Return to Mars (49 page)

Jamie heard more than sarcasm in Dex’s tone. He heard pain.

“I’m sure he’s very proud of you,” Jamie said.

“Yeah,” said Dex. “Real proud. Busting his buttons.”

Jamie said nothing.

“The thing is, if he really is proud, he’s keeping it a deep, dark secret. He’s good at that, hiding his pride in his only begotten son.”

“I’m sorry I brought it up.”

“Ah, never mind, Jamie. It’s not your problem.” Dex grabbed the juice cup and drained it. As he got up from the narrow table, he asked, “Now, what about moving the dome here? We can’t work out of the rover forever.”

“I know,” Jamie said. “I’ve been thinking about it.”

“And?”

“Moving the dome is a helluva task,” Jamie said. “It’ll take weeks.”

“We can do it between Christmas and New Year’s, I bet.”

“It would take longer than that.”

“So? We’ve got more than sixteen months to go. You’re not going to shuttle hack and forth from the present base site to here for all that time, are you?”

“It doesn’t sound practical,” Jamie admitted.

“So let me work out a plan for moving the dome, the whole base, the LAVs, the generators, everything.”

“Then we’ll be ready to receive tourists here with the next mission, is that it?”

Dex looked genuinely surprised, shocked. “Tourists? I’m not talking about tourists. Not yet, anyway. First things first, pal.”

“Yes,” Jamie replied. “First things first.”

I SHOULD BE HOME WITH MY FAMILY, THOUGHT ROGER NEWELL. IT’S Christmas Eve, for god’s sake. I feel like Bob Cratchit facing old man Scrooge.

Sitting across the tiny round table from him, Darryl C. Trumball seemed to take no notice of the crowds scurrying homeward outside the window of the cocktail lounge. The lounge was half a block from Newell’s office in the network headquarters building. He was a frequent customer, immediately recognized by the hostess who sat them by the window. Newell wished for a booth further away but never had the nerve to demand one.

Knowing that it would take a long limo ride from the airport to get to Manhattan, Trumball had taken the jet-speed express train to Grand Central Station specifically to have it out with the news media chiefs. It had been a long and potentially very profitable day for him.

“I’ve told all the others and I’m telling you, you’re free to use any and all of the footage they’ve taken,” Trumball said as he hunched over his scotch on the rocks, “but not the VR stuff.”

“But we have our own virtual reality network now,” Newell replied, “and we could—”

“No,” said Trumball firmly. “We sell VR tours of the Martian village to our own customers. We could make five hundred million on the first tour, easy.”

“Our audience—”

“Can you put up five hundred mil for the VR material?”

“Five hundred million dollars?” Newell squeaked. “Of course not. Not even close.”

“You see?” Trumball leaned back in his chair, smiling coldly.

“We’re preparing a prime-time special on the village,” said Newell. “Prime time! A science special on prime time. That hasn’t been done since—”

“That’s all well and good,” Trumball interrupted, “but neither you nor any of the other news nets are going to get our VR footage. Not unless you come up with five hundred mil.”

Newell shook his head. He had been against the idea of a prime-time special about the Martian village, but the suits upstairs had ignored his advice. Science shows get no audience, Newell knew. Well, maybe this special about the Martian building would do better than most, but still, everybody’s seen all the regular footage already. The building doesn’t do anything, it just sits there, an empty shell. It’ll be talking heads, with some of them inside space suit helmets, so we won’t even be able to see their faces, for god’s sake.

“Of course,” Trumball said slowly, reaching for his drink, “once we’ve shown the VR stuff to our own customers, it might be possible to work out a deal for the first network broadcast of the material.”

Newell immediately leaned closer to the older man. “How much?”

IN TELEVISION STUDIOS ALL ACROSS THE WORLD, THE STUNNING NEWS OF the structure on Mars set off a frenzy of talk.

“Tomorrow, definitely,” said the sweet-faced gray-haired lady. She was squinting slightly, unaccustomed to the TV lighting.

“Jesus will return to Earth tomorrow?” the interviewer asked, trying to hide his incredulity.

“It’s Christmas. His birthday.”

The interviewer tried to look sympathetic. He’d seen his share of weirdos and religious fanatics over the years. Inwardly, he sighed. As long as this grandmother stuck to her specific prediction of Christ’s return to Earth on Christmas day, she was worth rating points. Today, at least.

In the nearly-invisible receiver lodged in his left ear, he heard the prompt from the show’s director, a hard-edged black woman whose job depended on those rating points.

He repeated the question she gave him. “Our Lord left the Earth more than two thousand years ago. Just where has He been all this time?”

“On Mars, of course,” said the grandmother, with a beatific smile. “He’s been waiting for us to find Him on Mars.”

“This is nothing less than mind-blowing!” said the astronomer. He was young, bearded, wearing faded chinos and a red-checkered flannel shirt. It was cold in the unheated observatory, even with the California sun beaming out of a pristine blue sky.

The TV cameraman was shivering noticeably. The interviewer hoped it wouldn’t jitter the picture. She was made of sterner stuff; no matter how chilled she felt, she controlled herself absolutely.

“You moan finding the buildings on Mars,” she prompted.

“Finding intelligent life!” the young astronomer beamed. “Intelligent! On our next-door neighbor in space!”

“So what does this mean to our viewers?”

The astronomer looked squarely into the camera lens. “It means that not only life, but intelligence, is probably commonplace in the universe. We’re not alone. Intelligence may be as common as carbon or water. There are probably zillions of intelligent civilizations out there among the stars.”

Now the interviewer shuddered, despite herself.

The president of the Navaho Nation blinked, unaccustomed to the glare of the television lights. Last time he’d been on TV was when the FBI made a drug bust on reservation territory without letting the reservation police force in on it. Claimed the Navaho police might have tipped off the suspects. Hah!

It had taken a lot of lawyers from the People and from Washington to straighten that one out. Now, at least, this story today was a happy one.

The reporter stuck a microphone under the president’s chin and asked, ”How do you feel about a Navaho discovering this cliff dwelling on Mars?”

The president shrugged and nodded. Then he said, “Pretty good, I guess.”

The reporter waited for more. When it didn’t come, he scowled slightly and asked, “What can you tell us about Dr. Waterman?”

The president thought about that for a while. The reporter ground his teeth in silent frustration, hoping they’d have time back at the studio to edit these maddening pauses out of the tape.

“I never met Jamie Waterman,” the president answered at last. “I knew his grandfather pretty good, though. Al ran a shop over in Santa Fe for many years.”

“Yes, so we heard,” the reporter sputtered. “But about Jamie Waterman, the scientist on Mars—”

“He’s only half Navaho, you know,” said the president slowly. Then he smiled. “But I guess that’s good enough, huh?”

The reporter grimaced. He’d spent half the damned day getting all the way out here for this interview and all he was getting from it was shit.

Hodell Richards smiled with visible self-satisfaction. “Maybe now they’ll believe me.”

Richards was a lean, almost ascetic-looking man with the kind of perpetually youthful face that made elderly women want to mother him.

Pencil-thin mustache, ash blond hair worn long enough to reach the collar of his tweed jacket.

He sat in a TV studio in England, an expensive leather attaché case resting on his knees, his hands atop it. His interviewer was an intense-looking red-headed woman who specialized in UFO tales of alien abduction and unspeakable medical procedures.

She asked, “Then you firmly believe that the Martians are not extinct? That they still exist?”

“I have proof of it,” Richards said, drumming his fingertips on the attache case.

“And they have visited Earth?” the interviewer asked.

“They have a base here on Earth,” Richards replied. “In Tibet.”

“But why—”

“They’re here to propagate their own species. They impregnate Earth women and force them to bear Martian children.”

“Ah-hah,” said the interviewer.

In Barcelona, the Swiss-German self-styled space expert cocked a haughty eyebrow at his interviewer, a world-weary overweight Catalan who thought of himself as an investigative reporter. Since the interviewer spoke no German and the interviewee spoke no Spanish, they conducted their show in English. Subtitles on the screen translated instantly, of course.

“Then it is your belief that the Martian village—”

“Is bogus,” said the expert flatly.

“You mean it is all a lie?”

“Yes, a lie conducted by the American NASA.”

“But why would they lie about this?”

“To get popular support for their space explorations, of course.”

The interviewer considered this for a fraction of a second, then asked, “Yet I was under the impression that the expedition to Mars was funded by private sources, not by the NASA.”

The expert dismissed that idea with a snort. “That’s what they want us to believe. The U.S. government is behind it all.”

“But how can they fake a building on Mars? Are you saying that the explorers built it themselves? After all, there are only eight of them on Mars.”

“And what makes you think that this fake village is on Mars? They built it in Arizona or Texas or someplace like that.”

“Truly?”

“Of course.”

“I want to stress,” said the professor to the Tonight Show host, “that we don’t know anything at all about how the Martians looked.” Behind him were lurid paintings of “space aliens.”

“Nothing at all?” the host asked, smirking.

“Nothing. They might have had a dozen legs or none. We just don’t know.”

“So they probably didn’t look like this guy, then.” The host pointed to an ethereal image with doelike eyes.

“Nope,” the professor answered. “Nor like that one either.” He jabbed a thumb toward a slimy tentacled monster from The War of the Worlds.

The host sighed mightily. “Probably they look like my mother-in-law.”

JAMIE AND DEX HAD SPENT AN EXHAUSTING DAY SETTING UP THE FOUR CAMERAS they had brought with them at different locations in the cleft, photographing everything in sight and then moving the cameras to another location, time and again.

“I feel like some apprentice flunky to the assistant photographer on a movie set,” Dex grumbled.

“You and me both, pal,” said Jamie.

After spending all morning photographing, Jamie activated the VR equipment on his helmet and took a long, slow tour through the building, floor by floor, until he was on the roof once again. Dex went with him and stood by the walls and in the centers of the various rooms, to give the watchers an idea of each chamber’s scale.

Finally, as the sun neared the southwestern horizon, Jamie turned off the VR rig and they started back down to the ground floor.

“We’re assuming this was a dwelling of some sort,” Jamie heard himself saying to Dex, thinking out loud. “Maybe it wasn’t. Maybe it was a storage area, like a warehouse or a grain storage center.”

“Or a religious site,” Dex added.

“There doesn’t seem to be any evidence of furniture or utensils,” Jamie went on. “The kinds of things you would expect to find where people actually lived and worked.”