Leonora and Janice sat in the drugstore among strange women.

  “You ladies look pretty, but you sure look sad,” said the soda-fountain man.

  “Two chocolate malteds.” Leonora smiled for both of them, as if Janice were mute.

  They gazed at the chocolate drink as if it was a rare museum painting. Malts would be scarce, for many years, on Mars.

  Janice fussed in her purse and took out an envelope, reluctantly, and laid it on the marble counter.

  “This is from Will to me. It came in the rocket mail two days ago. It was this that made up my mind for me, made me decide to go. I didn’t tell you. I want you to see it now. Go ahead, read the note.”

  Leonora shook the note out of the envelope and read it aloud:

  “ ‘Dear Janice: This is our house if you decide to come to Mars. Will.’ ”

  Leonora tapped the envelope again and a color photograph dropped out, glistening, on the counter. It was a picture of a house, a dark, mossy, ancient, caramel-brown, comfortable house with red flowers and green cool ferns bordering it, and a disreputably hairy ivy on the porch.

  “But, Janice!”

  “What?”

  “This is a picture of your house, here on Earth, here on Elm Street!”

  “No. Look close.”

  And they looked again, together, and on both sides of the comfortable dark house and behind it was scenery that was not Earth scenery. The soil was a strange color of violet, and the grass was the faintest bit red, and the sky glowed like a gray diamond, and a strange crooked tree grew to one side, looking like an old woman with crystals in her white hair.

  “That’s the house Will’s built for me,” said Janice, “on Mars. It helps to look at it. All yesterday, when I had the chance, alone, and was most afraid and panicky, I took out this picture and looked at it.”

  They both gazed at the dark comfortable house 60,000,000 miles away, familiar but unfamiliar, old but new, a yellow light shining in the right front parlor window.

  “That man Will,” said Leonora, nodding her head, “knows just what he’s doing.”

  They finished their drinks. Outside, a vast warm crowd of strangers wandered by and the “snow” fell steadily in the summer sky.

  They bought many silly things to take with them, bags of lemon candy, glossy women’s magazines, fragile perfumes (let the take-off weighers worry later about what constitutes “essential load”); and then they walked out into the town and not minding the expense, rented two belted jackets—two small machines that refused gravity and imitated the butterfly—and touched the delicate controls and felt themselves whispered like white blossom petals over the town.

  “Anywhere,” said Leonora, “anywhere at all.”

  They let the wind blow them where it would, they let the wind take them through the night of summer apple trees and the night of warm preparation, over the lovely town, over the houses of childhood and other days, over schools and avenues, over creeks and meadows and farms so familiar that each grain of wheat was a golden coin. They blew as leaves must blow before the threat of a fire-wind, with warning whispers and summer lightning crackling among the folded hills. They saw the milk-dust country roads where not so long ago they had drifted in moonlit helicopters in great whorls of sound spiraling down to touch beside cool night streams with the young men who were now gone.

  They floated in an immense sigh above a town already made remote by the little space between themselves and the earth, a town receding behind them in a black river and coming up in a tidal wave of lights and color ahead, untouchable and a dream now, already smeared in their eyes with nostalgia, with a panic of memory that began before the thing was gone.

  Blown quietly, eddying, they gazed secretly at a hundred faces of dear friends they were leaving behind, the lamplit people held and framed by windows which slid by on the wind, it seemed; all of Time breathing them along. There was no tree they did not examine for old confessions of love carved and whittled there, no sidewalk they did not skim across as over fields of mica-snow. For the first time they knew that their town was beautiful and the lonely lights and the ancient bricks beautiful, and they both felt their eyes grow large with the beauty of this feast they were giving themselves. All floated upon an evening carousel, with fitful drifts of music wafting up here and there, and voices calling and murmuring from houses that were whitely haunted by television.

  The two women passed like needles, sewing one tree to the next with their perfume. Their eyes were too full, and yet they kept putting away each detail, each shadow, each solitary oak and elm, each passing car upon the small snaking streets below, until not only their eyes but their heads and then their hearts were too full.

  I feel like I’m dead, thought Janice, and in the graveyard on a spring night and everything alive but me and everyone moving and ready to go on with life without me. It’s like I felt each spring when I was very young, passing the graveyard and weeping for them because they were dead and it didn’t seem fair, on nights as soft as that, that I was alive. I was guilty of living. And now, here, tonight, I feel they have taken me from the graveyard and let me go above the town just once more to see what it is like to be living, to be a town and a people, before they slam the black door on me again.

  Softly, softly, like two white paper lanterns on a night wind, the women moved over their lifetime and their past, and over the meadows where the tent cities glowed and the highways where supply trucks would be clustered and running until dawn. They hovered above it all for a long time.

  The courthouse clock was booming 11:45 when they came like spiderwebs floating from the stars, touching on the moonlit pavement before Janice’s old house. The city was asleep, and Janice’s house waited for them to come in searching for their sleep, which was not there.

  “Is this us, here?” asked Janice. “Janice Smith and Leonora Holmes, in the year 2003?”

  “Yes.”

  Janice licked her lips and stood straight. “I wish it was some other year.”

  “1492? 1612?” Leonora sighed and the wind in the trees sighed with her, moving away. “It’s always Columbus Day or Plymouth Rock Day, and I’ll be darned if I know what we women can do about it.”

  “Be old maids.”

  “Or, do just what we’re doing.”

  They opened the door of the warm night house, the sounds of the town dying slowly in their ears. As they shut the door, the phone began to ring.

  “The call!” cried Janice, running.

  Leonora came into the bedroom after her and already Janice had the receiver up and was saying, “Hello, hello!” And the operator in a far city was readying the immense apparatus which would tie two worlds together, and the two women waited, one sitting and pale, the other standing but just as pale, bent toward her.

  There was a long pause, full of stars and time, a waiting pause not unlike the last three years for all of them. And now the moment had arrived, and it was Janice’s turn to phone through millions upon millions of miles of meteors and comets, running away from the yellow sun which might boil or burn her words or scorch the meaning from them, her voice like a silver needle through everything, in stitches of talking, across the big night, reverberating from the moons of Mars and rushing on. And then her voice found its way to a man in a room in a city there on another world, five minutes by radio away. And her message was this:

  “Hello, Will. This is Janice!”

  She swallowed.

  “They say I haven’t much time. A minute.”

  She closed her eyes.

  “I want to talk slow but they say talk fast and get it all in. So, I want to say—I’ve decided. I will come up there. I’ll go on the Rocket tomorrow. I will come up there to you, after all. And I love you. I hope you can hear me. I love you. It’s been so long . . .”

  Her voice motioned on its way to that unseen world. Now, with the message sent, the words said, she wanted to call them back, to censor, to rearrange them, to make a prettier sentence, a fairer explanation of her soul. But already the words were hung between planets and if, by some cosmic radiation, they could have been illuminated, caught fire in vaporous wonder there, her love would have lit a dozen worlds and startled the night side of Earth into a premature dawn, she thought. Now the words were not hers at all, they belonged to space, they belonged to no one until they arrived, and they were traveling at 186,000 miles a second to their target.

  What will he say to me? What will he say back in his minute of time? she wondered. She fussed with and twisted the watch on her wrist, and the light-phone receiver on her ear crackled and space talked to her with electrical jigs and dances and audible auroras.

  “Has he replied?” whispered Leonora.

  “Shhh!” said Janice, bending, as if sick.

  Then the voice came through space from him.

  “I hear him!” cried Janice.

  “What does he say?”

  The voice called out from Mars and took itself through the places where there was no sunrise or sunset, but always the night with a sun in the middle of the blackness. And somewhere between Mars and Earth everything of the message was lost, perhaps in a sweep of electrical gravity rushing by on the flood tides of a meteor, or interfered with by a rain of silver meteors. In any event, the small words and the unimportant words of the message were washed away. And his voice came through saying only one word:

  “. . . love . . .”

  After that, there was the huge night again and the sound of stars turning and suns whispering to themselves and the sound of her heart, like another world in space, filling her earphones.

  “Did you hear him?” asked Leonora.

  Janice could only nod.

  “What did he say, what did he say?” cried Leonora.

  But Janice could not tell anyone, it was much too good to tell. She sat, listening to that one word again and again, as her memory played it back to her. She sat listening, while Leonora took the phone away from her without her knowing it, and put it back upon its hook.

  Then they were in bed and the lights out and the night wind blowing through the rooms a smell of the long journey in darkness and stars, and their voices talking of tomorrow, and the days after tomorrow which would not be days at all, but day-nights of timeless time; their voices faded away into sleep or wakeful thinking, and Janice lay alone in her bed.

  Is this how it was over a century ago, she wondered, when the women, the night before, lay ready for sleep, or not ready, in the small towns of the East, and heard the sound of horses in the night and the creak of the Conestoga wagons ready to go, and the brooding of oxen under the trees, and the cry of children already lonely before their time? All the sounds of arrivals and departures into the deep forests and fields, the blacksmiths working in their own red hells through midnight? And the smell of bacons and hams ready for the journeying, and the heavy feel of the wagons like ships foundering with goods, with water in the wooden kegs to tilt and slop across prairies, and the chickens hysterical in their slung-beneath-the-wagon crates, and the dogs running out to the wilderness ahead and, fearful, running back with a look of empty space in their eyes? Is this then how it was so long ago? On the rim of the precipice, on the edge of the cliff of stars. In their time the smell of buffalo, and in our time the smell of the Rocket. Is this then how it was?

  And she decided, as sleep assumed the dreaming for her, that yes, yes indeed, very much so, irrevocably, this was as it had always been and would forever continue to be.

  Mars Is Ours

  Alfred Coppel

  Here’s one of those stories that throws off my great overarching theory of how stories about Mars have evolved—a vision of the red planet that owes nothing to the scientific romances of Burroughs and everything to Mars, the god of war.

  Alfredo Jose de Marini y Coppel, Jr. was a fighter pilot during World War II and published his first story in 1947. Over the years, he wrote two dozen novels, including thrillers such as Show Me a Hero and Thirty-Four East, and science-fiction novels such as Dark December. His most recent books are the three in the “Glory” series: Glory, Glory’s War, and Glory’s People. He lived in California until his death in 2004 at the age of eighty-three.

  THE RED DUNES woke to the morning sun. The stars dimmed, but did not fade before the dawn. Light touched the mare’s tails of high ice clouds and turned them pink against the great cobalt sky. To the far west, the eroded hills along the edge of Syrtis came alive with brilliant yellows and sere browns.

  The long column of armored vehicles, insectlike in the vast emptiness, inched northward. The sound of their engines faded quickly in the thin, cold air and the drifting iron sands swiftly covered the tracks of the steel cleats.

  Marrane woke from fitful slumber in his tank. The tiny reading light was still on and the book of plays lay open across his chest. He glanced at the clock in the footing of the tank and wondered if he had slept at all.

  He rubbed a hand across his stubbled face and fought down the familiar clamoring terror of waking. He forced himself to lie back and relax, letting the undulating movement of the Weasel soothe him.

  —this is real, he thought. Steel and rivets and the steady chugchugchug of the air compressor. Forget the nightmare of sticky, fear-ridden plains stretching out and out forever. And lay off the luminol.

  He felt sodden with the residue of the drug, thick in the mouth and eyes with it. Corday would have to give him something else. He was building up a tolerance for luminol, and it wasn’t driving away the nightmares. Corday would have to come up with something different. Something out of a bottle to buy a few hours’ rest and sleep without dreams. He couldn’t lead men into battle feeling this kicked out inside—

  The communicator light flashed. “What is it, Sergeant?” he asked heavily.

  “0600 hours, Major.” Grubich’s voice sounded tinny through the grille. “We’re starting to climb the shelf. You asked me to call you.”

  “Very well, Sergeant.”

  —out of the coffin, he thought. Out of the coffin and back to life. For God’s sake why? Another endless day crawling across the endless, featureless desert. He thought of blue lakes and the sea again. How long had it been? Years now. Not that it mattered.

  He slipped on his respirator and decompressed the tank. The latches didn’t stick, thank God. He had a horror of that happening.

  The interior of the Weasel was icy and Marrane shivered naked on the pitching deck. He wondered about shaving and decided against it. What water there was would be frozen, and he had no decent blades left. The power shaver had been ruined by the sand months ago crossing Syrtis. All supplies were getting short—like sand running out in a glass. They’d have to make contact soon or the Task Group would fall apart of its own dry decay. All hail the conquerors—

  Grubich stuck his cropped head around a bulkhead and asked: “Did you say something to me, Major?”

  “No,” he said sharply. “Carry on.”

  Grubich’s head vanished with a muttered yes, sir.

  Marrane dressed slowly. Each movement seemed an effort. He wondered whether it was the dry cold and the low pressure and the canned air. Or was it himself?

  —I’m thirty, he thought. Not old. But I feel old. Tired and sticky, somehow, and when I look out at the desert, I feel very small.

  He thought of the play he had been reading last night. One of the proscribed authors, but it didn’t seem to matter much up here. Graylist, Blacklist. The Loyalty Boards. They all seemed far-off and unreal across the gulf of night. But the play had troubled him. Steinbeck, or some such name. And the title so apt as the line of Weasels crawled their way across the Martian plain through the star-shot darkness. The Moon Is Down. About invaders in a war that was forgotten now in a place he’d never heard of. Yet there was a frightening phrase in the play. One that brought on the nightmare again in spite of the luminol. Perhaps it had been wise to keep such a book out of the hands of civilians.

  He shook his head wearily. It showed the way discipline was breaking down in the Task Group when an officer could lend a Graylist book to his commander without a twinge of conscience or fear. But my God, he wondered, what else can be expected after ten months on this desert looking for a Cominform Base that might not even exist. He told himself that he must remember to thank Hallerock for lending him the book.

  From the galley came the smell of burning synthetic proteins. The stoves never had worked properly here under seven pounds air pressure. Nor had the engines—gasping for breath in spite of all the huffing and puffing of the superchargers. Nothing worked properly. Nothing but the guns. And there was nothing to shoot at.

  —all hail the conquerors, he thought again, sardonically. Mars is ours. Marzizarz. It made just as much sense that way and it had the sound of officialese. He found himself smiling idiotically at the thought, Marzizarz.

  “Crest ahead, Major,” Grubich called.

  Marrane stopped smiling and finished dressing hurriedly. His heart was pounding when he took a grip on himself.

  —I’m going sand-happy, he thought, and so is every other man in the Task Group. Something basic was wrong with all this—the military vehicles trekking endlessly across the face of a world that had been quiet and dead and at peace for ten times ten million years. We should have come here for some other reason, he thought.

  He stumbled onto the bridge and stood behind Grubich and the driver.

  Behind the lumbering 200-foot machine, he could see the rest of the group strung out behind, following blindly across an endless wasteland of iron sands, radar antennae rotating with idiot military precision, searching for an enemy where none but the bitter frozen land could be seen.

  He checked the course and climbed to the navigation deck, his boots gritting on the sand that drifted everywhere in the Weasel. He checked the guns as he went by, making sure they were muzzled and protected against the abrasive rusty filth.