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CHAPTER ONE

“THE MAN IN THE MARS”

Ours is the invading army.

—Henry David Thoreau

Alex Smith, 21 June, Mars Year i

Novato, California, Planet Earth

Call me Alex.

I want to tell you a story.

“Once upon a time….”

Well, I guess you’ve heard that one before.

No, my story is about life and death and war and peace and all those good and ugly things.

I could tell you that we won every fight and killed every alien and drove the dirty buggers right back into space, but it wouldn’t be true.

I have quite another tale to tell, of terror and temerity and tremulousness.

It goes something like this:

In the early years of the twenty-first century, no one would have believed that our world had become the target of extraterrestrial intelligences vastly older and greater than our own.

We’d sent probes to the furthest reaches of the Solar System, and they confirmed the utter deadness of the deeps. SETI, that grand experiment to identify intelligent life “out there,” failed to produce even one “peep” of nonsense. We carefully measured craters and rocks and gas. We found no life, none at all.

The machines told us that Mars once had oceans and rivers and lakes—just like Earth. Where did the water go? Underground or into the sky, our scientists said, leaving few traces of its presence in that world’s barren fields and stony red hills.

Life on Mars, we all said, is certainly gone and dead—if it was ever there at all.

We were wrong.

We just hadn’t read the signs right.

Our robots woke the monsters from their long, leisurely sleep. We gained their sudden attention. We aroused their interest or suspicion or who the hell knows what.

I saw it all first-hand.

I was there when it started.

I was there when it ended.

This is the tale of the War of Two Worlds.

* * * *

That was the Year we later called Mars One.

I decided to take a sabbatical from the college. I’d had enough of the academic rat race to last me a lifetime. I would have been happy never to have seen Dean Broker’s pinched face or my sad-eyed students ever again. The Dean wanted more students—the students wanted more jobs. The serious discussion of history and philosophy, of why and how and for what reason, was somehow lost in the shuffle.

“The problem with philosophy,” one of my coeds joked, “is that it Kant make up its mind!”

“History is dead,” said another, “so why don’t we give it a decent burial?”

Ahem and amen. For a few months, at least, I had a book to write and grass to grow under my feet. It felt pretty damned good.

Then CNN reported a series of green flashes on the Red Planet. At the same time, our satellites around Mars suddenly went dead. The coincidence of the two events was much commented upon in the media. Carl Rover assured the press that the President had been briefed and knew what was happening, although she couldn’t tell the American public—for national security reasons, of course. Fox News thought this was another liberal conspiracy, and undoubtedly it was so.

Some scientists questioned the existence of the phenomena, treating the sparks of light like some UFO sighting. “Transient radiation,” a few said. Others thought that it was the interplanetary equivalent of “marsh gas.”

If I hadn’t bumped into Mindon at the market, I wouldn’t have known much more than the other boobs. Dr. Min was an eccentric colleague and part-time lecturer who specialized in astronomy and Native American studies, and claimed some small percentage of Indian blood himself, enough to qualify him for membership in the Moroño Tribe. He looked more like a washed-up hippie than a teacher, always sporting turquoise bolo ties and rings and beads over rather garish, unbuttoned Hawaiian sports shirts—“gotta rent the rug!” he’d say. He kept a reflecting telescope in a cabin he owned a half-mile west of his house, where he sometimes practiced his flute and smoked some Humboldt hash while instructing the local damsels-in-distress in the ways of AmerIndian love songs. I’d known him for years.

“Man, you just gotta see this!” he said, leaning on a cart filled with Dos Equis, low-salt, low-fat corn chips, kosher wieners, turkey burger patties, plus more beer. “It’s like Fourth of July up there. All these green and red lights popping out. I’ve invited Barbi and Bonni and Jillie and Stassi and Lissie and Evie and Frannie and Ollie…of course, you and Becky have got to come. Plenty to eat and drink.”

* * * *

It was getting dark by the time Rebecca and I reached Min’s hideaway. He’d already fired up the barbecue, and the ’scope was set on the concrete patio, outlined against the darkening sky like some praying mantis ready to pounce. I still remember that night: the small light glowing behind us against the garage, the near-burnt odor of hotdogs and chicken and burgers searing over charcoal briskets, the murmur of voices undercut by the rasping of crows and the twittering of crickets, and the smooth ratcheting of the telescope gears as the instrument was calibrated and pointed toward Mars.

Mindon moved about like some ancient wizard, barely visible in the failing twilight, somehow keeping his beard from dipping into the fire.

“Hey, Mindon!” One of the girls giggled. “What’s your first name?”

“That is my first name,” he said, and went back to work.

Then he called me over to the lens, shushing everyone up. I peered into the aperture, and could suddenly see the tiny, rust-colored planet swimming in the field. It was such a bitty thing, so bright and small and still, faintly marked with transverse stripes, white at the poles and slightly flattened at top and bottom, silvery warm, a pinhead of reddish light. It quivered in the Earth’s atmosphere.

As I watched, Mars seemed to grow larger and smaller, to advance and recede, but that was just my eyes growing tired. The planet was millions of miles distant, separated from us by an immensity of near-empty space.

A flash of brilliant green light shot from the planet’s surface, just for a second.

“Oh my God!” I said, “What’s that?”

“Something I’ve never seen before.”

“But there’s no life there. Everyone knows that.”

“Then what is it?”

Of course, I couldn’t respond, because I didn’t know, and I didn’t want to admit that I didn’t know.

“It’s the Man in the Mars,” one of the girls said, and everyone laughed out loud, a nervous, tittery, twitchy sort of thing, a hollow hitching sound without much mirth to it.

The evening was unseasonably warm and I was seasonably dry, so I left the ’scope to someone else and went looking for another cold brewski. Mindon took his turn showing the lassies just how to view the night sky.

“Ohhh, Min!” one of them said. The orbs Min was staring at weren’t anywhere near the sky!

I sat on a wooden bench in the dimming light, patches of green and crimson swimming before my eyes. I hadn’t smoked in years, but I suddenly wanted a cigar so bad I could taste it. That wasn’t the kind of smoke that Mindon stocked in his rural retreat, however. We kept watching for another hour before finally giving up. Becky and I drove slowly downhill back to town.

“What do you think it is?” she asked.

“Probably nothing,” I said, “just the Martian equivalent of farting.”

I chuckled at my witticism, but she didn’t think it was funny. Marriage is often like that: it survives (or not) based on the efficacy of one’s humor, good or ill.

The next day, the Chronicle ran a long story on the Martian lights, eventually concluding that the phenomenon was indeed some vast geological outgassing. After all, volcanism was common on the other planets within the Solar System, and we’d seen signs that Mars had had its share of eruptions in the past. Why not now? We knew so little about the planet, really, that anything was possible.

Truer words were never thought.

That evening I walked downtown with Becky by my side. I pointed out the twelve signs of the Zodiac, showing off, as academic men like to do, my accumulated superficiality of knowledge. Then I identified Mars, a dull red hostile eye hanging low in the evening sky.

“It’s beautiful,” she said.

“The Roman God of War,” I said. “It was he who brought death and destruction and chaos to the ancient world. Only Janus, the two-faced God of Peace, could stare him down.”

“Only a man can start a war,” she said, once again showing a wisdom that seemed beyond anything I could comprehend, “and only a woman can end one.”

“Yes, but….” I rambled on and on with my philosophical meanderings.

But peace was demonstrated on this summer’s eve with ice cream and chocolate and some gentle conversation, and gradually the rabid beast was stilled within. On our way home, we passed several groups of young people, energized by their noisy boom boxes and singing off-key in accompaniment.

“Were we ever so foolish?” I said.

“Oh, I think we were, Alex.”

“I’d almost forgotten.”

I sighed for all the years lost.

And I noticed, as we strode quietly towards home, the lights beginning to dim in the windows around us, blinking out one by one.

It was the end of day.

It was the beginning of night.

And there were only fifty million shopping days left until Christmas.

It was the last time that any of us really felt safe.