Mars Life (32 page)

Stavenger made a nonchalant shrug. “That’s his decision. Right now I think you owe it to the people working on Mars to let Trumball know what you can do.”

“Dr. Waterman’s going to hate it,” Doreen said in a small, almost whispering, voice.

“Be that as it may, your idea may save the entire Mars operation.”

The desk phone chimed. Doreen flinched visibly at the sound. Stavenger glanced at his wristwatch. “He’s right on time.”

Dex Trumball’s face took form on the phone screen. Stavenger introduced himself, then gestured toward Doreen. After the usual pleasantries, Stavenger got down to the point.

“Ms. McManus made a very interesting presentation to our governing board about the possibilities of using nanotechnology to enlarge the area on Mars where people can live and work. I thought that you and your Mars Foundation people ought to hear about it.”

Trumball’s sharp, hard eyes flicked from Stavenger to Doreen and back again. “Okay, I’m listening.”

Doreen began to speak, hesitantly at first but then with growing confidence and enthusiasm.

After half an hour, Dex interrupted, “Wait a minute. You’re saying that you can create a completely earthlike environment that’s
kilometers
wide?”

“As large as you want it,” Doreen said, nodding vigorously. “You can make it an ongoing operation, constantly enlarging the earthlike area.”

“Under a dome,” said Dex.

“Yes. It would have to be enclosed, of course.”

Stavenger interjected, “It wouldn’t be totally earthlike. The gravity would still be at the Martian level.”

“That’s not a problem,” Dex said. “As long as people could live under the dome in a shirtsleeve environment.”

“They could wear bikinis!” Doreen said.

Dex smiled. “Most of the tourists we’d bring to Mars would look awful in bikinis. But on the other hand . . .”

More in sorrow than in anger, Dex said to himself. Remember that: more in sorrow than in anger. Jamie’s a stubborn sonofabitch but that’s who he is and there’s no sense getting sore about it. You just have to do what you have to do.

Despite the brilliant sunshine and crystal blue sky, it was chilly up on the windswept roof of the Trumball Tower. Roland Kinnear was trying to smile bravely, but it was clear that the gusts whipping in from the harbor cut through his light summer-weight suit jacket and turned his perpetual smile into something of a grimace.

“Not like Hawaii,” he said to Dex, raising his voice over the rush of the wind.

“You want to go back downstairs?” Dex asked. Kinnear shrugged. “In a minute or two. I figure you brought me up here for a reason.”

Dex studied his old schoolmate’s round, normally cheerful face. “I wanted this conversation to be strictly private, Rollie. Just between you and me.”

Kinnear’s light blond brows furrowed. “You don’t trust your staff?”

“Sure I do,” Dex said. “But I don’t want to run the risk of somebody accidentally overhearing us.”

Kinnear thought that over for a moment, then asked, “Can we get out of this wind, at least?”

Dex laughed, then took Kinnear by the elbow and led him to the other side of the roof where they were sheltered by the bulk of the structure that housed the building’s cooling tower. From this angle he could see the city’s busy streets, and across the Charles River the gray, utilitarian buildings of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Harvard’s redbrick Colonial-style campus was off to their left, half hidden among the flaming trees in their autumnal colors. Farther on toward the horizon, past more colorful trees and stately slim white church steeples, was Lexington and the common where a handful of Minutemen had tried to make a stand against the British army.

“It’s pretty,” Kinnear said, “with all the trees in color.”

“They say we might even get some snow this winter,” Dex said, wistfully. “It looks beautiful all in white.”

Out of the wind, Kinnear relaxed enough to put his pleasant smile back on. “So what do you want to talk about, Dex?”

“Mars. What else?”

“You’re in bad shape, from what I hear.”

“We’re bleeding to death,” Dex admitted. “That damned priest’s just about killed us.”

“He didn’t do himself any good, either.” Kinnear grinned.

“Yeah, yeah, but now we’ve got people blaming 
us 
for his death. We’re getting really nasty mail, calling us priest killers, making threats.”

“Anything serious?”

“I’ve doubled our security. There’s a lot of nuts out there.” Dex shook his head. “Priest killers,” he muttered.

“So your money flow . . . ?”

“Down to a trickle. Less.”

“I still think the tourism idea could fly,” Kinnear said, obviously trying to brighten Dex’s mood.

“That’s what I want to talk to you about.”

“My people tell me Waterman turned you down flat.”

“You’ve got a line into my private office,” Dex said. “I figured as much.”

Widening his smile, Kinnear said, “We’re talking a ton of money here, Dex. I have to protect my investment.”

“You haven’t spent a dime, Rollie.”

“Well, I might have. But the Navaho chief nixed it, did he?”

Nodding, “I expected he would.”

“So, do you go over his head?”

“Can’t. The Navaho council has the final word on what we can or can’t do on Mars.”

“But they voted in favor of the tourist plan, didn’t they?”

“Yes, but they won’t go against Jamie. If he says no they’ll go along with him.”

“Shit. They’d turn down all that money?”

“They would and they will.”

Kinnear pursed his lips. “Well, that’s that, I guess.”

A jet airliner from Logan Aerospaceport, across the Inner Harbor, roared over them, making conversation impossible for a few moments. Dex used the time to frame the words he had to speak.

“Rollie, there’s a way we can get this done,” he said, as the airliner’s thunder diminished in the distance.

Kinnear looked askance at him.

“It works like this,” Dex said, wondering if he could really go through with it. “Without your tourist money, the Mars Foundation goes bust.”

“But you’ve got other sources of funding, don’t you?”

“It’s not enough. We’ve got enough in the bank to finance one more resupply flight to Mars. After that, if we don’t get an injection of new funding we’re going to have to shut down the operation on Mars and bring everybody home.”

“And that’s that.”

Dex shook his head. “No, that’s just the beginning. I’ll see to it that when the people leave Mars they mothball their base, you know, wrap up all the equipment, seal the domes they’ve been using, keep it all ready for somebody else to use.”

Kinnear’s smile widened. “You’re starting to interest me, Dex.”

“Once the last of them has left Mars, the Navaho no longer have their claim to the place. It’s open for grabs.”

“And we grab it!”

“We send a skeleton team to the base and reopen it, then claim exclusive use of the area for Kinnear Travel, Inc.”

“Holy shit! Would that be legal?”

“Perfectly legal. The Mars Foundation will be your partner, Rollie. You and me together. What’s more, I’ve got some experts from Selene who can build a completely shirtsleeve environment for the tourists. Let ‘em wander through the village and the cliff dwellings without using a spacesuit.”

“Tourists on Mars. Hot damn!”

“Scientists, too,” Dex said quickly. “We’ll bring scientists back, but they’ll be working under our direction.”

“Sure, sure, we’d need a few scientists to work as guides for the tourists.”

“And to continue their own studies, Rollie. I want to carry on with the work they’re trying to do now.”

“Yeah, okay. We could even bring your pal Waterman back— but under our terms.”

“Jamie?” Dex was truly surprised at the thought. “No, he won’t go back. Not if we’re running the show. He hates the whole idea of bringing tourists to Mars.”

“So? What’s he going to do?”

Feeling truly sad, Dex said, “He’ll probably commit suicide. Or murder.”

Sitting tensely in the little bungee-cord chair in his office cubicle, Jamie asked, “So what do you think?”

Maurice Zeroual looked equally tense. He was a logistics specialist from Selene who had come to Tithonium Base on the resupply flight a few weeks earlier. Born in Algeria, Zeroual had fled to the Moon when his nation dissolved into murderous sectarian violence. He had volunteered to study the possibilities of making the Mars base self-sufficient.

He did not look happy. Zeroual was a smallish man, wearing a loose-fitting white shirt and gray slacks. His skin was as dark as scorched tobacco leaf. A thin fringe of a beard outlined his jaw. Jamie thought he smelled a strange cologne: like mint, or some oriental spice.

“I haven’t completely finished my analysis,” Zeroual began, in a soft tenor voice with a definite British accent.

“But you’ve learned enough to ask to meet with me,” Jamie said, also softly, trying to encourage the younger man to speak freely.

“I can see the general picture clearly enough, yes.”

“And?”

Zeroual’s dark brown eyes shifted away from Jamie’s. “There’s no way you can continue to support two hundred people here. Not with the resources available to you.”

Jamie took in a breath. I expected that, he said to himself. Aloud, he asked, “How many?”

“At best, maybe thirty.”

“Thirty?”

“The optimal number would be somewhere around half that. Say, fifteen people. You could support fifteen people here indefinitely with the food you raise in the greenhouse and the amount of additional supplies that Selene can afford to send you.”

“Fifteen people.”

Zeroual leaned forward, rested his palms on his knees. “Of course, if you can obtain some continued funding from your Mars Foundation you could enlarge that number slightly.”

Nodding, Jamie said, “The Foundation can provide a trickle of money, I suppose. I don’t know for how long, though.”

“I’d advise that any funding you get from the Foundation should be devoted to enlarging your greenhouse,” Zeroual said earnestly. “If you can enlarge your resource base, even just a little at a time, you can support more people.”

“Like the Old Ones,” Jamie muttered.

“Excuse me?”

“The original people who settled in the southwestern United States, a thousand years ago or more,” Jamie explained. “They had to survive in a very harsh, very arid environment. They learned how to grow crops with precious little water. They learned to survive.”

Zeroual nodded. “Ah. Yes. Something like that. You’ll have to learn to survive in a harsh environment. With very little help from outside.”

State your name and affiliation, please.”

“Franklin Haverford Overmire. I have the honor to be archbishop of the New Morality Church.”

Archbishop Overmire looked tanned, vigorously healthy and completely at ease at the witness table, smiling at the senators arrayed across the front of the room. He wore his customary custom-tailored black suit. His light brown hair was cut just short of his clerical collar.

The clerk offered a Bible to Overmire; the archbishop placed his beringed right hand lightly upon it.

“Do you swear that the testimony you are about to give this committee will be the entire truth?”

“Of course.”

Morning sunlight beamed through the long windows of the committee chamber. At the head of the room sat the senators; every member of the committee was there. Every row of spectators’ benches was filled. The side aisles were crammed with news media camera teams.

The committee chairman, a crusty white-haired veteran of decades of Washington infighting, hunched over his pencil-slim microphone and announced in a grating voice, “The purpose of this investigation is to determine if the death of a member of the exploration crew on Mars was caused by negligence.”

He paused dramatically, then added, “Or if the conditions on Mars are too dangerous to allow human exploration there to continue.”

Sitting in the front row of benches directly behind the witness table, Dex Trumball fingered the subpoena he had folded into his jacket pocket. The committee lawyer who had personally presented the subpoena to him in Boston had promised that Dex would be called on the first day of the hearings. But he wondered why Archbishop Overmire had been asked to appear. What’s he got to testify about? Dex asked himself. All he knows about Mars is that he’s against our exploring it.

Besides, this committee can’t shut down our program. The government isn’t funding us and they can’t stop us. This hearing is strictly public-relations crap, a chance for these politicians to get their faces on the news.

Sure enough, after the first few powder-puff questions, the senator from Overmire’s state of Georgia was granted the floor. She was a youngish-looking woman with ash blond hair, slightly plump, with a high voice that reminded Dex of the whining of a handheld power drill.

“Archbishop Overmire,” she began, smiling broadly enough to make dimples, “the official report of Monsignor DiNardo’s death on Mars states that he suffered a paralytic stroke.”

“So I understand,” said the archbishop.

“Our investigation has determined that he had a preexisting cardiac problem, yet he was allowed to make the journey to Mars.”

“Scientific hubris,” the archbishop replied.

“You mean that the scientists directing the exploration of Mars didn’t investigate his health deeply enough to determine that he was suffering from cardiac disease?”

“Not exactly.”

“Or they ignored the fact that Monsignor DiNardo was ill? They allowed him to risk his life knowingly?”

Overmire shook his head slightly. “I’m afraid that the late Monsignor DiNardo thought of himself as a scientist ahead of his being a priest of the Roman Catholic Church. He wanted to work on Mars so badly that he was willing to tempt God.”

Dex felt his face flame.

“Tempt God, Archbishop?” prompted the senator.

“Matthew, chapter 4, verse 7: Thou shalt not tempt the Lord your God.”

The senator’s smile changed subtly. “You believe that Monsignor DiNardo tempted God by going to Mars, despite his illness?”

“What else? He chose secular humanism over his, Lord and Savior and suffered the consequences.”

“Then his death wasn’t an accident?”

“It was divine justice.”

Dex fought down a sudden urge to puke. This isn’t an investigation, he realized. It’s a fucking inquisition.