The Healer

Untitled Part 1

THE HEALER

Copyright 2014

By Jeffrey G. Roberts

We shall not cease from our explorations.

And the end of all our exploring,

Will be to arrive where we started,

And know the place for the first time.

T.S. Eliot

Chapter 1

2035

"Sweet Mother of God! The sons of bitches have been lying to us for almost sixty years! Ever since Viking!

Eric, record this! All of it! When we get back – if they let us get back – I'm personally going to take this disc to Washington and shove it down their God-damned throats! Eric? Eric! You hear me? Snap out of it!" And the Commander pushed the Lieutenant roughly against his shoulder, to break him out of his reverie.

"Sorry, Captain. It's – it's just too much to take in. I see it – but I don't believe it!"

"You'd rather believe those hypocrites at NASA, who knew the truth all along, but lied to the American people – lied to us; that it was just a trick of light & shadow – an optical illusion? Don't pay any attention to that man behind the curtain! And their handlers in Washington probably kept paying them off to keep their mouths shut, and keep us in the dark. Weak, scared little rats, who were afraid the truth would make their own little house of cards – so carefully constructed over the years – come crashing down around their heads; that they weren't numero uno any more. And we kept re-electing their shithead handlers in Washington, so they could keep paying off these "experts."

Growing up in West Virginia, my Daddy always told me, 'Don't spit in my eye and tell me it's dew!' And Eric – I don't like to be spit on! Do you?"

His second in command, still in awe, uttered a quiet, "No, Bill," without averting his gaze.

Chapter 2

The crimson sands of the Martian desert wailed across the cold forbidding plains in a ghostly pirouette at ninety below. Even though mankind had staked its claim to the fourth planet from the sun, quaint but disquieting legends had begun to evolve, concerning "Martian myths" – mystical tales 150 million miles from Earth – to frighten little children at night, and unsettle the dreams of seasoned old men.

But no ancient wonder so fired the imagination, than the titanic edifice first revealed by the Viking I spacecraft, fifty-nine years earlier. And it stood now – silent, immutable, incomprehensible. And in this shattering revelation, our cosmic innocence was lost. And all the secrecy, betrayals, and deception, had failed to conceal the fact – that we were not alone. But why the deception? One could only conjecture.

The Face on Mars. It was a visceral feeling, here in the brutal, wind-swept desolation of Cydonia, in the Northern hemisphere of Mars.

Did the creatures of the night look up, mystified in primal wonder, at Stonehenge on Earth? Did the desert viper gaze up in reptilian bewilderment at the pyramids? Such humbling analogies must have gone through the minds of the first astronauts to stare in disbelief at a structure they had been assured was nothing more than an optical illusion, a trick of the eye. But at least Stonehenge and the pyramids were Earthly constructs – fashioned by human hands. What faced the first Martian expedition in 2035, made these puny humans feel as insignificant as an insect contemplating a fusion reactor. And maybe the comparison was not totally undeserved, by what faced them: a monumental stone structure, 1.6 miles long, 1.2 miles wide – and half a mile high! It rested on the plains of the shoreline of an ancient sea, the Cydonian Sea. The Face. Staring up into the starry night with cold, eternal stone eyes. Waiting, waiting for at least half a million years, for the evolving creatures on the third planet from the sun to gain first sentience, then eons later, spaceflight capability.