“But . . . why did you come here? She expected to find you here. You both knew . . .”
“I told you. I came here to meet a lady.”
“Not Ilsa?”
“Not Ilsa.”
“Then who?”
He glanced at his watch. “Figuring that she’s always at least ten minutes late, she ought to be coming in right about now.”
I turned in my seat and looked toward the door. She came striding through, tall, glamorous, stylishly dressed. I immediately recognized her, although she’d been little more than a lovesick child when I’d known her in Casablanca.
Rick got to his feet again and went to her. She threw her arms around his neck and kissed him the way a Frenchwoman should.
Leading her to the table, Rick poured a glass of champagne for her. As they touched glasses, he smiled and said, “Here’s looking at you, kid.”
Yvonne positively glowed.
Introduction to
“The Great Moon Hoax, or, A Princess of Mars”
When I was a kid, the solar system seemed much more interesting than it looks today.
I mean, we had canals on Mars. Maybe an intelligent civilization there, desperately trying to save themselves from the encroaching drought that was drying out their planet.
And Venus: beneath its pole-to-pole cover of clouds, the planet was probably a Mesozoic jungle, teeming with the local variety of dinosaurs and such.
Alas, our space probes shattered those exciting possibilities. There are no canals on Mars, no dinosaurs on Venus.
Too bad. It was much more exciting before NASA’s spacecraft showed us the truth.
But is it the truth?
THE GREAT MOON HOAX, OR, A PRINCESS OF MARS
I leaned back in my desk chair and just plain stared at the triangular screen.
“What do you call this thing?” I asked the Martian.
“It is an interociter,” he said. He was half in the tank, as usual.
“Looks like a television set,” I said.
“Its principles are akin to your television, but you will note that its picture is in full color, and you can scan events that were recorded in the past.”
“We should be watching the president’s speech,” said Professor Schmidt.
“Why? We know what he’s going to say. He’s going to tell Congress that he wants to send a man to the moon before 1970.”
The Martian shuddered. His name was a collection of hisses and sputters that came out to something pretty close to Jazzbow. Anyhow, that’s what I called him. He didn’t seem to mind. Like me, he was a baseball fan.
We were sitting in my Culver City office, watching Ted Williams’s last ball game from last year. Now there was a baseball player. Best damned hitter since Ruth. And as independent as Harry Truman. Told the rest of the world to go to hell whenever he felt like it. I admired him for that.
I had missed almost the whole season last year; the Martians had taken me to Venus on safari with them. They were always doing little favors like that for me; this interociter device was just the latest one.
“I still think we should be watching President Kennedy,” Schmidt insisted.
“We can view it afterward, if you like,” said Jazzbow diplomatically. As I said, he had turned into quite a baseball fan, and we both wanted to see the Splendid Splinter’s final home run.
Jazzbow was a typical Martian. Some of the scientists still can’t tell one from another, they look so much alike, but I guess that’s because they’re all cloned rather than conceived sexually. Mars is pretty damned dull that way, you know. Of course, most of the scientists aren’t all that smart outside of their own fields of specialization. Take Einstein, for example. Terrific thinker. He believes if we all scrapped our atomic bombs, the world would be at peace. Yah. Sure.
Anyway, Jazzbow is about four feet nine with dark, leathery skin, kind of like a football that’s been left out in the sun too long. The water from the tank made him look even darker, of course. Powerful barrel chest, but otherwise a real spidery build, arms and legs like pipe stems. Webbed feet, evolved for walking on loose sand. Their hands have five fingers with opposable thumbs, just like ours, but the fingers have so many little bones in them that they’re as flexible as an octopus’s tentacles.
Martians would look really scary, I guess, if it weren’t for their goofy faces. They’ve got big, sorrowful, limpid eyes with long feminine eyelashes like a camel; their noses are splayed from one cheek to the other; and they’ve got these wide, lipless mouths stretched into a perpetual silly-looking grin, like a dolphin. No teeth at all. They eat nothing but liquids. Got long tongues, like some insects, which might be great for sex if they had any, but they don’t, and, anyway they usually keep their tongues rolled up inside a special pouch in their cheeks so they don’t startle any of us earthlings. How they talk with their tongues rolled up is beyond me.
Anyway, Jazzbow was half in the tank, as I said. He needed the water’s buoyancy to make himself comfortable in earthly gravity. Otherwise, he’d have to wear his exoskeleton suit, and I couldn’t see putting him through that just so we could have a face-to-face with Professor Schmidt.
The professor was fidgeting unhappily in his chair. He didn’t give a rat’s ass about baseball, but at least he could tell Jazzbow from the other Martians. I guess it’s because he was one of the special few who’d known the Martians ever since they had first crash-landed in New Mexico back in ’46.
Well, Williams socked his home run, and the Fenway Park fans stood up and cheered for what seemed like an hour and a half, but he never did come out of the dugout to tip his cap for them. Good for him! I thought. His own man to the very end. That was his last time on a ball field as a player. I found I had tears in my eyes.
“Now can we see the president?” Schmidt asked, exasperated. Normally, he looked like
