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CHAPTER TWO

KEEP WATCHING THE SKIES

Then I felt like some watcher of the skies

When a new planet swims into his ken.

—John Keats

Alex Smith, 16 Bi-February, Mars Year ii

Novato, California, Planet Earth

It was just a year ago that I finished my manuscript, Keep Watching the Skies: My Story of the War of Two Worlds. It was published in December on the second anniversary of the War, and I’m pleased to say that it’s done surprisingly well, particularly considering the number of volumes about the Martian War that were released in the immediate aftermath of the conflict.

I wrote my book at least partially to gain support for a renewed effort on the part of our government, in concert with our allies around the world, to prepare for the next attack from Mars, an attack that I believe to be inevitable. Of course, my work stirred up reactions from all the usual “crazies,” those folks who seem to find any excuse whatever for their wild imaginings and implausible schemes. One of these, I thought, was Dr. Geoffrey Alexander.

He first wrote to me shortly after the book appeared, saying that he had an artifact that he wanted me to examine. I didn’t bother to reply. By then I was being snowed by “fan” mail, and had finally given up trying to answer it all. I still teach philosophy at the State U., and my life is now centered mostly on my family and my academic career. Mars (I hope) has finally been purged from my consciousness. Well, mostly.

I still have nightmares and I still wake up with cold sweats in the wee hours of the morning. I don’t think that’ll ever go away. And I still regret what happened to Reverend Lesley.

But I also have a daughter now, a precocious one-year-old who is constantly surprising her parents with her perceptiveness and intelligence and beauty; and her presence has irrevocably altered my life for the good.

Alexander didn’t give up easily. He contacted my friend, Dr. Mindon Min, and convinced him of the reality of the thing; and Mindon set up a meeting between us three at Zee’s, a funky little eatery in downtown Novato.

You need to understand something about Zee. He’d served in Iraq many years before. Something had gone wrong there—he’d seen too much or done too much or sniffed too much, no one really knew which—but when he returned to Northern California he bought a café called Crumbly’s, and changed the name to Zee’s Zippy Zone. The décor was as eclectic as Zee himself.

The walls were lined with what Mindon called “Old Shit,” photos and implements and advertisements from the past, garnered from who knows where. Some of the larger doodads dangling from the ceiling swayed each time a patron entered or exited the place—or whenever we had an earthquake.

But it wasn’t just the atmosphere that kept people coming back. Zee was a damned good cook, and he fixed something different every day. Even when he appeared to repeat a dish, there was something new or unusual about it, some twist that hadn’t been there before. He didn’t offer a menu as such: you either ate what he served you that day—or you didn’t. I don’t think Zee really cared one way or the other. Strangely, even the teens seemed to love the place, maybe because he told one of them once that he’d actually fried some bugs up (I never saw them!).

So Mindon set up the confab, and I reluctantly agreed to go along, just for my friend’s sake, really. The events of the war had brought us even closer together than before, and he was one person (other than Becky) whom I didn’t want to lose.

When I got there, I saw him sitting with Dr. Alexander over in our favorite corner.

“You’re a hard man to get ahold of,” the paleontologist said.

“I try to be,” I said. “Don’t really like publicity all that much.”

“Then why write that book?”

“I felt that the world needed a wake-up call.”

“So you don’t think the Martian threat is over?”

“Nope.”

“Neither do I, but my reasons are different from yours. You might say they’re buried in the past. Take a look at this.”

He reached into a knapsack and pulled out an ovoid object about nine inches in diameter, almost purple in hue, with flakes of gray-colored stone splattered all around the outside.

“It’s the crushed egg of a duck-billed dinosaur, a hadrosaur,” he said, “dating from the late Cretaceous period, or right near the end of the Age of Reptiles. Notice anything odd about it?”

He carefully laid the heavy stone in my palm.

“What’re these prongs?” I pointed to several pieces of sharp metal protruding out of either side of the artifact.

“Well, that’s the $24,000 question, isn’t it? I thought at first it was a fake—we find them occasionally, even on the remote sites, seeded into otherwise pristine beds—but I’ve changed my mind. Problem was, I and the guy who discovered the thing couldn’t make it public. We’d’ve been laughed right out of town. No one in the scientific community would have believed that it was genuine, not under any circumstance. Eventually, I had a sliver of the metal analyzed, but that too was something unique. No one could place it—at least until the Martian invasion.

“A couple of essays appeared in Nature this past year, providing the first detailed metallurgical analyses of the Martian machines. Now, here’s the interesting thing: one of these profiles exactly matches the composition of the metal embedded in this sixty-five-million-year-old dinosaur egg.”

“Which one?” I asked, suddenly very much interested indeed.

“A piece of a Martian spaceship,” Alexander said. “They’re exactly the same.”

“But that means….”

“Yes,” he said, smiling. “It means that the Martians were here sixty-five million years ago. It means that the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs wasn’t an accident. It means that there was an earlier War of Two Worlds. And it means that we lost—big time! It means that all of the larger animals on Earth were killed as a result, slaughtered almost to the last one.”

“Jeez,” I said, “If they have that kind of technology…?”

“…Yeah, they could use it again,” Mindon interjected, “and we’re just sitting ducks, gents, one gigantic bull’s-eye called Planet Earth.”

“I’d like to have this verified myself, if that’s possible,” I said.

“Of course. That’s why I brought it. You’ve been getting an awful lot of media play over your book, even now. People in the right places need to know about this. They really need to know right away.”

He pulled out a folder and laid it on the table.

“This has all the documentation about the find, as described by me and Duke Alver, who was the one who actually stumbled on the thing. We were on a dig together in Montana a few years back. This one’s given me a lot of sleepless nights on the Procrustean bed, let me tell you. I’m happy to share the burden.”

“What about Duke?” I asked.

“Bought the farm couple of years ago.”

Then Zee brought our lunches, and laid them before us. It was something made with cheese (more than one kind), pastrami, ’shrooms, spinach, onions, and a few other things. The odor was overwhelmingly pleasing.

The restaurateur stopped suddenly, and then examined the artifact with a very odd expression on his face.

“E-e-egg!” he finally managed to choke out.

“Yes it is, Zee,” I said.

He shook his head: “D-don’t l-let it ha-hatch!”

Then he walked away. We looked at each other.

“Let’s eat,” I finally said.

“Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof,” Mindon added.