Читать книгу Seven Against Mars - Martin Berman-Gorvine - Страница 5

Chapter 1

Jack pushed his way cautiously through the grayish-green Venusian foliage. An Earthling would have found the day overcast and broiling hot, but to Jack it was on the cool side, with a tang in the air that hinted at the approach of the feared Venusian monsoon. However, the storm was at least an Earth-day away, and was the least of his concerns at the moment, for his beloved Anya, the girl with the flame-colored hair who had captured his heart, was trapped in the coils of the dreaded Greater Venusian Medusa, somewhere deep in this horrible wilderness.…

Rachel Zilber paused with her fingers poised over the typewriter keys, staring at the half-filled page. Did that sound right? Despite years of relentless drilling from Dad and nightly exposure to the BBC on the forbidden, battery-powered wireless set, she still worried about her command of English. Those prim-and-proper British newsreaders were no help in learning the slang she needed to write for the American pulps. For that, she had only her precious collection of Astounding Science-Fiction, Amazing Stories and the rest that her cousin Abe had mailed her from New York the summer before the war began. Three years had passed. Was her slang out of date? And now that the Americans were in the war too, had they lost their appetite for science fiction and started thinking it was a worthless, juvenile waste of time?

If so, they would have a strong ally in Mom. “What are you wasting your time on that rubbish for?” she would cry whenever she saw Rachel huddled over one of the dog-eared magazines with their garish covers. “You’ve got to stay up to date with your schoolwork! This war’s not going to last forever, you know, and when the Germans are beaten you’d better be prepared to finish high school and take your university entrance exams!” Rachel didn’t have the heart to share her growing fears that the Germans wouldn’t let them live to see the end of the war. Maybe if she didn’t say so aloud, it wouldn’t come true. So she studied her calculus and Polish literature textbooks and ventured out into the streets of the ghetto, where the sound of shooting was becoming more common every day, as little as possible. It was safer to stay in the smelly, crumbling little apartment, even though it was barely the size of her old room and she had to share it with her parents, bratty ten-year-old Sonya Goldberg and her even more obnoxious seven-year-old sister Shoshie, and their parents. And no one ever let her write in peace! Mrs. Goldberg always complained about “that clack, clack, clacking” while her horrible little girls always pestered her.

Sure enough, Sonya leaned over her shoulder, whining, “Whatcha writing?”

“None of your damn business!” Rachel leaned forward to cover the page.

“Oo, you used a bad word! I’m gonna tell my mommy you used a bad word, and she’s gonna tell your daddy, and girl, you are gonna get a spaaan-king.…”

“Don’t you ever call me ‘girl’ again, you little brat! You tell on me and see if your precious little dollies stay in one piece!”

Sonya’s face worked as if she was about to cry, tainting Rachel’s satisfaction with guilt that bubbled from her gut like the sour aftertaste of Mrs. Goldberg’s horrible cooking. Not that anybody could do anything much with the moldy potato ration they were getting these days. She huddled deeper into her corner, trying to ignore Sonya’s nasty words to Shoshie and the hard little knot of hunger in the pit of her stomach—breakfast had been a half-slice of stale bread. At least she still had her precious though dwindling store of paper, mainly blank pages ripped out of old books that she’d been able to scrounge or barter for here and there. After a moment, she typed:

Princess Anya was beautiful, with the delicate long-limbed loveliness of a native Martian raised in the Red Planet’s lesser gravity, and from the moment he first saw her looking lost and bewildered as she emerged from the immigrants’ quarantine at Aphrodite Port, Jack knew that they were meant for each other and that it was his duty to protect her. And that was before he even knew that she was a refugee from the evil Lord Ares II.

Jack swore as he hacked his way through the thick undergrowth with his electric machete. It had been almost twenty-four hours since Anya had run away into the jungle after catching a glimpse of a tall, spindly man with the telltale chin-beard of the police caste serving the current Martian tyrant, whom she always referred to disdainfully as “the usurper.” Of course, she knew nothing of the Great Jungle that stretched for thousands of miles in all directions from Aphrodite Port, so she had stumbled straight into the Medusa’s nest, and there she would have been trapped and slowly eaten, one lovely inch of her at a time, if not for his faithful friend Karolla, who knew these lands like the backs of his giant seven-fingered hands.…

♂

“Time to do your chores!” Ma called from downstairs.

“In a minute!”

“Right now, Katie!”

Kaitlyn Webb sighed and shut the book she had been reading in the uncertain predawn light that filtered through the battered lace curtains over her bedroom window. She stroked the cover’s fancy embossed gold lettering for a moment with work-calloused fingers. Nobody makes books like that anymore, she thought. Leastaways, nobody in Texas. Lost Classics of Science Fiction was an anthology of short stories published in New York City, which told you right there that it had to be at least half a century old. She felt sort of wistful, and also sort of resentful, reading about the future those old writers thought was coming. All those flying cars and cheap space travel to the ends of the universe. What would the author of “Zap-Gun Jack Flash and the Dame-Eating Monsters of Venus” have thought if he’d known that hundreds of years after his time, folks would be getting around in horse-and-buggies if they were rich like the Montoyas down the road, or on a broken-down old mule if they were poor like her family?

Katie tucked the book into a pocket of her overalls and made her way out to the well with two empty buckets. It was going to kill her to lug them back to the house. “Tough luck,” Ma would say if she complained. “You’re fifteen years old, almost a grown woman, and you’d better pull your weight around here!” Katie would’ve bet a whole lone­star that Zap-Gun Jack’s “unknown author” hadn’t had such problems. The brief blurb said the story was found in an old wooden trunk in an apartment in Warsaw, which had once been the capital of a European country called Poland, “in neatly typewritten manuscript form.” It was a romantic enough story, so Katie had invented a romantic figure to go with it. He was tall and dark and debonair (a word she’d learned from another book she’d found along with the anthology in the ruins of the library in the abandoned town of Jodie, on the road to Abilene). She pictured him in his early forties, with a distinguished touch of gray at his temples and a gently amused expression permanently etched into his face. Maybe he was a count! Didn’t they used to have counts in Europe? She’d bet anything that counts had exquisite manners, especially with girls like herself, and quite unlike the swaggering way Texas Rangers like that no-good Johnny Marshall had.

When she staggered into the kitchen with the water buckets, Pa was just finishing his breakfast of salted grits. This morning there weren’t even any eggs, let alone bacon, so he was in a bad mood and Katie steered clear of him. He grunted as she walked past.

“Now you hush and finish your breakfast so you can get along into town,” Ma said to him.

“Not goin’ into town today,” Pa replied.

“Why not? You know we need more kerosene for the lamps. Also soap, and twine, and—‍”

“Fred told me he saw more Dixies out in his back forty,” Pa interrupted.

“What? When was this?” Ma asked.

“Day before yesterday. Least half a dozen of them, there were, skulking around in those ash-gray uniforms of theirs and stealin’ the ripe corn. He didn’t dare say nothin’ to them, seein’ as how they were armed with rifles and all.”

Suddenly Mom turned on Katie. “What the heck are you doing, standing around eavesdropping on grown-up talk? Get yourself back out there and feed them pigs!”

“Yes, Ma,” she sighed. Wouldn’t be worth her while to complain out loud, not unless she wanted a spanking. No one else my age gets spanked. She made her way out to their miserable broken-down excuse for a barn. She never could resign herself to the stink of the pigs. But being out of sight of the house gave her the chance to take out the book and read a few more paragraphs:

Karolla was waiting for Jack in a clearing deep in the jungle. He looked something like a miniature model of Earth’s fabled Tyrannosaurus Rex, only with grayish, downy fur, the head of a sheepdog and startling blue eyes that blinked innocently down at Jack as he emerged and sheathed his electric machete. “You’re late,” the Venusian chided in a clear, high-pitched voice that always reminded Jack of his little brother Jim, lost and presumed drowned in the Half-Shell Ocean these many years.

To clear the lump that rose in his throat Jack snarled, “Wasn’t my fault, all right, ya big shaggy lump? I had to dodge Ares’ agents back in Aphrodite Port. Always did hate the city. I’d rather fight a Medusa barehanded any day than have to deal with one of those sneaky, hit-below-the-belt tough guys they got on every street corner there. But let’s not stand around jabbering. Take me to the Medusa that’s got Anya!”

“Right away, Jack,” Karolla said sweetly, and bounded off into the undergrowth. Jack charged after him, hollering in vain at the Venusian to slow down. At least he was easy enough to follow, because he left behind a trail of crushed and trampled joowallah plants oozing their scarlet juice onto the forest floor. In no time at all Jack emerged in the clearing where the Medusa had made its nest, but he saw right away that there was a problem.…

Rachel punched the typewriter keys as gently as she could while still leaving a mark on the page, so as not to wake up the brats. Mrs. Goldberg would kill her if she did. The late July night was sweltering, their room stifling thanks to the boards nailed over the windows, which did nothing to keep out the drafts on winter nights. There was little light to see by; for the millionth time Rachel thanked her lucky stars she had taken touch-typing lessons the summer before the Germans invaded. Still and all, it was her habit to write for at least an hour every night after the two brats had finally fallen asleep, despite all of Mom’s warnings about how she was going to ruin her eyesight, and Mrs. Goldberg’s warnings about what she would do if her precious children’s sleep was disturbed. Tonight she typed frantically, trying to forget her worry about her parents, who had gone out hours ago along with Mr. Goldberg, chasing a rumor of black-market apples. But her attempt to lose herself on Venus was soon shattered by a furtive knocking. Mrs. Goldberg lit a candle stub and dived to open the door, bumping into Rachel and shoving her out of the way. Mr. Goldberg lurched in, smelling of dirt and sweat, and embraced his wife wordlessly.

“What is it? Where’s Mom and Dad?” Rachel whispered. No one answered her at first. Then Mr. Goldberg detached himself from his wife and looked at her. In the flickering candlelight she couldn’t read his expression, but she thought she saw his eyes gleam.

“Maideleh, I’m so sorry, but the Germans took them. I barely got away myself.”

Mrs. Goldberg let out a stifled sob. Rachel just stared at him. “What do you mean the Germans took them?”

“The Germans grabbed them right off the street along with dozens of other people. I saw them being marched away with their hands up. They’re all going to work camps, or so the Germans say.”

Trust that weaselly little Goldberg to be the one to sneak away. “So how come you weren’t rounded up?”

Mrs. Goldberg stopped her soft crying. “Rachel, don’t—”

Mr. Goldberg’s head and shoulders sagged, as if he were a marionette whose strings had been cut. “I hid,” he confessed. “I didn’t dare sneak back here till now.”

“They should have taken you instead!” Rachel cried, and flung herself onto the filthy, broken-down pallet beside the window that she slept on instead of a bed—only the Goldberg brats were good enough to get actual beds. She buried her face in the pillow, sobbing until her throat was raw and her chest ached, waiting for Mrs. Goldberg to start slapping her and not caring if she did. But nothing happened.

Later, after Mr. and Mrs. Goldberg had settled into their bed, she gazed at the sliver of night sky just visible through the boards over the window. I’ll never sleep again. Her gaze was drawn to a bright light, too bright to be a star, so bright that it seemed to have definite mass, a shining pewter weight up there in space. Could it be the morning star? Venus was the morning star, wasn’t it? She yawned, her eyelids suddenly heavy, and she struggled to keep them open.

♂

A moment later she blinked and opened her eyes to gray daylight. She turned over and something wet seeped through her thin dress. She scrabbled to sit up. An oozing scarlet liquid the consistency of glue covered her hands and dress. I’m bleeding. Her guts lurched, but then the smell hit her, an odd, sharply sweet scent. She touched the tip of her tongue to her finger. Raspberries? How could she be lying in raspberry jam? The sugar ration had been eliminated, and when was the last time anyone in the ghetto had had fresh fruit to make into preserves?

Rachel sat up. “Mom?” She stared. Instead of sheets, she had been lying under grayish-tinged green leaves big enough to build a tent with. In fact, Zap-Gun Jack had done exactly that once, when he was fleeing from the Zonds, who hated Karolla’s people, the N’Bialys, so much that.… Rachel blinked twice, squeezed her eyes shut and pressed her fingers to her temples. I made all that stuff up. It isn’t real. I’m dreaming about it right now because I’m so upset about.… Anyway I’m going to wake up any second because the brats are bound to be fighting like they do every morning.… But when she opened her eyes she was still not in the apartment. Instead she was surrounded by giant unearthly trees, “with mother-of-pearl trunks that stretched up to touch the featureless ceiling of the world,” as she had written just last week. She tried to stand but the decaying leaves on the forest floor were so slippery she landed right back on her rump.

A man charged out of the jungle, grunting with effort and swearing to himself in English. “Darn that Karolla…if that thing has hurt one hair on Anya’s head I’ll.…” He stopped dead when he saw Rachel sitting there and they stared at each other.

“Jack?” Rachel finally whispered. “Zap-Gun Jack?”

“That’s my name.” Jack hitched his thumbs into the loops of his gun belt and rocked back on his heels. “Who might you be, missy?”

Before Rachel could answer there was a rustling to the left. Jack raised his index finger to his lips and tiptoed in that direction, zap-gun at the ready. Rachel held her breath, waiting for the “frizzing sizzle of the zap-gun, like an enormous steak cooking on the stovetop,” as she’d described it, her mouth watering at the simile. Instead there was a thrashing and a yelping and a surprised shout from Jack. A moment later he was back, his face set in a scowl as he pulled a skinny brown-haired boy by the hand. Wait. Not a boy, but a girl about her own age with her hair cut very short, dressed in dirty dungarees and a patched, short-sleeved shirt. She had a dazed look on her face and kept muttering to herself in strangely accented English, “Time to wake up now. Them pigs need feeding.…”

“Damn tourists,” Jack said. “Pardon my language, ladies, but what in the heck are you doing so far from Aphrodite Port? The deep jungle’s no place for offworlders. You can get hurt out here. In fact, I’m kind of in a rush right now because I have to rescue another offworlder who got herself in a pickle. Though she’s no tourist.”

“Neither am I,” the girl who looked like a boy said. “My name’s Kaitlyn Webb, but y’all can call me Katie. I was just walking back from feeding the pigs on our farm when I saw the Dixies surrounding our house. Looked like a whole platoon of them! I ran and hid, and then they took my parents away at gunpoint and set fire to our house.”

“Far?” said Rachel. “Oh, fire!”

“Yeah, that’s what I said.” Katie wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. “Damn butternuts! I’d have shot at them myself and maybe bagged me a few, but our guns were in the house, and I saw some filthy Alabama redneck swaggering around with Daddy’s best 12-gauge. So I ran to get help from the Montoyas, but there were Dixies there too! It was a regular invasion, and no Rangers around anywhere to drive the damn weevils off. I would’ve even been glad to see Johnny Marshall’s ugly face, but of course he was nowhere to be found. Everyone knows what them Dixies do to girls when they catch ’em, so I just ran and ran and ran till I couldn’t run no more, and I dropped and fell asleep right there on the open prairie. Last thing I saw was the morning star.”

Rachel started at this detail, and then slowly told her own story. “I also thought I must be dreaming, Katie,” she said, “especially because I made this whole thing up.”

“Made what whole thing up?” Jack interrupted. “You mean to say you girls have been lying to me this whole time?”

“No, no. I mean all this,” Rachel said, waving her hand around at the grayish-green foliage.

Jack looked even more confused, but Katie’s brown eyes widened. “You mean to tell me you’re the author of ‘Zap-Gun Jack and the Dame-Eating Monsters of Venus?’”

Rachel winced and her face heated up. “That’s a stupid title, but yes, I’m the one who made up Jack and Princess Anya and the N’Bialys.”

“You?” Katie cried.

Jack said, “How did you know my girl—the name of the princess? And how come you’re the only offworlder I ever met who can pronounce the Venusians’ true name?”

“Because I’m the author. I made all this up. I made you up, Zap-Gun Jack. So I know all about you. I know what happened to Jim. It wasn’t your fault, and anyway, he’s not really dead, he…”

Karolla bounded into the clearing. Katie shrank back, her arm over her eyes, but Rachel only muttered, “No no no, I said seven fingers. Seven! Oh…I see… that one’s just so much smaller than the others.…” The creature’s fur was mottled, providing better camouflage with the jungle foliage. I don’t remember thinking of that.

“Jack, why are you a-lazing while Anya is a-blazing?” the Venusian piped.

“I thought I told you, no more rhymes! It’s gettin’ on my nerves!” Jack reholstered his zap-gun.

“But it helps me with my English!” Karolla’s big blue eyes narrowed. “Hey, what’s the story with these pretty girls, Jack my lad? When Anya sees them, she’ll be mad!”

“They’re a couple of lost tourists,” Jack said. “And Anya isn’t going to see them, you furry horror, because they’re going to be good girls and wait right here till I’m finished rescuing the princess!” Jack and Karolla rushed into the jungle.

“Oh no we won’t.” Rachel took off after them. “I have information you need, Jack! I know where your brother is!”

“And I ain’t waiting out here on my own!” Katie ran after Rachel. Fortunately Jack needed his electric machete to blaze a trail through the dense growth, so he couldn’t get too far ahead. Still, it was hard work just keeping up, and both girls were soon dripping with sweat. Rachel kept staring at the landscape. She knew the names of the major species of trees—the ones with the tent-size leaves were called wharsawa, for instance, while the ones that were just a little taller than Karolla and had brilliant yellow flowers were called czarniy—but she didn’t know the names of all the smaller plants, apart from the joowallah and the dark green klemeth creeper vines. And she didn’t know what the dinner-plate-size fluorescent green ladybug that she almost stepped on was called. In fact she didn’t remember inventing so many things, but it was a jungle after all. The profusion of life made logical sense.

Something else was bothering her, though, and it took a while of listening to Jack and Karolla’s banter before she figured it out. The rhymes, that’s it. I never said the N’Bialy had a habit of rhyming in English. What else don’t I know about?

Katie interrupted her reverie. “So you’re the author, huh?”

“I am,” Rachel puffed. Wish I could keep up with the pace Jack is setting, like Katie can. For a city girl who didn’t get enough to eat, it wasn’t so easy.

“I always figured you for a count, since the book said your story was found in Poland.”

“Well, I’m not a count,” Rachel said. “I’m a Jew.”

Katie nodded. “The book said you might have been one, and that maybe you were in the Holocaust.”

“What’s the Holocaust?”

Katie grimaced and changed the subject. “How come we’re here, Miss Rachel? Any ideas?”

Rachel shook her head. “I don’t understand it either. I was just writing stories to take my mind off things. I missed our house and the friends I used to have before the Germans made us move to the ghetto.”

Katie nodded. “I used to play dolls with Jennie down the road, but then her family up and moved to California. My daddy used to say he never could understand why free-born Texians would want to go live under the Reagan, but Jennie said her daddy had an offer to manage a wind-farm up north of Big Sur, so they got their passports and we never saw them again.”

“I don’t understand. Aren’t you an American? Why would you need a passport to visit another American state?”

“Well yeah, I’m an American, same as you’re a European, I guess. But America hasn’t been a single country since—”

“Ladies, I hate to interrupt this symposium on Earthside politics, but you’re gonna have to keep it down from now on. Medusas have very sensitive hearing,” Jack said.

“I didn’t write that,” Rachel grumbled, but she obediently shut up and concentrated on avoiding the snakelike klemeth underfoot. Her mind whirled. Was Katie from the far future? Or from a parallel world of some kind? How exactly had her story come to be published, and how had Katie found it? And most of all, how on earth had both of them been catapulted into a world that she, Rachel, had made up? Mom might think she was a woolly-headed dreamer, but Rachel was no believer in magic. If by some miracle she did survive the war and went to college, she wanted to study physics. She’d read about Einstein’s Special and General Theories of Relativity, and the new quantum mechanics that even he didn’t seem to understand, and she thought it was the most exciting stuff in the world. That was how she wanted to spend her life, learning about how the universe really worked, cracking God’s code. Physics was so much more elegant than the clumsy attempts made at guessing the divine mind back in Biblical times. But this, this was as crazy and illogical as any story about bushes burning and the Red Sea splitting. And yet there seemed to be no alternative but to accept things at face value for now.

♂

Katie’s horizons were narrower than Rachel’s, but paradoxically this made it easier for her to accept the situation. Hadn’t she always dreamed of running away from the farm? It seemed like her prayers had come true, though God was playing a mighty cruel joke if He had taken her parents as the price of her escape. She tried to push the thought away and concentrate on making headway through the jungle. Jack was using his electric machete economically, cutting away only the largest plants and stomping right over the vines and some kind of mushroom-like growth that groaned when you stepped on it. They didn’t have anything like that back in the Texas Panhandle, but the farmers who scratched a living out of a prairie that got drier every year often spoke in hushed tones about “you-foes,” mysterious colored lights that appeared in the night skies and sometimes took away a calf or a child. Then too, Katie had found a collection of L. Frank Baum’s books in the children’s section of the ruined library, and while he wasn’t as good a writer as Rachel, he had also helped accustom her to the idea that all living things might not look or sound familiar.

“Hey Rachel,” she whispered, helping her over a tangle of vines, “what’s that important information you said you had for Jack?”

“Remember the part in the story where he first sees the Medusa?”

“Oh, yeah— Hey Jack!”

Jack hissed like the Montoyas’ sprinkler system. “Keep it down, I said! I don’t want to have to rescue three dames from the Medusa’s clutches.”

“But that’s what we have to tell you about,” Katie said. “The Medusa that’s got Anya—it’s calving.”

Jack stopped and turned around. “It’s doing what, now?”

“What Katie means is, it’s having babies,” Rachel explained.

Jack let loose with an impressive string of English swear words, some of which Rachel didn’t know. When he finished, he whistled and Karolla bounded back.

“Earthlings are so slow, how you don’t all get eaten I do not know,” he said.

“N’Bialy rush in where angels fear to tread,” Jack retorted. “Listen, you big galoot, is this Medusa spawning season?”

“I do not understand, Jack my man.”

“Aw, cripes. Are big Medusas making little ones now, you furbrain?”

“N’Bialy brains are not made of fur,” Karolla retorted. “The history textbooks Anya brought from Mars, I study with her. She is so patient, she’s teaching me to read English real well. Although I still find it hard to spell.”

“But not to make annoying rhymes,” said Jack. “Anya’s studying history?”

Rachel also looked surprised, but then her lips curled in a smile.

“Now’s not the time of studies to be dreaming. I can hear Anya screaming!”

“I don’t hear anything,” Jack said, but just then a distant shriek echoed through the jungle, and he moved faster than Rachel or Katie had ever seen a man run before. They did their best to keep up as he charged after Karolla, dashing down a gentle slope, splashing through a creek, and climbing a tuft of grass along the opposite bank, until they found themselves standing on a blasted patch of ground at least fifty yards across. In the center squatted the Greater Venusian Medusa, every bit as horrible as Rachel had imagined and then some. It was that thing in nightmares that grabs you from behind and lifts you slowly, oh so slowly off the ground while your parents and your friends watch with frozen, terror-stricken faces as you struggle to turn in its grasp and get a glimpse of it, and just when you’re about to succeed you wake up with your throat too tight even to scream. The Medusa had tentacles in profusion, yes, and claws like giant scimitars that gleamed in the occluded sunlight, and fangs where no fangs ought to be, and malevolent yellow eyes and wicked-looking spines and…and…and it took up half the clearing, and in its center (if the thing could be said to have a center) wriggled a tall, slim woman with flame-red hair dressed in what looked like a filmy white nightgown. Her face was bruised and thin rivulets of blood ran down her arms, chest and legs, staining her toga or whatever it was.

Jack unholstered his zap-gun. “Unhand her, you brute!” he cried.

“That’s a little corny, Rachel,” Katie said in an undertone.

“It’s how heroes are supposed to talk! Duck!” Rachel shouted as something whizzed through the air. Katie dodged and the thing crashed into a tree and fell to the ground with a sickening plop, waving claws and tentacles frantically until Karolla bounded into the clearing and stomped on it with the sound of a sledgehammer smashing a snail shell. That was the signal for half an hour of frenzied yelling, stomping and splattering, all mixed up with the sizzling noise of Jack’s zap-gun cauterizing various Medusa limbs. Katie had reason to be grateful for her tough work boots, while Rachel found a wharsawa stick and grunted every time she crushed a larva’s carapace. At last the mama Medusa let out a squealing bellow, like a woolly mammoth with its foot caught in a bear trap, flung Anya at Jack’s feet and scrabbled off into the jungle, followed by all the surviving larvae, which were chittering angrily as they retreated.

“My love.” Jack lifted Anya to her feet. “Are you all right?”

“Never better, Jack darling,” she gasped. And they kissed for a long time, while Rachel and Katie stood with folded arms and watched.

“You sure do know how to write a love scene,” Katie murmured after a while.

“Not really,” Rachel said out of the corner of her mouth. “I’ve, uh, I’ve never been kissed. I think Jack and the princess figured it out for themselves.”

When the lovers surfaced for air the Martian princess looked around, waved shyly at Karolla, and narrowed her eyes when she saw the girls. “Jack, who are these people?”

“They’re Earthling tourists who somehow got themselves lost in the jungle. I’m just taking them back to their tour group,” Jack said.

But Anya hardly seemed to hear his explanation. Her eyes remained narrowed, focused on Rachel, who promptly broke out in a fresh sweat.

“What? What is it? What’s wrong?”

Anya walked up to Rachel, placed her hands on her Rachel’s shoulders and said something in a foreign language.

“What? What was that?” Katie asked.

Jack said, “You never talk Martian to me, honey.”

“That’s because you’re lousy at languages, my love.” Anya stared into Rachel’s eyes. “I called her my sister.”

“In Polish,” Rachel said.

“Oh, yeah,” Katie looked from one to the other. “You do look alike. A lot alike! You could be twins, almost! You both got that long, curly red hair and green eyes, and.…” She stopped because Rachel was blushing furiously.

“In N’Bialy we say peggishah mishpakh’teet,” Karolla said approvingly. “A family reunion, how sweet.”

Jack cleared his throat. “Well, when you finish the reunion, ladies, could you please explain to me what you meant about my brother, Rachel?”

“Oh yes,” she said, shaking herself. “It’s simple enough. It was going to be in my next story. Jim is alive and well, but he’s being held captive on Mars by Lord Ares.”

“Then,” Jack said grimly, “we must rescue Jim, and free Mars from the awful tyranny of Lord Ares! Come with me!” And he strode forth without looking back to see if anyone was following him. But of course, they all were, Jack and the three dames and the furry Venusian monster.