A Martian Bat

A Martian Bat

(from King of the Cheap Romance by Joe R. Lansdale)

What happened was this.

The fever hit the Far Side, as we called the city long beyond the mountains. The Martian fever is a nasty beast. It comes on sudden and hot and burns the mind right out of a person, turns them red, mounds up pus-filled lesions quick-time, makes a person quiver, scream and rave, go completely off their nut.

No one really knew how it gets started, but it happened now and then, comes out of nowhere like rain from a clear, sunny sky. It was thought to have something to do with certain kinds of Martian water, melted snow that flowed down out of the mountains and joined up in streams and creeks that got into the water supply. Mars was mostly hot, dry desert, but up around the ice caps it was rich in water, cold and savage.

Though the fever was brutal, there was a cure, and it was mighty effective, if not readily available. That’s what my father and I were trying to do, make it available…

…

What I think about is how if we’d have left a few second earlier, or a few seconds later, none of it might have happened.

A Martian Bat. Illustration : Elena

But there we were with first light on the windshield, then the shield turned dark, and there was a whomp, a sound like some kind of machine tearing metal. It wasn’t metal though. It wasn’t the ship. It was the scream of the Martian Bat. The damn things are huge, and, unlike Earth bats, which Dad says travel by night, Martian Bats travel day and night but are blind, their eyes huge and white as snow.

They are guided by some kind of in-built radar.  That radar helps them find prey, and I guess the bat thought we were one of the great blue birds that fly over the ice, for it came at us and let out with its horrid scream that sounded like metal ripping. The craft twisted and swirled, but held to the sky all right, at least until the bat bit us and clawed us and we started to come apart.

The craft killed the bat due to the collision of its wings or part of the beast’s being sucked into a turbine. Whatever did it, we both went down. I remember seeing out the windshield a glimpse of bat’s wings, a near subliminal glimpse of those white eyes and that toothy mouth. The front end of the ship bent up, and down we went. Had the bat not had hold of us, had what was left of its massive wings not held and glided, we would have dropped faster than a stone and with the sudden impact of ripe fruit being slammed on rocks…

An Ice Shark

An Ice Shark

(from King of the Cheap Romance by Joe R. Lansdale)

At first, I thought it was an illusion, mirage. But no, it was real, a black fin had broken the ice, and it had broken it violently enough that I heard it crack, though I figure I was a quarter mile from that fin. I didn’t know what it was from experience, but I had read about it and recognized it that way.

It was an ice shark, big as killer whales on Earth, but sleeker, with a black fin and tentacles that exploded from its head like confetti strands but were considerably more dangerous. It could travel on the surface or underneath, and could even crawl on land for a long time. Its fin was harder than any known metal and could crack the ice without effort. The ice shark had a tremendous sense of smell, a bit or radar, not as highly developed as the bat, but effective enough. It could squeeze into tight places, like oatmeal sliding through a colander. It had most likely smelled my urine and had come for lunch.

That shark couldn’t have known I would be more vulnerable come night, but it sure seemed to. It came fast behind me but was never able to catch me, even though I had only pushed the throttle a little more than before. Yet, it was like it knew I had limitations. That if all it did was wait, I would have to slow down and it would have me.

It was growing dark, but I could still see the line of mountains and the vast expanse of nothing around me, then all of a sudden the light washed out and the moons rose up. I turned on the lights.

And then it happened.

An Ice Shark. Illustration by Elena.

Even inside the sled, I could hear the ice crack, and then I could see them. I had never actually seen them for realm just vids, but there they were, cracking up through the ice and rising up and sliding along – the Climbing Bergs. They were rises of solid ice that came down from the depths where it was cold and wet and where the old, old Mars was. They would break open the surface and slide along and suck in the air. They were mound of ice full of living organisms that owned them. Living organisms that came up for air and pulled it in and renewed themselves like Sothern Earth ladies with handshaking fans on a hot day in church. Sometimes they were empty ice – clear ice you could see all the way through. And sometimes the ice held the ancient Mars inside of it. I had heard of that, extinct animals, and even Martians themselves, though there had only been fragments of that discovered, and most stories about them were legends, as the ice soon sank back down into the depths, taking their ancient treasures and information with them.

The ice cracked loud as doom and rose up and the moons flashed on the clean, clear ice moonlight shone through it. In covered my entire path, and inside of the ice I could see something: a dark shadow. The shadow was in the center of the ice, and it was a shadow that covered acres and rose up high. Then I was close enough that I could see better what the shadow was. It almost took my breath away, almost made me forget about what was behind me. It was a slanting slide of ice that went directly up against the icy wall of the berg, and inside the berg was a huge set of stone stairs that rose up to a stone pyramid, and the stairs went inside and dipped into the dark. The ice between the outside and the pyramid looked thin, as if it might be hollow inside the berg.

I knew this much. I couldn’t keep outrunning the shark…

I glanced in the mirror and saw the shark’s fin, poking high, and I could see its shape shimmering beneath the ice. A huge shape, and I could see that it was, as I said, a monster that in spite of its name was really nothing like a shark. It was a dark form that was formless; it moved like gelatin, except for the fin, which stayed steady, sawing through the ice effortlessly…

I looked back. The shark tore its whole body through the ice. It shifted and twisted and wadded and finally it roared. It was a roar so loud I felt the ice beneath me shake. The rear and the wind carried its horrid breath to me. It was so foul I thought I might throw up. Its shape changed, became less flat and more solid, tentacles flashed out from its head, and I could see flippers on its belly, between those dipped little legs with bony hooks for feet. It was slithering and clawing its way across the cold space between me and it.

Wool

Wool

By Hugh Howey

The helmet came last handled with obvious care. The tech had her hold it while he adjusted the metal ring collar around her neck. She looked down at her reflection in the visor, her eyes hollow and so much older than she remembered yet so much younger than she felt. Finally, the helmet went on, the room dimmer through the dark glass. The tech reminded her of the argon blast, of the fires that would follow. She would have to get out quickly or die a far worse death inside.

He left her to consider this. The yellow door behind her clanged shut; its wheel spun on the inside as if by a ghost.

Juliette wondered if she should simply stay and succumb to the flames, not give this spiritual awakening a chance to persuade her. What would they say in Mechanical when that tale spiraled its way through the silo? Some would be proud of her obstinacy, she knew. Some would be horrified at her having gone out that way, in a bone-charring inferno. A few might even think she’d not been brave enough to take the first step out the door, that she’d wasted the chance to see the outside with her own eyes.

The helmet came last… Illustration by Megan Jorgensen (Elena)

Her suit crinkled as the argon was pumped into the room, creating enough pressure to temporarily hold the outside toxins at bay. She found herself shuffling toward the door, almost against her will. When it cracked, the plastic sheeting in the room flattened itself against every pipe, against the low-jutting bench, and she knew the end had come. The doors before her parted, the silo splitting like the skin of a pea, giving her a view of the outside through a haze of condensing steam.

One boot slid through that crack, followed by another. And Juliette moved out into the world, dead set on leaving it on her own terms, seeing it for the first time with her own eyes even through this limited portal, this roughly eight-inch-by-two-inch sheet of glass, she suddenly realized.

The Ghost Canal

The Ghost Canal

They knew what would happen, of course, when the mining companies and the archaeologists discovered a plentiful supply of water. That water would still be contaminated by centuries of leakage from an alien superbomb and would have to be filtered, probably not very thoroughly. That wouldn’t be much of a problem especially with expendable prison labor working down there. Stone guessed what the exploiters would do with the great calm waterway perpetually pouring into a bottomless canyon to be captured and recycled, by some mysterious process, back into the canal again. Power.  (The Lost Canal by Michael Moorcock)

On the west side of the canal, someone seemed to be trying to raise wheat again – that happened every decade or so, according to his father, when new settlers arrived from Earth. It never worked very well, but it usually produced enough spindly stalks to feed a few goats. (The Sunstone by Phyllis Eisentstein).

And Dave thought, not for the first time, how much more beautiful the stars were without that big, bright Earth satellite to spoil them ; the Martian moons were far more modest, with Phobos a fraction of the size and brightness of Earth’s moon and Deimos just another pinpoint in the great darkness. (King of the Cheap Romance by Joe R. Lansdale).

If you die on Mars, do you go to Martian Heaven? (Joe R. Lansdale). Image: © by Megan Jorgensen (Elena)

Jason’ first day on his new world would have been his last, his journeys ended in the belly of a sand-shark, had a passing Praxian naval ship not hauled him on board,(Chris Roberson, Mariner).

My last great excitement had been the night before we left for Mars. Ships! Space travel! Why, I could hardly sleep the night before launch. I soon discovered that space travel is very much like an ocean cruise, without the promenade decks and the excursions, and far, far fewer people. And much, much worse food. However tedious and braying the company for me, I derived some pleasure from the fact that for them it was three months locked in with Count Jack. (Ian McDonald, The Queen of the Night’s Aria)

Just a few weeks of being in the abandoned place, alone with a half-sane man, and she was already starting to hear whispers, to forget where she was leaving thing, finding light on she swore she’d turned off. Either she was going crazy, or Solo found humor in making her feel that way. (Wool, by Hugh Howey)

The Road to the Sea

The Road to the Sea

Arthur C. Clarke

“They have not always succeeded. The planets defeated them once; why should the worlds of other suns be more hospitable?”

It was a fair question. After five hundred years, the memory of the first failure was still bitter. With what hopes and dreams had Man set out for the planets, in the closing years of the twentieth century – only to find them not merely barren and lifeless, but fiercely hostile! From the sullen fires of the Mercurian lava seas to Pluto’s creeping glaciers of solid nitrogen, there was nowhere that he could live unprotected beyond his own world; and to his own world, after a century of fruitless struggle, he had returned.

Yet the vision had not wholly died; when the planning had been abandoned, there were still some who dared to dream of the stars. Out of that dream had come at last the Transcendental Drive, the first Expedition – and now the heady wine of long-delayed success.

“There are fifty solar-type stars within ten years’ flight of Earth,” Durven replied, “and almost all of them have planets. We believe now that the possession of planets is almost as much a characteristic of a G-type star as its spectrum, though we don’t know why. So the search for worlds like Earth was bound to be successful in time; I don’t think that we were particularly lucky to find Eden so soon.””

“Eden? Is that what you’ve called your new world?”

“Yes; it seemed appropriate”.

The future belongs to us; we will leave you to your dreams. We also have dreamed, and now we go to make our dreams come true. Illustration: Megan Jorgensen (Elena)

“What incurable romantics you scientists are! Perhaps the name’s too well chosen; all the life in that first Eden wasn’t friendly to Man, if you remember.”

Durven gave a bleak smile.

“That, again, depends on one’s viewpoint,” he replied. He pointed toward Shaster, where the first lights had begun to glimmer. “Unless our ancestors had eaten deeply from the Treee of Knowledge, you would never have had this.”

“And what do you suppose will happen to it now?” asked Hannar bitterly. “When you have opened the road to the stars, all the strength and vigor of the race will ebb away from Earth as from an open wound.”

“I do not deny it. It had happened before, and it will happen again. Shastar will go the way of Babylon and Carthage and New York. The future is built on the rubble of the past; wisdom lies in facing that fact, not in fighting against it. I have loved Shastar as much as you have done – so much so that know, though I shall never see it again, I dare not go down once more into its streets. You ask me what will become of it, and I will tell you. What we are doing will merely hasten the end. Even twenty years ago, when I was last here, I felt my will being sapped by the aimless ritual of your lives. Soon it will be the same in all the cities of Earth, for every one of them apes Shastar. I think the Drive has come none too soon; perhaps even you would believe me if you had spoken to the men who have come back from the stars, and felt the blood stirring in your veins once more after all these centuries of sleep. For your world is dying, Hannar; what you have now you may hold for ages yet, but in the end it will slip from your fingers. The future belongs to us; we will leave you to your dreams. We also have dreamed, and now we go to make our dreams come true”.

(Tales from Planet Earth by Arthur Clarke)