatever: at the three astonished wizards. The bullets hit the force field holding in the wizardly air bubble and whined away. Ronan had lowered his weapon, looking perplexed at Darryl’s laughter. “I’m sorry,” he said to Darryl, “but is there something funny I’m missing about this? Those are 
bullets!
”

“Yeah,” Darryl said, “but they’re 
movie
 bullets!”

Kit stared at him. 
“What?”

“This is all out of a movie!” Darryl said. “First time I saw it was when I was really little. It completely freaked me out, because I didn’t understand it was just a story. I thought it was the news from somewhere. Then I saw it again on one of the movie channels a few weeks ago, and when I recognized it, man, I couldn’t stop laughing; it’s so lame! It’s called 
The Angry Red Planet.
”

“Well, 
somebody’s
 angry,” Ronan said, as the barrage of bullets continued.

“Somebody’s scared,” Kit said. “Look, let’s go talk to them.”

“They’re constructs!” Ronan said. “Barely a step up from illusions. You really think we’re going to be able to communicate?”

Kit shrugged. “Do I look like an expert in what’s happening here? But they’re something to do with the superegg’s signal. And we’re wizards: communicating’s what we do. Let’s go see if we can find out what this is about.”

“But why are they shooting at 
us?
” Ronan said, glancing around him. “We didn’t do anything!”

Darryl was looking over his shoulder. “Uh, Ronan? Could be they’re shooting at 
those.
”

Behind them Kit saw something moving, but the redness was bothering his eyes enough that he had to stop and rub them. Afterward he looked again, thinking he could make out large leaves and some waving tendrils, maybe a few hundred yards away... and getting closer. “There are—are those some kind of 
plant?
”

Ronan squinted. “Only if plants have tentacles. And octopus faces.”

Kit hadn’t at first believed he was seeing those faces. Now he wished he still didn’t believe it. “Carnivorous,” Darryl said. “Wouldn’t get too close.”

“Seems to be what they have in mind,” Kit said. “Those were in the movie, too?”

Darryl nodded, looking less amused. “Don’t know if I’m wild about plants when they start walking around...”

Kit reached into his otherspace pocket and pulled out the piece of weaponry he’d almost used last night. Held in the hand, it looked like nothing more than a small, dark, shining globe, but it could be a lot more on demand. “You want to stay out of Nita’s basement, then,” Kit said as the plant creatures shambled closer.

“You kidding me? Those things aren’t a bit like our friendly neighborhood walking Christmas tree,” Ronan said, leveling his energy weapon again. “Our wee Filif could never give me the creeps like these. Will you look at the tentacles on them? Do they have
hinges? That
 can’t be right...”

More bullets whined past them. “Come on,” Kit said. “Those things won’t get through our force field, hinges or not. Neither will anything the spacemen have.”

“You sure about that?” Ronan said as one of the larger spacemen, getting within maybe a hundred yards, lifted a heavy-looking weapon and aimed it at one of the plant-octopi. A bright, hot stab of light leaped from it and hit the plant creature right between its bulbous eyes. After a few moments of theatrical thrashing and screaming, it fell to the scarlet dust. Its companions, seemingly oblivious, kept on advancing toward the spacemen.

Kit was now much more in a mood to pay attention to the weaponry of the approaching people. “Okay, they have lasers...” he said.

Ronan shrugged. “Your common-or-garden-variety ray gun,” he said. “The beam didn’t look all that coherent. It can’t get through our shields.”

“Oh, we 
are
 in a movie,” Darryl said, and started laughing again. “Did you hear those things? Since when do energy weapons make a noise like that?!”

“Restrain yourself, laughing boy,” Ronan said. “We’re representing our species here. If all this craziness is Mars trying to talk to us, don’t make fun of it just because somebody underfunded its special-effects budget five hundred thousand years ago.” He sighed and laid the long, bright rod of light over his shoulder.

“Your idea’s the best I’ve heard so far,” Ronan said to Kit. “Let’s go communicate.”

The three of them headed toward the approaching spacemen, now only a few hundred feet away. “Maybe we should all hold up one hand,” Darryl said. “That old ‘we come in peace’ gesture.”

“Maybe I’d feel better about that if 
they
 hadn’t started the unpeaceful part of this conversation,” Ronan said under his breath. “And now that I think of it, look at their heads. Is there something wrong with their space suits?”

“You mean 
besides
 the fact that there’s no glass in the helmets?” Kit said. “Wouldn’t surprise me.”

The two groups got within about fifty feet of each other, at which point the spacemen stopped, and four out of five of them pointed their rifles or ray guns at Darryl and Ronan and Kit. The three of them stopped, too. Kit cleared his throat.

“We’re on errantry,” Kit said in the Speech, “and we greet you.”

All of the spacemen stared at them, the four weapons not moving an inch; and, piercingly, the fifth spaceman screamed.

Kit and Darryl and Ronan looked at one another. 
And you’re ragging me about
 my 
favorite movies being old?
Ronan said silently to Darryl. 
At least in mine, woman astronauts are made of sterner stuff.
 To the spacemen, Ronan said, “Please excuse us. We didn’t mean to upset you. We’re here to investigate the sites targeted by the messages that the superegg transmitter sent out. Are you here to speak to us on behalf of the planet or some other instrumentality that’s been operating here?”

The spacemen looked at one another nervously. “They look human,” said one of them. “It’s impossible! Humans can’t survive in these conditions!”

Oh, yeah?
 We’re 
not the ones wearing the helmets without faceplates,
 Darryl said silently.

“They must be illusions,” said another of the spacemen.

“Or more monsters like 
those
 things—” said the single spacewoman, looking fearfully past them toward where the plant-octopi were still shambling closer.

“Please, believe me, we’re human,” Kit said. “We just have a force field protecting us. We’re here looking for indications of past life on this planet, and we—”

“Those plant things are getting closer!” another of the men shouted. “I don’t care how human these things look! This is a trap to keep us here while those plants surround us! We have to get back to the ship!”

Ship?
 Kit thought.

Darryl nodded off to one side. 
That just appeared,
 he said silently. 
Wondered when it’d turn up.
 

And indeed there it was, maybe a quarter mile away, gleaming metallically red in this weird lighting— a long cigar-shaped rocket ship very much in the old style, with a pointy nose and little fins down at the bottom. “Is that a 
lake
 over there?” Kit said, peering past the rocket.

“Looks like it,” Ronan said. “This is getting weirder all the time.” He turned back to the spacemen. “Come on, people,” he said in the Speech, “would you ever just tell us what you’re doing here on Mars? All we want to do is—”

“It’s in my mind again!”
 the woman shrieked, and fainted. Kit winced: this lady had the screaming part of her performance honed to a fine edge.

Ronan shook his head. “Fainting,” he said as one of the men hurriedly picked the woman up and carried her away. “You don’t see a lot of that these days.”

The other men started shooting at them again, ostensibly to cover their retreat. Bullets and ray-gun blasts splashed harmlessly off the force field as the spacemen hurried back toward their rocket ship.

“If there’s a list of Least Effective First Contacts in the manual,” Darryl said as the spacemen fled, “I think we’re on it now.”

“Yeah,” Ronan said. “As a definition of the phrase ‘talking at cross-purposes,’ this scenario works pretty well.” He ran a hand through his longish dark hair, looking exasperated.

Darryl shoved his hands in his pockets and stood admiring that very retro spacecraft, while behind the three of them the man-eating plants bumped into their force field, tried to push through it, couldn’t, and then blundered on around it in pursuit of their original prey. “Doesn’t look real stable,” Darryl said, watching the spacemen and once-more-conscious spacewoman clamber up the rocket’s fragile-looking ladder in desperate haste. “Hard to believe those could even fly.”

“That old V-2 design worked just fine in World War Two,” Ronan said, looking grim. “Those things blew half of London to smithereens. But they’re the granddaddy of every rocket since.”

Darryl shrugged. “Well, okay, in
atmosphere
they worked. But they’d never have made it to Mars.”

“The concept was right, though,” Ronan said. “Thrust comes out the back end, pushes the rest of the craft forward: got us to the Moon, didn’t it? Granted,
this
thing wouldn’t have made it forty million miles, but—”

“Guys?” Kit said. “Something 
else
 that I wouldn’t have thought could make it to Mars?”

They looked at him.

“The giant amoeba??”
 Kit said, pointing.

Darryl and Ronan both looked shocked. But there was no arguing the presence of the gigantic green blob that had appeared from nowhere in particular and was now oozing its way up the side of the rocket ...and, incidentally, out toward them as well.

Ronan looked annoyed. “Oh, come on, that’s never an amoeba! Lookit there, it’s got a couple effing great eyes stuck in the middle of it!”

“Three,” Kit said, peering at it. “Might be more.”

“Okay, give me a break, so it’s a 
space
 amoeba,” Darryl said. “They could have eyes, maybe.”

“People of Earth!”
 a gigantic voice shouted from somewhere or other.

They all jumped. “Okay,” Ronan said, unlimbering his weapon again. “Here we go...”

“Do not return to Mars!”
 the great voice cried. 
“We can and will destroy you if you do not heed our warning!”

“Not just a space amoeba, but a 
cranky
 space amoeba,” Kit said, hurriedly flipping his manual open, as boosting the force field surrounding their air bubble struck him as a good idea.

From across the crater came a roar and shudder, and the ground under their feet shook as the rocket ship took off. Or, rather, it tried to. The space amoeba was hanging on to it as tenaciously as a baby unwilling to let go of a favorite toy. In a great cloud of smoke, slowly and with difficulty the rocket pulled up out of the amoeba’s grip— then blasted free, leaping away from the surface in a great flare of fire. The giant amoeba slumped back to the surface to lie in a sulky, gelatinous heap.

“Is that thing going to come after
us
now?” Ronan muttered.

“I’d be more concerned about the green leafy octopi,” Darryl said.

“Wait,” Kit said, glancing around. All around, the color was draining out of the landscape. It took some moments for Kit to realize that the vista around them had actually resumed its proper colors, which now looked bizarrely pallid in contrast with the previous unnatural redness.

The carnivorous octopus-plants disappeared, along with the giant space amoeba, the bat-rat-crab-spider thing, and everything else that had pertained to that other and much more peculiar Mars. Darryl was standing there blinking. “Everything’s green,” he said.

“It’s what your eyes do after staring at red for too long,” Ronan said. “It’ll go away.” He sat down on a nearby rock, gazing up into the Martian sky, now sedate and empty of anything but some passing clouds. “So is it just me... or was that unusual?”

Kit laughed. “Not just you, no.”

“But no question,” Darryl said, “the planet was trying to communicate with us!”