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The small creature slumped in the pilot harness stared at the shattered instruments with pain-dulled eyes and fought back the waves of nausea that threatened to rob him of what control he had over his crippled ship. His golden-brown pelt was matted with blood from a deep wound in his right shoulder and he believed that a vital nerve had been severed because his right paw was numb and he could not move the fingers. Pilot Leader Skua knew fear, but like all religious Martians he was able to seal it off in that sector of his mind reserved for such primitive emotions.
At intervals, a high keening whistle told him that he was passing through the fringe of the enemy's atmospheric envelope. Without instruments, but aided by his unerring time sense, he estimated his grazing orbit from the duration and frequency of the contacts and set the automatic controls to land the ship. This done he could only wait and hope.
The last rays of the setting sun slanted through the gay chintz and gilded the blue and white china on the supper table in the kitchen of the O'Riordan farmhouse in the backblocks of New South Wales. John O'Riordan, a lean, big-boned man with yellow hair and a humorous face, screwed up his eyes against the strong light, and Barbara, his wife, paused on her way from the cooking range to the table to tug the curtains across.
She stood for a moment with the curtains half-closed, dark hair haloed by the golden sunlight, and said, 'What shall I wish, John?'
'Wish, dear?'
'Yes, I just saw a shooting star. It fell behind the west wood.'
'Oh, wish ... darned if I can think of anything to wish for just now, and it must have been a very bright one, for you to see it against the sunset.'
'Yes, it was bright like a piece of the sun itself. What should I wish for, Lorna?'
Lorna looked as superior as her eleven years would allow and referred to the Middle Ages and Barbaric Superstition, and her young brother who was only five and still professed a token belief in Santa Claus, cried 'My pony, Mum! Wish for my pony!
'All right, Billy Boy,' laughed Barbara, and 'I wish William will get his pony this Christmas,' she said solemnly with her eyes shut.
Skua came unsteadily from his wrecked ship. He found it difficult to believe that he was still alive and almost wished he was not, but the will to live was strong in him. It was the same spirit of self-preservation that had driven his ancestors to span the arid surface of their planet with great canals, using only hand tools. It was also the reason why no Earth colony could ever be established on Mars while any Martians were yet left alive.
In addition to his wound he now had to contend with a thick, hot atmosphere and a much higher gravity, although the greater amount of oxygen acted as a stimulant. He knew that he must find a secure hiding place and first aid materials, for his own kit was beneath the impenetrable tangle of wreckage. While it was possible that his landing had gone unnoticed if this was a sparsely populated area, it was almost certain that the ship which had been chasing him had marked his landing place and radioed the nearest military.
So he set out to put as much distance as possible between himself and his ship, and when two minutes had almost passed he crept into a dark hollow until the time bomb in the ship exploded, leaving nothing but a few twisted scraps of metal spread widely around a twenty foot crater in the forest.
John O'Riordan had pushed back his chair and was lighting his favourite pipe when the explosion slammed against the kitchen window and knocked a plate off the rack by the sink. He and his wife looked at each other questioningly. The match burned his fingers. He got to his feet and took his rifle down off the pegs in the wall and pulled the zipper up the front of his jacket and made sure his pipe was burning evenly. Barbara said, 'Be careful, dear,' and stood on tiptoe to kiss him before he strode out across the darkening farmyard. A thick column of smoke hung in the still evening air, silhouetted like a solid bar against the red glow of the sunset.
Skua glanced back uneasily at the tell-tale smoke as he plodded laboriously through the wood. Perhaps it had been unwise to blow up the ship, but the orders in the event of a forced landing were explicit. He realised he could not travel far; even now his muscles were tiring under the unaccustomed weight and he had to stop every few minutes to lie down and regain his breath. He had discarded his uniform harness and anklets before leaving the ship, retaining only the ceremonial collar that carried his badges of rank and concealed the small jeweled knife that was his last recourse in event of capture.
Hearing a faint sound ahead of him, Skua melted catlike into the forest. His eyes though color blind, were sensitive in a certain degree to infra-red, and it did not occur to him that the large biped moving past him along the trail with such a clumsy lack of silence might not possess similar vision. Skua noted the long metal object under its arm which was almost certainly a weapon, and wondered if it was a member of a military patrol called out by the pursuing ship. He was puzzled by the heat and smoke issuing from the stumpy object in the creature's mouth; surely they were not fire-eaters? He had never seen one of the enemy before, and he was disconcerted to find it so large and powerful. Although he was of the officer caste, the propaganda which was disseminated for the benefit of the warriors and workers had inevitably made some impression on him.
He waited until the biped had passed by and slipped back onto the path again, and as he did so he was arrested by a sudden brilliance that flared into life high above the pall of smoke that marked the grave of his ship. The landing jets of his pursuer.
John halted and shaded his eyes as the forest became a bizarre confusion of harsh white and impenetrable black, of silhouetted branches and trucks indistinguishable from their own shadows. The searing light sank earthwards, slowing: dropped below the level of the trees and went out, leaving him groping blindly with weird patterns burned onto his retina. He could not go forward, so he sat down with his back against a tree and smoked philosophically until the persistent vision faded. Then, knocking his pipe out on the trunk, he rose and continued towards the thinning smoke that now hardly obscured the early stars.
Presently, he came to the crater, which smelled of pungent explosive and was surrounded by uprooted trees and broken branches. He kicked at a shiny shard of metal. It slithered down into the crater, and at once he was caught in the white beam of a flashlight. He squinted against the light at the two uniformed men that came towards him round the lip of the crater carrying tommy guns cradled in their arms.
The man carrying the flashlight directed it at the ground and said, 'Hullo there! Seen anything of a Martian around here?'
'No, I haven't, but if this was his ship I don't think you need worry about it. My name is John O'Riordan.'
'Glad to know you. I'm Captain Wayne and this is Lootenant Monetti,' said the Captain, sticking his hand out. 'Ow do you do, Signor,' said the Lieutenant politely, bowing smartly from the waist.
'It's our opinion Mr. O'Riordan, that the Martian left its ship before she blew up,' explained the Captain. 'There was an interval of a couple of minutes between the landing and the explosion. That little stinker could have gotten clear away if it wasn't hurt.'
'I see. Well naturally I'm at your disposal, gentlemen. The nearest neighbours are seventeen miles to the south: I suppose you've already contacted the army?'
'Yeah, but it'll take them all of two hours to fly out here. I never saw such an isolated spot!' The Lieutenant's teeth gleamed in the darkness and he slapped the barrel of his tommy gun. 'Signor, eef we dont-a catch that leedle skunk eenside two hours, I eat-a my helmet. You betcha!'
'Now, I think I'd better go and tell my wife to lock all the doors and windows; I have a couple of children too. Its only a few minutes walk.'
'That's very wise of you, Mr. O'Riordan. Me and Monetti will come along and we'll work out a search plan. We got a few flares in the ship that may come in handy.'
Lorna and William scuttled pitter-pat up the ladder into the loft of the big barn, where their tame pigeons lived. Lorna lit the hurricane lamp, and as the warm light chased the darkness into the corners of the loft, William said in a pleased voice, 'Pretty pussy!'
Lorna advanced slowly towards the small furry thing huddled in a corner, half hidden under a heap of straw. The face was more like that of a marmoset than a cat, but the forehead was wide and bulging, the cranium almost of human proportions. There was no tail, and its fore-paws were long sensitive four-fingered hands complete with opposed thumbs, the fingers being divided in two for about half their length. The creature was wearing a wide collar, covered with jewels and delicately worked ornaments.
'Pussy's hurt!' said William with concern, and bent to touch the unconscious animal, but Lorna pulled him back. 'Better not touch it, Billy Boy. And it isn't a pussy.'
'Course it's a pussy,' said William scornfully, and began to stroke his new pet's head.
Skua awoke to an unfamiliar touch on the top of his skull, and almost panicked. He should have known better than to enter this building, but he had judged the place to be derelict by the amount of junk and dirt lying about. His captors resembled only superficially the giant he had seen in the forest; the smaller was not a great deal bigger than himself, so perhaps they were cubs. He considered making a run for it, but decided that they could catch him easily even if he had been uninjured, accustomed as they were to the crushing gravity. He also thought of his knife, but they might misinterpret his action, and if they were fast-moving, kill him before he could commit suicide. So he remained quite still and awaited developments.
'Look, Lorna. Pussy's woke up!' cried William happily, and his sister, forgetting her caution, knelt by the little animal and examined the ugly wound in its shoulder.
'Whatever it is,' she said, 'We must give it first aid, and the vet's calling tomorrow, so we can have him look at it.'
Skua correctly identified the peculiar piping sounds as speech, and guessed they concerned his wound by the close scrutiny the larger human was giving it. It was almost more than he dared hope, but could these creatures be friendly? He found the stroking action of the smaller one strangely pleasant. Some sort of therapy, perhaps. Certainly the terrible headache that had resulted from his head striking the instrument panel was almost gone, and a perceptible sense of well-being was entering his tired body. He began to relax.
'Now you stay here, Billy Boy, while I go and get some hot water and bandages.' Lorna turned to go, and the little animal suddenly reached out and weakly gripped her arm. It placed one finger of its other paw over its mouth and its great brown eyes looked at her with such trust and entreaty that her affectionate heart was touched.
"Why look at that, the poor thing doesn't want us to tell anybody its here. Of course I won't, pussy.' she said, imitating the gesture of silence. 'Don't let him move if you can help it, Billy Boy.' She shot down the ladder, out of the barn and across the farmyard, where she collided with her father.
'Woa there, girl! Gentlemen, this is my eldest, Lorna. Now step inside and meet my wife. Barbara, we have visitors!'
They went into the kitchen, blinking in the light, and Barbara came forward, wiping her hands on her apron and saying, 'Well, come in, come in! My goodness, soldiers with guns! You boys sit down by the stove and I'll get you some hot coffee. Lorna! Get some cups, dear.'
'Thank you, Ma'am,' said the Captain. 'Say,' he said, nudging his companion, 'This is O.K.!'
'You betcha!' sniggered Monetti, running his eyes over Barbara's figure. He sprawled back in his chair and opened his tunic.
John suppressed his resentment and said, 'Barbara, this is Captain Wayne and Lieutenant Monetti. They are looking for a Martian that crashed near here.
'A Martian! That must have been my shooting star. What are they like?'
'Oh, they're like some unholy cross between a cat and a monkey. Quite small, but cunning and vicious as a jaguar,' said Wayne.
'An' they got claws like-a razors an' teeth like-a sharks, an' eef they catch-a you they torture you so it take-a two-three days for you to die,' added Monetti with relish.
'They're stinkers,' concluded Wayne.
'Heavens! No wonder you're armed to the teeth. Are we in any danger here?'
Lorna, busy with cups and saucers, tried to reconcile this graphic description with the pathetic creature in the hayloft. Her young mind, impressionable and with a child's trait of instantly liking or disliking a person, was already antagonised by these swaggering officers. She was determined to help the Martian, and began to contrive a way of getting back to the loft in order to explain the situation to her brother.
Soon the kitchen was hazy with smoke from the cigars which the officers were continually chewing. They sprawled and sweated and boasted and spat on the stove and showed no inclination to forsake the warmth of the kitchen to hunt the Martian in the cold dark forest.
'Anyways you look at it,' drawled the Captain, 'Them Martians are finished. We got the ships and we got the weapons, and one good American is worth ten of them stinkin' monkeys. What goddam right have they got to say we can't land on their lousy planet anyhow? They ain't even got a democracy! I'm telling you ...'
'Mummy! cried William, 'Mummy, pussy's hurt!'
For several seconds everyone stared at the small boy in the doorway with the Martian clasped to his chest, and then Lorna said 'Billy!' with her voice full of reproach, and the tension in the room snapped like a drawn violin string. Monetti screamed something in Italian and dived for the tommy gun on the table.
When Skua saw the big human scoop the weapon from the table his first thought was to get clear from his friend and he wriggled from William's arms even as the Lieutenant snatched at the cocking handle and then he was out of the door and across the yard as fast as his straining muscles would carry him.
Monetti reached the door in a single leap, bowling the child over. The tommy gun roared and spat and jumped in his hands and the dust spurted around the running Martian, caught in the yellow rectangle of light from the kitchen. The bullets stitched the writhing body to the wall of the barn and the boy screamed in terror and grief and pummelled the man's thighs with his tiny fists and Monetti laughed and snarled and emptied the bucking gun into the small tattered corpse of the Martian.
Data entry by Judy Bemis
Updated June 23, 2001. If you have a comment about these web pages please send a note to the Fanac Webmaster. Thank you.