“But—but how would life get from here to the blue planet?”
“That world has prodigious gravity, remember? Calculations show that a respectable fraction of all the material that has ever been knocked off our world by impacts would eventually get swept up by the blue planet, falling as meteors there. And, of course, many forms of microbes can survive the long periods of freezing that would occur during a voyage dirough space.”
Delp regarded the blue point of light, her eyestalks quavering with wonder. “So the third planet is really a colony of this world?”
“That’s right. All those who live there now are the children of this planet.”
Rosalind Lee was giving her first press conference since being named the new administrator of NASA. “It’s been five years since we lost the Mars Climate Orbiter and the Mars Polar Lander,”
she said. “And, even more significantly, it’s been thirty-five years— over a third of a century!—since Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon. We should follow that giant leap with an even higher jump. For whatever reason, many of the unmanned probes we’ve sent to Mars have failed. It’s time some people went there to find out why.”
The door to Teltor’s office irised open. “Teltor!”
“Yes, Dostan?”
“Another ship has been detected coming from the blue planet—and it’s huge!”
Teltor’s eyestalks flexed in surprise. It had been years since the last one. Still, if the inhabitants of planet three had understood the message—had understood that we didn’t want them dumping mechanical junk on our world, didn’t want them sending robot probes, but rather would only welcome them in person—it would indeed have taken years to prepare for the journey. “Are there signs of life aboard?”
“Yes! Yes, indeed!”
“Track its approach carefully,” said Teltor. “I want to be there when it lands.”
The Bradbury had touched down beside Olympus Mons during the middle of the Martian day. The seven members of the international crew planted flags in the red sand and explored on foot until the sun set.
The astronauts were about to go to sleep; Earth had set, too, so no messages could be sent to Mission Control until it rose again. But, incredibly, one of the crew spotted something moving out on the planet’s surface.
It was—
No. No, it couldn’t be. It couldn’t.
But it was. A spindly, insectoid figure, perhaps a meter high, coming toward the lander.
A Martian.
The figure stood by one of the Bradbury’s articulated metal legs, next to the access ladder. It gestured repeatedly with four segmented arms, seemingly asking for someone to come out.
And, at last, the Bradbury’s captain did.
It would be months before the humans learned to understand the Martian language, but everything the exoskeletal being said into the thin air was recorded, of course. “Gitanda hatabk,” were the first words spoken to the travelers from Earth.
At the time, no human knew what Teltor meant, but nonetheless the words were absolutely appropriate. “Welcome home,” the Martian had said.
Wiping Out
The commission for this story came with a deadline only eight weeks away. I was swamped with other projects, including cohosting a two-hour TV documentary for Discovery Channel Canada, but I agreed to the assignment anyway.
The editors wanted space opera, a subgenre of SF with clear-cut heroes and villains, and lots of shoot-’em-up action; Star Wars is space opera. I dislike the way that subgenre so often glorifies war, and found it difficult to come up with an idea.
Then, on January 2, 2000—just one week before the deadline for this story—the documentary I’d been working on aired, and I had a few friends over to watch it on TV with my wife and me. The program was called Inventing the Future: 2000 Tears of Discovery, half of it was devoted to my predictions for the next millennium, and the other half was a retrospective of the seminal inventions of the last one thousand years, including the atomic bomb. Afterwards, one of my friends, Sally Tomasevic, noted that, “You can’t put the genie back in the bottle.” That comment inspired me, and I dived into writing this story the next morning.
They say flashbacks are normal. Five hundred years ago, soldiers who’d come home from Vietnam experienced them for the rest of their lives. Gulf War vets, Colombian War vets, Utopia Planitia vets—they all relived their battle experiences, over and over again.
And now I was reliving mine, too.
But this would be different, thank God. Oh, I would indeed relive it all, in precise detail, but it would only happen just this once.
And for that, I was grateful.
In war, you’re always taught to hate the enemy—and we had been at war my whole life. As a boy, I’d played with action figures. My favorite was Rod Roderick, Trisystems Interstellar Guard. He was the perfect twenty-fifth-century male specimen: tall, muscular, with coffee-colored skin; brown, almond-shaped eyes; and straight brown hair cropped short. Now that I was a Star Guard myself, I don’t think I looked quite so dashing, but I was still proud to wear the teal-and-black uniform.
I’d had an Altairian action figure, too: dark green, naked— like the animal it was—with horns on its head, spikes down its back, and teeth that stuck out even when its great gash of a mouth was sealed. Back then, I’d thought it was a male—I’d always referred to is as “he”—but now, of course, I knew that there were three Altairian sexes, and none of them corresponded precisely to our two.
But, regardless of the appropriate pronoun, I hated that toy Altairian—just as I hated every member of its evil species.
The Altairian action figure could explode, its six limbs and forked tail flying out of its body (little sensors in the toy making sure they never headed toward my eyes, of course). My Rod Roderick action figure frequently blew up the Altairian, aiming his blaster right at the center of the thing’s torso, at that hideous concavity where its heart should have been, and opening fire.
And now I was going to open fire on real Altairians. Not with a blaster sidearm—there was no one-on-one combat in a real interstellar war—but with something far more devastating.
I still had my Rod Roderick action figure; it sat on the dresser in my cabin here, aboard the Pteranodon. But the Altairian figure was long gone—when I was fifteen, I’d decided to really blow it up, using explosives I’d concocted with a chemistry set. I’d watched in giddy wonder as it burst into a thousand plastic shards.
The Pteranodon was one of a trio of Star Guard vessels now approaching Altair III: the others were the Quetzalcoatlus and the Rhamphorhynchus. Each had a bridge shaped like an arrowhead, with the captain—me in the Pteranodon’s case—at the center of the wide base, and two rows of consoles converging at a point in front. But, of course, you couldn’t see the walls; the consoles floated freely in an all-encompassing exterior hologram.
“We’re about to cross the orbit of their innermost moon,” said Kalsi, my navigator. “The Aides should detect us soon.”
I steepled my fingers in front of my face and stared at the planet, which was showing a gibbous phase. The harsh white light from its sun reflected off the wide oceans. The planet was more like Earth than any I’d ever seen; even Tau Ceti IV looks less similar. Of course, TC4 had had no intelligent life when we got to it; only dumb brutes. But Altair III did indeed have intelligent lifeforms: it was perhaps unfortunate that first contact, light-years from here, had gone so badly, all those decades ago. We never knew who had fired first—our survey ship, the Harmony, or their vessel, whatever it had been named. But, regardless, both ships were wrecked in the encounter, both crews killed, bloated bodies tumbling against the night— human ones and Altairians, too. When the rescue ships arrived, those emerald-dark corpses were our first glimpse of the toothy face of the enemy.