Return to Mars (48 page)

Trumball had insisted on dropping one of the spare video minicams on a separate line, alongside Jamie. He had plugged a palm-sized radio transceiver to it so it could transmit automatically back to the dome. They would mount the pair on a tripod near the edge of the cleft, so they could get a steady view of the village and a communications relay that could pick up their suit radios even when they were inside the building.

Jamie reached the top of the cleft, then slowed his descent manually. The morning sun was streaming into the niche in the cliff face, making the building glow warmly.

It’s still here, Jamie thought gratefully. It wasn’t a dream. It’s real.

He thought he heard his grandfather chuckling at him. Of course it’s real, Al said. It’s always been real.

He swung himself into the cleft and planted his boots firmly on the rock floor. Then he undipped the harness and started it back up toward Dex, waiting impatiently up at the Canyon rim.

Jamie walked slowly to the nearest opening in the wall, noticing that he left bootprints on the ground. Dust. It accumulates here from the storms. I wonder if it’s worth digging into it to see what might be buried underneath it.

Touch nothing, the cranky old archeologist had said. How can we be here and touch nothing?

The doorway was as wide as a normal human doorway, but only half its height. They weren’t very tall, Jamie thought. Or maybe this was an entrance for pets or animals.

He reached out and touched the wall. Hard and smooth. Not like adobe. Some kind of stone. Could it be schist?

“I’m starting down,” Dex’s voice called.

“Okay,” Jamie said absently, wanting to crawl through that doorway and see what was inside the building. But he had promised Dex he would wait so they could go together.

He looked down the length of the wall, down into the shadows deeper in the rock cleft. Two more entrances, both the same size as this one.

On a hunch, he turned back and walked to the edge of the cleft. He paced along the rim while listening to Dex grunting and panting his way down the cable.

There! I knew it’d be along here someplace. Steps, carved into the cliff face. Nothing fancy, just little nicks in the stone, enough to grab with a hand or put a foot into. Jamie got slowly down onto his hands and knees and peered over the edge. The cliff dropped dizzyingly down to the Canyon floor, kilometers below.

He saw a ragged, meandering line of steps carved into the cliff face. They took advantage of all the ledges and every possible resting place. It’s a damned long way up here, especially if they were carrying things.

They had hands and feet, he thought. Maybe not exactly like ours, but they had hands and feet that could use those steps to get up here. Maybe they grew their crops down at the Canyon floor.

What made them build their village all the way up here? What drove them to hide it up here?

“Where are you?” Dex demanded.

He saw Trumball’s spacesuited form hanging in the harness, just below the roof of the cleft, legs dangling, gloved hands gripping the cable tightly.

“Off to your left, along the edge,” Jamie said.

“Oh. I thought maybe the temptation got to you,” said Trumball.

“No, 1 wailed for you,” Jamie said as he looked across at Dex, hanging in the harness, swaying slightly.

“What’re you doing? Praying?”

Hauling himself up to his feet, Jamie realized that it must have looked that way. The last time I was in a church was my wedding, he remembered.

“Maybe I’ll build a shrine here,” he said.

“Not a bad idea,” Dex replied.

Jamie strode toward Dex and grabbed him when he swung himself into the cleft. Once the younger man planted his feet on the floor of the crevice, Jamie helped him out of the harness and tied it down on the spike he had left the previous day.

“Okay,” Dex said brightly. “Let’s go see what they left for us.”

Jamie led him to the nearest entrance.

“That’s the way in?”

“Either this one or one of the others just like it.”

Dex stopped, then started to bend down.

“Remember the protocol,” Jamie said. “Whatever we find inside there, we touch nothing.”

“Except for souvenirs,” Dex wisecracked.

“Nothing,” Jamie repeated flatly.

Dex crawled through the low rectangular opening in the wall, careful not to bang the VR cameras. They had decided to let him wear them today. Bending down to his hands and knees, Jamie crawled through after him, into the Martian dwelling. He got to his feet in a room that was spaciously wide but uncomfortably low; his helmet-mounted video camera scraped the ceiling, forcing Jamie to hunch over slightly.

“We’d beat them at basketball,” Dex said, turning slowly as he stepped to the middle of the room.

“The interplanetary Olympics,” Jamie mused.

The windowless chamber was surprisingly bright, but utterly empty, its floor thick with reddish dust.

“We ought to take samples of this dust,” Dex said.

“Not yet.”

“Come on, Jamie! That old fart didn’t mean that we couldn’t even touch the dust on the floor.”

“Let’s check with the old fart first,” Jamie said. “Or whoever’s going to work with us on this.”

Dex was silent for a heartbeat, then said, chuckling, “They’re probably killing each other back home, fighting to get on the committee that oversees this.”

Jamie had seen his share of academic infighting. “You might be right, Dex.”

“I can just see the archeologists and paleontologists at each other’s throats.”

“Science at its finest.”

“Well,” Dex said, “we’ll have to rope these rooms off, so the tourists won’t go tramping through them.”

Jamie’s heart lurched in his chest. “Tourists?”

“Like museums, y’know,” Dex went on, “where they show you a room some old king lived in. They rope off the entrance so you can peek in, but you can’t touch anything.”

“We can’t have tourists in here,” Jamie said.

“They’re probably lining up right now, pal. Paging through their L. L. Bean catalogues to buy hard suits and camping gear for their vacations on Mars.”

“That’s not funny, Dex.”

For several moments Trumball said nothing. Then he answered in a low voice, “Yeah. I know. But it’s going to happen, Jamie. There’s nothing either one of us can do to stop it.”

Jamie had no desire to fight with Dex. Not here, he told himself. Not now.

“Come on,” he said. “Let’s see what else is here.”

“Wait a sec.” Dex pulled a digital camera from his belt. “Better take some stills as we go. Old fart-face won’t object to a camera flash, d’you think?”

“Go right ahead,” said Jamie, thinking, We ought to take scrapings from the walls and try to fix a date for this structure. The dust is probably recent, contemporary. But how old is the building?

Dex popped away with the camera while Jamie turned a slow circle, allowing the video camera fixed to his helmet to take in the full three-hundred-sixty degrees of the chamber.

Then they walked, slightly stooped, from one chamber to another, forced to their hands and knees whenever they crawled through one of the low doorways, shambling like a pair of apes as they prowled through the ancient dwelling, leaving boot prints on the rust-colored Martian dust.

How old is this structure? Jamie kept wondering. How long has it been since anyone lived here?

They entered a bigger, central chamber that had a rectangular opening in its ceiling.

“A light well,” Jamie said. “That’s how they get light into the rooms inside.”

“Like the palace at Knossos,” Dex agreed.

Nodding, Jamie murmured, “Minoan. Ancient Crete.”

“That’s the way upstairs,” Dex said, pointing at the square hole.

But there were no stairs, no ladders leading upward to the next floor. The ceilings were so low, however, that Jamie could grip the edge of the opening and lift himself through it. Straining even under the light Martian gravity, he got a knee up on the floor, dragged himself away from the opening, and got to his feet.

“Need a hand?” he offered Dex.

“If you can do it, so can I,” the younger man said. Jamie heard him grunt and snort as he climbed up and finally stood beside him.

“Nothing to it,” Dex panted.

Inside his helmet, Jamie grinned.

Slowly they made their way to the roof and strode its length with the sturdy sheltering rock hardly a meter above their helmets. It made Jamie feel a tinge of claustrophobia to have the massive, pressing rock looming so close.

“It’s all empty,” Dex said. “Not a stick of furniture or a basket or a piece of pottery.”

“Maybe there’s something buried in the dust,” Jamie suggested, knowing that he was grasping at straws.

“Nah, the dust isn’t thick enough to hide a pottery shard, for chrissakes.”

“They must have taken everything with them.”

“They sure didn’t leave anything here.”

The entire building was empty. As if it had been cleaned out, eons ago. Looted? Abandoned by its builders? Jamie wondered. Why? When?

And it struck him all over again, hit him so hard his knees went watery.

Intelligent Martians lived here! They climbed up from the Canyon floor and built this dwelling. When? How long ago? What happened to them? Where did they go?

JAMIE SHIFTED UNCOMFORTABLY IN THE ROVER’S COCKPIT SEAT AND rubbed his eyes. He’d been reading off the comm screen for hours.

“It’s taking more time to answer all these messages than we spent in the village,” he complained.

From his bunk, where he sat cross-legged with his laptop screen glowing on his face, Dex said, “Everybody wants to congratulate us— and take some of the credit.”

“I suppose.”

They had split the task of replying to the calls from Earth. Dex was handling his half from his hunk. Jamie felt his stomach growling; it was long past their normal dinnertime. He had already sent a fifteen-minute report to the news media, to be shared by any station or print outlet that wanted to use it. Jamie could imagine how the video people would edit it down to a sound byte or two.

“Let’s take a break and get back to them after we eat,” Jamie suggested.

“Good idea—wait a sec! Here’s one from Father DiNardo, in Rome.” Dex broke into laughter. “Well, whattaya know? Our Jesuit geologist got himself named chairman of the archeology team. How’s that for tricky politics?”

“DiNardo? Hold on, I want to see what he’s got to say.”

Jamie tapped the keyboard between the two cockpit seats and Fr. DiNardo’s dark, jowly face came up on the control panel’s screen.

“… congratulations with all my heart,” the priest was saying. “God has been very generous to you. And to me, too, I suppose. As I was saying, the ICU has asked me to head the committee that directs your study of the Martian structure.”

Dex grinned up the length of the rover module at Jamie and made a slicing motion across his throat with one finger. Jamie understood: there must have been plenty of knives flashing in the dark over the past thirty-six hours or so.

“Apparently the archeologists and paleontologists could not agree on one of their own people to chair the committee, so Dr. Li suggested that I do it, as a sort of neutral entity, not favoring either side.”

“God works in mysterious ways,” Dex cracked.

“A certain number of anthropologists want to be included, also,” DiNardo went on, “but I am not convinced that anthropologists have any special claim to this investigation. Clearly the Martians are not human, by definition. However, the anthropologists insist on being involved.”

Knowing that it would take almost half an hour for a reply to reach him from Mars, DiNardo went on without waiting for an answer, without even pausing for a breath, it seemed to Jamie. The man was excited, Jamie realized. Beneath the placid exterior he tried to maintain, DiNardo was just as thrilled as he was himself.

And why not? Jamie asked silently. This is the biggest discovery in the history of the human race. We’re not alone! There are—or were— intelligent creatures on Mars.

The priest finally wound down his little speech. “You have already been told to touch nothing in or around the dwelling, I understand. Tomorrow you should set up as many cameras as you can, so we can see as much as possible of the exterior and interior of the building.”

“We did a lot of that today,” Dex said, more to himself than the image on the screen. Jamie realized that DiNardo had not yet seen the imagery they had sent to Earth.

“The next thing we will want is a tour through the building using the virtual reality system. In that way, our people here can get a better feeling for what you have there.”

Jamie nodded. Makes sense, he thought.

DiNardo’s image looked up sharply from the screen, at someone or something off-camera. “I must leave you now. We have set up an electronic meeting of the full committee and I must chair it. I will call you again tomorrow. Good-bye, and God be with you.”

“Amen,” said Dex. “Now let’s eat.”

Halfway through their prepackaged dinners, Dex looked up from his tray and said, “The virtual reality tour that DiNardo wants … it’ll make a terrific tourist attraction.”

Jamie forced himself to continue chewing.

“I mean, people could buy a trip through the village right in their own homes. Whet their appetites for the real thing.”

“I suppose you could make money out of it,” Jamie said, trying to keep his voice calm.

“Yeah.”

Jamie swallowed carefully, then asked, “Any word from your father yet?”

“No, not yet.” Dex took a swig of fruit juice, then planted the plastic cup firmly on the table between them. “Oh, he’ll get around to calling. He’ll let me wait a day or two and then he’ll call. Dear old dad’s always worrying about my head getting too big, so he tries to take the air out of my balloon whenever he thinks I need it. Which is always.”