
The OLD MARTIANS - By Rog Phillips
A tourist group wanders through the wind‑scoured ruins of an ancient Martian city, their guide snapping pictures while a nervous young woman named Dotty tries to keep everyone on schedule. Among the crowd is Herb, a gaunt, oddly graceful man whose physical traits betray a “throwback” lineage and whose erratic gestures hint at a fragile mind. He insists he remembers the place from a time before the ruins, convinced that buried evidence will prove his claim.
As the bus pulls away from a precarious, fence‑lined section of the site, Herb’s agitation grows, his elbows fluttering as he whispers about humanity’s forgotten past on the Red Planet. The narrator, a pragmatic observer hired to keep the visitors in line, watches the tension mount between curiosity and dread. Listeners are drawn into a fragile balance of scientific intrigue and the unsettling possibility that the ancient Martians were never human at all.
Language
en
Duration
~29 minutes (27K characters)
Publisher of text edition
Project Gutenberg
Credits
Produced by Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net
Release date
2010-05-30
Rights
Public domain in the USA.

1909–1965
A prolific magazine-era science fiction writer, this Golden Age regular became closely linked with Amazing Stories and built a reputation on lively, idea-driven short fiction. Writing mainly as Rog Phillips, he also published under several other names during a busy pulp career.
View all books
by Rog Phillips

by Rog Phillips

by Rog Phillips

by Rog Phillips

by Rog Phillips

by Rog Phillips

by Rog Phillips

by Rog Phillips