Species II (14 page)

God forgive him, but he had to ignore the stricken look on his boy’s face and push him on out the door.

“W
ow,” Laura said to Press in a low voice. “This is quite a difference from the way it looked from the outside, wouldn’t you say?”

When they’d first arrived at the Garberville Psychiatric Institute, she and Press had been shown to a lovely reception area just off the main foyer. Appearances were apparently everything here, and the pattern of English tea-rose paper adorning the walls flawlessly complemented the high-grade reproductions of dark Victorian-era furnishings. They’d sat on an uncomfortable gold-brocade settee that matched a chaise longue across the room that hadn’t looked very inviting either. There’d been no magazines there, and the pair had spent their time waiting and gazing at a sideboard and a glass-fronted china cabinet that held dainty porcelain figures that may or may not have been true antiques. Underfoot there was an expensive-looking Oriental area rug that stretched just a foot short of the walls in all four directions and showed the edge of the gleaming dark-wood floor.

Now, however, they saw the true face of Garberville.

Their “Special Government Agent” identification cards had gained them access to this room—small, with drab gray furnishings and dirty walls, overly lit by a double row of fluorescents screwed into the ceiling. A hard-faced technician—or perhaps she was an orderly—in a laboratory coat with food stains down the right side of it gestured to several chairs arranged haphazardly around an old stainless-steel table. Everything about the woman, from the way her fuzzy gray hair stuck up at the back of her head to the heavy pair of glasses that kept sliding down her nose, seemed to be an annoyance to her, and the presence of Press and Laura was just adding to her predicament.

“I’m going to bring Mr. Cromwell in now,” she said curtly. “Please be brief. He’s been acting very strangely of late and we’ve had to restrain him a number of times. If you get him overexcited, it will be on your conscience if we have to do it again.”

She left the room with a slam of the door and Laura looked over at Press. “ ‘On our conscience?’ What exactly are they doing to him here?”

“Oh, I think you have an idea,” Press responded dryly.

She frowned. “Tranquilizers are not necessarily the best way to manage psychiatric—”

Before she could finish, the door bounced open again and the tech propelled a man in his late fifties or early sixties into the room with them. “No funny business, Mr. Cromwell,” the woman snapped, “or we’ll have to resort to measures.” Her gaze lifted from her patient and fixed on Press and Laura, then turned into a glare. “You’ve got ten minutes,” she snapped. Another slam of the door, and it was just the three of them.

“She called me ‘Mister,’ ” Herman Cromwell said. The slightly skewed smile he offered them as he turned a chair around and straddled it never reached his intense, bright-blue eyes, destroying any notion that the man on the other side of the table was jovial. His head had been clean-shaven and his face was lined and cynical. “I guess the last time I heard that was in nineteen ninety-six. Before they put me here, of course.” He frowned at them suddenly. “And who the hell are you two, anyway?”

“My name is Preston Lennox, and this is Dr. Laura Baker,” Press began.

“Doctor, huh?” Cromwell peered at Laura. “What kind of doctor? Another psychiatrist? Or maybe they’re going for something more medical on me this time. Let’s see . . . they’ve tried behavior modification, but I just keep sticking to my story. So maybe you’re some kind of . . . neurological specialist, a surgeon perhaps. Yeah, that’s it, someone getting ready to split my head open—”

“I’m a molecular biologist.”

Abruptly Cromwell’s fingers came together, hard, like a man who’d suddenly decided it was time to launch a desperate prayer. “Yeah?”

“I’m here because—”

“I know why you’re here,” Cromwell interrupted. “You’ve come to hear my story.”

C
omposed now, Cromwell was completely different from the crazy-eyed man who’d been led into the room here only five minutes earlier.

“Ralph and I were old friends,” the former doctor told them. “I’m sorry to hear about his death.” He lapsed into silence, but only for a second. “They never told me he tried to call, of course—that’s to be expected. But I’m sure he did it because he’d found out something that had to do with my past. You see, I was doing research on the Mars meteorite.”

“The one that was found in nineteen eighty-four on the Alan Hills ice field in Antarctica?” Laura asked.

“Exactly. I’m sure you’re already aware that it wasn’t recognized as being of Martian origin until nineteen ninety-three.” Cromwell’s gaze dropped to the table, but he kept talking; Laura had the eerie impression that he was almost . . . reading with his eyes closed. She wondered if he had a photographic memory. “There aren’t a whole lot of Martian-traceable meteorites,” he continued. “A dozen total, no more. The one I’m talking about here is called
ALH84001,
and it’s the geologically oldest specimen that we have.”

“Oldest?” Press raised an eyebrow. “How old is old?”

“Four and a half billion years,” Cromwell answered, and Laura’s mouth dropped open. “All the others range from a hundred and eighty million to about one point three billion years old, babies by comparison.”

“Jesus,” Press said. “I didn’t know
anything
could exist for that long.”

“Oh, you bet it can,” Cromwell hissed. His face was suddenly creased with emotion. He inhaled and made a visible effort to collect himself, then continued shakily. “As I was about to say,
ALH84001
underwent extensive testing, of course. It was a complicated series—we used everything from a laser mass spectrometer and a highly classified means of carbon dating to extremely high magnification under a transmission electron microscope. It wasn’t easy to get high-resolution images—the fossils we ultimately found were of primitive cellular life measuring only twenty to one hundred nanometers across.”

“Everyone has heard about this,” Press said. “It was all in the news.”

Cromwell laughed, the sound on the edge of high-pitched. “No, not all, Mr. Lennox. Only part of it was released. It was what they left out that was the most interesting, you see. The part about how those fossils that we found weren’t organic to the planet Mars.”

Laura shot a glance at Press, who said nothing. A good soldier he was, but this was her arena. “What is the basis for that determination, Dr. Cromwell?”

Cromwell smiled at her ruefully. “Thank you for that sign of respect, Dr. Baker. But that title was taken from me.” He looked away for a moment, his gaze fixing on the mesh-embedded windowpane on the outside wall of the room. When he turned back to them, the bald man’s eyes were sharp and full of intelligence. “The research we performed on what we found led us to believe that carbon-based elements found in
ALH84001
exist only in the Magellanic galaxy.” He leaned over the scratched surface of the table, determined to make his point. “That galaxy is over a hundred and seventy
thousand
light-years away from us.”

“So what were these fossils doing on Mars?” Press asked.

“As I see it,” Cromwell said softly, “Mars was colonized by an alien species several billion years ago.”

Laura could feel Press’s shock from across the table. “That’s a very interesting theory,” she said carefully. “But again . . . on what basis are you making these claims?”

Without warning, a fly buzzed across her field of vision. Laura blinked and jerked away from it while Cromwell began swatting wildly at it. Another strike, another miss. “The geologic history of Mars is quite common knowledge,” he said, and leaned back on his chair. The exertion had made him slightly breathless, and now only his eyes, a luminous shade of blue, moved as they tracked the fly’s progress in the air above the table.

“At the present time,” Cromwell continued, “Mars is in its youngest state, of course, what we call the Amazonian Period. The planet itself is a little over four and a half billion years old, and in the first part of its history, the Noachian Period, it was a thriving environment. If it wasn’t exactly like Earth—being farther away from the sun—it did have water, an atmosphere, and a hospitable climate. I believe the aliens that landed on that planet made it the hunk of useless rock we see today. They spread like a plague across its surface, and no doubt the life-form depleted its supply of water and raw materials. A technologically advanced species could easily have engineered the destruction of Mars’s artesian aquifers and thus triggered the fault lines, which in turn resulted in the eruption of the Tharsis volcano, as well as the thousands of other volcanoes across the planet’s surface.” He looked at Press and Laura solemnly. “Surface buckling, artificially induced fissures in the landscape in search of water, on and on. We all know what a more powerful and so-called ‘intelligent’ life-form can do to its environment So . . .
voilà.
The end of a flourishing environment for Mars.”

When no one said anything, Cromwell again folded his hands on the tabletop, that same strange gesture of supplication. “When I heard that the United States was sending a landing mission to Mars, I strongly urged the government to reconsider.”

“Why?” asked Laura. “If what you say is true—and I feel obligated to point out that there is absolutely no evidence to back up your postulations—these alien colonists clearly died out millions, possibly
billions,
of years ago. On what grounds would you expect the government to cancel a project like this?”

Cromwell’s cheeks flushed. “Don’t you get it?” he demanded. “Grounds? I’ll give you a reason, all right. For all of the beauty and life-sustaining atmosphere Mars probably had at one time, it would never,
ever
have supported human life. At its best, it would have always been a harsh planet on which only an extremely strong, hardy life-form could exist. A life-form that would no doubt be incredibly dangerous and harmful to humans!” Cromwell’s voice had risen to a near shout. “A species that could very possibly go dormant and leave its own DNA on the surface—like spores—so that any attempt by another form of life would result in biological contamination!”

“Still—”

“Let me guess,” Press said, cutting her off. “Uncle Sam told you to shove your theory where the Martian sun doesn’t shine.”

“But you were insistent,” Laura added, picking up where Press headed. It was just as well that Press had stepped in when he had; arguing with Herman Cromwell would accomplish nothing. “And in being so . . . determined, someone got rather annoyed with you. Do you know who?”

“Oh, I could give it a guess,” Press said with a nasty grin.

“Senator Judson Ross, of course,” Herman Cromwell said.

“Of course,” Laura repeated. “Our nation’s biggest proponent of space exploration since the nineteen sixties.”

“It wasn’t just Ross,” Cromwell said flatly. “He was a part of it, yes. The clincher was apparently the Pentagon had strategic reasons for wanting to go to Mars. Strategic
military
reasons it wasn’t likely to share with the lowly public. And the higher-ups definitely did not want some geeky college researcher stirring up public curiosity or opposition to their grand plans.” For the first time since they’d sat down to talk to him, the older man’s voice slid toward bitterness. “Got me fired from Stanford, and that was just the beginning. Oh, yeah. Couldn’t jeopardize their little outpost of the future, or whatever crap it was they had designs for. They harassed the shit out of me, set me up at every public function, turned me into a laughingstock in front of my colleagues and friends . . . even my
family.”

“How did you end up here at Garberville, Dr. Cromwell?” Something in Press’s voice was dark and unpleasant, and Laura looked at him sharply.

“I went to a conference at the Johnson Space Center,” he answered, and again there was that longing look at the wire-sheathed window. “It’s a bi-yearly thing, and I thought that there,
surely,
I could find someone with enough brainpower to at least listen to me. They didn’t have to believe—all the figures and the research were there for them to read and decide for themselves. I went to a meeting there on the possibility of extraterrestrial life and got shouted down by some meathead whom I later learned was a Pentagon shill instructed to heckle.” Cromwell looked at his hands, then unfolded his fingers. He wasn’t a big man—average in everything but for his getting-on-in-years age. His voice held hints of both pride and regret. “I’ve always been a passionate man when it comes to my beliefs. We scuffled, and I . . . I was so angry. When I hit him, I broke his damned jaw.”

“Those
fuckers,”
Press whispered.

Laura cleared her throat. “What do you think Dr. Orinsky called you about on the night he was killed?”

There was no victory in the former doctor’s gaze. “To say I was right,” he answered in a small voice. “To tell me that those poor astronauts had doomed Earth by bringing home whatever aliens destroyed Mars.”

Both Press and Laura jumped as Cromwell’s hand shot out and snatched the fly from midair. He opened his palm and held it out, showing them the insect’s crushed carcass.

“We will be to these aliens what this fly is to us,” Herman Cromwell said softly. “I wonder . . . do you think God will take pity on the three who have brought about the destruction of his most complex creation?”