THE STUDIOS
IN TELEVISION STUDIOS ALL ACROSS THE WORLD, THE STUNNING news of the structure on Mars set off a frenzy of talk.
“Tomorrow, definitely,” said the sweet-faced gray-haired lady. She was squinting slightly, unaccustomed to the TV lighting.
“Jesus will return to Earth tomorrow?” the interviewer asked, trying to hide his incredulity.
“It’s Christmas. His birthday.”
The interviewer tried to look sympathetic. He’d seen his share of weirdos and religious fanatics over the years. Inwardly, he sighed. As long as this grandmother stuck to her specific prediction of Christ’s return to Earth on Christmas day, she was worth rating points. Today, at least.
In the nearly invisible receiver lodged in his left ear, he heard the prompt from the show’s director, a hard-edged black woman whose job depended on those rating points.
He repeated the question she gave him. “Our Lord left the Earth more than two thousand years ago. Just where has He been all this time?”
“On Mars, of course,” said the grandmother, with a beatific smile. “He’s been waiting for us to find Him on Mars.”
“This is nothing less than mind-blowing!” said the astronomer. He was young, bearded, wearing faded chinos and a red-checkered flannel shirt. It was cold in the unheated observatory, even with the California sun beaming out of a pristine blue sky.
The TV cameraman was shivering noticeably. The interviewer hoped it wouldn’t jitter the picture. She was made of sterner stuff; no matter how chilled she felt, she controlled herself absolutely.
“You mean finding the buildings on Mars,” she prompted.
“Finding intelligent life!” the young astronomer beamed. “Intelligent! On our next-door neighbor in space!”
“So what does this mean to our viewers?”
The astronomer looked squarely into the camera lens. “It means that not only life, but intelligence, is probably commonplace in the universe. We’re not alone. Intelligence may be as common as carbon or water. There are probably zillions of intelligent civilizations out there among the stars.”
Now the interviewer shuddered, despite herself.
The president of the Navaho Nation blinked, unaccustomed to the glare of the television lights. Last time he’d been on TV was when the FBI made a drug bust on reservation territory without letting the reservation police force in on it. Claimed the Navaho police might have tipped off the suspects. Hah!
It had taken a lot of lawyers from the People and from Washington to straighten that one out. Now, at least, this story today was a happy one.
The reporter stuck a microphone under the president’s chin and asked, “How do you feel about a Navaho discovering this cliff dwelling on Mars?”
The president shrugged and nodded. Then he said, “Pretty good, I guess.”
The reporter waited for more. When it didn’t come, he scowled slightly and asked, “What can you tell us about Dr. Waterman?”
The president thought about that for a while. The reporter ground his teeth in silent frustration, hoping they’d have time back at the, studio to edit these maddening pauses out of the tape.
“I never met Jamie Waterman,” the president answered at last. “I knew his grandfather pretty good, though, Al ran a shop over in Sante Fe for many years.”
“Yes, so we heard,” the reporter sputtered. “But about Jamie Waterman, the scientist on Mars—”
“He’s only half Navaho, you know,” said the president slowly. Then he smiled. “But I guess that’s good enough, huh?”
The reporter grimaced. He’d spent half the damned day getting all the way out here for this interview and all he was getting from it was shit.
Hodell Richards smiled with visible self-satisfaction. “Maybe now they’ll believe me.”
Richards was a lean, almost ascetic-looking man with the kind of perpetually youthful face that made elderly women want to mother him. Pencil-thin mustache, ash blond hair worn long enough to reach the collar of his tweed jacket.
He sat in a TV studio in England, an expensive leather attaché case resting on his knees, his hands atop it. His interviewer was an intense-looking red-headed woman who specialized in UFO tales of alien abduction and unspeakable medical procedures.
She asked, “Then you firmly believe that the Martians are not extinct? That they still exist?”
“I have proof of it,” Richards said, drumming his fingertips on the attaché case.
“And they have visited Earth?” the interviewer asked.
“They have a base here on Earth,” Richards replied. “In Tibet.”
“But why—”
“They’re here to propagate their own species. They impregnate Earth women and force them to bear Martian children.”
“Ah-hah,” said the interviewer.
In Barcelona, the Swiss-German self-styled space expert cocked a haughty eyebrow at his interviewer, a world-weary overweight Catalan who thought of himself as an investigative reporter. Since the interviewer spoke no German and the interviewee spoke no Spanish, they conducted their show in English. Subtitles on the screen translated instantly, of course.
“Then it is your belief that the Martian village—”
“Is bogus,” said the expert flatly.
“You mean it is all a lie?”
“Yes, a lie conducted by the American NASA.”
“But why would they lie about this?”
“To get popular support for their space explorations, of course.”
The interviewer considered this for a fraction of a second, then asked, “Yet I was under the impression that the expedition to Mars was funded by private sources, not by the NASA.”
The expert dismissed that idea with a snort. “That’s what they want us to believe. The U.S. government is behind it all.”
“But how can they fake a building on Mars? Are you saying that the explorers built it themselves? After all, there are only eight of them on Mars.”
“And what makes you think that this fake village is on Mars? They built it in Arizona or Texas or someplace like that.”
“Trulv?”
“Of course.”
“I want to stress,” said the professor to the Tonight Show host, “that we don’t know anything at all about how the Martians looked.”
Behind him were lurid paintings of “space aliens.”
“Nothing at all?” the host asked, smirking.
“Nothing. They might have had a dozen legs or none. We just don’t know.”
“So they probably didn’t look like this guy, then.” The host pointed to an ethereal image with doelike eyes.
“Nope,” the professor answered. “Nor like that one either.” He jabbed a thumb toward a slimy tentacled monster from The War of the Worlds.
The host sighed mightily. “Probably they look like my mother-in-law.”