Return to Mars (46 page)

“In a perfect world, maybe,” Dex replied, his voice lower. “But then you and I wouldn’t be here, would we?”

“No, I guess not.”

“Well, I want to be on Mars. Now. Me. Whatever it costs. And you feel the same way, too, or you wouldn’t be here.”

Jamie looked into the younger man’s face. The brash grin was gone, the blue-green eyes were deep and unwavering.

“Maybe you’re right,” Jamie admitted, heading back toward the galley again. “But 1 feel like a Judas goat.”

“Or Kit Carson, maybe?”

Jamie whirled back and saw that Dex was grinning again. He knows about the Long Walk, when Carson and the army forced the People off their own land.

“Right,” he said tightly. “Kit Carson. That’s me.”

JAMIE DANGLED HALF A MILE FROM THE CLIFF’S RIM, SWAYING IN THE HARNESS, the layered reddish rock face a mere arm’s length from him. He touched it with one booted foot, then pushed away. It made him tilt back and forth dizzily like a kid on a swing.

“Almost there,” he grunted. He realized that he was panting and sweaty, even with the motorized winch doing most of the work.

“Take it easy now.” Dex’s voice sounded tight, harsh in his earphones. The two men had said almost nothing to one another after their argument the previous night; their only words had been those necessary for their work.

Jamie realized he was trusting his life to Dex, up there with the winch that held his lifeline. He almost laughed to himself. Our argument is purely philosophical, not physical. But then he thought of Vijay and realized that it could get physical quickly enough, once they returned to the dome.

Carefully, he touched the power control. The rock face slid past, too fast, almost a blur. He lifted his gloved finger from the control stud and the harness jerked to a stop again, swinging him even more violently than before. He banged against the rock with his shoulder, forcing a grunt from his lungs, then put his legs out again to cushion the next blow.

“You okay?”

“Yeah. Okay,” Jamie answered.

“I’m getting seasick watching your imagery,” Dex complained.

The balky VR cameras clipped to Jamie’s helmet were recording everything, not so much for show business but to maintain a record of the descent. Dex had set up a portable monitor beside the winch, up at the rim of the Canyon.

Reluctantly, Jamie looked down. The cleft in the rock wall was still several hundred meters below. And the bottom of the canyon seemed thousands of kilometers deeper, swaying rhythmically, so far down that it looked like a carpet of red blood waiting for him to fall into it.

How’s that look, wiseass? he asked Dex silently.

Then his own stomach heaved. Jamie clutched the thin Buckyball cable with both hands. Closing his eyes, he told himself that the cable could hold more than a ton of weight, that he himself weighed only a third on Mars of his weight on Earth, that the harness held him securely and had never been known to break.

Still, it was a long way down. A long way. He leaned back as far as he dared to look up through the visor of his helmet and realized it was a long way back up to the canyon rim, too.

Licking his lips, he said into his helmet microphone, “Okay, one more time ought to do it.”

“Be careful,” Dex said.

“Right,” Jamie said, adding silently, Great advice. Like he gives a damn.

He touched the power stud as lightly as he could, barely kissing it, and the cliff wall slid past more slowly. Maybe I’m getting the hang of it, Jamie told himself. The ride smoothed out as he held his finger frozen on the button and watched the rock face unreel past his staring eyes, layer upon layer, red and brown, pink and bleached pale tan, a streak of yellowish white, a smear of gleaming silver. It looked to him like sedimentary deposits that had been put down billions of years ago, when Mars was young and an ocean covered what was now bleak waterless desert.

And then the land had split apart, ripped open for thousands of kilometers, a jagged wound that left a scar eight kilometers deep; it made the Grand Canyon of Arizona look like a dimple. What broke the ground open like this, what could rip open a canyon so wide you can’t even see the other side of it because it’s over the horizon?

It couldn’t be plate tectonics, like on Earth. Mars’ core wasn’t hot enough for long enough to cause a rift like this.

A crevice scrolled up before him and Jamie stopped the winch. But it was only a crack in the canyon wall, a long thin cave, dark and empty. No Navahos hiding in it from Carson and his treacherous Ute Indian scouts.

He started down again. No sound except his own breathing; the winch itself was more than a kilometer above him, up on the canyon rim with Trumball.

The rock began to blur again. Too fast. Jamie eased the pressure of his cramped finger and his descent slowed.

He glanced down again and saw, between his dangling boots, the dark edge of the niche. Almost there. Another few meters. Slowly, painfully slowly, he lowered himself.

It was a huge recess in the canyon wall, as big as the hollow at Mesa Verde, maybe bigger. Heavy rock overhang to protect it from the weather, not that there’d been much weather on Mars over the past thousand millennia.

“I’m at the niche,” he reported into his helmet mike. “Going to manual.”

For a moment there was no reply, then Dex’s voice said tightly, “I’m getting your camera view. Looks good.”

Jamie nodded. If anything happens to me, they’ll have it all on video. Something for the tourists to see.

Swinging in midair, he disengaged the winch’s power control and began lowering himself by hand, slowly, carefully, staring into the shadowed recess in the cliff face as he descended.

It was there! Jamie saw a smooth wall of grayish-pink, something like sandstone, rising from the floor of the giant cave. It was laid out so perfectly straight that it couldn’t possibly be a natural formation. It had been built, constructed by intelligence.

For eternally-long moments he hung there in the harness, swaying slightly back and forth, and merely stared at the wall rising into the shadows of the crevasse, almost as high as the rock ceiling would allow. He could feel his heart thumping against his ribs.

“Are you all right?”

Dex’s voice stirred him out of his awestruck daze.

“Do you see it?” Jamie shouted, his voice pitched high with exhilaration.

“Yeah, I’ve got it on the monitor,” he replied. “It really looks like a wall.”

“It is a wall! A wall that somebody built!”

“Don’t go jumping to conclusions,” Dex said, his voice strained, harsh.

Slowly, deliberately, Jamie turned his head from one end of the wall to its far corner so that the camera mounted on his helmet, slaved to where his eyes pointed, could record its entire length.

“Nearly a hundred meters long,” he reported. “About ten-twelve meters high, I’d estimate.”

“Looks like the top edge has crumbled,” Dex said. “Hard to tell, though, it’s in shadow.”

“Crumbled, broken, right,” said Jamie. “Must be fairly soft material. Sandstone, or something like it.”

“Can you tell how thick it is?”

“Not from here.”

No response from above. He knows what comes next, Jamie told himself.

“I’m going in,” he said.

Immediately Dex replied, “No! It’s too late in the day, the sun’ll be going down in another hour or so. It’ll still be there tomorrow.”

“I can do it,” Jamie said. “I’ve climbed enough mountains on Earth to handle this.” Silently he added, the hell with tomorrow. I’m going in there now.

He undipped the spring-loaded tether gun from his equipment belt and held it in both gloved hands, aiming for the niche’s rock floor rather than the wall itself. Sandstone might give way, he told himself, but in reality he knew it would be sacrilegious to deface the wall.

Jamie squeezed the trigger and the tether buzzed out, vibrating in his hands as it unreeled. The power spike imbedded itself in the rock floor with a thunk he could hear even in the thin air as he dangled in the harness. When he fastened the gun back on his belt, the tether automatically adjusted its tension to take up the slack. Jamie tested the line; it seemed to be holding fast.

“Dammit, Jamie, if you don’t start up I’m going to power up the winch and drag you up! Come on. Now.”

Jamie ignored Dex’s call. Carefully he pulled himself into the crevice, hand over gloved hand, until his boots touched the stone floor of the niche. The wall loomed above him, pinkish brown, solid, silent.

With trembling hands Jamie bent over to anchor the cable attached to his harness on the spike in the stone floor. He worked with enforced, consciously deliberate motions. He was quivering inside; he wanted to leap out and explore the cliff dwelling, but he knew he had to make certain his lifeline back to the rim of the canyon wall was secure. Like a drunk trying to show he was sober, Jamie tied down the cable with exaggerated exactness.

“Your picture’s breaking up.” Dex’s voice crackled with static in his earphones. “Rock’s interfering with the transmission.”

“Can’t be helped,” Jamie said. He started to unclip the harness. His hands were shaking so much it took him three tries to unfasten it completely.

“Jamie, you’ve got to come up now.” Dex’s urging voice was weak, distant, scratched with interference.

“Half an hour,” he said absently as he finally stepped out of the harness and stood erect and free on the floor of the crevice. His insides were trembling.

“Don’t go … wait until …” Dex’s voice fluttered, whined, “… Stacy … from the dome … having a fit …”

Jamie ignored him. He looked up at the wall that rose before him, the wall built by Martians. High up, near its top, he saw rectangular openings. A line of them, from one end of the wall to the other.

Windows! They’re windows! What had looked like a broken, crumbled roof line from outside was actually a row of windows staring out into the canyon. His knees felt rubbery, his insides fluttered.

They were here, Grandfather, he said in his mind. They really were here. Jamie’s eyes blurred, and he realized they were filled with tears.

His earphones were silent now, except for a faint hissing static. The voices from above couldn’t reach him here. Jamie was alone with the ghosts of the long-gone past.

The building was old. Even encased in the bulky hard suit Jamie could feel the centuries and millennia, the eons that these walls had stood here. The solid, silent stones exuded age, untold spans of years, countless generations of hope and faith and endurance. The burnished dying light from the distant setting sun bathed the walls in a ruddy luster, made them seem to glow from within.

Old, incredibly ancient. Before the cliff dwellings of the Old Ones. Before the Parthenon. Before the Pyramids this building stood here in this niche of rock, waiting, waiting.

Waiting for me. For us. For people of the blue world to find you, Jamie said to himself.

Blinking, forcing his shaking legs to carry him, he paced the length of the stone wall. His geologist’s mind was asking: How old? What materials? What purpose? But in his red heart he knew: Intelligent creatures built this community, this village, in this sheltered cove of rock millions of years ago.

Millions of years ago.

They were here! What happened to them? Where did they go?

“Are you getting this imagery?” he asked.

No reply.

Jamie forced himself to walk back to the spike and the tethered cable. He could see that the sky was beginning to darken. What little sunlight left to the day carried no warmth.

“Can you hear me, Dex?”

“Yes! You’ve got to come up. It’s almost sunset.”

“Come on down,” Jamie said. “I’ll send the harness up to you.”

“No! I can’t.”

“Dex, you won’t want to miss this. When we report back to Stacy and the others, it ought to be both of us.”

A long moment of silence. Then Dex said, “There’s only about another half-hour of daylight. Maybe less.”

“Enough,” Jamie said, unfastening the cable from the spike imbedded in the rock floor. The harness swung free, out beyond the edge of the cleft.

“Take it up,” he told Trumball. “Full speed. Don’t waste time.”

“The safety regulations …”

“There were Martians down here, Dex. Living, intelligent, building Martians.”

The harness yanked up and out of sight.

While he waited for Dex, Jamie paced deeper into the cleft, along the sidewall of the village. He saw low entryways in the wall and, hack in the gloomy shadows at the rear of the cave, a circular pit.

A well? he asked himself. Too big for that. A kiva? He laughed nervously. Don’t start that. It’d be a kiva back in Mesa Verde, but that doesn’t mean the Martians built the same kind of religious centers. Don’t jump to conclusions.

But what else could it be? a voice in his head demanded.

Patience, his grandfather whispered. You can’t unlock all the doors at once.

“I’m starting down,” Dex’s voice crackled in his earphones, tense, unhappy.

“Great.”

“Nobody’s minding the winch, y’know.”

“It won’t walk away,” Jamie said. “We planted it good and firm.”

“I hope.”

Jamie paced the length of the building, fighting the irrational urge to tear off his hard suit and face these ancient stones unprotected, feel them with his bare hands.

The sky above the far horizon was turning from orange to violet when Dex came into view, dangling in the harness. Jamie wished he could see the man’s face; see his eyes pop at his first sight of the dwelling.

He heard Dex’s sharp intake of breath. “Christ, how old can this be?”

“That’s what we’re here to find out,” Jamie said.