Alice: The Girl From Earth

The Tewteqs

As I had promised Alice I took her along when I went to Mars for a conference.

The flight was uneventful. True, I do not take weightlessness well and therefore preferred to keep to the acceleration couch, but my daughter spent all her time flitting around the ship and once I was called to remove her from ceiling of the control room because she had wanted to press the red button the one for emergency deceleration. But the pilots were not really very angry with her.

On Mars we looked around the city, went with a tour group into the desert and even visited the Grand Cavern. But after this I had no more time to be with my daughter and I took her to the local boarding school for the week. A great many specialists from Earth work on Mars, and the Martians have helped us construct an enormous dome for a children’s camp. The camp is a fine place there are real Earth trees growing there. Sometimes the kids go on excursions.

When they do, they wear their own space suits and walk in a file down the street.

Tatiana Petrovna that was the name of the headmistress said that I could leave her there without a worry. Alice also told me not to worry. And I said good-bye to her for the week.

On the third day Alice disappeared.

It was a totally extraordinary event. To begin with, in all the years the boarding school had been in operation it had never lost, or even mislaid, a single child for more than ten minutes. It was totally impossible to get lost in the city on Mars. Let alone an Earth child, in a space helmet. The first Martian who saw him would bring him back to the school. Not to mention the robots. And the police. No, getting lost on Mars is completely impossible. But Alice had done it.

She had been nowhere to be seen for about two hours when I was summoned from the conference and brought to the boarding school in a martian walker. I must have looked utterly distraught when I cycled through the airlock into the dome everyone gathered there froze and were absolutely silent. And just who wasn’t there! All the teachers and the schools robots, the ten Martians in space helmets (they had to wear helmets when they went into the dome where there was an Earth atmosphere) space men, the emergency search team chief Nazaryan, archeologists…

It turned out the city-net and entertainment channels had for the last three hours been broadcasting news that an Earth child had vanished. The whole videophone system was being used to broadcast the emergency. The Martian schools had closed and the school children had gone out in groups combing the city and surroundings…

Alice’s disappearance was noticed as soon as her group returned from its walk. Since then two hours had passed. The oxygen in her helmet was sufficient for three hours.

I, knowing my daughter, asked if they had looked in the secluded spots in the school itself, or right next to the building. Quite possibly she

They answered that the city had no cellars, all the potentially secluded spots had been searched by the school children and the students at the Martian University who knew them all by heart.

I was very angry with Alice. Just about now I expected her to emerge from some corner or hole with the most innocent look on her face. But her behavior had inflicted enormous bother and cost, worse than a bad sand storm. All the Martians, and all the Earthmen living in the city had been torn from their own affairs and business, and set out on foot to join the rescue service. At the same time I was terribly worried. This little adventure of hers could end terribly badly.

News from the search parties was flowing in constantly.

“Third Martian Technical School students report they have search the stadium. No Alice.” “MarsSweets candy factory reports no child found on our property.”

“Is it possible that she managed to get out into the desert?” I mused. In the city, they would have certainly found her by now. The Martian deserts are still not well explored, and one could get lost there so throughly they would not find you in ten years’ searching. But the closest regions of the desert had already been searched by people in walkers.

“They found her!” A Martian in a blue tunic shouted; he was looking at his pocket-com.

“Where? How? Where?” Everyone under the dome shouted in excitement.

“In the desert. Some two hundred kilometers from here.”

“Two hundred?!”

Of course. I thought. They don’t know Alice. Something entirely expected…

“The child is all right and will be here soon.”

“And just how did she get out there?”

“In a postal rocket.”

“Of course!” Tatiana Petronva said and started to cry uncontrollably. She had endured far more than anyone else. Everyone ran to console her.

“We went on a walk that took us past the post office. They were loading the automated postal rockets. But I didn’t pay it any attention. You see them more than a hundred times a day!”

But ten minutes later, when a Martian flyer brought Alice in, everything became clear.

“I went inside to get your letter, Papa.” Alice said.

“What letter?”

“Papa, you said that mama was going to write us a letter. So I went inside the rocket to see if it was there.”

“You just got inside?”

“Of course. The door was open, and there were a lot of letters there…”

“And then…”

“As soon as I got inside the door closed, and the rocket took off. I started to press buttons to stop it. There were a lot of buttons. When I pressed the last one the rocket went down and then the door opened. I went out, but it was all sand around everywhere, and Auntie Tanya wasn’t there, and the other kids weren’t there…”

“She hit the emergency landing button.” The Martian in the blue tunic said with admiration in his voice.

“I cried a lot, then I decided to walk home.”

“But how did you decide which way to go?

“I went up on a small hill to look around. And there was a door in the hill. I couldn’t see anything at all from the hill. So I went inside the room and sat down there.”

“What door?” The Martian was amazed. “That region is completely empty.”

“No, there was a door, and room. And in the room there’s a big stone. Like an Egyptian pyramid. Only small. Remember, Papa, you read me that book on Egyptian pyramids.”

Alice’s unexpected revelation produced consternation among the Martians and Nazaryan, the Rescue Chief.

“The Tewteqs!” They shouted.

“Where did you find the girl? The map coordinates!”

And half those present vanished in a puff of smoke.

But Tatiana Petrovna, who had started to feed Alice, told me that many thousands of years ago there had existed on Mars a mysterious civil ization called the Tewteqs. All that remained of them were stone pyramids. Up to now, neither the Martians nor the archaeologists from Earth had been able to find a single example of Tewteq construction. Just pyramids, scattered around the desert and drowned in sand. And here Alice had come across a Tewteq ruin by accident.

“So here we are, and nothing bad happened, again.” I said. “But I am going to take you back home right away, anyway. On Earth you can get lost as much as you want. Without a helmet.

“I like getting lost at home more too.” Alice said.

Two months later I was reading an article entitled “What were the Tewteqs?” in the magazine Around The World. In the article the writers described how they were at last able to examine an intact Tewteq archeological site. The scientists were now occupied with the deciphering of the inscriptions found in the site. But what was most interesting, on the pyramid itself they observed the drawing of a Tewteq, preserved as though it had been carved yesterday. And there was the photograph of the pyramid with the Tewteq portrait….

The portrait was somewhat familiar. I was suddenly overcome with a horrible suspicion.

“Alice.” I said in my strictest of Strict Father voices. “Answer me honestly: did you draw anything at all on the pyramid when you were lost in the desert?”

Before she answered, Alice walked over and looked at the picture in the magazine very carefully.

“You’re right, Papa. I did draw it. Only it wasn’t really drawing. I had to scrape it with a small stone. I was so bored there….”