Meanwhile, Out There on Mars

Merzan stroked his ocular extensions with seven-fingered hands. Okay, not really seven fingers, since two were thumbs on opposite sides of his palms. It gave a different meaning to “opposable thumbs” but no humans would ever get the joke. Merzan and his kind had no use for humans, except as a source of some useful metal objects.

Here on the fourth planet from their star, they had in recent revolutions around that star seen quite a few metal contraptions landed, sent from the third planet where the humans lived. That all the stuff landed out in unoccupied spaces was the longest running joke about intelligent life on the third planet. So here on the news transmitter was the brainwaves depicting the latest, a pile of junk because it crashed.

When the humans first began hurling objects outside their atmosphere, Merzan’s people worried it could mean trouble. These hopeless primitives seemed obsessed with themselves, sending huge waves of electronic noise which, when decoded, was all about their petty little concerns. It was clear they didn’t amount to much, and their technology, such as it was, meant manipulating metals and other materials manually. Poor humans, completely lacking the ability to get other life forms on the planet to do their work. Oh sure, they had similar creatures dragging stuff around for them, but they had just barely started working with microbes, something Merzan’s folk had been doing since before humans climbed down out of the trees.

The electronic noise was hardly anything at all compared to the vast mass of psychotic brainwave garbage they had been projecting. Without the filters over their cities, it would have driven Merzan’s people insane long ago. Such naked and primitive emotions were like being caught in a stinging sand storm out where the idiots had been dropping their toys. Nobody in their right minds spent much time out there. And nobody in their right minds projected unguarded emotional brainwaves all over the star system, either.

Merzan’s people always wore heavy protective gear in the wilderness areas only because it meant walking out from under the filters. Near as Merzan could tell, the humans still thought the filters were the surface of the planet. Fine, let them think that and stay away. Gods help them if any of that junk started crashing through the filter fabric. While faster than the way humans did things, it still took some resources, and way too much time, for microbes to produce that fabric. Strong as it might be, it would be easily punctured by the hard metallic human probes. Merzan’s people didn’t have much metal ores, and precious few microbes could be trained to work with metals.

So when the first bits of human stuff showed up, they all drooled with glee from both eating orifices. Here was their chance at collecting some metal in bulk, if they were just patient about it. As soon as the stuff stopped transmitting back to the human planet, they knew it was considered “lost” and sent teams to drag it up under the screens. It didn’t at first occur to them there would be fresh probes sent to the same desolate place looking for the first load. But then the broadcast conversations between the humans, leaking out into space, made it clear their puzzlement meant even more probes.

So this latest crash landing, quite a ways from the rich collection from the two or three previous landing sites, meant they could check it out right away. They waited a couple of rotations to see if it would transmit, but it remained silent.

So it was Merzan stood stroking his ocular appendages in anticipation of donning the sand-colored suits with the moving screens. It would take quite a few rotations since they traveled much slower than humans did on their own planet. For just a moment, Merzan felt a bit of pity these alien creatures lived such short lives. But only for a moment.