Old Mars

Mac glared in utter disbelief at a bulky “noman” staring down at him from illuminated eyes, hooked hands resting on its metal hips. A type of robot he’d never seen. It looked local. Like something he’d come across in the Terran Museum of Martian Artifacts. Only that one had been about a foot high and carved from pink teastone. The archaeologists thought it was a household god or a child’s toy.

Just above the faceless noman, a pale green pillar fizzed like bad Galifrean beer. Then it coalesced into a figure that Stone was surprised to see was human. A bronzed man in the peak of physical condition, wearing less than was considered seemly even on Jam-bock Boulevard. Except for the little signs of regular wear and tear on his leather harness, the man looked like something out of a serial V-drama. At his right hip was a big, old-fashioned brass-and-steel pistol. Scabbarded on his left was some kind of long antique sword. For a wild moment, Stone wondered if he had been captured by those crazy reenactors who played out completely unlikely battles between invented Martian races. He’d seen groups of them in Sunday Field on vacation afternoons.

The guy in the green pillar fizzed again and broke up a few times before he stabilized long enough to say clearly: “You can’t fight me. I’m not actually here. I’m a scientist. I’m from Earth like you. I came to Mars millennia ago, long before the meteor storms. I’m projecting this image into my future. It’s interactive.”

He smiled. “I’m Miguel Krane.” Evidently, he expected Mac to know the name. He had an old-fashioned accent Mac associated with Terra. “We call this little device a chronowire. It sends images and sounds back and forth across time. It is the nearest we’ve been able to come to time travel. Living organisms get seriously damaged. We discovered to our cost that people and animals can’t travel physically in time. The wanal won’t bother you now. Her old responses are still reachable in her deep subconscious. In our time, we domesticate and use her ancestors to find lost travelers. Their natural instinct is to eat us, but thousands of years of training changed their brains. We found her down here with our explorer noman. We sent her for you. In case of any problems, we fed her some sleepy meat. I’m sorry about the crude robot, too. Believe it or not, he’s code-activated! We have to work through remote control with what we can find. In this case, very remote! What do you want to know from me?”

Mac shuddered as he scraped gelatinous stuff from his battered day suit. He looked around. A man-made room. Two doors. A kind of stone box at his feet. He was surprised how warm it was. “You’re not fooling me. Time travel? How the hell could you have gotten from Terra to Mars thousands of years ago? Before anyone had space travel?” He looked around at the cavern. Ingeniously reflected light. The walls were bright with luminous veins of phosphorescent ore and precious stones sparkling like stars. If he kept his knife, he might be able to dig out a few long diamonds and get away. Assuming he could dodge this madman.

The man in the projection shrugged. “Malfunctioning matter transmitter. Lost control. I traveled backward to Mars. One way. You’ve probably heard of me. Captain Miguel Krane? Haven’t you read my books? About my life on Mars? I’m surprised you don’t know them. They didn’t appear under my name, but I dictated them myself.”

“I don’t listen to books much.”

The man in the green pillar seemed thrown by Mac’s illiteracy. But Mac could read forty-seven interplanetary languages and write fluently in most of them. He had taught himself for purely practical reasons. He wasn’t a scholar. He was a thief. He would have been insulted to be thought of as anything else.

For his own part, Mac was uneasy, still checking for his gun, reassured by the feel of a knife in his boot. Miguel Krane’s voice was amused, but Mac didn’t like to hear it in his head like that. Too creepy.

Yet Krane had been instrumental in saving his life. Somewhere over their heads, on the Martian surface, a wombot was still searching for him with the objective of covering him with jelly that could seep through his skin and eat his bones from the inside out. He was in no doubt about his preference. He’d take his chances here.

“Those chances aren’t much better, Stone.” Krane’s voice was still amused. “Let’s just say you’d be dying for a good cause.”

Mac laughed. “When I hear words like that, I reach for my Banning. Where is my gun, by the way?”

“Look for yourself. I didn’t take it. Neither did the noman. Want to know why I sent the wanal after you?”

“I guess.” Mac looked down into the pit, where the nasty thing was finishing its bloody meal. He saw his gun some way up, where it had lodged on a shelf of rock.

“Do you recall a lep coming to see you a few weeks ago?”