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Waiting for Ourselves Mars is only slightly more interesting than the moon, I thought. So lonely, lacking all settlements, unlike Venus. I hefted the equipment bag over my shoulder and started off toward the spaceship. I longed to get off this barren red planet. On my way back, I spotted something. My extensive and grueling training back on Earth told me not to ignore it - not to ignore anything. I went in for a closer look. The florescence on the rock was not natural, not random enough, too many patterns. I put my gloved hand on it. The design glittered in the sun. I knelt down, searching for my camera and sample-collecting tool when I fell. It must have been at least four meters, but, thanks to the slightly reduced gravity, I suffered no great damage. I did manage to crush my backup transmitter, but I was okay as long as I didn't stay out longer than three and a half more hours, which is about the time I'd lose my primary batteries. I got up, rubbing a bruise on my elbow. It was rather gloomy in the cavern, so I took a six-hour glowrod from my ankle pouch and activated it. In the slowly brightening light, I could see the cave was red, just like the rest of Mars, but a little less brilliant, probably due to less moisture. This cavern could have been sealed off from the outside for quite a while. After exploring for a few minutes, I discovered that I couldn't climb back up, the walls being too steep. I couldn't transmit anything to the ship, my devices said something about high iron content (of course - it was Mars) and it was blocking my transmissions. After exploring for a few minutes, I discovered that I couldn't climb back up, the walls being too steep. I also found a passageway leading downward. I had tried hooking the iridescent rock with a line to pull myself up, but I proved heavier, it flew down, and I found myself on the floor with the rock lying next to my helmet. There were no other anchors near the hole where I fell to drag myself up, so before I went down the passageway, I used the line to grab my equipment bag, this time careful not to get hit. I plodded on. The path was rather narrow, going down all the time. Sometimes, the ceiling would also slope downward. I had to drag my equipment bag on its line. Once, I even had to cut off a piece of stubborn rock with my Portalaser. After some time, it could have been an hour, I came to an enormous cave of maybe fifty meters square. The floor was of a smooth, flat, dusty, sponge-type material. It looked like it was one piece. Leading out from this place were a few hundred (thousand?) passages. There was one big tunnel. As I walked towards the center of the dome-shaped area, I noticed more writing above each passageway - in the same iridescent ink as the rock. It seemed to glow, even when I shielded the glowrod's light. I checked my oxygen - four hours left. And without further dawdling, I picked up my bag's lead and walked through the larger sized hole. After more walking, I began to think about what I had just seen. The more I thought, the more frightened I became. As far as I knew, I was the first person to walk on Mars. I knew John was going to be the second, only a few hours after me. NASA launched me here with a great crew of twenty-five people not more than three and a half weeks ago. My glowrod was failing and the darkness was drawing in on me. I was getting hungry. I decided to take a quick rest, try the transmitter again. Still fuzzy. I surfed the radio bands, looking for search-signals from the ship. Nothing. I sent out a quick message on the Priority5 frequency, but it was blank as ever. I tried the Priority7 and even the Emergency3 with the same results. The rust and iron level must have been highly concentrated. I was about to shut off the switch when I heard a peeping sound from the speaker. I checked the dial. It was coming from a very high, unused frequency. I answered a short distress call. More peeping. I dug through my equipment bag and found a manual, flipped to the radio signal section. The peeping checked to be nothing standard. Must have been a malfunction of my transmitter, I thought. But it came again. I glanced at my direction finder. Straight down the tunnel. I lit another glowrod, clipped it to my helmet, and started off downward again, following an alien signal. Time passed. I walked faster. Oxygen was down to forty-five minutes. I began to worry about my suit's battery usage, so I shut down some unimportant circuits to conserve energy. I also dropped an empty cylinder of oxygen, its weight taking its toll. It was a few minutes later when I got there. The place was huge. I mean, really huge. I thought the last cave was enormous, but when I saw this, even with my thoroughly conditioned body, I almost had a heart attack. About twenty of the last caves would fit in this area with room to spare. My glowrod seemed insignificant against the amount of light in this cave. When I got over the shock, I looked around. There were at least a million large passageways like the one I had just emerged from leading out of the cave. The floor was as smooth as ever. There seemed to be a small building in the middle of the room. Or did it just seem small because the room was so big? I left a marker at the passageway I came out of and walked toward the building, dragging my equipment bag behind me. It grew in size the whole fifteen minutes it took to walk to it. I came to the box shaped structure made of the same material as the floor. It was one color and without windows. I came to a cut in the material that seemed to resemble a door of some sort. I pressed on the "door," and it opened with a click-feel. There seemed to be so much of a concentration of the luminous stuff that I didn't need to use the glowrod to see what was in front of me. A pedestal. With an oversized watermelon shaped shiny metal pill lying on it. I could see my warped reflection in the surface. It had a green tint. I lifted it up, felt its weight. It was too bulky for me to pick up very efficiently. I tried to back out of the building with the object, my fear temporarily forgotten by the excitement. It returned immediately after I saw the reflection of movement in the metallic surface. I dropped the object and spun around. I was half expecting a rubbery green alien to jump out and attack me, but whoever attacked me certainly wasn't a rubbery green alien. Not by a long shot. He had a Portalaser in his hand. And he was pointing it at me, his finger on the activation switch. I touched the contact on my belt to turn on the radio. "What are you doing, John?" I asked. I couldn't see his face through the tinted helmet. "What do you think I'm doing?" it was a cold voice. "You know what I want." "Put that down." I always knew John to be dubious. He had the kind of looks that told you he meant trouble. His features were sharp, and so was his attitude. He spoke again through the radio, his voice low even with the radio putting a high-filter effect on it. "You know what I want," his hand relaxed down slightly. "I wanted to be the first to set foot on this rotten planet. I wanted to have all the publicity. I wanted it to be me. And you, yes, rott'n old you, got picked. Yeah, we drew straws, but it wasn't fair." What was I to say? His hand tightened up again and he was fairly shouting. "So I'm going to kill you and pretend you never existed! I was meant to be first!" I must tell you now that the object I had dropped a few minutes ago was supposedly on the ground and, perhaps, broken. For some reason or other, when John was talking, I thought to look towards the object. When I found it was not on the floor, but quite contrarily floating right where I dropped it put me in an advanced state of shock. I was already shocked from what John had said, but this bumped it over the top. John moved under the doorway. He pointed the Portalaser at the ceiling over my head, activated it and started to burn a slow, long slit that would end in my head. I had a plan, but I didn't know if it would work. I flexed my biceps, hoped for the best, and expected the worst. He was melting the antennae of the primary transmitter. I could imagine his face, all bent into a cruel smile. I struck. The lighter gravity and the atmosphere (or lack thereof) teamed up against the clumsiness of my low-pressure suit to equal about what the same maneuver would be like on earth. I shot out my hands to grab the object and drag it over in front of the top of my helmet. John wasn't fast enough, and just had time enough to pull the laser down a few more centimeters, but by that time, I had the object in place. The resulting deflected energy simply cut a deep gash in the ground, but it saved me for the time being. I had figured out how to save my skin for this amount of time, but due to the lack of time, I hadn't worked out what to do next. I improvised. Pushing the metal thing, I charged forward. I barely got a step when the ground started shaking. As a product of the clumsy outfit I was wearing and my limited dexterity, I was on the floor before I knew it. My heart sped up at least fifty percent; the ground was moving awfully. It was a short quake, but for all my training, they never taught us about this type of incident. I remember hearing a scream over the radio that was cut off immediately with a burst of static. After the ground shake, I got up, looked around. The metal thing was sitting right where it was when I fell, as if it didn't know what was occurring. The second thing that I realized was that John's helmet and chest had been crushed by the door beam falling on him. I did not wish to see his face. I relieved him of his Portalaser, a good power cell, an undamaged oxygen tank and some spare glowrods. I checked my systems and found that I had now two hours of oxygen and that my systems were so out of whack that they thought I was just under the center of Mt. Olympus Mons! Other than this, they were working just fine. I wasn't scared for the last fifteen minutes because of the high-level of adrenaline I was pumping. I walked out of the building, still dragging the equipment bag and pushing the floaty thing, carefully avoiding John's body. How was I going to get out of this place? I looked around. The cavern was still intact, even after the quake. After some time, I spotted the marker I left in the first cavern. I started to walk towards it when I was suddenly gripped with deja vu as I fell down through a weak spot in the floor. I dropped right into a hole I didn't see that must have been created during the earthquake (or Marsquake). I lost my grip on the metal thing, and it was lucky the equipment bag took it down with me. My back landed on a sharp rock and created much pain, a little blood and an all but punctured suit. My glowrod was about to fail; it must've been malmanufactured. I lit another and set on. This time the path was straight, leading forward in the direction of the building. I thought a lot while walking, and I figured that the hole I fell into must have been an emergency exit. It took a good half of my pressure to fall through the ground, and it was after the Marsquake. I guess some old system kept it going, and became activated after the shaking. Another thing that bugged me was how John found me. After some thought, I came to the conclusion that he must have been following the same peeping signal that I was - thinking it was me. After I thought about that, I turned on my receiver to see if the signal was still there (my radio had turned off automatically from the shock when I fell). The peeping was coming directly from the metal object! I went on - and on. My oxygen was running low again, down to twenty-five minutes. At this point, the path went steeply upwards. On I went. About ten minutes later I saw the light. The passage was so straight that I could see it even though it was a long way away. A kind of welcome-back kind of light. A bright light. A light I hadn't seen in many hours. A light that reminded me of the Sun. I went faster. Dragging all my equipment and the funny warped sphere, I almost ran up to the surface. When I got there, I glanced at my oxygen gauge. Five minutes. I switched on the radio as soon as I could. Just before I hit the button, I turned around to see - Mt. Olympus Mons! I emerged from just under it. So my instruments weren't all crumpled! "Hello! Can anybody read me?!" The return signal was welcome. "Dave, turn on your Position Signal Generator." I complied. "Can you send a transport pronto? I'm a tad bit low on oxygen." "Do you think you can hold out that long?" asked the operator. "Just send the damn thing!" "Okay. It's coming. We've been looking for you for quite a while. What happened? How did you hold out this long with the oxygen you've had? And where's John?" "I'll tell you later," and I passed out. The next thing I knew I was being revived with smelling salts. I was given something to eat, and was told that I had slept ten hours. They barely got me into the ship in time to give me a proper amount of oxygen. I knew I only just made it, because of the heat bath that they give to everyone and everything that comes aboard. Ever since they discovered the bacteria on Mars that lived on anything made of carbon - including carbon life forms - ever so long ago, they've been kind of paranoid. While I was sleeping, I was told, the scientists on the Explorer were figuring out how to open the metallic thing. So far, they thought that whatever was inside it would be okay in a carbon dioxide environment, so they opened it in one. I was relating my strange story for the tenth time when they paged me to come to the scientists' room. In the glass case were the creatures. They had fattish bodies and large heads. There were three of them, each about seven inches tall. They seemed to have small arms and legs. They were lacking noses. They floated in mid-air. The scientists handed me a receiver. "They'll only talk to the 'true finder'," they said. "We've decoded their transmissions. They communicate to each other through radio," my mouth opened for a moment and then closed again. After some pause, I raised the transmitter to my lips. "Greetings!" I said slowly. There was a pause as the computer coded and decoded the message. A signal came through. "Greetings. We come in peace. We are the embassy from the past with important information for you," the voice was tinny and monotonous. "What is the information?" Again, a pause. "We have a story to tell you. A long time ago, our race was big. We had our people all over this planet. We had our carbon-based biologically engineered buildings all over. We had built everything like this because it was easier to work than stone, and stronger than anything else. Our technology was incredibly high and we lived in peace and prosperity. "Then an enemy sent a bacterial substance to this planet. It destroyed everything. Our buildings fell, our people died. "A council was organized in a place the bacteria hadn't yet reached. They elected us as delegates, stuck us in that time capsule. We've been monitoring you. We made the surface cave in when you were on it, guiding you here. Our goal was to possibly send a message of danger to the future. They are trying to take over the solar system. We weren't the first; other planets have been taken over. If we can defeat them, other races won't have this happened to them." Questions flooded my head. "Wait. Who are these enemies? When will they come to take over Mars? How will we know what they look like? How long have you been waiting in the metal sphere? Why didn't you put your entire race in things like that? Will the enemies attack Earth the same way?" "Nobody from our race has seen the enemy. We just know that when the pods exploded in our atmosphere, some chemical reaction occurred and turned into bacteria. We've seen the exact same thing happen in other planets. We've been waiting some forty Earth years, and no ships have arrived besides yours. We didn't package the other resident up in these containers because the bacteria had spread over much of the planet by that time, and also it was extremely expensive to manufacture and seal up these capsules. So far, nothing of this sort has occurred to your home planet." "What should we do?" "We don't know. We were only chosen to relay the message. We have no idea when the enemy will come." "Thank you. Scientist? Please talk to them, find out as much as you can," and again to the creatures, "thanks again. Thank you." "It is our pleasure, human," they said it in such a way as to give the impression that we were of lesser beings than them. I left the room, shaken. The ship was scheduled to take an immediate and premature takeoff back to Earth the next day at 0500 hours. I decided to eat something. The ship was transmitting the information about the creatures and their message to the NASA technicians on Earth. From there, it would be broadcast all over the world in many languages. The next day, I was sitting at dinner when I heard the announcement. "Will David Blume please come to Experiment Room 2b," it's canned announced. I walked in, a bit staggering from the still firing rocket engines. There, on the floor were the three creatures. Their glass box had been smashed, and they looked dead. I instantly asked what happened. "You know Keith Wokfield?" the head scientist asked. "Not really. Wait, yeah. He was the young apprentice to the chemist, right?" "That's the one. He came in last night and smashed the glass, hoping to dissect the creatures and find out how they levitate and transmit through radio. They died when they came in contact with the oxygen. We caught and detained him in his quarters." I was dumbfounded. Imagine the best friends we had were now wiped out - due to the insane acts of an amateur scientist. I walked sadly to my room. We arrived on Earth without further incident, we received immense amounts of publicity; I was considered a hero; the bodies of the creatures were studied and put on display; Keith was put on trial; and the world prepared for our first-ever interstellar war. Chemicals were studied and made into serums to counteract the poisonous bacterial pods. The military was preparing for more war-like situations with beefed up weapons, new airplanes and outer-space vehicles. Our countries began to work together and the population of earth joined in the armies or science industries, whichever they were physically and mentally in shape for. Memorials were held everywhere, mourning the deaths of the creatures, our friends. And now, years later, as I lie in my death bed writing this, years having passed in fear and apprehension because the enemies have not yet come, I think about the past. The more I think about it, the more I realize. I know there won't be any enemy coming with bacterial weapons. I realize they won't come. Not even one. I remember the old experiments they launched, from Earth, to every planet when I was a little boy. I seem to recall them being in pods, loaded with chemicals. Now I think about an entire race being wiped out, possibly more. And I realize who the enemy really is.
Critiques: -I like this story; it sounds like something I'd write, except for the scientific parts. |