“That’s about where the road would be,” he said, and handed the glasses to Hana. He and I looked at each other.
“Let’s get down there,” I said.
“I’ll radio for help,” Xhosa said, hurrying to the tool box. “It won’t take long for them to catch up.”
“I see it!” Hana said. “It looks like a field car to me.”
When Xhosa was done radioing for reinforcements we hopped down the ledges of the rim slope like we were in a race. When we got to the head of the rift we jogged down the road. Halfway there we had to slow down and catch our breath. I turned up the oxygen supply from my suit and instructed the others to do the same. We hurried again, and after a short scramble came to the wet, rime-crusted rubble at the bottom of the new slide. A stiff climb up the canyon’s side brought us as close to the object I had spotted as we could get without stepping on the new slide.
“It is a car,” Hana said.
“Looks like burn marks on the front end there, see?” Xhosa pointed.
That stopped us for a moment; the implication was clear, and I saw foreboding mix with the anticipation on the others’ faces. We had all found too many bodies.
I stepped onto the broken clay to test the stability of the slide. The clay was soft, and it seemed possible I might start another slide by walking on it. The car was only five or six meters from the slide’s edge, and I wanted badly to reach it before anyone else arrived. Carefully I tamped a footprint down until it was ankle deep; stepped onto it, and tamped down the next one.
“Maybe you should wait,” Hana said.
“We’ll still have to do this.”
“But it would be safer if you were roped to us.”
“It seems solid enough.”
And so it was. I continued very slowly, and was only a meter or two from the car when a large group came bounding down the canyon, all talking at once. “We scanned this section with a metal detector,” Bill said peevishly. “I wonder how we missed this.”
“Did you bring any rope?” I called.
“We brought everything,” Petrini said. “Have you found buried treasure?”
“Maybe so,” Hana said sharply.
“An old field car, slightly burned,” I said. “Throw me one end of a rope, please.” Now that a rope was available I felt exposed. Bill threw an end to me, and I tied it around my chest, just under my arms. Upcanyon McNeil and two students were hurrying to reach us. I stepped the final distance to the car, checked beneath a rear wheel to see what kind of ground it rested on, and found it was on the edge of the buried road. I hiked back over the slide, finding it solider than it felt before the rope’s arrival, and took a holo camera from McNeil. Then I retraced my steps.
The door of the car still had its plastic window intact; it was this that had reflected the sunlight and drawn my eye. I cleared the window of a film of dirt, and peered inside. An empty interior; it looked like a little cave in the canyonside. The windshield was crazed but still intact. The opposite door’s window was gone, and dirt spilled through it onto the floor of the car.
“Any bodies?” Petrini asked. Always the first question at New Houston.
“No bodies.” It was an eight-passenger car, and the last two seats held boxes. I tried the door; it gave and opened with a loud creak. I reached in and put the holo camera on its stand, set for six holos. When the six beeps had sounded I took the camera out, and carefully tested the floor of the car with my foot. “Don’t disturb anything!” McNeil said.
“Oh, McNeil!” several voices cried in unison. The car was firm as bedrock, and I stepped in to look at the boxes in the back.
“They’re full of papers,” I said, but no one heard me. I could hear my pulse hammering in my ears. Folders, notebooks, plastic sheaves, computer disks, folded maps, blueprints. I picked up a box and carried it outside, hefted it and walked on my prints one more time.
“There’s going to be a time when you’ll want it all in the position you found it, that’s all I’m saying,” McNeil muttered. But he looked in the box as curiously as the rest of us when I set it down. And when I returned with the next one he was on his knees with Petrini, poring over the contents.
As I picked up the last box, I noticed a notebook on the floor of the car, nearly buried by the spill of dirt from the broken window. It was a little plastic-covered spiral bound thing, and I almost missed it. I pulled it free, knocked some dirt from it, and carried it across the slide clamped in between glove and box. When I put the box down I kept the notebook in my hand, and showed it to the others. “This was free on the floor.”
“Here’s a news poster signed at the bottom by an Andrew Jones of the Washington-Lenin Alliance,” Hana said from her crouch over one of the boxes. She showed it to Petrini, who read it swiftly, eyebrows lifted.
I was shivering; from the cold, from my excitement, I couldn’t tell. I put the notebook in one of the boxes. “Let’s get all this back to camp,” I said. “I’m running low on oxygen.” I looked at the group of clay-smeared people around me, and I couldn’t help smiling. “There’s a lot of work here.”
* * *
Lava Channels
Plans for the city’s defense; tapes and xeroxes of communications with the Washington-Lenin Alliance in other cities, and in space; lists of people, casualties, weapons, supplies; partial accounts of the revolution in New Houston and the Nirgal Vallis, and around Mars; memos from the Johnson still stations; and maps, including one of the east or lower end of Valles Marineris.
McNeil organized and catalogued as the little boxes were emptied, and he handed each piece or bundle of paper to an eagerly waiting scientist. Almost everyone in the expedition was in the main commons, helping to figure out what we had. Two Xerox machines were working full time to copy everything, several computer consoles were in action, and a cassette player suddenly spoke in voices obscured by radio crackle. The excitement in the air was as palpable as the smell of the copiers. Satarwal was there too, grimly working to appear unconcerned. Few people met his eye, or addressed a comment to him.
As for me—I felt as if I were dreaming. Kalinin and McNeil clapped me on the shoulders, and Kalinin said, “This is it right here, Nederland. You’ve got your proof.”
Hana heard this and looked downcast. I didn’t understand this; but then, reflecting on it, I thought I did. I followed her to the coffee machine in the hall.
“He’s wrong, you know. We’ll need every bit of supporting physical evidence that we can find.” So that her taggarts would still mean something, you see.
And the way she smiled at me I knew I had guessed what troubled her. She had felt what I would have felt in her place; and I had figured it out and done something about it to help. I don’t know if I am less able than other people to understand my fellow humans, but I suspect it is so. It happened so seldom like this, to see someone’s face and know what they felt! Elation bloomed in me like a flower, and impulsively I shook Hana’s hand. Even the sight of Petrini and Satarwal conferring down the hall could do nothing to dampen my mood. I returned to the main commons and wandered, looking over shoulders and congratulating students right and left for their good work, causing a growing ripple of smiles and laughter. I shook hands with McNeil, who was still cataloguing. Behind him the Kleserts were leaning over a table, absorbed in one of the notebooks. “It’s like reading Scott’s journal,” Claudia said.
Satarwal came back into the room, and I approached him. “This material implies a cover-up by the Aimes Commission, you know,” I said in a friendly way. “Aimes and many of the witnesses are still in government service. Questions are going to have to be asked.” And the answers will make heads roll! I wanted to add. Satarwal gave me a cold look, and Petrini joined him.
Petrini, looking over at Satarwal to be sure he had it right, said, “We feel that even though the rioters here in New Houston obviously fancied themselves part of a larger thing, it is still a question whether any planet-wide revolution was planned. Especially given the g
reat bulk of evidence to the contrary in the Aimes Report.”
But it only made me laugh, at the time. I was too happy for such nonsense to disturb me. “You people will try to explain away anything. But how much longer can you carry it off?”
* * *
So I ignored them and went back to it. Bill Strickland was repacking one of the boxes of Xeroxes under McNeil’s direction. He had a worried look on his face, and he said to me, “We should re-scan the whole south slope of Spear Canyon. There may be other things we missed.”
“You do that.” I saw by his elbow the little plastic notebook that had lain free on the floor of the car. Curiously I picked it up and tucked it under my arm; I had forgotten about it, and now I wanted to have a look at it. McNeil asked me where the boxes of duplicates should be sent, and that took a while. “Hiroko Nakayama and Anya Lebedyan will really enjoy these.” Then there were more questions concerning the car from Kalinin, and a quick meal, eaten on our feet; then Hana wanted me to look at one of the city maps found in the first box, which showed that the Leaky Tap tavern had been one of the neighborhood defense centers. With these and other matters a few hours passed, and it was not until everyone but McNeil and I had gone to bed that I got a chance to sit down with the notebook and look at it. “You’ve had this copied?” I asked McNeil.
“Several times.”
So I opened the dirty blue cover. The first page was blank; the second filled with careful, pointy handwriting.
The first indication I had of the mutiny came as we approached the inner limit of the first asteroid belt. Of course I didn’t know what it meant at the time; it was no more than a locked door.
I followed the crabbed lines of script rapidly. “Emma Weil,” I said, looking up at McNeil. “Have I heard that name before?”
“Hellas?” he said, without looking up. “I think she helped design the first city over the reservoir. I repaired the plumbing there once—it was good work for that time. I think she disappeared in the Unrest.”
“Well, I’ve found her again. It says here she was on a mining ship.”
“So how did she end up here?”
“I don’t know yet.”
McNeil came over to my table. “Where’s a duplicate of that?”
I laughed. “Did I hear that from McNeil?” I went back to reading. McNeil found a duplicate of the journal, and joined me.
So a Mars Starship Association had started their own private revolution, using the larger one on Mars to cover their theft of three miners, their construction of a starship.… “That Soviet fleet,” I said in wonder, and McNeil was far enough along to nod his agreement. “Have you ever heard of this Mars Starship Association?”
McNeil shook his head. “I just heard of it two pages ago.” He looked up. “This is really something!”
“I know.” And once I got to the point where Weil agreed to help the mutineers construct their jury-rigged starship, curiosity got the better of me, and I began skimming the pages to discover what happened next. Evading the police—readying the starship—departing for deep space—each incident set me reading faster, until Emma Weil returned to a Mars in the throes of revolution. At that point I slowed, and read with care. I cannot well describe my emotions as I made my way through the last part of her journal; each sentence seemed to answer some question I had, so that I was galvanized repeatedly by shocks of confirmation or surprise. It was as if her voice spoke to me in direct revelation, as if I had stumbled on the greatest samizdat account of them all. I was completely unprepared for the end of the account; on one page she was detailing their plans for the escape from the city, and the next page was blank. The notebook was only two-thirds full. I closed it slowly, thinking hard.
“Looks like they didn’t make it,” McNeil said. He had skimmed even faster than I. “Those burn marks—the car must have been hit.”
“True.” I stood to walk around. “But there weren’t any bodies in the car. Maybe the car was hit, and in their hurry they left all this.”
“Maybe.”
“Where’s that map of the chaotic terrain east of Marineris?”
“Second box, top. But it’s such a small scale map, it couldn’t have been used to lead them to anything. The marks may just be water stations.”
“Same problem for them, though.” I found the map and opened it. Topographic map in faint brown lines, marking the unmistakable forms of the eastern end of Valles Marineris, and the patches of chaotic terrain farther east; and in this wordless forest of closely set lines were four small red dots, three in the southern border of one of the sinks of chaos, and the fourth in its center. Without print I could not immediately name the sink, but a quick check with a planetary map was enough to recognize it; the red dots were in the Aureum Chaos, a deep sink of what was still untouched wilderness. “Maybe this was a general map, and they took the local ones with them.”
“Maybe.”
I folded the map and placed it in the notebook. “A starship! Can you believe it?”
“No. No wonder she thought they were crazy.”
“Yes.” But I liked the spirit of the group, their resistance to the Committee. “I wonder how they did.”
“Weil was a good designer. If they had the fuel, and the supplies, they might have gone a long way. But who knows how far they would have to go. What did they think they would find? Another Earth?”
“Or another Mars. They were desperate people.” Their hatred of the Committee—I knew the feeling, but I had never acted on it. All my work only helped the Committee. What had prodded them to action? What kept me from it? “Is there a spare copy of the journal?”
“Over on the far table.”
I walked over and picked up a copy, took it to our mail slots, shoved it savagely into Satarwal’s tray, where it wedged firmly. “I don’t think he’s gotten a chance to see this yet.”
McNeil smiled. “The prize of the dig. Martian history won’t be the same.”
“Yes.” I was warm all through, and I knew I was flushed dirt red and grinning like a clown, but I didn’t care. I clutched Emma Weil’s journal to my stomach and waggled my other hand speechlessly. It felt so strange to have what I wanted. An empty camp commons, tables covered with boxes and papers, lights faintly pulsing, coffeemaker faintly buzzing, a single colleague hunched wearily over a chair in the midnight calm: such a familiar scene in my life, and yet now utterly transformed by the words pressed against me. Now I was the victor in a strewn battlefield, the dreamer standing in his dream realized. “I almost … I almost lost hope.” McNeil cocked his head at me, showing he was listening with the relaxed economy of a tired man. “But I didn’t! And—” I felt the grin grow across my face again. “I’m going to go to bed and read this thing properly.”
And so I did. That was the second reading. And how many times since then have I lain down at night to be with Emma Weil, and read her mind, and feel her anger and hope, and wonder fearfully at the blank pages, with their unwritten message concerning her survival and whereabouts, I would not care to guess. A hundred times, perhaps, perhaps more. I lived with that notebook, and Emma Weil became part of my mind, so that I often wondered (fearfully) what she would have made of me, and a day never passed when I didn’t think of her. But I never read her again as I did on that first night, when I trembled uncontrollably in my bed at the shock of it, and each successive phrase was like a window into another person’s mind—like a new world.
* * *
Within the week dozens of reporters joined us, and the students guided them down Spear Canyon to look at the field car, which had been completely excavated and pulled out of landslide danger. The car appeared on all the Martian holo stations. I observed this activity with great interest; Public Information and Publications Review were letting all of these reports on the air, and I wasn’t sure what that meant. Satarwal’s bosses in Planetary Survey had not released any statements concerning the find, and until they did we wouldn’t learn how they planned to deal with it. I answered r
eporters’ questions over and over: “Some of this evidence contradicts the Aimes Report, yes. No, I can’t explain it. Speculate? You can do that as well as I. Probably better.” Soon the reporters were off to Burroughs, to question Aimes himself; but Aimes refused comment. And the Committee and all its subcommittees stayed silent. Still, since they had allowed the dig to take place, they surely had plans to deal with a discovery like this. I waited to see what they were.
Satarwal threw his copy of Emma’s journal back on my desk. “Bad luck for her, to fall in with such fools.”
I smiled. “One might say the same of you.” I tried to hide my sense of triumph over him, but it may be I failed. “You see, there was a Washington-Lenin Alliance fighting you.”
He grimaced. “No matter what they called themselves, they were still murderers.”
Then a few days later he was recalled to Burroughs. He had all of his policemen pack up, and they left together, in the cars of the last group of reporters. What the reporters made of the opportunity I never discovered. I did not go out to see them off.
A few days after that, word arrived that Petrini and I had been made codirectors of the dig. No mention of Satarwal. With this announcement came news of a press conference to be held in the state office in Burroughs. We gathered to watch it on the holo in the main commons. Petrini shook my hand. “Now we are codirectors, as we should have been from the start.”
“And with so much left to do,” I said; but he took me seriously.
The Committee’s spokesman was Shrike. I moved to the back of the commons to watch him, feeling uncomfortable under the eyes of the others in the room.
Shrike was as languid and charming as always with the press, and they loved it. He looked down at the podium, composing his features to an official seriousness: a lean, silver-haired man in a very expensive gray suit; small silver rings on each little finger and in each earlobe; sharp nose, thick eyebrows, dark blue eyes. He read a statement first. “The recent finds in the excavation of New Houston are an exciting and moving addition to our knowledge of one of the most troubled times in Martian history. Those months of 2248 called the Unrest were a time of great suffering and heroism, and this new account of the brave defense of a beleaguered city is inspiring to all of us who love Mars. The men and women who fought for New Houston were struggling for the rights and privileges that we now take for granted, and it is partly because of their sacrifices that we enjoy the free and open lives that we now live. We commend the fine archaeologists of the Planetary Survey and the University of Mars for their historic discovery.”
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