We have been in contact with our Martian brethren for more than half a century now—”
“We?”
“A very small, very elite group. A few university dons such as myself. The tiniest handful of military officers. Four industrial leaders, at present. The group changes slightly as people die, of course. Three of our members are living on Mars at the present moment.”
“You’re crazy!”
“Am I?” Schmidt opened his top desk drawer and drew out a slim folder. From it he pulled a single photograph and handed it wordlessly to the goggle eyed Huggins.
Who saw three figures standing in a dripping dank jungle. Only the one in the bush hat and moustache was human. They were standing in front of the enormous dead carcass of something that looked very much like a dinosaur. Each of them was holding a rifle of some unearthly design.
“Do you recognize that man?”
Huggins shook his head as he stared hard at the photograph. The man looked vaguely familiar.
“Howard Hughes, of course. Taken in 1957. On Venus.”
“Venus?” Huggins’ voice was a mouse’s squeak.
“Venus,” repeated the professor. “Underneath those clouds it’s a world of Mesozoic jungles, almost from pole to pole.”
“But Venus is a barren desert! Runaway greenhouse! Surface temperatures hot enough to melt lead!”
“That’s all a bit of a subterfuge, I’m afraid,” said Schmidt. “Just as our erasure of the Martian canal network. A necessary deception.”
“What. . . why?”
Schmidt’s expression grew serious. “When the first Martians landed, back in ‘46, it quickly became clear to those of us privileged to meet them that Mars was ahead of the Earth technologically—but not very far ahead. A century, perhaps. Perhaps only a few decades.”
“How can that be?”
Ignoring his question, the professor went on, “They needed our help. Their own natural resources were dwindling at an alarming rate, despite their heroic efforts of engineering. And conservation, too, I might add.”
“They came to take over the Earth?”
“Nonsense! Pulp-magazine twaddle! Their ethical beliefs would not allow them to step on a beetle. They came to beg for our help.”
Muggins felt a tiny stab of guilt at his fear-filled gut reaction.
“It was obvious,” Schmidt went on, “that the Martians were in desperate straits. It was even more obvious to the tiny group who had been brought together to meet our visitors that the people of Earth were not prepared to face the fact that their planetary neighbor was the home of a high and noble civilization.”
“The emotional shock would be too much for our people?” Huggins asked.
“No,” said the professor, in a sad and heavy voice. “Just the opposite. The shock would be too much for the Martians. We humans are driven by fear and greed and lust, my boy. We would have ground the Martians into the dust, just as we did with the Native Americans and the Polynesians.”
Huggins looked confused. “But you said the Martians were ahead of us.”
“Technologically, yes. But by no more than a century. And ethically they are light-years ahead of us. Most of us, that is. It is the ethical part that would have been their downfall.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Can you imagine a delicate, ethically bound Martian standing in the way of a real-estate developer? Or a packager of tourist trips? The average human politician? Or evangelist? To say nothing of most of the military. They would have been off to nuke Mars in a flash!”
“Oh.”
“The fragile Martian civilization would have been pulverized. No, we had to keep their existence a secret. It was the only decent thing to do. We had to cover up the truth, even to the point of faking data from space probes and astronomical observatories.”
“All this time . . .”
“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?”
