Mars (35 page)

“This is where we should have landed,” he was saying, looking out from the screen as if he knew his eyes would meet hers. “There’s moisture here and I’m willing to bet that the temperatures down at the bottom of the valley are significantly warmer than up here on the plain.”

He went on, his eyes sparkling as he described the rock
formations that looked to him so much like the adobe cliff dwellings of southwestern America.

“He’s a handsome red devil, isn’t he?”

Joanna whirled on the stool. Tony Reed was standing there, one arm casually leaning on the transparent plastic hood of an empty isolation box. He wore a black turtleneck shirt beneath his tan coveralls. One corner of his lips was curved slightly in a strange sardonic smile. Joanna stared at him for a wordless moment. It was almost as if Reed’s face had been split in two: half his face was smiling, the other half not.

“Jamie makes a strong case for studying the canyon,” she said. “The chances for finding living organisms, or even the fossils of extinct species …”

Reed moved closer to her, pulled up the other stool, and straddled it. Gesturing toward the screen he said, “Our Indian friend seems to think he’s found the ruins of an ancient village. How preposterous.”

Sudden anger flared within Joanna. “How do you know it is preposterous? How can we say anything about this world until we have explored all of it?”

Reed’s smile widened. “I’m not a betting man, but I’d be willing to wager long odds that there are no ancient civilizations to be found on Mars.”

“Yes, and a century and a half ago you would have bet that Schliemann would never find the ruins of Troy.”

“My, aren’t we fiery!” Reed laughed.

Joanna turned back to the computer, but Vosnesensky’s heavy-featured, morose face filled the screen now. She clicked it off.

“You’re right, of course,” Reed admitted easily. “One mustn’t jump to conclusions—either way.”

Joanna accepted it as an apology.

“Jamie’s doing good work, isn’t he?” Reed asked rhetorically. “I’m glad we fought to get him onto the team.”

“He is a great asset,” Joanna agreed.

“Much better than Hoffman would have been, although I wonder how DiNardo would have fared here.”

“What do you mean?”

Leaning both his elbows on the lab bench behind him, Reed appeared as relaxed as if he were in a London pub. “Well, DiNardo has this enormous reputation, you know. If
he had seen what Jamie’s seen out there at the Grand Canyon, I wonder if his prestige would have been big enough to get us to move the camp there.”

“The entire base?”

Reed cocked his head slightly, sending a boyish lock of sandy hair over his forehead. “If Jamie’s right and the canyon is the best place to look for life, then we should at least set up a secondary camp there, don’t you think?”

Nodding slowly, Joanna said, “But we can’t pick up this entire dome and move it.”

“With that silly Japanese getting himself killed,” Reed answered, “the mission controllers probably won’t allow us to do anything that’s even a millimeter off our official schedule.”

“But the schedule was meant to be flexible! They cannot hold us to a preset routine, as if we were puppets.”

“You think not? I can’t help supposing, though, that if DiNardo were here we’d already be working out a plan to set up a camp on the floor of the canyon.”

“That is what Jamie wants to do, is it not?”

“Rather. But he’s in trouble with his own politicos back in the States, you know, over this Navaho nonsense he said when we landed. I doubt that his recommendations would be accepted by the powers that be.”

Joanna studied the English physician’s face. He was no longer grinning. He seemed completely serious.

“I can speak to my father about it,” she said. “I am sure he already knows about the possibility—or he will, as soon as today’s data reaches mission control.”

“Yes, surely your father would be helpful. I was thinking more of DiNardo, though. If we can get his agreement that we should set up a secondary camp in the canyon, that would help enormously, I should think.”

Joanna felt a thrill of excitement run through her. “Yes! Of course! They could not fail to agree with Father DiNardo.”

“Hardly,” said Reed.

“I will contact him myself,” Joanna said. “And suggest to my father that he enlist Father DiNardo’s aid, as well.”

“Yes, that’s the ticket.”

“I will send a message now, this evening. Right away.”

“Good show,” said Reed. He straightened up and got off
the stool. Leaning closer to Joanna he whispered, “We can accomplish a great deal, you and I, working behind the Scenes.”

“Oh, yes. Thank you. I am grateful for your help.”

“Think nothing of it, dear lady.”

But as he strolled casually away from the biology lab back toward his own cubicle, Reed thought: She’s hot for Jamie, that’s for certain. Now the game is to work things out so that he remains out there in the Grand Canyon and she stays here. A thousand kilometers or so between them ought to give me enough working room. I’ll have her, sooner or later. All I need is patience. And a little help, which she herself will provide. How nice!

He actually whistled, tunelessly, as he strode past the wardroom where most of the others sat huddled together, discussing the day’s events like a gaggle of schoolchildren. Reed ignored them and headed for his cot and his dreams.

Jamie and Vosnesensky sat in the rover’s cockpit as they made their evening report. Once they were finished with their official duty, Pete Connors filled them in on the reactions to Konoye’s accident. While he watched the astronaut’s troubled features on the display screen in the center of the cockpit control panel, Jamie glanced at the secondary screen. The glowing curves of its graphic display showed that the ozone outgassing from the Martian dust in the airlock was now down almost to zero.

“The accident’s got everybody pretty down,” Connors was saying worriedly. “Dr. Li has been on the horn with Kaliningrad for hours now. God knows what they’re going to do.”

“But nothing went wrong with the equipment,” Jamie said. “The cosmonaut and the rest of the team worked just the way they’ve been trained. Konoye just had a stroke.”

“Or panicked for some reason and then suffered the stroke,” Vosnesensky said, heavy with gloom.

Connors was also deeply somber. “Whatever happened, the politicians are going apeshit. It doesn’t look good to have somebody killed. …”

“He wasn’t killed,” Jamie snapped. “He died.”

“D’you think that matters in Tokyo? Or Washington?” Connors growled.

“No, I guess it doesn’t.”

Vosnesensky said, “We will start back at first light tomorrow morning, as ordered. In the meantime, I will transmit to you all the videotape and other data we have accumulated.”

“Okay. I’ll set up the computer to receive your transmission.”

He’s not even mentioning the cliff dwellings, Jamie realized. Not a word about them.

“Can I talk with Dr. Patel, please?” he asked Connors. “Is he there?”

“Sure.”

In a few moments Connors’s image was replaced by the round, dark face of the geologist from India. Both the geologists on this mission are Indians, Jamie thought without humor. We can thank Columbus and his wacky sense of direction for that.

Patel’s dark skin seemed to shine always, as if covered with a fine sheen of perspiration or newly rubbed with oil. His eyes were large and liquid, giving him the innocent look of a child near tears.

“I would appreciate it, Rava, if you’d get O’Hara to put the videotape footage we shot today through the image-enhancement program,” Jamie said to his fellow geologist.

“Is there something in particular you wish me to examine?”

Jamie realized his fellow geologist had not bothered to listen to his oral report. Probably too busy gossiping with the rest of them about the accident.

“You’ll see a formation in a cleft set into the cliff face,” he said. After a moment’s hesitation, “It—it almost looks like buildings erected there deliberately.”

Those liquid dark eyes went even rounder. “Buildings?” Patel squeaked. “Artificial buildings?”

Jamie forced himself to state calmly, “The odds against them being artifacts are tremendous; you know that as well as I do.” He took a breath. “But they sure remind me of the cliff dwellings I’ve seen in the southwest.”

Patel blinked several times. Then he said, “Yes, of course. I will study the tapes most carefully. I will ask Dr. O’Hara to put them through the image-enhancement program. By the time you return here we will have the data thoroughly analyzed, I assure you.”

Jamie said, “Thanks.” In his gut he felt an irrational suspicion that they would distort the data, mess up the images, fix it so that the cliff dwellings he had seen would look like nothing more than weathered old rock.

He crawled into his bunk at last. Vosnesensky turned out all the lights except the dim telltales on the control panel up in the cockpit.

“Sleep well, Jamie,” the Russian said, yawning as he stretched out in the bunk on the opposite wall.

“You too, Mikhail.”

The soft night wind of Mars brushed past the parked rover, stroking its metallic skin mere inches away from Jamie’s listening ears. He strained to catch a hint of a voice in the wind, even the moaning wail of a long-dead Martian spirit. Nothing.

No ghosts haunting the night here, Jamie said drowsily to himself. He felt disappointed.

The red world was not only farther from Father Sun than the blue world. It was also much closer to the small worldlets that still swarmed in the darkness of the void, leftover bits and pieces from the time of the beginning. Often they streaked down onto the red world, howling like monsters as they traced their demon’s trails of fire across the pale sky.

Small, cold, bombarded by sky-demons, its air and water slowly wasting away, if the red world bore any life at all its creatures must have struggled mightily to keep the spark of existence glowing within them.

Even so, death struck swiftly, and without remorse.

One of the biggest of those devil worlds drifted close enough to the red world to feel its pull. It was a huge mountain of rock roaming through the darkness of space, a thousand times bigger than the rock that caused the Meteor Crater to the south of the land where The People live. For a thousand thousand years it danced a delicate ceremony with the red world, approaching it and then slipping away into the outer depths of the emptiness. Like the ritual dancers of The People it moved to the rhythm of eternity. Each time it approached the red world it skimmed closer, each near-miss a temporary reprieve, a promise of what was to come.

Finally it plunged down into the red world, roaring like all the furies of hell as it smashed into the crust. Under that titanic violence the rocks turned liquid almost down to the very core of the red world. An enormous cloud of burning dust boiled high into the atmosphere and spread swiftly from pole to pole. The shock rang through the whole body of the poor tortured red world, lifting up the ground on the opposite
side of the globe into a gigantic bulge. The very air of the red world was blown away almost completely.

Darkness covered the face of the red world. There was no day; only black night. The waters froze, later to be covered by the red dust sifting down through the pitifully thin air. The crust hardened over once again, but deep below, the rocks were still white-hot, liquid, seething. Volcanoes erupted for thousands of centuries afterward.

When the skies cleared at last, the red world was a scene of utter devastation. The seas were gone. The atmosphere was nothing more than a thin wisp of what it had once been. The ground was barren. Life, if it had ever existed on the red world at all, was nowhere to be seen.

N
EW YORK
: Alberto Brumado squinted when the overhead lights were turned on; then his eyes adjusted to the brightness. How much of my life have I spent in television studios? he asked himself. It must be years, many years, if you add up all the minutes and hours.

For the first time in his memory, though, he felt nervous about the impending interview. Not because it was American network television. Not because he would have to face a trio of experienced senior interrogators from the most prestigious newspaper, news magazine, and television network news department in the United States. He had fenced with such before.

The anxiety that rippled through his heart was that the interviewers smelled blood. The death of Dr. Konoye had brought the sharks out, circling, circling what they perceived as a wounded and bleeding Mars Project. There would be no gentility about this interview, no kid gloves. Brumado knew that he was in for a rough ordeal.

The technical crew had been uniformly kind, as usual. The matronly makeup woman smiled and chatted with him as she patted pancake on Brumado’s browned face. While he was still in the barber-type chair, the harried-looking producer had come in. Standing behind him and speaking to Brumado’s reflection in the big wall mirror, she assured him that all he had to do was to be natural, be himself, and the audience “will love you up.” The young assistant producer, younger than his own daughter, had done everything she could to put Brumado at ease. Accustomed to smilingly evasive politicians and brash entertainment stars who hid their anxieties behind banalities, she offered Brumado coffee, soft
drinks, even a Bloody Mary. Smiling tensely, he refused everything except water.

Now he was in the studio with the crew hiding behind their cameras and the electrician pinning the cordless microphone to his necktie just under his chin.

The show’s moderator walked onto the brightly lit set, up the carpeted two steps to the chair next to Brumado’s.

Extending a hand, he said, “Please don’t get up, Dr. Brumado. It was good of you to come on such short notice.”

“I want to dispel any doubts that may be in the public’s mind about this unfortunate tragedy,” Brumado replied as the moderator sat down. His microphone was already in place, hardly visible against his dark blue tie. He also wore a minuscule flesh-toned earphone like a hearing aid.