The Alternate Martians

by A Bertram Chandler

  The biologist was all ready, save for his helmet, in a light spacesuit. Over the armor he wore a belt, and from this depended a sheathed knife and a holstered pistol. He was smiling confidently — but the smile could not hide his underlying nervousness. Natalie, too, was trying to disguise her real feelings. She asked flippantly, “Aren’t you overdressed, Boris? I thought a little apron and a pair of suspenders would be the rig of the day. And a sword, of course….”

  “Dr. Titov,” Henshaw asked fussily, “are you sure that you’ve forgotten nothing?”

  “Quite sure, Dr. Henshaw. What would you say, Wilkinson? You’re the only one with any real experience.”

  “After what I went through, I’d suggest a machine cannon.”

  Titov laughed. “You should have made sure there was one in the ship’s stores.” He turned to Natalie. “Help the knight on with the rest of his armor, wench.”

  “To hear is to obey, Sir Boris.”

  She was already holding the helmet, but before she lifted it into place she leaned forward and kissed him full on the lips. Then, saying nothing, she brought the transparent sphere down onto the neck-piece of the suit and gave it a swift half turn. Titov, his voice distorted by the helmet diaphragm, said, “Thank you.” He walked steadily to the white circle and took his stance in the center of it.

  Henshaw grunted, then made his way to the switchboard. He growled, “Keep well clear, all the rest of you.” As though he were at the keyboard of some fantastic musical instrument, he pressed buttons and turned knobs — and the accompaniment to his actions was the song of the suddenly spinning wheels, low-pitched at first and then rising higher and higher to an almost painful shrillness, to a thin, keening near-inaudibility. And a lambent flame was flickering through the intricate convolutions of the glass tubing, the distorted and attenuated Klein flasks, and the gleaming rotors were spinning in a luminescent haze … were spinning and fading, spinning and precessing, tumbling down some formless infinity, down into the gulfs between the continua, fading and vanishing, yet entirely invisible.

  And the metallic Moebius strip was turning slowly on its mount, turning until it seemed to be a misshapen lens focusing the emanations from the spinning, precessing rotors onto the man who stood in the center of the circle. Titov raised his hand in a gesture of salute.

  Vanessa’s grip tightened painfully on Wilkinson’s arm. Natalie uttered a little cry that was half gasp, half sob.

  Titov was gone.

  Henshaw, still at his controls, was muttering irritably to himself. The light in the transparent convolutions flickered and flared, flickered and died. The song of the gyroscopes faltered and the thin, high whine dropped down the scale to a dying rumble. The spinning wheels, as their rotation slowed, resumed their solidity.

  And Titov, back in the center of the painted circle, glistening ice crystals thickly scattered over the shoulders of his suit, something white-furred and bedraggled in his right hand that dripped blood onto the polished deck, was stamping the snow from his boots.

  When Natalie had lifted the helmet from his head and he had lowered himself to a chair pushed forward by one of the assistants, he said, “It was cold — not that it worried me in this suit. It was cold, and the snow was in deep drifts, although there were lichen-covered boulders exposed here and there. And it was snowing. Quite a blizzard, in fact….”

  He held the pitiful bundle of bloodied fur in his two hands. “I found this. I saw it killed, as a matter of fact. Luckily, one shot from my pistol scared away the brute that had done the killing — otherwise this would have been the entrée and myself the main course.”

  “But what is it, Titov?” Henshaw was asking excitedly.

  “Can’t you see, Doctor? It’s a common enough little animal on Earth.”

  “A rabbit,” said Wilkinson.

  “Yes. A rabbit. It’s not an albino, so it must have adapted to Arctic conditions.”

  “But there are rabbits on Mars,” Wilkinson pointed out. “Rabbit farming, for home consumption, is quite a thriving local industry.”

  “So there are rabbits on Mars. But, tell me, are there any rabbits outside the domes?”

  “I … I don’t think so. But it would need only one pair to get loose, and they’d soon multiply.”

  “Would they? And what would they breathe while they were doing their multiplication? And what would they eat?”

  “Mutations …?” suggested Wilkinson dubiously.

  “Possibly, possibly — but that first pair would already have to be mutants before they escaped, on this Mars.” He held the corpse up by its long ears. The blow that had killed it had crushed the hindquarters; the head and the upper portion of the body were undamaged. “Look carefully. Do you see any signs of abnormal lung capacity?”

  “No … But …”

  “There aren’t any. You can take my word for that.”

  “But you can’t be sure until you’ve dissected it.”

  “But I’m sure now. I’m sure that the world on the other Time Coil is very different from this one. Very different. To begin with, there was that heavy snowfall.”

  “Freak weather conditions.”

  “And there was the animal that killed the rabbit.”

  “What was it?” demanded Dr. Henshaw.

  “A refugee from Burroughs’ Martian novels. It was big, and it looked something like a Polar Bear.

  “But it had six legs.”

  IX

  BOTH WILKINSON and Vanessa, with their past experience of Time Jumping, were asked to attend the conference that was held shortly after Titov’s return. It was Wilkinson who pointed out that the Polar regions were most unsuitable as a jumping-off place. He said, “Unless the other Mars has some race equivalent to the Terran Eskimo, you’ll find no intelligent life on the ice-cap. There’ll be a few herbivores — indigenous ones, perhaps, as well as imported ones like your rabbit. There’ll be carnivores to prey upon them. And that’s all.”

  “There could be trappers, or hunters …” suggested Natalie.

  “Yes. There could be. But trappers and hunters, human or otherwise, would be just the right sort of people to shoot first and to ask questions afterwards.”

  Natalie paled and Titov said, “I think you have something there, Chris. But what do you suggest?”

  “I’d suggest lifting ship and shifting a few degrees of latitude to the south. But first of all we’d have to get permission from the Martian government at Marsala — and they’d probably refer it back to Washington. And, of course, we’d want the works in working order.”

  “So that’s out, for the time being at least. Any more suggestions?”

  “Yes. Dr. Henshaw, could the field of your machine be extended so that two people can travel at once?”

  “There’s no need to modify the apparatus. If the two people stand very close together in the circle they will both be transported.”

  “Good.” Wilkinson turned back to Titov. “I think that two people should go next time, both of them well-armed.”

  “He needs me to keep an eye on him,” said Natalie Weldon.

  “You will stay here and now,” Titov told her.

  “Like hell I will. I’m as good a shot as you, and you know it.”

  “I suggested two people,” explained Wilkinson carefully, “so that they can take with them one of the collapsible aircraft that are used on Mars. They’re odd little brutes — a sort of cross between a balloon and an airplane. One man can attend to the laying out of gasbags and their inflation from the helium cylinders, but it’s better to have two. There’s a light electric motor, of course, with power packs …” He paused, trying to visualize the contraption in its deflated form. “Yes. I’m pretty sure that two people, together with all the bundles, gas cylinders and whatever, could crowd themselves into the circle, even though it meant holding quite a lot of things over their heads.”

  “I suppose that there’ll be no trouble in obtaining one of the things?”

  “No troub
le at all. In fact, we can put in the order now by radio telephone, and Jones and Wilson’s technicians can bring it out with them in their rocket plane tomorrow.” Then, to Titov, “You can fly, of course?”

  “I’m sorry, Chris, I can’t. A hover car’s my limit.”

  “What about you, Natalie?”

  “I could learn….” she said hopefully.

  “It’s not a thing you can learn in five minutes.” He sighed, but it was more for effect than from emotional upset. “Oh, well, it looks like I’m elected.”

  “Chris!” Vanessa’s voice was sharp. “I don’t like this.”

  “Somebody has to do it, dear.”

  “But why you?”

  “Because I seem to be the only atmosphere pilot aboard this ship.”

  She made no further comment, but he knew that he would have to talk, and talk hard, once they were by themselves.

  “But with all this gallivanting around in flying machines,” objected Henshaw, “you’ll complicate the question of return to the here and now.”

  “Not necessarily,” Titov told him. “You’ll just have to keep your machine running in reverse until we come back from our survey flight.”

  “Yes, yes, but what if some wild animal stumbles through the … the gateway?”

  “That’s easily handled. A cage of steel bars to completely enclose the area covered by the circle. Somebody on duty here all the time with a supply of anesthetic grenades.”

  “Why not a rifle?” asked Wilkinson.

  “Because I’m a biologist, and I’d like a few living specimens.”

  “But suppose we try to come back, and the cage is already full to bursting with a couple or three of your not-quite Polar Bears?”

  ““I said it was a complicated problem,” sniffed Henshaw.

  “Those bracelets you made for me …” said Wilkinson thoughtfully. “Those little Moebius strip affairs … Is there any way you could adjust the field of your apparatus so that only anyone wearing a bracelet could pass through?”

  “Yes …” admitted Henshaw, “I could….”

  “Then why not make another couple of the bracelets?”

  “Or four,” added Titov. “Two and two spares …”

  “So you can bring back Dejah Thoris?” asked Natalie sweetly.

  “I’d hoped you’d forgotten her,” said Titov.

  “No more than you have, darling.”

  “Of course,” huffed Henshaw, “you must realize that all these things take time.”

  “We have an infinitude of Times to play with,” Titov told him.

  X

  AFTER ALL, Wilkinson told himself, there was no hurry. He could appreciate the spirit of inquiry that was driving Titov — but the biologist’s motives were far less urgent than his own had been. He, Wilkinson, had snatched at the chance, however slim, of finding his lost love; all that Titov wanted to do was to prove that some fantastically bad guesses made by twentieth century science fiction writers hadn’t been bad guesses at all, but faulty memories. And what did it matter? (But did his wild search for Vanessa matter to anybody but Vanessa and himself?) And the other worlds, on the other Coils of Time, would keep. He, now, was content with this one.

  But was he?

  He had volunteered to pilot the light aircraft for Titov. He would be leaving Vanessa, just as Titov would be leaving Natalie.

  Why?

  Why?

  Why was he a spaceman, and why was Titov a scientist — one of the “Mad Scientists,” at that? Was it that in both of them there was the desire to see what lay over the next hill, on the further shore? Was it no more (and no less) than a manifestation of the Wanderlust, the urge that on Earth had driven men across seas and deserts and mountain ranges, that was now driving them, in their flimsy tin coffins, further and further across the boundless seas of space?

  And if space, why not time?

  As he stirred and twisted in his bed, a fragment of half-remembered verse came to him, a chorus from some queer old play he had seen somewhere — London, perhaps, or Marsala, or Moon City. It had been an Arabian Nights sort of story, set in ancient Baghdad … a passionate pastry-cook, and a captive princess, and …

  He murmured,

  “We are the pilgrims, Master, we shall go

  “Always a little further; it may be

  “Across that last blue mountain rimmed with snow,

  “Across that angry or that shimmering sea …”

  “What was that?” asked Vanessa sharply.

  Perversely he replied,

  “Take courage, ladies, it was ever thus,

  “Men are unwise and curiously planned …”

  And she continued,

  “They have their dreams, and do not think of us …”

  “What comes next?” he demanded, with a strange urgency.

  Her voice was tense as she answered, “You should say it. But we’ll say it together.

  “We take the Golden Road to Samarkand!”

  But I saw the play with Vanessa, thought Wilkinson. It must have been all of a year before the Martian Maid disaster. I saw the play with her in Marsala….

  And Vanessa, the other Vanessa, said, “I remembered that, from somewhere. I remember a theater, and you sitting beside me, and on the stage characters in what I think must have been ancient Persian dress…. And the scenery … archways, and minarets, drenched in blazing moonlight….”

  “Perhaps on Venus … your Venus.”

  “How could it have been? Can you imagine the Underground, as you yourself knew it, going in for amateur theatricals?”

  “You read it, perhaps?”

  “And what books did we have?” She laughed bitterly. “One or two technical manuals. How to strip and reassemble a machine pistol, and what part does which. Laser maintenance and repair…. No, if it’s a memory it must be a memory of my — my, not her, Christopher — of my life on this Mars, on this Coil of Time. Boris is right. There are memories. And that’s why I’m scared. I know — don’t ask me how I know — I know that this other Mars, the world into which we opened the door briefly this morning, is a world in which none of us has any existence. There are no memories at all.”

  Wilkinson laughed gently. “How can there be? As you know, we read those fantastic Martian novels on the voyage out. There was only one Earthman on Burroughs’ Mars, and that was John Carter. And we have no John Carters in our crew.”

  “I suppose you’re right. And, after all, the only thing of which I can be certain is that a duplicate of myself is not waiting for you on the other side of the doorway. Which, perhaps, is just as well.”

  He said, “There’s only one of you, Vanessa.”

  “That’s not true, and you know it. How would you act, I wonder, if you did meet my duplicate?”

  “Not duplicate. Incarnation.”

  “How would you act, anyhow?”

  “It all depends upon whether or not I knew it was another incarnation.”

  She laughed. “Cautious. Very cautious. But I was only teasing. Even so, it’s … odd.”

  “As we well know.”

  “But there’s nothing odd about us. There’s nothing odd about our being together. About our having been together, on Coil after Coil of Time….”

  “But there must have been worlds in which the cards didn’t fall just right, in which the random groupings of genes and chromosomes produced you but not me, or me but not you — or neither of us. After all, the individual is no more than an utterly insignificant eddy on the surface of the broad stream of history….”

  “You’re right, I suppose. But I still like to feel that there’s some … some continuity insofar as the individual is concerned. The trouble is that I feel that we’ll be venturing onto a Coil of Time on which that continuity is broken.”

  “We?”

  “Did I say we? You, I meant. You and Boris. And Natalie and I will have to sit here, waiting patiently, while the pair of you go flapping off in that absurd flying machine, and we won’
t even be able to see what’s happening to you. You are selfish, you know. I’m no hothouse flower, Christopher. I did my share of the fighting when I was in the Underground. I wouldn’t mind betting that I’m as good a shot as Boris, if not better.”

  “But this is Boris’s party, after all. And the folplanes carry only two people.”

  “Then why are you going along?”

  “To fly the damned thing!” he almost shouted.

  He reached to the bedside table for a cigarette, savagely puffed it into life. By the dim glow of its smouldering tip he could see her beside him, her eyes and mouth large and dark in her pale face. He wondered how he could have been such a fool as to have volunteered to pilot a light aircraft over the Polar regions of an unknown and possibly — no, probably — hostile planet. It didn’t make sense. It just didn’t make sense.

  Oh, well, at least he would take a memory with him, and leave one with Vanessa. He threw the cigarette into the disposali and turned toward her. At first her lips on his were welcoming — and then abruptly she stiffened, got her arms between their bodies and pushed him away.

  “What’s the idea?” he demanded, hurt.

  She said coldly, “I can see the point of a woman’s giving her hero one last night of love when he’s leaving her because he has to leave, or when he’s volunteered for some worthwhile mission. But this isn’t a worthwhile mission. Oh, all right, you think that you owe a debt to your Science City friends because you think that they helped you to find me. But they didn’t send you into my Venus for your sake, Chris, or for our sakes. All they knew and cared was that you were a willing guinea pig. If Boris had some real motive — if he’d lost Natalie and knew that she was waiting for him on the other side of the gateway, for instance — that’d be different. I’d expect you to do all you could to help.

  “But just to advance human knowledge — no. If the advancement of human knowledge is so damned important, let the Government take over the experiment. Let them send the Army through every gateway that’s opened — horse, foot and artillery. And the Navy.