by Ben Bova
DiNardo gasped at the thought.
“Apparently,” the confessor went on, “God decided to bring the trial of tears on Mars to an end. He called the Martians back to him. Their time of testing ended sixty-five million years ago.”
“Judgment Day,” DiNardo murmured.
“It is not our place to question God’s actions. We must accept what He has done.”
“Judgment Day,” DiNardo repeated.
“It may seem harsh to you, but the Martians are now in their heavenly home, looking upon the face of God. Is that a cruelty?”
DiNardo almost laughed aloud. “No, Father. You’re right, of course. I was looking on it from a strictly secular point of view.”
“For your penance, I think perhaps a retreat would be in order. Renew your spiritual strength, my friend.”
Retreat? DiNardo stiffened at the thought. Spend a week or more in prayer and meditation, cut off from the rest of the world? Miss the news from Mars?
That would be penance indeed, he thought.
IV: THE DECISION
Listen to the wisdom of the Old Ones. Coyote is the trickster who brings misery to the People. But sometimes he helps them. No one can be all bad. Or all good.
AFTERNOON: SOL 342
A THING OF BEAUTY IS A JOY FOREVER, SAID WILEY CRAIG, WITH GENUINE appreciation in his voice.
The garden enclosure by the new dome was finished at last, a squared-off structure of glass bricks built entirely of materials from the Martian sand. Craig and Rodriguez stood by the big parabolic dish of the solar mirror that had provided the heat for their kiln, admiring their handiwork.
Rodriguez nodded inside his helmet. “We finished it in record time, too.”
Craig laughed. “Wasn’t much of a record we had to beat, Tom. And it helped that nobody got hurt while we were building it.”
Flexing his scarred hand inside its glove, Rodriguez murmured, “Yeah, that’s right.”
The new dome—with its garden greenhouse—sat by the edge of the Canyon cliff. Four Buckyball cables ran down past the niche where the ancient building stood and extended all the way down to the Canyon floor.
Hall and Fuchida were down there, studying the lichen in the rocks, while a new drill chugged away, bringing up deep-dwelling bacteria from below the permafrost level.
The new dome had come on the unmanned resupply mission from Earth with a flexible access tunnel that could be linked to the airlock hatch of a rover by remote control, either from inside the dome itself or from inside the rover. The explorers could now go from the rover to the dome or vice versa in their shirtsleeves.
The replenishment lander had also carried a similar tunnel for the old dome, still sitting at its original site on Lunae Planum. Stacy and Fuchida were attaching it to the airlock hatch.
Over the past six months the explorers had mapped out the extent of the lichen across the entire face of Mars. Fuchida had returned to Olympus Mons to gather more samples of the Ares olympicus bacteria, then—with a delight bordering on delirium—discovered similar strains of rock-eating bacteria in two of the other Tharsis shield volcanoes.
Stacy had piloted only one of those flights with Fuchida, despite her ardent desire to fly. The responsibilities of being mission director weighed heavily upon her, but she could not entirely overcome her love of flying. “Rank has some privileges,” she said firmly when she announced her decision to pilot the rocketplane.
Fuchida handled all the excursions to the volcanoes. Trudy Hall was scheduled for half of them, but the two biologists announced that Trudy would prefer to work on the lichen at the Canyon floor and let Fuchida deal with the volcanoes.
When Dex teased Trudy about being afraid to fly, Rodriguez jumped to her defense. “You think riding that cable up and down four kilometers isn’t scary? Man, I feel a lot safer riding in something that’s at least got wings on it.”
Stacy worked out a meticulous schedule for all eight of them, a schedule that kept Jamie at the new dome by the Canyon while Stacy herself remained most of the time at the old base on Lunae Planum. Jamie marveled at how she managed to keep Vijay away when he and Dex were both in the same place. He saw Vijay when Dex was gone, and he knew she saw Dex when he wasn’t around.
Jamie had not slept with Vijay since he’d stepped down as mission director. He kept telling himself that she wasn’t sleeping with Dex, either. He tried hard to believe that, and most of the time he succeeded. But there were moments, when Dex would return from a trip to the old dome with a sly grin on his face that made Jamie’s insides burn.
Yet he and Dex were getting along well together. Without Vijay around, they worked and ate side by side. They speculated about the Martian building and the Martians themselves. And they worried about the day when Dex’s father would arrive to start his commercial operations.
“Why don’t we get the ICU to claim this area?” Dex suggested one night, as the two of them huddled over mugs of coffee in the new dome’s galley.
Jamie went through Connors to Dr. Li, and via Li to the chairman of the ICU board.
Walter Laurence’s normally imperturbable face looked troubled when he finally replied to Jamie’s pleading messages. Jamie waited until late at night to open Laurence’s message; the dome was quiet, lights turned down, most of the others already asleep.
Even in the display screen of Jamie’s laptop, the executive director of the International Consortium of Universities seemed upset, unhappy.
“Dr. Waterman,” he began, stiffly, his earth-brown eyes focused slightly low, at his own display screen instead of the camera atop it, “the entire ICU board of directors has given your request a great deal of thought.”
Jamie watched in silence as Laurence wormed through a long, torturous array of excuses. The man constantly ran one hand through his thick mane of silver hair, as though he were in distress.
“So the long and the short of it is,” Laurence concluded at last, “that the board feels it would be improper for the ICU to claim utilization of any part of Mars—or any other body in the solar system, for that matter. We are dedicated to scientific research, not real estate development.”
When Jamie went over to Dex’s cubicle, the younger man was already heading Jamie’s way.
“You saw Laurence’s answer?” Jamie asked needlessly.
“He’s got as much backbone as a slime mold,” Dex muttered. “Him and his whole frigging board.”
“They’re not going to risk getting your father sore at them.”
“No,” Dex agreed. “Money talks, loud and clear.”
“We’ve only got thirty days before the backup mission launches.”
“With dear old Dad aboard.”
They walked together through the shadowy dome to the galley. “Your father’s really coming?”
“He passed all the physicals. Sent me a video of him in a hard suit, practicing emergency procedures in the big water tank down at Huntsville.”
“Money talks, all right,” Jamie grumbled.
All through the past six months, Fuchida had been buttonholing Jamie whenever he could to try to convince him that one of the explorers was deliberately sabotaging their equipment.
The burned-out wheel bearing from the rover that Stacy had driven became a bone of contention. Fuchida examined it and claimed he saw evidence of tampering.
“See these scratches, here along the seal that failed?” the biologist pointed out. “Deliberate! Someone purposely pried open the seal enough to allow dust to get in and seize up the bearing.”
Jamie looked hard at the bearing in Fuchida’s hand. He saw the scratches but had to tell the biologist that there was no way of knowing if they were deliberately made.
“How else?” Fuchida demanded.
“Dust particles,” Jamie suggested. “Pebbles kicked up by the wheel, maybe.”
The biologist shook his head stubbornly.
“I could ask Wiley to take a look,” Jamie said. “Get his opinion.”
“Us
eless, if he is the saboteur,” Fuchida replied dejectedly.
Every equipment failure, every minor accident, every time one of the explorers tripped or got nicked in any way, Fuchida added it to the list of “evidence” he was amassing. He called Jamie at least weekly, usually late at night, when everyone else was asleep—and even then Fuchida looked furtive, distrustful, suspicious.
Finally Jamie had to tell him, “Mitsuo, you’re getting paranoid about this.”
Surprisingly, the biologist agreed. “I know,” he said, his voice low and tight. “I am beginning to wonder if I am going mad. Why am I the only one who sees what is happening?”
Jamie tried to make light of it. “Maybe you’re brighter than the rest of us.”
“Or crazier,” Fuchida admitted.
There is that, Jamie thought.
DIARY ENTRY
Nothing works right. Whatever I do, they ignore it. I know they ‘ re watching me, but they won’t admit it. They won’t step up to me, face to face, and have it out. Behind my back, of course, they’re talking about me. Whispering, really. I can hear them whispering when they think I’m not listening, not watching. I’m going to have to take drastic steps. The poor deluded fools! Can’t they see that I’m trying to save their lives? The longer we stay here on Mars the likelier we’ll all be killed. Better to kill one or two of them and save the rest. We’ve got to get away! Back to Earth, where it’s safe. Better to sacrifice a few and save the others.
MORNING: SOL 358
JAMIE WOKE UP SLOWLY, THE REMNANTS OF A DISTURBING DREAM FADING from his consciousness like a mirage dissipating as he tried to reach it. Something about the Martians, he thought, although he vaguely remembered Fuchida in his dream, trying desperately to tell him something but unable to speak a word aloud.
A mini-nightmare, Jamie decided as he quickly showered and shaved. Got to keep up appearances, he told himself while he ran the electric razor across his chin. It’s buzzing sounded weak, lower in pitch than normal. The batteries need recharging. Which started him thinking about the nuclear generator buried a full kilometer from the dome. People still freaked out about nuclear power back home. Here we couldn’t get along without it.
This is home, Jamie, he heard his grandfather whisper. That other world isn’t for you. This one is.
“For a while, Grandfather,” Jamie answered in a barely vocal whisper. “Only until Trumball arrives to take it away from us.”
He pulled on his coveralls and sat dejectedly at his desk chair. We’re just going through the motions, Jamie told himself. The excitement has drained away. Now we’re just collecting data bits, like a bunch of graduate students following the drill that the professors back on Earth have set for us.
Nothing new had been discovered in months. The cliff building held its secrets tenaciously, empty and silent, revealing nothing. Except that it’s very existence told so much.
What do we know? Jamie asked himself for the thousandth time that week.
We know that Mars bears life: lichen in some surface rocks and bacteria deep underground.
We know that once intelligent Martians lived here and they built the structure in the cliff.
We know that they no longer exist.
We’re pretty certain they were wiped out by one or more meteor strikes about sixty-five million years ago.
And that’s it. They had developed writing. Maybe they even understood what was happening to them.
But we haven’t been able to find another building anywhere on the whole planet. We don’t understand their writing and probably never will.
So why are we going through the motions of searching the planet and poking around the niche where the building is sited? We don’t have the tools or the manpower to find anything more. We don’t have the fundamental understanding to figure who or what they were. They could have honeycombed this planet with their cities and farms, but after sixty-five million years they’re all lost, gone, covered over by dust or ground into dust themselves.
Jamie admitted to himself, we’re wasting our time here. Even the VR shows we beam to Earth have lost their appeal; the audience is down to schools and museums. We might as well pack up and go home.
Then he saw Trumball and his hotel builders and the tourists he wanted to bring to Mars. Bulldozers and buses and shopping malls where you could buy plastic Martian dolls.
Grimly he turned to his laptop and booted it up, ready to review the day’s schedule of tasks.
Instead, Pete Connors’ chocolate-brown face looked out at him from the display screen, grinning cheerily.
“Congratulations! Today marks the three hundredth and sixty-fifth day since your arrival on Mars. You’ve put in a full year on the planet’s surface. A real milestone, guys.”
Jamie blinked at Connors’ image. It’s only sol three fifty-eight, he saw from the data line at the bottom of the screen.
Then, despite his listless mood, he smiled tightly. Of course, he told himself. Three hundred sixty-five Earth days, not Martian. A full Earth year.
He didn’t feel like celebrating.
In the main dome, Vijay was also thinking about the calendar.
“It’s a real accomplishment,” she said to Stacy, “and we ought to do something to celebrate it.”
The two women were in Vijay’s phonebooth-sized infirmary. Dezhurova was stripped to her bra and panties, a blood-pressure cuff wrapped around her left arm, six medical sensor patches plastered to her sturdy chest and back.
“What do you have in mind?” she asked warily. As a cosmonaut she distrusted medics, especially doctors who doubled as psychiatrists. It was their job to find reasons to keep fliers on the ground, Dezhurova feared.
“I’m not sure,” Vijay replied, seemingly unaware of her patient’s latent hostility. “With the group split up like it is between the two domes, it’s difficult to bring everyone together for a blast.”
“No alcohol,” Dezhurova said flatly.
“I didn’t mean a booze party,” Vijay quickly amended, one eye on the monitor screens. Dezhurova seemed adequately healthy; blood pressure a bit lower than usual, but well within tolerable limits.
“Then what?”
Vijay shrugged and started unwrapping the cuff from the cosmonaut’s beefy upper arm. Dezhurova began peeling off the sensors with her free hand.
“We need something,” Vijay said. “Morale is sinking quite low. It’s been nothing but work, work, work the past several months. No excitement at all. That’s not good for our emotional outlook.”
“Trudy and Tom seem happy,” Dezhurova said as she got down from the examination table and reached for her coveralls.
“When they’re together, yes,” Vijay agreed. “But he tends to mope when they’re apart.”
Stacy shook her head. “I can’t adjust the work schedule to accommodate their romance.”
”No, of course not. And frankly, I think Trudy is grateful for some time away from Tommy.”
“You think she does not love Tom?”
“Love’s got very little to do with it,” Vijay said, her face growing quite serious. “Tommy may be bonkers over her, but she…” Vijay’s voice trailed off.
“Yes? What?”
“I’m not sure,” Vijay said, looking troubled. “Trudy likes Tom, of course. Very much. But I don’t think you could call it love, not for either one of them.”
“Is that your professional opinion?” Dezhurova asked, sealing the coveralls’ Velcro seam.
“Not quite.”
Stacy tapped Vijay on the shoulder with a heavy, blunt finger. “Is this what you psychologists call projection?”
“Projection?”
“You can’t make a commitment to Jamie, so you believe Trudy has the same problem.”
“I can’t make …?” Vijay’s dark eyes flashed wide, then she looked away from Dezhurova.
With a grim smile, Stacy said, “Dex and Jamie are both in the second dome. I think it’s good to keep you away from them. No party.”
And with that she walked out of the infirmary.
Instead of a party, Dezhurova linked all eight of the explorers electronically at dinner. She planted a Picturephone unit at one end of the galley table in Dome One and ordered Jamie to do the same at Dome Two.
“We mark this milestone with unity and comradeship,” she said, sitting at the head of her table and lifting a glass of grapefruit juice.
“Unity and comradeship,” Jamie repeated from the head of his table.
But as he glanced at the three others with him, Jamie knew that the toast was empty. Fuchida suspected that one of their comrades was an insane saboteur. Rodriguez was gloomy because he wanted to be with Trudy, and he knew that when he shuttled back to Dome One, Trudy would be coming here to Dome Two. Tomas probably thinks Stacy is keeping them apart on purpose.
Looking at Dex, Jamie thought that he had changed a good deal over the past year. Especially since we found the building, he told himself. But he’s torn up inside over his father. And deep down, where it counts, he still wants to turn Mars into a profit-making venture.
Unity and comradeship, Jamie repeated silently. Not likely.
After dinner Jamie went to the comm center, more to get away from the others than anything else. But it was not to be. Jamie had barely started reviewing the task assignments for the next day when Fuchida stepped in and wordlessly pulled up the second chair.
“What is it, Mitsuo?” he asked, dreading the answer.
Fuchida pulled a minidisk out of the chest pocket of his coveralls.
“I believe I know who our saboteur is,” he said, nearly whispering.
Despite himself, Jamie asked, “Who?”
Fuchida proffered the disk. “Take a look at this.”
Sliding it into the computer port, Jamie asked, “What is it?”
“I correlated every so-called ‘accident’ with the job assignments of each one of us,” the biologist said.
Jamie saw a bewildering chart on the computer display: eight jagged lines in eight different colors marched across a gridwork background.