Seven Against Mars. Martin Berman-Gorvine
house, and I saw some filthy Alabama redneck swaggering around with Daddy’s best 12-gauge. So I ran to get help from the Montoyas, but there were Dixies there too! It was a regular invasion, and no Rangers around anywhere to drive the damn weevils off. I would’ve even been glad to see Johnny Marshall’s ugly face, but of course he was nowhere to be found. Everyone knows what them Dixies do to girls when they catch ’em, so I just ran and ran and ran till I couldn’t run no more, and I dropped and fell asleep right there on the open prairie. Last thing I saw was the morning star.”
Rachel started at this detail, and then slowly told her own story. “I also thought I must be dreaming, Katie,” she said, “especially because I made this whole thing up.”
“Made what whole thing up?” Jack interrupted. “You mean to say you girls have been lying to me this whole time?”
“No, no. I mean all this,” Rachel said, waving her hand around at the grayish-green foliage.
Jack looked even more confused, but Katie’s brown eyes widened. “You mean to tell me you’re the author of ‘Zap-Gun Jack and the Dame-Eating Monsters of Venus?’”
Rachel winced and her face heated up. “That’s a stupid title, but yes, I’m the one who made up Jack and Princess Anya and the N’Bialys.”
“You?” Katie cried.
Jack said, “How did you know my girl—the name of the princess? And how come you’re the only offworlder I ever met who can pronounce the Venusians’ true name?”
“Because I’m the author. I made all this up. I made you up, Zap-Gun Jack. So I know all about you. I know what happened to Jim. It wasn’t your fault, and anyway, he’s not really dead, he…”
Karolla bounded into the clearing. Katie shrank back, her arm over her eyes, but Rachel only muttered, “No no no, I said seven fingers. Seven! Oh…I see… that one’s just so much smaller than the others.…” The creature’s fur was mottled, providing better camouflage with the jungle foliage. I don’t remember thinking of that.
“Jack, why are you a-lazing while Anya is a-blazing?” the Venusian piped.
“I thought I told you, no more rhymes! It’s gettin’ on my nerves!” Jack reholstered his zap-gun.
“But it helps me with my English!” Karolla’s big blue eyes narrowed. “Hey, what’s the story with these pretty girls, Jack my lad? When Anya sees them, she’ll be mad!”
“They’re a couple of lost tourists,” Jack said. “And Anya isn’t going to see them, you furry horror, because they’re going to be good girls and wait right here till I’m finished rescuing the princess!” Jack and Karolla rushed into the jungle.
“Oh no we won’t.” Rachel took off after them. “I have information you need, Jack! I know where your brother is!”
“And I ain’t waiting out here on my own!” Katie ran after Rachel. Fortunately Jack needed his electric machete to blaze a trail through the dense growth, so he couldn’t get too far ahead. Still, it was hard work just keeping up, and both girls were soon dripping with sweat. Rachel kept staring at the landscape. She knew the names of the major species of trees—the ones with the tent-size leaves were called wharsawa, for instance, while the ones that were just a little taller than Karolla and had brilliant yellow flowers were called czarniy—but she didn’t know the names of all the smaller plants, apart from the joowallah and the dark green klemeth creeper vines. And she didn’t know what the dinner-plate-size fluorescent green ladybug that she almost stepped on was called. In fact she didn’t remember inventing so many things, but it was a jungle after all. The profusion of life made logical sense.
Something else was bothering her, though, and it took a while of listening to Jack and Karolla’s banter before she figured it out. The rhymes, that’s it. I never said the N’Bialy had a habit of rhyming in English. What else don’t I know about?
Katie interrupted her reverie. “So you’re the author, huh?”
“I am,” Rachel puffed. Wish I could keep up with the pace Jack is setting, like Katie can. For a city girl who didn’t get enough to eat, it wasn’t so easy.
“I always figured you for a count, since the book said your story was found in Poland.”
“Well, I’m not a count,” Rachel said. “I’m a Jew.”
Katie nodded. “The book said you might have been one, and that maybe you were in the Holocaust.”
“What’s the Holocaust?”
Katie grimaced and changed the subject. “How come we’re here, Miss Rachel? Any ideas?”
Rachel shook her head. “I don’t understand it either. I was just writing stories to take my mind off things. I missed our house and the friends I used to have before the Germans made us move to the ghetto.”
Katie nodded. “I used to play dolls with Jennie down the road, but then her family up and moved to California. My daddy used to say he never could understand why free-born Texians would want to go live under the Reagan, but Jennie said her daddy had an offer to manage a wind-farm up north of Big Sur, so they got their passports and we never saw them again.”
“I don’t understand. Aren’t you an American? Why would you need a passport to visit another American state?”
“Well yeah, I’m an American, same as you’re a European, I guess. But America hasn’t been a single country since—”
“Ladies, I hate to interrupt this symposium on Earthside politics, but you’re gonna have to keep it down from now on. Medusas have very sensitive hearing,” Jack said.
“I didn’t write that,” Rachel grumbled, but she obediently shut up and concentrated on avoiding the snakelike klemeth underfoot. Her mind whirled. Was Katie from the far future? Or from a parallel world of some kind? How exactly had her story come to be published, and how had Katie found it? And most of all, how on earth had both of them been catapulted into a world that she, Rachel, had made up? Mom might think she was a woolly-headed dreamer, but Rachel was no believer in magic. If by some miracle she did survive the war and went to college, she wanted to study physics. She’d read about Einstein’s Special and General Theories of Relativity, and the new quantum mechanics that even he didn’t seem to understand, and she thought it was the most exciting stuff in the world. That was how she wanted to spend her life, learning about how the universe really worked, cracking God’s code. Physics was so much more elegant than the clumsy attempts made at guessing the divine mind back in Biblical times. But this, this was as crazy and illogical as any story about bushes burning and the Red Sea splitting. And yet there seemed to be no alternative but to accept things at face value for now.
♂
Katie’s horizons were narrower than Rachel’s, but paradoxically this made it easier for her to accept the situation. Hadn’t she always dreamed of running away from the farm? It seemed like her prayers had come true, though God was playing a mighty cruel joke if He had taken her parents as the price of her escape. She tried to push the thought away and concentrate on making headway through the jungle. Jack was using his electric machete economically, cutting away only the largest plants and stomping right over the vines and some kind of mushroom-like growth that groaned when you stepped on it. They didn’t have anything like that back in the Texas Panhandle, but the farmers who scratched a living out of a prairie that got drier every year often spoke in hushed tones about “you-foes,” mysterious colored lights that appeared in the night skies and sometimes took away a calf or a child. Then too, Katie had found a collection of L. Frank Baum’s books in the children’s section of the ruined library, and while he wasn’t as good a writer as Rachel, he had also helped accustom her to the idea that all living things might not look or sound familiar.
“Hey Rachel,” she whispered, helping her over a tangle of vines, “what’s that important information you said you had for Jack?”
“Remember the part in the