Operation Crimson Storm. Robert Reginald
I said, squirming. “That! I’d almost forgotten.”
“Poleeeze!” Mellie said. “I’m covering my ears now.”
I didn’t worry about Mars for quite some time. It’s amazing what zero-G can do for your libido.
But before morning bells shook the ship from its slumber, I had the strangest dream.
It was dark. I was floating in a pool of sea water. I could taste the salt spray, and could hear the slight sloshing noise of the small waves as they tiptoed past me. The red weed caressed the underside of my body, tickling me and almost making me giggle. The growth swirled about as if it were animate. Then something grabbed my penis and pulled me down beneath the surface of the pool. I started gasping for air and blowing bubbles in my desperate attempt to get loose.
That’s when I came to the surface again.
“Alex, what’s wrong?” Becky asked, putting her arms around me.
I struggled for a moment to get free, still touched by the fronds of my imagination.
“What’s the matter?”
“The weed,” I managed to gasp. “It’s Mars, Becky. It’s reaching out for me.”
She held me close until I stopped shuddering. I felt like I’d been violated.
“Now you know how I feel sometimes,” she said.
CHAPTER EIGHT
DREAM STORY
Dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before.
—Edgar Allan Poe
Alex Smith, 3 Bi-July, Mars Year vii
U.S.S. Armageddon, in Transit from Earth to Mars
But I wasn’t the only one who had trouble sleeping during those long days of voyaging through the æther. The ladies were being increasingly bothered, almost on a daily basis, by visions, nightmares, even waking dreams of the Martian homeworld. A few of the male members of the expedition seemed to be headed in the same direction. The Advisory Council was charged with finding the commonality between these disparate groups, but other than the fact that all of the affected men seemed to have had some direct contact with the invaders more than a dozen years earlier, nothing else was obvious.
I left a message with Dr. Jarmann back on Earth. The xenobiologist had been invited to join the expedition, but had declined for personal reasons, being now rather elderly and not wanting to leave his Bavarian Mountain Retreat on the Zugspitze.
He spoke no English, and my German was insufficient to conduct a conversation, so we had to work back and forth through the translation programs available on the Interlink.
“Herr Doktor Smith,” he said, when we finally made contact.
“Herr Doktor Jarmann,” I said, explaining to him the reason for my call.
“This is very interesting,” the old scientist said. “As you know, we have been trying to sequence the DNA of the Martians and their plants, but it has taken us a very long time to get any results that are actually usable. The alien genome is extraordinarily different from ours, particularly since they reproduce asexually. This is true, by the way, of both the plant and animal life on Mars.
“What we have discovered, my young friend, is that there are surprising underlying similarities between all of the Martian life forms. The plants appear to share some of their genetic structures with the animate creatures of Mars, and vice versa. We do not know yet whether this is because they have been deliberately bred that way by the Martians, or whether this occurred naturally over a long period of time.
“We suspect that all of the Martian creatures live together symbiotically, that they each require something of the others to continue to survive and prosper. This would lead us naturally to the conclusion that the Martian intelligences actually died, not of infection by the Earthly microbes, as had been previously supposed (and which we had personally already discounted, since the Martians varied so widely in their physiology from any Earthly species); but through a failure to obtain some essential nutrient or ingredient necessary to their continued existence. Perhaps it was the inability of the Martian flora to establish themselves permanently on Earth that led to the demise of their masters.”
“I find all this intriguing, of course,” I said, “but what does it have to do with our present situation?”
“Ah,” he replied, after the usual pause in communication caused by the huge distance the message had to travel from Earth to the Armageddon. “Do you know of any individuals who have been affected by this disease which we might have called the Traumnovelle?”
He employed here the title of an Arthur Schnitzler tale; it meant something like “Dream Story.”
“Well, I’ve been having nightmares myself,” I said, “and they’ve been getting steadily worse as we approach ever closer to Mars.”
“Ach, this is what we might have expected,” Jarmann said. “And you had some contact with the Martians in Upper California, no?”
I explained my brief history to him.
“This is not exactly what we meant by this interrogatory,” he said. “What we really want to know is whether or not you actually touched a living Martian.”
To the best of my knowledge, I hadn’t. The tentacle of one of the handling-machines had brushed the heel of my foot (which was encased within its shoe), just briefly, during those terrible weeks I was trapped in the ruined house in Marin County, but I hadn’t actually felt one of the buggers, and I told him so.
“What about the red weed or the other Martian growths?” he asked.
“The weed was everywhere,” I said. “You couldn’t move around without encountering the stuff. I stepped over and through big patches of it, I moved it out of the way with my hands, I even cut some pieces of the weed and ate it, I was so hungry.”
“Ach,” he said again. “Ahhhh! Well, there we have it, you see. You ingested some of the plant, and it has become part of you, my dear friend. Martian life is very adaptable, or so we have found. Even here on Earth, we have now discovered that the weed and its cousins did not totally disappear from our fields and streams, as we had first thought. In places it has now actually come back, never as much as before, but it has such an amazing capacity for survival. What an interesting species it is!”
“But you said yourself that Martian DNA is very different from ours,” I noted.
“So we did,” he said, “and this is true, my dear Doctor. Nonetheless, we suspect that the Martian genome is capable of adapting itself to an almost infinite variety of homes and environments, including other organic structures. Of course, some of my colleagues would disagree with this theory, and actually proving it will take many more years of research. Also, if such a transmission takes place, how much contact is actually required; and does the transmission proceed in both directions? All of these are very, very fascinating questions.
“We have ourselves eaten the red weed and pieces of the other Martian plants. We can fix them in a salad with a few fava beans, spinach, onions, pepper, chili, and olive oil, and they are, as you say, quite, quite delicious. They also mix well within an olio of lentil beans, well roasted pork, onions, cilantro, a sprinkling of havarti cheese, and black pepper. We have not yet perceived any of the dreams that you described, although we occasionally suffer from the gas and the indigestion.”
He belched quite noticeably.
“Uh, thank you, Doktor,” I said, and terminated the connection.
Later that day, I spotted my friend Mindon in the gym, and reported on my conversation with Jarmann. Min was working hard on a stationary cycle, where he had to strap himself into place to generate any tension. We had all been urged to do an hour’s worth of exercise daily to avoid deterioration of our muscles; some of us did better at this than others.
“I