Return to Mars (52 page)

There were scratches on the wall. From about halfway down from the ceiling to the level where the uncleared dust still clung, the wall was covered with a fine tracery of curving lines.

“Cracks,” said Dex. But his breezy manner was gone.

“Or writing,” Jamie said.

“Writing,” Fuchida agreed.

In his earphones Jamie could hear all four of them breathing hard, panting, almost.

Trudy said, “Cracks wouldn’t be so regular. Look …” Her gloved finger traced along the length of the wall. “There’s line after line of it.”

“Don’t touch the wall,” Jamie warned.

“I’m not touching it,” she said, slightly annoyed.

“Let’s get the rest of the wall cleaned off,” Dex said.

All four of them fell to it, whisking gently but impatiently. Rustred dust blew in every direction.

“We’ll have to put up plastic tenting or something,” Dex was thinking aloud, “to cover the openings, make certain more dust doesn’t blow in here.”

Jamie nodded inside his helmet. “I wish we could date these walls.”

All their attempts to determine the age of the walls had been frustrated. There was no organic material in the pieces of rock that made up the walls. They had been cut and chiselled to fit together like the walls of Machu Picchu, and their interior faces skillfully polished.

“There’s going to be a lot of Ph.D.s earned here, trying to figure out a way to get a reliable dating system,” Dex said.

“The rock must have come from deeper in the cleft,” Fuchida pointed out as they worked.

“D’you think there was ever water flowing in here?” Hall asked.

“Must’ve been,” said Dex.

“No evidence of it,” Jamie said.

“We haven’t really looked for it,” Dex countered.

“It would be very difficult for them to bring water up from the Canyon floor,” Fuchida pointed out.

“If there ever was a stream running down there,” said Jamie, sweeping carefully, trying to keep control over his growing excitement. More and more lines adorned the rock wall.

“I’ll bet we find evidence of a river down there,” Dex said.

“But when did it flow?” Jamie asked. “How long ago?”

“Look!” Trudy cried. “It’s a picture, I think.”

She kept on brushing at her section of the wall, exposing a circle with what appeared to be arrows emanating from it.

“A sun symbol?” Jamie gasped with shock. It looked like the kind of symbol the Navaho and other tribes used to indicate the sun.

“They had eyes like ours,” Trudy said, her voice hollow. “They had a sense of vision and they invented writing.”

“Writing,” Dex breathed. His usual cocky air was gone.

The wall bore a whole row of picturelike symbols. Pictographs, Jamie thought. Like the earliest forms of writing in Egypt.

“What does it mean?” Fuchida asked. “What were they trying to tell us?”

Jamie’s throat felt dry. It took him three tries to work up a little saliva and swallow.

“Come on,” he said. “Let’s clear off the rest of it.”

They fell to the work in silence.

Jamie glanced back at the sun symbol. No, it can’t be, he told himself. These people can’t be our ancestors. They weren’t human. They were built differently. They died off … they didn’t migrate to Earth. That’s ridiculous.

“Oh-oh,” Dex grunted.

They turned to see what he was doing. Dex had bent down to his knees, to brush away the dust from the bottom of the wall.

The regular lines of well-spaced symbols ended about a meter above the floor. More ragged symbols followed, lopsided and scrawling, compared to the ones above.

“Like children’s writing,” Hall murmured.

“Or primitive adults,” said Fuchida.

“These regular lines up here,” Hall said, pointing with her gloved hand, ”have been inscribed. They used chisels or some other tools that cut the lines into the rock deeply. See? But these down below …”

“They’re scratched onto the rock,” Dex said. “Like scribbles.”

“Graffiti,” said Fuchida.

“Children? Vandals?” Hall wondered.

“Tourists,” Jamie muttered.

“More drawings down here,” Dex said, brushing furiously. The dust billowed all around him.

“Who’s got the camera?” Jamie asked.

“I do,” said Fuchida.

“Don’t take off the lens cap until this dust settles!” Dex warned, wiping at his helmet visor with his free hand. “At least this stuff doesn’t cling the way the dust does on the Moon.”

“The dust on the Moon is electrostatically charged,” Fuchida said. “From the infalling solar wind.”

“Tell me about it,” Dex groused.

The three of them bent closer as Dex brushed the final section of the wall, down low and at the end where it joined the other wall at a right angle.

“Pictures, all right,” Dex said, still kneeling.

Jamie peered through the thinning dust cloud. The pictures at the bottom of the wall seemed crude, hastily drawn.

“What’s that?” Hall asked, pointing again.

Jamie saw a lopsided, bulbous figure scratched atop a ragged, sloping line.

“An erection,” Dex snickered.

“Don’t be an idiot,” Trudy snapped.

“Whatever it’s supposed to be, it’s pretty primitive work,” said Dex.

“And this?” Hall asked again. “It looks as if somebody just clawed a half-dozen streaks across the rock.”

Fuchida bent so close his visor almost touched the rock. “But look, there are pinpoints here and there … this one looks like a cross or an x.”

Dex dismissed it with, “Pits in the rock.”

“Not this x symbol,” Fuchida maintained.

Jamie stared hard at the crude drawings. He knew with all the certainty of ancient wisdom that the primitive artist was trying to tell them something. He didn’t just rattle off some graffiti here. These symbols meant something to him. They mean something now. But what? What was he trying to say? What did he want to record in the rock? What is the message he left for us?

“The philologists are going to have a smashing time with this,” Hall said.

Straightening up slowly, the joints of his suit grating slightly, Dex agreed, “They’ll go nuts, all right.”

Jamie felt his spine creak as he stood up, too. “They’ll go crazy with frustration. There’s no way they can interpret this writing. The pictures, maybe, but not the writing.”

“No Rosetta stone,” Fuchida said.

“That’s right,” said Jamie. “The only way they translated languages from antiquity was to find translations into languages they already knew. You need a key.”

“And there’s no key here,” Dex said, recognizing the problem. “It’s all Martian.”

“No connection to any language on Earth,” Fuchida said.

“Maybe the pictures will help,” Hall suggested.

“Maybe.”

“I wouldn’t bet money on it,” Jamie said.

Dex laughed. “One thing’s for sure.”

“What?”

“They’ll invent six zillion different explanations for every symbol on this wall.”

“And no two of them will agree.” Fuchida broke into a giggle.

“But they’ll write scads of papers about it,” said Hall. She started laughing, too.

Jamie stood silent inside his suit while the three others laughed on the edge of hysteria. Blowing off steam, he realized. They’ve got to laugh or cry or scream from the rooftops. Can’t blame them. It’s the greatest discovery of all time. But what does it mean?

What does it goddamn mean?

He stared at the symbols. So neat and orderly at the outset. Professional work. They took pride in it. But down at the bottom, just a scrawl.

What happened here? What happened to these people?

He felt cold and weak, as if his legs were no longer able to support him. The path ends here, Grandfather. They left a message and we have no way of understanding it.

“Jamie? You okay?”

It was Dex’s voice. Jamie stirred himself, focused his eyes on the three other humans in their impersonal hard suits.

“Yeah, yes. I’m okay.”

Dex said, “I was saying we’ll have to report this back to DiNardo and his committee people.”

Jamie nodded inside his helmet. “And to the world.”

They had recovered from their first reaction. Now they were all business. Fuchida was clicking away with the still camera.

“We should bring the video equipment in here for this,” Hall said.

“And the VR rig,” said Dex. “Every tourist in the world is going to want to see this!”

Jamie turned and began walking away from the others. For an insane moment he felt it would be better to dynamite the whole dwelling, bury it in tons of rock so that no one could ever find it again, leave it in peace and never let anyone else set foot in it.

“WRITING?” DARRYL C. TRUMBALL DEMANDED. “THEY FOUND ACTUAL writing?”

He was in his limousine, crawling through the clotted, beeping traffic along Storrow Drive. A cold winter rain was slanting down, driven by a gusty northeastern gale. The Charles River was overflowing its banks again, snarling traffic even more than usual.

His personal assistant, a bland young man with an MBA from Harvard, seemed excited. His image in the display screen set between the limo’s two rearward-facing seats was small and grainy, but the man appeared to be on the verge of breaking into a dance of celebration.

“Writing! Yessir! Martian writing! It’s fantastic, the find of a lifetime, the grandest discovery of all time, really!”

Trumball’s excitement was more controlled. Stock prices for the top few travel agencies had been climbing nicely; aerospace stocks were doing even better. Each news release about the Mars expedition pushed the prices a little higher.

“Sir,” his assistant said, “I believe the time has come to take a much more proactive position on this.”

“On what?” Trumball growled, leaning deeper into the limo’s plush rear seat. He eyed the bar at his side, but had promised himself he would not start the evening’s drinking until he got home.

“On putting together an organization to take tourists to Mars!” his assistant replied eagerly. “The demand is building, and with this discovery of the Martian writing, people are going to want to go see it for themselves! Like the Sistine Chapel or those cave paintings in Spain!”

“You mean there’s a measurable demand now?”

“There could be, sir, if you take the lead and shape the trend.”

“And just what do you suggest?” Trumball asked sourly. He could barely make out the dark silhouettes of the buildings flanking the Drive, the rain was pounding down so hard. A good, warming shot of bourbon was what he needed, but he knew that if his wife smelled liquor on him when he got home she would start another of her tearful lectures about his goddamned blood pressure.

The assistant’s answering smile told Trumball that the young man had been figuring this out for days. He wasn’t quick enough to come up with a plan on the spur of the moment. Bright, yes. But not last on his feet.

“I suggest, sir,” the assistant said, “that we find a prominent public figure who would be willing to go to Mars on the next expedition. And we send that expedition as soon as we possibly can. We’ve got to capitalize on the publicity and public enthusiasm while it’s still hot.”

Trumball said nothing, waiting for more.

The assistant continued, “A well-known public figure, sir. Like a video star, or perhaps even a prominent politician. Perhaps one of the retired presidents!”