Martian Knightlife

by James P. Hogan

  "Just collecting thoughts." Kieran pulled up a chair and sat down opposite them. "About that nano work of Pierre's that we mentioned this morning."

  "What about it?"

  "I assume that these remote-programmable protein synthesizers can self-assemble in any cell of the body. If they're taken in through ingestion or respiration, there's no way they can discriminate."

  "That's my understanding," Dennis agreed.

  "Yet you couldn't have them switching on in every cell in the body when they get a signal. It would be too crude. You'd swamp the system. There would have to be a way of selecting which cells you want activated."

  "Correct. There's some way they react to enzyme activity and know which kind of cell they're in. So part of the signal instructs which cells to activate." Dennis looked at Jean. "Wasn't that how it worked?"

  "Something like that. I'm not sure I remember the details. We'd have to ask Pierre."

  "Why are you interested?" Dennis asked Kieran.

  But Kieran was still too absorbed in his line of thought to reply directly. "So you could instruct them to start making some specific kind of protein only in a certain, specified kind of target cell? Harmless colored protein—a pigment?"

  "Well . . . yes. That's the idea," Dennis said.

  "How close are you two to Pierre?" Kieran asked them. "Harry said Jean knows him from years back."

  "That's right," Jean said. "Back on Earth. We were in the same bunch of students who hung around together, went on hikes, camping trips, tours abroad, things like that—the things kids do." She sent Dennis a mystified look.

  "Do you think he'd let you have access to this technology?" Kieran asked. "Maybe to help test it out in an impromptu field trial?"

  Jean frowned. Dennis looked askance. "Well, wait a minute," he cautioned. "I don't know about that. As far as I know, it's still a nonpublicized piece of private research. . . ."

  "It's not even his to decide about," Jean said. "What are you asking him to do, steal it?" She shook her head. "Why should he do a thing like that?"

  "What was his interest in your work here?" Kieran asked, trying another angle. "Was he on board just as the medic? I get the feeling his involvement went deeper than that."

  "That's true," Jean agreed. "Earth's early history and the mysteries of the Technolithics had always been one of his passions. When we told him about the expedition, he was wild to get a place on it. We talked to Hamil. Hamil said that if we recommended Pierre it was good enough for him, and arranged for Pierre to travel out from Lowell with Walter. Pierre was devastated when he had to call it off—even more so now he's heard what we're finding here."

  "He knows about it all, then?" Kieran said.

  "Yes, we kept him informed," Dennis confirmed. "As we've said, we're good friends. There was no reason not to."

  "So he'd be pretty upset to learn that the whole thing might be over."

  "Devastated," Jean said again.

  Kieran gave them a moment to reconsider what he had said earlier. "Then why don't we give him a chance to help save it?" he suggested.

  Dennis and Jean exchanged looks that were puzzled but at the same time interested. "I'm not sure I follow," Dennis said.

  "Pierre is in Lowell now, yes?" Kieran said. "I want us to call him, and for you to introduce me so I can ask him a few more questions about this work of his. Then, if it's what it sounds like it could be, I'd like to offer that we try a sample out for him . . . but leave that part to me." Kieran rose to his feet, as if what he was proposing were as natural and everyday as calling a friend to set up lunch. "Let's go through to the Jug and call him from there. It'll be more private."

  * * *

  The face staring back from the screen in the Juggernaut's center compartment was in its thirties, boyish but stubble-chinned, with intense dark eyes and a mop of black hair that hung in a curlicue over the forehead. Kieran's first impressions of Pierre were that he was of the reflective sort, not overly given to words, serious in disposition, probably a romantic at heart—all of them good signs. Also, Pierre evidently had faith in Dennis and Jean's judgment, showing equanimity over their telling Kieran as much as they had about his work—but being understandably curious.

  Kieran posed the questions that he had listed, mainly concerning the coding system used and how it would be sent. The answers turned out to be surprisingly simple: the molecular receivers would respond to a pulse modulation impressed on a low-intensity, radio-frequency field surrounding the body. For remote direction to produce medical pharmaceuticals internally, the present intention was to send a signal to a body transducer worn by the patient, maybe on a belt, carried in a pocket, or worn as a bracelet or pendant. "But it wouldn't have to be in contact?" Kieran checked. That was correct. A field from any equivalent transmitter would do, as long as the local field strength was sufficient. It sounded promising. Now Kieran came to the crucial part. He mustered the look of one about to divulge sensitive secrets.

  "You've been pretty direct, Pierre. Thanks," he acknowledged. "Now let me tell you why I'm interested. I'm not with the expedition just as your replacement. There's a political aspect to what's going on that Hamil couldn't really talk about before Walter got here." Which was perfectly true: neither Hamil nor anyone else had known about it. "Some people have shown up from one of the big construction conglomerates. They're claiming first rights to the area, and if they succeed, they'll obliterate everything. There'll be nothing to show for the expedition, nothing on record. It will all be lost."

  Pierre looked aghast. "No!" he protested. "Such a thing would be criminal! It could never happen!"

  "Tell Juanita," Kieran replied. "Ask her what the oil industry did to dozens of unexcavated Olmec sites in Mexico a hundred years back."

  For the first time, Pierre seemed to lose some of his composure, shifting his gaze agitatedly from one to another of the three images confronting him. "They must be stopped!" he said.

  "That's what I'm here to find an angle on, if I can," Kieran told him.

  Pierre studied him, seeming to go back in his mind over what had been said. "Are you saying there's something I can do? My work here can help somehow?"

  "Maybe—if you don't mind bending a rule or two," Kieran said cheerfully. He made it sound like conspiring to do no more than keeping secret a birthday surprise. "And then again, it might even contribute something back. As I said before, you might think of it as helping the firm out by staging a small, unofficial field trial. . . ."

  * * *

  After they had finished, Kieran put a call through to Solomon Leppo. "Have you sent the drone off with those things yet?" he asked him.

  "I've cleared it with Mahom and got the stuff you listed. I was leaving it till after dark, like you said," Leppo answered.

  "Good," Kieran said. "Hold it a little longer. There'll be one more item. Someone will be contacting you. She'll deliver it. Let me know when you're set to go."

  * * *

  June called back with profiles of the four people that Zorken had sent to Mars. Justin Banks, from what everyone had seen, the senior member of the group, was listed in Zorken's organizational tree as an executive project leader, reporting to a Thornton Velte, projects appraisals director for the Mining Division and one of Hamilton Gilder's inner clique. That Banks represented the corporation's mining interests, not construction or engineering, was surely significant—all the more so when taken in conjunction with the backgrounds of the three people who had come with him. Gertrude Heissen, who had to have been the thin-lipped, pale-faced woman present with Banks at the first meeting with Hamil, was described as a corporate mineralogist. The bearded Asian with them was almost certainly Tran Xedeidang, a geochemist also employed by Zorken. The fourth Mars arrival, Clarence Porter, not seen on that occasion, was an outside consultant specializing in petrological magnetism and radiation.

  "Great stuff!" Kieran complimented. "Now it's starting to make more sense. Look, there's one more thing I'd like you to do. There's a guy i
n Lowell who's into biological nano-research. He has a package that I need sent out here. Can you pick it up from him and deliver it to Mahom's mechanic out on Beacon Way? He's going to ship it out with some other stuff that's waiting."

  "What are you up to now, Kieran?" June asked suspiciously.

  "Remote-programming body cells to change color. What do you think? It could open up a whole new world of body art. How would you like a completely different medium of self-expression?"

  "Right now, I don't think I'm even up to hearing about it. Just give me the details," June sighed.

  * * *

  Hamil confirmed that the expedition's own work had found an abnormally high radiation background in the plateau area. He hadn't mentioned it to Kieran before because it hadn't seemed relevant. But the clear implication seemed to be that what was holding the interest of Zorken Consolidated in this part of the Tharsis region was minerals potential. "It makes sense," Kieran said when he reviewed his findings with the scientists. "Extract what's under the ground first. Then use your land rights for development afterward."

  "Very efficient. Very thorough," Hamil conceded. "So do you have an answer to it? You seem to have been very busy."

  The others were following with solemn faces. Kieran cast an eye around the circle, then said to them all, "Going back to these Technolithic structures and sites back on Earth . . . You sometimes hear legends of `curses' and `perils' associated with these things—mysteries that popular fears get built around, which are said to defy explanation. I'd like to know more. What can you tell me about them?"

  Some of the listeners looked taken aback, but gradually they opened up. The talk went on to cover strange accidents said by some to have befallen desecraters of tombs; alignments of structures supposedly modeling astronomical configurations and the precessional cycle of the equinoxes; peculiar ratios of height and base measurements coming out at precise multiples of pi, giving rise to speculation that both Egyptian and Central American pyramids were planar representations of a hemisphere of the Earth. Katrina mentioned that the French sites at Quimper, Tombeau de Geant, and Istres marked a triangle in exact proportion to a side of the Cheops Pyramid but fourteen million times larger. Personally, she didn't assign any particular significance to this—it was just an observation that some had drawn attention to; but that was the kind of thing Kieran had asked for. Jean Graas described the mysterious ground drawings of Nazca, in Peru, which made sense only when viewed from high altitudes—and how they could have been marked out so precisely without direction from such a vantage point was also difficult to imagine.

  "What's the point of this?" Rudi asked with a trace of irritation after it had gone on for a while. "This kind of thing is mainly fanciful imagination and wishful thinking. How is it supposed to help us in our present situation?"

  "I'm not sure yet. Just some thoughts I'm toying with," Kieran replied vaguely.

  Trevany hesitated for a few seconds. "There is another story that goes back to the 1960s," he said finally. "I've never had reason to check the details personally, but it involved an American physicist called Louis Alvarez. He set up a cosmic ray detector inside the Khafre Pyramid at Giza in an attempt to locate hidden chambers containing archives of scientific records that were supposed to exist. Penetrating radiation should show a greater intensity if it encounters hollow spaces than if it goes all the way through solid rock. By analyzing the patterns from many different directions, he hoped to map the internal structure. But the results were so garbled that nobody could make sense of them. Even the outer faces and edges couldn't be distinguished. It was as if some other source inside or under the pyramid was interfering with the readings. The equipment was taken outside, dismantled and checked, and worked just fine. But back inside again, it did the same thing. As far as I know, no one has ever been able to explain it." Trevany looked at the others to invite dissent. They shrugged or shook their heads.

  His remarks prompted Juanita to follow. "There's another strange thing that they found at Teotihuacan."

  Kieran thought back over the things he had heard in the previous few days. "That was . . . the City of the Gods, in Mexico, right?"

  She nodded. "A little north of Mexico City—supposed to be Quetzlcoatl's capital. One of the structures there is known as the Pyramid of the Sun. Back in the early years of the twentieth century, they found a thick, continuous sheet of mica sandwiched between two of the upper levels. What it was doing there was never established. It was stripped out and sold before anyone got a chance to examine it properly."

  "Mica? That's what's used for capacitors and high-voltage insulation," Kieran said.

  "Yes, exactly."

  "As a moderator in nuclear reactors too," Dennis added. "It's opaque to fast neutrons."

  Harry Quong looked dubious. "Too convenient," he commented. "Stories about things that vanish like that make me wonder if they ever existed at all."

  "Weren't there more, though?" Trevany said to Juanita. "There's one somewhere that's called the Mica Temple, isn't there?"

  She nodded. "It's another building in the same place. Two massive sheets of mica are laid one above the other under a floor paved with heavy rock slabs." She shot a look at Harry. "And yes, they're still there: each ninety feet square, carefully cut and laid—and that takes a lot of skill."

  "Nobody's figured out their purpose?" Kieran said.

  Juanita shrugged. "They have no decorative function—and were out of sight anyway. . . . But the strange thing is that mica from different places varies in trace element composition and is fairly easy to identify. This particular type occurs only in Brazil, two thousand miles away. It seems that the builders had some definite need in going to the trouble of bringing it there. Other varieties are available locally."

  "Interesting," Kieran mused. Just at that moment, he had nothing to add.

  "What's the point, though?" Rudi asked again. "Are you wondering if it might be possible to scare those Zorken people off with legends and fables?"

  "Maybe," Kieran said.

  "No chance!" Rudi shook his head and jabbed a finger in the direction where the Mule was parked outside. "You've seen the kind of person Banks is. He's never going to believe anything like that."

  "That isn't the point," Kieran replied evenly. "Think of him as a conduit back to their big chief in the head office, who's a very different kind of person. The object is to get to him. It's what he believes that matters." He gazed around the circle of curious faces. "I don't know where this will lead, but it's the best I can think of that might be worth a try. You're all at a stop for the time being, and that might be good because it will involve enough work to keep all of us busy." He looked toward Hamil for endorsement. Hamil stared back at him for a moment, then returned a consenting nod. Kieran, it seemed, was becoming the de facto leader of the group.

  * * *

  The Aerobot from Leppo arrived a couple of hours later, coming in as Kieran had instructed on a low approach along the valley from the direction opposite to the Zorken camp, landing a few hundred feet back below the ridgeline undetected by the Mule's radar. Kieran checked the items that it had brought and was satisfied. Then he got Hamil to put a call across to Justin Banks in the Mule, saying that there was a person here with the expedition that Banks really needed to meet and talk with face-to-face. By then, the time was approaching midnight. As Kieran had anticipated, Banks preserved his symbolic authority by decreeing that it would have to wait until the following morning.

  And that suited Kieran's plan fine.

  After the two camps had settled down for the night, Rudi sent out his little tracked robot, Gottfried, to a hollow between two rocks that had been noted by daylight, where it was able to pass under the lowest beam of the Zorken camp's security perimeter. The robot was equipped with a telescopic arm terminating in a jointed three-claw hand, which it used to unscrew the cap of the external fill pipe to the Mule's amply sized drinking-water tank. It then inserted a tube, through which it pumped a measured amo
unt of the liquid solution that had been supplied by Pierre.

  13

  Clad in a surface suit, Kieran crossed the few hundred feet of ground separating the two camps. Neither he nor Hamil wanted direct confrontation at this point, and he passed Chas Ryan, Lou and Zeke, laying out and inventorying equipment in anticipation of the expedition's having to pull out. A camera mounted inside the opened outer door of the Mule scrutinized him as he approached. He mounted the steps to the access lock, waited for it to close and pressurize, and when the inner door opened, entered the main cabin.

  The Mule was designed for inhospitable environments, and as such provided extended-term living accommodations besides being simply a vehicle. In some ways a flying version of the Juggernaut with freight space instead of lab facilities, it possessed a full galley and surface-endurance life support system, with the main cabin functioning both as dayroom and sleeping quarters. Observation from the other camp had shown Banks and his group to be generally keeping to the Mule, availing themselves of its superior comforts compared to the shacks. Kieran guessed that the shacks were being left for the military contingent that he was expecting, who would be using more basically equipped, less commodious vehicles.

  The same trio who had met Hamil were waiting in the cabin: Banks, Gertrude Heissen, and Tran Xedeidang. Clarence Porter had left on foot about half an hour previously with one of the three crewmen identified so far. The two others were probably in the nose section, Kieran guessed. That could be a problem, because he wanted to get in there. Banks watched with a sour expression while Kieran removed his helmet and gloves and placed them on a side ledge before sitting down uninvited and settling back with as much comfort as a light-duty suit, even with its flat, compact back unit, would permit. Kieran had dusted his hair a little grayer and added some line work that added a few years to his face.

  "Mr. Keziah Turle," Banks acknowledged.

  "Doctor, if you don't mind."

  Banks shrugged. "As you wish. Now, would you get to the point? Your professor said there were matters you need to discuss directly. I can't imagine what they might be, but you have our attention."