The reporter who had asked about natives got choked on his drink and
had to be pounded on the back. On my left, Abe Marker leaned against
the bar to look past me at the little guy.
"Frogs we got now," he said admiringly. "By the billions?"
"There are more frogs on Mars," the little man said, "than there are
gnats and fish together, and they never stop croaking. You'd have to
hear it to believe it."
The television screen lit up suddenly, chopping off conversation, and
we were watching the first Marscast in history.
* * * * *
Colonel Sanderson himself was talking. He looked the way Stanley must
have looked when he found Livingstone, gaunt and bearded and jumpy; and
his crew, lined up behind him before the ship's pickup camera, were in
no better shape. The lot of them stared hungrily out at us as if they
had just found a peephole into Heaven and couldn't wait to see if
there was a gate farther along the fence.
"... established conceptions of Martian areography are completely
erroneous," the colonel was saying. "There are no drifting deserts
of sand or howling typhoons of ferrous dust. We can show you actual
conditions better by camera, I think, than they could be detailed in
words."
The view jumped to another camera aimed from an outside port, and we
saw Mars. Colonel Sanderson's voice kept up a running commentary behind
the scene, but we only half heard him.
The ship rested in about two feet of water. Around it the whole world
curved up to the horizon in a shallow concave sweep like the inside of
a great rusty bowl, lined with knee-high reeds that grew as far as the
eye could see out of a knee-deep marsh. A fist-sized sun hung low in
the sky, its glare dulled to a muddy crimson by a shimmering cloud of
gnats that whirled and danced to infinity. There was a sort of vast,
featureless roaring in the background that sounded like Niagara at two
hundred yards, not deafening but loud enough to force Colonel Sanderson
to raise his voice.
"The frog noise is worst," he was saying. "It drives us to the point
of insanity at times.... One member of our party has succumbed to it
already, a machinist named Willkins who disappeared two weeks ago.
Apparently the poor fellow drowned himself in the marsh, since no trace
of him has been found since."
That was when I realized why the little man on the stool beside me
looked so familiar--because I had seen his pictures in the papers,
along with the rest of Sanderson's crew, a thousand times during the
past year. The mixed expression on his face made sense now, too; he
wasn't only disgusted and defensive, he was _guilty_.
"So that's how you knew what it was like," I said. "You couldn't stick
it out with the others, so you jumped ship. You deserted!"
He gave me a hangdog look. "It's not deserting unless the country is at
war," he said. "It's just going over the hill, A.W.O.L."
The television roar got louder, and when I looked up the ship's
cameraman was doing a close-up for our benefit. He panned the shot
downward until we seemed to be standing ten feet above the marsh, and
at that distance I could see plainly what it was that caused the uproar.
The water between the reddish-brown reeds was thick with huge frogs,
all blinking and croaking like mad.
I remember thinking then that you couldn't really blame a man for
jumping ship in a hole like that. It was bad enough to be stuck
thirty-odd million miles from home, so far that light itself needed
three minutes to--
"Hey, wait up!" I said to the little guy, who was sneering at himself
in the mirror again. "If you went A.W.O.L. up there, then how the hell
did you get back _here_?"