Boundary

by Eric Flint

  "That's not even a skeleton," Helen said finally. "I'm not sure what to make of it."

  "I thought it was like some kind of squid," A.J. said. "I know there was a lot of squiddage back then. Squids with shells, if I remember right. Ammonites, they were called?"

  Joe frowned. "Well, we do have a sort of cephalopodic outline here." He sketched an elongated oval in the air. "Those could be tentacles, sort of. I only see three of them, though. And it looks almost like there are more at the rear."

  "A lot shorter, though," Helen pointed out. "And much of the rest looks like it is a skeleton. Well, sort of. Weird though it is, that part here, near the longer, um, tentacles, looks like a skull to me, and it's attached to these other parts. But it's not an ammonite or any kind of shell, that's for damn sure. And what's the segmentation effect we have here? What are those things you're rendering in blue, A.J.? Look like layered armor plates or something."

  A.J. shrugged. "Like I said, don't ask me what they are. But I can extract one for you, no problem."

  He glanced into his VRD, mumbled some barely audible words, tapped out orders on an imaginary keyboard, and suddenly one of the "plates" glowed and seemed to spiral up and expand, filling a secondary window at the top of the image.

  There were immediate startled exclamations from the three others in the tent.

  "My god, Jackie. That's your mystery fossil!" Joe almost shouted.

  If Helen had had any lingering thoughts that A.J. was playing some kind of practical joke, this eliminated them. None of them had mentioned Jackie's unique find to him, and A.J. certainly had never had a chance to see it.

  Yet there was no doubt about it. The "shell" Jackie had found was now revealed to be one of many sequential components in what appeared to be some kind of arm.

  "And the . . . tentacle on the right," Joe said, pointing. "There. It's shorter than the others. I'll bet that it lost part of the arm, maybe in a fight with the raptors, and so that part got weathered out."

  "But what was it?" Helen demanded, returning to the main question. "How do those plates come into the picture? They're not armor—the attachment points make that clear. They're internal structures of some kind. But I don't see any ordinary bones or anything, so . . ."

  "Maybe they are bones," Jackie suggested quietly.

  Helen stopped short and looked more closely at the image. Her classes in reconstruction stood out more clearly now in her mind than ever before. She visualized the connections, the necessary methods for locomotion, the attachment points as related to the way the— arm plates?—were clearly meant to fit. She could see Joe's face going through the same steps, and that Joe was finding the conclusion hard to believe.

  "A.J., can I use your interface?" she asked. "Or can you hook the simulation up to something I can access?"

  "Your portable have standard wireless? Sure, hold on." A moment later, he said, "Okay, tell it to access WEIRDSIM. The interface should be pretty straightforward."

  Helen saw the interface come up in front of her. Not that different from the one she used at the lab, actually. A.J. clearly understood the totality of his field, including user requirements. For several minutes there was mostly silence as Helen patched in her own reconstruction data, modified it, cursed softly as she realized she needed something unique, queried the Net for a formula that would describe what she wanted, added that in.

  "Here goes. Take a look at this."

  The general display flickered, and a long, slender window opened across the site display. The plates moved forward and backward in a motion similar to that of a telescope or old-style antenna, the individual parts extending to make a longer unit, then pulling back to retract the tentaclelike arm into a shorter, fatter configuration. It flexed and moved in a manner that was both familiar and subtly, disquietingly wrong. A stick-figure simulation showed the shorter, wider "tentacles" moving in a peculiar rhythm that pushed the weird thing along with surprising speed.

  It certainly wasn't impossible, mechanically or biologically speaking. But it was clearly not a method of locomotion used by any form of life that Helen had ever seen or read about.

  Joe's head lifted and he stared incredulously at the imaged fossil again. He then turned to Helen. She lifted her head, stared into his eyes, and then nodded slowly.

  "My god. Helen, this is it! This is the biggest find in three centuries—in history, dammit!"

  "And you and Jackie might want to get very far away before I finish this dig, too," Helen said softly.

  "What the—? Oh."

  Joe and Jackie looked at each other. Their expressions showed that they understood what Helen was saying.

  A.J., however, was obviously in the dark. "Um, what's the problem? One second you're practically ready to start writing your Nobel Prize speeches. The next minute you're acting as if Jack the Ripper just came in."

  Joe pointed at the image. "If Helen publishes a full report on that, it'll probably wreck her career."

  "Well, not quite that," Helen said, shaking her head. "I've got tenure, after all, so I'd keep collecting a paycheck. But it would most likely get me relegated to the status of a crackpot. At least in the eyes of most of my colleagues."

  "So screw 'em," A.J. snorted. "They don't believe you, too bad for them. It's right there in front of 'em!"

  "A.J., that may work for you—your imaging work deals with real solid stuff that no one can argue with. But paleontologists are more in the position of detectives trying to figure out what happened with only a handful of clues."

  Joe's tone of voice was that of a parent trying to explain the facts of life to a stubborn eight-year-old. Given that A.J. was, in point of fact, not more than a year or two younger than Joe, Helen found it somewhat amusing.

  But she could see that A.J. was beginning to bridle at the tone, so she intervened.

  "Look, A.J., it's just a fact that paleontologists tend to be very conservative, in a scientific sense. Nor, by the way, do I say that critically. Joe's right, you know. We do have to work from mostly disconnected facts, just like detectives—and the fossil record is about as far removed as you can get from what anyone in their right mind would call a 'perfect crime scene.' Our data is hundreds of millions of year old, and fragmented to boot. There's so much gray area—so many different ways anything can be interpreted—that members of my profession generally look cross-eyed whenever somebody comes up with a sweeping proposition. Especially one that flies completely in the face of previous findings."

  A.J. set his jaw. "So, what are you saying? You want to dump all this data and forget the dig?"

  "Hell, no!" Helen said. She glanced at her two co-workers. "They're just worried. Mostly about me, and it's really sweet of you, Joe." Joe blushed.

  "No, I just had to make sure they knew what might happen. You, A.J., I'm not worried about. Like Joe said, on your side no one will care what my interpretations of the data are, as long as the data you got is bona fide—and my excavation will prove that beyond any shadow of a doubt. But if I'm going to survive professionally, I'm going to have to be very, very careful about how I report this."

  A.J. shrugged. Somehow he managed to make even that gesture a bit theatrical.

  "Hey, as long as my pretty pictures don't go to waste, I'm happy. And if you end up in a controversy, it'll be free publicity for me. But it'd be a crying shame for them to be stupid enough to blackball you. I can tell a professional when I work with one."

  He stretched. "Well, it's off to bed for me, and then back to the lab tomorrow. Thanks a lot for calling me in—this has been pretty challenging and interesting—and looks like it's going to be fun to watch the fireworks coming up." He grinned and headed off to the tent they'd set up for him.

  "So," Joe said finally, after A.J.'s footsteps had faded away. "How are you going to approach it?"

  "I don't have to decide yet, Joe." Helen was still staring at the image of the impossible. "I have some vague ideas, but I've got months to finish the dig and it'll be at least a year
after that before I can get anything published. I think I'll just wait and see what comes up. Wait and see."

  PART II: QUARRLES

  Controversy, n: a prolonged public dispute,

  debate, or contention; disputation concerning a matter

  of opinion; contention, strike, or argument.

  Chapter 5

  A.J. Baker skipped down the hall, drawing tolerant stares from other members of the Ares Project. He might have just turned twenty-eight years old, but after the year or so he'd been with Ares they had stopped expecting him to act much more than eighteen. He bounced through Glenn Friedet's office door, making the harried-looking project director jump.

  "I swear, A.J.," Glenn sighed, "more than half of my gray hairs come from you."

  "Well, let me see if I can make your day a happier one, Fearless Leader." A.J. slapped a sheet of paper down in front of Glenn.

  That got Glenn's attention. "Paper? From you?"

  A.J. grinned, smugly aware of his reputation as someone so far out on the bleeding edge that he considered paper and papyrus to be equally outmoded.

  "You won't begrudge me the death of that tree, Glenn."

  Glenn's gaze scanned the paper. "They went for it!"

  "You better believe they did!" He bounced around the office. "Yeah! Yeah! Yeah! I get to build Tinkerbell, Ariel, and the rest of my Faeries! And get to make all the rest of your engineers modify the designs on Pirate!"

  The latter made Glenn wince. Wince twice, actually, first at A.J.'s official use of the very unofficial nickname of the Automated Arean Reconnaissance Rover and Return module. Officially A2R3—which had led to its own spate of Star Wars jokes—the longhand acronym AARRR had been pronounced in such a way as to inevitably be followed by "matey," "walk the plank," and so on, thereby causing the obvious moniker of Pirate to refer to the test vehicle.

  The second wince was at the equally inevitable complaints the redesign would engender from the engineers.

  A.J. recognized both winces with satisfaction. "Hey, Glenn, I told them I would win this one. They should've planned for it."

  "Actually, they probably did. But with two more months going by than we'd expected, we were getting pretty settled into the other design."

  "So, do I call up NASA and tell them to keep their money?"

  Glenn laughed. "Not a chance. We can use all we can get, and none of the critical construction stages have been passed yet— though this was close."

  "I'll go get things started in RDD, then. You get someone processing the files—I've already digisigned everything to authorize my end and you'll find the secure contract files in your inbox."

  A.J. jogged out, giving another whoop of triumph as he exited the office area. His grin grew even wider as he headed toward Research, Development and Design.

  It was finally sinking in. Despite his words, he hadn't been nearly so sure NASA would go for his proposal. It made sense, true, but sense often didn't have much to do with government contracts, especially when the government agency in question was competing with the proposing private organization.

  The Ares Project.

  It had been A.J.'s dream since he was a kid to be able to go into space, and especially to land on Mars. But despite some initial rumbles in that direction in the very early part of the twenty-first century, the government's efforts to land a manned mission on the Red Planet had progressed only haltingly, with the vast complexity, immense inertia, and often wrongheaded design strategies that had characterized government space missions for years.

  With a new generation of engineers agitating for private space missions, the U.S. government had finally authorized a few incentives for private space work. A series of prizes had been established for achieving certain space-travel goals, with a general eye towards eventually reaching Mars.

  The prizes involved were mere pittances, needless to say, from the point of view of most government agencies and megacorporations. But they were large enough to warrant an attempt by moderate-sized consortia of interested organizations. The idea itself had its genesis in Robert Zubrin's The Case For Mars, and the Ares Project had been formed to seize the opportunity. Many of the founders were, of course, the same people who had hounded the government into arranging the prizes. Collectively, the group had gained the nickname of the Nuts That Roared, for their Grand Fenwickian victory over the ponderous and generally unswervable inertia of official space programs.

  The public had started to take notice when the Ares Project successfully orbited, deorbited, and retrieved a fully functional man-capable space module—and did it for a million dollars less than the prize money for that achievement. But it was the follow-on Ares-2, a smaller but fully automated sensing satellite, that galvanized public opinion. The completely privately constructed spacecraft reached the Red Planet, used aerobraking to achieve orbital velocity, and sent back multiple high-quality images. And did it at a smaller cost than any equivalent government probe to date.

  Stung into high gear by these successes, the politicians had showered money onto the space program. NASA and its associated partner agencies suddenly found themselves with quadrupled budgets and a mandate to get a manned spacecraft to Mars—and the unspoken mandate to manage the task before the Ares Project beat them to it.

  Politics and government approaches still influenced the work at NASA, of course, and part of that caused NASA to avoid using many of the approaches which Ares used. This suited members of the Project, like A.J., just fine. If NASA decided to copy their methods, it might well outdo the Project despite its current lead.

  For A.J.'s purposes, one important way in which they had taken a lesson from the Project was to avoid what Zubrin had called the "Siren Call" of the moon: i.e., to see the establishment of a moon base as a necessary precursor to a Mars expedition. The important way in which they had not taken that lesson was politically connected. The moon-base faction had been persuaded to give up on a Luna base, and a compromise reached: that a base would be constructed on Phobos, one of the two moons of Mars.

  This was not something the Ares Project was directly interested in, but it made a lot more sense than building a base on Earth's moon. Phobos had no gravity well to speak of, and aerobraking in Mars' atmosphere could help in achieving a matched orbit at a reasonable cost. That done, the closeness of the moonlet would allow excellent surveying of parts of Mars.

  Better still, there had been some indications from prior probes, including the ill-fated Soviet Phobos 2, that there might be some fossil deposits of water on Phobos, which was over twenty kilometers wide. That wasn't really surprising, since both Phobos and its brother moon Deimos were suspected to be captured outer-system bodies, possibly the cores of former comets. So the Phobos project was justifiable on its own terms while still being reasonably well integrated into NASA's overall mission design. And—always a critical factor in the world inhabited by government agencies and the megacorporations with whom they maintained an incestuous relationship—the Phobos project kept the existing vested interests happy. A moon base, after all, was a moon base, regardless of what moon it was on.

  It was here that A.J. had seen an opportunity. Obviously, no one—neither government regulatory agencies nor private insurance companies—was going to let the Ares Project blast human beings into space without firm proof that all aspects of the proposed system would work safely. Pirate was an unmanned device designed to demonstrate the most critical aspects of the system: to be able to travel to the Red Planet with no return fuel, just a small store of "seed" hydrogen; to be able to create fuel from Mars' atmosphere; and then return to Earth using Mars-manufactured propellant.

  A rover unit was to be deployed during the atmospheric fuel manufacturing stage to do surveying of the area, which was one of the prime locations currently considered for final landing of a manned mission. It would also leave the first "hab"—habitable enclosure—on Mars, although it was a scaled-down version from the full-scale "tuna cans" in the forthcoming main prep flights. The "
hab" would serve as a testbed for the long-term operation of some of the systems and as a radio beacon as well.