Mars Life (35 page)

Must’ve been some dreams you had, love,” Vijay said as she dressed for the day.

Freshly showered, Jamie looked up at her as he pulled on his softboots. “What do yon mean?”

“You were tossing all night. Nearly pushed me out of the bed, you did.”

“No!”

She sat on the edge of the bed beside him and put a hand on his shoulder. “What was it, Jamie? What were you dreaming about?”

Jamie tried to remember. “It was all pretty confusing.”

“You called out to your grandfather. More’n once.”

Nodding, he replied, “Yes, Al was there. And Billy Graycloud. And you, too.”

“That’s what you were moaning about?”

“It’s a jumble. It doesn’t make any sense. The more I try to remember it the blurrier it gets.”

Vijay got to her feet, smiling. “Well, whatever it is, I hope you resolve it. Kept me up most of the night.”

She waited while he finished dressing. As he took the bear fetish from atop the bed table and slipped it into his coverall pocket, Jamie thought about his dreams.

There was more than one, he remembered. I was with Al and Billy in the village, then I was at an airport somewhere with Dex. And then with Vijay, here on Mars again. And they were all dying. Everything was dying. The people in the village, Al, Billy, Vijay— everybody was dying and there wasn’t anything I could do about it.

“Where are you, love?”

He twitched with surprise and realized that he’d been standing by the bed table for several minutes, lost in thought.

“I’m sorry,” he mumbled.

Vijay smiled again. “Come on, mate. Breakfast time. Then I’ve got to write up a half dozen psych profiles.”

“And I’ve got to sort out the personnel files, see who wants to stay and who has to go.”

They left their quarters and started across the dome toward the cafeteria, Jamie plodding along like a schoolboy trudging unwillingly to class. Morning sunlight filled the dome with brightness.

“How are you and Dr. Quintana getting along?” he asked as they got into line at the serving counter. Somebody was cooking up pancakes; Jamie savored the aroma of baking and maple syrup.

“No worries with Nari,” said Vijay. “We’re writing this paper together and I help her on her regular rounds in the infirmary. She likes to pretend she’s a tigress, but under it all she’s more like a little koala bear, actually.”

“No more lice patrol?”

Vijay laughed. “Not until the next resupply mission lands.”

In two weeks, Jamie knew. They’ll take back a few dozen people. Then Dex’ll send the evacuation flight to take the rest of the staff. We’ll only have fifteen people left here. Fifteen people. Unless. . . Unless. . .

After breakfast Jamie went to his cubicle of an office and pulled up the logistics and financial data that Mo Zeroual had amassed. Fifteen people, he thought. Fifteen men and women. Working here at the dome indefinitely, maybe for a year or more before we can afford another resupply flight.

Then he called up the detailed proposal that Dex had sent from Boston. Tourists. Jamie’s blood ran cold at the thought. Only ten at a time. Three times a year. Or four. If we go with four it could bring in two billion dollars a year. Enough to keep us going. We’d have to shave the operation a little, cut the number of people here by ten percent or so. But we could keep nearly two hundred people working here. We could keep going—as long as the tourists keep coming.

But now Dex wants to terraform the whole area here. Put a big glass dome over the village and the cliff structures so the tourists can tramp around in their shirtsleeves.

Damn! Jamie wanted to slam a fist on his desktop, but he knew that the flimsy folding table would collapse if he did. Instead, he got to his feet and paced out of his cubicle, walking blindly across the dome, wondering what to do, what to do.

We’re digging up the fossils of Martians! he screamed silently to himself. We’re learning how they lived, what they felt, the meaning of the pictographs they carved into the wall of their temple.

And nobody on Earth cares! Nobody gives a damn! Nobody who matters, at least.

How can I get us through this? Jamie asked himself. Fingering the fetish in his pocket, he wondered, What path should I choose, Grandfather?

“Jamie? Dr. Waterman?”

Jamie blinked to see tall, gangling Sal Hasdrubal looming before him, his dark face set in a hard, troubled frown.

Pulling himself out of his thoughts, Jamie said, “Sal. Good morning.”

“Can I talk with you? In private?”

“Sure.” Jamie gestured back toward his cubicle. “In my office.”

Hasdrubal’s lanky form nearly filled the cube; his long legs stretched almost the width of the small compartment.

“What’s on your mind, Sal?” Jamie asked. He had slid his own chair as far into a corner as he could.

“It’s the crater,” said Hasdrubal. “The one that the meteor impact made.”

“Crater Chang,” Jamie said.

Hasdrubal almost smiled. “Yeah, Chang.”

“What about it?”

Hasdrubal pointed toward Jamie’s laptop, resting on the folding table against one of the partitions.

“Can I use your computer?”

“Go right ahead.”

Within a few seconds the laptop’s screen displayed a series of graphs. Before Jamie could ask what they represented, Hasdrubal explained: “The crater’s still outgassing.” He traced one of the curves with a long, slim finger. “See, here’s the data from the sensors we left there. Water vapor, some trace elements. But no superoxides.”

Jamie understood. “The bottom of the crater is deep enough so that it’s below the superoxide layer near the ground’s surface.”

“Right. And there’s still enough heat to be boilin’ out some of the permafrost down there.”

“How deep is the crater?” Jamie asked.

“Twenty-eight meters at its deepest point.”

“And the permafrost is still boiling off? That can’t be from the heat of the impact, not after this many weeks.”

“Don’t know,” Hasdrubal said, with a shrug. “But I have a hunch.”

Jamie waited.

“It could be that the bacteria living that deep are melting the permafrost.”

“Bacteria?”

“Yeah. You know, SLiMEs. They get their water from the permafrost. They must be able to liquefy the ice.”

“How could they do that?”

“That’s one of the reasons I want to go back.”

“Chang won’t permit it?”

“I’ve tried to get him to okay a trip back to the crater, but he says you decided we hafta put all our efforts into Carleton’s dig.”

Jamie hesitated, then nodded. “That’s right. I did.”

“But that crater’s 
important,” 
Hasdrubal insisted. “Look. Look at this.”

The biologist flicked his long fingers across the keyboard of Jamie’s laptop. Photomicrographs appeared on the screen.

Squinting slightly, Jamie said, “Those look like bacteria.”

“That’s right! That’s just what they are. SLiMEs. From the soil at the bottom of the crater.”

“Living?”

Hasdrubal’s dark face was intense, demanding. “Not for long. They’re desiccating, drying out. Their natural environment is underground, where it’s safe from the radiation hitting the surface. And warmer. Now they’ve been exposed and it’s killing them.”

“So what can you do about it?”

Gesturing with his long arms, Hasdrubal replied, “Go to the crater, pack up some samples and bring ‘em back here where I can keep them in an environmental chamber.”

“And study them,” Jamie finished for him.

“And study them, right,” Hasdrubal agreed. “They’ll be in a simulated environment instead of the real thing, but we can watch how they react, how they grow and reproduce, how they melt the permafrost.”

Jamie thought about it for a moment. “They eat rock?”

“Iron. These SLiMEs are siderophiles. But they need to be in a high-pressure environment, and protected from solar radiation.”

“And the harder stuff, too,” Jamie added. “X-rays and gammas.”

“Yeah,” said Hasdrubal. “Exposed on the surface they get a full dose of whatever hits the ground, even at the bottom of the crater.”

Looking up from the screen, Jamie asked, “So you want to go back to the crater and scoop up some samples of the bacteria.”

“I need to!” Hasdrubal said fervently. “It’s important for our work here. I mean, why the hell are we here if we can’t study the indigenous life forms?”

Jamie smiled, remembering when his two-year-old Jimmy discovered the difference between “I want some candy, Daddy” and “I 
need 
some candy, Daddy.”

“How long would you have to stay at the crater?”

“Haifa day, at most. Well, maybe a whole day.”

Nodding wearily, Jamie said, “Let me talk to Chang about it. Maybe we can squeeze in a quick excursion for you before the resupply ship arrives.”

Hasdrubal nodded knowingly. “And we start packing up to leave.”

You really don’t have to do this,” she said.

Dex looked up from the small pile of data discs he was stuffing into his travel bag. “Yes I do,” he said tightly.

His wife sighed, a maneuver that never failed to stir Dex, even though she was wearing a loose-fitting casual blouse over a comfortable pair of dark slacks.

“Two weeks?” she bleated.

“Five days out, three days on Mars, five days back,” Dex replied. “Thirteen days, total. I’ll be back in time for election day.”

“And what am I supposed to do while you’re gone? Have you thought about that?”

Dex recognized the slightly veiled threat. He made himself grin at her. “Read our prenup,” he suggested.

“You’re rotten!”

“I know. I’m sorry. I told you you could come with me.”

“To Mars?” Her china blue eyes went wide.

“Sure. I’ve been there. It’s fascinating. It’d be fun to have you there with me.”

She shook her blond head. “Not me! I’ll stay home and wait for you, like those wives of whaling sailors in the old days.”

“Maybe I should build a widow’s walk up on the roof,” Dex muttered as he zipped up the travel bag.

“You’re really leaving?” she said, her voice going small, almost frightened.

“I’ll be back.”

“You’re risking your neck because of your Apache friend.”

“Navaho.”

“Whatever. I hate him.”

Dex looked squarely at her. She was really upset. “Look, honey, it’s no more dangerous than flying to London. Really.”

“But why do you have to go to frigging Mars just to tell him you’re sending everybody home?”

With a sadness that he’d kept under control until this moment, Dex said, “I can’t tell him any other way. It’s got to be face-to-face, man-to-man.”

“Stupid macho bullshit,” she muttered.

Dex shrugged. “When you have to kill a man,” he quoted Churchill, “it costs nothing to be polite about it.”

His wife dabbed at her eyes as he brushed past her and headed for the limousine waiting to take him to the aerospaceport.

It was the first time in more than two months that the president had invited Francisco Delgado to the Oval Office, and she wished she hadn’t.

The president of the United States sat behind her broad dark mahogany desk, smiling at Archbishop Overmire, who seemed perfectly at ease in the cushioned leather chair next to Delgado’s. Behind the president, through the long windows that looked out on the Rose Garden, the science advisor could see that last night’s rainstorm had stripped the last leaves from the trees. The Weather Service predicts a colder-than-normal winter, Delgado thought idly; maybe even a little snow up in New England.

“I’m very pleased that you could find the time to attend this meeting,” the president was saying to Archbishop Overmire. Her smile seemed genuine enough; much warmer than she had ever vouchsafed to her science advisor.

Overmire smiled back graciously. “Madam President, your slightest wish is my command.”

Three of Overmire’s aides sat back on the sofa by the unused fireplace, dressed, like the archbishop, in black clerical suits. Delgado thought they looked like clones: each of them ascetically thin and pale. Overmire himself glowed with pink-cheeked health and happy good cheer. On the facing sofa sat the president’s chief of staff and her chief counsel.

Delgado had wanted to bring a couple of his assistants to this meeting, especially the young geologist who monitored the work on Mars and the head of the Georgetown University anthropology department, a Jesuit who was closely following Carleton’s excavation of the Martian fossils. But the president’s assistants had said no: this was a small, informal meeting. No staff people.

Except for the archbishop’s three clones and the president’s two staff members. What they meant was that Delgado was not allowed to bring his own people with him.

After a few minutes of meaningless pleasantries, the president said to Overmire, “I take it you’ve seen the images from the Martian graves.”

“I have indeed,” said the archbishop. “They look more like the skeletons of dogs or pigs than people.”

“They’re Martians,” Delgado said. “We shouldn’t expect them to look like human beings.”

Overmire smiled tolerantly. “I’m not a scientist, of course, but it looks to me as if your people on Mars have uncovered a pet cemetery, not a graveyard where people are buried.”

Delgado felt his cheeks flame, but he immediately clamped down on his anger. The man’s trying to bait me, he told himself. Turning to the president, he said, “Whether the skeletons uncovered so far are the remains of the people who built the village or their pets, the fact remains that intelligent creatures lived on Mars, built their homes on Mars, and even believed in some form of afterlife.”

“They worshipped God,” the president breathed.

Overmire corrected, “They worshipped false gods, of course. They had no knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.”

“How can you know that?” Delgado demanded. “What evidence do you have — “

“Gentlemen,” said the president, “we’re not here to discuss religion. Or archeology, for that matter.”

“Of course,” said Overmire, smiling again.

Just what are we here to discuss? Delgado wondered silently.

As if to answer his unvoiced question, the president explained, “My secretary of education is making a fuss about these Martian fossils. She wants to encourage schools around the country to study what the scientists are discovering.”

Ahh, thought Delgado. Education’s doing her job and that’s got the president worried.

Overmire’s smile disappeared. “Use federal tax dollars to popularize godless humanism?” he said, his voice low and tight. “It’s bad enough that secular university scientists are giving seminars and holding conferences about these alleged Martians — “

“Alleged?” Delgado snapped.

“There’s no proof that the Martians were intelligent.”

“No proof?” Delgado’s temper snapped. “They built that village! They buried their dead! With funeral adornments! They built those structures up in the cliff! They carved writing into the walls!”

“One wall,” said Overmire. “And, quite frankly, it’s just as easy to believe that this Navaho scientist put up all these so-called structures just to wheedle more money out of us.”

Delgado sputtered, “That’s. . . that’s. . . it’s a goddamned lie and you know it!”

Unruffled, Overmire lifted one hand and replied, “You scientists have a saying about Ockham’s razor, don’t you? If you have more than one possible explanation for something, then the simplest one is the right one? Well, which is simpler, assuming that there was a race of intelligent people on Mars sixty million years ago, or assuming that some fanatical scientists have faked the evidence for them?”

It took all of Delgado’s willpower to keep from leaping at the archbishop’s throat and throttling him.

The president, behind her massive desk, made a curt gesture. “Now, listen,” she said. “My education secretary is priming herself for a run for the presidency in two years. I can’t let her use Mars as ammunition against me.”

Overmire’s smile turned crafty. He eased back in his chair and said, “Madam President, your administration has not been as fully cooperative with the Lord’s work as it might be.”

“I admit that,” said the president. “And I’m taking steps to change it.”

The archbishop beamed. “In that case, be assured that you will have the full backing of the New Morality—and every right-thinking, God-fearing voter in the land.”

The president smiled back at him.

“That is, 
if,” 
Overmire continued, “you ask for the resignation of your secretary of education and replace her with someone we can both work with.”

The president’s smile started to look forced, but she nodded.

“By their fruits you shall know them,” Overmire murmured.

Trying to contain his temper, Delgado said, “Madam President, you’ve got to see the whole picture here. We’re dealing with the difference between science and misplaced religious faith.”

“Misplaced?” Overmire looked shocked.

“We’re dealing,” Delgado went on, his voice rising, “with the struggle between free scientific inquiry and dogmatic dictates from people who cherish ignorance over understanding. It’s bad enough that we’ve stopped supporting the exploration of Mars, and we’ve got congressional committees investigating that priest’s death. Now you’re talking about preventing the Department of Education from helping school children learn about the cutting edge of scientific exploration!”

“I resent your attitude,” said the archbishop.

The president agreed. “You could notch it down a bit, Dr. Delgado. An apology wouldn’t be out of order.”

“Apologize? For the truth? I’d sooner resign!”

With a shrug, the president said, “If that’s the way you feel, I’ll expect your resignation on my desk before the end of the day.”

Overmire’s smile turned smug. And Delgado finally understood why he’d been invited to the Oval Office.