Martian night. The cold and the dark and the stars are so intense they make music, like a faint tinkle of ice xylophones. Maybe it’s my air tank hose scraping; maybe it’s my imagination. Maybe it’s real.
Standing on the edge of Swift Plateau, I’m afraid to move or breathe deeply, as I whisper into the helmet recorder, lest I disturb something holy: God’s sharp scrutiny of Edom Crater. I’ve gone outside, away
from the lander and my crewmates, to order my
thoughts about what has happened.
The Martians came just twelve hours ago, like a tide of five-foot-high laboratory rats running and leaping on their hind legs. To us, it seemed as if they were storming the lander, intent on knocking it over. But it seems now we were merely in their way.
We didn’t just sit here and let them swamp us. We Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html
didn’t hurt or kill any of them–Cobb beat at them with a roll of foil and I used the parasol of the damaged directenna to shoo them off. First contact, and we must have looked like clowns in an old silent comedy. The glider wings came perilously close to being severely damaged. We foiled and doped what
