by Ben Bova
It couldn’t be plate tectonics, like on Earth. Mars’ core wasn’t hot enough for long enough to cause a rift like this.
A crevice scrolled up before him and Jamie stopped the winch. But it was only a crack in the canyon wall, a long thin cave, dark and empty. No Navahos hiding in it from Carson and his treacherous Ute Indian scouts.
He started down again. No sound except his own breathing; the winch itself was more than a kilometer above him, up on the canyon rim with Trumball.
The rock began to blur again. Too fast. Jamie eased the pressure of his cramped finger and his descent slowed.
He glanced down again and saw, between his dangling boots, the dark edge of the niche. Almost there. Another few meters. Slowly, painfully slowly, he lowered himself.
It was a huge recess in the canyon wall, as big as the hollow at Mesa Verde, maybe bigger. Heavy rock overhang to protect it from the weather, not that there’d been much weather on Mars over the past thousand millennia.
“I’m at the niche,” he reported into his helmet mike. “Going to manual.”
For a moment there was no reply, then Dex’s voice said tightly, “I’m getting your camera view. Looks good.”
Jamie nodded. If anything happens to me, they’ll have it all on video. Something for the tourists to see.
Swinging in midair, he disengaged the winch’s power control and began lowering himself by hand, slowly, carefully, staring into the shadowed recess in the cliff face as he descended.
It was there! Jamie saw a smooth wall of grayish-pink, something like sandstone, rising from the floor of the giant cave. It was laid out so perfectly straight that it couldn’t possibly be a natural formation. It had been built, constructed by intelligence.
For eternally-long moments he hung there in the harness, swaying slightly back and forth, and merely stared at the wall rising into the shadows of the crevasse, almost as high as the rock ceiling would allow. He could feel his heart thumping against his ribs.
“Are you all right?”
Dex’s voice stirred him out of his awestruck daze.
“Do you see it?” Jamie shouted, his voice pitched high with exhilaration.
“Yeah, I’ve got it on the monitor,” he replied. “It really looks like a wall.”
“It is a wall! A wall that somebody built!”
“Don’t go jumping to conclusions,” Dex said, his voice strained, harsh.
Slowly, deliberately, Jamie turned his head from one end of the wall to its far corner so that the camera mounted on his helmet, slaved to where his eyes pointed, could record its entire length.
“Nearly a hundred meters long,” he reported. “About ten-twelve meters high, I’d estimate.”
“Looks like the top edge has crumbled,” Dex said. “Hard to tell, though, it’s in shadow.”
“Crumbled, broken, right,” said Jamie. “Must be fairly soft material. Sandstone, or something like it.”
“Can you tell how thick it is?”
“Not from here.”
No response from above. He knows what comes next, Jamie told himself.
“I’m going in,” he said.
Immediately Dex replied, “No! It’s too late in the day, the sun’ll be going down in another hour or so. It’ll still be there tomorrow.”
“I can do it,” Jamie said. “I’ve climbed enough mountains on Earth to handle this.” Silently he added, the hell with tomorrow. I’m going in there now.
He undipped the spring-loaded tether gun from his equipment belt and held it in both gloved hands, aiming for the niche’s rock floor rather than the wall itself. Sandstone might give way, he told himself, but in reality he knew it would be sacrilegious to deface the wall.
Jamie squeezed the trigger and the tether buzzed out, vibrating in his hands as it unreeled. The power spike imbedded itself in the rock floor with a thunk he could hear even in the thin air as he dangled in the harness. When he fastened the gun back on his belt, the tether automatically adjusted its tension to take up the slack. Jamie tested the line; it seemed to be holding fast.
“Dammit, Jamie, if you don’t start up I’m going to power up the winch and drag you up! Come on. Now.”
Jamie ignored Dex’s call. Carefully he pulled himself into the crevice, hand over gloved hand, until his boots touched the stone floor of the niche. The wall loomed above him, pinkish brown, solid, silent.
With trembling hands Jamie bent over to anchor the cable attached to his harness on the spike in the stone floor. He worked with enforced, consciously deliberate motions. He was quivering inside; he wanted to leap out and explore the cliff dwelling, but he knew he had to make certain his lifeline back to the rim of the canyon wall was secure. Like a drunk trying to show he was sober, Jamie tied down the cable with exaggerated exactness.
“Your picture’s breaking up.” Dex’s voice crackled with static in his earphones. “Rock’s interfering with the transmission.”
“Can’t be helped,” Jamie said. He started to unclip the harness. His hands were shaking so much it took him three tries to unfasten it completely.
“Jamie, you’ve got to come up now.” Dex’s urging voice was weak, distant, scratched with interference.
“Half an hour,” he said absently as he finally stepped out of the harness and stood erect and free on the floor of the crevice. His insides were trembling.
“Don’t go … wait until …” Dex’s voice fluttered, whined, “… Stacy … from the dome … having a fit …”
Jamie ignored him. He looked up at the wall that rose before him, the wall built by Martians. High up, near its top, he saw rectangular openings. A line of them, from one end of the wall to the other.
Windows! They’re windows! What had looked like a broken, crumbled roof line from outside was actually a row of windows staring out into the canyon. His knees felt rubbery, his insides fluttered.
They were here, Grandfather, he said in his mind. They really were here. Jamie’s eyes blurred, and he realized they were filled with tears.
His earphones were silent now, except for a faint hissing static. The voices from above couldn’t reach him here. Jamie was alone with the ghosts of the long-gone past.
The building was old. Even encased in the bulky hard suit Jamie could feel the centuries and millennia, the eons that these walls had stood here. The solid, silent stones exuded age, untold spans of years, countless generations of hope and faith and endurance. The burnished dying light from the distant setting sun bathed the walls in a ruddy luster, made them seem to glow from within.
Old, incredibly ancient. Before the cliff dwellings of the Old Ones. Before the Parthenon. Before the Pyramids this building stood here in this niche of rock, waiting, waiting.
Waiting for me. For us. For people of the blue world to find you, Jamie said to himself.
Blinking, forcing his shaking legs to carry him, he paced the length of the stone wall. His geologist’s mind was asking: How old? What materials? What purpose? But in his red heart he knew: Intelligent creatures built this community, this village, in this sheltered cove of rock millions of years ago.
Millions of years ago.
They were here! What happened to them? Where did they go?
“Are you getting this imagery?” he asked.
No reply.
Jamie forced himself to walk back to the spike and the tethered cable. He could see that the sky was beginning to darken. What little sunlight left to the day carried no warmth.
“Can you hear me, Dex?”
“Yes! You’ve got to come up. It’s almost sunset.”
“Come on down,” Jamie said. “I’ll send the harness up to you.”
“No! I can’t.”
“Dex, you won’t want to miss this. When we report back to Stacy and the others, it ought to be both of us.”
A long moment of silence. Then Dex said, “There’s only about another half-hour of daylight. Maybe less.”
“Enough,” Jamie said, unfastening the cable from the
spike imbedded in the rock floor. The harness swung free, out beyond the edge of the cleft.
“Take it up,” he told Trumball. “Full speed. Don’t waste time.”
“The safety regulations …”
“There were Martians down here, Dex. Living, intelligent, building Martians.”
The harness yanked up and out of sight.
While he waited for Dex, Jamie paced deeper into the cleft, along the sidewall of the village. He saw low entryways in the wall and, hack in the gloomy shadows at the rear of the cave, a circular pit.
A well? he asked himself. Too big for that. A kiva? He laughed nervously. Don’t start that. It’d be a kiva back in Mesa Verde, but that doesn’t mean the Martians built the same kind of religious centers. Don’t jump to conclusions.
But what else could it be? a voice in his head demanded.
Patience, his grandfather whispered. You can’t unlock all the doors at once.
“I’m starting down,” Dex’s voice crackled in his earphones, tense, unhappy.
“Great.”
“Nobody’s minding the winch, y’know.”
“It won’t walk away,” Jamie said. “We planted it good and firm.”
“I hope.”
Jamie paced the length of the building, fighting the irrational urge to tear off his hard suit and face these ancient stones unprotected, feel them with his bare hands.
The sky above the far horizon was turning from orange to violet when Dex came into view, dangling in the harness. Jamie wished he could see the man’s face; see his eyes pop at his first sight of the dwelling.
He heard Dex’s sharp intake of breath. “Christ, how old can this be?”
“That’s what we’re here to find out,” Jamie said.
THE SPEED OF LIGHT
VIJAY FELT THE PRESS OF THEIR BODIES AS ALL SIX OF THE EXPLORERS crowded into the comm center. Rodriguez sat at the console with his bandaged hand tied against his chest by a sling. Stacy Dezhurova sat beside him. No one made a sound, not even a breath, as they stared at the main display screen.
“We’ve got to get back up to the rover now,” Jamie was saying, his voice sounding tired, drained. “I just wanted to make sure that you all saw this. It’s a building, for certain. There were intelligent Martians here.”
Vijay’s throat felt dry, even though she was perspiring in the hot, crowded cubicle.
“I did not think it was real,” Dezhurova admitted, her voice low, hollow. “Not until your imagery started to come through did I believe it is real.”
“It’s real,” Jamie said. “Better send the news to Tarawa.”
Pete Connors was dozing peacefully in his aluminum-and-plastic beach lounge chair. It was Sunday afternoon. The sun was hot, but the breeze coming in off the reef was brisk and delicious. He had been watching the Kansas City Chiefs playing a night football game against the Philadelphia Eagles on his little portable TV, but had fallen asleep in the middle of a scoreless defensive struggle.
He awoke to his wife rudely shaking his shoulder. “Wha … whatsamatter?”
She was frowning. “It’s the office. They want you to come over right away. Top priority, they say.”
Connors scrambled out of the lounge chair, nearly tripping himself.
“What the hell’s gone wrong now?” he muttered.
With a peck for his wife’s cheek he ran from the lanai around the corner of the tile-roofed house to the garage, hopped on his electric motorbike, and started pedaling furiously down the housing tract street that led to the island’s main road.
In less than ten minutes he was gawking at Jamie’s footage of the cliff dwelling.
“Oh my good lord,” said former astronaut Pete Connors, sinking into a chair in front of the display screen. “This is the big one.”
The people crowding around him in the cinderblock-walled comm center were staring too, some grinning, some open-mouthed with awe.
“Feed this to ICU headquarters right away,” Connors said.
“It’s Saturday evening in New York,” one of his assistants reminded him. “They’ll be closed.”
“Maybe we ought to send it directly to the news media?” someone suggested.
“No!” Connors snapped. “ICU’s got to make the announcement, not us. Get the board chairman on the phone, wherever he is. And Li Chengdu, at Princeton.”
“What about Mr. Trumball?”
Connors took in a deep breath. “Yeah, Trumball, too. He’d get pretty pissed if we didn’t tell him right off.”
Walter Laurence was sipping a martini as he supervised the trimming of the family Christmas tree, a chore that he once dreaded, but now that he was a grandfather it was actually enjoyable to watch his grown children struggling to keep their tykes from breaking the ornaments and messing everything up beyond recall.
He sat in his favorite wingchair by the fireplace, wishing it would snow. There hadn’t been a white Christmas in simply ages, and Central Park always looked so pretty in the snow. Now it was gray and bare and grimy-looking outside his twentieth-floor window.
The butler brought the phone to him and placed it gently on the sherry table beside the wingchair. “Tarawa, sir.” He still pronounced it Ta-RA-wa, instead of properly, Laurence realized with some annoyance.
Wondering what kind of catastrophe would prompt Tarawa to call on the Saturday before Christmas, Laurence touched the keypad.
Pete Connors’ dark face appeared on the tiny screen, split from ear to ear by a toothy grin.
“Sorry to disturb you, but I thought you’d want to see this right away.”
It took several moments for Laurence to understand what he was looking at. Once he grasped that it was a village built by Martians, he leaped to his feet and gave a war whoop that startled his family so badly they nearly knocked the Christmas tree over.
Dr. Li Chengdu watched his neighbors preparing for Christmas with the cool detached eye of an alien observer. They struggled to string colored lights over their houses, put up elaborate decorations on their lawns, and drove themselves deeper into debt by buying elaborate gifts and throwing too many parties.
Now and then they talked about the religious significance of the holiday, but as far as Li could determine the true purpose of the occasion was to boost retail sales. No matter. He enjoyed the fuss and merriment, even though much of it was underlaid with a kind of desperate determination to do everything right and be happy no matter what the family tensions.
When Connors called from Tarawa, the black former astronaut seemed more excited than the neighborhood children.
“Jamie did it!” Connors blurted. “It’s really a village! Built by Martians!”
Li half collapsed into his favorite chair, the comfortable yielding recliner that had been his one luxury on the First Mars Expedition, and stared open-mouthed at the phone screen’s display of the Martian building.
His heart thudded beneath his ribs. Intelligent creatures lived on Mars. We are not alone in the universe! Not only life, but intelligent life exists elsewhere!
His gaze wandered to his living room window and the twinkling lights on his neighbor’s house and lawn, across the suburban street.
What will they feel when the news reaches them? Frightened? Excited? Eager to meet their peers? Or afraid of meeting their superiors?
Darryl C. Trumball was at home on Saturday evening, struggling with the decision of whether to go downtown to his club for dinner, or tell his wife to have the cook fix something for the two of them.
Connors’ phone call ended all thoughts of dinner. Trumball gaped at the views from Mars, then immediately snapped, “Get off this line! I’ve got six dozen people to call right away!”
Connors said, “The news media—”
“Never mind the stupid media! Let Laurence and his flunkies take care of that. I’m calling money people, man. They’ll be begging to back the next expedition now!”
“Is this a crank call?” asked the news director.
“Young lady
,” said Walter Laurence, “I am the executive director of the International Consortium of Universities. My people are phoning all the major networks and print outlets. I chose to call your network personally because your CEO is a close friend of mine.”
Then why didn’t you call him? The news director wondered. She was a bone-thin, sharp-featured woman of thirty-seven who had seen her share of hoaxes and scams. Intelligent Martians my ass, she thought.
“Look, what you showed me looks like an adobe housing project. You claim it’s on Mars?”
It took Laurence fully fifteen minutes and all the patience he could engender to convince her that he was telling the truth. Still, she did not fully believe him until the monitors above her desk—which showed what the other networks were running—all suddenly started showing footage of the Martian cliff dwelling. Even the Saturday night football game was preempted.
That’s what finally convinced her.
The President of the United States was startled when his science advisor phoned to tell him the Mars explorers had found intelligent Martians.
“Have you notified DoD?” the president asked immediately.
The science advisor shook her head. She had not had access to the president for weeks, and she was surprised at how much older he looked on her office wall screen without his makeup.
Her office was crowded with grinning, partying young men and women. Champagne corks were popping. People were toasting the Mars explorers. Martian jokes were buzzing through the group: How many Martians does it take to replace a light bulb? Why do Martians have headaches?
”Mr. President, the Martians no longer exist. Their village is empty. They pose no threat to us.”
The president blinked his baggy eyes. “Well, this one village may be abandoned, but there might be others, mightn’t there?”
The science advisor nodded thoughtfully. He’s got a point there. If Waterman and his people have found one village, there must be others, elsewhere on the planet.