Red Planet Run (25 page)

For the rest, the place was as bare as Mother Hubbard’s cupboard. It was frustrating as hell. I wanted a sign, preferably in System English, saying, “Constructed in 499,937 B.C., by Alpha Centauri Contractors, Inc., press this button.” Then when I pressed the button I wanted the entire history of the Cydonia project to scroll up the wall, starting with who built it and why, and was anything in it likely to hurt my kids.

“Hey, Mom, watch this.”

Sean stuck his foot over the edge of the dish recessed into the floor, or tried to. It bounced back.

“Sean.”

“No, it’s okay. Watch.” He raised a hand and tried to push his palm into the circle of air encompassed by the edge of the dish. He couldn’t. I could hear him grunt with the effort over my headset. He flung up both arms, stood up on the toes of his goonsuit, and threw his body forward.

“Sean!” I shouted, starting around the circle.

He was laughing. “Look, Ma, no hands!” He wasn’t exactly floating through the air with the greatest of ease, but something I couldn’t see was holding him up, keeping him from falling face forward into the bowl. And off the bubble in the bowl.

“Hey, Mom, watch this.” I looked up, and saw Paddy’s attempt to vault over, feet first. Something nudged her feet aside. She tried again, same result. I tried it, pressing both hands out in front of me, and got nowhere. My palms tingled until I pulled back, but that could have been me, from the pressure I was exerting. I didn’t think so.

By now we had an audience, as the archaeologists deserted the view outside for the conundrum inside. One by one they tried to pierce whatever it was surrounding the depression in the floor, and one by one they failed. Whatever it was would not let so much as a fingertip through to the other side.

I stood back, watching, thinking. Paddy came up to stand next to me. “Isn’t this cool? Some kind of electrostatic force field, do you think?” She gave an excited laugh. “It’s like it’s a nucleus and we’re the electrons. Except we can walk away. Mom?”

I turned and walked to the window. With my back to it, the domed ceiling was merely an echo of the bubble in the bowl at the center of the room.

And then I got it. It was so simple, it fit so well with the few known facts that I couldn’t believe I hadn’t figured it out sooner. I looked at the bubble in the bowl. Its range would be horizon to horizon, with a 360-degree radial reach. I wondered if there would be some way of extending that reach to encompass the entire planet. I’d bet my last dime there was probably one—no, two—other mechanisms just like this one, spaced equidistantly around the planet.

Sean, less excited and more observant, came over to stand next to me. “What is it, Mom?”

I raised the halogen torch I was carrying and threw it overhand, not as hard as I could, but on a trajectory that should have had it impacting on the bubble two seconds later.

What happened then supported my thesis and scared the hell out of everyone else. Halfway there, the torch was nudged to one side. Nudged, not knocked. Its original trajectory was altered just enough to make it land outside the circle. It bounced once and remained intact, a testament to Eveready durability and craftsmanship.

Nobody moved for a moment, and then everyone moved at once, hurling objects at the dish—three more torches, two whiskbrooms, and an oxygen tank. The dish never missed a catch, nudging them all out of the way with gentle deftness.

Into the second silence I said, “Art?”

Evans’ voice was minus its usual cheerful drawl. “Yes, Star?”

“What was that you said about missing your first approach to Mars?”

There was a brief silence, and then he said, “We missed our first approach, and our second and third corrections were screwed practically before we entered them into the IMU. In the end, we got down with some real seat-of-the-pants stuff, basically just dead-reckoned our way in.”

“What happened?”

“We don’t know. All of a sudden in the middle of our orbit we were off course.”

“Which orbit?”

“Our second.”

Paddy moved suddenly on my right, but kept silent.

“Did you run a check?”

“We ran a dozen after we managed to get down. There wasn’t anything wrong. The verniers weren’t even firing; it was as if something was fending us off, like a bumper between a boat and a dock.…” His voice trailed off, and the entire group turned from us to stare at the dish in the center of the room.

“Do you think that’s what it is, Mom?” Sean said. “A defense mechanism?”

“The Great Galactic Ghoul,” Paddy murmured, marveling.

They were both right. “Paddy, do you remember how many probes and ships have been lost in attempting to orbit or land on Mars?”

“Gosh, Mom, I don’t know. A lot. The majority of them, that’s for certain. What was it Crip was griping about on the way in? Something about only one in fourteen early UER probes making it down to the surface intact?”

“And that one only transmitted a couple of pixels,” Sean confirmed.

I walked back to the dish and leaned against it. Again, my arm tingled from shoulder to wrist. “Did any of you feel anything when you tried this?”

“A kind of buzz?” someone suggested.

“A ripple, like a wave of some kind.”

“Like a sonic rifle on low?”

“You’re thinking maybe compressed sound waves?” Evans asked.

“Maybe.” I turned my back to the dish. The tingle transferred from arm to spine. I crossed my arms over my chest and enjoyed the feeling of being propped up by nothing. “Supposing I was construction boss on a site located on the fourth—or fifth—planet out of the system of a main-sequence yellow star, surface temperature fifty-five hundred degrees Celsius.”

I paused for a moment, thinking that over. Just the right temperature for a Librarian’s ship to plug into and refuel. Main-sequence stars made up ninety percent of the stars in the known universe. Smart of the Librarians to build their ship around the most available fuel supply. Not like us Terrans, who propelled our best and fastest ships with nuclear propellant, the source of which we had exhausted on Terra and were rapidly depleting in the Belt. Maybe Brother Moses had the right idea after all. I thought of Simon’s reaction to that and grinned involuntarily.

“Mom?” Sean’s voice drew me back to the present.

“Okay,” I said, “suppose further that my team had to leave that planet, and leave everything behind, and—”

“Why?”

I shrugged. “The project ran out of funds, I was called home after a change of administration, I’d accumulated all the data I needed from this particular project, I got a promotion—I’m just supposing, here. So suppose further that I’d done some of my best work here on Cydonia, and now I’d been ordered out, and I couldn’t be sure when I’d get back, if ever. This is a solar system pretty far down the arm of a mediocre galaxy not exactly located in the center of the universe, remember.” I waved a hand toward the window. “And look around. Mars is lousy with splosh craters. What causes splosh craters?”

“Meteors.”

“Well, suppose after all my hard work I can’t bear the thought of a stray meteor messing up my handiwork. What would I do, providing I had the technological know-how?”

Sean’s voice was excited. “Of course! You’d build a defense mechanism!”

“Of course. And five hundred thousand years later the inhabitants of the
third
planet in the same system poke their heads up for a look and the Tholus goes into action, resulting in the loss or misdirection of probe after probe, and great anguish at various Terran Departments of Space.”

“I’ll bet the force generated is proportional to the mass that passes in front of it,” Sean said, frowning at the dish. “It’s not a killing machine. It exerts just enough effort to nudge whatever is approaching it out of the way.”

“And that’s all it takes,” Paddy said, nodding furiously inside her helmet. “A little nudge at any approaching object, just enough to knock them a little bit off course. Remember that trip around the Belt with Mom and Dad? Remember that corkscrew approach we made to No Return? We almost missed it completely because of a misfire in the portside vernier that lasted less than a second.”

“Remember the time Leif was missing for two days because he came too close to 19201 Hi Ho and its mass moved him one-tenth of one centimeter off course?”

“It doesn’t take much,” I agreed.

“I like ‘Great Galactic Ghoul’ better than ‘the Tholus,’ though.”

“So do I, Paddy,” I said.

There was a cough and a harrumph over my headset. “A most interesting speculation, Ms. Svensdotter, but I must remind everyone that it is only the sheerest of speculation.” Dr. Woolley looked at me, leaning up against nothing, and harrumphed again. “It is, of course, one possible thesis.”

Do you have another? I almost asked him, but forbore. He was quite right. The tingle running up my spine was proof enough for me, but it would not be for others, not until we took a ship out of the Martian atmosphere and made a series of test runs at insertion. I said mildly, “Dr. Woolley, did you count the steps up to this floor?”

“What? Why, no.”

“There are five hundred of them.”

“Fifty floors,” someone said.

“Fifty floors between ground level and top floor.” I looked back at Woolley. “What else do you think is in this building?”

Woolley sounded testy. “I don’t know, what?”

“Did you notice the exterior?”

“Certainly I did.”

“Did you take a close look at the paneling?”

“Of course.”

“And?”

“And,” Evans said, taking Woolley off the hook, “we reckoned it was some type of solar cells.”

“I figure that, too. Why’d they build this place so tall?” I answered my own question: “To have the largest possible area for solar collection and energy generation. And they shaped the building like an air foil to avert for as long as possible its being buried and covering up those cells.”

“Batteries?” Sean hazarded.

“There would have to be, wouldn’t there? With the certain prospect of yearly dust storms that literally block out the sunlight for months on end, there would have to be a backup power supply built into the system. If you were going to go away and leave something for centuries, for millennia even, you’d want to have enough redundancies built into the systems to last. My best guess is, everything beneath this top floor is just one big solar generator, backed up about a thousand times.”

“And they don’t want us dimwits messing with it,” Evans said. “That’s why no exits off the stairs except this one.”

Sean gave a long, blissful sigh. “I can’t wait to tell Crip.”

“Yeah,” Paddy said. “He’ll be relieved to know it wasn’t him.”

“Y’all—” Evans said, and paused. “I keep thinking about that door downstairs.”

“What about it?”

“About how it was just the right size, and how the steps were just the right height for us to climb. This thing is awful user-friendly, don’t y’all reckon?”

“You think they were expecting us?” Sean said slowly.

“Oh, please,” Paddy said, “not again.”

“I shore do,” Evans said doggedly. “And once we got up this far, they protected the only thing of value in it from our ignorance.”

Some circumstantial evidence is very strong, as when you find a trout in the milk.

 

—Henry David Thoreau

 

A YELLOW LIGHT FLASHED
inside my helmet. We’d been EVA for more than six hours and my goonsuit was running on empty. “Time to head back to the ship, boys and girls. Folks, it’ll be a tight fit, but you’re welcome to come aboard the
Kayak
for a light lunch.”

Naturally they all wanted a gander at our balloon, so I led a quick march down the stairs and back to the rim of the crater, which was beginning to look more regular in feature every time I looked at it. Inside
Kayak
, the gravediggers oohed and ahed over the golden-crowned sparrows while Sean got busy with lunch, herb omelets with cheese sauce. That sauce effectively wiped out our store of sharp cheddar and put the FBE synthesizer on overtime for a week, but the omelets were superb and the crowd went wild. I got more elbow in my face than lunch, but the talk was worth it. “They weren’t expecting trouble from the surface,” Claudia Sestieri said thoughtfully.

She was a slender brunette with a thin, sharp-featured face and a rare smile. Sitting cross-legged on the floor next to her, Irene Sukenik ran a finger around her plate and licked it clean. “Maybe Star was right and the Ghoul was built specifically to deflect meteorites. That it knocked our probes and our ships off course was just coincidence. They weren’t expecting anyone to land and walk over.”

“Then why the door and the stairs? And the Face?” Amedeo de Caro had the classic Latin features of a Michelangelo sculpture, broad brow, high cheekbones, and square, firm chin all clothed in flawless olive skin. His brown eyes were ardent and thickly lashed. His body looked as if it had been designed for competition in the decathlon. He was a beautiful young man, and Paddy was watching him with far too much interest for my peace of mind.

“Why the Face?” I echoed. “What do you mean?”

“The Face is what caused Terrans to take a closer look at Cydonia in the first place. Why build the Face to draw our attention to Cydonia, then build the Ghoul to keep us away?”

Howard Carter, a stocky man with dark blond hair that looked as if it had been cut with a pair of sheep shears, and wide blue eyes that never really focused on anyone except his wife, said, “Analyses of the proportions of the Face indicate a similarity between its features and the features of Homo erectus.”

His wife, Evelyn, was a bouncy redhead whose words came in a rush punctuated by a quick, infectious grin. “Maybe they were watching us.” She frowned. “But if that was the case, why did they leave?”

“Last night on the radio, Tom and Jeannie were telling us that the east and south faces of the Pyramid are really damaged, compared to the rest of the structure. Maybe they were attacked.”