Now Mercer felt no fear, only a lust for the chase. She was determined to see as much of this as possible, to get close enough to actually witness—and record—the touchdown and whatever happened next. She glanced over at Jansen. The young woman was handling the camera skillfully, holding it steady against the violent jouncing of the crawler as it bounded over the rock-strewn plain.
Now they had to look up to see the asteroid. It was close enough that it seemed to be directly over them. Suddenly it stopped its gradual descent and hung, motionless, in midair for a moment. Then the nose began to pitch down toward the west, catching the light of the fast-fading Sun. Slowly, ponderously, the huge mass swung around in the sky, blocking out the sunlight. A flurry of boulder-sized chunks of debris was shaken loose and fell to the ground. One of them smashed into the ground a scant hundred meters ahead of the crawler, and Mercer abruptly decided they were close enough. She braked to a violent stop and stood up in the cab of the open vehicle.
The floating asteroid passed in front of the setting Sun, eclipsing all light. The massive body blocked out the entire western sky, a huge, rough-edged oblong of stone so close it seemed to stretch from horizon to horizon.
At last it began to settle in toward the ground, moving slowly, slowly down. It moved in a graceful, near-perfect silence, flawed only by moaning and whistling of the wind that caught at it, played with it, before running on. Dust devils began to spurt up below it as jets of wind were forced downward into the ground.
Then, the silence was broken as the asteroid touched down with a booming, endless roar, a roar Jansen could feel rattling her body as it vibrated the crawler they sat in.
The noise went on and on, as if it had been pent up for too long and now sought to make up for lost time. The asteroid rolled a bit as it settled on the Martian soil. Massive fragments of it snapped off under the stress of supporting the asteroid’s weight. More and more rubble slumped over as the collapse continued, kicking up dust all around the behemoth, shrouding it in a ruddy cloud until the wind whipped the haze away again. Smaller landslides continued for a time, but the asteroid’s basic structure held. Hazed in dust, backlit by the setting Sun, it sat there, already part of the landscape.
Mercer stared at the scene in wide-eyed fascination. An asteroid had just landed a bare kilometer from where she stood. Jansen grabbed her arm and pointed. “Up there!” Jansen cried. “There’s that miner’s hab shed.” Mercer spotted the tiny white dot on the gray-and-brown mountain. For a fleeting moment, Mercer thought back to her children’s storybooks and envisioned the scene as an albino mouse perched on an elephant’s back. But no, even that scale was wrong. A mouse was far larger in relation to an elephant.
“Do you see it?” Jansen asked. “There’s something moving up there.”
“Rockslide,” Mercer said, in a voice that sounded unconvincing even to herself. She snapped her binoculars back into place and looked again. “Oh, my God,” she said. “I don’t believe it. The miner’s alive.”
A tiny, stick-figure human was boosting itself out of the hab shed, climbing free from the hatch, escaping the unlikely prison that had held it.
Coyote clung hard to the rocks, holding fiercely to each knob and crevice. She stared out against the massive shadows cast by the behemoth she had ridden, out over the lonely ocher sands of Mars. Behind her, the Sun was setting, drenching the cold land ever deeper into life-red blood. She sat down gingerly on the asteroid and looked out over the broad, clear, understandable landscape below.
But none of it was real. She felt a rumble in the stone beneath her feet. A further settling of the stone—or the beast within the stone, struggling to be free? The monster, and its eye sliced from its own belly by its own hand. The eye in the stone.
That was real. Nothing else could be.
The shakes began again. She knelt down and grabbed at an outcropping of rock, held on to it with all her might, as if clinging to it would keep the last of sanity from slipping away.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Grover’s Mill, New Jersey
McGillicutty did not trust dragonflies. The Martian-style helicopters seemed too fragile, too delicate to entrust his life to. He clung to the handhold and swallowed hard, wishing mightily that he could be magically transported back to Port Viking, that he could peel off his pressure suit and forget this entire nightmare.
He looked out the open side-hatch, down onto the sprawling desert plains below. There was a new feature in the once wide-open spaces, and the dragonfly was coming up on it fast.
The ‘fly pilot swooped in low, down onto the craggy and unstable rocks atop the summit of the asteroid. The landing skids touched down, bounced once, and the ’fly was resting lightly on the rock. Time to go. McGillicutty found himself hesitating.
The geologist, Jansen Alter, urged him on with an un-subtle toe in his rear, and McGillicutty stepped out onto the ugly surface. Alter and Marcia MacDougal followed.
But the ‘fly didn’t leave immediately. The members of the stretcher party climbed aboard, bearing their ungainly load as well as they could. A near-catatonic woman in a miner’s armored pressure suit had to be hell to carry, especially under these conditions.
Its return passengers in place, the dragonfly leapt away.
McGillicutty, Jansen, and MacDougal watched it go, before turning toward the little habitat shelter, toward whatever had driven Coyote Westlake mad.
McGillicutty shivered a bit as he made his way over the craggy surface. It would not do to think of their destination in those terms, though he was hard-pressed to think of an alternative.
Already, some people had trouble referring to it as an asteroid. After all, there it was, a huge part of the landscape, so big that it was hard to imagine that it hadn’t always been there. Now they were calling it the Lander. Images of the huge asteroid slumped over on the Martian landscape were glowing down from video screens the length and breadth of the Solar System. Nothing like it had ever been seen.
But the second Lander was already coming, and the third was not far behind. Mercer stood, transfixed, watching the predawn sky as another of the massive things glided down to a magical, impossible landing. What were these incredible things? What did they intend?
Mercer was frightened, badly frightened by the invaders, and yet there was something far beyond fear in her heart. These were miracles she was seeing. Dangerous and threatening as they might be, the Landers were also wondrous. They were far beyond any imaginable human technology, as far beyond present human ability as flight would have been to King Tut. A strange and fitting comparison, Mercer told herself, for mountains of hewn stone symbolized the ancient Egyptian civilization—and here was a new monument of stone, a flying monument to rival any power of Tut’s engineers.
And, like Tut’s tomb, this Lander held mysteries inside. What or who was inside that made these mountains fly?
Her reverie was broken as another pressure-suited figure shoved past her, carrying some unknown piece of equipment toward the security perimeter around the first Lander. She and Jansen had lost their exclusive dominion over the landing site in the first minutes after the touchdown, but still she felt an irrational resentment against all these strangers barging in on “their” discovery.