The Martians

  And the following afternoon, after climbing all day up a hill that grows ever gentler, that always looks as if it will peak out just over the horizon above them, they reach flattened ground. An hour's hike, and they reach the caldera wall. They have climbed Olympus Mons.

  They look down into the caldera. It is a gigantic brown plain, ringed by the round cliffs of the caldera wall. Smaller ringed cliffs inside the caldera drop to collapse craters, then terrace the round plain with round depressions, which overlap each other. The sky overhead is almost black; they can see stars, and Jupiter. Perhaps the high evening star is Earth. The thick blue rind of the atmosphere actually starts below them, so that they stand on a broad island in the middle of a round blue band, capped by a dome of black sky. Sky, caldera, ringed stone desolation. A million shades of brown, tan, red, rust. The planet Mars.

  Along the rim a short distance stands the ruins of a Tibetan Buddhist lamasery. When Roger sees it his jaw drops. It is brown, and the main structure appears to have been a squarish boulder the size of a large house, carved and excavated until it is more air than stone. While it was occupied it must have been hermetically sealed, with airlocks in the doorways and windows fixed in place; now the windows are gone, and side buildings leaning against the main structure are broken-walled, roofless, open to the black sky. A chest-high wall of stone extends away from the outbuildings and along the rim; colored prayer wheels and prayer flags stick up from it on thin poles. Under the light touch of the stratosphere the wheels spin slowly, the flags flap limply.

  "No."

  "The caldera is as big as Luxembourg."

  “You're kidding.”

  Finally even Marie is impressed. She walks to the prayer wall, touches a prayer wheel with one hand; looks out at the caldera, and from time to time spins the wheel, absently.

  "Invigorating view, eh?"

  It will take a few days to hike around the caldera to the railway station, so they set up camp next to the abandoned lamasery, and the heap of brown stone is joined by a big mushroom of clear plastic, filled with colorful gear.

  The climbers wander in the later afternoon, chatting quietly over rocks, or the view into the shadowed caldera. Several sections of the ringed inner cliffs look like good climbing.

  The sun is about to descend behind the rim to the west, and great shafts of light spear the indigo sky below them, giving the mountaintop an eerie indirect illumination. The voices on the common band are rapt and quiet, fading away to silence.

  Roger gives Eileen a squeeze of the hand and wanders off by himself. The ground is black, the rock cracked in a million pieces, as if the gods have been sledgehammering it for eons. Nothing but rock. He clicks off the common band. It is nearly sunset. Great lavender shafts of light spear the purple murk to the sides, and overhead, stars shine in the blackness. All the shadows stretch off to infinity. The bright bronze coin of the sun grows big and oblate, slows in its descent. Roger circles the lamasery. Its western walls catch the last of the sun and cast a warm orange glaze over the ground and the ruined outbuildings. Roger kicks around the low prayer wall, replaces a fallen stone. The prayer wheels still spin—some sort of light wood, he thinks, cylinders carved with big black eyes and cursive lettering, and white paint, red paint, yellow paint, all chipped away. Roger stares into a pair of stoic Asian eyes, gives the wheel a slow spin, feels a little bit of vertigo. World everywhere. Even here. The flattened sun lands on the rim, across the caldera to the west. A faint gust of wind lofts a long banner out, ripples it slowly in dark orange air—"All right!” Roger says aloud, and gives the wheel a final hard spin and steps away, circles dizzily, tries to take in everything at once. “All right! All right. I give in. I accept."

  He wipes red dust from the glass of his faceplate and recalls the little bird-thing, pecking free of clouded ice. A new creature steps on the face of green Mars.

  Arthur Sternbach Bringsthe Curveball to Mars

  He was a tall skinny Martian kid, shy and stooping. Gangly as a puppy. Why they had him playing third base I have no idea. Then again they had me playing short-stop and I'm left-handed. And can't field grounders. But I'm American so there I was. That's what learning a sport by video will do. Some things are so obvious people never think to mention them. Like never put a lefty at shortstop. But on Mars they were making it all new. Some people there had fallen in love with baseball, and ordered the equipment and rolled some fields, and off they went.

  So there we were, me and this kid Gregor, butchering the left side of the infield. He looked so young I asked him how old he was, and he said eight and I thought, Jeez you're not that young, but realized he meant Martian years of course, so he was about sixteen or seventeen, but he seemed younger. He had recently moved to Argyre from somewhere else, and was staying at the local house of his co-op with relatives or friends, I never got that straight, but he seemed pretty lonely to me. He never missed practice even though he was the worst of a terrible team, and clearly he got frustrated at all his errors and strikeouts. I used to wonder why he came out at all. And so shy; and that stoop; and the acne; and the tripping over his own feet, the blushing, the mumbling—he was a classic.

  English wasn't his first language either. It was Armenian, or Moravian, something like that. Something no one else spoke, anyway, except for an elderly couple in his co-op. So he mumbled what passes for English on Mars, and sometimes even used a translation box, but basically tried never to be in a situation where he had to speak. And made error after error. We must have made quite a sight—me about waist-high to him, and both of us letting grounders pass through us like we were a magic show. Or else knocking them down and chasing them around, then winging them past the first baseman. We very seldom made an out. It would have been conspicuous except everyone else was the same way. Baseball on Mars was a high-scoring game.

  But beautiful anyway. It was like a dream, really. First of all the horizon, when you're on a flat plain like Argyre, is only three miles away rather than six. It's very noticeable to a Terran eye. Then their diamonds have just over normal-sized infields, but the outfields have to be huge. At my team's ballpark it was nine hundred feet to dead center, seven hundred down the lines. Standing at the plate the outfield fence was like a little green line off in the distance, under a purple sky, pretty near the horizon itself—what I'm telling you is that the baseball diamond about covered the entire visible world. It was so great.

  They played with four outfielders, like in softball, and still the alleys between fielders were wide. And the air was about as thin as at Everest base camp, and the gravity itself only bats .380, so to speak. So when you hit the ball solid it flies like a golf ball hit by a big driver. Even as big as the fields were, there were still a number of home runs every game. Not many shutouts on Mars. Not till I got there anyway.

  I went there after I climbed Olympus Mons, to help them establish a new soil-sciences institute. They had the sense not to try that by video. At first I climbed in the Charitums in my time off, but after I got hooked into baseball it took up most of my spare time. Fine, I'll play, I said when they asked me. But I won't coach. I don't like telling people what to do.

  So I'd go out and start by doing soccer exercises with the rest of them, warming up all the muscles we would never use. Then Werner would start hitting infield practice, and Gregor and I would start flailing. We were like matadors. Occasionally we'd snag one and whale it over to first, and occasionally the first baseman, who was well over two meters tall and built like a tank, would catch our throws, and we'd slap our gloves together. Doing this day after day Gregor got a little less shy with me, though not much. And I saw that he threw the ball pretty damned hard. His arm was as long as my whole body, and boneless it seemed, like something pulled off a squid, so loose-wristed that he got some real pop on the ball. Of course sometimes it would still be rising when it passed ten meters over the first baseman's head, but it was moving, no doubt about it. I began to see that maybe the reason he came out to play, beyond just bei
ng around people he didn't have to talk to, was the chance to throw things really hard. I saw too that he wasn't so much shy as he was surly. Or both.

  Anyway our fielding was a joke. Hitting went a bit better. Gregor learned to chop down on the ball and hit grounders up the middle; it was pretty effective. And I began to get my timing together. Coming to it from years of slow-pitch softball, I had started by swinging at everything a week late, and between that and my short-stopping I'm sure my teammates figured they had gotten a defective American. And since they had a rule limiting each team to only two Terrans, no doubt they were disappointed by that. But slowly I adjusted my timing, and after that I hit pretty well. The thing was their pitchers had no breaking stuff. These big guys would rear back and throw as hard as they could, like Gregor, but it took everything in their power just to throw strikes. It was a little scary because they often threw right at you by accident. But if they got it down the pipe then all you had to do was time it. And if you hit one, how the ball flew! Every time I connected it was like a miracle. It felt like you could put one into orbit if you hit it right, in fact that was one of their nicknames for a home run. Oh that's orbital they would say, watching one leave the park headed for the horizon. They had a little bell, like a ship's bell, attached to the backstop, and every time someone hit one out they would ring that bell while the batter rounded the bases. A very nice local custom.

  So I enjoyed it. It's a beautiful game even when you're butchering it. My sorest muscles after practice were in my stomach from laughing so hard. I even began to have some success at short. When I caught balls going to my right I twirled around backward to throw to first or second. People were impressed though of course it was ridiculous. It was a case of the one-eyed man in the country of the blind. Not that they weren't good athletes, you understand, but none of them had played as kids, and so they had no baseball instincts. They just liked to play. And I could see why—out there on a green field as big as the world, under a purple sky, with the yellow-green balls flying around—it was beautiful. We had a good time.

  I started to give a few tips to Gregor too, though I had sworn to myself not to get into coaching. I don't like trying to tell people what to do. The game's too hard for that. But I'd be hitting flies to the outfielders, and it was hard not to tell them to watch the ball and run under it and then put the glove up and catch it, rather than run all the way with their arms stuck up like the Statue of Liberty's. Or when they took turns hitting flies (it's harder than it looks) giving them batting tips. And Gregor and I played catch all the time during warm-ups, so just watching me—and trying to throw to such a short target—he got better. He definitely threw hard. And I saw there was a whole lot of movement in his throws. They'd come tailing in to me every which way, no surprise given how loose-wristed he was. I had to look sharp or I'd miss. He was out of control, but he had potential.

  And the truth was, our pitchers were bad. I loved the guys, but they couldn't throw strikes if you paid them. They'd regularly walk ten or twenty batters every game, and these were five-inning games. Werner would watch Thomas walk ten, then he'd take over in relief and walk ten more himself. Sometimes they'd go through this twice. Gregor and I would stand there while the other team's runners walked by as in a parade, or a line at the grocery store. When Werner went to the mound I'd stand by Gregor and say, You know, Gregor, you could pitch better than these guys. You've got a good arm. And he would look at me horrified, muttering, No no no no, not possible.

  But then one time warming up he broke off a really mean curve and I caught it on my wrist. While I was rubbing it down I walked over to him. Did you see the way that ball curved? I said.

  Yes, he said, looking away. I'm sorry.

  Don't be sorry. That's called a curveball, Gregor. It can be a useful throw. You twisted your hand at the last moment and the ball came over the top of it, like this, see? Here, try it again.

  So we slowly got into it. I was all-state in Connecticut my senior year in high school, and it was all from throwing junk—curve, slider, split-finger, change. I could see Gregor throwing most of those just by accident, but to keep from confusing him I just worked on a straight curve. I told him, Just throw it to me like you did that first time.

  I thought you weren't to coach us, he said.

  I'm not coaching you! Just throw it like that. Then in the games throw it straight. As straight as possible.

  He mumbled a bit at me in Moravian, and didn't look me in the eye. But he did it. And after a while he worked up a good curve. Of course the thinner air on Mars meant there was little for the balls to bite on. But I noticed that the blue-dot balls they played with had higher stitching than the red-dot balls. They played with both of them as if there was no difference, but there was. So I filed that away and kept working with Gregor.

  We practiced a lot. I showed him how to throw from the stretch, figuring that a windup from Gregor was likely to end up in knots. And by mid-season he threw a mean curve from the stretch. We had not mentioned it to anyone else. He was wild with it, but it hooked hard; I had to be really sharp to catch some of them. It made me better at shortstop too. Although finally in one game, behind 20-0 as usual, a batter hit a towering pop fly and I took off running back on it, and the wind kept carrying it and I kept following it, until when I got it I was out there sprawled between our startled center fielders.

  Maybe you should play outfield, Werner said.

  I said, Thank God.

  So after that I played left-center or right-center, and I spent the games chasing line drives to the fence and throwing them back in to the cutoff man. Or more likely, standing there and watching the other team take their walks. I called in my usual chatter, and only then did I notice that no one on Mars ever yelled anything at these games. It was like playing in a league of deaf-mutes. I had to provide the chatter for the whole team from two hundred yards away in center field, including of course criticism of the plate umpire's calls. My view of the plate was miniaturized but I still did a better job than they did, and they knew it too. It was fun. People would walk by and say, Hey there must be an American out there.

  One day after one of our home losses, 28-12 I think it was, everyone went to get something to eat, and Gregor was just standing there looking off into the distance. You want to come along? I asked him, gesturing after the others, but he shook his head. He had to get back home and work. I was going back to work myself, so I walked with him into town, a place like you'd see in the Texas panhandle. I stopped outside his co-op, which was a big house or little apartment complex, I could never tell which was which on Mars. There he stood like a lamppost, and I was about to leave when an old woman came out and invited me in. Gregor had told her about me, she said in stiff English. So I was introduced to the people in the kitchen there, most of them incredibly tall. Gregor seemed really embarrassed, he didn't want me to be there, so I left as soon as I could get away. The old woman had a husband, and they seemed like Gregor's grandparents. There was a young girl there too, about his age, looking at both of us like a hawk. Gregor never met her eye.

  Next time at practice, I said, Gregor, were those your grandparents?

  Like my grandparents.

  And that girl, who was she?

  No answer.

  Like a cousin or something?

  Yes.

  Gregor, what about your parents? Where are they?

  He just shrugged and started throwing me the ball.

  I got the impression they lived in another branch of his co-op somewhere else, but I never found out for sure. A lot of what I saw on Mars I liked—the way they run their businesses together in co-ops takes a lot of pressure off them, and they live pretty relaxed lives compared to us on Earth. But some of their parenting systems—kids brought up by groups, or by one parent, or whatever—I wasn't so sure about those. It makes for problems if you ask me. Bunch of teenage boys ready to slug somebody. Maybe that happens no matter what you do.

  Anyway we finally got to the end of the
season, and I was going to go back to Earth after it. Our team's record was three and fifteen, and we came in in last place in the regular-season standings. But they held a final weekend tournament for all the teams in the Argyre Basin, a bunch of three-inning games, as there were a lot to get through. Immediately we lost the first game and were in the loser's bracket. Then we were losing the next one too, and all because of walks, mostly. Werner relieved Thomas for a time, then when that didn't work out Thomas went back to the mound to rerelieve Werner. When that happened I ran all the way in from center to join them on the mound. I said, Look you guys, let Gregor pitch.

  Gregor! they both said. No way!

  He'll be even worse than us, Werner said.

  How could he be? I said. You guys just walked eleven batters in a row. Night will fall before Gregor could do that.

  So they agreed to it. They were both discouraged at that point, as you might expect. So I went over to Gregor and said, Okay, Gregor, you give it a try now.

  Oh no, no no no no no no. He was pretty set against it. He glanced up into the stands where we had a couple hundred spectators, mostly friends and family and some curious passersby, and I saw then that his like-grandparents and his girl something-or-other were up there watching. Gregor was getting more hangdog and sullen every second.

  Come on, Gregor, I said, putting the ball in his glove. Tell you what, I'll catch you. It'll be just like warming up. Just keep throwing your curveball. And I dragged him over to the mound.

  So Werner warmed him up while I went over and got on the catcher's gear, moving a box of blue-dot balls to the front of the ump's supply area while I was at it. I could see Gregor was nervous, and so was I. I had never caught before, and he had never pitched, and bases were loaded and no one was out. It was an unusual baseball moment.