Farmer,Philip Jose - Jesus on Mars

PHILIP JOSÉ FARMER

JESUS ON MARS

v1.0

Scanned and Proofed

By Neugaia (#bookz)

[13/11/2002]

JESUS ON MARS

Richard Orme was confused. As the captive leader of an expedition to Mars, he

is eager to learn just what game his Martian 'hosts' are playing at. The man in the

golden orb that floats above their subterranean cities - is he really Jesus? And

when this 'Jesus' returns to Earth - would history repeat itself, once more? Orme

does not know who to turn to in this strange, hollowed-out planet - not the Krsh

teachers, nor the man they call Jesus, nor even the comely Martian whose

dangerous love so kindles his desires...

To my mother

Granada Paperback UK Original 1982

Granada Publishing Ltd.

ISDN 0 586 05308 5

1

The great canyon complex of the Vallis Marineris was a black wound on a red

body. It ran for 3,000 miles from east to west near the equator of Mars. At its

widest it was fifty miles and at its deepest several miles. If it resembled a terrible

gash in a corpse, it also looked like a colossal centipede, the legs being the

channels winding through the highlands towards the vast rift, and the bristles on

the legs, the subtributaries.

From the Aries, in a stationary orbit, Richard Orme looked down as if from

an incredibly high mountain. A rapidly dying wind was blowing high clouds of ice

crystals and low clouds of red dust across part of the complex, obscuring the

section that was their goal after four months of voyage. He turned from the port

and floated towards Madeleine Danton. She was seated before a viewscreen,

her waist belted to a chair, which was bolted to the deck. Behind her floated

Nadir Shirazi and Avram Bronski. Their hands gripped the back of the chair while

they stared over her shoulders at the screen.

Orme seized Shirazi's shoulder, swivelled around, and steadied himself.

On the screen was the exposed tunnel that the satellite had photographed five

years ago. Its roof, once a thin shell of rock, had fallen in. A passage ten feet

wide, twenty feet tall, and eighty feet long was revealed.

Though the dust storm looked solid from the ports of the ship, the pictures

transmitted by the robot rover, which had landed two years ago, were fairly clear

within fifty feet. Beyond was a reddish haze.

The tunnel's floor was slowly being covered by dust. At one end it

disappeared into the darkness of the part of the roof that had not collapsed. At

the other end, vaguely discernible through the dust, was a door. It was of some

dark material that could be metal or stone. Its smoothness showed that it had

been machine-made.

On the black surface of the door were two large orange characters: Greek

letters, capital tau and capital omega. Danton's oval face was expressionless.

Shirazi's hawkish features showed an intensity reminding Orme of a bird of prey

that has just spotted a rabbit. Bronski's dark handsome face held a smirk.

His own black features, he supposed, looked slightly ecstatic.

Orme's heart was thudding, and its sudden increase in rate would have

been monitored about 11.5 minutes from now by Houston if the sensors had

been attached to him. But he was dressed in a jump suit. Launch time was two

hours away. By then the lower wind should have subsided to a gentle breeze.

'Let's see the ship,' Orme said.

Danton punched in the orders on the tiny console before her. The view

lifted up, showing a vague dark mass through the dust, the walls of the mile-deep

rift, and then a huge mass; no, only its intimations, a ghost.

The rover was crawling towards it now. Minutes passed while the curving

outlines of the mass became clearer. Danton gave a verbal order to the robot to

stop. Now they could see the great curving thing that had first attracted the

survey satellite six years ago, shocking and exciting all of Earth and resulting in

the first manned expedition to the red planet.

'I've seen it a hundred times on Earth,' Orme said. 'And I still don't believe

it. A spaceship!'

Nobody answered. They understood that he was just talking to relieve

tension.

How long ago was it that the vessel had landed or crashed? A hundred

years ago? A thousand? How long had it been before a landslide of rotten stone

had covered it? And how many years had passed before some of the rock

covering had slid off to expose a small part of the colossus? Or had it been

deliberately concealed, the stones piled on it by its crew?

If it hadn't been for the curiosity of an Australian scientist, his 'hunch' that

the shadowy thing in the photographs looked unnatural and his persistence, the

vessel still might not be noticed. It might have been undiscovered forever. Then

the open tunnel had been found, and after three years, a robot had been landed

to make a closer inspection. And the whole world was agog.

Richard Orme, born in Toronto, Canada in 1979, had been thirty years old

when the IASA had reluctantly announced that the curving mass was indeed

artificial. He had anticipated the events that would follow, and he had worked and

schemed and fought to be a member of this expedition. A toss of a coin had

decided whether he or an Australian astronaut would be the captain and the

fourth crewperson of the Aries. The loser had smiled and congratulated him, but

that night he'd got drunk and been badly crippled in an automobile accident.

Though he knew that it was irrational, Orme had felt guilty about it. Part of the

guilt came from his elation at having won.

Orme glanced at the chronometer and said, 'Time to start the next phase.'

Danton stayed at the console; Bronski and Shirazi got busy helping Orme

to suit up. Then Orme helped the Iranian to get Bronski into his armour.

Meanwhile, Danton, in her slightly French-accented English, kept up a steady

flow of reports on environmental data and the progress of the preparations. It

was not an easy job since the long time-lag transmissions meant that she had to

receive and often answer to comments relayed from Earth through the satellite

above Houston. She had to keep in mind what she had said earlier.

The whole world was listening at this moment; it would be doing so at

every opportunity. The operation should go smoothly because of their many

hours of practice landing on the Moon. But there was always the possibility of

electromechanical malfunction.

Finally, Orme and Bronski slid through the hatch into the lander, the

Barsoom. The head of IASA had been a reader of Edgar Rice Burroughs in his

childhood. His name was John Carter, the same as the hero of Burroughs's

earlier books about Mars, known as Barsoom by its fictional natives. Carter had

first proposed the name and had made the necessary political manipulations to

get it accepted. Those who had wanted to name the lander Tau Omega, after the

two characters on the tunnel door, had lost in the voting by a narrow margin.

After half an hour of rechecking, Orme gave the order for launching. The

Barsoom departed slowly from the mother ship under a weak jet pulse. Orme felt

a warm spot over his navel, as if that psychic umbilical cord attaching him to the

mother planet had been severed. But there was no time for any introspection. His

mind had to be focused on the objective, the position of the lander in relation to

the landing surface, and the constant inflow of flight data. He had to be a

machine without flaw; the awe and wonder during descent and the ecstasy of

accomplishment could come after the touchdown on Mars. If, that is, there were

no immediate problems.

The crew had practised landings on Earth in a much more powerful

machine which could handle the heavy gravity and thick atmosphere. It had also

practised on the Moon, where the gravitational pull was much weaker than that of

Earth's and the atmosphere was practically nil. But the atmosphere here, though

relatively tenuous, was still a considerable factor. However, the theory of a

Martian landing had been worked out and the crew had drilled so many times

under simulated conditions that the reality should be no problem.

For four days the crew of the Aries had waited for the winds to die down.

Now, finally, the high ice clouds and the lower dust clouds were subsiding. Only a

few thin cirri floated along below them, and the surface atmosphere should not

present difficulties.

The red orb expanded swiftly. The top of Olympus Mons, a volcano as

wide as the state of New Mexico and 15.5 miles high, sank out of sight. The

Tharsis ridge, looking like a colossal dinosaur with fleshy dorsal plates, widened

and then dropped out of sight. The Tithonius Chasma, more than 46 miles wide

and several miles deep, part of the Vallis Marineris canyon complex, broadened.

For twenty seconds, whiteness surrounded them as they passed through

a long, narrow and deep cloud of ice. To the east lay a shadow, night on Mars,

advancing at almost the rate it did on Earth. It was the bow which shot darkness

and a terrible cold over the wastelands. Not that it was warm on the surface.

When they landed, they would find the temperature to be +20° C.

Orme turned the lander to face west as the thin but still strong wind began

to carry them east. He adjusted the pulses to counter the push of the

atmosphere. The Barsoom sank, and he noted that the air, though it was

becoming thicker, was not moving as swiftly as the higher altitude wind. He

decreased the pulses; the raser indicator showed that the Barsoom was

maintaining its angle of descent. A straight line drawn from the lander would end

dead on the point of contact, the floor of the Tithonius Chasma.

Time passed as he poured data into the transceiver. The transmitter would

also be sending photographs of the approaching surface of Mars and of the two

Marsnauts in this womb of irradiated plastic.

Like a mouth, the rift opened beneath him. The vast mounds of the

volcanoes outside dropped, and presently the ship was below the edges of the

awesomely towering cliffs. They were still in the thin but bright sunlight of the red

planet. Not until the sun was low would the shadow of the western wall fall on

them.

Orme, glancing now and then out of the port, could see the metallic curve

of the other vessel buried beneath the landslide. Reddish rocks and a finer

material, dust, were mixed in this collapse from the weathered material of the

canyon wall. There was little wind here, which made Orme's task easier.

Bronski, overcome by emotion, forgot his English and spoke in Polish.

This had been his native language; he had not learned French until the age of

ten, when his parents had fled to Sweden and thence to Paris. He corrected

himself a moment later, saying, 'It is an artefact! A ship!'

Orme thought that it remained to be proved that it was a spacecraft but he

had no time to comment. Besides, he felt that Bronski was right.

The lander settled firmly on its six pads, and it sank a trifle as its

telescoping legs absorbed the shock, then recoiled to lift the vessel. Orme cut off

the power and sat for a moment feeling the weak pull of Mars and hearing the

silence. Then he said jubilantly, 'Martians, we're here!'

He'd planned a number of short speeches, some quite poetic, but he had

finally decided to hell with it. He'd say whatever came spontaneously.

Danton's voice broke the silence. 'Congratulations, commander.'

Orme was startled when Bronski's arms enfolded him from behind and his

voice bellowed in Orme's ears.

'By God, we've done it!'

'He's here, too,' Orme said, and he meant it. 'Even if this place does look

like the devil's workshop.'

2

Orme unstrapped himself and rose slowly, remembering that though there was

gravity it was not Earth's. He looked through the port and quickly described what

he saw. The lander was 300 feet from the edge of the landslide, resting on an

area detected from the Aries. It was comparatively free of the rocks that littered

the floor of the canyon; the pads had missed all of them and sat on rock swept

smooth of dust by the recent winds. Through the top port he could see the sky, a

light blue crossed by a few wisps of whiteness. Coming towards them was the

robot explorer, RED II, which had first seen the two Greek characters on the

tunnel door. Danton had directed it to approach the Barsoom closely and transmit

pictures of the Marsnauts as they left the lander and worked around the Aries.

These pictures would be transmitted to the Aries, which would relay them to the

satellite and thence to Earth.

Eight hundred feet behind the explorer, invisible even from its height, was

the tunnel. Orme and Bronski got to work. After donning their suits and helmets

and checking them, they entered the cramped room of the decompression

chamber and closed the port leading to the interior of the lander. Orme set a

gauge and pressed a button. Within three minutes the pressure in the chamber

had been reduced to that of the atmosphere outside. Orme opened the hatch and

unrolled a metal ladder. Though he could easily have jumped down to the ground

fourteen feet below, he was forbidden to do so. The two were to take no

chances.

He clambered down the ladder and stepped backward on to the rock and

turned. He felt a headiness which was not caused by the lighter gravity. He,

Richard Orme, a black Canadian, was the first human being to step upon the

surface of the red planet. Whatever happened from this second on, he would be

recorded in history as the first man on Mars. The rover, that metallic insect-like

machine, was transmitting pictures of the unique event right now. Of him, Richard

Orme, the first Earthman to step upon the ancient rock of another planet.

'Columbus, you should be here!' he said, acutely conscious that 11.5

minutes from now, billions would hear this statement. He did not utter his

succeeding thought. And you'd crap in your pants! The old navigator could never

even have dreamed of this.

'Five hundred and twenty-three years have brought us a long way!’ he

said. He didn't elaborate. There would be enough people on earth who'd

understand what he meant and explain it to the viewers.

Bronski came down the ladder then, looked around for a minute, and at a

signal from Orme joined him in the work. From a compartment at the bottom of

the lander they unloaded a cable, a driller, and a sonar. The latter determined

that the landing place was solid rock and thick enough for the anchor. Bronski

drilled into the basalt and then disengaged the drill from the power unit. One end

of the cable was secured to the part of the drill sticking up from the surface.

Orme prepared a cement mixture and poured it down between the drill and the

hole.

While waiting for the quick-drying material to harden, they walked to the

silvery metal curve protruding from the masses of rock. Standing under the great

arc and looking up at it, Orme felt awed. If this was a vessel, and it surely was,

then it would be the size of an old passenger liner, say the Queen Mary, or as

large as the Zeppelin Hindenburg. Whoever had built it had had an energy

source that Earth lacked. To lift this monster from a planet into space, to drive it

through interstellar space and to land here required a power staggering to think

about.

How long had it lain here at the bottom of this colossal canyon? Long

enough, certainly, for the wall to weather and for chunks of rock to fall down and

bury it. And then long enough for some force, perhaps the effect of very strong

winds over a long time, to remove the rocks that had covered this part of the

vessel.

But it was possible that this exposed section had never been' covered.

The survey satellite had photographed it many times, but no areographer had

noticed it until Lackley, the Australian, had had his 'hunch'.

Or, perhaps, some beings had started to remove the rocks and something

had interrupted their work.

At this thought, a chill ran up his spine and over his scalp. Involuntarily, he

turned around to look behind him. There was, of course, no group of Martians

advancing silently towards him. He laughed.

'What's so funny?' Bronski said.

'Nothing in particular. I laughed because... it doesn't matter. Joy, maybe.

Here. Get the kit out.'

He turned his back to Bronski, who removed a box from the cylinder on it.

This was a minilaboratory designed for making chemical-physical tests. Bronski

put the box on the ground, opened the lid, and he and Orme went through the

process with a swiftness owing to long training. When they were done, Orme

gave his report.

'The door looks like metal. As you heard through the audiometer, the

interior is hollow. It rings when hit with a steel hammer. Even a diamond won't

scratch it. Nitric acid leaves it unmarked. I don't want to use a laser beam on it

because air might damage the contents. Providing there are any. Whatever

material it's made of, it's unknown to Terrestrial science.'

Bronski replaced the box in the cylinder, and they walked back to the

Barsoom. The cement was hard. In this atmosphere, where the pressure was

equal to that ten miles above Earth's surface, the moisture quickly left the

cement. It had boiled off in a vapour invisible in this twilight.

Orme used a tiny jack to draw up the slack and make the cable taut. Now

even a 250-mile-an-hour wind, which wasn't likely at the canyon bottom, would

not be able to push the lander over.

Nadir Shirazi, who was spelling Danton now, said, 'How do you two feel?

Do you want to rest before you go to the tunnel?'

'I'm too excited to stop now,' Bronski said. 'I'd like to push on.'

From the compartment which had held the anchoring material, they

removed a telescoping aluminium ladder and a box of explosives. Orme carrying

the box, they walked to the edge of the tunnel. The rover followed them, its main

scanner keeping them in view for the two in the Aries and the billions of people

on Earth. Orme put the box down and opened its lid. Bronski lowered the ladder

down into the tunnel. With a powerful lamp he'd taken from the box, Orme played

a beam of light along the tunnel. At the left side of the two men, the rover

followed the light with its antennas.

Orme had seen the interior of the opening many times by courtesy of the

rover. But now that he was seeing it with his own eyes, he felt the same thrill as

when he'd first witnessed it in the Houston laboratory. At the far end was a mass

of rock, pieces of the fallen roof. These presumably covered another door. Along

the length of the floor were other stone chunks, large and small. At the other end

was the upper part of a door, its lower quarter behind more pieces of rock. Red

dust covered the rocks. But its thinness indicated the roof had caved in recently.

What had caused the collapse? No one had a theory which could hold up

under any rationalisation. The tunnel was too tar away from the nearest cliff for

any rocks to have fallen on it. Anyway, there were no large rocks inside the

tunnel or near it. To the west were some huge boulders, but these had been

trundled down the canyon floor by water in some very remote past.

One scientist had proposed that a small meteorite had shattered the roof.

But the area around here was free of any impact craters, small or large. And it

seemed too much of a coincidence that a rare meteorite should happen to strike

this very narrow area and reveal what would otherwise never have been

discovered.

Orme steadied the beam on the orange characters in the dull black door.

Tau Omega in majuscule writing. But had they been made by one versed in

Greek? Were not the letters so simple that they would have been used by other

sentients? T and Ω would naturally occur to anyone who was originating an

alphabet. If indeed these characters were alphabetical. They could just as easily

be letters in a syllabary, or in an ideogrammatic system such as the Chinese,

used. They could also be arithmetical symbols.

Orme gestured to Bronski to go, down the ladder. If he wasn't to be the

first man to step on to Mars, he at least could be the first to touch the door in the

tunnel.

The rover was on the edge of the opening now, one scanner on Orme and

the other following the Frenchman. When Orme saw that Bronski was off the

ladder, he dropped the box to him. Bronski caught it easily, and Orme went down

the ladder.

Bronski had climbed up the small pile of rocks and was examining the

door by the time Orme reached him. Orme picked up a stone about the size of

his head and heaved it up and out of the tunnel, first making sure that the rover

wouldn't be struck by it. Bronski came down from the top of the pile to help him.

In about five minutes the way to the door was cleared. In the light of the four-

legged lamp, which had been set on the floor, Bronski removed the box from the

cylinder on Orme's back. The tests revealed that the door was of a steel alloy.

'It's set within the opening very tightly,' Orme said. 'Obviously, it's an air-

pressure seal, designed for just what happened, the collapse of a section of

tunnel.'

Unlike the shell of the supposed spaceship, the door was thick. There was

no hollow echo when he hit it with the hammer.

'We could try to blow it out,' Orme said. 'But I think it'll be easier of we go

to the roof of the next section and dig down.'

They got out of the tunnel and returned to the lander. Orme was beginning

to get tired, which meant that Bronski should be even more fatigued. Orme was

only five feet eight, but he weighed a muscular 190 pounds on Earth, with no

excess fat. The slender Bronski was quick, but he could not keep up with his

captain.

Orme suggested that they eat while taking a rest and perhaps even grab a

nap. The Frenchman refused.

'I'm still too keyed up.'

Carter, however, from his command post in Houston, ordered that they

attach the monitors. After reading the indicators, he said, 'You guys will have to

recharge your batteries. You're really tired.'

By the time the message came through, they had eaten. For an hour they

rested in their reclined seats. Orme used alpha-wave techniques to get to sleep.

Even so, it took twenty minutes, according to the monitors, before he

succumbed. He would have sworn that he'd been awake the entire period.

Twenty minutes later, they were back at the tunnel site. Eighteen inches

beyond the door, Orme cut a hole into the tunnel roof with a small laser-tipped

drill. When it broke through, the explosion of enclosed air drove the tool up out of

the hole. But Orme, expecting this, was standing to one side. Even so, the drill

was almost jerked out of his hand.

He set to work at once to drill five more holes, all in a circle with a

diameter of three feet. He could have connected the holes with the laser and cut

a complete section to drop down into the tunnel. But he had to conserve power,

so he planted gelignite charges in the holes and touched off the explosive at a

distance with a battery. The circular section went up in smoke and larger

fragments of rock. They rose higher than they would have on the home planet,

the smoke disappeared more quickly, and the dust settled more swiftly.

'If there's an automatic sealing system, and it's still working, then the end

of that tunnel will be shut off,' Orme said. 'And we'll have to open a door. But that

will mean that the next section will seal. We don't have the materials to go

through many doors.'

The tunnel, if it continued in a straight line, would go into the canyon wall.

By now the shadow of the western wall was over them, and it was getting colder.

They were comfortable in their suits, bulky though they were and with much

equipment strapped onto them. Inside each was a flask of water which they could

suck up through a tube by bending their heads inside the helmet down and to

one side. They still had half a flask left, and they could urinate into a bladder

attached to the front of one leg.

Nevertheless, John Carter ordered them to quit for the night after they'd

taken a reading to determine if the tunnel did enter the cliff.

'You can conserve the power in your lights if you work in daylight. And we

can observe you better.'

Orme didn't want to agree, but he had to. After validating that the tunnel

did go beneath the cliff, he told Bronski they had to get back.

'Tomorrow we'll put in a full day. We'll be refreshed. It was the landing that

took everything out of us. Even though we exercised on the Aries during the trip,

we aren't in tiptop shape. Null gravity is insidious; it weakens you after a long

time.'

Bronski said, 'Yes.' His tone indicated that he knew this and Orme knew

that he knew it. But it was better to talk repetitions and banalities than to listen to

the silence. The stars were out now, shining more brightly than in Earth's thick

atmosphere. Being at the bottom of the canyon was like standing at the bottom of

a well. The stars they could see looked baleful, as if they didn't like the presence

of these two aliens.

Orme knew that his reaction was due to his fatigue, the feeling of

insignificance in relation to the towering wall, the eeriness of the entire situation,

the feeling that somewhere down there were beings who could be menacing.

Just how, he didn't know, since Earth people represented no danger to Martians -

if they existed - and there was no reason he could think of why they should

believe two aliens to be dangerous.

But the buried spaceship indicated a very advanced technology, and the

tunnel seemed to mean that the people who had landed had dug into Mars. If

they had managed to survive underground, and they must have been there a

long time, why hadn't they emerged to repair the ship? If, that is, the ship had

been wrecked?

There was no use worrying about such things. Tomorrow or the day after

or a week or two from now would bring the answers.

Nevertheless, he was glad to get back to the lander. Though it wasn't the

most comfortable or roomy of homes, it was still, in a sense, a piece of Earth. He

had no trouble falling asleep, but, in the middle of the night, he woke with a start.

He'd thought he'd heard something hard rapping against the double hull. He got

up and. looked through the ports but could see nothing except darkness on all

sides but one. Stars still moved slowly across the open roof of the canyon. The

rover was a vague bulk which he would have thought a boulder if he hadn't

known it was there.

Then, as he watched, a light sprang from it, a beam that moved down into

the tunnel and then lifted and described a 380-degree arc. After two minutes, the

light went out. Once an hour, as ordered by Danton, it became activated and

swept the area with visible light, infrared, and radar. If anything moved for miles,

it would sound an alarm in the lander and in the Aries.

His sleep the rest of the night was untroubled. The alarm, triggered by a

radio wave from the Aries, awoke him with a, start. It was still dark outside, but

the sky was paling above the top of the canyon. After the necessary reports,

checking the equipment, and breakfast, he and Bronski climbed down on to the

ground. On the way to the base of the cliff, he looked at the grey curve sticking

out of the rubble. If they ran into a dead end in the tunnels, they would start

removing the rocks from around the spaceship. Or, if they didn't find a port or

Farmer, Philip Jose - Jesus on Mars

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