Death to Martians

"To make a statement, we need explosives, a detonator, and someone who is willing to blow himself to smithereens." The Professor's smile winks in the tobacco-shrouded gloom of a cellar somewhere in Boston. "Obviously the last resource is the rarest and most expensive."

Christopher scuffs his shoe in the sand and eyes the sign over the Reformed Presbyterian Church spring Bake Sale. His expression is one of hunger, and disgust, and hopelessness.

"Our target is the male between fourteen and twenty," the professor's voice grates, " jobless, mentally immature."

Christopher looks into his wallet, sees that it is empty, and throws it angrily on the ground, swearing loud enough that mothers with babies jerk away from him. That fact might make him feel better, but there is a tightness in Christopher's chest that makes breathing difficult and turns his manly cursing into pitiful, asthmatic wheezing. Ashamed, Christopher bends and retrieves his wallet. His bus tokens are in there.

The Professor ticks the points off on his fingers. "No money, no girl, can't take care of his family. He wants to find a job, but…" Light from the single overhead bulb flashes white off the palms of the Professor's hands as he holds them out in a shrug.

A surly frown on his face, focused on his constricted breathing and the ruined ground in front of him, Christopher slouches toward the bake sale tables. Maybe he can steal something.

"He joins our cause because he has nothing better to do."

"You look lost, son." The woman behind the piles of cookies, brownies, and cakes is in her fifties and as wrinkled as a smiling apple. She holds out a brownie wrapped in a piece of oil-paper and Christopher takes it. "No work today?"

"No," he says. "Not today." It is impossible for him to hide how hungry he is as he bites into the confection. Not just beet sugar and brown coloring. Could that be the taste of real chocolate? "Shit this is good."

"Language!" The grandma barks, then settles back onto her stool, smiling. "A young man needs money to keep his family healthy, isn't that right?"

His family. Christopher winces. He promised his mother he would bring something home today.

"So we give them something to do," says the Professor in his cellar, not very far away from where Christopher stands, "and we give them a way to become the men of their households."

The grandmother's practiced eyes run over the gawky boy in front of her. The acne, the squint, the gawky bulges of knees and elbows on undernourished limbs, the stooped shoulders and labored breathing of a childhood spent inhaling coal dust.

"You know, I see a lot of young men like you," she settles comfortably onto her stool as children run around her and large-eyed young mothers whisper to each other. "Good boys, but they don't know what to do. Now that the Demons have taken over, what is there for them to do?" She forks the sign of the devil at the sky.

"Yeah." Christopher spits into the dust of the ruined city under his feet. "Fucking Martians."

"Language!"

His face screws up at her, but then a lifetime of training kicks in and he only stares at the old woman, wheezing slightly.

"You are a mess. You know that?" The grandmother's voice is sharp, but her eyes smile as she leans forward. "But you still have fire in you. I can tell. You still want to fight."

Christopher nods, pulling his slouched shoulders straighter.

"That's good." The old woman's voice is a whisper now, and Christopher has to lean forward to hear her. "You know, in cases like yours. I find faith can help."

Christopher nods. He has finished the brownie and now he eyes and apple cobbler. "I pray all the time."

"I'm sure you do." And the grandmother reaches into her net bag and pulls out a folded sheet of paper. "But perhaps, in the right place, with the right company, your prayers might be answered." Quickly, but without signs of nervousness, she picks up the apple cobbler in its stained aluminum tray, places it over the sheet of paper, and passes both to Christopher. "Go on now," she says, smiling, "and God bless."

"We give him hope." For a moment, the Professor's harsh voice loses its menacing and reptilian cynicism. For a moment, it sounds as if he almost believes himself. "Hope that he can fix the world."

*

It is an hour later, and the shadow of the Boston Tripod stretches long and black over the city.

Sitting in that shadow, on a chunk of rubble left over from the bombed-out State House on Capitol Hill, Christopher looks out over the redweed-choked swamp of Back Bay and wipes the crumbs of the cobbler off his lips.

He squints at the picture at the top of the paper. It was drawn with more enthusiasm than skill in the first place and has been so badly mimeographed so many times that by now it is almost abstract, a Rorschach test. But this is a test to which any human being, at least anyone born after the Second Invasion, could give the answer.

There is a central blot, lumpy and cancerous, suggesting wrinkles and folds in leathery skin, pulsing and be-slimed. There is a confused tangle of tentacles, wriggling, squirming, writhing up, it seems, to grasp the reader by the throat. To hold him. To enslave him. And there are two, huge, murderous eyes staring out from a face as baggy as a child's clown-nightmare.

Above the picture are the words: "The American Humans' Guardian Organization" and below: "Kill a Martian, go to Heaven: Can YOU be a Holy Martyr for Christ and all Man-kind?" And there is a time and a place. Christopher reads the words, and shivers.

Then he walks home, kicking at stones and bits of trash, wheezing in the bad air, and casting furious, terrified looks at the Eiffel-Tower-bulk of the Tripod stretching into the sky on the hill behind him. As the sun sinks, a star winks into life in the sky. Christopher, assuming, that he is looking at the Martian colony of Venus, gives the finger to what is actually the reflection off the solar panels of the Free Human Orbital Habitat.

Christopher avoids the robot patrols handily and is almost to his tenement before he realizes that, again, he has brought nothing home for his brothers and sisters to eat.

*

"And that is how we get power." Smoke curls around the Professor's thick fingers as he removes the cigarette from his mouth. "So. We take him away 48 hours before."

His agent, Uncle Fred, came for him at dawn. "It's time to go, Martyr."

"He writes letters, and we make photos for promotional materials."

"And tell my little brother that he can have my…uh…"

"Yeah?" Says Uncle Fred, "have your what?"

"I want to go home," Christopher can't keep the quaver out of his voice.

"Well of course you can if you want to," says Uncle Fred, "but what will your family think? And we've made all these calendars. Look at these pictures." He holds out a sheet of paper, impressed with green ink from a hastily-done acid etching. " You and the angel maidens. They'll be disappointed, hm?"

The ex-slave-soldier looks at Christopher with eyes drained of the slightest trace of humor, but Christopher feels he is expected to smile. He does so, and sniffs.

"Yeah," he says, "I guess so."

*

"The day of the demonstration," the Professor says, then pauses a moment to cough into his fist, "the day of the demonstration, is the first time he sees the explosives. The first time he puts them on is, at most, twenty minutes before the demonstration itself."

"You have everything?"

"I think so."

The van is old, with wheels instead of the more modern tripod legs, and it bounces so hard on the pot-holed asphalt that Christopher is afraid it might set off the explosives strapped to his torso. That wouldn't be terrible because it would kill him, he reminds himself, but that the death would be wasted.

"Don't think," says Uncle Fred, "know it, Martyr. Do you have everything?"

"Detonator," says Christopher, "check." The van hits a particularly deep hole and the floor slaps him in the ass hard enough to click his teeth together. He imagines the sad, decrepit buildings of what used to be the fancy shops on Tremont street rushing past them. Most are bombed-out wrecks now, only inhabited in the top levels. There, curtains and burlap sacks cover the holes where windows once were, blinding the dwellers inside to the sight of the ruined capital building, and the Tripod, stretching up into the sooty sky above it. "Vest, check."

"Wires?" Uncle Fred leans over the front seat. Next to him, the driver concentrates on the road.

"Yeah," says Christopher, swallowing.

"And you know how to connect them?"

"Yeah."

"Okay. You got your trench coat?"

It is already on, disguising the bulk of the vest of explosives. Uncle Fred must be able to see that it's on, but Christopher makes the verbal confirmation anyway. "Yeah."

"Okay. And everything else? The cross, the bible, the pictures of the angel brides?"

"Uh huh?"

"Good." Uncle Fred sighs as the van makes a gentle turn and stops. Ahead will be Boylston, with its legged-traffic-only blockade. Ahead will be the foyer of the hotel.

Christopher's breathing speeds up. And he thinks: oh no.

"Uncle Fred," he says, "I forgot my inhaler."

The ex-slave-soldier stops his slide out the van's door. "Your what?"

"My inhaler!" And even now Christopher can feel his throat tighten. "You gave it---the Professor gave it to me. It's the only one I ever---"

"You don't need an asthma inhaler," says Uncle Fred, opening the van's passenger's side door. "You think you're going to have asthma in heaven, Martyr?"

Christopher swallows. "No, but---"

"And you'll be in heaven before that damn Demon-spawned disease has time to get you again." Uncle Fred opens the van's back doors, smiling. "Think of it, martyr, your last attack! Now," he holds out his hand to help Christopher out of the van, "tell me why you're doing this."

"And through all of this, he is talking." The Professor clarifies for his unseen listeners in his basement hideaway. " His letters to his family he wrote last night. His prayer and meditation are over. But in the time leading to the demonstration, it is essential that he not be given time alone, or in silence. Thought was our friend in the initial stages of training, but at the end, thought is our enemy."

"…the only thing standing between our people and utter destruction," Christopher recites to Uncle Fred, as the two wend their ways through back alleys to the hotel. "If we do not stop them, they will wipe our civilization out of existence."

"Good kid. Good Martyr." But Uncle Fred does not look as if he is listening very closely. He strains to look over the heads of the crowds on the street. He peers at ambling police droids and passenger tripods.

"Uncle Fred?" Says Christopher, thinking of angels and fire, sex and destruction, "I…I…" he doesn't know what to say.

Uncle Fred frowns, checks his watch. Then he turns to Christopher and claps a hand on his shoulder. Now he is not distracted. Eyes like Martian Heat-Rays are suddenly focused as if to burn a hole through the back of Christopher's skull. "Get in there," uncle Fred says, "and help us."

Then his eyes dart away. Uncle Fred flips up the collar on his trenchcoat, mutters "God bless," and walks away.

Christopher, mind completely blank, flips up his collar, and joins the flow of foot traffic into the hotel.

"Of course what we are doing is right." The Professor runs his hands over his expensive suit, twists the rings on his fingers. "The way the Demons have made our world, what we are doing is not only right, it is inevitable. We are the only thing standing between our people and utter destruction."

The hotel is crowded. There is some sort of festival or conference going on. Something. Banners hang from the ceiling high above, drooping down under a huge chandelier, lively with brightly colored Martian glyphs. Music rises above the babble of voices, filling the foyer with the buzzing, base-heavy beating that the Demons seem to enjoy.

" If it were not for us," booms the voice of the Professor, in his cellar, in Christopher's head, "our people would die of starvation, of disease, of hoplessness. The Demons have ripped our powers from us, and now at work dissolving the very minds and souls of our people."

Where was his target? Ah, there. In the corner of the foyer, by the vast, bustling staircase, a knot of people gathered around what looked like a huge, mechanical spider. And sitting in the spider's cradle, hooting and pulsing, its tentacles wriggling like slimy pythons, is a Martian.

" Just look at the men who come back from their orbital mines, and the ones who don't. The women who work in their factories. Look at the human children waving their arms and hooting like monsters. If we do not stop them, they will wipe our civilization out of existence."

Christopher walks toward the monster and its thralls, shoving through the crowd. The detonator finds its way into his hand.

"If we do not stop them, they will wipe our civilization out of existence. "

It is only as he tries to say these words that Christopher realizes it. He has not inhaled in nearly a minute.

When he tries, he finds that he cannot.

And so Christopher stands, his eyes feeling as wide as a Martian's, the crowd a yelling and hand-waving chaos around him as he tries to pull air into his suddenly constricted trachea. And he can't. He can't. He can't breathe. He's dying.

Christopher has never had an asthma attack this bad. In panic he tries to scream out for help, but his mouth only flaps open and closed, like a Martian's speechless siphon. He pushes forward, vision dimming, scrabbling with numb hands at the people around them, mouthing "help" at them.

As he falls to his knees in the jostling crowd, he forgets all about the detonator in his hands. When he loses consciousness, it slides out of his fingers, button un-depressed.

*

"Hey."

He isn't dead.

"Hey, kid."

The Professor is going to kill him.

"Hey. Kid. Look at me."

Or the police will kill him. Or this person, whoever it is, who has found him. Someone, anyway. He has no hope. Funny, he thought he had had no hope before.

"I told you not to expect thanks," a second voice says.

There is a rustling, and a low hoot, like air blown over a Coke-bottle. Something large and dark moves on the other side of his eyelids.

"Yes, yes, very nice," says the first voice, as if responding to a comment, "but we can't enjoy the Water-Rich Utopia of Kindness if this nincompoop refuses to get out of bed. Open your eyes, kid."

Christopher does. The first thing he sees is the Martian. He opens his mouth, and Christopher screams.

A little while later, the two men standing in front of the Martian take their hands off their ears. "Good work, Will," says the one on the left, the one in the astronaut's pajamas of an Orbital, "your work…speaks for itself."

"Ha ha," says the other one, the one wearing doctor's whites, then looks at Christopher. "Please don't do that again, kid. Your lungs are delicate as well as extremely expensive. "

Behind them, the nightmarish bulk of the Martian pulses and three wriggling tentacles extend up into view.

Christopher screams again.

This time, the doctor, Will, puts a hand over his mouth. "Look," he hisses, face angry, "aside from the disrespect for my work, one thing you do not want to be doing is drawing attention to yourself right now."

"You've already had more luck than anyone has any reason to expect." The astronaut, the Free Orbital says, voice hard. "So I think it's time you stopped relying on it to keep you alive and out of jail and start using your goddamn brain."

What? Christopher makes a questioning whine from under the doctor's palm, eyes still following the writhing of the Martian's tentacles. What is that thing doing here with a Free Human? He can remember seeing their war in the sky. A four-year-old on his uncle's shoulders watching hope in fading scratches of light on against the sky. The clouds from the Ecuador Tower Impact had left the sky gray for nearly a year after.

A twitch from the bristled tip of a tentacle sends a shower of mucus onto his face, and Christopher jerks violently in his bed. He nearly screams again, but Will's hand is still over his mouth.

"In case you don't understand our boss," says the astronaut, "let me repeat that you owe us your life. And add that you continue to do so right now."

Christopher's eyes squint with anger. He considers biting the hand over his mouth.

"Don't be an idiot," says the doctor, as if sensing the impulse. "We took 30 pounds of explosives off you, kid. We took photos of them. All it takes is one phone call…"

Christopher's hands fly to his chest, his fingers trip across naked ribs like piano keys.

"We removed them," repeats the doctor. "Then repaired your lungs."

A low hoot. Gray tentacles writhe in the air at the foot of his bed.

"He paid for it." The Astronaut hooks a thumb at the Martian.

"Why?" Mumbles Christopher as Will removed his hand from his mouth. "Why don't you just kill me? I mean," he says, as he looks at the Martian and remembers the Professor, "you should just kill me. Because if you don't---"

"We're not going to kill you." Interrupts the astronaut, sounding disgusted.

"Then I'll kill you!" The boy hisses.

"No you won't," says the astronaut. "You'll help us. You'll give us the information we need to take down…" he glances at the Martian pulsing at the foot of the bed and his mouth quirks up, "take down the monsters who are destroying our way of life."

"Huh?"

The eyes of the astronaut dart back to Christopher's and the ironic smile is gone. "I mean the monsters who would brainwash kids into killing themselves in order to make a political point. You, kid, will tell us exactly how you were recruited, and where, and when, and how. "

"And then," says the doctor, Will, "while we work to make life better down here, we'll send you to live a better life up there." He points at the ceiling, or something beyond the ceiling. Not heaven, but space. Orbit.

"The asteroid mines?" He asks, as if to test this impossible promise, to show it is nothing but new slavery.

"Only if you can get a job there," snorts the astronaut, "which I doubt."

"You'll go up the Kongo Tower to Free Human Orbital Habitat," corrects the doctor more gently. "Where you will learn a skill that can take you anywhere in the Free Orbital Republic. Or to the Moon, or Mars, or even Venus!"

"And," rumbles the astronaut, more cogently, "you'll make enough money to send help to your family."

The Martian makes a remark with a tentacle's whip-crack.

"And possibly become a useful person," the astronaut continues.

"No," says Christopher automatically, "you're trying to brainwash me, and it won't work. You'll have to…" he gasps, then realizes that he can gasp, and almost smiles despite everything else, "you'll have to kill me before I kill you!"

"They have given us only two choices," the Professor's voice seems to whisper in his ear, "to lie down and die, or to stand up and fight. No third option exists."

The Martian's tentacles wriggle.

"He says," translates the doctor, "'What if there was a third option?'"