Диана Дуэйн - A Wizard Of Mars

“She might be later,” Kit said. “They’re still trying to fix her by remote. For all I know, they’re doing it right now—the manual diagnostics show a few attempted contacts just within the last six hours. If they do manage to get through, then all the data associated with us will get uplinked too. Not what we want!”

Ronan looked up from his manual. “That stealth shell you were talking about?” he said. “I’d say this is the moment. We can’t hide the whole crater from space. But we can hide it from the rover if we put the shell over it—”

Kit nodded. That green light was only a hundred or so feet away now, and there was still the Mars Orbiter satellite to think about. “Right,” he said. “Get that set up.” Kit picked up his manual and stood up. “But right now I just want to make real sure nobody on Earth gets lucky with the comms somehow and screws this up—”

He pulled out his antenna-wand, thought about the wizardry he needed. Even though she looks pretty stuck, best to add a quick wheel-freeze. Both rovers have had that happen sometimes if there’s been a temperature fluctuation. “Half a sec,” Kit said, pointing the wand at Spirit’s left front wheel. It took only a few words’ worth of the Speech to heat the joint up just enough for it to swell a few microns thicker than usual, locking the wheel in place. Kit backed away. “Sorry, baby. Okay, go!”

Ronan began reading hurriedly in the Speech.

Seconds later a shimmering hemispherical dome-shell about three meters wide appeared over Spirit, swirling with a soap-bubble light of working wizardry. “Okay,” Ronan said, wiping sweat off his brow and breathing hard as he finished the spell. “While that lasts, it won’t see or sense anything it hasn’t seen for the last few minutes.”

“Good,” Kit said, turning to face what approached. “Because here comes trouble!”

The green light washed over them, turning everything as verdant now as it had been red in Stokes. Then darkness fell.

***

But not complete darkness. It was more a dusk light, the last embers of local sunset burning at the bottom of it, and the surroundings were beyond peculiar, bearing in mind what “local” should have been. The sunset was peach and golden, not blue. And Kit and Darryl and Ronan were now standing, not amid Martian rocks and dirt, but on a sidewalk next to what looked like a somewhat rural street with a double yellow stripe painted down the middle of it, and down the length of the road, streetlights were coming on, burning yellow against the oncoming evening.

Kit stared around him. The twilight slowly falling around them was indisputably earthly. Scattered down their side of the street were some very normal and suburban-looking houses; across the road were more of the same. Nearby, a smaller street met this one. A street sign stood at the corner.

Ronan looked around him suspiciously, then made his way over to the sign, looked up at it. “Cranbury Road?” he said. “I’m no cooking expert, but don’t you usually spell that with an e and two r’s?”

Darryl was meanwhile turning slowly around, examining the houses and front yards and driveways of the surroundings with an expression of utter astonishment. Then he stopped, staring at the biggest of the nearby structures. It was a red clapboard building with white-painted windows and a side door of the kind you might see on a barn, painted white on the doorsills and crossbars, red on the main panels. At one end of the building, among various enameled metal signs advertising the makers of farm equipment and power tools, was a set of concrete stairs leading up to a door. Over the door hung a sign that said: GROVERS MILL CO.

At the sight of the sign, Darryl’s eyes went wide. Then he burst out laughing and turned back to Ronan. “Now I get it!” he said. “I am impressed with you!”

Startled, Ronan looked around as if expecting the person Darryl was really addressing to be standing behind him. “Why me?!”

“Because this is your fault!”

“What?”

“You were the one who was singing the If-anything-was-going-to-come-from-Mars music!”

Ronan suddenly looked very defensive. “But— Well, why shouldn’t I? It’s good music, and anyway, it’s famous. Anybody might have thought about it when they came to Mars! Besides, how was I supposed to know this would happen—?”

“Too late for excuses now!” Laughing, Darryl salaamed before Ronan, though with a total lack of respect. “Seriously, we are not worthy to hang out with an adept like you! You are the wizard’s wizard, man! You have turned Mars into New Jersey!”

Even in the general alarm of the moment, Kit had to snicker. Ronan stood there looking as cool as usual, but something in his eyes betrayed the fact that he wasn’t sure he was being complimented. “Could have been worse,” Ronan said under his breath as he looked around. “Could have done it the other way round.”

“This is the place where that old radio version of War of the Worlds happened, isn’t it?” Kit said. “The one they did on Halloween way back whenever it was, and they pretended it was happening in New Jersey somewhere, instead of England.”

“And it’s not even the right New Jersey!” Darryl said. “It’s New Jersey now! Look over there.” He pointed. Off to their right, across the street, was a big handsome blue building with a long, peaked roof. On the opposite side of the road in front of it stood a pole with road signs that said ROUTE 629 and TO NJ TURNPIKE. Farther down the pole were posted a laserprinted ad for an Internet café and a faded picture of somebody’s lost dog.

Darryl was looking at the big blue building. “Bet you that was the mill once,” Darryl said. “Look, I was right! There’s the old millstones. They’ve got ’em sunk into the ground so cars won’t ruin their lawn when they turn the corner. There’s where the water came out past the mill. But no Martians!” He started laughing again.

“I wouldn’t be too sure about that,” Ronan said, very quietly.

There was something about the way he said it that stopped Darryl’s laughter. He and Kit both looked up at where Ronan was pointing among the trees behind the old mill building. Half-obscured by a stand of big old trees that surrounded it stood what looked like some kind of elderly, jury-rigged water tower. The part that had held the water, like an upended bucket, was suspended between four narrow iron uprights, all rusty with time.

Darryl peered at the vessel, which had individual wooden staves like an old bucket, held together with rusty iron hoops. “Are those bullet holes in that?” Darryl said, still amused: but now there was some unease to the amusement. “Can’t you just see it? People around here were listening to that radio broadcast, the night before Halloween, and some of them really bought into it, and they ran outside with their guns when they heard that Martian war machines were landing in their town, and some of them saw that thing in the dark, looking all tripod-y, and they shot it up—”

“Darryl,” Kit said.

With a long, low moan of bending metal, the water tower moved.

“Bad,” Ronan said, sounding utterly conversational, “this is very bad. We had TV shows like this back home on Saturday afternoons when I was little. This is the part where I always hid behind the couch.”

Against the cold, hard stars of the Martian sky, among the trees of a suburban New Jersey that had no business being where it was, the water tower lurched to one side, then lurched the other way, hard. It shook itself like a creature trying to rid itself of some kind of impediment: and the fourth upright fell away, leaving it standing on three. The water tower shook itself again, picked up one of those legs and jerked it back and around somehow until it was balanced evenly on all three of them. Then the water tower started getting taller against that blackness, rearing up past the tops of the highest trees. Up near its top, a red glow started to develop into an eye that Kit felt was looking right at him.