Диана Дуэйн - A Wizard Of Mars

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?”

“Seek professional help,” Ronan said.

“On Earth,” said Darryl. “In a hurry! And not come back any time soon.”

“But if you’re not scared off,” Kit said, “that means you can see through the illusion. Which also means you’re probably a wizard, and you’ll be able to figure out what the planet’s trying to tell you.”

“And it’s going crazy doing that right now because you broke that egg,” Ronan said.

Kit glared at him. “No, you dummy,” Ronan said, sounding a bit exasperated, “not broke as in ‘caused to stop functioning.’ Broke as in ‘you have to break a few to make an omelet.’ You don’t leave a message-capsule wizardry around for nothing, right? You want it broken! And maybe it’s not about just messaging.”

“Maybe it’s a test?” Darryl said.

Ronan shrugged. “Makes sense. And the same forces that busted loose out of the egg, and made this weirdness happen, are watching to see what we do.”

“Well, great,” Kit said, “but if this was a test, how do we know if we passed or failed?”

The other two shook their heads. “Keep going, I guess,” Darryl said. “Visit the other places where the signal went. Maybe one thing being tested is whether we give up when nothing seems to happen.”

Kit nodded. “And also nobody gives you a test if they don’t care what result you produce! If we finally pass, then something should pop up and tell us what all this has been about.”

“You hope,” Ronan said. He sighed and stood up again, dusting the omnipresent beige-y dust off him. “At least we can see all right again. Why did everything go that weird shade of red?”

“That was in the movie,” Darryl said. “Some effect they put in to make the puppets and the cheap background paintings look less cheap.”

“Well, cheap or not,” Ronan said, looking back toward the crater, “I wouldn’t have liked to meet those things without a force field.”

“No argument,” Darryl said. “Now, while we’re all feeling good about how competent we are, I have a question.” He turned to Kit. “And since you are, as our overly tall cousin here says, Mars Uber-Geek Boy, you should have the answer. How many satellites are in orbit around Mars right now, and when’s the next one due over?”

Kit’s eyes went wide. He started paging hurriedly through his manual.

“And if one’s been over already,” Ronan said, “did it see anything? And if it did, what? And how can we keep the imagery from getting back to Earth? Because I think that the poor guys at NASA are going to have big trouble with the giant amoebas.”

“Space amoebas—” Darryl said.

“And finny rocket ships and bat-rat-crab things,” Ronan said, “and wizards shooting at them…”

“We’ve got two satellites right now,” Kit said. “Odyssey and Mars Express. Here are the orbits—” He held out the manual, touched the open pages: they produced a double-page spread of sine curves spreading themselves across the rectangular whole-planet map. He studied the diagram, then let loose the breath he’d been holding. “We got lucky,” Kit said. “Odyssey’s on the other side of the planet: Express is a third of the way around. Both out of range.” He glanced out at where the giant amoeba and the rocket had been.