Irritated, I threw the money onto the counter. I would get no more information out of him. I realized that his suspicion was too quickly aroused to be normal. The chances were that he wanted Lois himself, probably didn't get anywhere with her in the face of the competition, and the constant spectacle of men and boys flirting with her in his restaurant kept him on the raw edge of frustrated anger.
Impatience gnawed at me, but there was nothing I could do but wait. I stood hesitating outside the restaurant, wondering if I should go to the registrar's office to try to find out where Lois lived. I might run into trouble. I was already planning to break one of the academic rules by arranging to have Laurie Hendricks visit my trailer that evening, but at least I had a plausible reason—and in spite of the rules, meetings with students in the home over class projects were not unusual. For me to try to get the address or phone number of a young and obviously endowed co-ed who was not in any of my classes was something else again.
I spent the afternoon, except for one lecture at two o'clock, in the safety of the library stacks. I compiled a bibliography of recent publications in the library on the subject of life on other planets. There was a special section of articles and research projects concerning Mars, most of them written by Dr. Temple himself or members of his staff. It would take much more than one afternoon to burrow through all the material, and I might not have many afternoons.
I had to act on the premise that I was sane, that I had overheard aliens conferring telepathically, that the conviction they were determined to destroy me was not a delusion. They were real. They menaced not only my safety but that of the world. And they planned to bring others of their kind back to Earth. These were the facts I had to begin with.
They pointed directly to Mars.
I was surprised at the unanimity of scientific opinion concerning the possibility of life on other planets. In our solar system, there was only one planet other than Earth which could possibly support life as we understood it. On the other planets either heat or the lack of it, the presence of poisonous gases or the absence of atmosphere, argued that life could not exist. There might well be planets in other solar systems with conditions conducive to the existence of an intelligent life form, but in ours there was only Earth—and the planet man had reached in his first great conquest of space: Mars.
There had long been heated scientific debate on the possibility of Mars supporting life, especially after the discovery of the famous canals. Even observations from the moon during the late 1970's and the 1980's had not settled the issue or resolved the mystery of the canals. There had always been a dedicated group who maintained that life on the red planet was not only possible but probable.
Then came the successful mission in 1989-90. I didn't have to read the innumerable articles to know the general facts about what humans had found there—and what they had failed to find. There was life in the form of vegetation and microscopic organisms. There was even animal life—a tiny reptile which had been seen and photographed but had shown such remarkable elusiveness that it had never been trapped alive. Besides these, there were clear signs of a dead civilization that had been created by intelligent beings. Crude by our standards, especially in crafts and tools, but intelligent. These discoveries served only to create the new Martian mystery. The planet abounded in fossil remains of lower animals. Nothing else. Nothing that seemed capable of the intelligence which had wrought the civilization of Mars and dug its amazing network of canals. It was as if the intelligent beings which had ruled the planets thousands of years ago had simply left it. They had not died there. Or they had mysteriously dissolved, leaving no trace of themselves except their handiwork, leaving behind a dying planet.
Mars was the only place from which the aliens could have come, I thought—but no intelligent aliens had returned on the space ship. Even the specimens of plant life had failed to survive the trip back to earth. And yet—
I tried to remember exactly what I had overheard. The voices had talked of a launching soon. And the fact was that a new flight to Mars was scheduled to take place. They had talked of it as returning to their own place of origin, to their fellows. But if they needed a space ship in which to return, they must have come on our ship.