by Ben Bova
“Good idea.”
The two men slid out from the table and went up to the cockpit. Jamie spoke briefly with Dezhurova, who swiftly agreed that the biologists should be doing biology, but then added:
“They will need their own rover, to get down to the Canyon floor. I will send Rodriguez with the number two rover.”
“His hand’s okay?”
“Not good enough to play baseball, but good enough to drive.”
“Okay. How soon?”
“A day to stock the rover. Two days to reach you.”
“Fine,” said Jamie. He thought about asking to speak with Vijay, but with Dex sitting beside him, decided against it. She had not called him, and he had not called her. Probably better to leave it at that, for the time being, he told himself.
“We want to see today’s imagery from the soarplane,” Dex said.
Dezhurova nodded. “Nothing new, but you should look for yourselves.”
She was right, Jamie saw. The imagery showed the rusty, frigid, barren Martian landscape in beautiful detail, down to a one-meter resolution. But no hint of buildings. Not a trace of structure, order. No outlines of ancient foundations. No piles of dressed stones. Nothing but bare, empty wilderness, endlessly. Miles and miles of nothing but miles and miles, Jamie thought. It makes Death Valley look lush and inviting.
“Funny thing,” Dex said as they watched the imagery unfold silently on the cockpit screen.
“What?”
“I got a message from my old man. Sort of a belated Christmas card.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. Couple days ago. Said he’s sorry he couldn’t talk to me on Christmas day. He was in Monaco, at an international conference of nonprofit research foundations.”
“Raising money?”
“What else?” Dex asked. “Oh, I suppose he chased a few topless bathing beauties. He does that when he’s away from home.”
“Did your mother call you on Christmas?” Jamie wondered aloud.
Dex snorted. “I got her Christmas greeting two days early. She always sends all her greetings early. Records one message and sends it out to her mailing list. As personal as a department store catalogue, my mom.”
Jamie could not think of anything to say.
“The thing is,” Dex went on, “Dad said he was proud of the work I’m doing here. He sort of read it, like he was reading it off a teleprompter. Probably got one of his flunkies to write it out for him.”
“I don’t think—”
Dex laughed softly. “You don’t know the old bird the way I do. But he actually said he was proud of me. I think that’s a first.”
“Well, I’m glad he did.”
Dex looked at Jamie for a long silent moment as they sat side by side in the cockpit. “You didn’t have anything to do with it, did you?”
“Me?”
”I mean, the old man never told me was proud of me before. Did you put him onto it?”
Before Jamie could answer, Dex said, “Never mind. Don’t tell me. I don’t want to know. I’d rather think my dear old dad is getting sentimental in his old age.”
Now Jamie chuckled. “He doesn’t strike me as the sentimental type.”
“No, not hardly,” Dex agreed. “Anyway, if you did have a hand in it … thanks.”
Jamie kept silent, not wanting to strain the slender thread that was slowly strengthening between the two of them.
“Another thing,” Dex said, as the barren imagery flowed across the screen. “We’ve got to move the dome here, sooner or later. I think sooner would be better.”
Jamie sighed. “I’ve been thinking about that.”
“And?”
“How about asking Tarawa to send the backup dome here, with cables and equipment to build a better lift?”
Dex’s eyes lit up. “That way we wouldn’t have to move the base.”
“Right,” said Jamie.
“The thing is, it’d take five-six months to get it here even if they started on it tomorrow morning.”
“True,” Jamie admitted. “But trying to move the dome from where it is would take a month to six weeks, wouldn’t it?”
“At least.”
“And we wouldn’t be doing any productive work during that time. The useful work would stop dead.”
“Yeah.”
“They’ve got the backup dome just sitting there at Baikonur—”
“And a resupply mission is in the budget,” Dex finished for Jamie.
“Right! That’s the way to do it.”
“Good. I’ll tell Stacy and she can relay it to Connors.”
“Do you think Tarawa will agree to it?”
“They’ll have to,” Dex said firmly. “I mean, we can’t keep shuttling rovers back and forth. It’s wasteful. And we’re eating up all our prepackaged food. We’ll have no backup food supplies. We’re supposed to be living off the garden.”
Jamie knew it was true. “We’ll have to set up another greenhouse.”
Nodding enthusiastically, Dex said, “Why not make it a manned flight? Bring in some of those archeologists who want to get here.”
“They’d have to undergo months of training, Dex. You can’t just pick a team of people and pop them off to Mars without training them first.”
Dex’s face fell slightly. “Yeah. Right.”
“But it makes sense to pick a few and start training them now,” Jamie said.
“I suppose,” Dex replied. “The thing is, I was hoping to get some of ‘em here soon enough so they could do the sweeping work, instead of us.”
AFTERNOON: SOL 113
“I’VE GOT SOMETHING HERE.”
Jamie looked up from his sweeping. It had been another monotonous, laborious day. They had cleared the entire top floor of the dwelling and found nothing. Not an iota of material of any sort. Nothing but bare walls. Now they were working on the second floor.
Rodriguez had just started his trek in the rover from the dome to them, his departure delayed by a dozen maddeningly tiny but unavoidable holdups, including the fact that he could not squeeze his bandaged hand into his hard suit glove. At the last minute Vijay had to find a larger-sized glove for him. She took one of Craig’s from his backup supplies.
Pete Connors had immediately endorsed the idea of sending the spare dome and all its equipment to the Canyon site. He bucked the request to the ICU board, with a personal message to Trumball in Boston about it.
“Mitsuo, was that you?” Jamie asked.
“Yes,” the biologist replied. His voice sounded strange, choked, tight with tension. “Come and take a look at this.”
Jamie was in the middle of a large room, slowly, carefully sweeping the dust from the floor to the opening that led below. If you pushed the dust too hard it would billow and drift back to the area you had just cleared. And every few minutes they had to sift the dust with screens scavenged from the air duct supplies.
It would be so much easier if they could simply vacuum the dust up off the floors and walls, but the hand vacs that they used to clean their suits could not handle the sheer volume of dust accumulated in the building; it was several centimeters deep in some corners. The hand vacs were running raggedly as it was, working harder than their designers had ever intended each evening when the four of them climbed back into the rover, caked with rustred dust almost up to their helmets. Rodriguez was bringing a set of backups with him, so that the ones they were using could go back to Stacy and Wiley Craig for some much-needed maintenance.
Besides, the scientists back on Earth had insisted on sifting the dust by hand. The vacuum cleaners might pass or crush some incalculably important shard of pottery or chip of fossilized bone.
Jamie almost had to laugh. They had found nothing. Nada. Zip. Zero. No shards, no chips, no traces of anything but maddeningly endless dust.
Until this moment.
“What is it, Mitsuo?” Jamie asked as he headed for the corner where the biologist had been working. Now he was standing stock-s
till, facing the wall he had been cleaning.
“You … you’d better come and see for yourself.”
Dex came striding across the big empty chamber, the royal blue stripes on his hard suit almost indistinguishable beneath a coating of red dust. Trudy Hall was close behind him.
“Whatcha got, pal?” Dex asked. “Find any Martians?”
“I think maybe so.” Fuchida’s voice was trembling slightly.
Jamie saw he was pointing at the wall he’d been cleaning. It was not a smoothly blank face, as the other walls had been.
There were scratches on the wall. From about halfway down from the ceiling to the level where the uncleared dust still clung, the wall was covered with a fine tracery of curving lines.
“Cracks,” said Dex. But his breezy manner was gone.
“Or writing,” Jamie said.
“Writing,” Fuchida agreed.
In his earphones Jamie could hear all four of them breathing hard, panting, almost.
Trudy said, “Cracks wouldn’t be so regular. Look …” Her gloved finger traced along the length of the wall. “There’s line after line of it.”
“Don’t touch the wall,” Jamie warned.
“I’m not touching it,” she said, slightly annoyed.
“Let’s get the rest of the wall cleaned off,” Dex said.
All four of them fell to it, whisking gently but impatiently. Rustred dust blew in every direction.
“We’ll have to put up plastic tenting or something,” Dex was thinking aloud, “to cover the openings, make certain more dust doesn’t blow in here.”
Jamie nodded inside his helmet. “I wish we could date these walls.”
All their attempts to determine the age of the walls had been frustrated. There was no organic material in the pieces of rock that made up the walls. They had been cut and chiselled to fit together like the walls of Machu Picchu, and their interior faces skillfully polished.
“There’s going to be a lot of Ph.D.s earned here, trying to figure out a way to get a reliable dating system,” Dex said.
“The rock must have come from deeper in the cleft,” Fuchida pointed out as they worked.
“D’you think there was ever water flowing in here?” Hall asked.
“Must’ve been,” said Dex.
“No evidence of it,” Jamie said.
“We haven’t really looked for it,” Dex countered.
“It would be very difficult for them to bring water up from the Canyon floor,” Fuchida pointed out.
“If there ever was a stream running down there,” said Jamie, sweeping carefully, trying to keep control over his growing excitement. More and more lines adorned the rock wall.
“I’ll bet we find evidence of a river down there,” Dex said.
“But when did it flow?” Jamie asked. “How long ago?”
“Look!” Trudy cried. “It’s a picture, I think.”
She kept on brushing at her section of the wall, exposing a circle with what appeared to be arrows emanating from it.
“A sun symbol?” Jamie gasped with shock. It looked like the kind of symbol the Navaho and other tribes used to indicate the sun.
“They had eyes like ours,” Trudy said, her voice hollow. “They had a sense of vision and they invented writing.”
“Writing,” Dex breathed. His usual cocky air was gone.
The wall bore a whole row of picturelike symbols. Pictographs, Jamie thought. Like the earliest forms of writing in Egypt.
“What does it mean?” Fuchida asked. “What were they trying to tell us?”
Jamie’s throat felt dry. It took him three tries to work up a little saliva and swallow.
“Come on,” he said. “Let’s clear off the rest of it.”
They fell to the work in silence.
Jamie glanced back at the sun symbol. No, it can’t be, he told himself. These people can’t be our ancestors. They weren’t human. They were built differently. They died off … they didn’t migrate to Earth. That’s ridiculous.
“Oh-oh,” Dex grunted.
They turned to see what he was doing. Dex had bent down to his knees, to brush away the dust from the bottom of the wall.
The regular lines of well-spaced symbols ended about a meter above the floor. More ragged symbols followed, lopsided and scrawling, compared to the ones above.
“Like children’s writing,” Hall murmured.
“Or primitive adults,” said Fuchida.
“These regular lines up here,” Hall said, pointing with her gloved hand, ”have been inscribed. They used chisels or some other tools that cut the lines into the rock deeply. See? But these down below …”
“They’re scratched onto the rock,” Dex said. “Like scribbles.”
“Graffiti,” said Fuchida.
“Children? Vandals?” Hall wondered.
“Tourists,” Jamie muttered.
“More drawings down here,” Dex said, brushing furiously. The dust billowed all around him.
“Who’s got the camera?” Jamie asked.
“I do,” said Fuchida.
“Don’t take off the lens cap until this dust settles!” Dex warned, wiping at his helmet visor with his free hand. “At least this stuff doesn’t cling the way the dust does on the Moon.”
“The dust on the Moon is electrostatically charged,” Fuchida said. “From the infalling solar wind.”
“Tell me about it,” Dex groused.
The three of them bent closer as Dex brushed the final section of the wall, down low and at the end where it joined the other wall at a right angle.
“Pictures, all right,” Dex said, still kneeling.
Jamie peered through the thinning dust cloud. The pictures at the bottom of the wall seemed crude, hastily drawn.
“What’s that?” Hall asked, pointing again.
Jamie saw a lopsided, bulbous figure scratched atop a ragged, sloping line.
“An erection,” Dex snickered.
“Don’t be an idiot,” Trudy snapped.
“Whatever it’s supposed to be, it’s pretty primitive work,” said Dex.
“And this?” Hall asked again. “It looks as if somebody just clawed a half-dozen streaks across the rock.”
Fuchida bent so close his visor almost touched the rock. “But look, there are pinpoints here and there … this one looks like a cross or an x.”
Dex dismissed it with, “Pits in the rock.”
“Not this x symbol,” Fuchida maintained.
Jamie stared hard at the crude drawings. He knew with all the certainty of ancient wisdom that the primitive artist was trying to tell them something. He didn’t just rattle off some graffiti here. These symbols meant something to him. They mean something now. But what? What was he trying to say? What did he want to record in the rock? What is the message he left for us?
“The philologists are going to have a smashing time with this,” Hall said.
Straightening up slowly, the joints of his suit grating slightly, Dex agreed, “They’ll go nuts, all right.”
Jamie felt his spine creak as he stood up, too. “They’ll go crazy with frustration. There’s no way they can interpret this writing. The pictures, maybe, but not the writing.”
“No Rosetta stone,” Fuchida said.
“That’s right,” said Jamie. “The only way they translated languages from antiquity was to find translations into languages they already knew. You need a key.”
“And there’s no key here,” Dex said, recognizing the problem. “It’s all Martian.”
“No connection to any language on Earth,” Fuchida said.
“Maybe the pictures will help,” Hall suggested.
“Maybe.”
“I wouldn’t bet money on it,” Jamie said.
Dex laughed. “One thing’s for sure.”
“What?”
“They’ll invent six zillion different explanations for every symbol on this wall.”
“And no two of them will agree.” Fuchida broke int
o a giggle.
“But they’ll write scads of papers about it,” said Hall. She started laughing, too.
Jamie stood silent inside his suit while the three others laughed on the edge of hysteria. Blowing off steam, he realized. They’ve got to laugh or cry or scream from the rooftops. Can’t blame them. It’s the greatest discovery of all time. But what does it mean?
What does it goddamn mean?
He stared at the symbols. So neat and orderly at the outset. Professional work. They took pride in it. But down at the bottom, just a scrawl.
What happened here? What happened to these people?
He felt cold and weak, as if his legs were no longer able to support him. The path ends here, Grandfather. They left a message and we have no way of understanding it.
“Jamie? You okay?”
It was Dex’s voice. Jamie stirred himself, focused his eyes on the three other humans in their impersonal hard suits.
“Yeah, yes. I’m okay.”
Dex said, “I was saying we’ll have to report this back to DiNardo and his committee people.”
Jamie nodded inside his helmet. “And to the world.”
They had recovered from their first reaction. Now they were all business. Fuchida was clicking away with the still camera.
“We should bring the video equipment in here for this,” Hall said.
“And the VR rig,” said Dex. “Every tourist in the world is going to want to see this!”
Jamie turned and began walking away from the others. For an insane moment he felt it would be better to dynamite the whole dwelling, bury it in tons of rock so that no one could ever find it again, leave it in peace and never let anyone else set foot in it.
DIARY ENTRY
They blame everything on me. I’m their scapegoat. If anything goes wrong, it’s my fault. They’re much too clever to come right out and say it, but I can tell by the way they talk about me behind my back, by the way they look at me when they think I can’t see them. They’re so excited about the cliff dwelling and the writing. They’ll never want to leave. But I’m going to outsmart them all. I’ll fix it so that they’ll HAVE TO leave, whether they want to or not.