“We’ve had some close calls. The National Enquirer and those other scandal sheets keep snooping around. Every time a Martian tried to make contact with an ‘ordinary’ human being, as their ethical code insisted they should, the affair was totally misunderstood. Sensationalized by the tabloids and all that.”

“What ordinary human beings?” Huggins asked.

“You see, the Martians are not elitists. Far from it! From time to time they have tried to establish contact with farmers and sheriff’s deputies and people driving down country roads at night. You know the results. Scare headlines and ridiculous stories about abductions.”

“This is getting weird.”

But Schmidt was not listening. “We even had one writer stumble onto the truth, back in the late forties. Someone named Burberry or Bradbury or something like that. We had to wipe his memory.”

“My god!”

“It wasn’t entirely effective. We’ve learned how to do it better since then.”

“Is that what you’re going to do to me? Wipe out my memory?”

Leaning back in his chair again, Schmidt resumed his beneficent Santa expression. “I don’t think we’ll have to. We recruit only a very, very few young men and women. I have believed for some time that you have what it takes to be one of us.”

“What does that mean—being one of you?”

Positively beaming at his student, Schmidt answered, “It means helping the Martians to use the abundant resources of Venus to maintain their own civilization. It means helping the people of Earth to gradually grow in their ethical maturity until they can meet the Martians without destroying them.”

“That may take generations,” said Huggins.

“Centuries, more likely. It is one of the motivations behind our starting the environmental movement. If we can only get the great masses of people to treat our own planet properly we’ll be halfway to the goal of treating other worlds properly. And other people.”

“And in the meantime?”

Schmidt heaved a great sigh. “In the meantime we maintain the pretense that Mars is a barren desert, Venus is a greenhouse oven, and there’s nothing out there in space to be terribly interested in—unless you’re an egghead of a scientist.”

Huggins began to understand. “That’s why the space program was stopped after the landings on the Moon.”

“Yes,” the professor said. “A sad necessity. We’ve had to work very hard to keep the uninformed parts of the government—which is most of them—from moving our space program into high gear.”

“Can—” Huggins hesitated, then seemed to straighten his spine and ask, “May I meet the Martians?”

“Of course! Of course you can, my boy. Their representative is waiting to meet you now.”

Schmidt pulled himself up from his chair and came around the desk. “Right this way.” He gestured toward the side door of the office.

His heart hammering beneath his ribs, Huggins got up and followed his professor’s burly form.

Schmidt grasped the doorknob, then stopped and turned slightly back toward his student. “I must warn you of two things,” the professor said. “First, our Martian visitor obviously cannot run around the campus in his native form. So he has disguised himself as a human. Even so, he has to be very circumspect about allowing himself to be seen.”

A tingle of doubt shivered in the back of Huggins’ mind. “He’ll look human?”

“Completely. Of course, if you wish, he will remove his human disguise. We want you to be absolutely certain of what I’ve told you, after all.”

“I see.”

With a satisfied nod, Schmidt turned the knob and pushed the door open.

Huggins was asking, “What else did you want to warn me . . .”

Before he could finish the sentence he saw the disguised Martian sitting in the darkened little side room. Huggins’ jaw fell.

“That’s the other thing I meant to warn you about,” said Professor Schmidt. “The Martians also have a rather odd sense of humor.”

Huggins just stared. At Elvis Presley.

(With apologies to Ray Bradbury.)

THE GREAT MOON HOAX OR A PRINCESS OF MARS

This one you can blame on Norman Spinrad.

Norm is one of the best writers in the science fiction field, and a man who combines deep intelligence with a droll sense of humor.

In 1992 Norm invited me to contribute to an anthology he was putting together, Down in Flames. In his own words, the basic idea of the anthology was to “satirize, destroy, take the piss out of, overturn the basic premises of   . . . your own universe.” In other words, Norm wanted a story that would be the antithesis of my usual carefully-researched, scientifically-accurate fiction.

Norm’s anthology never came to fruition, but I took his challenge and decided to write a story “explains” just about everything from NASA’s dullness to UFOs to—well, read it and see.

I leaned back in my desk chair and just plain stared at the triangular screen.

“What do you call this thing?” I asked the Martian.

“It is an interociter,” he said. He was half in the tank, as usual.

“Looks like a television set,” I said.

“Its principles are akin to your television, but you will note that its picture is in full color, and you can scan events that were recorded in the past.”

“We should be watching the President’s speech,” said Prof. Schmidt.