The Old Martians

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.