She wondered how she could hang on to the end of the season—even though it was only three more days. They had committed themselves to a rigidly-planned schedule, a clockwork program that had them and the other "vacationing" tourists jumping and squeaking like automatons: Exotic Martian sports. Martian tennis played on a hundred-yard court with the players hopping through the rarified air and lower gravity with an almost obscene abandon. Swimming in a strangely buoyant water, called, of course, Martian water. Sandsled racing. Air-hopping with the de-gravity balloons. Spectator sports, including gladiators who leaped into the phony canals and fought to the death against the hideous-looking Martian rat-fish. There were many other "activities", in none of which Madeleine had been able to interest herself.
This last three days promised something called the "Martian Love Ritual under the Double Moons." And a climactic treasure hunt among the subterranean Martian labyrinths. They too, Madeleine was sure, were artificial.
Mrs. Ericson adjusted her polaroid glasses and waved her rickshaw boy into his harness, where his thighs tensed for the long haul. He was an incredibly huge man, taller even than those specially-bred movie stars, who averaged eight feet tall. Madeleine felt faint and clung to her camel. The Martian camels were coughing and wheezing and the sun glared horribly in the early afternoon.
Mr. Ericson looked with guarded apprehension at the six-legged camel. Don pulled him aboard. "What a helluva beast!" laughed Ericson. Earth camels specially bred by the big travel agencies to have a so-called "unearthly" appearance. Sad creatures with two extra, dangling limbs and a single, half-blind, blood-shot eye, watery and humbly resentful.
Pathetic mutation, Madeleine thought. Like those horrid rat-fish, like the canals and the games and the ruins and those silly rituals. All ersatz.
The caravan moved along the high ridge, a narrow trail that wound back toward Martian Haven along the edge of the eroded cliffs.
"Maybe the only thing that would satisfy Madeleine," her father said, "would be a real Martian."
"But that's not in the brochure," Don said.
"What's Mars without a Martian?" giggled Mrs. Ericson.
In her own insular little world, which had been the only one Madeleine had ever been able to tolerate at all, she swayed and bumped to the camel's movements. "One thing sure, Don," she said softly. "There were real Martians once. So why all the phony props? You can't tell me this nonsense is better than the facts about the real Martians."