Identity Theft and Other Stories

by Robert J. Sawyer

  But no—no, it wasn’t a disk. It was a dish, a great metal bowl, as if an entire crater had been lined with aluminum, and—

  “Jesus,” said Don.

  “What?” replied Sas.

  “It’s an antenna dish.”

  “Who could have built it?” asked Sas.

  Don tipped his head up to look at Mars—but he couldn’t see Mars; they were on Deimos’s farside.

  The farside! Of course!

  “Sas—it’s a radio telescope!”

  “Why would anyone put a radio telescope on the back side of Deimos?” asked Sas. “Unless…oh, my. Oh, my.”

  Don was nodding inside his space helmet. “It was built here for the same reason we want to build a radio telescope on the backside of Earth’s moon. Luna farside, with all those kilometers of rock between it and Earth, is the one place in the solar system that’s shielded from the radio noise coming from human civilization…”

  “And,” said Sas, “Deimos farside, with fifteen kilometers of rock between it and Mars, would be shielded from the radio noise coming from…” His voice actually cracked. “…from Martian civilization.”

  Sas and Don continued to search, hoping there would be more to the installation than just the giant dish, but soon enough Deimos’s rapid orbit caused the sun—only half the apparent diameter it was from Earth and giving off just one-quarter the heat—to sink below the horizon. Deimos took 30 hours and 19 minutes to circle Mars; it would be almost fifteen hours before the sun rose on the tiny moon again.

  “This is huge,” said Sas, when they were back inside the habitat. “This is gigantic.”

  “A Martian civilization,” said Don. He couldn’t get enough of the phrase.

  “There’s no other possibility, is there?”

  Don thought about that. There had been a contingency plan for Apollo 11 in case it found Soviets already on the moon—but NASA was no longer in a space race with anyone. “Well,” said Don, “it certainly wasn’t built by humans.”

  “Zakarian and company are going to have a lot to look for on the surface,” said Sas.

  Don shrugged a bit. “Maybe. Maybe not. There’s weather on Mars, including sandstorms that last for months. All the large-scale water-erosion features we see on Mars are at least a billion years old, judging by the amount of cratering over top of them. That suggests that whatever Martian civilization might have once existed did so at least that long ago. In a billion years, wind erosion could have destroyed every trace of an ancient civilization down there.”

  “Ah,” said Sas, grinning. “But not here! No air; no erosion to speak of. Just the odd micrometeoroid impact.” He paused. “That dish must have been here an awfully long time, to get buried under that much dust.”

  Don smiled. “You know,” he said, “every space station humanity has ever been involved with has been inhabited by successive crews—Skylab, Mir, Alpha. One crew would go down; another would come up.”

  Sas raised his eyebrows. “But there’s never been such a long hiatus between one crew leaving and the next one arriving.”

  When they knew the sun would be up on Deimos farside, Don and Sas headed back to the site of the alien antenna dish. They had almost finished making their way around its perimeter when they found a spoke, projecting outward from the rim of the antenna. They kept digging down, following it away from the dish, until—

  “Allah-o-akbar!” exclaimed Sasim.

  “God Almighty,” said Don.

  The spoke led to a buried building, and—

  Well, its inhabitants had been astronomers. It made sense that they’d have a glass roof, a clear ceiling through which they could look up at the stars.

  As Don and Sas brushed away more and more dust, they were better able to see in through the roof. There was furniture inside, but none of it designed for human occupants: several bowl-shaped affairs that Don imagined were chairs, and low work tables, covered with square sheets of something that seemed to serve the same purpose as paper. Scattered about were opaque cylindrical units that looked like they might be for storage. And—

  Slumped against the wall, at the far end—

  It was incredible. Absolutely incredible.

  A Martian, perfectly preserved for countless millennia. Either they had no such thing as bacteria leading to decay, or everything had been sterilized before coming to Deimos, or perhaps all the air had leaked out somehow, preserving the being in vacuum.

  The former resident of the building was vaguely insectoid, with rusty exoskeletal armor, four arms and two legs. In life, he would have walked proud and upright. His mandible was tripartite; his giant eyes, lidless behind crystal shells, were a soft, kind blue.

  “Amazing,” said Sas softly. “Amazing.”

  “There must be a way inside,” said Don, looking around. For all they knew from what they’d exposed of the transparent roof so far, the building might be no bigger than a single room. Still, it had been carved into the rocks of Deimos, so the airlock, if there was one, should be somewhere on the roof.

  Don and Sas worked at clearing debris, and, after about twenty minutes, Don found what they were looking for. It was a transparent tube, like the one George Jetson shot up through, stretching between the glass roof and the floor. The tube had an opening in its circular walls at ground level, and a hatch up on the roof, forming a chamber that air could be pumped into or out of.

  Any space station had lots of electrical parts, but doors were something sane engineers would make purely mechanical. After all, if the power went out, you didn’t want to be trapped inside or outside. It took Sas and Don a few minutes to work out the logic of the door mechanism—a central disk in the middle of the roof had to be depressed, then rotated counterclockwise. Once that was done, the rest of the hatch irised open, and the locking disk, attached by what looked like a plastic cord, dangled very loosely at one side.

  Don glided down the tube first. He wasn’t able to open the inside door until Sas closed the upper lid; a safety interlock apparently prevented anyone from accidentally venting the habitat’s air out into space.

  Still, it was immediately obvious to Don, once he was out of the airlock tube, that there was no air inside the habitat. The rigidity of his pressure suit didn’t change; no condensation appeared on his visor; there was no resistance to waving his arms vigorously. Doubtless there had been some air once, but, despite the safety precautions, it had all leaked out. Perhaps a small meteor had drilled through the roof at some point they hadn’t yet uncovered.

  Sas came down the airlock tube next—the locking disk could be engaged from either side of the iris. By the time he was down, Don had already made his way over to the dead thing. Its rusty color seemed good confirming evidence that Mars was indeed the being’s original home. The creature was about a meter and a half tall, and, if there had been any doubt about its intelligence, that was dispelled now. The Martian wore clothes—apparently not for protection, but rather for convenience; the translucent garment covering part of its abdomen was rich with pockets and pouches. Still, the body showed signs of having suffered a massive decompression; innards had partially burst out through various seams in the exoskeleton.

  While Don continued to examine the being—the first alien lifeform ever seen by a human—Sas poked around the room. “Don!” he shouted.

  Don reluctantly left the Martian and glided over to Sas, who was pointing through an open archway.

  The underground complex went on and on. And Martian bodies were everywhere.

  “Wow,” said Sas. “Wow.”

  Don tried to activate the radio circuit to Earth, but he wasn’t able to pick up the beacon signal from Mission Control. Of course not: this facility had operated a massive radio telescope; it would be shielded to prevent interference with the antenna. Don and Sas made their way up the airlock tube and out to the surface. There they had no trouble acquiring the beacon.

  “Mission Control,” said Don. “Tell Chuck Zakarian we hope he has a good time down
on Mars’s surface—although, given all the wind erosion that goes on there, I doubt he’ll find much. But that’s okay, Houston; we’ll make up for that. You see, it seems we’re not the first crew to occupy…” He paused, the perfect name coming to him at last. “…Mike Collins Station.”

  The Good

  Doctor

  There’s a tradition in science fiction of short-short stories that build up to a horrendous pun in the last line; the most famous of these are the “Ferdinand Feghoot” tales by Reginald Bretnor (written under the anagrammatic pen name Grendel Briarton). In the late 1980s, I perpetrated one of these myself, and it was published as my third appearance in Amazing Stories, the world’s oldest SF magazine, which was founded by Hugo Gernsback, after whom the Hugo Awards are named.

  “There’s a new patient here to see you, Dr. Butcher,” said the pleasant contralto over the intercom.

  Shaggy eyebrows above craggy countenance lifted in mild irritation. “Well, what is it? Human? Dolphin? Quint?”

  “It’s a Kogloo, sir.”

  “A Kogloo! Send it in.” A Kogloo on Earth was about as rare as a current magazine chip in Butcher’s waiting room. The hunched human ushered the barrel-shaped being into his office. “What can I do for you?”

  “Doctor, doctor, I is terrible problem.” The words were thick, but, to its credit, the Kogloo was working without a translator. “I try to writing Skience Fiction, no?”

  “So?”

  “So this!” The Kogloo upended a satchel over Butcher’s already cluttered desk. Countless cards and pieces of paper cascaded out.

  “Rejection slips?” Butcher grunted. He had his own collection from The Lancet. “Unless you’ve got writer’s cramp, I can’t help you.”

  “No, please.” The aliens tripartite mandible popped the P. “I write good, in mine own language, no?” Butcher had heard that the big four SF chips had Kogloonian editions now. “I send novella to Amazing—they love it! They even buy! Effing SF is eating out of my foot. Analog, the same. But that other one—!” The Kogloo waved its antennae expressively. “Bah, they no want.”

  “Look,” said Butcher, annoyance honing his words. “I’m an M.D., a medical doctor. This is out of—”

  “Please! I decide to come to Earth. I want to meet man whose name is in the title, no? But trip out is very, very bad!”

  “Now see here!” Dr. Butcher’s doctor had warned him to watch his blood pressure. “I’m a busy man—”

  “But here is even worse! Flyer, boat, tram, tube train, is all the same.”

  Butcher exploded. “This is not a travel agency! I’m a doctor, understand. A doctor! I treat sickness and injuries. Now, unless you have a medical problem—”

  The Kogloo bashed its forehead on the desktop in the traditional gesture of excitement. “Yes! Yes! Every time I get into vehicle, I very uncomfortable. I embarrass myself and anger driver.” A sigh. “I afraid I never get to where that title man is.”

  Butcher’s eyes widened in comprehension. “I think I see what’s causing your troubles…”

  The Kogloo nodded vigorously. “Doctor, I sick as I move!”

  Ineluctable

  In November 2000, I was Guest of Honor at Contact 4 Japan, a conference devoted to potential first contact with extraterrestrial life. For that conference, I was asked to devise a role-playing scenario involving the receipt of a series of alien radio messages; teams would try to decode the messages and provide appropriate responses. The conference was one of the most enjoyable events I’ve ever attended, and it also afforded me an opportunity to meet the staff of Hayakawa, my Japanese publisher.

  After the conference, I decided to expand my first-contact scenario into a full-fledged SF story, and sent it off to Stanley Schmidt, the editor of Analog. Now, by this point, I’d had 300,000 words of fiction in Analog, but it had all been in the form of novel serializations: The Terminal Experiment (which Analog ran under my original title, Hobson’s Choice), Starplex, and Hominids. When Stan bought this story—at 8,800 words, technically a novelette—it became my first short-fiction sale to Analog. “Ineluctable” went on to win the Aurora Award for best English story of the year.

  What to do? What to do?

  Darren Hamasaki blew out air, trying to calm down, but his heart kept pounding, a metronome on amphetamines.

  This was big. This was huge.

  There had to be procedures in place. Surely someone had thought this through, had come up with a—a protocol, that was the word.

  Darren left the observatory shed in his backyard and trudged through the snow. He stepped up onto the wooden deck and entered his house through the sliding-glass rear doors. He hit the light switch, the halogen glow from the torchiere by the desk stinging his dark-adapted eyes.

  Darren took off his boots, gloves, tuque, and parka, then crossed the room, sitting down at his computer. He clicked on the Firefox icon. Of course he had Internet Explorer, too, but Darren always favored the underdog. His search engine of choice was also the current underdog: Yahoo. He logged on to it and stared at the dialog box, trying to think of what keywords to type.

  Protocol was indeed appropriate, but as for the rest—

  He shrugged a little, conceding the magnitude of what he was about to enter. And then he pecked out three more words: contact, extraterrestrial, and intelligence.

  He’d expected to have to go spelunking, and, indeed, there were over thirteen hundred hits, but the very first one turned out to be what he was looking for: “Declaration of Principles Concerning Activities Following the Detection of Extraterrestrial Intelligence,” a document on the SETI League web site. Darren scanned it, his eyes skittering across the screen like a puck across ice. As he did so, he rolled his index finger back and forth on his mouse’s knurled wheel.

  “We, the institutions and individuals participating in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence…”

  Darren frowned. No one had sought his opinion, but, then again, he hadn’t actually been looking for aliens.

  “…inspired by the profound significance for mankind of detecting evidence…”

  Seemed to Darren that “mankind” was probably a sexist term; just how old was this document?

  “The discoverer should seek to verify that the most plausible explanation is the existence of extraterrestrial intelligence rather than some other natural or anthropogenic phenomenon…”

  Well, there was no doubt about it. No natural phenomenon was likely to generate the squares of one, two, three, and four over and over again, and the source was in the direction of Groombridge 1618, a star 15.9 light-years from Earth; Groombridge 1618 was in Ursa Major, nowhere near the plane of the ecliptic into which almost every Earth-made space probe and vessel had been launched. It had to be extraterrestrial.

  “…should inform the Secretary General of the United Nations in accordance with Article XI of the Treaty on Principles Governing the Activities of States in the Exploration and Use of Outer Space…”

  Darren’s eyebrows went up. Somehow he doubted that the switchboard at the UN would put his call through to the Secretary-General—was it still Kofi Annan?—if he said he was ringing him up to advise him that contact had been made with aliens. Besides, it was 2:00 a.m. here in Ontario, and UN headquarters were in New York; the same time zone. Surely the Secretary-General would be at home asleep right now anyway.

  “The discoverer should inform observers throughout the world through the Central Bureau for Astronomical Telegrams of the International Astronomical Union…”

  Good God, is it still possible to send a telegram? Is Western Union even still in business? Surely the submission could be made by E-mail…

  Yahoo quickly yielded the URL for the bureau, which still used the word “telegrams” in its name, but one could indeed fill out an online form on their home page to send a report. Too bad, in a way: Darren had been enjoying composing a telegram in his head, something he’d never done before: “Major news stop alien signal received from Groombridge
1618 stop…”

  The brief instructions accompanying the form only talked about reporting comets, novae, supernovae, and outbursts of unusual variable stars (and there were warnings not to bother the bureau with trivial matters, such as the sighting of meteors or the discovery of new asteroids). Nary a word about submitting news of the receipt of an alien signal.

  Regardless, Darren composed a brief message and sent it. Then he clicked his browser’s back button several times to return to the Declaration of Principles, and skimmed it some more. Ah, now that was more like it: “The discoverer should have the privilege of making the first public announcement…”

  Very well, then. Very well.

  There was nothing to do now but wait and see if the beings living on the third planet were going to reply. Palm-Up-Middle-Fingers-Splayed expected they indeed would, but it would take time: time for the laser flashes to reach their destination, and an equal time for any response the inhabitants of that watery globe might wish to send—plus, of course, whatever time they took deciding whether to answer.

  There were many things Palm-Up-Middle-Fingers-Splayed could do to while away the time: read, watch a video, inhale a landscape. And, well, had it been any other time, he probably would have contented himself with one of those. The landscape was particularly appealing: he had a full molecular map of the air in early spring from his world’s eastern continent, a heady blending of yellowshoot blossoms, clumpweed pollens, pondskins, skyleaper pheromones, and the tang of ozone from the vernal storms. Nothing relaxed him more.

  He’d been afraid at first to access that molecular map, afraid the homesickness would be too much. After all, their ship, the Ineluctable, had been traveling for many years now, visiting seven other star systems before coming here. And there were still three more stars—and several years of travel—after this stop before Palm-Up-Middle-Fingers-Splayed would really get to inhale the joyous scents of his homeland again. Fortunately, though, it had turned out that he could enjoy the simulation without his tail twitching too much in sadness.