A part of her did not want to say it. This is impossible. It can’t be…“A…human shape.”
No mistake. The mat was creating a pseudopod, pseudohuman. Responding?
“What…?”
“It’s the mat’s idea of us.”
“Another kind of echo?”
Marc could not take his eyes off the changing shape, which had now stopped thrusting out. It stood there, fully two feet above the surrounding mass, a blunt but recognizable outline of the human body. She tried to ask herself questions, to make her mind work. How could a mat enlarge itself into a particular mold, so quickly…? How could it know…?
She said through a dry throat, “It can see us, somehow. At least enough to work out our outlines.”
“It has eyes?”
“Maybe that’s what all this glowing is about. It communicates across the cavern with light.”
“Sentience?”
“Must be. Of some kind. It has developed enough to control its environment. Life does.”
“But why’d it kill Gerda and Chen?” Marc asked as he twisted in his harness. His microcam flashed on and he took a long pan of the thing in available light. Was it glowing more now? He might capture its image, though the moist darkness seemed to absorb light. They had kept their beams away from the mat, relying on back-reflection from the mist to light up the area. The mat glow seemed stronger around the form. She aimed her own microcam at it and carefully swept the area to take it all in.
“It didn’t,” she said softly, “except maybe by accident. Holding them, feeling all over them…to find out what they were?”
“They were out of their harnesses, couldn’t winch out anyway. Then the mat got them.”
Can it hear us? What senses does it have…and are they remotely like ours?
She spoke rapidly, to quell a rising wave of unease. “Maybe in response to them, the Marsmat protected itself. That valve membrane above, it closed automatically. Its major threats come from above—peroxides and cold and vacuum. The mat could build up vapor pressure in here by sealing that exit. Chen and Gerda were trapped below it and got stuck in the mat itself.”
Marc spun carefully around the axis of his line, peering uneasily at the vast darkness that now seemed to close in, clasping them in gossamer veils of haze. “How do we convince it to let us go?”
“I expect it’s sentient but probably not intelligent.”
“So?”
She was unsure of everything, and every breath narrowed their options. Was this extruded shape an attempt at communication? Or a threat? How to get it to release the valve above? Noises? Thin atmosphere, unlikely it would respond to sound. The flashlights? What signal to send? They had been sweeping their beams all over this cavern.
Her heart thudded harder. To fight the rising panic she knew she had to keep her thinking crisp, direct. React later.
“Look, it must be responsive to chemical stimuli. If the gases coming up from deep in the interior are wrong for it, there’s got to be a way to filter them, expel others.”
“So we make it want to let us go by poisoning it?”
“Maybe Chen figured that, too. That’s why the burns in the mat.”
“Which failed.”
“Maybe to irk the whole system we have to pour it on.”
“With what?”
“Their oxygen tanks.”
“They’re our reserve!” Marc was getting impatient.
“Notice their connectors? They’re screw type, not the pressure clamps we have. So we can’t tap them anyway.”
“Damn, no, I didn’t.”
“So we might as well try with them.”
“Me, I’d rather bang on the door up there.”
“No reason we can’t do both.”
“Not like I can think of anything else, either.”
She sent a call to Viktor, for the Rover to relay. At least they would know what had happened down here…
The winches labored hard—don’t burn them out!—to lift them away from the glowing, phosphorescent mat with its strange humanoid shape, its elephant ears and festoons of every blobby shape, its mass of essential strangeness.
In the haunting darkness her muscles now ached and her breath came in ragged gasps. Tired? Or scared?…
Both.
A part of her thought of what message they would be sending to this strange place, how they would appear to this being, a truly advanced Martian life-form. No way to tell. But what choice did they have?
