THE FROGS OF MARS

There was nothing special about the little man who came into Larry's place, unless it might have been his air of vague familiarity and the mixed expression on his face. He looked disgusted and defensive and at the same time a little resentful, with a dash of something else thrown in which none of us recognized until later.

I'd have mistaken him for another reporter from the Advertiser across the street if the five newsmen already at the bar hadn't given each other a blank look that meant only one thing: none of them knew him. Neither did Larry, who was trying to bring in the first broadcast from Mars on the television set bracketed to the wall over his whiskey stock, and who wasn't pleased at having his little after-hours party crashed.

"The bar's closed," Larry said. His tone didn't invite argument. "City ordinance. No customers after 1:00 a.m."

The little man looked at the clock, which said 3:15, and then at the front windows which were shuttered tight. Then he looked at the six of us sitting at the bar with our drinks.

"I'll have bourbon and water," he said. He sat down at the end of the bar on the stool next to mine and looked at his reflection in the mirror without approval.

Larry got the look that bartenders get with troublesome customers.

"The bar's closed," he said again. "It's a city—"

"Water on the side," the little man said. "Don't mix it."

Abe Marker, who does sports for the Advertiser, got up and checked the front-door lock. The thumb-catch hadn't been thrown, so Abe put it on and came back to the bar.

"Nobody else will wander in," he said. "Make with the t-v, Larry. You're holding up the show."

Larry looked stubborn.

"It's after 1:00 a.m.," he said. "And that door was supposed to be locked. There's a city ordinance—"

"You're breaking it already," the little man said, looking at us. He didn't seem angry, just weary and disgusted. "Not that I give a damn. All I want is a bourbon and water."

"Better give it to him, Larry," Willard Saxton said from down the bar. Willard is the Advertiser's science editor and is an authority on the planets, especially Mars. "He'll probably turn you in if you throw him out."

Larry muttered and looked mulish, but he rang up the little man's money and gave him a bourbon and water. The little guy drank it and looked at himself in the bar mirror with an expression that was just short of being a sneer. Larry grunted and went back to fiddling with the television set.

Abe Marker came over and sat down on the stool to my left.

"They're doing this all over town tonight," he said, explaining to the little man across me. "The bars have to observe curfew as usual, but most of them are letting a few regular customers stay late to see the Marscast. Everybody is anxious to know what Colonel Sanderson and his crew found up there, so—"

"They're going to be disappointed," the little man said. He sounded sour but positive. "Mars ain't what people think it is, not by a hell of a sight. It stinks."

We all looked up at that, and somebody snickered.

"Have you been to Mars, sir?"

The little man didn't seem to mind when we laughed.

"Maybe," he said, and shoved his shot glass forward. "Another bourbon, bartender."

The station announcer came on screen then and told us what we already knew, that contact with Colonel Sanderson's party was delayed because of transmission difficulties. The Sanderson expedition would leave Mars for Earth in two more days, when the current opposition was completed, but in the meantime the program sponsors appreciated the interest shown by their public and would relay the broadcast to us as soon as contact was established.

A film cartoon featuring a lizard named Freddie came on next, and Larry turned down the sound so he could hear orders for refills. The little man drank his bourbon and water and sneered at his reflection in the mirror; none of us paid him any further attention, but talk started up again along the bar.

Somebody at the other end asked how long it took a television signal to travel across all that space, and choked on his drink when Willard Saxton told him.

"My God," he said when he stopped coughing. "You mean Mars is so far away it takes three minutes just to see it?"

All of us laughed at that but Larry and the little man at the end of the bar.

"What I'm wondering," somebody else said, "Is how the colonel and his boys feel after breathing nothing but canned air for a year."

"Maybe the air up there is better than our scientists think," Abe Marker said. He winked at us and looked at the little man on my right. "How about it, friend? Is the air good on Mars?"

"Breathable, but not good," the little guy said. "It smells like dead fish."

Silence fell along the bar while we waited for a straight man to raise his head.

Willard Saxton took the bait. "And why should it smell so, may I ask?"

"Because Mars is lousy with fish," the little man said. "And because when fish die, they stink."

Larry did a brisk business for a few minutes while we sized the little guy up again. He definitely wasn't drunk, but the task of deciding whether he was being dead-pan-comic or just nasty was a sort of challenge that called for thought.

"But you'd need extensive oceans to support so many fish," Willard Saxton argued, still taking it seriously. "And if Mars had oceans we'd have seen them long ago. They reflect light."

"Mars is too level for oceans," the little man said. "The water spreads out thin to make one big marsh, and you can't see it because the weeds that grow up from the bottom camouflage it."

Somebody down the bar said, "This gets curiouser and curiouser," and everybody laughed again but Willard and Larry and the little comic. Somebody else asked if he was a professional and what show was he on, but he didn't answer. He just pushed his shot glass forward instead.

"Another bourbon," he said.

The announcer came on screen again when the lizard cartoon went off and said that the Mars party's signal was beginning to come through and that as soon as it cleared up they would put it on the cable. Then he told us about a new kind of pretzel prepared with a special salt guaranteed not to give us hardening of the arteries, and after that we had another film cartoon. This one was about two crows at a circus, but nobody could follow it because Larry turned down the sound again.

Between his third and fourth stingers Willard Saxton—who had a reputation to uphold, being science editor of the Advertiser—had made up his mind by now to put the little man in his place. It burned him brown to see this character drinking bourbon and sneering at himself in the mirror and not caring a damn what we thought, and it put Willard under a sort of obligation to show him up.

"Reliable tests have conclusively proved," Willard said, "that the atmosphere of Mars contains only minute traces of water vapor, and that its oxygen content is less than one-hundredth the density necessary to sustain human life. Spectroanalysis findings—"

"A spectroanalysis of Earth from Mars," the little man said, "shows nothing beyond our Heaviside layer, and proves that we can't live here because nothing can breathe pure ozone."

He finished his bourbon and made chains of wet rings on the bartop with his glass. The mixed look on his face was so strong that for a moment I almost thought of the name for it.

Willard stalled for time by ordering another stinger—a double, this time—and Abe Marker took over.

"How about those pictures of Martian dust storms the boys at Palomar make?" Abe asked. "You can't have dust storms on a marshy planet, can you?"

"Those aren't dust storms," the little man said. "They're clouds of gnats."

"Gnats?" we all said at once, and somebody down the bar, quicker-witted than the rest of us, added: "Gnats to you too, Charlie!"

"A fact," the little man said, but not as if he cared. "They travel in swarms thousands of miles wide, and they bite like hell."

We sat and watched the two voiceless crows flap through the television cartoon for a while. Nobody spoke until the film was over and the screen went blank, when the little man caught Larry's eye and held up one finger.

"Bourbon," he said.

We heard a confused muttering of voices in the background and waited expectantly for Colonel Sanderson to speak to us from Mars, but apparently the network people were still having trouble with their transmission beam. The screen stayed blank.

"You left out the interesting part, Charlie," somebody called from down the bar. "The Martian natives. How about them?"

"There aren't any—as you'd know them," the little man said. He seemed to grow thoughtful for a moment. "But they are intelligent. They do things you couldn't do."

"Such as what?" somebody asked.

The little man shrugged. "Teleport. They're good at it too."

Saxton let out a laugh. "That would make them more intelligent than us!" he said. "What do these Martians look like?"

The little man screwed up his face distastefully. "Frogs."

The reporter who had asked about natives got choked on his drink and had to be pounded on the back. On my left, Abe Marker leaned against the bar to look past me at the little guy.

"Frogs we got now," he said admiringly. "By the billions?"

"There are more frogs on Mars," the little man said, "than there are gnats and fish together, and they never stop croaking. You'd have to hear it to believe it."

The television screen lit up suddenly, chopping off conversation, and we were watching the first Marscast in history.

Colonel Sanderson himself was talking. He looked the way Stanley must have looked when he found Livingstone, gaunt and bearded and jumpy; and his crew, lined up behind him before the ship's pickup camera, were in no better shape. The lot of them stared hungrily out at us as if they had just found a peephole into Heaven and couldn't wait to see if there was a gate farther along the fence.

"... established conceptions of Martian areography are completely erroneous," the colonel was saying. "There are no drifting deserts of sand or howling typhoons of ferrous dust. We can show you actual conditions better by camera, I think, than they could be detailed in words."

The view jumped to another camera aimed from an outside port, and we saw Mars. Colonel Sanderson's voice kept up a running commentary behind the scene, but we only half heard him.

The ship rested in about two feet of water. Around it the whole world curved up to the horizon in a shallow concave sweep like the inside of a great rusty bowl, lined with knee-high reeds that grew as far as the eye could see out of a knee-deep marsh. A fist-sized sun hung low in the sky, its glare dulled to a muddy crimson by a shimmering cloud of gnats that whirled and danced to infinity. There was a sort of vast, featureless roaring in the background that sounded like Niagara at two hundred yards, not deafening but loud enough to force Colonel Sanderson to raise his voice.

"The frog noise is worst," he was saying. "It drives us to the point of insanity at times.... One member of our party has succumbed to it already, a machinist named Willkins who disappeared two weeks ago. Apparently the poor fellow drowned himself in the marsh, since no trace of him has been found since."

That was when I realized why the little man on the stool beside me looked so familiar—because I had seen his pictures in the papers, along with the rest of Sanderson's crew, a thousand times during the past year. The mixed expression on his face made sense now, too; he wasn't only disgusted and defensive, he was guilty.

"So that's how you knew what it was like," I said. "You couldn't stick it out with the others, so you jumped ship. You deserted!"

He gave me a hangdog look. "It's not deserting unless the country is at war," he said. "It's just going over the hill, A.W.O.L."

The television roar got louder, and when I looked up the ship's cameraman was doing a close-up for our benefit. He panned the shot downward until we seemed to be standing ten feet above the marsh, and at that distance I could see plainly what it was that caused the uproar.

The water between the reddish-brown reeds was thick with huge frogs, all blinking and croaking like mad.

I remember thinking then that you couldn't really blame a man for jumping ship in a hole like that. It was bad enough to be stuck thirty-odd million miles from home, so far that light itself needed three minutes to—

"Hey, wait up!" I said to the little guy, who was sneering at himself in the mirror again. "If you went A.W.O.L. up there, then how the hell did you get back here?"

I didn't find out.

The guy was gone. He had been standing there so close I could have touched him, but now he was gone. I looked around quick. Nobody else seemed to have noticed. All eyes were on the TV screen.

Then I saw it. On the floor. Two wet marks—right where the guy should have been, where he was. Two wet marks that had a funny shape to them—web-like.

I felt my throat tighten at the thought. I shook my head. What was going through it was fantastic, impossible and downright lunacy. There was an intelligent life-form on Mars—beings that looked like frogs and could teleport. Could they also mimic human shape temporarily? Especially if they got hold of one for a model—say a missing crewman....

"Hey! Where are you going? Don't you want to see the Marscast?"

I was walking to the door. I looked back at the barkeep. "I've seen enough, Larry, I got things to do."

He shrugged. "Yeh, what?"

"Like hunting frogs," I told him as I shoved the door open. "I got a hunch we'll be doing a lot of that before very long...."