by Allen Steele
L’Enfant said nothing. Nash could now see his profile through the faceplate of his helmet, yet he wore an expectant smile as he gazed upon the abyss hurtling toward them. It was far too late for either of them to escape their shared fate.
He hugged his chest with his left arm and slowly raised the gun.
‘Your boss has good taste,’ L’Enfant murmured.
‘No,’ Nash replied. ‘He’s just a jerk like you. Talks too much.’
L’Enfant sat still in his chair, saying nothing. Patiently waiting for the bullet.
Nash closed his eyes, then he placed the barrel of the gun against the side of L’Enfant’s helmet and squeezed the trigger.
He felt the recoil, heard the shot and the sharp crack of L’Enfant’s helmet shattering. Yet he didn’t look at what he had just done; he had seen enough blood. The satisfaction of getting the job done was good enough to last the rest of his life.
Nash dropped the gun to the deck and sat down on the gangway. He was exhausted beyond belief. Behind him, he could hear the muted crashing of the airship falling apart, collapsing in on itself. Had it been this way inside the Takada Maru when she went under the waves?
He would know soon enough.
The edge of the canyon was just before him, clearly visible through the gondola windows. Beyond was the vast dark chasm, a bottomless pit as old as time itself. Nash grabbed the gangway railing for support and forced his eyes shut. There was a violent, grinding lurch as the bottom of the gondola scraped against rocky soil. He wondered for a half-instant if he might survive after all—perhaps the airship would be stopped at the penultimate moment—then the windows shattered and broken glass lacerated his arms and chest. There was an endless scream of metal, then silence except for the harsh Martian wind and the sensation of falling, falling, falling…
He had a chance to murmur a final prayer as the Akron crossed the edge of the precipice and plummeted into the Labyrinth of Night.
Epilogue
‘IF ALL THIS HAS been happening, they should have arrived here by now. So where are they?’
Enrico Fermi
Regarding extraterrestrial intelligence (Los Alamos, 1950)
Arsia Station, Mars: September 1, 1050 MCM, 2032
PEWTER-COLORED MINNOWS CHASED each other in and out of her reflection in the aquaculture pool, turned silver by the mid-morning sunlight which gleamed through the high windows of the central atrium.
Miho Sasaki had chosen a stone bench by the pool to sit while she composed her report, but the cool waters had distracted her. The data pad she’d carried with her into the garden lay open on her lap, its keys untouched since she had created a file…how long ago had it been?
She glanced at her watch and sighed with frustration. A half-hour ago. She was wasting time.
Miho moved her feet restlessly along the grass planted near the artificial pond, favoring her bandaged left ankle, as she gazed again at the blank flatscreen of the pad. She absently tapped the cap of her stylus against her lips as she once again sought for the opening words to her report. How could she possibly describe, with the rational detachment and scientific objectivity which was prerequisite of such a report, all that she had seen in the past several days?
Eight people dead,…an alien race whose technology stretched the limits of man’s understanding…the needless loss of so many friends…
It was impossible to write about these things. The memories were too fresh. Miho put the pad down on the bench as her eyes wandered again to the dancing minnows. Lucky little creatures. They had been born in this small, quiet pond; they didn’t know that their ancestors had evolved on a planet many millions of miles away, that they belonged to a species that could never have been produced on Mars without the aid of a higher intelligence. For them, their miniature ecosystem circumscribed the known universe; Miho was a vague shadow hovering over their world, frightening perhaps but otherwise part of something of which they could remain cheerfully ignorant.
‘You’re so fortunate,’ she murmured aloud as she watched them play. ‘You have the liberty to be stupid…’
‘Now, that’s not a very nice thing to say to a fish,’ said a voice from behind her.
Sasaki was not surprised to hear W. J. Boggs; she had been expecting him to turn up sometime today. The only surprise was that she had spoken in English; on the rare occasions when she talked to herself, she usually spoke in Japanese. She looked over her shoulder as he approached from the living area. ‘Good morning. What did the doctor say about your leg?’
Boggs hobbled toward her, clumsily riding the two aluminum crutches he’d been given late last night in the station infirmary, the last place she had seen him. He wore a pair of denim overalls over a worn-out Grand Ol’ Opry sweatshirt; the clothes had come from his locker in the station-crew bunkhouse, but the right leg of his Levi’s had been cut up to the top of his thigh, making room for the white plaster cast which encased his entire leg, from his hip down to his calf.
‘Same as before, I reckon. Multiple fractures in the tibia and femur, busted kneecap…I forget what else, but I sure as hell ain’t walking without these damn things for a while.’ He grinned at her. ‘If you plan to get romantic with me any time soon, please be careful. I’m a hurtin’ old hound dog.’
Hurting old hound dog. She smiled slightly at the thought; he was lucky to be alive at all. She herself had come away with a sprained ankle after their desperate evacuation from the Akron, only because she had clung to the cable until her feet had touched ground. Boggs had been on the cable behind her, but he had been forced to jump the last thirty feet before the airship fell into the Noctis Labyrinthis. His good fortune was that his skin-suit hadn’t been split open by his fall. But, of course, he always found a reason to complain…
Miho picked up the data pad, making a place for him to sit down. ‘Much obliged,’ he said as he made his ungainly way to the bench and carefully settled down on it, pulling up his crutches as he thrust out his rigid leg. He gently massaged the plaster. ‘Damn thing itches like a bitch…hey, you wanna sign it?’
‘Sign it?’ Miho shook her head. ‘I don’t understand…’
‘Fine old American tradition. Like getting a baseball autographed, but you don’t have to pay anyone for the privilege. Collected one already, from my best bartender.’ He tapped a fresh ink-scrawl located just above his knee. Miho looked closer. Cripples drink for free! Nuge.
‘All I have is the stylus,’ she said, holding up her light-pen. ‘I’ll autograph it later.’ Boggs looked mildly disappointed, but he nodded his head. ‘What I meant was…’
She hesitated. ‘Are you going back on the Lowell?’ she asked quietly.
Boggs took a deep breath. ‘Well, I guess that all depends,’ he said slowly. ‘It’s gonna be at least another six months before this leg is fixed-up again. Even if they had another airship for me to fly, I couldn’t handle the thing anyway…and my guess is that it’s going to be at least two years before they replace the Akron. There’s not much for a blimp jockey to do up here until then, so…’
He looked at her sharply as another thought appeared to cross his mind. ‘Did you talk to anyone about the Akron? I mean, about the crash site?’
Miho felt rebuffed; her question to him was unanswered, whether he meant to be evasive or not. ‘Yes. I spoke to the station general manager and the resident scientists this morning.’
Boggs chuckled. ‘Was Leahy sober?’
‘So far as I could tell, yes.’ She smiled a little. ‘I think he was hung over, He didn’t say much.’
‘Typical. I smelled booze on his breath when they were working on me last night.’ Boggs shook his head in disgust. ‘All he could say was. “You crashed my airship? You crashed my airship?” Wetbrain sonnuva…’
‘They wanted to send a team into the canyon,’ she went on, ‘but I told them to quarantine the crash site and gave them the reasons why.’
She paused, kneading her hands together. ‘I don’t know whether they will obey my wis
hes. Some of them were eager to collect samples of the nanites, regardless of the danger. But, at least for the time being, they have agreed to place remote monitors near the canyon ledge and not to venture down to the wreckage.’
Miho placed her hand on the data pad. ‘That is why I’m trying to write a report and send it to my people as soon as the communications window reopens. Perhaps when they see the inherent risk in trying to develop the Cootie nanotechnology without proper safeguards, they will proceed carefully.’
‘Uh-huh.’ Boggs had become more somber. He rested his elbows on his knees and clasped his hands together, staring into the aquaculture pool. ‘And what did they say about L’Enfant…?’
He stopped. ‘And Nash?’ he asked more softly.
Sasaki licked her lips. ‘Commander L’Enfant, they agreed, was completely insane. Paranoid-schizophrenic. His actions were completely without authorization. No one had heard of Operation Kentucky Derby. He was a…’
She rolled her hands around each other. ‘Loose cannon? Loose gun?’
‘Loose cannon.’ Boggs closed his eyes and grimaced in disgust. ‘That figures. Complete deniability, right on down the line. The fucking assholes…’
He spat into the pool; the minnows feverishly swam toward his cob until they realized it was not a snack, then they meandered away, almost as if embarrassed. ‘And as for Nash…?’
‘They had never even heard of August Nash,’ she said. ‘Even Leahy denied having heard his name before. They expressed surprise that he was anyone except…’
‘My co-pilot.’ Boggs put his face between his hands. ‘I can’t even remember his fake name, and the poor bastard…the guy will probably have it carved on a marker in the graveyard. So far as they’re concerned…’
‘He never existed,’ she replied. ‘He never lived.’
‘He saved our lives,’ he said softly, ‘and the assholes will never even admit that he was here. The bastards will never…’
‘Hush. Be quiet now.’ Miho laid her head against his shoulder, feeling the tears she had suppressed come freely now as she remembered all the two of them had been through. For once, Waylon J. Boggs shut up when he was told to shut up. He put his arm around her shoulder; this time, she didn’t pull away from the touch of his hand.
For a few minutes, they clung silently to each other. A man and a woman, sitting together on a garden bench, a long way from home. Remembering all the lies, the wasted resources, the banalities of politics, the distortions of truth, the sacrifices…
‘The lives,’ she whispered. ‘All the lives…’
Harvard, Massachusetts: November 11, 2230 EST, 2032
A cool evening wind blew across the hilltop, scattering dead autumn leaves which covered the paved asphalt lot surrounding the giant radiotelescope. Down the road from the big dish, past the signs asking drivers to switch off their headlights, astronomers were opening the white-painted dome that covered the sixty-inch optical telescope which had already been maneuvered to point toward a certain direction in the western sky. Meanwhile, the eighty-four-foot radiotelescope was being rotated to face the same celestial coordinates.
The sound of a blues guitar floated from within the concrete shed at the base of the radio dish. In the clear night sky, a bright red star hove into view above the naked treetops.
Although the Harvard-Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory had been in operation on this rural Massachusetts hilltop for close to seventy-five years, it was a rare moment when both the radiotelescope and the optical telescope were used simultaneously for a joint project. Yet now that Mars was emerging from the far side of the Sun, the opportunity was too good to miss. The Project META radiotelescope had been scanning the northern hemisphere sky for over fifty years, searching for signs of extraterrestrial intelligence.
Finally, the astronomers had a definite direction in which to search. Not only that, but tonight they also had a means of talking back to the stars.
Inside the radiotelescope’s blockhouse, Arthur Johnson listened for a few moments to a telephone, then cupped his hand over the receiver. ‘They’ve acquired the starship,’ he said aloud. Behind him in the bare concrete room, the sound of the blues guitar abruptly stopped in mid-chord. ‘Looks like it’s point-five AU’s past Mars orbit, out in the belt somewhere. Do we have anything on the spectrum analyzer yet?’
Inside the adjacent glassed-in computer center, two other Planetary Society scientists were crouched over a computer terminal. Next to them was the heart and soul of the Megachannel Extra-Terrestrial Assay, the 8.4-million-channel radio receiver and spectrum analyzer which was capable of eavesdropping on radio frequencies from deep space. Diodes flashed like tiny Christmas lights across the mammoth steel-cabineted computer; displayed on the terminal’s flatscreen was a regular pattern resembling a series of slender rectangles.
One of the scientists looked up from the screen. ‘We have a definite ET signal,’ he announced, his young face flushed with pride. ‘Same azimuth and everything. We’re right on the money.’
‘Good deal. Frequency?’
‘Fourteen-twenty megahertz,’ the other scientist murmured. ‘I’ll be damned if it ain’t right in the ol’ waterhole itself.’ He looked up from the screen and grinned. ‘Think it’s time for our concert, Dr. Johnson.’
‘Right, then.’ The astrophysicist tapped another number into his phone. ‘Cape, this is Harvard META. Code word is Bravo Whiskey Echo two-three-two.’
He waited a moment, then smiled broadly. ‘Yes, Nathan, this is Art. Glad we’ve dispensed with all that password stuff. Listen, we’ve got a positive fix on the Cooties. The frequency is fourteen-twenty megahertz. Are you ready down there?’ Again he listened, then nodded his head. ‘Fine, fine. We’ve got him all hooked up and he’s been practicing for the last half-hour or so. All right, if you’ve got a clear feed from us, we’ll get started…’
Johnson put down the phone and turned to face the man standing in the back of the room. ‘We’re ready whenever you are, Ben.’ He sat down on a table beneath a poster-map of the Milky Way. ‘Let’s hear some tunes.’
Ben Cassidy sat on a stool at the other end of the room, his Yamaha perched on his lap, a harmonica held within a brace strapped around his neck. Except for a small monitor speaker, the only other pieces of equipment were a microphone and a hardwired soundboard for his guitar; both, though, were hooked into a shielded telephone hookup.
Several thousand miles south of the hilltop observatory lay the other end of his communications relay: the giant dish-array of the NASA Deep Space Communications Network at Cape Canaveral. The DSCN was usually dedicated to maintaining communications with spacecraft in Earth orbit, but tonight—like the Harvard-Smithsonian telescope—it was oriented toward a certain point in the night sky.
Out there, far beyond Mars, the Cootie starship was making its way out of the Solar System, heading straight out from the red planet on a course which, until this time, had rendered it invisible to human observers on Earth. The starship was transmitting a steady signal of unknown content as it left the humankind Solar System; that much had already been ascertained by Arsia Station.
The time had come to say farewell, in the only way that the Cooties had ever paid any attention.
Cassidy swallowed and touched the strings of his instrument. He played a couple of random notes, but found no inspiration. He glanced up at Arthur Johnson; his old friend waited expectantly but said nothing. The musician looked toward the computer room.
‘Excuse me,’ he said. Through the window, the other two scientists were still staring intently at the screen. ‘Excuse me,’ he said more loudly, and they looked over their shoulders at him. ‘Would y’all mind standing out of the way for a minute? I want to see what’s on that thing.’
The two men glanced at each other, then at Johnson. Arthur made a shooing gesture with his hand; the radio astronomers stood erect and stepped back from the terminal, allowing Cassidy to have a clear view of the oscillating signal-pattern from the
Cootie starship.
Cassidy watched it for a moment: a rhythmic series of ups-and-downs, almost like patterns on a music scale. Like B-flat jumping up to F, then to G, and back to B-flat…
He touched the appropriate commands into the guitar’s memory, then hesitantly placed his fingers on the strings and began to play a deep-throated, melancholy song, one so old that no one knew its exact origins, yet so familiar that every seasoned musician had performed it at some time or another. He started with a thumping, repetitive bass-line, then assayed a quick run from the low end of the scale to the high, then back again…Cassidy closed his eyes as he concentrated on the opening bars, then placed his lips against the harmonica and tramped through the refrain once again, this time accompanying his guitar licks with the brassy railroad-blues sound. When he was through with the harmonica, he raised his head and sang to the aliens…
‘I know you rider.
Gonna miss me when I’m gone.
Well, I know you rider,
Gonna miss me when I’m gone.
Gonna miss you, babe,
From rolling in your arms…’
Across the room, Arthur Johnson nodded his head in time with the music; inside the META room, the two scientists turned their attention from the pulses on the screen to watch Cassidy dishing out the timeless song.
‘I’m goin’ down the road
Where I can get more decent care.
I’m goin’ down the road
Where I can get more decent care.
Goin’ back to my used-to-be rider
’Cause I don’t feel welcome here…’
Cassidy accented the second stanza with another refrain on his harmonica, a sassy comment to an extraterrestrial vessel leaving the confused realm of humanity forever. A nanosecond later it was transmitted to the asteroid belt, hurled at the speed of light toward an invisible lifeboat making its way back home across a trackless void. A last goodbye from Earth.
When Cassidy was through with the song, they waited for a reply, watching the terminal screen for a change in pattern, an alteration in the interplanetary static. A sign that they cared. None came. As before, the human race was left only with themselves for conversation.