Would you like to select a new topic?
You have chosen to return to the topic “Safety Considerations":
Despite the hostile environment of Mars, Red Planet Adventures has never had a fatality in the three years we have been offering our tours. While every effort has been made to ensure the safety of our guests, we would like to remind you to use extreme caution at all times while traveling the red planet. Mars dust is a major potential threat to both machinery and humans: dust devils have been known to disable computers and delicate electronics, interfere with radio communications and even damage pressurized human habitats. It is necessary to keep in mind that despite initial terraforming experiments, the atmosphere, the air temperature, and the barometric pressure are still such that Mars remains uninhabitable for humans outside of the habitats. Pressure suits should be worn in all situations where it is possible that the visitor might be subject to Martian elements—
You have chosen the topic “Pressure Suit":
The pressure suits provided for guests of Red Planet Adventures are state-of-the-art suit technology, employing mechanical counter-pressure (MCP) for the extremities of Martian exploration. The MCP suit system consists of a lightweight, elastic bio-suit layer, hard torso shell, portable life-support system, helmet, gloves, and boots. The life-support system attaches to the torso shell. The MCP suit exerts pressure on the body through the form-fitting bio-suit rather than by the breathing gas. The helmet, attached to the life-support system, provides pressurization to the head as well as oxygen for breathing. Tears in an MCP suit can cause symptoms of localized low pressure exposure at the site of the tear (such as bruising and edema), but the rest of the body remains protected: the elastic weave of the bio-suit prevents the tear from propagating.
The power cells running the suit's life-support system can be recharged using standard hydrogen fuel cells, such as those powering a pressurized rover, for a service life of up to twelve hours. Integrated into the suit is a communications module, biosensors, and the computer you are at present accessing—
You have chosen the topic “communications module":
The communications modules of the bio-suits provide a direct connection to the communications systems in the Mars bases via satellite coverage. This ensures that the traveler can easily contact the rover or the nearest base in case he or she gets lost—
You have chosen the topic “satellite coverage":
Red Planet Adventures does not conduct tours where satellite coverage is unavailable; however, signals may be hampered by land formations such as walls of craters or valles, or rough chasmal terrain, among others. Such areas which are frequently traveled will have GPS and comm repeaters mounted along the rim or higher altitudes at regular intervals. If spotty coverage still occurs, it may be the result of storm damage. In the case of an emergency situation, your tour guide—
I have no entry in my database for “tour guide dead."
Would you like to select a new topic?
You have chosen the topic “Emergency":
In the case of an emergency situation, your tour guide—
I have no entry in my database for “fuck you."
Would you like to select a new topic?
You have chosen the topic “Emergency Situation":
A number of accidents qualify as emergency situations according to the Mars Emergency Rescue Statutes (MERS):
1) Damage to a habitat that would endanger pressurization or breathable oxygen levels.
2) Damage to an oxygen production plant.
3) Failure in a wind or solar energy plant.
4) Failure in the communications system—
You have chosen the topic “Failure in the Communications System":
In the case of a failure in the communications system, make your way to the nearest relay station or base as quickly as possible and notify the proper authorities of the failure. This transport-based database will provide you with all the information needed for MEA to localize the problem.
You have chosen the topic “Failure in Ground Transportation":
In the case of a failure in ground transportation, notify the proper authorities via satellite as quickly as possible.
You have chosen the topic “Failure in Multiple Systems":
In the case of a failure in multiple systems, a number of options are available, including the following:
1) Repair of the ground transportation.
2) Repair of the communications system.
3) Manual signaling to nearby bases or relay stations.
If none of these options is feasible, it may be necessary to navigate on foot to the nearest base or relay station. With an undamaged bio-suit and full oxygen reserves in the life-support system, an experienced Mars explorer can survive for several days in the open environment. It is, however, critical to maintain suit reserve power: the traveler should be careful not to stray too far from the rover's fuel cell capacity in order to ensure that batteries can be recharged—
You have chosen the topic “Fuel Cell Damage":
Damaged fuel cells can be replaced at all Martian bases. In the event that rover fuel cells are damaged to the extent that return to a base is not possible, notify Mars Emergency Authority immediately.
If you'd like—
You have chosen the topic “Notify Mars Emergency Authority":
In order to notify the Mars Emergency Authority (MEA), use either the communications module in your pressure suit or the communications system of the rover. Give your location, the unit number of your tour, and a precise description of the problem. A rescue team will be to your site within eight hours.
I have no entry in my database for “rescue my ass."
Would you like to select a new topic?
I'm sorry, the volume of your last request was too high for me to understand. Please repeat.
You have chosen the topic “help":
The Help System of the Mars Traveler's Guide is an extensive database covering a wide range of topics, both informational and practical. If you do not find the topic you need, contact user support and make a suggestion. We are always happy to receive feedback.
If you'd like me to repeat this entry, say ‘repeat.’ If you'd like to explore a new topic, simply say the name of the topic. If you're done using the Mars Traveler's Guide, say “quit” to shut the system down.
* * * *
You have not made a selection for more than ten minutes. In order to access the database, select a topic on your wrist unit or voice a topic of your own. If there is no appropriate entry in the database, search for a similar word or term. If you are no longer in need of the help system, select or voice “quit."
Would you like to select a new topic?
* * * *
The system has been idle for more than thirty minutes and will go into sleep mode. To reactivate the system, simply voice your request.
* * * *
The system has been idle for more than sixty minutes. This system is shutting down.
[Back to Table of Contents]
The Quest for Creeping Charlie by James Powell
Although he has been publishing short fiction for more than forty years, James Powell's name might not be familiar to many of our readers. That's because the majority of his work is in the mystery genre—he has been a frequent contributor to Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine and a winner of the Arthur Ellis Award. Not surprisingly, his first F&SF story includes an investigation, but it is definitely a work of fantasy. Really. Honest. Trust us.
In the early 1950s, George Muir, a college student with his librarian mother's love of books, often stopped to browse at the sale bins outside a used bookstore on Yonge. The street had recently been chosen as the site for Toronto's first subway line, one constructed by the trench-and-cover method. This meant digging up the roadway and temporarily replacing much of the sidewalk with wooden planks and railing.
The bookstore owner sat just inside the door wearing a look that said this too
will pass, meaning the dust, noise, and drop in foot traffic. But as the subway work dragged on he moved his chair deeper and deeper into the gloom of his shop and the sale bins brimmed.
One day Muir pulled from a pile an old volume called Ponder's Hornbook, a collection of aphorisms and anecdotes in no seeming order. It fell open at this anonymous entry: “When asked to name the smartest of all the animals an ancient wise man replied, ‘Surely the megamensalopes, because they have avoided discovery by man.’”
Muir laid the book aside. But the megamensalopes remained in his thoughts. If they existed, he could understand why they kept their distance from man. How many animals had men hunted to extinction or worked to death or sent to the slaughterhouse? Before falling asleep that night Muir vowed he would be the one to find the sly creatures. Later he told this to some college friends over beer. When they laughed, Muir, who had his father's thin skin, never mentioned his quest to anyone again.
* * * *
After college he went to work in his family's hardware supply business. He also joined the Toronto chapter of the Explorers’ Club, with their pith helmets, easy chairs, and trophy heads on the walls. Like the other members, Muir was drawn to those regions the ancient cartographers marked with warnings: “Beyond this point there be dragons.” Here, he was sure, the megamensalopes lived to escape discovery by man.
Muir gave his quarry a good deal of thought. He decided they couldn't be invisible. No animals were. But like chameleons they might be able to blend into the background. He imagined them as centaurs with human torsos on the bodies of small deer. But not too small, for they would need good-sized brainpans. For his part Muir knew he wasn't the smartest guy around. But that might actually help when he found the megamensalopes. Maybe he and their brightest would be able to communicate. He remembered reading an old Russian saying: the dumber the peasant the better his horse understands him.
To prepare for expeditions to distant locales, Muir spent several summer vacations leading a packhorse through the Canadian Rockies on a club project to follow by land Alexander Mackenzie's canoe trip to the Pacific in 1793. But he didn't care much for life in the great outdoors. Knots others tied with fluid grace he labored over, and in the end they slipped. The mountain peaks and river valleys did not charm him because he sensed no megamensalopes lived there.
One night as he lay thinking in the dark under canvas—reading by gasoline lantern gave him a headache—Muir decided his quarry must surely know it was not in man's nature to leave any place unmapped or peak unscaled. He also reasoned that if they were smarter than the other animals, the megamensalopes would be lonely and drawn to the same humans from whom they knew they had to hide. He likened them to the green men of Celtic mythology who in their curiosity stared at man out of the forest in masks made of foliage.
So Muir left the Explorers’ Club and started looking closer at hand. He didn't think the megamensalopes would care for the suburbs where they might be mistaken for deer and hated for eating expensive shrubbery. No, they'd be city dwellers, feeding off humbler plants like the pungent ground ivy Canadians called Creeping Charlie which grew throughout Toronto in vacant lots and poorly tended lawns. And since we are what we eat, Muir named them Creeping Charlies. Megamensalopes was just too much of a mouthful.
* * * *
When spring brought the first ground ivy, Muir knew the Creeping Charlie herds were heading back from wintering in the States. On his lunch hours he would look for neighborhoods where the ground ivy grew thick. Then he would return at night, for he suspected the Creeping Charlies were nocturnal. But he avoided the more sordid parts of town. Not caring for them himself, he assumed the Creeping Charlies wouldn't either, particularly at night.
When he found his quarry, Muir meant to protect them from the likes of zoos or circus sideshows. Then, he hoped, the Creeping Charlies would choose him as their spokesman. He saw himself standing before the United Nations to scold the delegates for their exploitation of the creatures of this Earth.
* * * *
The year his mother died, Muir was courting a young woman from accounting. As he spoke about their future, he gestured around the office and assured her he wanted more than this. He meant finding Creeping Charlie. She thought he meant a larger hardware supply business and liked his ambition. He proposed at Casa Lo Mien, a restaurant serving a fusion of Mexican, Chinese, and Canadian cuisine. During the meal he meant to bring up the Creeping Charlies, but by then he'd come to value her esteem and couldn't find the courage.
Muir made up many excuses to cover his spring and summer searching. After the creatures migrated south he tried to make up for it. But even when he and his wife were watching television or talking about their children or done making love, the hunt for Creeping Charlie was uppermost in his mind. The same year his father died, Muir's wife said she wanted a divorce. She said he was never there for her. He was always off on another planet.
The divorce was finalized during an exciting time in his search. Toronto's original subway plan envisioned an east-west line running beneath Queen Street to intersect with the Yonge Street line. But the city's rapid expansion northward made a line farther up on Bloor more practical. Muir began hearing stories of an abandoned subway station built under the Queen Street stop in anticipation of that earlier east-west line and suspected he'd found the Creeping Charlies’ daytime lair. He made enquiries but the Toronto Transportation Commission, perhaps to cover up their own lack of foresight, denied such a station existed.
Prowling the upper station after work, Muir found several locked doors marked “Staff Only.” Did they lead down to the sleeping creatures? He watched over several days at sunset hoping to see the Creeping Charlies escaping like bats into the twilight. He never did. Perhaps they used the subway tunnel itself to come and go. But whenever anyone went in or out the “Staff Only” doors, he checked the knobs. One day a door was left unlocked.
Inside, Muir followed a flight of bare cement steps down into the darkness. When he found the Creeping Charlies he would sit quietly and wait for them to wake. Then they would see they'd been found but that he meant them no harm.
But Muir's quarry wasn't there—only bare walls and ceilings—an unfinished version of the station above set on another axis. No traces of Creeping Charlie, no nests of leaves, no ground ivy for snacking, no pop bottles holding their water supply.
Muir returned to searching Toronto neighborhoods in no predictable pattern. He imagined a Creeping Charlie at his window at night, watching him plot his visits on a city map and warning the others. Once, seeing something out of the corner of his eye, Muir turned and was startled to see a face of unexceptional appearance, the kind any Creeping Charlie would cultivate. Of course it was only his own reflection in the glass. Then for a moment Muir imagined that his ancestors, an enterprising tribe of the Creeping Charlies, had blended in with man generations before. Over time they might even have forgotten who they really were. The next morning after his shower Muir examined his middle-aged butt in the bathroom mirror using a hand mirror and thought he saw in the wrinkles there the remnants of hindquarters. But then he threw back his head and laughed.
At last the day came when Muir had to admit he'd failed to find his quarry because the Creeping Charlies, for whatever reason, had chosen to live in the terrible parts of town. So be it. He would search them out. Muir could have hired a bodyguard to go with him. But he desired so much to deliver his “Creeping Charlie, I presume” line alone that he did not.
* * * *
What Muir smelled wasn't crushed ground ivy. It was stale clothes on a staler body. Then an arm pinned him from behind and another ugly looking man stepped out of the darkness in front of him and began to go through Muir's pockets. He didn't have to be told not to resist. This wasn't the first time he'd been mugged. He never carried much with him on these expeditions.
Suddenly, over the ugly man's shoulder and down an alley, Muir saw someone waiting—clearly with a purpose—on the edge of a pool of light
from a bare bulb over a back door. Except for the several days’ growth of beard and the hunter's camouflage jacket, the figure could have been Muir's double. Was he a lookout? Did the door lead to the Creeping Charlies’ lair?
Muir gave a shout and struggled to break loose. When the startled creature stepped into the darkness, Muir thought he heard the clatter of hooves. “Brother!” he called and fought to throw off his attackers. Then something came crashing down on the back of his head.
* * * *
Dr. Lorne Osborne who worked the night emergency room at St. Michael's Hospital was a student of the afterlife. Having done all he could for dying patients, he often remained nearby to note down their last words, hoping to shed some light on the intersection of life and death. “Please,” “I'm afraid” and “Forgiveness” were common though it was unclear whether the last was being asked for or granted.
The man lying on his examination table had been found on the street suffering from massive trauma caused by a severe blow to the head. He was a bit cleaner and better dressed than the neighborhood's usual residents. Osborne wondered what had brought him there. At one moment his patient called out for something. Was it for a cantaloupe? Another time it was for “megamen” which the doctor thought might be a rock group or comic book characters or an herbal medicine to enhance sexual powers.
Suddenly and very clearly, as though uttering a password, the man said, “Creeping Charlie.” Then he smiled and died. Osborne knew the smile. The mind was coaxing its old sweetheart the body to come out of its dark corner into the light. “Don't be afraid,” it was saying. “Death has found us as we knew it would someday."
A few weeks later, going through his notes, Osborne found the Creeping Charlie reference and decided to Google it. After a lengthy list of botanical entries on ground ivy, its eradication, and the plant's use in France to flavor beer, Osborne came to this perplexing one: “When asked who was the smartest man, a wise megamensalope said, “Gotta be what's-his-name, the guy who almost found us, the one who tagged us Creeping Charlie. Gotta be."
FSF, January 2008 Page 12