“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 en
d, 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!”
“If that’s true,” said Ronan, “then the planet needs its head felt!”
“Seriously!” Darryl said. “It was trying to get through to us. It took something from inside our heads—”
“Your head maybe,” Ronan said. “Got better things going on inside mine than bat-rat-crab puppety thingies where you can still see the strings hanging off them! Not to mention man-eating broccoli with tentacles.” He rolled his eyes. “Tentacles held together with eyelets and wire!”
“I can’t help the details,” Darryl said. “I didn’t make the movie! Which I said was dire! But something here felt it, or got into my head and saw it, and tried using it to get through to us.”
“To say what?” Ronan said. “‘Bugger off’?”
“Language, guy,” Darryl said. “But yeah. And it’d make sense for them to be trying to scare casual visitors off! If Mamvish is right, if the people who lived here managed to store some way to wake them up, then they don’t want it trashed. They want to make sure anybody who comes poking around isn’t just going to run away, and knows what they’re doing. If they can scare you away, so much the better for them and you.”
Kit and Ronan sat thinking about that for a moment. “Yeah,” Kit said. “I mean, if you were a normal astronaut and you landed here and found these bat-rat-crab things running around and giant amoebas sliming all over the place, what would you do?”
“Seek professional help,” Ronan said.
“On Earth,” said Darryl. “In a hurry! And not come back any time soon.”
“But if you’re not scared off,” Kit said, “that means you can see through the illusion. Which also means you’re probably a wizard, and you’ll be able to figure out what the planet’s trying to tell you.”
“And it’s going crazy doing that right now because you broke that egg,” Ronan said.
Kit glared at him. “No, you dummy,” Ronan said, sounding a bit exasperated, “not broke as in ‘caused to stop functioning.’ Broke as in ‘you have to break a few to make an omelet.’ You don’t leave a message-capsule wizardry around for nothing, right? You want it broken! And maybe it’s not about just messaging.”
“Maybe it’s a test?” Darryl said.
Ronan shrugged. “Makes sense. And the same forces that busted loose out of the egg, and made this weirdness happen, are watching to see what we do.”
“Well, great,” Kit said, “but if this was a test, how do we know if we passed or failed?”
The other two shook their heads. “Keep going, I guess,” Darryl said. “Visit the other places where the signal went. Maybe one thing being tested is whether we give up when nothing seems to happen.”
Kit nodded. “And also nobody gives you a test if they don’t care what result you produce! If we finally pass, then something should pop up and tell us what all this has been about.”
“You hope,” Ronan said. He sighed and stood up again, dusting the omnipresent beige-y dust off him. “At least we can see all right again. Why did everything go that weird shade of red?”
“That was in the movie,” Darryl said. “Some effect they put in to make the puppets and the cheap background paintings look less cheap.”
“Well, cheap or not,” Ronan said, looking back toward the crater, “I wouldn’t have liked to meet those things without a force field.”
“No argument,” Darryl said. “Now, while we’re all feeling good about how competent we are, I have a question.” He turned to Kit. “And since you are, as our overly tall cousin here says, Mars Uber-Geek Boy, you should have the answer. How many satellites are in orbit around Mars right now, and when’s the next one due over?”
Kit’s eyes went wide. He started paging hurriedly through his manual.
“And if one’s been over already,” Ronan said, “did it see anything? And if it did, what? And how can we keep the imagery from getting back to Earth? Because I think that the poor guys at NASA are going to have big trouble with the giant amoebas.”
“Space amoebas—” Darryl said.
“And finny rocket ships and bat-rat-crab things,” Ronan said, “and wizards shooting at them...”
“We’ve got two satellites right now,” Kit said. “Odyssey and Mars Express. Here are the orbits—” He held out the manual, touched the open pages: they produced a double-page spread of sine curves spreading themselves across the rectangular whole-planet map. He studied the diagram, then let loose the breath he’d been holding. “We got lucky,” Kit said. “Odyssey’s on the other side of the planet: Express is a third of the way around. Both out of range.” He glanced out at where the giant amoeba and the rocket had been.
“Any residual heat from that, you think?” Ronan said.
Darryl was pulling another page out of his WizPod and examining it. Over a map of the area, a few nested blobs of various colors were displaying. “Some,” he said. “The heat was real. Those constructs were able to affect their surroundings, even though themselves they were only temporary.”
“We’d better go cool down the places where they were, then,” Ronan said.
“Don’t think we’ll need to,” Kit said. He looked over Darryl’s shoulder at the notations under the graph showing the heat readings. They were already sinking toward baseline. “The crust here doesn’t hold heat real well: that’s why the surface erosion’s so aggressive. By the time the satellites come around again, the heat’ll be gone. It’s not a big worry right now.”
Darryl looked alarmed. “Got something worse?”
“Kind of a worry,” Kit said. “What if we didn’t just trigger this one site by turning up here? What if we triggered the others, too, and they’re doing something right now? Something important that we shouldn’t miss?”
“You’re not going to suggest that we split up to investigate them separately, I hope!” Ronan said.
Kit rolled his eyes. “A recipe for trouble,” he said. “In weird other-planet horror movies, or out of them.”
Darryl shoved his WizPod into a pocket. “I could split up,” he said.
Kit and Ronan exchanged a glance, and Ronan looked at Darryl with some concern. “You sure that’s a good idea? You’re here twice already. I mean, here and on Earth, so that’s twice—”
“I think I could do three,” Darryl said, “one after another. I did three at once back home, last week. Wouldn’t want to push it much further, though. All of me kept walking into things. Too much data to process, or else my brain doesn’t like working in triplicate.”
Darryl glanced around. “So let’s get busy. Where do you want me?”
Kit showed him his manual. “These three spots. They’re all near largish craters. De Vaucouleurs— Cassini— Hutton.”
“What are the names for? Famous people or something?”
“Yeah, or places on Earth.”
“Okay. Which is closest?”
“This one.” Kit pointed at de Vaucouleurs. “A couple of hundred miles south, right by Wahoo.”
Ronan gave Kit an incredulous look. “You’re just yanking our chains. There’s never any crater called Wahoo!”
Kit scowled, pointed at the map. “Right here, next to Yuty.”
“You didn’t even need to look at the map just then,” Ronan said in wonder. “I’ll decide whether to be impressed or horrified later. Darryl?”