Thud!
The ground belched and bolted and raised itself up. At first I thought “earthquake,” but then I figured it out: one of the alien monstrosities was striding boldly over the landscape towards me. I couldn’t see it and I couldn’t hear it, but I knew it was there nonetheless. I tried to move, but my limbs seemed paralyzed. My breath caught in my throat.
Thud! Thud!
The zap-zit of a death-ray flashed over my head and incinerated one of the trees down the road, making it a Roman candle of instant flame.
Thud! Thud! Thud!
Closer and closer the machine strode. I thought I could hear someone crying in the distance, but I couldn’t have, could I?
“Help!” he screamed. “Help me!”
It might have been Mayer. It might have been Stromwick. Whoever it was, I couldn’t save them.
Thud! Thud! THUUUD!
A great metal pad splattered right down on top of me, straddling my narrow reserve. I could see the cross-pattern, the stitchery, if you will, of its fabric hanging right above my face. It paused for a moment to release another great zzzappp!—and someone from our squad replied in turn, the RPG striking twenty feet away. But the shadow of alien machine’s foot protected me, saving me from myself. I could feel the vibration of the metal fragments rattling off its armor.
And then it was gone, just like that!
I was free.
But still I couldn’t move.
I felt a pressure on my chest, as if the Martian were yet perched there, squeezing the life out of me, sucking it from my very heart. I’ll never forget that moment, however long I live.
Bang! Bang! You’re dead!
Thud! Thud! Thud! Thud!
Was it me who was rumbling and rambling—or the alien?
Was I dead—or just barely alive?
Why did I live while so many others died?
Why?
I wish the bloody hell I knew.
CHAPTER ONE
“THE MAN IN THE MARS”
Ours is the invading army.
—Henry David Thoreau
Alex Smith, 21 June, Mars Year i
Novato, California, Planet Earth
Call me Alex.
I want to tell you a story.
“Once upon a time….”
Well, I guess you’ve heard that one before.
No, my story is about life and death and war and peace and all those good and ugly things.
I could tell you that we won every fight and killed every alien and drove the dirty buggers right back into space, but it wouldn’t be true.
I have quite another tale to tell, of terror and temerity and tremulousness.
It goes something like this:
In the early years of the twenty-first century, no one would have believed that our world had become the target of extraterrestrial intelligences vastly older and greater than our own.
We’d sent probes to the furthest reaches of the Solar System, and they confirmed the utter deadness of the deeps. SETI, that grand experiment to identify intelligent life “out there,” failed to produce even one “peep” of nonsense. We carefully measured craters and rocks and gas. We found no life, none at all.
The machines told us that Mars once had oceans and rivers and lakes—just like Earth. Where did the water go? Underground or into the sky, our scientists said, leaving few traces of its presence in that world’s barren fields and stony red hills.
Life on Mars, we all said, is certainly gone and dead—if it was ever there at all.
We were wrong.
We just hadn’t read the signs right.
Our robots woke the monsters from their long, leisurely sleep. We gained their sudden attention. We aroused their interest or suspicion or who the hell knows what.
I saw it all first-hand.
I was there when it started.
I was there when it ended.
This is the tale of the War of Two Worlds.
* * * *
That was the Year we later called Mars One.
I decided to take a sabbatical from the college. I’d had enough of the academic rat race to last me a lifetime. I would have been happy never to have seen Dean Broker’s pinched face or my sad-eyed students ever again. The Dean wanted more students—the students wanted more jobs. The serious discussion of history and philosophy, of why and how and for what reason, was somehow lost in the shuffle.
“The problem with philosophy,” one of my coeds joked, “is that it Kant make up its mind!”
“History is dead,” said another, “so why don’t we give it a decent burial?”
Ahem and amen. For a few months, at least, I had a book to write and grass to grow under my feet. It felt pretty damned good.
Then CNN reported a series of green flashes on the Red Planet. At the same time, our satellites around Mars suddenly went dead. The coincidence of the two events was much commented upon in the media. Carl Rover assured the press that the President had been briefed and knew what was happening, although she couldn’t tell the American public—for national security reasons, of course. Fox News thought this was another liberal conspiracy, and undoubtedly it was so.
Some scientists questioned the existence of the phenomena, treating the sparks of light like some UFO sighting. “Transient radiation,” a few said. Others thought that it was the interplanetary equivalent of “marsh gas.”
If I hadn’t bumped into Mindon at the market, I wouldn’t have known much more than the other boobs. Dr. Min was an eccentric colleague and part-time lecturer who specialized in astronomy and Native American studies, and claimed some small percentage of Indian blood himself, enough to qualify him for membership in the Moroño Tribe. He looked more like a washed-up hippie than a teacher, always sporting turquoise bolo ties and rings and beads over rather garish, unbuttoned Hawaiian sports shirts—“gotta rent the rug!” he’d say. He kept a reflecting telescope in a cabin he owned a half-mile west of his house, where he sometimes practiced his flute and smoked some Humboldt hash while instructing the local damsels-in-distress in the ways of AmerIndian love songs. I’d known him for years.
“Man, you just gotta see this!” he said, leaning on
