“George,” I said. “Can you hear me?”
“I hear you, Kellie.”
There didn’t seem much point in recriminations. “Are you still in the chair?”
“Yes.”
“Restraints?”
“—Are already on.”
“Point the thrusters down.”
Pause. “How do I do that?”
Yeah. You know how to operate it. “Red levers on your left. Push full forward.”
I heard him grumbling to himself. Then: “Done.”
“Now turn on the thrusters. Full. You know how to do that?”
“Explain it to me, please.”
While I told him how, the inner airlock door opened and we took our seats. Tod watched him going down and shook his head.
His thrusters fired and his rate of descent slowed. But it wasn’t going to be enough, and even had it been he was moving forward too quickly. The ground was about to become a hopeless tangle of rock and metal.
“Kellie.”
“I’m here, George.”
“I’m sorry. I know this will create a problem for you.”
“Forget it. Just hang on.”
“Okay.”
And pray.
Tod set up a clock. I saw thirty-six seconds begin to tick down.
“Looks too fast, Kellie. I don’t think it’s going to work.”
I didn’t say anything. Didn’t know what to say. He’s watching the ground rush up at him, what am I going to do, tell him everything’s going to be fine, have a nice day?
The last few seconds drained away. And without a sound Delta ripped into the ground. There was a brief flare in the darkness—not enough fuel left for a real explosion—, and he was gone.
They didn’t exactly blame it on me, although the muscles in Sylvia’s jaw did funny things when she saw me again, that night and during the investigation and later at the memorial service. We all said nice things about George, how he always found time for others, how he loved his work, how he was extraordinarily patient. None of it was true. Most of the time his work was fairly routine and he endured it. Now and then it turned up something that seriously engaged his interest, like the books at the Retreat. But that wasn’t the same thing at all.
He did succeed in saving most of them. So he became the hero of the hour, and we all drank to him. A few people looked down their noses at me, visibly grateful that someone had had the guts to stay with the payload.
In the end, though, it didn’t matter, at least as far as translations were concerned. The print—the ink—was smeared beyond recovery. Nobody’s sure yet whether it was that the force field that guarded the Retreat had stayed on for a longer time than anyone had expected, blocking out the preserving vacuum, or whether the occupants of the Retreat had needed a moist environment. Whichever it was, there’d been too much humidity over an extended period. The specialists had enough to conclude that they could detect only one language, that the language used upper and lower case, that it read from right to left, that it used punctuation, and that individual words were separated by spaces.
And that was it. Whatever scientific or philosophical ruminations might have existed therein, whatever timeless novels, whatever observations on the state of the universe, it was all lost.
So when I ventured to suggest to Sylvia that George’s sacrifice had consequently been pointless, she drew herself up in righteous indignation. We were standing in the main room, in front of the oculus, looking out at the spectacle of worlds and rings. The sofa and one of the armchairs had not yet been moved up to the Bromfield. They were huge pieces of furniture, the way everything looked when you were four years old. One of the side walls was in the process of being taken down and prepared for shipment back to Arlington. “Don’t even think it,” she said. “The books are invaluable artifacts, even if we can’t read them.”
Well, maybe there’s something to that. But it didn’t seem like much consolation for what we’d lost. And I couldn’t help recalling George’s comment just before it all started. “We already have the critical information about them. Even if we didn’t have the books, we have the window.”
What critical information?
I related the remark to Sylvia.
She frowned, considered it, and nodded. “Well,” she said, “I guess it’s a reference to the esthetic sense of their owners. And their creators. I suppose that’s significant. Considering what they looked like,”—she managed a smile—, “that comes as something of a surprise.” She turned away to caution one of the technicians to use more care in lifting a section of wall.
I thought there must have been more to it. But it didn’t occur to me until later that, if you stood in front of the oculus at the right angle, you could see your own reflection.
GOOD INTENTIONS
Written with Stanley Schmidt
“Do you believe in UFO’s?”
No, dammit. I don’t believe in anything that hasn’t been parked in my driveway so I could kick the tires and check the gearshift. So don’t ask again. Just because I’m a science fiction writer doesn’t mean I’m demented. I have no time for crop circles, telepathy, alien abductions, power centers, spontaneous combustion, or ancient astronauts. Loch Ness is empty, Atlantis is bunk, and I’ll sleep in any haunted house in the world for five hundred bucks plus expenses. Okay?
I mention this up front because I attended a seminar this past summer during which I may have touched the infinite. And I know how that sounds. But I want to avoid your saying well, after all, this is Jake Cobblemere, he writes all those stories about time travelers and rubber dimensions, so what do you expect? If you want to believe I’ve lost it, that’s okay; but don’t conclude all this just bubbled up out of my workday habits. Because that isn’t what happened.
Not at all.
Last spring I got a call from Sam Wynn inviting me to participate as an advisor at the Baranov Seminar, which is conducted annually at the Skyhawk Conference Center in upstate New York. You might have heard of it. The participants refer to themselves as Baranovians. They’re science fiction enthusiasts who meet for a few days every summer to renew old acquaintances and do the SF equivalent of a mystery weekend. They bring in a writer and maybe an outside expert to put together a simulation for them. The previous summer, for example, they converted Skyhawk into Moonbase and staged a murder. One of the guests was the New York City medical examiner. (The murderer, by the way, turned out to be the computer, à la Hal.)
The seminars have been running since 1971, when Abraham Baranov personally launched them, discovered how engaging they were, and stayed with them until his death. It was, I need not tell you, a signal honor to be asked to step briefly into the great man’s shoes.
“This year they want to do a Martian dig,” Sam told me. He explained that the group decides each summer what sort of program they’ll do the following year. “We’ve got Marsbase up and running. We’ve been there for a while, taking soil samples and whatnot, and we discover some artifacts.”
“Artifacts?” I said. “What sort of artifacts?”
“That’s up to you, Jake.”
“But Mars is dead. Has been for a couple of billion years, except maybe for microbes. How could there be artifacts?”
“Your problem, Jake. Come up with something. And listen, we’re giving you a professional archeologist to work with.”
“Okay,” I said, warming to the idea. “Does the archeologist write science fiction?”
“She doesn’t like science fiction. But she’s a friend of mine, she’s available, and she offered to come no charge.”
“What am I supposed to do with an archeologist? “
“They want to do an actual dig. She knows how.”
“I thought this would be a simulation.”
“Oh, no. There’ll be a real dig site. We’ve set aside some ground. You’re going to bury the artifacts, and the team will dig them up and try to solve the mystery.”
“What mystery?”
“Invent one.”
The archeologist was Maureen Coverdale. She worked out of Penn, and I lived in Indianapolis, so we did all the planning on-line. She surprised me. I guess I’d expected that she would treat the whole thing more or less as an excuse to get a free vacation, but she took it all very seriously. She kept after me, pointing out that Martian artifacts could not be produced at the last minute, and that we had a clear obligation to make sure the Baranovians got their money’s worth.
She turned out to be twenty years younger than I’d expected, dark-eyed, trim, a woman who looked as if she’d be more at home among soft blue lights than among ruins. But I dreamed up a story line and we agreed on what we needed to do. She took charge of manufacturing the stuff we needed. She showed up two days before the program was to start, supervised the Skyhawk earthmover, buried everything, and was waiting (with Sam Wynn) to shake my hand when I arrived late, having underestimated the driving time on a series of winding roads.
We retired to The Hawk’s Nest and reviewed our plans over rum and Coke. Then we walked out to the dig site, which was located about a quarter mile from Harper Hall. (Harper would serve as the team’s mobile field station.) The site was about sixteen feet on a side, shielded by a canvass awning.
“Are the Baranovians here yet?” I asked.
“Some are,” said Sam. “Most of them will straggle in during the night.” He consulted a clipboard. “Altogether, we’ll have twenty-four.”
Skyhawk is located in deep forest on the shores of a glacial lake. Green-carpeted mountains rise on all sides. On that first night there was a brilliant full moon, the wind was loud in the spruce, and the woods smelled of mint and cold water. A half-dozen lights lined the far shore. Nothing could have been farther from Mars.
Warren Hatch was glad to get off his hands and knees, and give his place to Judy Conroy. “I never knew archeology was so mind-numbing,” he told Maureen. A dozen or so members of the team were working meticulously over the site, removing the crumbly Martian soil a half-inch at a time, brushing it off rocks, turning it over to others who strained it to be sure nothing was being overlooked. “Whatever happened to Indiana Jones?” he asked. “To buried temples? Secret doors? That sort of thing?”
Maureen smiled. “Real archeology would make a slow movie,” she said.
Warren looked out past the dig site, through the plasteel shell that shielded them from the near-vacuum. Low red hills rose in the north, and he could see a dune buggy moving across the horizon.
“Got something here.” Patti Kubik’s voice. She brushed the object and held it up. It was a knife. Long and slightly curved, it had a metal blade and handle, and was still in good condition.
“No telling how old it is,” said Cobblemere. “It could have been in the ground for centuries without showing any real deterioration.”
They noted where the knife had been found and placed it beside the two urns they’d recovered earlier.
“Here. Look at this.” Eddie Edwards, short, squat, barrel-shaped, bent close to the ground. He was on his knees, rear end stuck up, face red with effort, working with brush and fingers to clear a rectangular tablet about the size of a dinner plate. “It’s got a picture on it,” he said. That brought a crowd.
The tablet depicted a vaguely reptilian-looking creature with long teeth and crocodilian eyes. The stuff of bad science fiction films. For all that, it maintained an aspect that seemed almost pious. It wore a robe, and it seemed to have just dropped something that might have been a stone or a crumpled piece of paper. A jagged line resembling a lightning bolt was drawn through the dropped object. A string of exotic characters lined the top and right side of the tablet.
“This can’t be right,” said Jason Kelly, the team’s senior member in terms of age and service. Kelly was almost seventy, but he was a physical fitness freak and he could probably have run most of his associates into the ground. He claimed to be the world’s lone exobiologist. “It’s a hoax. Has to be.”
“Why?” asked Warren.
“If this is supposed to be a Martian, it’s all wrong. Martians couldn’t possibly look like this. These creatures would have evolved in a swampy environment.”
“Here’s another.” Murray Fineberg, this time. Murray was middle-aged, overweight, a man who looked as if he would have been more at home running a publishing business than kneeling in Martian silt. His tablet revealed the same sort of creature, this time bowing before a pyramid from which lines of light seemed to emanate.
“It just doesn’t figure,” said Jason. “We know surface conditions were never adequate to support anything more complicated than a bacterium.”
“Then why,” asked Patti Kubik, “are we out here in the first place?” Patti was middle-aged, prematurely gray, possibly the most personable individual on Mars. Among a group of people who considered one another egomaniacs, she managed to maintain a good-humored humility. “We’re all idiots much of the time,” she’d told Warren once. “If you recognize that, it explains a lot.”
Sam Wynn was wearing a headset. He was tall, thoughtful, deliberate, dressed in an ivory-colored jacket with an Oakland Raiders logo. His brows drew suddenly together and he pressed both earphones. After a moment he nodded and then called for attention. “I’ve got some news,” he said. “The Delta team just found two metal disks on the north ridge. They’re approximately five meters in diameter, and they’re mounted on cradles that permit both lateral and horizontal movement.”
“Sounds like satellite dishes,” said Bryan Trahan. Bryan was among the younger members of the team. He was in his early twenties, tall, quiet, with clear handsome features and bright brown eyes.
“That’s what Clancey thinks,” said Sam. Clancey was the leader of Delta team.
“So where are the satellites?” asked Patti.
“Negative,” said Sam. “No satellites. We know that for a fact.”
Eddie pushed his thick fingers into the soil and nodded to himself. “Another tablet,” he said.
There was more: pots, cups, primitive tools. More tablets. Beads. Jewelry. A paperweight-sized pyramid that might have been made of diamond. (The diamond, if indeed that’s what it was, had a scarlet tinge in its depths.) And a long metallic rod with markings. Not unlike a gauge. They also dug up a strip of cable, which appeared to be made of plastic. Odd.
At the edge of the excavation, they found the remains of a wall. The wall was a high-tech alloy, and must once have enclosed the site, even as their own plastic dome now sealed it off.
Sam was listening to his earphones again. He was frowning. “Okay,” he said into the mike. “We’ve got something else.” He raised his voice so all could hear. “Somebody blew up Union Station in Chicago. During rush hour. They’ve got several hundred dead. Almost a thousand people hurt.” It was the latest in a wave of terrorist attacks by all kinds of disgruntled groups. Anybody with a grudge and enough money to buy a bombmaker could now make his irritation felt. (His was the correct usage, because to date no women had been charged.)
“Mars is starting to look good.” Judy Conroy was from Chicago. She was diminutive, with classic features and dark brown hair, cropped in a pageboy. Her blue eyes, which were usually bright and penetrating, smoldered.
“Crazies everywhere,” said Warren. Two weeks earlier, one group had bombed a nuclear power plant upwind of New York City in an unsuccessful effort to cause a meltdown.
“What’s this?” asked Murray. He was brushing soil away from a long, smooth stone surface.
“Careful,” said Maureen.
It was roughly one by three meters. Maureen took over direction, and within an hour they’d uncovered a tabletop with a solid base about a meter and a half deep.
“You know what it looks like?” said Bryan.
“Yeah.” Murray rubbed his hand across his balding scalp. “It looks like an altar.”
Warren knelt down to examine it. It was stained.
“I think we’re off to a good start,” said Maureen.
She sliced a strip off her steak, tasted it, and nodded her approval. We’d secured a corner table, away from the Baranovians. Down on the beach, a few die-hard bathers were still in the water, even though the evening was turning cool.
“We should be,” I said. Her artifacts had been damned good to start with, and she’d taken my suggestions and improved on them. “How long did it take you to bury the stuff?”
She looked out across the open field at the awning which marked the dig site. The ground was muddy. Unfortunately, the dome that held back the Martian vacuum could not keep out a terrestrial rainstorm. They’d all got drenched, and some had even retreated to the dining hall or their individual quarters. (An outdoor wedding had also taken a hit that afternoon.) But a half-dozen of the hardier Baranovians had hung on, cutting down through the soil until the urns and tools and gadgets had been recovered and recorded. And until the altar lay exposed.
There’d been visitors. Neighbors of Skyhawk, and guests from the wedding party, all curious as to why these people were digging a large hole in the lawn, had gathered outside the perimeter. Sam had set himself to intercept them, to keep them at a distance. He’d answered their questions as best he could. Some had seemed interested; others had smiled and moved on.
“The blood on the altar,” Sam said. “That’s a great idea. Where are we going with this?”
Only Maureen and I knew the scenario. “You think it’s blood?” I asked innocently.
“Sure,” he said. “What else? I’ve seen your work, Jake. You never miss a chance to spill blood.”
I was hurt by the comment, and I was trying to think how to respond when Bryan joined us. His plate was heaped high with roast beef and mashed potatoes. “Interesting afternoon,” he said. “Do you expect we’ll be able to finish with the dig tomorrow?”
Maureen was slow to respond. She approved of Bryan, who was bright and intense. The kind of young man who would go far. “Yes,” she said finally. “If we were doing this in real time, this kind of excavation might take weeks. But we’ll wrap it up about noon.”
A Voice in the Night Page 26