Jesus On Mars Read online

  Jesus On Mars

  Philip Jose Farmer

  philip Jose Farmer

  Jesus On Mars

  Richard Orme was confused. As the captive leader of an expedition to Mars, he is eager to learn just what game his Martian 'hosts' are playing at. The man in the golden orb that floats above their subterranean cities - is he really Jesus? And when this 'Jesus' returns to Earth - would history repeat itself, once more? Orme does not know who to turn to in this strange, hollowed-out planet - not the Krsh teachers, nor the man they call Jesus, nor even the comely Martian whose dangerous love so kindles his desires...

  To my mother

  1

  The great canyon complex of the Vallis Marineris was a black wound on a red body. It ran for 3,000 miles from east to west near the equator of Mars. At its widest it was fifty miles and at its deepest several miles. If it resembled a terrible gash in a corpse, it also looked like a colossal centipede, the legs being the channels winding through the highlands towards the vast rift, and the bristles on the legs, the subtributaries.

  From the Aries, in a stationary orbit, Richard Orme looked down as if from an incredibly high mountain. A rapidly dying wind was blowing high clouds of ice crystals and low clouds of red dust across part of the complex, obscuring the section that was their goal after four months of voyage. He turned from the port and floated towards Madeleine Danton. She was seated before a viewscreen, her waist belted to a chair, which was bolted to the deck. Behind her floated Nadir Shirazi and Avram Bronski. Their hands gripped the back of the chair while they stared over her shoulders at the screen.

  Orme seized Shirazi's shoulder, swivelled around, and steadied himself. On the screen was the exposed tunnel that the satellite had photographed five years ago. Its roof, once a thin shell of rock, had fallen in. A passage ten feet wide, twenty feet tall, and eighty feet long was revealed.

  Though the dust storm looked solid from the ports of the ship, the pictures transmitted by the robot rover, which had landed two years ago, were fairly clear within fifty feet. Beyond was a reddish haze.

  The tunnel's floor was slowly being covered by dust. At one end it disappeared into the darkness of the part of the roof that had not collapsed. At the other end, vaguely discernible through the dust, was a door. It was of some dark material that could be metal or stone. Its smoothness showed that it had been machine-made.

  On the black surface of the door were two large orange characters: Greek letters, capital tau and capital omega. Danton's oval face was expressionless. Shirazi's hawkish features showed an intensity reminding Orme of a bird of prey that has just spotted a rabbit. Bronski's dark handsome face held a smirk.

  His own black features, he supposed, looked slightly ecstatic.

  Orme's heart was thudding, and its sudden increase in rate would have been monitored about 11.5 minutes from now by Houston if the sensors had been attached to him. But he was dressed in a jump suit. Launch time was two hours away. By then the lower wind should have subsided to a gentle breeze.

  'Let's see the ship,' Orme said.

  Danton punched in the orders on the tiny console before her. The view lifted up, showing a vague dark mass through the dust, the walls of the mile-deep rift, and then a huge mass; no, only its intimations, a ghost.

  The rover was crawling towards it now. Minutes passed while the curving outlines of the mass became clearer. Danton gave a verbal order to the robot to stop. Now they could see the great curving thing that had first attracted the survey satellite six years ago, shocking and exciting all of Earth and resulting in the first manned expedition to the red planet.

  'I've seen it a hundred times on Earth,' Orme said. 'And I still don't believe it. A spaceship!'

  Nobody answered. They understood that he was just talking to relieve tension.

  How long ago was it that the vessel had landed or crashed? A hundred years ago? A thousand? How long had it been before a landslide of rotten stone had covered it? And how many years had passed before some of the rock covering had slid off to expose a small part of the colossus? Or had it been deliberately concealed, the stones piled on it by its crew?

  If it hadn't been for the curiosity of an Australian scientist, his 'hunch' that the shadowy thing in the photographs looked unnatural and his persistence, the vessel still might not be noticed. It might have been undiscovered forever. Then the open tunnel had been found, and after three years, a robot had been landed to make a closer inspection. And the whole world was agog.

  Richard Orme, born in Toronto, Canada in 1979, had been thirty years old when the IASA had reluctantly announced that the curving mass was indeed artificial. He had anticipated the events that would follow, and he had worked and schemed and fought to be a member of this expedition. A toss of a coin had decided whether he or an Australian astronaut would be the captain and the fourth crewperson of the Aries. The loser had smiled and congratulated him, but that night he'd got drunk and been badly crippled in an automobile accident. Though he knew that it was irrational, Orme had felt guilty about it. Part of the guilt came from his elation at having won.

  Orme glanced at the chronometer and said, 'Time to start the next phase.'

  Danton stayed at the console; Bronski and Shirazi got busy helping Orme to suit up. Then Orme helped the Iranian to get Bronski into his armour.

  Meanwhile, Danton, in her slightly French-accented English, kept up a steady flow of reports on environmental data and the progress of the preparations. It was not an easy job since the long time-lag transmissions meant that she had to receive and often answer to comments relayed from Earth through the satellite above Houston. She had to keep in mind what she had said earlier.

  The whole world was listening at this moment; it would be doing so at every opportunity. The operation should go smoothly because of their many hours of practice landing on the Moon. But there was always the possibility of electromechanical malfunction.

  Finally, Orme and Bronski slid through the hatch into the lander, the Barsoom. The head of IASA had been a reader of Edgar Rice Burroughs in his childhood. His name was John Carter, the same as the hero of Burroughs's earlier books about Mars, known as Barsoom by its fictional natives. Carter had first proposed the name and had made the necessary political manipulations to get it accepted. Those who had wanted to name the lander Tau Omega, after the two characters on the tunnel door, had lost in the voting by a narrow margin.

  After half an hour of rechecking, Orme gave the order for launching. The Barsoom departed slowly from the mother ship under a weak jet pulse. Orme felt a warm spot over his navel, as if that psychic umbilical cord attaching him to the mother planet had been severed. But there was no time for any introspection. His mind had to be focused on the objective, the position of the lander in relation to the landing surface, and the constant inflow of flight data. He had to be a machine without flaw; the awe and wonder during descent and the ecstasy of accomplishment could come after the touchdown on Mars. If, that is, there were no immediate problems.

  The crew had practised landings on Earth in a much more powerful machine which could handle the heavy gravity and thick atmosphere. It had also practised on the Moon, where the gravitational pull was much weaker than that of Earth's and the atmosphere was practically nil. But the atmosphere here, though relatively tenuous, was still a considerable factor. However, the theory of a Martian landing had been worked out and the crew had drilled so many times under simulated conditions that the reality should be no problem.

  For four days the crew of the Aries had waited for the winds to die down. Now, finally, the high ice clouds and the lower dust clouds were subsiding. Only a few thin cirri floated along below them, and the surface atmosphere should not present difficulties.

  The red orb
expanded swiftly. The top of Olympus Mons, a volcano as wide as the state of New Mexico and 15.5 miles high, sank out of sight. The Tharsis ridge, looking like a colossal dinosaur with fleshy dorsal plates, widened and then dropped out of sight. The Tithonius Chasma, more than 46 miles wide and several miles deep, part of the Vallis Marineris canyon complex, broadened.

  For twenty seconds, whiteness surrounded them as they passed through a long, narrow and deep cloud of ice. To the east lay a shadow, night on Mars, advancing at almost the rate it did on Earth. It was the bow which shot darkness and a terrible cold over the wastelands. Not that it was warm on the surface.

  When they landed, they would find the temperature to be +20° C.

  Orme turned the lander to face west as the thin but still strong wind began to carry them east. He adjusted the pulses to counter the push of the atmosphere. The Barsoom sank, and he noted that the air, though it was becoming thicker, was not moving as swiftly as the higher altitude wind. He decreased the pulses; the raser indicator showed that the Barsoom was maintaining its angle of descent. A straight line drawn from the lander would end dead on the point of contact, the floor of the Tithonius Chasma.

  Time passed as he poured data into the transceiver. The transmitter would also be sending photographs of the approaching surface of Mars and of the two Marsnauts in this womb of irradiated plastic.

  Like a mouth, the rift opened beneath him. The vast mounds of the volcanoes outside dropped, and presently the ship was below the edges of the awesomely towering cliffs. They were still in the thin but bright sunlight of the red planet. Not until the sun was low would the shadow of the western wall fall on them.

  Orme, glancing now and then out of the port, could see the metallic curve of the other vessel buried beneath the landslide. Reddish rocks and a finer material, dust, were mixed in this collapse from the weathered material of the canyon wall. There was little wind here, which made Orme's task easier.

  Bronski, overcome by emotion, forgot his English and spoke in Polish. This had been his native language; he had not learned French until the age of ten, when his parents had fled to Sweden and thence to Paris. He corrected himself a moment later, saying, 'It is an artefact! A ship!'

  Orme thought that it remained to be proved that it was a spacecraft but he had no time to comment. Besides, he felt that Bronski was right.

  The lander settled firmly on its six pads, and it sank a trifle as its telescoping legs absorbed the shock, then recoiled to lift the vessel. Orme cut off the power and sat for a moment feeling the weak pull of Mars and hearing the silence. Then he said jubilantly, 'Martians, we're here!'

  He'd planned a number of short speeches, some quite poetic, but he had finally decided to hell with it. He'd say whatever came spontaneously.

  Danton's voice broke the silence. 'Congratulations, commander.'

  Orme was startled when Bronski's arms enfolded him from behind and his voice bellowed in Orme's ears.

  'By God, we've done it!'

  'He's here, too,' Orme said, and he meant it. 'Even if this place does look like the devil's workshop.'

  2

  Orme unstrapped himself and rose slowly, remembering that though there was gravity it was not Earth's. He looked through the port and quickly described what he saw. The lander was 300 feet from the edge of the landslide, resting on an area detected from the Aries. It was comparatively free of the rocks that littered the floor of the canyon; the pads had missed all of them and sat on rock swept smooth of dust by the recent winds. Through the top port he could see the sky, a light blue crossed by a few wisps of whiteness. Coming towards them was the robot explorer, RED II, which had first seen the two Greek characters on the tunnel door. Danton had directed it to approach the Barsoom closely and transmit pictures of the Marsnauts as they left the lander and worked around the Aries. These pictures would be transmitted to the Aries, which would relay them to the satellite and thence to Earth.

  Eight hundred feet behind the explorer, invisible even from its height, was the tunnel. Orme and Bronski got to work. After donning their suits and helmets and checking them, they entered the cramped room of the decompression chamber and closed the port leading to the interior of the lander. Orme set a gauge and pressed a button. Within three minutes the pressure in the chamber had been reduced to that of the atmosphere outside. Orme opened the hatch and unrolled a metal ladder. Though he could easily have jumped down to the ground fourteen feet below, he was forbidden to do so. The two were to take no chances.

  He clambered down the ladder and stepped backward on to the rock and turned. He felt a headiness which was not caused by the lighter gravity. He, Richard Orme, a black Canadian, was the first human being to step upon the surface of the red planet. Whatever happened from this second on, he would be recorded in history as the first man on Mars. The rover, that metallic insect-like machine, was transmitting pictures of the unique event right now. Of him, Richard Orme, the first Earthman to step upon the ancient rock of another planet.

  'Columbus, you should be here!' he said, acutely conscious that 11.5 minutes from now, billions would hear this statement. He did not utter his succeeding thought. And you'd crap in your pants! The old navigator could never even have dreamed of this.

  'Five hundred and twenty-three years have brought us a long way!’ he said. He didn't elaborate. There would be enough people on earth who'd understand what he meant and explain it to the viewers.

  Bronski came down the ladder then, looked around for a minute, and at a signal from Orme joined him in the work. From a compartment at the bottom of the lander they unloaded a cable, a driller, and a sonar. The latter determined that the landing place was solid rock and thick enough for the anchor. Bronski drilled into the basalt and then disengaged the drill from the power unit. One end of the cable was secured to the part of the drill sticking up from the surface. Orme prepared a cement mixture and poured it down between the drill and the hole.

  While waiting for the quick-drying material to harden, they walked to the silvery metal curve protruding from the masses of rock. Standing under the great arc and looking up at it, Orme felt awed. If this was a vessel, and it surely was, then it would be the size of an old passenger liner, say the Queen Mary, or as large as the Zeppelin Hindenburg. Whoever had built it had had an energy source that Earth lacked. To lift this monster from a planet into space, to drive it through interstellar space and to land here required a power staggering to think about.

  How long had it lain here at the bottom of this colossal canyon? Long enough, certainly, for the wall to weather and for chunks of rock to fall down and bury it. And then long enough for some force, perhaps the effect of very strong winds over a long time, to remove the rocks that had covered this part of the vessel.

  But it was possible that this exposed section had never been' covered. The survey satellite had photographed it many times, but no areographer had noticed it until Lackley, the Australian, had had his 'hunch'.

  Or, perhaps, some beings had started to remove the rocks and something had interrupted their work.

  At this thought, a chill ran up his spine and over his scalp. Involuntarily, he turned around to look behind him. There was, of course, no group of Martians advancing silently towards him. He laughed.

  'What's so funny?' Bronski said.

  'Nothing in particular. I laughed because... it doesn't matter. Joy, maybe. Here. Get the kit out.'

  He turned his back to Bronski, who removed a box from the cylinder on it. This was a minilaboratory designed for making chemical-physical tests. Bronski put the box on the ground, opened the lid, and he and Orme went through the process with a swiftness owing to long training. When they were done, Orme gave his report.

  'The door looks like metal. As you heard through the audiometer, the interior is hollow. It rings when hit with a steel hammer. Even a diamond won't scratch it. Nitric acid leaves it unmarked. I don't want to use a laser beam on it because air might damage the contents. Providing there are any. Whateve
r material it's made of, it's unknown to Terrestrial science.'

  Bronski replaced the box in the cylinder, and they walked back to the Barsoom. The cement was hard. In this atmosphere, where the pressure was equal to that ten miles above Earth's surface, the moisture quickly left the cement. It had boiled off in a vapour invisible in this twilight.

  Orme used a tiny jack to draw up the slack and make the cable taut. Now even a 250-mile-an-hour wind, which wasn't likely at the canyon bottom, would not be able to push the lander over.

  Nadir Shirazi, who was spelling Danton now, said, 'How do you two feel? Do you want to rest before you go to the tunnel?'

  'I'm too excited to stop now,' Bronski said. 'I'd like to push on.'

  From the compartment which had held the anchoring material, they removed a telescoping aluminium ladder and a box of explosives. Orme carrying the box, they walked to the edge of the tunnel. The rover followed them, its main scanner keeping them in view for the two in the Aries and the billions of people on Earth. Orme put the box down and opened its lid. Bronski lowered the ladder down into the tunnel. With a powerful lamp he'd taken from the box, Orme played a beam of light along the tunnel. At the left side of the two men, the rover followed the light with its antennas.

  Orme had seen the interior of the opening many times by courtesy of the rover. But now that he was seeing it with his own eyes, he felt the same thrill as when he'd first witnessed it in the Houston laboratory. At the far end was a mass of rock, pieces of the fallen roof. These presumably covered another door. Along the length of the floor were other stone chunks, large and small. At the other end was the upper part of a door, its lower quarter behind more pieces of rock. Red dust covered the rocks. But its thinness indicated the roof had caved in recently.

  What had caused the collapse? No one had a theory which could hold up under any rationalisation. The tunnel was too tar away from the nearest cliff for any rocks to have fallen on it. Anyway, there were no large rocks inside the tunnel or near it. To the west were some huge boulders, but these had been trundled down the canyon floor by water in some very remote past.