Return to Mars (55 page)

“I know. I understand that now.”

They were standing beneath the squared-off opening in the ceiling, the light well that allowed morning sunlight to brighten the windowless chamber.

“So how do we go about protecting it? How do we stop your father?”

“What’s this ‘we,’ red man?”

“He’s your father, Dex.”

“So?”

“So you’ve got to stop him.”

“Me? Are you kidding? He’s never listened to me in his life.”

“Then at least you can help me.”

“How?”

Jamie had no ready answer. “I don’t know,” he admitted.

“Well,” Dex said, reaching up for the edge of the square opening in the ceiling, “when you figure out what to do, let me know.”

He pulled himself up. Jamie followed him, thinking, There must be some way to stop Trumball. Something that can make him see, make him understand. But what?

They spent the morning going through their assigned tasks, carefully chipping still more rock samples from random blocks of stone in the walls on the three different floors. Once they were back on the ground level they went outside again and collected more samples from the outside of the wall.

‘ ‘How about some samples from the quarry, out back?” Dex asked.

“They haven’t asked for that.”

“Well, why don’t you take this batch up to the rover while I bang out a couple more samples from back there, just for the hell of it.”

Jamie knew the samples from the quarry gave them a date for the age of the undisturbed rock. Maybe Dex is onto something, he thought. Maybe the samples from the building will show some difference in the amount of radiation they’ve absorbed from infalling cosmic particles: a sort of subatomic weathering that might allow us to pin down the age of the building.

But it’s the rates of weathering that we don’t know, don’t even have a feeling for, Jamie knew. All the data we’ve accumulated don’t mean anything because we don’t know how fast the weathering action took place.

Not yet, he told himself. The geologists back on Earth have much more sophisticated equipment than we do here. It they can get a fix on the rates, then maybe we can figure out just how old this building really is.

“Okay,” he said to Dex. “You take more samples from the quarry. I’ll see you in the rover.”

“Don’t start lunch without me,” Dex called as Jamie headed for the climbing harness.

Once in the L/AV’s lab module, Jamie checked with Fuchida and Hall down on the Canyon floor, then started testing the morning’s rock samples. The sooner our data get to Earth the better, he thought. Give them as much data as we can.

Dezhurova called in; she would be at the site before nightfall, at her present rate of travel. Good.

Jamie was bent over the computer screen in the makeshift lab they had put together when Dex clomped in through the airlock below. Jamie could hear the thin buzz of the hand vac as Dex cleaned the dust off his suit.

He finished the analysis program and sent the data Earthward, then ducked through the hatch into the galley. Dex wasn’t there. Jamie found him in the command center, sitting at the comm console, apparently talking with Tarawa. The face on the screen was unfamiliar, but the scenery through the window behind her was unmistakably South Sea Island.

“Ready for lunch?” Jamie asked.

Dex quickly signed off and turned in his seat. Jamie saw that the younger man’s face was white, his eyes wide and staring.

“What is it?” Jamie asked. “What’s happened?”

“They came up with a preliminary date for the building,” Dex said, his voice shaking a little.

“Tarawa?”

“The geologists and archeologists weren’t fighting about it. They just didn’t believe it could be possible, so they checked the work several times before they decided it must be right.”

Jamie felt a tendril of anxiety worming through his gut. “They didn’t believe the date they got?”

“It’s a rough number. Very rough.”

“What is it?” Jamie thought he knew what the answer would be.

“Near as they can pin it down, the building was put up about sixty-five million years ago.”

“Sixty-five million?” Jamie’s voice sounded hollow, far away, even in his own ears.

Dex nodded somberly. “That’s it. Sixty-five million years ago.”

Jamie’s legs felt rubbery. He sat on the chair next to Dex. “The K-T boundary.”

“The meteor strike that killed the dinosaurs.” “Something hit here, too,” Jamie said. “It killed off the Martians.” “That lopsided sketch on the wall … it’s a mushroom cloud.” “From the meteor strike.”

“They were wiped out the same way the dinosaurs were,” Dex said, his voice trembling.

“THAT’S WHAT MUST HAVE HAPPENED,” JAMIE SAID TO VIJAY.

His image in the display screen looked grave, solemn. Vijay was running the comm center at the dome, Jamie was in his quarters aboard the L/AV out at the Canyon, from the looks of it.

“A meteor?” she asked, feeling the uneasy stir of an old memory, a childhood fear, within her.

“Meteoroid,” Dex corrected, leaning over Jamie’s shoulder to push his face into the picture.

“Maybe more than one,” Jamie said. “The disaster that wiped out the dinosaurs on Earth might’ve been more than one meteor strike.”

Vijay felt the old, old fear clutching at her.

“It must have been a swarm of them,” Dex said, his voice strangely flat, drained of emotion. “Big suckers, too.”

“On Earth three-quarters of every living species was wiped out, land, sea and air,” Jamie said.

“And here on Mars,” Dex went on, “nothing survived except the lichen and the bacteria underground.”

“Shiva,” Vijay whispered.

“What?”

“Shiva, the destroyer,” she said, remembering the tales of the ancient gods that her mother had told her.

Jamie’s brow furrowed slightly. “Is that—”

“Shiva is a god,” Vijay explained. “His dance is the rhythm of the universe. He destroys worlds.”

Dex pushed into the picture again. “Shiva is a bunch of big rocks, then.”

“His avatar,” said Vijay. “His presence among us.”

Jamie saw it with his inner Navaho’s eyes: The Martians working under a hot sun, their crops waving in the breeze, their villages dotting the fertile land. And then death comes roaring out of the sky. The explosions as the meteoroids impact. The ground quakes. Mushroom clouds billow into the blue sky. The Martians flee to their temples, begging their gods to end this rain of devastation.

The terrible bombardment from the sky goes on and on, without end, without mercy. The planet’s air is blown away almost completely, until a mere wisp remains. The seas freeze. The Martians die, every one of them, their crops, their herds, their very memory erased from the planet’s surface. Except for a rare temple here and there, in a protected spot, where the last dying members of the race desperately scratch the final chapter of their story into the stones.

Dust covers the frozen seas. Nothing alive remains except the hardy lichen and the bacteria that dwell deep underground. Death reigns over all of Mars.

With a shudder, Jamie forced his attention back to the present, to this moment. He could see on the little laptop screen that Vijay looked somber, almost frightened. Maybe we should all be scared, he thought. Another rock could wipe us out, too.

You don’t know that for certain, the rational side of his mind warned him. The data could be off by millions of years. The dating could be just a coincidence. But he could not believe in such a coincidence.

“So that’s what happened to the Martians,” Vijay said, her voice hardly above a whisper. “Shiva destroyed them. Without mercy. Without warning. They were swept away as if they never existed at all.”

Nodding, Jamie said, “But they left this temple. Maybe there are other—”

The yellow priority message icon began blinking on his computer screen.

“Hold on,” Jamie said, splitting the screen to see who was calling so urgently.

Dezhurova’s dour face appeared. She was obviously in the rover’s cockpit, and obviously unhappy.

“Stacy, what’s the matter?” Jamie asked.

“I am stopped about fifty kilometers from you,” the cosmonaut said.

“Stopped?”

“Wheel malfunction. Must be dust in the bearings. It is overheating badly. If I try to proceed it will probably burn out completely.”

“I’ll tell the dome,” Jamie said. “I’m already talking with Vijay.”

“Good. Tell Rodriguez to come in the number two rover with a replacement wheel bearing.”

Jamie glanced at the digital clock blinking in the screen’s lower right-hand corner. “You’ll be stuck there overnight.”

“Not problem.”

“If we kept a rover here,” Dex pointed out, “we could go out and get you before sunset.”

“Perhaps,” the cosmonaut agreed glumly.

“That might be something to think about,” said Jamie. “We have the extra rover …”

“Tell Rodriguez to come in the old rover,” Dex said, “and then leave it here with us.”

“Perhaps a good plan,” Dezhurova said slowly. “I will discuss it with Tom.”

Close to midnight, as Jamie lay in his bunk, the yellow message light on his laptop began blinking again.

“Now what?” he muttered. It was late, he was tired, emotionally weary from the realization of what had wiped out the Martians. He had spent several hours looking over the archeologists’ reports on the age of the building. Then DiNardo had called in, a long, rambling monologue that boiled down to the Jesuit geologist’s doubts about associating the demise of the Martians with the extinction of the dinosaurs.

“The error bars on the archeologists’ dating for the Martian structure encompass several million years,” DiNardo said, his voice almost trembling with emotion. “It is fantastic to believe that the same event that caused the extinctions at the end of the Cretaceous on Earth also caused the extinction of the Martians.”

He’s frightened, Jamie saw as he studied DiNardo’s swarthy, stubble-jawed face. For some reason this idea scares him.

“Father DiNardo,” Jamie replied after watching the geologist’s message twice, ”I have to admit that the data on the age of the building here are pretty shaky. But even if the K/T extinctions on Earth and the end of the Martians happened a few million years apart, they still might have been the result of a single cause. A swarm of big meteoroids could have swung through the inner solar system and collided with the planets over a span of millions of years. We should be looking for evidence of a bombardment around that era on the Moon, don’t you think?”

He sent his message to DiNardo, then saw more than a dozen members of the archeologists’ committee wanted to talk with him. And the ICU board wanted to discuss the replenishment mission that was going to be launched. And Tarawa was scheduling a media conference for tomorrow.

Jamie had been glad when he attended to the last of his waiting messages and could finally crawl into bed and try to sleep. Then the message light started blinking again.

Who could be calling at this hour? Tarawa wouldn’t unless there was some sort of emergency. Nobody at the dome, they’re all asleep by now.

Stacy? He sat up on the bunk. Is Stacy having trouble out in the rover?

Jamie reached out and tapped the keyboard. Mitsuo Fuchida’s face showed on the screen.

“What’s wrong, Mitsuo?” Jamie asked.

The biologist was obviously in his quarters in the L/AV, only a few feet from Jamie’s cubicle. Yet he chose to call rather than come over in person. The lighting was dim, but Jamie could see that Fuchida appeared troubled, worried.

“I am convinced we have a saboteur among us,” Fuchida said, almost in a whisper.

“What?”

“I have been reviewing the evidence associated with several so-called accidents,” Fuchida said, “and I believe they were deliberately caused.”

Jamie swung his legs off the bunk and hunched closer to the laptop screen. Great, he thought. Mitsuo’s playing Sherlock Holmes.

“What accidents?” he asked wearily.

“The puncturing of the garden dome during the dust storm, for one.”

“That was sabotage?”

“Those punctures were made from the inside, not by the storm.”

“We’ve been through all that …”

“And Tomas’ injury? Do you believe that the tray of molten glass just happened to give way while he was standing beside it?”

Jamie drew a deep breath. ”Why are you telling me this? And why in the middle of the night?”

“Because you are the only one I trust,” Fuchida answered urgently. “The saboteur might be any of the others!”

“Why would anybody want to sabotage our equipment? Or hurt one of us?”

“I don’t know. Maybe he’s insane.”

There is that, Jamie admitted to himself. According to Vijay we’re all a little nuts.

Fuchida added, “And now this bearing malfunction in Stacy’s rover. Those bearings are sealed against dust penetration!”

Shaking his head, more in weariness than annoyance, Jamie said, “Okay, Mitsuo, tell you what. You and Wiley check out that faulty bearing when you go back to the dome. If you find any tampering with it, then tell Stacy about it. She’s the mission director now, not me.”

“But she might be the saboteur!”

“Stacy? That’s …” Jamie was about to say crazy, then realized that it would fit right in with Fuchida’s theory.

“She was on comm duty in the dome the night of the storm, while all the rest of us were sleeping. Remember?” the biologist insisted. “She helped to build the kiln for the glass bricks. She is alone in the rover and it breaks down.”

“You think she did it so she could spend the night alone out there?”

Jamie asked.

“If she is insane her motives would not be rational,” Fuchida replied.