Mars (59 page)

“We have not seen any other evidence for
intelligent
life, Jamie. I am merely suggesting …”

“There’s that face carved on the rock up in the Acidalia region.”

“Oh, James! Surely you don’t believe that!”

He shrugged. “Now that we know that there’s life on Mars, who knows what to believe?”

“That there were once intelligent Martians?” She was reaching for a fresh hypo.

Looking away from the glinting needle, Jamie said, “The planet’s had billions of years. Time enough for intelligence to evolve—and then get wiped out when the climate changed.”

Joanna shook her head as she tied the rubber tubing above Jamie’s elbow. “But there is no evidence, no remains of civilization, no ruins.”

“All covered up by the dust storms.” He pumped up his arm. “Except for my village up there in the cliff. Maybe there are more …
ouch!”

“I’m sorry.” She had missed his vein. It took her three tries before she got blood.

Jamie said, “This changes everything for you, doesn’t it?”

“What do you mean?”

“Finding life. You’re a famous woman now. You’ll be more famous than your father.”

She blinked several times. “I had not thought about that. Once we get back … ”

“We won’t be able to settle into normal lives after all. At least you won’t.”

“Nor you,” Joanna said. “If it had not been for you, we would never have gotten here.”

“You’ve fulfilled your father’s greatest expectations,” Jamie said, as gently as he knew how. “You don’t have to be afraid of him anymore.”

“I am not afraid of my father!”

“I mean, he’ll have to let go of you now.”

She looked into his face for a long moment, troubled, uncertain. “I will have to let go of him, too, then.”

“Yes.” Jamie nodded even though it hurt his head. Neither of them smiled.

Ilona and Connors took their turn in the lab module together while Joanna went to the lavatory and prepared for bed. Jamie, too restless even to think about sleep, made his way up to the cockpit. The storm shrilled continuously outside, making the night blacker than any he had yet experienced on Mars. He peeked through the thermal shroud, saw that there was nothing to see, then let it snap back into place.

He felt no fear of the billowing dust racing past. To Jamie it was more like soft cottony clouds enwrapping them; he had no sense of gritty sand particles that could scratch and grind
metal. I could walk out there if I had to, even at the height of this storm, he told himself. It might even be fun.

When will it end? he asked himself. Maybe I should call Toshima and ask for his forecast. Then he thought, Why bother? It’ll end when it ends, no matter what the meteorologist says. Fingering the comforting smooth stone of the bear fetish in his pocket, Jamie told himself it was foolish to try to press things. Especially when you have no power over them. Wait out the storm. Wait out all the storms.

He felt tired, utterly tired, yet too keyed up to crawl into his bunk. Like a kid the night before Christmas. So damned tired he can barely keep his eyes open, yet too excited to go to sleep.

Connors and Ilona are spending a long time in the lab. Is she up to her old tricks again? Well, if Pete can get it up when he feels as bad as he looks, then more credit to him. And Ilona—he almost laughed—she’s like the good old Post Office: neither rain nor storm nor dark of night will stop her.

He rubbed a hand across his bristly chin. Maybe I ought to shave. If we get the antenna fixed and we’re on TV tomorrow I ought at least to try to look respectable. On the other hand, maybe I’ll look worse shaved than with a four-day growth. Maybe. Li won’t want the media to know we’re sick. Brumado must know about his daughter and the rest of us, but we sure as hell don’t want the media to pick up on it. They’ll go nuts. Martian fever. Everything we’ve accomplished will get buried the instant they suspect one of us has so much as the sniffles.

He realized that there are people on Earth who would be afraid of any Martian life. The idea of life on other worlds destroyed their comforting self-esteem, attacked their religious beliefs, shattered their view of the universe. Or worse. The UFO nuts must be going crazy! They’ll be expecting a Martian invasion, at the very least. The thought startled Jamie. Saddened him beyond measure.

Absently, his mind churning, Jamie leaned across the control panel and turned on the rover’s headlamps. Peeking through the thermal shroud again, he. saw a softly diffused grayish light that revealed nothing, just a dimensionless glow like a thick, billowing fog. The Martian wind sang its endless song, although he thought it sounded a tone deeper than before. Is that good news or bad? he wondered.

They’re going to make us turn back tomorrow, he knew. Without getting near the cliff village. They’re going to say we’re too sick to go on and make us head back for the dome.

Jamie knew that it was the right thing to do. Four lives depended on it. Yet as he peered out at the pearly gray clouds wafting past the rover’s canopy he wondered if there were some way he could get them to agree to pushing forward instead of retreating.

I could walk it, he thought. I could walk there from here and get to see it, climb up the cliff and put my hands on it. I could do it.

And then die. There’s no way to get back again; the suit can’t keep you alive for that long. But I could at least get there and see it for myself. It wouldn’t be a bad place to die. Maybe that’s the meaning of my dream.

Tony Reed could not sleep either.

He had retired to his cubicle, of course, as had the seven others living in the dome when the lights had automatically dimmed for the night. Vosnesensky insisted on keeping exactly to the mission schedule except for dire emergencies, and Mikhail Andreivitch was becoming more of a stickler than ever, grouchy and brooding, as the illness took hold of him.

As soon as he heard the Russian’s deep snoring, like a farm tractor rumbling back and forth, Reed got up from his bunk and tiptoed in his bulky slipper socks back to his infirmary. The dome felt cold in the darkness. Reed dared not turn on the overhead lights as he padded past the silent workstations. He reached the infirmary and, sliding its door shut, groped around his desk to his chair and reached for his desktop computer as he sat down. He found its power switch by touch and turned it on. The little screen glowed orange like a cheery fire.

They’re dying, Reed knew. They’re all dying and they’re looking to me to save them. And I don’t know what to do! He scrolled through the data from the latest medical checks. Nothing new. Nothing he could see that offered the slightest clue as to what might be infecting them.

Tony shook his head as he stared at the screen. He himself felt fine: a bit tired, eyes burning from overwork, but otherwise
fine. None of the symptoms the others had. How can that be? he asked himself. We all eat the same foods, breathe the same air. Yet they’re all sick, every one of them, in the rover and here in the dome. And I’m not.

Leaning back in his spindly plastic chair, Reed half closed his eyes and steepled his long fingers on his chest. Think, man, he snarled to himself. Use the brain up there inside your skull and
think.

Proposition one: Both the team in the rover and the crew here in the dome have come down with it, whatever it is. Therefore it cannot be an infection from the life forms that the rover team has found.

Yes, true. But can it be an infectious organism in the air? Even though theory says Martian parasites could not possibly attack visitors from another planet, might there be some sort of highly adaptable virus in the air? We know that there is life on Mars. What if there are organisms floating in the air?

Reed shook his head, trying to dismiss the idea, We’ve sampled the air. Monique has tested it with every piece of equipment she has. Vosnesensky has checked the air purifiers. They’ve found nothing. And the air in here is Earth-normal, not Martian. Any Martian organisms would be killed by the high levels of oxygen.

And yet—we don’t have an electron microscope. A virus could slip past Monique’s tests, especially since we don’t know exactly what to look for. Maybe they
like
oxygen. And we aren’t consistent; we’re very careful not to contaminate Martian soil or air samples with our bugs, aren’t we? If the bigwigs actually believed their theory, why would they worry that we might possibly infect Mars?

It just doesn’t make any sense, Reed told himself. If it’s a native Martian organism infecting us, why haven’t I been infected? Why am I healthy while all the others are dying?

For the first time he could remember, Tony Reed felt guilty. And inadequate.

He also felt terribly afraid. But that was an emotion he had experienced all his life.

Dr. Yang Meilin slept, but not well. She was troubled by a dream. A nightmare. She was an intern once again in her native city of Wuxi. The great famine had the entire province
in its grip. The streets were so littered with the dead that people wore perfumed gauze masks to keep the stench of decaying flesh from their nostrils.

Dr. Yang was at the hospital, in a ward jammed with squalling babies. Emaciated limbs and bloated bellies. Yet even though the babies were being fed with the supplies sent by the International Red Cross, they were still dying.

She was making love with the handsome doctor from Beijing, but she could not give herself to him totally because she could hear the painful crying of the babies through the thin curtains they had pulled around the bed. The doctor returned to Beijing the next morning without even bidding her farewell. And the babies continued to whimper and shriek. And die.

They are not dying of malnutrition, Dr. Yang knew. And even as she said that to herself her dream changed, shifted, mutated: the babies were astronauts, the hospital ward was the dome on the red surface of Mars.

She felt totally helpless. Why are they dying? It is my responsibility to save them, to help them, to keep them alive and return them to health. It is my responsibility to remember. Remember.

She sat bolt upright in her bunk aboard the
Mars 2
spacecraft, instantly awake.

But she could not remember what the dream was trying to tell her.

W
ASHINGTON
: Staring out her hotel room window, Edith held the phone tightly against her ear.

“You’re fired, Edie,” said Howard Francis’s angry, rasping voice.

The first thought that went through her mind was, There goes the expense account.

“But why me?” Edith asked. “I tried to get you …”

Francis’s voice screeched, “You had the fuckin’ story an hour and a half before anybody else and you just sat on it! We could’ve been on the air before all the other networks, even before CNN, if you had done your job right!”

“I tried to get y’all. I tried to get through to the news director, but some shitty little tramp wouldn’t let me.”

“She was the assistant news director, for Chrissakes! You shoulda told her!”

“She would have cut my throat.”

“So what? The
network
would have been first on the air with the biggest story of all time!”

Fuck the network, Edith thought. Aloud, she said, “I tried to tell her how important it was. She just wouldn’t believe me. I bet even if I told her what it was, she would have thought I was just some nut.”

“Oh, my god, Edie, my own ass is in a sling around here. I’ll be lucky if they don’t fire me!”

“That’d be too bad,” Edith said, her voice brittle with anger. I hope they fire all you assholes, she added silently as she hung up.

Later that morning, when Alberto Brumado picked her up on his way to NASA headquarters, Edith told him her sad news.

“Weil,” he said, glancing around the quietly opulent hotel lobby, “I suppose you could move in with me.”

Edith felt her brows go up.

Brumado smiled his boyish smile. “There is a guest suite on the top floor of the house. You can have complete privacy. I did not mean to suggest anything more.”

Edith gave him a smile in return. “I appreciate it, Alberto. I sure need a place—until I can find a job.”

“Perhaps I can help you there, too. I have many acquaintances among the media people.”

Edith marveled at how smart Brumado really was, understanding that the media people he knew were acquaintances, not friends.

Jamie awoke well before dawn. The wind had stopped! He lay flat on his bunk, listening. The storm must be over. There was no sound of the wind, no sounds in the darkened rover at all except Connors’s fitful snoring and the faint rustling of Joanna turning on her bunk just above him. And the ever-present background hum of electrical power and air fans.

Slowly, silently, he slid out of the bunk and padded in his socks and coveralls to the cockpit. He pulled back the thermal shroud. Still black night outside. There was no discernible moonlight on Mars; its two satellites were too tiny to shed much light on the planet’s surface. Jamie switched on the rover’s headlamps. The air was clear. He could see the cliff wall out there standing gray and rugged like the ghost of some ancient grandfather.

Quickly he turned the headlamps off, closed the shroud, and crept back to his bunk, satisfied that the storm had indeed ended. He crawled beneath the thin blanket and soon fell back to sleep.

He dreamed of Joanna, the two of them walking across the desert wearing ordinary street clothes. He could not tell if the desert was on Earth or Mars. A city shone on the horizon, white and sparkling in the hot sun. But no matter how long they walked the city came no closer. They trudged along for hours, tired, thirsty, sweaty, but the gleaming towers remained nothing more than a hope in the distance. They became weaker and weaker. Joanna collapsed in his arms, suddenly naked. They both sank to the burning sand, dying, too weak to go any farther.

Jamie had his fetish in his hand, but the little stone bear
melted beneath the awful heat and flowed between his fingers.

He was reaching for it, scrabbling in the sand to recover it, when he awoke and realized he was pawing at the sheet that had become tangled between his legs.