Mars Life (31 page)

Sitting rigidly behind his desk, his face a frozen mask, Chang dipped his chin in the slightest gesture of agreement.

Jamie was still on his feet. “You both have reasonable points,” he said. “But the important issue is this: there’s work to be done. We have this village to uncover, and there will be more villages, in time. Carter can’t get the job done without volunteers to help with the digging.”

“Volunteers,” Larkin repeated.

“But once you volunteer,” Jamie said, trying to make it sound reasonable, “you’ve committed yourself to a certain amount of man-hours.”

Chang puffed out a breath, then said, “I have spent many hours setting up work schedules for volunteers.”

Larkin shifted uncomfortably on his chair. “I have my own work to think about. I should be—”

“You should be living up to your commitments,” Carleton snapped.

Before the biologist could reply, Jamie said, “Look. We’re a team here. A family. Families have arguments all the time, but we shouldn’t let an argument get in the way of doing what we came here to do.”

“What we’re doing here,” Larkin said heatedly, “is rearranging the deck chairs on the 
Titanic.”

Jamie stared at him.

“This world is dying,” the biologist went on. “The endolithic lichen are dying off. There’s not enough water available to support—”

“Permafrost contains oceans of water!” Chang interrupted.

“Frozen. The SLiMEs can tap the permafrost, but nothing on the surface of Mars can. Eventually the last of the lichen will die off and the surface will be totally sterile. Then the SLiMEs’ll be next.”

He’s right, Jamie thought. Mars is dying. But he heard himself ask, “How long is ‘eventually’?”

Larkin shrugged his thin shoulders. “A hundred thousand years. A million. What difference does it make? The planet’s dying and there’s nothing we can do about it.”

Carleton said, “All the more important, then, to excavate what remains of the village. And anything else we can find.”

“Digging up the dead,” Larkin muttered. “While I ought to be seeing how long the SLiMEs can last.”

“It’s important!” Carleton insisted. “Vital!”

“So’s my own work,” Larkin retorted.

Surprisingly, Chang said, “I can rearrange schedule. It can be altered.”

“What?” Larkin looked astounded.

Chang almost smiled. “You will work same number of hours at the dig. I will stretch out your commitment, give you more time in your lab.”

Jamie asked, “Carter, is that agreeable to you?”

Carleton hesitated, then mumbled, “As long as I have the manpower I need to keep the excavation work going.”

“Zeke?”

Reluctantly, Larkin nodded. “Yeah, I suppose so. If I can spend more time in my lab.”

“Good,” said Chang.

“Thank you, Dr. Chang,” said Jamie gratefully. “You’ve solved the problem.” Silently he added, For the time being. Until the next flare-up.

Then Larkin muttered, “It doesn’t make any difference, anyway. We’ll all be packing up and leaving here before another year is up.”

Jamie didn’t have the heart to contradict him.

From her desk just inside the infirmary’s entrance Vijay could see just about the whole interior of the dome. She watched Larkin and Carleton leave Chang’s office and walk toward the cafeteria without so much as glancing at each other. As if each one of them is totally alone, she thought. Neither one of them wants to acknowledge the presence of the other. Well, at least they’re not screaming at each other.

Jamie was still in the mission director’s office with Chang. He’ll prob’ly be in there for a while yet, Vijay realized. They must have a lot to hash over.

Turning slightly, she saw Larkin get in line at the cafeteria’s counter. Carleton went past him to the coffee urn, poured himself a mug, then looked around for a place to sit. He found an empty table by the curving wall of the dome and sat there, alone, while Larkin filled his tray and joined three other men and women at a table on the other side of the cafeteria. As far away from Carleton as they could get, Vijay saw.

The cafeteria seemed unusually quiet, she thought, conversations muted, little knots of men and women talking in subdued tones, as if they were afraid of being overheard.

It took Vijay a few moments to decide, but then she shut down her desktop computer and went to the cafeteria’s trio of urns to make herself a cup of tea. The water wasn’t much more than tepid and the urns themselves looked dull, almost grimy. Maintenance is slipping, she thought, as she made her way through the tables toward Carleton.

“Mind if I join you?” she asked as she took the chair across the small table from him.

Carleton smirked at her. “You’re not afraid of catching it?”

“Catching? What?”

“Carleton’s disease. It’s something like leprosy. Nobody wants to be near you.” He gestured with one hand; all the tables next to theirs were empty, unoccupied.

“That’s a bit melodramatic, i’n’t it?”

“A bit, perhaps,” he admitted with a slightly sheepish grin. “But they all think of me as some kind of ogre now. The big, bad taskmaster who’s abusing his volunteer helpers.”

Vijay took a sip of the lukewarm tea, then asked, “How do you feel about it?”

He stared at her for a long moment. “This is a psych quiz, isn’t it?”

She lowered her eyes, then replied, “The emotional stability of this group is as important as its physical health. You know that.”

“And I’m a threat to the group’s emotional stability,” he muttered.

Vijay smiled at him. “It’s not about you, Carter.”

“Isn’t it?”

“Not entirely. There are two hundred and some other people here, y’know.”

“Most of whom would gladly push me out the airlock in my Jockey shorts.”

“You 
are 
a narcissist,” she said, laughing.

He cocked his head to one side. “It is the stars, the stars above us, govern our conditions.”

“What’s that from? Shakespeare?”

“King Lear, if I remember correctly.”

“Di’n’t Shakespeare also say that the fault is not in our stars, but in ourselves?”

Nodding, Carleton said, “That’s from 
Julius Caesar.”

“So which is it? The stars or ourselves?”

“Both,” he said, with a tired sigh. “Neither.”

More seriously, Vijay asked, “Are you going to be all right?”

“Me? I’m fine. Go do a psych profile on that hotheaded biologist if you’re looking for a troublemaker.”

“Maybe I should,” she said.

“There you are!” Turning, Vijay saw Jamie approaching their table. She broke into a big smile.

“I thought you were going to stay in Chang’s office all night,” she said.

Jamie pulled a chair from one of the unoccupied tables and sat between Carleton and Vijay. “He needed to have his feathers smoothed a little. He doesn’t show it much, but he gets just as worked up as any of us.”

“You don’t,” Carleton said. “You’re always as cool as a sea breeze.”

“Not inside,” Jamie said. Turning to Vijay, “Had dinner yet?”

“Not yet.”

Looking back at Carleton, Jamie asked, “Would you like to join us?”

Carleton’s eyes nickered from Jamie to Vijay and back again. Then he said, “No thanks. I’m not very hungry this evening.”

He got to his feet and walked away without another word.

Vijay watched him go. “He’s a ticking bomb,” she murmured.

“Just what we need,” said Jamie.

Heading toward his quarters, Carleton had to pass the table where Larkin was sitting with another man and two women. He nodded graciously to them; the lean-faced biologist gave him a wary nod back.

Halfway across the dome, Carleton looked back over his shoulder at Waterman and his wife, standing at the service counter loading their trays, smiling at each other.

She’s beautiful, and therefore to be woo’d, he quoted to himself. She is a woman, therefore to be won.

Billy Graycloud sipped at a lukewarm mug of coffee as he watched the computer’s latest run scroll down the desktop monitor screen. Outside the partitions of the comm center the dome was dark, shadowy. Everybody else was asleep, Graycloud thought. He had volunteered for the night shift at the comm center so that he could work on his attempt to translate the Martian pictographs. No disturbances. The dome’s life-support systems were running smoothly enough and the occasional message from Earth was never so important that it couldn’t wait until morning to be read and acted on.

Volunteered. Graycloud mulled the word around in his mind. The idea of volunteering had caused a big blowup a few hours earlier. Zeke Larkin and Dr. Carleton were sore enough to start socking each other, Graycloud thought. Right there at the lockers alongside the main airlock. In front of everybody. For a while Graycloud thought that maybe one of them was high on drugs. Maybe both of them.

Even Chang got into it. But then Dr. Waterman came on the scene and calmed them all down. Sitting bleary eyed at the central console in the communications center, Graycloud wondered what Dr. Waterman had done, what he had said, to put an end to the fight. He had no doubt that Dr. W had been the peacemaker. No doubt at all.

Graycloud had been one of the volunteers out at the dig when Larkin had exploded. Dr. Carleton had been pretty bossy, Graycloud thought, but the anthropologist was always a hard-ass out there. He called it 
his 
dig and that’s the way he thought of it. Volunteers like me are just supposed to do what we’re told and not talk back.

So what? he asked himself. Why did Larkin get so uptight? Graycloud yawned and stretched his arms over his head. Forget about it. Dr. W smoothed things over. Get back to your own work and stop rehashing what happened this afternoon.

Yesterday afternoon, he corrected himself. It’s past midnight.

He returned his attention to the words scrolling down the desktop screen. Gibberish. No sense to them. “Sun, cook river, make house unknown word, unknown word.” With a shake of his head Graycloud decided that his latest stab at assigning words to the Martian symbols was a complete flop. With a touch of a key he blanked the screen, then called up the images of the Martian pictographs.

They mean something, Graycloud told himself. But what? He yawned again and noticed that it was actually well past one a.m.

Get some sleep, he told himself. The comm center doesn’t need you sitting here all night. Messages from Earth are routed automatically, and we don’t have anybody out on an excursion so there won’t be any calls from outside the dome. If anything goes wrong with the life-support systems the alarms will whoop everybody wide awake in two seconds.

He reached for the keyboard to shut down the computer, but the Martian images entranced him. They’ve been sitting on that wall for millions of years, he told himself. They can wait another couple of hours. Yet he kept staring at them as if he could make the symbols speak to him. He fell asleep in his chair in front of the computer screen.

Bright morning sunlight slanted through the dome’s transparent walls as Jamie stared at his desktop screen. His cubbyhole of an office was bare except for the laptop computer resting on the shaky folding table and the other, empty chair. The thin, flexible smart screens that he had taped to the cubicle’s partitions were blank, gray. Only his laptop showed Dex Trumball’s earnest face.

Dex had warned him to plug in the earphone for this message; he didn’t want anyone to overhear it. Now, as Jamie sat listening to his proposal, he understood why.

“I know it goes against the grain, Jamie,” Dex was saying, “but we’ve got to face the facts. If you want to keep the program going, this is the only way to get the funding you need.”

Dex was at his home on Boston’s North Shore, Jamie could see: in his darkly paneled den. Through the narrow window behind Dex, Jamie could see thickly leaved maple trees glowing red and gold in the afternoon sun. It must be autumn in New England, he thought in a separate part of his mind as he tried to digest what Dex was saying.

“It won’t be like a swarm of tourists, Jamie. This’ll be strictly a high-end operation. Rollie Kinnear figures he can get fifty million a pop. Fifty million each! If we ferry ten people to Mars for a week’s visit, that’s half a billion dollars, gross. Do that three, four times a year and we can support your people indefinitely.”

Ten wealthy tourists, Jamie thought. Then ten more. Then twenty, twenty-five. A hundred. A thousand. They’ll trample around here and ruin everything. We won’t be able to get any work done. They’ll want souvenirs: 
Be the first in your crowd to bring back a rock from Mars! Look, I brought a piece of pottery from the Martian village! 
Jamie shuddered.

“I’ve talked it over with the Navaho president and her council,” Dex was going on. “They’re not crazy about the idea but they’ll go along with it because it can bring in money for them.”

Let the palefaces have their little settlement by the water’s edge, Jamie thought with the bitterness of tribal memory. There’s only a few of them and the land is wide and free.

Dex was saying, “Um, the council voted to approve the plan, but only providing that you handle the operation from your end. You personally. They don’t trust anybody else to take care of the tourists properly, see that they don’t mess things up over there.”

You want me to be the Judas, Jamie answered silently. Open up Mars to tourism and let Jamie take the responsibility.

He listened to Dex’s words and watched his erstwhile friend’s face closely as the man spoke. Dex’s expression alternated from earnest enthusiasm to worried apprehension to an almost truculent insistence.

“I know you won’t like this idea, Jamie, but it’s the only way we can raise enough money to keep you guys going. Otherwise we’re going to have to shut down the whole operation and bring you all back home.”

And once we leave, your friends can come in and set up a wide-open tourism operation. 
See the Martian cliff dwellings! Plant your footprints where no human being has stood before! Walk through an ancient Martian village!

Strangely, Jamie felt no anger. Only a deep, aching, sullen remorse, the kind of pain that grips the heart when a dream is shattered.

Dex had finished talking. His image waited frozen on the laptop’s small screen.

Jamie looked out through the open doorway of his cubicle toward the rusty red, rock-strewn ground. Mars is dying, he heard Zeke Larkin say. And he knew that Zeke was right. This is a dying world. And we’re dying with it.

Fingering the communicator clipped to his ear, Jamie said, “Dex, the answer is no. Thanks for your effort. I know you think you’re doing what needs to be done. But no. Not now. Not while I live.”

He turned off the laptop, knowing it would take more than ten minutes for his reply to reach Earth. God knows how long it’ll take Dex to react. Jamie shook his head. It doesn’t matter what his reaction is. It doesn’t matter if he quits the program altogether and cuts off his foundation’s funding completely. None of that matters.

Yet Jamie feared he was wrong. He was cutting off the exploration team’s lifeblood. While it might take a million years for the last Martian lichen to shrivel and die from lack of water, the human explorers on Mars would disappear in a matter of months, for lack of funds.

Billy Graycloud had raised his fist to rap on the partition of Dr. Waterman’s office, but saw that Jamie was staring intently at his laptop screen, comm unit clipped to his ear.

He won’t want to be disturbed, Graycloud thought. He turned and went to the cafeteria, sipped briefly at a mug of weak coffee, then walked back to the cubicle. The laptop was closed now; Dr. Waterman was sitting stiffly in his little chair, staring at infinity.

“Uh ... Dr. W?”

Jamie stirred and focused on Graycloud. “Billy. What is it?”

“Got a minute?”

With a nod, “Sure. Come in.”

Graycloud settled onto the only other chair in the cubbyhole, his long legs bumping the wobbly little table on which the laptop sat, his knees poking up awkwardly.

“It’s the translation, sir.”

“What about it, Billy?”

“It’s not goin’ anyplace. I’ve tried about a hundred sets of words, you know, definitions for each of the symbols—but they don’t make any sense.”

Jamie smiled tiredly. “Maybe the hundred and first.”

“Maybe.”

“Or the thousandth.”

Graycloud started to reply, hesitated, then asked, “Are we gonna be here that long?”