The Martians(22)

All so many dreams. Mars was a dead planet. Eileen scuffed the freeze-dried dirt and watched through damp eyes as the pinkish sand lofted away from her boot. All dead. That was her home: dead Mars. Not even dead, which implied a life and a dying. Just . . . nothing. A red void.

They turned down the main canyon. Far below was their tent, looking like it would slide down its slope any instant. Now there was a sign of life. Eileen grinned bleakly behind her faceplate. Outside her suit it was forty degrees below zero, and the air was not air.

Roger was hurrying down the canyon ahead of them, no doubt to turn on the air and heat in the tent, or pull the wagon out to move it all downcanyon. In the alien gravity she had lived in all her life, he dropped down the great trench as in a dream, not bounding gazelle-like in the manner of John or Doran, but just on the straightest line, the most efficient path, in a sort of boulder ballet all the more graceful for being so simple. Eileen liked that. Now there, she thought, is a man reconciled to the absolute deadness of Mars. It seemed his home, his landscape. An old line occurred to her: “We have met the enemy, and he is us.” And then something from Bradbury: “The Martians were there . . . Timothy and Robert and Michael and Mom and Dad.”

She pondered the idea as she followed Clayborne down their canyon, trying to imitate that stride.


"But there was life on Mars.” That evening she watched him. Ivan and Doran talked to Cheryl; John sulked on his cot. Roger chatted with the Mitsumus, who liked him. At sunset when they showered (they had moved the tent to another fine flat site) he walked over to his paneled cubicle naked, and the flat onyx bracelet he wore around his left wrist suddenly seemed to Eileen the most beautiful ornamentation. She realized she was glancing at him in the same way John and the doctor looked at her—only differently—and she blushed.

After dinner the others were quiet, returning to their cots. Roger continued telling the Mitsumus and Eileen stories. She had never heard him talk so much. He was still sarcastic with her, but that wasn't what his smile was saying. She watched him move . . . and sighed, exasperated with herself; wasn't this just what she had come out here to get away from? Did she really need or want this feeling again, this quickening interest?

“They still can't decide if there's some ultrasmall nanobacteria down in the bedrock. The arguments go back and forth in the scientific journals all the time. Could be down there, so small we can't even see it. There's been reports of drilling contamination. . . . But I don't think so.”

Yet he certainly was different from the men she had known in recent years. After everyone had gone to bed, she concentrated on that difference, that quality; he was . . . Martian. He was that alien life, and she wanted him in a way she had never wanted her other lovers. Mrs. Mitsumu had been smiling at them, as if she saw something going on, something she had seen developing long before, when the two of them were always at odds. . . . Earth girl lusts for virile Martian; she laughed at herself, but there it was. Still constructing stories to populate this planet, still falling in love, despite herself. And she wanted to do something about it. She had always lived by Eulert's saying: If you don't act on it, it wasn't a true feeling. It had gotten her in trouble too, but she was forgetting that. And tomorrow they would be at the little outpost that was their destination, and the chance would be gone. For an hour she thought about it, evaluating the looks he had given her that evening. How did you evaluate an alien's glances? Ah, but he was human—just adapted to Mars in a way she wished she could be—and there had been something in his eyes very human, very understandable. Around her the black hills loomed against the black sky, the double star hung overhead, that home she had never set foot on. It was a lonely place.

Well, she had never been particularly shy in these matters, but she had always favored a more inpulling approach, encouraging advances rather than making them (usually) so that when she quietly got off her cot and slipped into shorts and a shirt, her heart was knocking like a tympani roll. She tiptoed to the panels, thinking Fortune favors the bold, and slipped between them, went to his side.

He sat up; she put her hand to his mouth. She didn't know what to do next. Her heart was knocking harder than ever. That gave her an idea, and she leaned over and pulled his head around and placed it against her ribs, so he could hear her pulse. He looked up at her, pulled her down to the cot. They kissed. Some whispers. The cot was too narrow and creaky, and they moved to the floor, lay next to each other kissing. She could feel him, hard against her thigh; some sort of Martian stone, she reckoned, like that flesh jade. . . . They whispered to each other, lips to each other's ears like headpiece intercoms. She found it difficult to stay so quiet making love, exploring that Martian rock, being explored by it. . . . She lost her mind for a while then, and when she came to she was quivering now and again; an occasional aftershock, she thought to herself. A seismology of sex. He appeared to read her mind, for he whispered happily in her ear, “Your seismographs are probably picking us up right now.”