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Read Ebook: The Frogs of Mars by Aycock Roger D
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Ebook has 604 lines and 27451 words, and 13 pages
The little guy comes into the bar just as the first Marscast is about to start. He scoffs at scientific facts and keeps mumbling about--
THE FROGS OF MARS
There was nothing special about the little man who came into Larry's place, unless it might have been his air of vague familiarity and the mixed expression on his face. He looked disgusted and defensive and at the same time a little resentful, with a dash of something else thrown in which none of us recognized until later.
"The bar's closed," Larry said. His tone didn't invite argument. "City ordinance. No customers after 1:00 a.m."
The little man looked at the clock, which said 3:15, and then at the front windows which were shuttered tight. Then he looked at the six of us sitting at the bar with our drinks.
"I'll have bourbon and water," he said. He sat down at the end of the bar on the stool next to mine and looked at his reflection in the mirror without approval.
Larry got the look that bartenders get with troublesome customers.
"The bar's closed," he said again. "It's a city--"
"Water on the side," the little man said. "Don't mix it."
"Nobody else will wander in," he said. "Make with the t-v, Larry. You're holding up the show."
Larry looked stubborn.
"It's after 1:00 a.m.," he said. "And that door was supposed to be locked. There's a city ordinance--"
"You're breaking it already," the little man said, looking at us. He didn't seem angry, just weary and disgusted. "Not that I give a damn. All I want is a bourbon and water."
Larry muttered and looked mulish, but he rang up the little man's money and gave him a bourbon and water. The little guy drank it and looked at himself in the bar mirror with an expression that was just short of being a sneer. Larry grunted and went back to fiddling with the television set.
Abe Marker came over and sat down on the stool to my left.
"They're doing this all over town tonight," he said, explaining to the little man across me. "The bars have to observe curfew as usual, but most of them are letting a few regular customers stay late to see the Marscast. Everybody is anxious to know what Colonel Sanderson and his crew found up there, so--"
"They're going to be disappointed," the little man said. He sounded sour but positive. "Mars ain't what people think it is, not by a hell of a sight. It stinks."
We all looked up at that, and somebody snickered.
"Have you been to Mars, sir?"
The little man didn't seem to mind when we laughed.
"Maybe," he said, and shoved his shot glass forward. "Another bourbon, bartender."
The station announcer came on screen then and told us what we already knew, that contact with Colonel Sanderson's party was delayed because of transmission difficulties. The Sanderson expedition would leave Mars for Earth in two more days, when the current opposition was completed, but in the meantime the program sponsors appreciated the interest shown by their public and would relay the broadcast to us as soon as contact was established.
A film cartoon featuring a lizard named Freddie came on next, and Larry turned down the sound so he could hear orders for refills. The little man drank his bourbon and water and sneered at his reflection in the mirror; none of us paid him any further attention, but talk started up again along the bar.
Somebody at the other end asked how long it took a television signal to travel across all that space, and choked on his drink when Willard Saxton told him.
All of us laughed at that but Larry and the little man at the end of the bar.
"What I'm wondering," somebody else said, "Is how the colonel and his boys feel after breathing nothing but canned air for a year."
"Maybe the air up there is better than our scientists think," Abe Marker said. He winked at us and looked at the little man on my right. "How about it, friend? Is the air good on Mars?"
"Breathable, but not good," the little guy said. "It smells like dead fish."
Silence fell along the bar while we waited for a straight man to raise his head.
Willard Saxton took the bait. "And why should it smell so, may I ask?"
"Because Mars is lousy with fish," the little man said. "And because when fish die, they stink."
Larry did a brisk business for a few minutes while we sized the little guy up again. He definitely wasn't drunk, but the task of deciding whether he was being dead-pan-comic or just nasty was a sort of challenge that called for thought.
"But you'd need extensive oceans to support so many fish," Willard Saxton argued, still taking it seriously. "And if Mars had oceans we'd have seen them long ago. They reflect light."
"Mars is too level for oceans," the little man said. "The water spreads out thin to make one big marsh, and you can't see it because the weeds that grow up from the bottom camouflage it."
Somebody down the bar said, "This gets curiouser and curiouser," and everybody laughed again but Willard and Larry and the little comic. Somebody else asked if he was a professional and what show was he on, but he didn't answer. He just pushed his shot glass forward instead.
"Another bourbon," he said.
The announcer came on screen again when the lizard cartoon went off and said that the Mars party's signal was beginning to come through and that as soon as it cleared up they would put it on the cable. Then he told us about a new kind of pretzel prepared with a special salt guaranteed not to give us hardening of the arteries, and after that we had another film cartoon. This one was about two crows at a circus, but nobody could follow it because Larry turned down the sound again.
"Reliable tests have conclusively proved," Willard said, "that the atmosphere of Mars contains only minute traces of water vapor, and that its oxygen content is less than one-hundredth the density necessary to sustain human life. Spectroanalysis findings--"
"A spectroanalysis of Earth from Mars," the little man said, "shows nothing beyond our Heaviside layer, and proves that we can't live here because nothing can breathe pure ozone."
He finished his bourbon and made chains of wet rings on the bartop with his glass. The mixed look on his face was so strong that for a moment I almost thought of the name for it.
Willard stalled for time by ordering another stinger--a double, this time--and Abe Marker took over.
"How about those pictures of Martian dust storms the boys at Palomar make?" Abe asked. "You can't have dust storms on a marshy planet, can you?"
"Those aren't dust storms," the little man said. "They're clouds of gnats."
"A fact," the little man said, but not as if he cared. "They travel in swarms thousands of miles wide, and they bite like hell."
We sat and watched the two voiceless crows flap through the television cartoon for a while. Nobody spoke until the film was over and the screen went blank, when the little man caught Larry's eye and held up one finger.
"Bourbon," he said.
We heard a confused muttering of voices in the background and waited expectantly for Colonel Sanderson to speak to us from Mars, but apparently the network people were still having trouble with their transmission beam. The screen stayed blank.
"You left out the interesting part, Charlie," somebody called from down the bar. "The Martian natives. How about them?"
"There aren't any--as you'd know them," the little man said. He seemed to grow thoughtful for a moment. "But they are intelligent. They do things you couldn't do."
"Such as what?" somebody asked.
The little man shrugged. "Teleport. They're good at it too."
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