“Mr. President,” I said as he walked through the chilly desert night from the helicopter toward the hangar door. I sort of stood at attention: for the office, not the man, you understand. Remember, I voted for Nixon.
He nodded at me and made a weary smile and stuck out his hand the way every politician does. I let him shake my hand, making a mental note to excuse myself and go to the washroom as soon as decently possible.
As we had agreed, he left his two aides at the hangar door and accompanied me inside all by himself. He kind of shuddered.
“It’s cold out there, isn’t it?” he said.
He was wearing a summer-weight suit. I had an old windbreaker over my shirt and slacks.
“We’ve got the heat going inside,” I said, gesturing him through the door in the first partition. I led him into the living area and to the big carpeted central room where the water tank was. Schmidt followed behind us so close I could almost feel his breath on my neck. It gave me that crawly feeling I get when I realize how many millions of germs are floating through the air all the time.
“Odd place for a swimming tank,” the president said as soon as we entered the central room.
“It’s not as odd as you think,” I said. Jazzbow had ducked low, out of sight for the time being.
My people had arranged two big sofas and a scattering of comfortable armchairs around a coffee table on which they had set up a fair-sized bar. Bottles of every description, even champagne in its own ice bucket.
“What’ll you have?” I asked. We had decided that, with just the three of us humans present, I would be the bartender.
Both the president and Schmidt asked for scotch. I made the drinks big, knowing they would both need them.
“Now, what’s this all about?” Kennedy asked after his first sip of the booze. “Why all this secrecy and urgency?”
I turned to Schmidt, but he seemed to be petrified. So absolutely frozen that he couldn’t even open his mouth or pick up his drink. He just stared at the president, overwhelmed by the enormity of what we had to do.
So I said, “Mr. President, you have to stop this moon program.”
He blinked his baggy eyes. Then he grinned. “Do I?”
“Yessir.”
“Why?”
“Because it will hurt the Martians.”
“The Martians, you said?”
“That’s right. The Martians,” I repeated.
Kennedy took another sip of scotch, then put his glass down on the coffee table. “Mr. Hughes, I had heard that you’d gone off the deep end, that you’ve become a recluse and something of a mental case—”
Schmidt snapped out of his funk. “Mr. President, he’s telling you the truth. There are Martians.”
Kennedy gave him a “who are you trying to kid” look. “Professor Schmidt, I know you’re a highly respected astronomer, but if you expect me to believe there are living creatures on Mars, you’re going to have to show me some evidence.”
On that cue, Jazzbow came slithering out of the water tank. The president’s eyes goggled as old Jazzie made his painful way, dripping on the rug, to one of the armchairs and half collapsed into it.
“Mr. President,” I said, “may I introduce Jazzbow of Mars. Jazzbow, President Kennedy.”
The president just kept on staring. Jazzbow extended his right hand, that perpetual clown’s grin smeared across his face. With his jaw hanging open, Kennedy took it in his hand. And flinched.
“I assure you,” Jazzbow said, not letting go of the president’s hand, “that I am truly from Mars.”
Kennedy nodded. He believed it. He had to. Martians can make you see the truth of things. Goes with their telepathic abilities, I guess.
Schmidt explained the situation. How the Martians had built their canals once they realized that their world was dying. How they tried to bring water from the polar ice caps to their cities and farmlands. It worked, for a few centuries, but eventually even that wasn’t enough to save the Martians from slow but certain extinction.
They were great engineers, great thinkers. Their technology was roughly a century or so ahead of ours. They had invented the electric lightbulb, for example, during the time of our French and Indian War.
By the time they realized that Mars was going to dry up and wither away despite all their efforts, they had developed a rudimentary form of spaceflight. Desperate, they thought that maybe they could bring natural resources from other worlds in the solar system to revive their dying planet. They knew that Venus was, beneath its clouds, a teeming Mesozoic jungle. Plenty of water there, if they could cart it back to Mars.
They couldn’t. Their first attempts at spaceflight ended in disasters. Of the first five saucers they sent toward Venus, three of them blew up on takeoff, one veered off course and was never heard from again, and the fifth crash-landed in New Mexico—which is a helluva long way from Venus.
Fortunately, their saucer crash-landed near a small astronomical station in the desert. A young graduate student—who eventually became Professor Schmidt—was the first to find them. The Martians inside the saucer were pretty banged up, but three of them were still alive. Even more fortunately, humans had something that the Martians desperately needed: the raw materials and manufacturing capabilities to mass-produce flying saucers for them. That’s where I had come in, as a tycoon of the aviation industry.
President Kennedy found his voice. “Do you mean to tell me that the existence of Martians—living, breathing, intelligent Martians—has been kept a secret since 1946? More than fifteen years?”
“It’s been touch-and-go on several occasions,” said Schmidt.
