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!”
“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?”