Jesus On Mars Read online

  One scientist had proposed that a small meteorite had shattered the roof. But the area around here was free of any impact craters, small or large. And it seemed too much of a coincidence that a rare meteorite should happen to strike this very narrow area and reveal what would otherwise never have been discovered.

  Orme steadied the beam on the orange characters in the dull black door. Tau Omega in majuscule writing. But had they been made by one versed in Greek? Were not the letters so simple that they would have been used by other sentients? T and . would naturally occur to anyone who was originating an alphabet. If indeed these characters were alphabetical. They could just as easily be letters in a syllabary, or in an ideogrammatic system such as the Chinese, used. They could also be arithmetical symbols.

  Orme gestured to Bronski to go, down the ladder. If he wasn't to be the first man to step on to Mars, he at least could be the first to touch the door in the tunnel.

  The rover was on the edge of the opening now, one scanner on Orme and the other following the Frenchman. When Orme saw that Bronski was off the ladder, he dropped the box to him. Bronski caught it easily, and Orme went down the ladder.

  Bronski had climbed up the small pile of rocks and was examining the door by the time Orme reached him. Orme picked up a stone about the size of his head and heaved it up and out of the tunnel, first making sure that the rover wouldn't be struck by it. Bronski came down from the top of the pile to help him. In about five minutes the way to the door was cleared. In the light of the four- legged lamp, which had been set on the floor, Bronski removed the box from the cylinder on Orme's back. The tests revealed that the door was of a steel alloy.

  'It's set within the opening very tightly,' Orme said. 'Obviously, it's an air- pressure seal, designed for just what happened, the collapse of a section of tunnel.'

  Unlike the shell of the supposed spaceship, the door was thick. There was no hollow echo when he hit it with the hammer.

  'We could try to blow it out,' Orme said. 'But I think it'll be easier of we go to the roof of the next section and dig down.'

  They got out of the tunnel and returned to the lander. Orme was beginning to get tired, which meant that Bronski should be even more fatigued. Orme was only five feet eight, but he weighed a muscular 190 pounds on Earth, with no excess fat. The slender Bronski was quick, but he could not keep up with his captain.

  Orme suggested that they eat while taking a rest and perhaps even grab a nap. The Frenchman refused.

  'I'm still too keyed up.'

  Carter, however, from his command post in Houston, ordered that they attach the monitors. After reading the indicators, he said, 'You guys will have to recharge your batteries. You're really tired.'

  By the time the message came through, they had eaten. For an hour they rested in their reclined seats. Orme used alpha-wave techniques to get to sleep. Even so, it took twenty minutes, according to the monitors, before he succumbed. He would have sworn that he'd been awake the entire period.

  Twenty minutes later, they were back at the tunnel site. Eighteen inches beyond the door, Orme cut a hole into the tunnel roof with a small laser-tipped drill. When it broke through, the explosion of enclosed air drove the tool up out of the hole. But Orme, expecting this, was standing to one side. Even so, the drill was almost jerked out of his hand.

  He set to work at once to drill five more holes, all in a circle with a diameter of three feet. He could have connected the holes with the laser and cut a complete section to drop down into the tunnel. But he had to conserve power, so he planted gelignite charges in the holes and touched off the explosive at a distance with a battery. The circular section went up in smoke and larger fragments of rock. They rose higher than they would have on the home planet, the smoke disappeared more quickly, and the dust settled more swiftly.

  'If there's an automatic sealing system, and it's still working, then the end of that tunnel will be shut off,' Orme said. 'And we'll have to open a door. But that will mean that the next section will seal. We don't have the materials to go through many doors.'

  The tunnel, if it continued in a straight line, would go into the canyon wall. By now the shadow of the western wall was over them, and it was getting colder. They were comfortable in their suits, bulky though they were and with much equipment strapped onto them. Inside each was a flask of water which they could suck up through a tube by bending their heads inside the helmet down and to one side. They still had half a flask left, and they could urinate into a bladder attached to the front of one leg.

  Nevertheless, John Carter ordered them to quit for the night after they'd taken a reading to determine if the tunnel did enter the cliff.

  'You can conserve the power in your lights if you work in daylight. And we can observe you better.'

  Orme didn't want to agree, but he had to. After validating that the tunnel did go beneath the cliff, he told Bronski they had to get back.

  'Tomorrow we'll put in a full day. We'll be refreshed. It was the landing that took everything out of us. Even though we exercised on the Aries during the trip, we aren't in tiptop shape. Null gravity is insidious; it weakens you after a long time.'

  Bronski said, 'Yes.' His tone indicated that he knew this and Orme knew that he knew it. But it was better to talk repetitions and banalities than to listen to the silence. The stars were out now, shining more brightly than in Earth's thick atmosphere. Being at the bottom of the canyon was like standing at the bottom of a well. The stars they could see looked baleful, as if they didn't like the presence of these two aliens.

  Orme knew that his reaction was due to his fatigue, the feeling of insignificance in relation to the towering wall, the eeriness of the entire situation, the feeling that somewhere down there were beings who could be menacing. Just how, he didn't know, since Earth people represented no danger to Martians - if they existed - and there was no reason he could think of why they should believe two aliens to be dangerous.

  But the buried spaceship indicated a very advanced technology, and the tunnel seemed to mean that the people who had landed had dug into Mars. If they had managed to survive underground, and they must have been there a long time, why hadn't they emerged to repair the ship? If, that is, the ship had been wrecked?

  There was no use worrying about such things. Tomorrow or the day after or a week or two from now would bring the answers.

  Nevertheless, he was glad to get back to the lander. Though it wasn't the most comfortable or roomy of homes, it was still, in a sense, a piece of Earth. He had no trouble falling asleep, but, in the middle of the night, he woke with a start. He'd thought he'd heard something hard rapping against the double hull. He got up and. looked through the ports but could see nothing except darkness on all sides but one. Stars still moved slowly across the open roof of the canyon. The rover was a vague bulk which he would have thought a boulder if he hadn't known it was there.

  Then, as he watched, a light sprang from it, a beam that moved down into the tunnel and then lifted and described a 380-degree arc. After two minutes, the light went out. Once an hour, as ordered by Danton, it became activated and swept the area with visible light, infrared, and radar. If anything moved for miles, it would sound an alarm in the lander and in the Aries.

  His sleep the rest of the night was untroubled. The alarm, triggered by a radio wave from the Aries, awoke him with a, start. It was still dark outside, but the sky was paling above the top of the canyon. After the necessary reports, checking the equipment, and breakfast, he and Bronski climbed down on to the ground. On the way to the base of the cliff, he looked at the grey curve sticking out of the rubble. If they ran into a dead end in the tunnels, they would start removing the rocks from around the spaceship. Or, if they didn't find a port or some means of easy entrance, after so many days of labour, they would try to cut into it with a laser.

  On Earth, removing the rocks, some of which were rather large, would have been impossible without a crane or much blasting powder. Here, two men should be able to
lift any boulder he'd seen in the pile. But Shirazi and Danton might have to come down, too, to help.

  As he went past the rover, he waved at it. Though it looked like a science fiction version of a Martian, it was familiar, and hence friendly. Another reminder of the home planet.

  A moment later he looked back. The rover was following him as a dog follows its master. Danton, on duty now, had ordered it to accompany them. When he and Bronski descended into the tunnel through the hole they had made the day before, the rover extended a flexible arm at the end of which was a light and a camera. It would keep an eye on them so that the two in the Barsoom and the whole world could watch their progress - or lack of it.

  Orme shook his head. It wasn't like him to be having such pessimistic thoughts. He was as optimistic as a person could be and still be sane. But there was in everyone a layer of darkness that no amount of psychological testing could reveal. It was too deep. It was unknown even to its possessor unless certain situations occurred to reveal it. This was one of them. But he wasn't going to let it overcome him. Once he got busy, he'd forget it.

  Orme, in the lead, was almost within reach of the door, which should give entrance to another section of tunnel. If he had been a step closer, he would have been knocked down, perhaps badly crippled or killed, when it shot open.

  It was as if a charge of TNT had gone off in the section beyond. He was lifted up and half-turned over by the explosion of air from the tunnel behind it. He glimpsed light there, had a vague impression of some kind of domed machine, and then he struck the ground.

  Half-stunned, he lay helpless for a minute or perhaps more. He was not really aware of where he was or even who he was. Before his senses rallied, he was seized by people in spacesuits, the dark faceplates of their helmets masking their features. But they were human-sized and had two arms and two legs and five fingers. Two of them lifted him up and half-carried him towards the big wheeled machine. Danton's voice was yammering in his ear. 'What's going on, Richard? Richard? Are you there?’

  As he began to come to, he thought, You can see me, can't you? but he did not reply for a minute. Then he mumbled, 'I'm okay. There's some things... no... people... like people...'

  He was shoved into the open door of the machine and set firmly down in a chair. Something passed across his chest. A moment later, he knew that it was a metal band that confined his arms.

  Bronski was dragged in, struggling, and he was placed in a chair in front of Orme. Past the rows of chairs were two chairs before a control board. The driver and another person had to sit there. The big curving screen in front gave a 150- degree view, allowing Orme to see what some of his captors were doing.

  He said, 'Madeleine, they're placing six metal strips across the doorway. Now... they're putting six horizontal strips across the vertical. They seem to be glued on. Now... they're gluing on a screen to the strips.'

  The rover's arm was still sticking down through the hole. But it was a figure seen in fog through the finely meshed screen.

  'Now they're spraying something over the screen. What they're doing, they're putting up a kind of temporary door, I think, so they can pump air back into this section. Can you read me, Madeleine?'

  There was no answer. The barrier was blocking off radio waves.

  The workers returned to the rear of the machine where, he supposed, they stored their tools in a compartment. Then they climbed in and took seats, the door was shut, the machine turned around and headed towards the opposite door. It sat for perhaps ten minutes, and suddenly the door swung open. The machine rolled into another section just like the previous ones except that it had overhead lights.

  Orme thought that Nadir and Madeleine must be going crazy by now. And on Earth, where the first photographs by the rover and the voice recordings would be coming in, people would be in a frenzy. He said, 'God, let these... people... be friendly. Let them also be Yours.'

  3

  Avram Bronski said, 'This may be the most luxurious prison cell in the solar system.'

  They were in a four-room apartment cut out of the rock high up on one side of the immense cave. The walls were panelled with a light reddish-brown wood-like material. The ceiling was stone but painted with murals depicting scenes of domestic animals. No 'Martians' appeared in them nor were they represented in the framed paintings on the walls. These paintings were either abstract art, still life, or of buildings or creatures that either existed there or were from mythology. Some looked like dragons; one was a whalelike seven-horned beast bursting out of a sea.

  Bronski, who had been doing some private speculating, had explained that the law against representing any living creature in painting, sculpture, or in any form whatsoever, had been modified. But he thought, if he were right, that it was still forbidden to make images of sentient beings.

  'Though not in holographic communication,' he said. 'And, since their medical science seems to be highly advanced, they must use pictures of the human body in textbooks and replicas of organs and so forth for the students. I don't have the slightest idea whether or not they dissect corpses.'

  The holographic TV sets in the apartment could be dialled to see and hear the correct time. After three days' confinement, Orme and Bronski had learned to read the numbers necessary to understand the system. Bronski, who on Earth was a famed linguist in addition to being a premier areologist, had mastered the words associated with the symbols. They had correlated their own chronometers to the local time. But they didn't think they'd be going any place soon, so time was of no special concern.

  One of the few things they'd ascertained was that the tau and the omega on the tunnel door were not of Greek origin. That language was spoken by a few here, but the arithmetical symbols on the TV sets came from a place far from Earth.

  Orme got up off the chair and walked to Bronski. Together they stared at a scene that had become familiar by now, though it hadn't lost its fascination. Their prison was about one hundred feet up on one wall of the vast hemisphere cut out of solid basalt. The base of the wall opposite was an estimated thirty-five miles away. The apex of the dome seemed to be a mile and a half high.

  From where they stood, they could see seven enormous horseshoe- shaped openings and twenty-one smaller ones. These must lead to passageways opening into other hollows. They believed that this hollow was only part of a gigantic underground complex.

  Except for the floor of the dome, the stone was sky-blue. This was not the natural colour of basalt, so it must have been spray-painted or treated with something else. Whatever the method used, the dome looked just like the heavens above Earth on a cloudless day.

  About one hundred feet below the highest point of the hemisphere hung a sun-bright globe. A half-hour before 18:00 in the 'evening', it began to dim. By 18:00 it was shining feebly, as if the sun had turned into the moon. This was the only light aside from that coming from the windows of houses, until 06:00, when the 'sun' began to wax.

  The luminary didn't seem to be hanging from a cable though it was difficult to see past the brightness. But if it was suspended without attachment, it was held up by some sort of antigravity device. Until now Orme and Bronski had been sure that antigravity machines were possible only in science fiction; that is, unless you labelled stairs, ladders, elevators, balloons, airships, airplanes, and rockets as such.

  So far, the luminary was the only thing they'd seen without visible means of support. The people they saw either walked or rode horses or horse-driven buggies and wagons or bicycles or the few wheeled-powered vehicles.

  The cavern floor was neither level nor curving downward to form a horizon. Instead, it had a gentle gradient upward from the centre in all directions, ending at the wall. Water flowed from holes at the base of the wall and formed winding brooks, creeks, and two rivers. The latter were each about three-quarters of a mile wide. The smaller streams flowed into the rivers, which emptied eventually into a roughly hourglass-shaped lake in the centre. This was half a mile wide at the broadest parts and two m
iles long.

  There were trees and farms and small parks and forests everywhere with villages here and there. The only structures over two storeys high were the barns. Each obviously residential structure was surrounded by a large yard and had a garden. Some of the buildings looked like schools. To each village was attached an open stadium where track and field meets, horse races, and games were held. One of the games was much like soccer and another was a form of basketball. There were also many public swimming pools, but no private house had any.

  Through the binoculars given them by Hfathon, one of their captors, they could see much of what would otherwise have been blurred or unviewable. If there were tall buildings anywhere, they would have been able to detect them. The upward swell of the floor assured that.

  Two-lane paved roads connected the towns and farms. They saw no trucks, though horse-drawn wagons laden with farm produce were plentiful.

  Near the central lake was a long one-storey building into which people streamed in large numbers at 08:00. They left at noon and picnicked in parks or swam or boated in the lake. An hour later they re-entered; at 14:00 they swarmed out. Most went to houses within a range of a mile, but others bicycled or rode horses or even jogged to more distant dwellings.

  Bronski thought that it might be the main administration building for the government.

  'There's no telling how many levels there are under the ground.'

  Opposite this, on the other side of the lake, was what had to be a university campus. Other buildings, from the number of people who entered them on the Sabbath, looked like places of worship.

  All the structures were roofed. Orme wondered why they should be, since the entire hollow was probably air-conditioned. The fourth day, he found out why. Water rained from the ceiling of the dome for half an hour.