Mars Life (33 page)

Zeke Larkin laid his digging spade on his shoulder as he and Alonzo Jenkins trudged through the morning sunshine from the dome’s main airlock toward the dig.

Lonzo, a stubby, dark-skinned postdoc geochemist from Toronto, was singing his usual lament, “. . . picked up my shovel and walked to th’ mine. Loaded sixteen tons of number nine coal and th’ straw boss said — “

“Don’t you know any other songs?” Larkin asked, half annoyed, half amused.

“None that’s so appropriate.”

The rest of the digging crew were already standing around the edge of the pit in their nanofabric suits. Carleton was nowhere in sight.

“Where’s our taskmaster?” Larkin asked, turning back toward the airlock.

Sure enough, Carleton came through the hatch in his bulky hard-shell suit. He’s too goddamned stubborn to switch to a nanosuit, Larkin thought. Like it’s going to damage his reputation if he gives in and admits the nanos are better.

Carleton strode to the edge of the dig, his face hidden behind the reflective visor of his helmet. “All right,” he said, “let’s get to work.”

Larkin realized that Carleton didn’t give him any specific instructions. After his blowup with the anthropologist two days earlier, he’d stayed away from the dig. But Jamie Waterman had stepped into his lab the previous evening to tell him that Dr. Chang had rearranged his schedule and he was expected at the excavation site the next morning.

So he stood with his spade on his shoulder, like an infantryman with his rifle, as all the others started down the ramp and into the pit.

“Larkin, you go with Jenkins and help him with the digging out by the old riverbed,” Carleton said, his voicing sounding tight, edgy in Larkin’s earphone.

Suppressing an instinct to give the anthropologist a military salute, Larkin said merely, “Right. Okay.”

But he hesitated. “Dr. Carleton . . .”

“What?”

“Over on the other side of the village, where I was digging a couple of days ago—”

“When you decided to quit?” Carleton snapped.

Larkin sucked in a breath.

“Well?” Carleton demanded.

“Nothing,” said Larkin. And he started down the ramp to catch up with Jenkins. Why bother? he thought. So there’s some bumps in the ground out there. So what? It’s probably not important. And even if it is, he’s too pigheaded to listen to me. I’m on his shitlist, big time.

As the day wore on, though, Larkin kept thinking about the seemingly empty ground on the other side of the village. He and Jenkins were just going through the motions, he realized. They were digging through the layers of accumulated stone that had once been the bed of the river that flowed through the valley.

Look for possible fossils, Carleton had told them. Yeah, sure, thought Larkin. Like we’d be able to tell what’s a fossil from what’s an ordinary rock. On Earth you might turn up a fragment of a seashell, or the bones of some animal. But on Earth you’d recognize them for what they are. What do Martian seashells look like? How can I tell if this flat rock is just a rock or maybe it was once a turtle’s shell? No way to know. Like trying to decipher those hieroglyphics from the buildings up on the cliff. We’ve got nothing to compare them to.

Still his mind kept returning to the memory of those slight, hardy perceptible ridges in the ground out in the empty area on the other side of the village. You can hardly make them out, Larkin said lo himself. Only when the sunlight slants in at the end of the day, I hat’s when you can see them.

Do they mean anything? Probably not. And yet—they’re 
regular, 
like a pattern. Not random.

His spade struck a hard, stubborn layer of rock with an impact that sent a shudder up his arms. Damn! Like the pirates in 
Treasure Island 
when they hit the buried treasure chest.

“Hey, Lonzo,” he called. “Gimme a hand here.”

“Whatcha got?” Jenkins asked, straightening up tiredly from his own digging.

“Maybe a whale,” Larkin wisecracked.

Jenkins came over and the two of them began digging carefully around the hard object. It took more than an hour, but they finally cleared all the compacted dust from it.

“Some whale,” Jenkins grumbled, panting from the exertion. “It’s just a goddamned big flat rock.”

Larkin stared at it. Maybe a geologist could make something out of it, but he had to agree with Lonzo: it was nothing more than a big flat rock.

“A lot of work for nothing,” Larkin said.

“Yeah, but you never know. Might’ve been a whale. Or a dinosaur. You don’t know till you’ve done the work to uncover it.”

Larkin shook his head inside the inflated bubble of his helmet. “What’s that song of yours say? ‘Another day older and deeper in debt’?”

“Exactly.” Jenkins looked up at the sky. “Well, this day’s just about over. We’ve loaded our sixteen tons, right?”

“Right. Let’s head for the showers.”

But when they got to the ramp that led up to the lip of the excavation, Larkin told his partner, “You go on, Lonzo. I want to look at something.”

Jenkins shrugged inside his nanosuit and started up the ramp. Larkin walked through the remains of the village, past the dark square shapes of building foundations laid out in neat geometric order, and out to the edge of the empty space.

The sun was low enough to throw those slight banks of ground into high relief. Another few minutes and the sun’ll sink down past the edge of the pit, Larkin thought. Then it’ll all go into shadow.

He hunkered down to his knees, then leaned forward and put his head on the ground, squinting at the faint, faint rows of raised mounds.

“What are you doing?” Carleton’s voice sounded more annoyed than curious.

Getting up to a kneeling position, Larkin called back, “There’s a pattern here.”

“A pattern? What are you talking about?”

“Come over here and take a look. Quick, before the sun goes down too far.”

Turning to look over his shoulder, Larkin saw Carleton’s cumbersome hard suit clumping slowly toward him, like some robot monster from a horror vid.

“Come on,” Larkin urged. “Faster.”

Carleton lumbered up to him. “What pattern? I don’t see any—”

“Get down. You can barely make it out, but if you get down you can see the shadows.”

Muttering to himself, Carleton slowly, awkwardly lowered himself to his hands and knees. “If this is some kind of a practical joke .. .”

“Lower. Quick, the sun’s almost down.”

Carleton slowly, carefully got down flat on his belly. Larkin fought back a laugh. The anthropologist looked like a beached mechanical whale.

“What pat—” Carleton’s breath caught in his throat.

“You see it?” Larkin urged.

“Rectangles! Laid out in orderly rows!”

“Yeah!”

“Do you know what this is?” Carleton’s voice was brimming with excitement.

“Their farm?”

“Farm, hell! This is their cemetery! I’ll bet my life on it! We’ve found their cemetery!”

Larkin started to frown at the word “we,” but then he thought, What the hell. He wants to horn in on the credit, so what? If he’s right. . .

He sat there, squatting on his knees with Carleton stretched out prone beside him in the bulky hard suit, until the sun dipped below the edge of the excavation and the area darkened into shadow.

“All right,” Carleton said, sounding excited. “All right. Now what we’ve got to do is—ugh!”

“What? What do we have to do?”

“Get me back on my feet! I can’t get up in this damned hardshell.”

Larkin laughed and tried to pull Carleton up. He had to call two other men to help him.

Jamie asked to use Chang’s office for this meeting of the team’s three key people to decide on the future of the exploration effort. He began by explaining the conclusions of the logistics study that Maurice Zeroual had headed.

“We can afford to maintain fifteen people on Mars,” he told them. “That’s all that the Mars Foundation can support, even with help from Selene.”

“Fifteen people?” The shock broke through Chang Laodong’s normal impassivity. “Not enough. Impossible.”

“That would really be a skeleton crew,” quipped Carter Carleton.

Jamie nodded grimly. “Skeleton, as in dead.”

Carleton nodded.

The other person in Chang’s office was Nari Quintana. She sat in one of the chairs that flanked the low coffee table, her legs tucked under her, her brown eyes flicking from one man to the next.

Jamie, on the sofa beside Chang, asked her, “Dr. Quintana, would reducing the number of people here to fifteen or so present any special medical problems?”

She hesitated a moment, then replied, “I can’t see where it would. Except that I would probably have to help in some of the other work, like Carter’s excavation.”

“You would stay?” Jamie asked. “Under those circumstances?”

Quintana nodded slowly.

“Indefinitely?” Jamie prodded. “I don’t know how frequently we’d be able to bring resupply flights in.”

“There’s a flight due in next month, isn’t there?”

Chang said, “That is the last scheduled flight.”

“There’ll be one more,” Jamie said, his voice almost choking. “To take most of the staff home.”

“Evacuation flight,” said Chang. “Yes. But no further resupply flight for at least one year.”

“One year,” Quintana echoed. She took a deep breath, obviously juggling several possibilities in her mind. “I will stay. But not forever, of course.”

“Of course.”

Chang said, “I will have to return to Earth.”

Jamie turned toward him. “No, that’s not necessary.”

Chang closed his eyes briefly. “Very necessary. I am an administrator, not a working scientist. I cannot dig in Dr. Carleton’s pit. I should not fill a position on a geology team that a younger, more vigorous man could occupy. When the evacuation flight comes, I will leave on it.”

Jamie wanted to say something, but he could not think of any words.

“All right,” Carleton said impatiently. “Are we finished? I’ve got to get out to the dig. We’re starting to probe their cemetery.”

Jamie held up one hand. “Be patient a bit, will you?”

“But-”

“Your wife should be part of this discussion,” Quintana said. “She’s our psychologist. Emotional questions will be just as important as medical, if you plan to reduce the staff here to fifteen.”

“You’re right,” Jamie said. As he fished for his phone in his shirt pocket he couldn’t help thinking, We’re shriveling away, just like the lichen. But it won’t take a million years for us to disappear from Mars.

Carleton, sitting across the low table from Quintana, shook his head impatiently. “Just when we’re about to hit pay dirt. We’ve located their cemetery. I’ve got an engineering team rigging up a deep-radar set so we can use it to see what’s buried there before we start digging.”

“Do you really believe it’s the cemetery?” Quintana asked.

“I’m certain of it.” Jabbing a finger at her, Carleton went on, “In another week we’ll be uncovering the remains of the Martians who lived in that village. We’ll be making epochal discoveries, learning what they looked like, how they treated their dead. And now this. Reduce our work force to fifteen. It’s as if they don’t want us to find anything.”

“They?” Quintana asked.

“The fundamentalists. The idiots who’re running the governments back Earthside. And everything else.”

Chang almost smiled. “Perhaps they are right. Perhaps God does not want you to make discoveries.”

Carleton glared at him.

“I was joking,” Chang said.

Jamie clicked his phone shut. “Vijay will join us in a few moments.”

Chang sighed, then said to Carleton, “Many discoveries will remain undone. The new crater that the meteor impact made. The search for other villages. Stratigraphy mapping. South polar cap’s melting. None of that. With fifteen people they can only stay here at base. No excursions.”

“My excavation will slow down to a crawl,” Carleton muttered.

Someone tapped at the office door, then slid it open. Vijay stepped in, wearing coral coveralls with a bright orange and yellow scarf tied around her waist. Jamie moved over on the sofa to make room for her to sit between him and Chang.

“We’re discussing the problems that might arise when the staff here is reduced to fifteen people,” Jamie explained.

“The question of psychological problems came up,” said Quintana.

Vijay glanced at Jamie, then turned to face the others and began, “Yes, the emotional pressures of having only a dozen or so people will certainly increase. ‘Specially at the outset. It’ll be painfully clear that we’re here on a shoestring.”

“What do you see as major problems?” Chang asked.

“Fear,” she replied immediately. “We’ve all got a certain amount of fear to deal with, but most of the time we keep it bottled up inside. Remember when that meteor hit, a couple weeks ago? The fear came out then, di’n’t it?”

Quintana mused, “With only fifteen people . . .”

“The fear quotient will grow, of course. It’ll show up in different ways. Moodiness. Irritability. Aggression, in some.” She looked directly at Carleton.

“Physical aggression?” Jamie asked.

“Maybe sexual,” Carleton said. “Fifteen people is a damned small gene pool.”

That night, as Jamie climbed wearily into bed, Vijay asked, “Well, d’you think your meeting accomplished anything?”

“A little,” he said, pulling the thin cover over himself. “Chang said he’d leave. Carleton figures that digging up his village is about all we can do with just fifteen people.”

“Nan’s planning to stay?”

He turned toward her. “Yes. She said she’d stay indefinitely.”

“Good.”

Jamie turned off the lamp on the night table. Their bedroom went dark, except for the faint greenish glow of the digital clock’s display.

“You di’n’t tell them about the other option, did you,” Vijay said. It was a statement, not a question.

Jamie didn’t reply.

“Dex’s plan,” Vijay added. “You could keep more’n a hundred scientists here if you let Dex have his way.”

“I’m not turning Mars into a tourist resort.”

For a heartbeat or two Vijay didn’t reply. At last she murmured, “You could at least consider it, love. You could be a bit more flexible.”

“No.”

She slid her body against his and ran a hand down his abdomen, to his crotch. “Y’know, love, a hard man is good to find, true enough. But sometimes you’ve got to bend a little.”

Jamie closed his eyes as he felt his body tingle beneath her hand. “You’re using your feminine wiles on me.”

“Just asking you to think clearly, love. Look at all your options. Don’t make up your mind until you’ve explored the different paths that’re open to you.”

He grunted. “You sound like my grandfather.”

He could hear the smile in her voice. “I make you think of your grandfather?”

Jamie reached for her. “You’re a damned good psychologist, you know.”

“That’s right, love. And now it’s time for some physical therapy.”

In Boston it was well past seven p.m.

“Are you going to hide in here all night? We’re almost ready to serve dinner and you haven’t even said hello to our guests yet.” Dex’s wife was frowning at him from the doorway of the big old house’s library. Wearing a skintight, low-cut gown of gold lame, she held a stemmed martini glass in one hand.

Dex looked up from the phone screen and forced a smile. “Just another minute or two. Tell the cook that he works for me, not the other way round.”

His wife’s frown deepened, but she said nothing further, just turned and swept grandly out of his sight.

“Sorry for the interruption,” Dex said to the image in the phone screen.

Rollie Kinnear grinned at him. “Hey, I’ve got a wife, too.”

Dex could see it was midafternoon in Hawaii. Rollie was stretched out on the lanai of his beachfront home, dark glasses over his eyes, garishly bright shirt flapping in the sea breeze.

“She’s throwing a dinner party,” Dex muttered.

“Trying to raise money for you?”

“I wish. She couldn’t care less about Mars.”

“So when do you tell your Indian pal that you’re shutting down the whole operation?”

Dex sucked in a breath. “It’s going to just about kill Jamie, you know.”

“Hey, you know what general Sheridan said about good Indians.” Kinnear laughed.

“I can’t do it in a goddamned message,” said Dex, surprised at his own words. “This is something that’s got to be done face-to-face.”

“So bring him back home and tell him,” Kinnear said, his smile shrinking. “I’ve got investors who’re hot to trot. But they won’t stay hot forever, you know.”

“I know,” Dex said, as he realized what must be done. “There’s a flight going to Mars in three weeks. I’ll go out on it and tell Jamie what’s going down.”

“To Mars? How long’s it going to take you to get all the way out there?”

“Less than a week. The fusion torch ships are fast.”

“Can’t be fast enough,” Kinnear said, totally serious now. “I want to get this deal finalized, Dex. We’re talking major bucks here, pal.”

“I know,” Dex replied. Silently he added, And we’re dealing with a man’s life.