by Ben Bova
“This other man, the amnesiac,” said Pratt warily. “He was rescued from the Alhambra also.”
Smoothly, Bracknell answered, “Then he must have been a convict. Captain Farad had the pleasant little trick of putting troublemakers outside, in spacesuits, until they learned to behave themselves.”
“I see.” At last Pratt said, “You’re a very fortunate man, Mr. Alexios.”
“Don’t I know it!”
With a look of utter distaste, Pratt commanded his phone to authorize payment to Dante Alexios.
Alexios asked, “May I ask, how much is the, uh, benefit?”
Pratt glanced at his display screen. “Twelve point seven million New International Dollars.”
Alexios’s brows lifted. “That much?”
“What do you intend to do with your money?”
Taking a deep breath, Alexios said, “Well, there are some debts I have to pay. After that… I don’t know … I just might start my own engineering firm.”
He surprised Takeo by paying the physician’s normal fee for a cosmetic remake. Then Dante Alexios opened a small consulting engineering office in Selene. He started by taking on charity work and performing community services, such as designing a new water processing plant for Selene’s growing population of retirees from Earth. His first paying assignment was as a consultant on the new mass driver being built out on Mare Nubium to catapult cargos of lunar helium three to the hungry fusion power plants on Earth. He began to learn how to use nanotechnology. With a derisive grin he would tell himself, Damned useful, these little nanomachines.
In two years he was well known in Selene for his community services. In four he was wealthy in his own right, with enough contracts to hire a small but growing staff of engineers and office personnel. Often he thought about returning to Earth and looking up Lara, but he resisted the temptation. That part of his life was finished. Even his hatred of Victor and Danvers had abated. There was nothing to be done. The desire for vengeance cooled, although he still felt angry whenever he thought of their betrayal.
Instead of traveling to Earth, Dante Alexios won a contract to build a complete research station on Mars, a new base in the giant circular basin in the southern hemisphere called Hellas. He flew to Mars to personally supervise the construction.
He lived at the construction site, surrounded by nanotech engineers and some of the scientists who would live and work at the base once it was finished. He walked the iron sands of the red planet and watched the distant, pale Sun set in the cloudless caramel-colored sky. He felt the peace and harmony of this empty world, with its craggy mountains and rugged canyons and winding ancient river beds.
We haven’t corrupted this world, Alexios told himself. There are only a handful of humans here, not enough to tear the place apart and rebuild it the way we’ve done to Earth, the way we’re doing to the Moon.
Yet he knew he was a part of that process; he had helped to extend human habitation across the dead and battered face of the Moon. Mars was different, though. Life dwelled here. Once, a race of intelligent creatures built their homes and temples into the high crevasses in the cliffs. Alexios got permission from the scientists running the exploration effort to visit the ruins of their cliff dwellings.
Gone. Whoever built these villages, whoever farmed those valleys, they were all wiped out by an impersonal planetwide catastrophe that snuffed out virtually all life on the red planet, blew away most of its atmosphere, flash-froze this world into a dusty, dry global desert. The scientists thought the plain of Hellas held the key to the disaster that sterilized Mars sixty-five million years ago, the same disaster that wiped out the dinosaurs and half of all living species on Earth.
Alexios felt very humble when he stared through his spacesuit visor at the crumbling ruins of a Martian cliff dwelling. Life can be snuffed out so easily. Like a skytower falling, crushing the life out of millions, ending a lifetime of hope and work with a snap of destiny’s fingers.
He was mulling his own destiny when he returned to the base nearing completion at Hellas. As the rocket glider that carried him soared over the vast circular depression, Alexios looked through the thick quartz window with some pride. The base spread across several square kilometers of the immense crater’s floor, domes and tunnels and the tangled tracks of many vehicles. The work of my mind, he said to himself. The base is almost finished, and I did it. I created it. With a little help from my nanofriends. Like the skytower, taunted a voice in his mind.
That night, he lay in his bunk and watched the Earthside news broadcasts while the Martian wind moaned softly past the plastic dome that housed the construction crew. Then he saw an item that made him sit straight up in bed.
Saito Yamagata was going to start a project to build solar power satellites in orbit around the planet Mercury.
Yamagata! He’s come out of his so-called retreat in Tibet and he’s heading for Mercury.
Without a moment’s hesitation, without a heartbeat of reflection, Alexios decided he would go to Mercury, too. He owed Yamagata a death. And as he sat in his darkened bedroom, the flickering light from the video screen playing across his transformed features, he realized that he could pay back both Victor and Danvers, too.
All the old hatred, all the old fury, all the old seething acid boiled up anew in his guts. Alexios felt his teeth grinding together. I’ll make them pay, he promised himself. I had almost forgotten about them, about what they did to me and all those millions of others. Almost forgotten Addie and her father and the others aboard Alhambra. How easy it is to let a comfortable life swallow you up. How easy to let the blade’s edge go dull.
He threw back the bed covers and strode naked to his desktop phone. Yamagata. Molina. Danvers. I’ll get all three of them on that hellhole of a world, Mercury.
Goethe Base
Sitting in his bare little office, Dante Alexios smiled bitterly to himself as the memories of his ten lost years came flooding back to him. He finished reading the report issued by McFergusen and his ICU committee and leaned back in his desk chair. They’ve worded it very diplomatically, Alexios thought as he read the final paragraph, but their meaning is clear.
The aforementioned tests unequivocally show that the rocks in question originated on Mars. While there is a vanishingly small chance that they were deposited on Mercury’s surface by natural processes, the overwhelming likelihood is that they were transported to Mercury by human hands. The discovery of biomarkers in these samples by V. Molina is not, therefore, indicative of biological activity on the planet Mercury.
Victor is wiped out, Alexios said to himself, with satisfaction. McFergusen won’t come right out and say it, but the implication is crystal clear: either Victor planted those rocks here himself, or he fell dupe to some prankster who did it. Either way, Victor’s reputation as a scientist is permanently demolished.
Laughing out loud, Alexios thought, Now it’s your turn, Danvers.
He put in a call to Molina, to start the process of destroying Bishop Elliott Danvers.
As he strode down the central corridor of the orbiting Himawari, heading toward Molina’s quarters, Alexios began to feel nervous. Lara will be there, he knew. She lives with him. Sleeps with him. They have an eight-year-old son. He worried that sooner or later she would see through his nanotherapy and recognize Mance Bracknell. Then he realized that even if she did it wouldn’t change anything.
Still, he hesitated once he arrived at the door to their stateroom, his fist in midair poised to knock. What will I do if she does recognize me? he asked himself. What will you do if she doesn’t? replied the scornful voice in his head.
He took a breath, then knocked. Lara opened the door immediately, as if she had been standing behind it waiting anxiously for him.
He had to swallow before he could say, “Hello, Mrs. Molina.”
“Mr. Alexios.” Her voice was hushed, apprehensive. “Won’t you come in?”
Feeling every fiber of his body quivering nervously, Alexios step
ped into their compartment. Victor was sitting on the two-place sofa set against the far bulkhead, his head in his hands. The bed was neatly made up; everything in the stateroom seemed in fastidious order. Except for Molina: he looked a wreck, hair mussed, face ashen, a two-day stubble on his jaw, dark rings under his eyes.
Alexios relaxed somewhat. This isn’t going to be difficult at all. He’s ready to clutch at any straw I can offer.
Lara asked, “Can I get you something, Mr. Alexios?”
“Dante,” he said. “Please call me Dante.”
With a nod, she said, “Very well, Dante. A drink, maybe?”
His memory flashed a picture of all the times he and Lara had drunk together. She’d been partial to margaritas in the old days; Mance Bracknell had a taste for wine.
“Just some water, please,” he said.
“Fruit juice?” she suggested.
He almost shuddered with the recollection of the nanomachine-laden juice he had drunk in Koga’s clinic. “Water will be fine, thank you.”
Lara went to the kitchenette built behind a short bar next to the sofa. Alexios pulled up one of the plush chairs and sat across the coffee table from Molina.
“As I said on the phone, Dr. Molina, I’m here to help you in any way I can.”
Molina shook his head. “There isn’t anything you can do,” he said in a hoarse whisper.
“Someone set you up for this,” Alexios said gently. “If we can find out who did it, that would show everyone that you’re not at fault.”
Lara placed a tray of glasses on the coffee table and sat next to her husband. “That’s what I’ve been telling him. We can’t just take this lying down. We’ve got to find out who’s responsible for this.”
“What can you do?” Molina asked morosely.
Alexios tilted his head slightly, as if thinking about the problem. “Well… you said you received an anonymous call about the rocks.”
“Yes. Somebody left a message for me at my office on campus. No name. No return address.”
“And on the strength of that one call you came out here to Mercury?”
Anger flared in Molina’s eyes. “Don’t you start, too! Yes, I came here on the strength of that one call. It sounded too good to be ignored.”
Lara laid a placating hand on his knee. “Victor, he’s trying to help you,” she said soothingly.
Molina visibly choked back his anger. “I figured that if it’s a blind alley I could be back home in a couple of weeks. But if it is was real, it would be a terrific discovery.”
“But it was a deliberate hoax,” Alexios said, as sympathetically as he could manage.
“That’s right. And they all think I did it. They think I’m a fraud, a cheat, a—”
“The thing to do,” Alexios said, cutting through Molina’s rising bitterness, “is to track down who made that call.”
“I don’t see how—”
“Whoever it was had access to Martian rocks,” Alexios went on. “And he probably knew you.”
“What makes you think that?” Lara asked, surprise showing clearly in her amber eyes.
With a small shrug, Alexios replied, “He called you, no one else. He wanted you, specifically you, to come here and be his victim.”
“Who would do such a thing?” Lara wondered. “And why?”
“That’s what we’ve got to find out.”
Evidence
Alexios knew he had to work fast, because Lara and Victor were due to leave Mercury in a few days. Yet he couldn’t be too swift; that might show his hand to them. Besides, now that the IAA’s interdict on his work on the planet’s surface was lifted, he had plenty of tasks to accomplish: resume scooping raw materials from the regolith, hire a nanotech team and bring them to Mercury, lay out plans for building a mass driver and the components for solar power satellites that would be catapulted into orbit and assembled in space.
He waited for two days. Then he rode the shuttle back to Himawari with the evidence in his tunic pocket.
Lara and Victor eagerly greeted him at the airlock. They hurried down the passageway together toward the Molinas’ stateroom, Victor in a sweat to see what Alexios had uncovered, Lara just as eager but more controlled.
As soon as the stateroom door closed Molina demanded, “Well? What did you find?”
“Quite a bit,” said Alexios. “Is McFergusen still here? He should see—”
“He left two days ago,” Molina snapped. “What did you find out?” Alexios pulled two thin sheets of plastic from his tunic and unfolded them on the coffee table as Molina and his wife sat together on the little sofa. He tapped the one on top.
“Is this the anonymous message you received?” he asked Molina.
The astrobiologist scanned it. “Yes, that’s it.”
Alexios knew it was. He had sent it. He turned that sheet over to show the one beneath it.
“What’s this?” Lara asked.
“A copy of a requisition from the International Consortium of Universities, selling eleven Martian rocks to a private research facility on Earth.”
“My rocks!” Molina blurted.
“How did they get from Earth to Mercury?” Lara asked.
Alexios knew perfectly well, but he said, “That part of it we’ll have to deduce from the available evidence.”
“Who sent this message to me?” Molina demanded, tapping the first sheet.
“It wasn’t easy tracking down the sender. He was very careful to cover his tracks.”
“Who was it?”
“And he had a large, well-financed organization behind him, as well,” Alexios added.
“Who was it?” Molina fairly screamed.
Alexios glanced at Lara. She was obviously on tenterhooks, her lips parted slightly, her eyes wide with anticipation.
“Bishop Danvers,” said Alexios.
“Elliott?” Molina gasped.
“I can’t believe it,” said Lara. “He’s a man of god—he wouldn’t stoop to such chicanery.”
“He’s my friend,” Molina said, looking bewildered. “At least, I thought he was.”
Alexios said, “The New Morality hates the discoveries you astrobiologists have made, you know that. What better way to discredit the entire field than by showing a prominent astrobiologist to be a fraud, a liar?”
Molina sank back in the sofa. “Elliott did this? To me?”
“What proof do you have?” Lara asked.
Alexios looked into her gold-flecked eyes. “The people who traced this message used highly irregular methods—”
“Illegal, you mean,” she said flatly.
“Extralegal,” Alexios countered.
“Then this so-called evidence won’t hold up in a court of law.”
“No, but there must be a record of this message in Danvers’s computer files. Even if he erased the message, a scan of his memory core might find a trace of it.”
Lara stared hard at him. “The bishop could claim that someone planted the message in his computer.”
Alexios knew she was perfectly correct. But he said, “And why would anyone do that?”
Impatiently, Molina argued, “We can’t examine Elliott’s computer files without his permission. And if he really did this he won’t give permission. So where are we?”
“You’re forgetting this invoice,” said Alexios. “It can be traced to the New Morality school in Gabon, in west Africa.”
Lara looked at her husband. “Elliott was stationed in Libreville.”
“For almost ten years,” Molina said.
She turned back to Alexios. “You’re certain of all this?”
He nodded and lied, “Absolutely. I paid a good deal of money to obtain this information.”
“Elliott?” Molina was still finding it difficult to accept the idea. “Elliott deliberately tried to destroy me?”
“I’m afraid he has destroyed you,” Alexios said grimly. “Your reputation is permanently tainted.”
Molina nodded ruefully. Then h
is expression changed, hardened. “Then I’m taking that pompous sonofabitch down with me!”
Confrontation
“It’s utterly ridiculous!” cried Bishop Danvers.
Molina was standing in Danvers’s stateroom, too furious to sit down. He paced the little room like a prowling animal. Lara sat on one of the upholstered chairs, Alexios on the other one. Danvers was on the sofa between them, staring bewilderedly at the two flimsy sheets that Alexios had brought.
“We have the proof,” Molina said, jabbing a finger toward the message and the invoice.
“It’s not true, Victor,” said Danvers. “Believe me, it’s not true.”
“You deliberately ruined me, Elliott.”
“No, I—”
“Why?” Molina shouted. “Why did you do this to me?”
“I didn’t!” Danvers howled back, his face reddening. “It’s a pack of lies.” Desperately, he turned to Lara. “Lara, you believe me, don’t you? You know I wouldn’t have done this. I couldn’t have!”
Lara’s eyes flicked from her husband to the bishop and back again.
“Someone has deliberately ruined Victor’s reputation,” she said evenly, fixing her gaze on Alexios. “No matter who did this, Victor’s career is destroyed.”
“But it wasn’t me!” Danvers pleaded.
“Wasn’t it?” Molina snapped. “When I think of all the talks we’ve had, over the years, all the arguments—”
“Discussions!” Danvers corrected. “Philosophical discussions.”
“You’ve had it in for me ever since you found out that I was using those gengineered viruses to help build the skytower,” Molina accused. “You and your kind hate everything that science stands for, don’t you?”
“No, it’s not true.” Danvers seemed almost in tears.
Molina stopped his pacing to face the bishop. “When I told you about what I was doing at the skytower, you reported it to your New Morality superiors, didn’t you?”
“Of course. It was important information.”
“You were a spy back in Ecuador. You were sent to the skytower project to snoop, not to pray for people’s souls.”