George Martin - Old Mars

Mac Stone prepared himself for death.

HE WAS STILL TRYING TO POINT HIS PISTOL WHEN THE FISSURE became a tunnel, thick with something caked around its sides. The worst stink in creation. Croc dung! Threat of death really did sharpen the memory. That’s what it coated its long burrow with. The Martian wanal or ock-croc was the only large predator left. These giant, tentacled reptilian insects drove deep burrows using old blowholes or wells; they weren’t particular. They hibernated for years, woke up very hungry. The first hatchling typically ate all its siblings and sometimes its parent. Then it ate whoever was still hibernating. Although not radioactive themselves, they preferred areas still “buzzy” and lethal to humans. If the croc didn’t eat Stone right away, the chances were he’d soon die painfully of radiation poisoning.

“Oh, damn!” He couldn’t do anything with his holstered gun. The thing seemed to know precisely how to catch him so he did it the least damage. He had to be many meters down now, the Banning long since passed out of sight and no longer his main fear. A bionic wombot might follow him, but so far he felt relatively sanguine about that. The chances were the croc would also eat the wombot, built-in explosives and all. The thought gave Mac a brief moment of satisfaction.

The tunnel opened into a pit occupied by a huge pulsing head with six round eyes the size of portholes, which slowly retreated from him as a single tentacle—one of many—dragged him deeper.

Mac did all he could to slow his descent into the pit, where its own green-yellow luminescence revealed the croc’s enormous carcass. A nightmare of snakelike waving arms with a long snout full of dagger-size needles for teeth, the wriggling body a black blob of scaly horror. More tentacles snared him so that he couldn’t move any part of his body without making things worse. He was resigned to what must happen next.

He heard a double click as the thing disconnected its jaw, ready to swallow him. Then he thought he heard human speech. One tentacle released his right arm. If he could only get hold of his gun, he might not kill the croc but he’d give it the worst attack of indigestion it had known in all its long, quasi-reptilian life. He made one last lunge. His fingers clutched for the butt.

As his Banning came loose, something else fell out of the air and rattled on the rock. He looked down and saw a tiny blue flickering of flame. Voices seemed to jeer inside his head.

He felt horribly cold. At this rate, he’d freeze to death before the croc ate him. The questor had found him just as he was making camp. He’d had to move fast. When the Martian night caught him without his Hopkins blanket, it would be over anyway. The wanal only had to wait for him to lose a little more heat. They were famous for their cunning patience. Once, there had been a dozen varieties of the creature. Mac had seen pictures of them in the old hunting cubes of the Sindolu, the extinct nomads of the northern hemisphere, from whose encampments a few artifacts had been miraculously preserved. The wanal they had feared most had massive mandibles and ten tentacles. This was that kind of wanal .

It reached out for him again, giggling its nasty pleasure. Then it hesitated. Something red and dripping was thrown to it over the edge of the pit. Then a sharp command came from the darkness and it backed off, peering hungrily from him to the meat.

Snagging the hard case containing the flickering blue flame, Mac pocketed the thing and made haste to clamber as best he could up the other side of the rough pit. The slippery shale made climbing difficult, but he virtually levitated himself out of there. He took the case with the flickering flame out of his glove and put it on the palm of his hand. It made a small hiss. What in the nine inhabited worlds was it? He sensed danger, glanced to his right.

Mac glared in utter disbelief at a bulky “noman” staring down at him from illuminated eyes, hooked hands resting on its metal hips. A type of robot he’d never seen. It looked local. Like something he’d come across in the Terran Museum of Martian Artifacts. Only that one had been about a foot high and carved from pink teastone. The archaeologists thought it was a household god or a child’s toy.

Just above the faceless noman, a pale green pillar fizzed like bad Galifrean beer. Then it coalesced into a figure that Stone was surprised to see was human. A bronzed man in the peak of physical condition, wearing less than was considered seemly even on Jam-bock Boulevard. Except for the little signs of regular wear and tear on his leather harness, the man looked like something out of a serial V-drama. At his right hip was a big, old-fashioned brass-and-steel pistol. Scabbarded on his left was some kind of long antique sword. For a wild moment, Stone wondered if he had been captured by those crazy reenactors who played out completely unlikely battles between invented Martian races. He’d seen groups of them in Sunday Field on vacation afternoons.

The guy in the green pillar fizzed again and broke up a few times before he stabilized long enough to say clearly: “You can’t fight me. I’m not actually here. I’m a scientist. I’m from Earth like you. I came to Mars millennia ago, long before the meteor storms. I’m projecting this image into my future. It’s interactive.”

He smiled. “I’m Miguel Krane.” Evidently, he expected Mac to know the name. He had an old-fashioned accent Mac associated with Terra. “We call this little device a chronowire. It sends images and sounds back and forth across time. It is the nearest we’ve been able to come to time travel. Living organisms get seriously damaged. We discovered to our cost that people and animals can’t travel physically in time. The wanal won’t bother you now. Her old responses are still reachable in her deep subconscious. In our time, we domesticate and use her ancestors to find lost travelers. Their natural instinct is to eat us, but thousands of years of training changed their brains. We found her down here with our explorer noman. We sent her for you. In case of any problems, we fed her some sleepy meat. I’m sorry about the crude robot, too. Believe it or not, he’s code-activated! We have to work through remote control with what we can find. In this case, very remote! What do you want to know from me?”

Mac shuddered as he scraped gelatinous stuff from his battered day suit. He looked around. A man-made room. Two doors. A kind of stone box at his feet. He was surprised how warm it was. “You’re not fooling me. Time travel? How the hell could you have gotten from Terra to Mars thousands of years ago? Before anyone had space travel?” He looked around at the cavern. Ingeniously reflected light. The walls were bright with luminous veins of phosphorescent ore and precious stones sparkling like stars. If he kept his knife, he might be able to dig out a few long diamonds and get away. Assuming he could dodge this madman.

The man in the projection shrugged. “Malfunctioning matter transmitter. Lost control. I traveled backward to Mars. One way. You’ve probably heard of me. Captain Miguel Krane? Haven’t you read my books? About my life on Mars? I’m surprised you don’t know them. They didn’t appear under my name, but I dictated them myself.”

“I don’t listen to books much.”

The man in the green pillar seemed thrown by Mac’s illiteracy. But Mac could read forty-seven interplanetary languages and write fluently in most of them. He had taught himself for purely practical reasons. He wasn’t a scholar. He was a thief. He would have been insulted to be thought of as anything else.

For his own part, Mac was uneasy, still checking for his gun, reassured by the feel of a knife in his boot. Miguel Krane’s voice was amused, but Mac didn’t like to hear it in his head like that. Too creepy.