Return to Mars (63 page)

Connors talked on and on, more to have something to say, to feel that he was doing something, than for any other reason, Jamie thought. This disaster’s hit him almost as hard as it’s hit us.

“You’ll have to figure out which one of them did it, which one’s the wacko. We’ll keep it quiet, don’t worry about that. Nobody here wants to admit that one of our own people sabotaged the expedition. But we’ll have to know, have to check into the psych profile and background. For future reference, to make certain that type doesn’t get included in future missions.”

Future missions? Jamie thought. Will there be future missions? They won’t be able to keep this out of the news media. Sooner or later somebody will leak the story. He could picture the headlines: Scientist goes crazy on Mars, tries to wipe out expedition.

“For what it’s worth,” Connors continued, “I think it was Hall. I can’t believe an astronaut, a flier, would crack up like that. It wasn’t Rodriguez; I’d bet money on it.”

Jamie nodded silent agreement.

After Connors signed off, Jamie got up and walked slowly to the greenhouse hatch. If anyone noticed that he had left the comm center unattended, no one said a word.

He pushed the inner hatch open and stepped into the greenhouse. Nothing had changed. The plants were all gone, their trays nothing but twisted, buckled metal frames. The glass bricks of the ceiling and one wall were charred black, the floor littered with burned debris. It smelled acrid, faintly musty, an odor Jamie had not smelled since he’d been a boy, hiding in the unused fireplace of his parents’ house. Nothing was wet. Nothing dripped. There was no sound at all inside the greenhouse, it was as silent as death. A mess. A terrible wasteful mess.

When he finally came out of the greenhouse and made his dismal way to the galley, the three other men were still sitting glumly at the table. Jamie still smelled a faint burnt odor in the air. Imagination, he told himself. Maybe not.

“Stacy’s in the infirmary, helping Vijay change Trudy’s dressings,” Dex said, without being asked.

“How’re they doing?” Jamie asked.

Craig waggled a hand in the air. “Trudy’s got second-degree burns over the upper half of her body. She’s a mess.”

“Her face, too?”

“Yep.”

“And Tomas?”

“Hands and arms, mostly. Shoulders. Looks like he was trying to drag Trudy out of there when the smoke got him.”

“Serves him right for sleeping on the job,” Dex muttered.

“Tomas? Sleeping?”

“He was snoozing at the console around three this morning,” Dex said angrily. “I saw him.”

“Not him,” Fuchida said, shaking his head.

“I saw him.”

“Then she must have drugged him,” the biologist insisted. “I know Tom. He would not sleep on duty.”

“Then it was Trudy who set the fire?” Jamie asked rhetorically.

“And punctured the garden dome during the storm,” Fuchida said firmly. “And the other ‘accidents,’ too.”

Jamie started to go to the food locker for some breakfast, but realized that he had no appetite.

Turning back to the others, he said, “Come on, let’s get the video cameras and document the damage. Tarawa’s going to need the imagery.”

Craig and Fuchida got up from the table and headed off. Dex rose to his feet, too, but remained as the other two left.

“What is it, Dex?” Jamie asked.

“We’re packing it in?”

Jamie nodded. “As soon as we do a damage assessment, we’ll go back to Dome One and take off for Earth.”

“Heading home, with our tails between our legs.”

“Not much else we can do,” Jamie said. Two people badly injured, one of them a psycho. This expedition is a bust.”

Dex looked as grim as Connors had. Grimmer.

“The thing is,” he said slowly, “if we leave, that tears up the

Navaho claim to this territory.”

A flash of fear raced along Jamie’s nerves. “What do you mean?”

Very gently, like a doctor breaking the news of a loved one’s death, Dex said, “You’ve got to be on the ground to maintain a legal claim to the utilization rights. Once we leave, anybody can claim this territory.”

Jamie felt his insides go hollow. “But we’re being forced to leave. An accident—”

“Cuts no ice,” Dex said. “I’ve studied the law, the treaties and all the international agreements. If you abandon this territory, your legal claim goes down the chute.”

Jamie sank down onto the nearest chair.

“I’m sorry,” Dex said softly.

“But your father won’t be,” Jamie muttered.

“No, dammit. He’ll be overjoyed.”

Trudy Hall’s hands, arms, face, her entire upper body was wrapped in spray-on antiseptic bandaging. Her eyes were covered, a breathing tube was inserted into her nostrils. There was a small slit where her mouth should be. What was left of her hair looked like the singed pinfeathers of a badly seared chicken.

The medical monitors on one side of the cramped infirmary cubicle were all humming peacefully, however. Blood pressure, heart rate, and most of the other indicators were steady. Her breathing was ragged, but that was to be expected from the fire-heated air she had inhaled.

“Has she regained consciousness at all?” Jamie asked, in a whisper.

Vijay stood on the other side of the bed, replacing a bag of saline solution for the IV drip.

“Only briefly,” she answered, her voice somewhat louder than his. “I’ve been sedating her rather heavily, you know. She’d be in considerable pain otherwise.”

“I need to talk to her,” he said.

“Not for a while, mate.”

“And Tomas?”

“He’s in much better shape,” Vijay said, allowing herself a tiny smile. “You can talk to him all you want.”

Rodriguez lay in his bunk on his stomach, head and shoulders propped up by a small mountain of cushions. Jamie recognized them: they were mattresses from one of the rovers, rolled tightly and strapped with duct tape.

“I just couldn’t keep my eyes open,” he was telling Jamie, his face showing guilt and puzzlement. “Never happened to me before, I just couldn’t keep my eyes open.”

“Trudy put sleeping pills in your coffee,” Jamie said. He had pulled the cubicle’s desk chair up to the edge of the bunk. “Vijay told me she’d been taking pills—”

“I never saw her take any,” Rodriguez blurted.

Jamie shrugged. “She must’ve been saving them to use on you.”

“I still can’t believe that she’d do that.”

“She’s emotionally sick,” Jamie said. “She must be.”

“Yeah, guess so.”

“The smoke alarm woke you up?”

Rodriguez nodded, winced. His back must be painful, Jamie realized.

“Yeah. Y’know, I felt like I’d been drugged. Couldn’t move fast at first, everything seemed slow, dopey.”

“Trudy wasn’t in the comm center?”

“No. I saw the smoke coming from the greenhouse hatch. She wasn’t anywhere in sight, so I went in to see if she’d been caught inside the greenhouse. And there she was.”

There she was, Jamie thought. A poor scared little sparrow who went over the edge. Why? What happened in her mind to make her snap like this?

Another voice in his head sneered, What difference does it make? She’s destroyed this expedition and turned Mars over to Trumball and his world-wreckers.

THEY RETURNED TO DOME ONE, DISPIRITED, WEARY, A SAD PROCESSION OF beaten men and women. Hall had to be carried in; Rodriguez could walk shakily, Jamie and Dex supporting him.

After they got the L/AV’s fuel cells producing electricity for the dome, Craig and Dezhurova went out to the fuel generator to connect it to the fuel cells.

Fuchida shook his head as he stood in the middle of the dome. “Mars has defeated us,” he said quietly.

Jamie suppressed an urge to punch him. “Mars didn’t do this,” he snapped. “We’ve defeated ourselves.”

Hours later, Jamie was helping Vijay check out the medical stores inventory, comparing what was actually on the shelves of the infirmary against the computer records. The replenishment mission was bringing

a fresh cargo of medical supplies, bin they had to make certain the computer inventory was correct before they left.

“Remember our first night here?” Jamie asked. “The party?”

“I remember you hiding in your quarters while the rest of us partied,” Vijay said.

“I remember other nights, too,” Jamie said. He was sitting at her tiny desk, the inventory list on the computer screen in front of him.

She turned from the open cabinet and looked at him. “So do I,” she said, her voice low.

“They were good.”

Vijay nodded, then turned back to her work.

Jamie found that he couldn’t focus his attention on the inventory list. His mind was filled with thoughts of Trumball and the Navaho Nation and how this expedition had been such a disaster even though they had found the Martian building and Mars must be dotted with similar buildings, there must be the remains of cities scattered across the planet, there couldn’t be just this one building left on a whole world that was populated by intelligent beings, and how much he wanted Vijay, standing close enough for him to reach out and take in his arms yet miles away, light-years away because he had pushed her out of his life and had no right, no hope, not even a whisper of a chance to bring her back to him.

He heard himself tell her, “I’m not leaving.” His voice sounded so damned controlled, not a trace of emotion showing.

Vijay closed the cabinet. When she turned, her luminous midnight eyes were sorrowful. “I know.”

That jolted him. “How could you know? I didn’t know myself until just now.”

She made a rueful smile. “I’m the psychologist, remember? And I know you. As soon as Dex told you that if we all left it would break the Navaho claim, I knew you’d stay.”

“You knew it before I did, then.”

“No,” Vijay said, shaking her head. “You knew it then, too, but you had to go through all the logical steps first. You had to turn it over in your mind and convince yourself you could last here four months or more by yourself.”

Reluctantly he nodded agreement. “I guess you’re right.”

“So you’ve concluded that you can make it, then?”

“I think so. I don’t see why not.”

“By yourself?”

He wanted to say, not if you’ll stay with me, but knew that he couldn’t ask her that. It was one thing to risk his own neck alone on Mars for more than four months, he couldn’t ask her to share that risk with him. It meant too much, there were too many complications.

So he merely nodded tightly and said, “By myself, yes.”

“Just you and Mars, eh?”

He shrugged. “It shouldn’t he that much of a sweat. The garden here is okay. All the equipment is functioning. I won’t starve and I won’t run out of air.”

“But you’ll want to run down to the building and poke around some more, won’t you?”

“No,” Jamie said firmly. “I’m going to stay right here and do some of the geological work we should’ve done months ago.” Then he added, “And I’ll try making a few solar cells out of in situ materials. It’d be a big help if we could generate enough electricity out of sunlight to run the entire dome.”

“Alone,” she repeated.

He hesitated for the barest fraction of a moment, then said, “Alone.”

Her face a blank mask, Vijay put her hand out to Jamie and said, “Well, come on then, you’d better tell the others.”

The others were gathering in the galley for their last dinner on Mars, all except Trudy, who was still confined to her bunk. The burns on her face would require plastic surgery, and despite all of Rodriguez’s assurances that it would all turn out fine, she had sunk into a pit of depression.

Rodriguez tried hard to cheer her, making a show of each time he could get rid of a set of bandages. Stacy, Jamie and even Fuchida had spent hours with Trudy, assuring her that there would be no publicity about her emotional breakdown, no accusations, no blame. Their assurances seemed only to deepen the biologist’s depression.

Vijay slapped together a dinner tray for Trudy as the others milled about, making their selections without worrying about the planned menus the nutritionists had worked out for them.

“I’ll be happy to see a real steak again,” Fuchida said, quite seriously.

“With real beer,” Rodriguez quipped.

Without a word to any of them, Vijay started off toward Trudy’s quarters with the tray. Behind her, she heard Jamie announce:

“I’m not leaving with you. I’m going to stay here.”

She slid Trudy’s door open, stepped through, and slammed it shut again.

Trudy was sitting up now, her back healed enough for her to rest it against a water-filled plastic cushion. It had struck Vijay, when she pulled the device out of the medical stores, that they might have adapted it to make waterbeds for themselves. Fine time to think of that, she had huffed at herself.

“How’re you feeling?” Vijay asked brightly.

“We’re leaving tomorrow?” Trudy asked. The bandages were off her face; her skin was raw and pink. It would he scarred and brittle by the time they reached Earth. She had no eyebrows, no eyelashes. She was lucky that she could still see, Vijay thought, then wondered how lucky it was to be able to look into a mirror when your face is so horribly burned.

“Yes,” Vijay replied, keeping her voice light, cheerful. “Tomorrow.”

Trudy looked down at the tray Vijay placed on her lap. At last she murmured, “I’ve made an awful mess of everything, haven’t I?”

Vijay answered softly, “I suppose one could say that.”

“I could have killed Tommy. I never thought that I’d be placing him in danger.”

Vijay wanted to say that she’d placed them all in danger, but she held her tongue. Trudy Hall was going to be a wonderful subject for a psychology research paper, she thought. I’ll have five months on the return trip to study her, probe her motivations …