"Talking to Braddock wasn't much fun," Annie said, more relaxed.
"Why? What'd he do?"
"Nothing. I just don't like his attitude. They divide us up and interrogate us one at a time, like suspects. It's the classic police ploy. The whole thing is incredible."
"What'd Braddock want to know?"
"What we knew."
"What'd you say?"
"That you had already told them what we knew, this afternoon."
"Did you say anything about the pic..." Carter stopped and looked around the room.
After an awkward pause, Philippe said, "Go on." He looked at the ceiling again. "We're not telling them anything they don't already know. Hey, Sturgis," he yelled at the ceiling, "we got lots of really interesting pictures, just waiting to be published." He whispered to Carter as an aside, "I don't really think it's bugged, but then you never know."
"Annie, did Braddock say anything about Stafford?"
"No."
Carter turned to Philippe. "What about you? Did you overhear anything to explain what's going on."
"No. They were pretty upset. They kept talking about needing more time, about keeping us here. Stafford said maybe they should come clean, but Sturgis didn't want to."
"Wait. Stop," Annie said, standing. "Stand up. Come here."
Blank stares. They got up.
Annie was smiling. She walked between them. "What's the matter with you guys? Stafford is alive! I want to see some smiles." She hugged them both in a wide embrace.
When they had finished talking, Annie made a show of ushering them both out at the same time.
Carter lay in his bed, pondering.
So. Was the story nearly over?
He had a sudden and depressing vision of his Mars City, which he thought he knew, as a hollow facade. The pioneers of Mars had been scripted into unknowing roles, storyboarded by people who understood "what was really important." He and his friends had been struggling ignorantly in the red dust while the puppet masters' laughter resonated all the way back to the spinning cabarets and green resorts of Earth.
Stafford, alive? He could close the book. Hand in his report. Be done with it. Settle things with Annie. Maybe go back to Earth. A real planet, crowds, decay, and all that. But what would he say about the polar plot to cover up Stafford's movements? Would they even allow him to hand in a report?
Why hadn't Elena and Sturgis come pounding on the doors, demanding to know where Philippe had been? They must be caucusing to figure out what to do next. And what about Annie's role? Would there be some new moment of revelation with her, when she told them her next secret? For the first time he was beginning to feel immune to her secrets, like a patient inoculated with small doses of a dangerous pathogen. Still, he could never believe that she was a complete fraud. Not after ... what? Loving her? Being in love with her?
There were two shows going on here, simultaneously. He realized he didn't know which was the main show in his life. Annie? Or Stafford and his disappearance.
Annie's most outstanding characteristic was the level of concern she radiated. ("You were sincere, you just weren't honest." Philippe's words came back to him.) Anyway, Philippe's theory—that she was just using him to get at her story—still nagged at him whether he believed it or not. In fact, whether she believed it or not.
Bur the more important thing, as usual, was tomorrow. His mind kept toggling back and forth between his mission and his feelings. One thought would block out the other. He would have to live with his doubts about Annie for the time being, he told himself. He would have to focus his concentration on the problem of Alwyn Stafford and Elena Trevina and Doug Sturgis, and how they all fit together.
The image of Elena drove a new thought into his mind. So, Lena was the one who had used him, used sex to get close to him. What had she said during their night together? What had she asked him? He had to admit to himself that he couldn't remember much of it. That whole night, his heart hadn't been in it. A sorry admission.
What if ... What if Elena's friendliness was all a ploy, and what if Annie had been sincere all along? What if he and Philippe had been wrong about her, in the heat of their jealousies? He tried to picture her as genuinely drawn to both of them, with her real lover a hundred million kilometers away. For that matter, what if Annie and Elena had both been sincere, had both been ordinary human beings coping with existence one day at a time. He drifted toward sleep with his mind in confusion, hoping dimly that the light of day would clear away the uncertainties.
25
MARCH 4, WEDNESDAY
Ten A.M. They gathered in Lena's conference room. Carter, Annie, Philippe, Elena, Braddock, and Sturgis. Forced pleasantries. The tension each of them brought had not yet begun to anneal. The room seemed brighter than yesterday, as if the light level had been turned up a notch.
Right, Carter thought to himself. Here goes nothing.
"There's somebody we want you to meet," Elena announced. She gestured toward the door.
Stafford stepped in quietly. He smiled guiltily, like a small boy returning for dinner after running away from home for only an afternoon. Carter had tried to prepare himself for a moment like this, but no preparation could be adequate. He was seeing a ghost.
Lena and her crew were silent. Passing up the chance to gloat or make some cute remark, Carter thought to himself. He wondered why she had even bothered to set up this grand entrance.
Stafford cut a commanding figure, standing as erect as his silvery crew cut, with his fists leaning firmly on the back of an empty chair at the end of the conference table. His eyes twinkled over his white mustache. "Resurrected. In the flesh. Don't all start cheering at once," he said. "Might disturb the scientists, if there're any left around here." He winked at Sturgis, who sat with a stony face.
Carter was glad he didn't react. He didn't want to give Lena and the others the satisfaction of thinking they had surprised him.
Annie and Philippe also failed to exclaim. The stoicism was nothing they had planned together. It was as if each took pride in rebuffing anything that the polar cabal could throw at them, even this seeming end of their quest. But Carter saw that Annie's eyes glistened with excitement.
Suddenly Carter realized he'd been running on adrenaline until this moment. Now everything was different. He managed an inadequate greeting. "Hi, Alwyn."
Stafford nodded, now with a profound smile. He looked as if he could read Carter's mind exactly. Philippe introduced Annie.
Lena's crew remained silent, almost respectful, as if letting them say a good-bye instead of hello.
Carter studied his old friend, his recent obsession. Stafford had a certain patrician quality about him, an aristocratic and self-reliant bearing, mixed with an air of loss. The twinkle in his eyes was a sad betrayal of secret knowledge, as if he realized he was one of the last of a generation that had ruled the world, a generation now caught up in some tragedy. Old American Anglos all had that sad, aristocratic air of having known the old days, and having no one around who could fully understand their surprise at how things were turning out. In Stafford's case, the feelings must have been intensified: he was the oldest Martian, the one who had known everything since the beginning of the world.
Carter saw their friendship flashing before him, as if he were a drowning man. Little things came back. Stafford was the only man Carter knew who still wore a tiny earring, in the old style. It was a bit of polished Martian hematite. Stafford had told him once, during their old bull sessions in Nix-O, like Zen master and student, that the earring had originally been a little diamond his wife had given him when they started their life together during his sabbatical year at Tycho. Then, when they came to Mars, his wife had decided the diamond was a needless echo of Earth. He needed something from the new world, one of the perfect hematite crystals he had found on an early field expedition. She took it to a tough young woman in the metal shop, and the two women had concocted what Stafford's wife called "Martian jewelry." Alwyn and his wife ha
d sent the diamond in a small packet back to their daughter on Earth. They claimed it was the first diamond in the universe that had traveled from Earth to the moon and then to Mars and back—though there were stories that Nadya Peseka had been wearing her engagement ring during the fiery reentry disaster of '21. Carter remembered the wistful way that Stafford had fingered the jewel in his ear as he had told the story during one of their talks in Nix-O. His wife had died years before. "Thought about hitching up again," Stafford had said. "You see all these beautiful women around here. You think, that's what I want; you know? But finally I realized that any woman you get comes with a whole life of her own. Family. Plans. Habits. Furniture. Dreams of travel. Last thing I need ... Naw. I've got enough to do."
The memories of Stafford came flashing back, even as Stafford stood there smiling expectantly in the flesh. Abruptly Carter was back in the present. He rose, walked to the end of the table, and gave Stafford a silent hug. He returned to his seat in silence. Philippe was studying Sturgis intently. Annie was fiddling with her bag.
Lena waited with a courtly air of deference till Carter sat down. He was still silent. There was nothing to say.
Lena nodded expectantly at Stafford, who turned to Carter. "Sorry to have caused a problem for you, my friend. I appreciate your coming to look tor me."
"What's going on, Alwyn?"
Stafford glanced uncomfortably at Elena.
She turned to Carter. "This is hard for all of us. We've discussed it and we've agreed to try to explain it to you. All of you." She nodded at Annie. "It's a long story, but it's important. You need to understand what we're doing. We'll show you. There's one catch. It means you can't go back to Mars City or publicize this for two more weeks."
Annie started to speak. "Two weeks! Wait a minute. I never agreed..."
"You wait a minute," Sturgis said to her from across the table. His voice was strained, as if he had been waiting to be unleashed. "You barged in here, now you better hear what we've got to say. It won't do you any good to object, anyway."
Lena interrupted. "Wait. Let Stafford explain it to them."
Stafford stood at the head of the table. "I'll tell this in the order you experienced it." He began pacing the room, as if he needed to move in order to talk. "You were correct in your analysis, Carter. I compliment you. I drove out there into the desert. I found the Mars-2 lander, of which I am inordinately proud. That may be the best thing I did in this whole affair." He glanced at Sturgis, who pursed his lips. So, Carter thought, Lena's been reporting my theories to them. Or was Philippe right about the rooms being bugged?
Stafford continued. "Following the plan of Mr. Sturgis, here, I made a confusion of tracks at the site. Then I drove on to an agreed-upon spot, that little crater, stashed my buggy in it, and let them pick me up in a hopper. We came back here. People were supposed to think I had been lost in the desert. Even if they did follow my tracks, they were supposed to find the buggy and think I had wandered off somewhere."
"But why...?"
"It was a plan of Mr. Sturgis here to create a diversion and buy some time. It may have been a stupid plan in the first place"—Stafford was pacing and looking straight ahead, but Sturgis scowled—"but I bought into it."
"But why...?"
"Don't repeat yourself, my boy." Stafford shot Carter a paternal look. Stafford had come to a window, where he paused, gazing seriously at the pale, apricot-tinged snowscape. There was no snow falling today. The horizon was clear and creamy, no longer shrouded in gray fog. But thin gray clouds muted the color of the sky, and the low sun was struggling to shine through.
"The Mars-2 lander was my own idea. I'd been planning to go out there for months, long before I heard of Mr. Sturgis or the rest of it. I'd picked up various clues over the years. I researched it. I figured it out myself."
Annie fidgeted as if she wanted to talk. Carter hoped she'd stick to their agreement and keep a low profile.
"Then one day, eight or nine weeks ago, just when I was getting ready to go look for Mars-2, I got a call from Lena. Some of her people found something. Changed my plan."
"Something?"
"Don't worry. We're going to take you out and show you. It's in the category of artifacts. Artifacts that didn't come from Earth."
Now Carter reacted. He had been leaning elbows on the table, but he found himself back against his chair, tipping his head back and feeling the tingle in his spine. His breath came hard. He felt like the air had been knocked out of him. After all the searching and all the fantasizing about aliens...
Philippe grinned as if in some personal triumph. Annie was obviously struggling to restrain herself from bursting out in questions.
Sturgis broke in. "You begin to see our problem."
Annie, now staring at the table in an effort not to ask questions, was giving her head the slightest shake, no.
Philippe waved his pen in the air. "You're saying life really did get started on Mars? Intelligence...? What kind of artifacts...?"
"More like one big artifact. As for it, hold your questions. Better you should see it for yourself tomorrow. As for the interpretation, that's where we're still working. That's one of the reasons they called me in. But I swear, when you've got only one part per billion organics, and only microbial fossil, you're not going to convince me intelligence ever evolved on this planet. Nothing advanced enough to build what we've got, anyway. On Mars, there just wasn't enough time to get advanced life started. The interval between the end of the early intense cratering and the evaporation of the liquid water..."
"You're getting off the subject," Sturgis interrupted. "They've all heard your theories before."
"Most of us agree with him," Lena said. "What we've found didn't come from Mars."
The chill returned to Carter's spine.
"There's another factor," Stafford added. "We got an age on what we've found. It's in strata that test out at 3.2 billion years old. We got several sites. They all test the same. So it probably ties in with that layer of enhanced organics we found years ago. It looks like the microbial life may have gotten a start at that time. The climate was..."
"But did you date this artifact itself?" Philippe interrupted. "Or just the soil?" Philippe was always intrigued by archaeology. You had to hand it to Philippe, Carter thought; he was always intrigued by everything.
"Smart boy," Stafford said approvingly. "So far we can only date the soil."
"Then how do you know it wasn't just buried at that depth, more recently? Maybe somebody liked that particular kind of soil."
"There's no evidence at any of the sites that the soil was disturbed to emplace the artifact. The sediments settled on top. I'm sure of it. There's more evidence we'll explain tomorrow."
"But how can intelligence be that old? The solar system's only 4.5 billion years old. You're saying intelligence evolved in only, what, 1.3 billion years from the beginning?"
"You weren't listening, my boy. Did I say it was from this solar system?" Stafford paused to grip the back of his chair and face his audience. "It's not from Mars; there's no precursors in the earlier soil. And ever since that false alarm about creatures under the Europa ice, we've ruled out the rest of the solar system, as far as intelligence is concerned."
Stafford was warming to his lecture now. "And Gerault should have known better on that Titan business," he added, as if to himself.
"Anyway," he continued, watching Carter intently now, as if passing on his knowledge to the next generation, "my interpretation is that we're talking extra-solar. This stuff was left here by some nice folks from some other star. Probably some star older than the sun."
Philippe: "But then why haven't we picked up more signs of intelligent life among all the extra-solar planet systems? Beacons or something."
"Maybe intelligence—what we smugly call intelligence—is pretty rare after all. Suppose it takes a few billion years to get from organic molecules to a civilization. Maybe your typical civilization has, what, a hundred thousand year
s until an asteroid wipes it out? Interplanetary technology has to evolve in one of those hundred-thousand-year windows and start moving asteroids round to end that threat. Maybe only a few of them actually get out into interstellar space; the rest perish. You have a hundred-thousand-year window for a civilization out of a ten-billion-year-old history of the universe. So out of all the planet systems that ought to have civilization, only one in a hundred thousand actually does at any given moment."
Philippe continued, "But a habitable planet would regenerate intelligence from the surviving species in a hundred million years...."
"It's all speculation. Anyway, interstellar civilizations are obviously rare. Maybe the galaxy's had several episodes of civilizations rising, then dying. We don't know what kind of interstellar flight technology they had, or how far they came to get here. Maybe they came through some loophole from the Virgo cluster or something. Hell, that's beyond anything I know about."
Sturgis broke in. "Look, you guys can go have your scientific argument later."
Stafford cleared his throat. "Yeah, well. Anyway, the people who built this ... they themselves may be long extinct. All I can tell you is two basic facts: we've got one piece of alien technology on Mars, and it was put here 3.2 billion years ago."
Suddenly, Annie's resolve to listen evaporated. "What does all this have to do with secret trips to the pole? This is a fantastic discovery. Why was there no announcement...?"
Lena and Stafford started to answer at once. For the first time, Carter had the impression they were genuinely trying to explain what had happened.
"He's coming to that," Sturgis interrupted. He smiled at Annie. The smile looked forced.
"If you have to blame somebody, you can blame me," Stafford said. "I went along with the plan."
"There's no question of blame," Lena said. "At first, when we began to get broken drill bits, we didn't know what we had. It took a few weeks to find out. When we began to realize it was weird, I had Stafford come down here for a little trip. That was still before we really knew what we had."
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