Return to Mars (51 page)

Jamie kept glancing at the control panel up in the cockpit, to see if the message light was blinking. It remained dark. Dex seemed oblivious to what he was trying to do, singing and laughing as hard as any of the others. Harder, perhaps.

By midnight there was still no call from Earth. But if any Martians were roaming across that bitterly cold, almost airless plain by the edge of the Grand Canyon, wafting on the thin night air they would have heard strange, alien voices singing raggedly:

“Deck us all with Boston, Charlie,

Walla Walla, Wash., and Kalamazoo.

Nora’s freezin’ on the trolley,

Swaller dollar, cauliflower, alley-ga-roo

MY BACK HURTS.

Jamie looked up to see Fuchida lifting his helmet off. The biologist looked tired; fatigue lines creased his forehead and his eyes were bleary.

Jamie had just finished vacuuming the dust off his hard suit after still another day of sweeping inside the cliff dwelling. Fuchida had been the last of the team to ride up the cable and return to the rover.

For more than a week now the four explorers had been painstakingly, tediously sweeping the dust off the floor and walls of the building. Under the direction of DiNardo’s committee of Earthbound archeologists and paleontologists, Jamie, Dex, Trudy and Mitsuo had adapted the brushes originally intended to clean spacesuits and electronic equipment into makeshift brooms and whisks.

Day after day they laboriously cleaned a small patch of one of the rooms, sifting the dust carefully to make certain that they did not miss a shard of pottery or sliver of metal. They found nothing. Night after night they limped back to the rover, backs aching, fingers cramped from hours of gripping the improvised handles of then” lowly tools.

“Whoever was here,” Dex said tiredly after a week of it, “picked the place clean. There’s nothing here. Nothing at all.”

Fuchida had already pulled down his upper bunk and climbed into it. “We are wasting our time. Trudy and I should be down on the Canyon floor, where the lichen are.”

Jamie, in the galley microwaving his dinner, perked up his ears. If Mitsuo’s starting to complain, we’ve got real trouble here.

“I’ll talk it over with DiNardo tonight,” he promised. “Maybe Dex and I can finish the sweeping while you and Trudy get back to the lichen.”

Hall was sitting on the edge of her bunk, beneath Fuchida’s. “His blasted committee takes a week to decide anything.”

Dex agreed. “Yeah. I say we check it out with Stacy, and if she doesn’t have any problem with the move, we let Trudy and Mitsuo go down to the Canyon floor.”

“And DiNardo?” Jamie asked.

“We tell him what we’re doing, we don’t ask him.”

Jamie thought it over. The microwave chimed and he pulled his dinner tray out and walked up to the table standing between the two racks of bunks.

Sitting beside Dex, who was already wolfing down his own dinner, Jamie realized that the younger man had matured considerably over the past weeks. He’s getting downright likeable, Jamie thought.

“How do you feel about suspending your geology work, Dex?”

The younger man shrugged as he chewed. Then he swallowed and answered, “I sure as hell don’t appreciate being turned into a menial laborer. That’s grad student’s work. But I guess somebody’s got to do it.”

“I appreciate your help,” Jamie said.

Instead of his usual grin, Dex gave him a thoughtful glance. ‘ ‘I just wish we could find something. Something. All this damned sweeping and we haven’t found a pin.”

Nodding, Jamie said, “It’s like you said, Dex. Somebody cleaned this place out very thoroughly before they left.”

“Who? And where’d they go to?”

“Those are the big questions, aren’t they?”

Dex shook his head. “I don’t like mysteries. They bother me. I always read the end first.”

With a smile, Jamie said, “We don’t know what the end is on this one.”

“It’s enough to drive you nuts!” Dex blurted. “The building is there, but it tells us nothing. Not a goddamned thing!”

“It tells us that there were builders here,” Jamie said softly. “Intelligent Martians.”

Dex nodded wearily. “Yeah. But that’s not enough, is it?”

“Not now,” Jamie agreed.

“Anything from the soarplanes?”

“Nothing so far. Nothing that looks like a village or a building. Nothing from the satellite scans, either.”

“Nothing recognizable.”

“Remember that the satellites and soarplanes didn’t spot this building,” Jamie reminded him.

“Yeah, I know,” said Dex. “It took the keen eyes of our Navaho scout.”

Jamie smiled. For once, there was no malice in Dex’s wisecrack.

The younger man grumbled, “There could be a zillion more buildings like this one scattered across the planet, and we wouldn’t know it until we stumbled onto them.”

Jamie looked across the table at the two biologists. They both seemed to be asleep already. Mitsuo’s right, he said to himself. They should be down studying the lichen, not doing stoop labor here.

He had wondered briefly about Trudy being alone with the three of them, but as far as he could tell there was no sexual tension in the rover. The quarters here are too tight for anything to happen, Jamie thought. Besides, Trudy’s made it clear that Rodriguez is her man and Tomas could get very physical with any guy who bothered her. She’s well protected, even though he’s not here.

Dex intruded on his thoughts. ”Well, we might as well go see what the day’s soarplane images look like.”

“Good idea.”

The two men slid out from the table and went up to the cockpit. Jamie spoke briefly with Dezhurova, who swiftly agreed that the biologists should be doing biology, but then added:

“They will need their own rover, to get down to the Canyon floor. I will send Rodriguez with the number two rover.”

“His hand’s okay?”

“Not good enough to play baseball, but good enough to drive.”

“Okay. How soon?”

“A day to stock the rover. Two days to reach you.”

“Fine,” said Jamie. He thought about asking to speak with Vijay, but with Dex sitting beside him, decided against it. She had not called him, and he had not called her. Probably better to leave it at that, for the time being, he told himself.

“We want to see today’s imagery from the soarplane,” Dex said.

Dezhurova nodded. “Nothing new, but you should look for yourselves.”

She was right, Jamie saw. The imagery showed the rusty, frigid, barren Martian landscape in beautiful detail, down to a one-meter resolution. But no hint of buildings. Not a trace of structure, order. No outlines of ancient foundations. No piles of dressed stones. Nothing but bare, empty wilderness, endlessly. Miles and miles of nothing but miles and miles, Jamie thought. It makes Death Valley look lush and inviting.

“Funny thing,” Dex said as they watched the imagery unfold silently on the cockpit screen.

“What?”

“I got a message from my old man. Sort of a belated Christmas card.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. Couple days ago. Said he’s sorry he couldn’t talk to me on Christmas day. He was in Monaco, at an international conference of nonprofit research foundations.”

“Raising money?”

“What else?” Dex asked. “Oh, I suppose he chased a few topless bathing beauties. He does that when he’s away from home.”

“Did your mother call you on Christmas?” Jamie wondered aloud.

Dex snorted. “I got her Christmas greeting two days early. She always sends all her greetings early. Records one message and sends it out to her mailing list. As personal as a department store catalogue, my mom.”

Jamie could not think of anything to say.

“The thing is,” Dex went on, “Dad said he was proud of the work I’m doing here. He sort of read it, like he was reading it off a teleprompter. Probably got one of his flunkies to write it out for him.”

“I don’t think—”

Dex laughed softly. “You don’t know the old bird the way I do. But he actually said he was proud of me. I think that’s a first.”

“Well, I’m glad he did.”

Dex looked at Jamie for a long silent moment as they sat side by side in the cockpit. “You didn’t have anything to do with it, did you?”

“Me?”

”I mean, the old man never told me was proud of me before. Did you put him onto it?”

Before Jamie could answer, Dex said, “Never mind. Don’t tell me. I don’t want to know. I’d rather think my dear old dad is getting sentimental in his old age.”

Now Jamie chuckled. “He doesn’t strike me as the sentimental type.”

“No, not hardly,” Dex agreed. “Anyway, if you did have a hand in it … thanks.”

Jamie kept silent, not wanting to strain the slender thread that was slowly strengthening between the two of them.

“Another thing,” Dex said, as the barren imagery flowed across the screen. “We’ve got to move the dome here, sooner or later. I think sooner would be better.”

Jamie sighed. “I’ve been thinking about that.”

“And?”

“How about asking Tarawa to send the backup dome here, with cables and equipment to build a better lift?”

Dex’s eyes lit up. “That way we wouldn’t have to move the base.”

“Right,” said Jamie.

“The thing is, it’d take five-six months to get it here even if they started on it tomorrow morning.”

“True,” Jamie admitted. “But trying to move the dome from where it is would take a month to six weeks, wouldn’t it?”

“At least.”

“And we wouldn’t be doing any productive work during that time. The useful work would stop dead.”

“Yeah.”

“They’ve got the backup dome just sitting there at Baikonur—”

“And a resupply mission is in the budget,” Dex finished for Jamie.

“Right! That’s the way to do it.”

“Good. I’ll tell Stacy and she can relay it to Connors.”

“Do you think Tarawa will agree to it?”

“They’ll have to,” Dex said firmly. “I mean, we can’t keep shuttling rovers back and forth. It’s wasteful. And we’re eating up all our prepackaged food. We’ll have no backup food supplies. We’re supposed to be living off the garden.”

Jamie knew it was true. “We’ll have to set up another greenhouse.”

Nodding enthusiastically, Dex said, “Why not make it a manned flight? Bring in some of those archeologists who want to get here.”

“They’d have to undergo months of training, Dex. You can’t just pick a team of people and pop them off to Mars without training them first.”

Dex’s face fell slightly. “Yeah. Right.”

“But it makes sense to pick a few and start training them now,” Jamie said.

“I suppose,” Dex replied. “The thing is, I was hoping to get some of ‘em here soon enough so they could do the sweeping work, instead of us.”

“I’VE GOT SOMETHING HERE.”

Jamie looked up from his sweeping. It had been another monotonous, laborious day. They had cleared the entire top floor of the dwelling and found nothing. Not an iota of material of any sort. Nothing but bare walls. Now they were working on the second floor.

Rodriguez had just started his trek in the rover from the dome to them, his departure delayed by a dozen maddeningly tiny but unavoidable holdups, including the fact that he could not squeeze his bandaged hand into his hard suit glove. At the last minute Vijay had to find a larger-sized glove for him. She took one of Craig’s from his backup supplies.

Pete Connors had immediately endorsed the idea of sending the spare dome and all its equipment to the Canyon site. He bucked the request to the ICU board, with a personal message to Trumball in Boston about it.

“Mitsuo, was that you?” Jamie asked.

“Yes,” the biologist replied. His voice sounded strange, choked, tight with tension. “Come and take a look at this.”

Jamie was in the middle of a large room, slowly, carefully sweeping the dust from the floor to the opening that led below. If you pushed the dust too hard it would billow and drift back to the area you had just cleared. And every few minutes they had to sift the dust with screens scavenged from the air duct supplies.

It would be so much easier if they could simply vacuum the dust up off the floors and walls, but the hand vacs that they used to clean their suits could not handle the sheer volume of dust accumulated in the building; it was several centimeters deep in some corners. The hand vacs were running raggedly as it was, working harder than their designers had ever intended each evening when the four of them climbed back into the rover, caked with rustred dust almost up to their helmets. Rodriguez was bringing a set of backups with him, so that the ones they were using could go back to Stacy and Wiley Craig for some much-needed maintenance.

Besides, the scientists back on Earth had insisted on sifting the dust by hand. The vacuum cleaners might pass or crush some incalculably important shard of pottery or chip of fossilized bone.

Jamie almost had to laugh. They had found nothing. Nada. Zip. Zero. No shards, no chips, no traces of anything but maddeningly endless dust.

Until this moment.

“What is it, Mitsuo?” Jamie asked as he headed for the corner where the biologist had been working. Now he was standing stock-still, facing the wall he had been cleaning.

“You … you’d better come and see for yourself.”

Dex came striding across the big empty chamber, the royal blue stripes on his hard suit almost indistinguishable beneath a coating of red dust. Trudy Hall was close behind him.

“Whatcha got, pal?” Dex asked. “Find any Martians?”

“I think maybe so.” Fuchida’s voice was trembling slightly.

Jamie saw he was pointing at the wall he’d been cleaning. It was not a smoothly blank face, as the other walls had been.