Диана Дуэйн - A Wizard Of Mars

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.”