20 Million Leagues Over the Sea (9 page)

"The conference room for the meeting is that
way," he said, pointing towards the corridor to their left. "But
the laboratories are this way. Oh! And the loo is across the hall
from them. Very important to know."

They entered a chamber bound in metal, wood,
and glass. The scientists had stuffed every inch to the gills with
all manner of contraptions for dissection and examination. The lab
reminded her of so many others that she had seen (and nicked from)
before, but never had she seen one this large. She did recognize a
few of the tools: scalpels, microscopes, and racks of tubes filled
with a rainbow of fluids. From the wall between a lab bench and a
keypunch machine there emerged another pneumatic tube. A cylinder
awaited retrieval in its receptacle. She saw more of the glass
panels like the ones on the bridge; the rectangles bore
grease-penciled equations, sketches, and words that she could not
pronounce despite all her lab experience. One was covered in a
tangle of C's and G's, A's and T's in impossible combinations that
formed a cipher text that she could not break.

And books! So very many books! Textbooks,
bound journals, handwritten notebooks, and volumes of mathematical
tables smothered the lab. They towered in stacks on the shelves,
lurked on the corners of tables, loitered about the floor, and
generally occupied any flat surface available (real or imagined).
It was a treasure-trove of secrets, low-hanging fruit ripe for the
taking. They had not yet been defined as part of her job. The books
could wait.

She scrutinized the men in the lab, already
hard at work, as if they had been on the ship for weeks, toiling
away at their glass panels. Some of them were European, but others
appeared to be from India and Arabia. And naturally, she was the
only female amongst them.

He guided her farther into the laboratory.
"Here is the space set aside for you, Miss Gemma. I am afraid they
haven't brought your equipment in from the cargo bay just yet."

Here was the only empty spot in the entire
room; it was as bare as the others were full to bursting. While the
other glass panels bore smudged equations and fingerprints, her own
pane gleamed in the bright overhead lights. She hoped that her
feeling of panic did not show on her face.

Hui continued, "Do you remember where in the
cargo bay they stored your equipment? Perhaps I could put in a
request for you to have it moved here."

Gemma froze as she stared at the vacant
shelves. They yawned before her in a bookless abyss. Mrs. Brightman
had mentioned nothing about equipment in her hurried briefing.
Perhaps she had thought that the Cohort would provide it all. Even
though she had been excited by the prospect of the job, Gemma was
used to being the assistant or the computer, not the actual
scientist. Her situation was getting more precarious by the moment,
and she wasn't past the moon yet. She had to say
something
,
perhaps even the truth.

"I am not sure. They sent me to replace
someone else who could not make the trip, at the very last moment.
I do not know where their equipment might be. Perhaps there has
been some mistake?"

Hui closed his eyes for a moment and shook
his head. "Oh, my, what a tragedy! Perhaps you should have visited
the laboratory before we launched, so you might have requested that
they send it up. But perhaps it would have made us miss the launch
window. Very well. Can you tell me what experiments you had
planned? Perhaps someone can loan you something?"

He was quite chatty, and she found it
expedient to act as puzzled as he was; it was not difficult. The
word "Experiments" was already on her emergency list of Things to
Ponder; experiments would be even more difficult to fake with
nonexistent paraphernalia. Her next message back to the School
would be a strongly worded one.

"Perhaps you brought some samples in your
personal luggage?" Hui continued. "Minerals for your non-Mars
research? Some strike plates? Perhaps some gems?" He rubbed his
hands together with an excited gleam in his eyes.

"No, I am sorry."

"Oh, well," he sighed as he hunched his
shoulders. "I thought perhaps they might have provided you some
lunar rocks to study, at the very least. Check with Dr. Pugh.
Perhaps he has a few from the last voyage." He paused and clasped
his hands together, lost in thought. He shrugged. "You are already
here, at any rate. Perhaps we can find something for you to
do."

She cringed and was no longer afraid to do
so. There wasn't as much as a slide rule at her station. She had
known going into this that it would be difficult enough to convince
the Cohort of her abilities; looking worse than unprepared would
make it nearly impossible. She had to think, and think quickly, or
she was going to be in an awkward position for a very long
time.

"I have heard that we will have a tour of the
Oberth Engines today," Hui said, startling her out of the dark
tunnel she was thinking her way down. "Dr. Pugh saw them on the
last trip, but the rest of us are new here, just like you. Isn't it
exciting? I have heard that they use radio waves! Radio waves! How
did they ever conceive of such a thing? I cannot wait to see
it!"

She breathed a quiet sigh of relief at the
change of topic. Perhaps that would give her some time to think
about how she was going to handle her growing List. This wasn't the
first time Gemma had had to improvise, but this job was going to
push her skills to the limit.

A towering stack of books walked over to them
on spindly legs. "I noticed you have some storage space to spare,"
the stack said in an accent that had grown up somewhere near
Bangalore. "Mind if I borrow a bit?"

The stack rested itself on her workbench and
revealed the man behind it. His face was nearly as brown as his lab
blouse, and his black hair, frosted at the temples, floated untamed
about his head like a quiet storm cloud of curls. The wrinkles of
his lab blouse stored the crumbs of breakfast, and his now
book-free hands were stained with ink and pencil grease.

"I could not help but overhear. So, I expect
you won't need your space anytime soon. Any chance I might use your
shelves? And your board?" He pointed to her gleaming glass panel.
"The grease pencils are not nearly as nice as chalk, I will admit,
but I could use the space."

"Ah, Dr. Bidarhalli," Hui answered before she
could even take a breath to respond. "Please meet the much
anticipated Miss Gemma, our geologist. Miss Gemma, this is Dr.
Santosh Bidarhalli, our mathematician from Hyderabad, India's City
of Pearls." Shedding his fatherly smile for a moment, he shook a
finger at the other scientist. "Santosh, you remember what Pugh
told us yesterday. Chalk gets in the air recycling and chokes
everybody." He turned to Gemma. "Pugh told me that they learned the
hard way during the lunar voyage."

A familiar voice interrupted them. "Just
about time, lads," Dr. Pugh said, his lanky frame filling the
doorway. "Come on to the conference room. Hui, do make sure that
Llewellyn doesn't get lost on the way, if you please."

For once, she was grateful for his intrusion.
It gave her some time to think. She followed Hui, Bidarhalli, and
the rest back down the hall and past the lift. Feeling like a lost
chick in a flock of clucking brown hens, she considered her
situation. Perhaps she could barter her empty space for some time
with the others' books and Bunsen burners. The curious side of her
mind reveled in the thought of observing their work. She hated
leaving a mission before knowing the final results of her target's
experiments. They would expect her to take notes; even the most
socially awkward scientist would notice if she didn't scribble
something every so often. She would need pens and notebooks as
well. The two members she had just met seemed amenable to such a
trade. With her training as a computer, she would be right at home
with the mathematician's materials.

Hui pulled out a chair for her, and she sat
down carefully, with her hands folded in her lap and ankles crossed
beneath her long skirt. She looked about the conference room as it
began to fill with the other members of the Cohort.

There were no "
Terra Vigila
" posters
here. Sophie didn't do any welding in this room, Gemma supposed. In
fact, the only sign on the wall that she recognized was the "Lights
of Blue, Go to the Loo!" one from the mess hall. Otherwise, maps of
their destination covered the walls like the tattered remnants of
tapestries. Some were marked with the possible locations of seas,
canals, and cities that some had glimpsed through earth-bound
telescopes.

A guide to the Moon was there as well, with
features that she had never seen in the newspaper articles covering
the maiden voyage. On the main table sat a globe of Mars, a
red-gold sphere that shone in the bright light beaming down from
the ceiling panels. Books, papers, rulers, and drafting tools were
scattered about the globe's base, and some were employed as weights
to hold down still more maps. Bound volumes of numerical tables
computed by the Admiralty Computing Service lurked beside copies of
Darwin and Lyell. Gemma noted that the latter was the same edition
as the one in her cabin.

A geology book amongst these fellows?
Perhaps her Watcher was in this very room.
If so,
she
thought,
his disguise is superb. Most of them could not
infiltrate a post office.

With much squeaking and fidgeting, they
finished seating themselves. They were a room of dull brown hens,
and it took a moment for the clucking to subside. A couple of them
glared at her, as if she were an unexpected fly swimming in an
Erlenmeyer flask of carefully distilled water. Hui and a fatherly
man on her other side flashed her paternal smiles while Bidarhalli
and the rest found some other scientific object to occupy their
attention.

"Right," Pugh said, hunching over the head of
the table. "You lot know each other, but we have a new member that
I need to introduce." She could almost feel the effort he was
making to avoid rolling his eyes. "Miss Gemma Llewellyn, Ship's
Geologist. Miss Llewellyn, may I present the rest of the
Cohort."

He gestured to the smiling man sitting to her
right. He wore a clerical collar beneath his browns.

"This is Father Abramo Alfieri, our
astronomer. He's on loan to us from the Vatican Observatory."
Pugh's left eye twitched. "He is also the ship's chaplain. Should
we need one."

Father Alfieri stood up and bowed to Gemma as
he said, "I say Mass on Sunday mornings and hear confession on
Wednesday evenings after tea. Of course, I am available for
spiritual counsel whenever the need arises. I have a small chapel
just off the mess hall for everyone's convenience."

This time the other scientists
did
roll their eyes. They grunted in response, but they did not
interrupt him. Alfieri was a small man; he was one of the few
people that Gemma had met so far with whom she could literally see
eye to eye. Silver hair framed his broad smiling face. His deep-set
eyes twinkled above a neatly trimmed beard.

Pugh cleared his throat and continued
pointing out the other men at the table.

"Professor Yuri Stanislav of St. Petersburg,
Germ Sciences. And next to him, Declan Shaw, of Trinity College.
They are the G-bomb experts. That's 'germ bomb' to the
uninitiated."

The two men nodded at her without speaking.
Shaw shot her a look that she had encountered more than once in her
travels, a derisive sneer that said he already knew about her empty
workspace and that he had expected nothing more than that. The
other hostile glower in the room clung to the face of the man next
to him.

"Alvar Berndsen, lately of Copenhagen, is my
fellow biologist. He also assists the ship's surgeon from time to
time. And here is our linguist and cryptanalyst, hailing from the
Ottoman Empire, Abdul-Halim ibn Saeed ibn... ibn... oh heavens, I
can't remember the rest. We just call him Abbie."

"Which he doesn't particularly like," Hui
whispered in her ear.

The man in question stroked his luxurious
beard with a studied and silent frown. Not an angry frown, as she
had seen many times before, but one of deep rumination that refused
to reveal its secrets.

"Abbie deciphers and translates the
information we retrieved from the Martian cylinders. I suppose you
are already acquainted with our resident physicist and
mathematician," Pugh continued, pointing to the Hui and Bidarhalli
in turn.

Gemma didn't recognize any of these fellows
from any of her previous jobs; she was thankful for that.

"Now that that's over with, let's crack on.
Most of you are quite familiar with the plan, but I will review for
our latecomers." He managed to say this without staring at her this
time. "Our first order of business as the Cohort is to improve our
knowledge of the Red Planet itself. As we get a better view of it
with our telescopes, we will see what is where and revise our maps.
We're not certain of their accuracy by any means. There has been
some argument back home over whether the canals marked on the maps
truly exist or if they are mere artifacts of our telescopes. But
these," he pointed out red circles on one of the maps, "are our
best guesses as to the locations of the main population centres. We
have reckoned that these are the best targets for our attack run.
Shaw, where are we on the payload development?"

Father Alfieri fidgeted in his seat and
interrupted before Shaw had a chance to reply. "So, the suggestion
that we might parley with them has been put aside?"

Pugh sighed. "Once again, Father, we don't
think they'd be very keen," Pugh replied. "I know the Church has a
vested interest in increasing its flock, but from what we can tell,
the Martians evolved for War, not theological debate."