The Martian Viking (24 page)

"IT'S JUST LIKE your father to do this," Ronindella said, staring out through the transparency at the Martian desert. "Especially after we've come all this way just to see him."

Smitty didn't say anything. He was disappointed that his Dad hadn't been at Elysium when the tour got there, but he was pleased about the escape . . .even if the timing wasn't so good.

"It seems as if everything he touches turns bad," Ronindella groused. "See the woman piloting this bus?"

"It's a carrier, Mom."

"Carrier, bus, what's the difference? Anyway, she was the co-pilot on the Interplan ship that brought your father to Mars. And do you know what happened?"

"No."

"The captain was murdered by Arkies, and they sent a complete crew to fly her ship back to Earth. They didn't need Prudy, so she's been stuck here ever since, poor thing. God bless her."

Smitty thought the carrier pilot was mean, but he didn't say so. Besides, what did his Dad have to do with any of this stuff? Just because he was on their Interplan ship, it was supposed to be his fault?

"And what do I have to go back to?" Ronindella went on. "Ryan's been sent to the moon, and your father's income in going to evaporate, now that he's become a deserter. What am I going to do?"

Maybe you could get a job, Smitty thought. But he didn't dare to say it aloud. Someday he would, but not yet.

"I'll have to appeal to the Church," Ronindella said. "That's all there is to it."

Smitty groaned.

"They'll help me. I know they will. If they don't help the victims of men like Johnsmith Biberkopf, the Conglom won't give them so much air time."

Smitty didn't know if he believed that, but his Mom always said this kind of thing. She was pretty sure that the Church was there to help her out, but it seemed to Smitty that she put so much into her Church activities that they were getting more than their money's worth from her. His Dad had said things along those lines once or twice, but she had accused him of being sacrilegious and he had shut up.

"You could stay on Mars," the old man sitting across the aisle said. "They always need people here, volunteers for the hard work that has to be done on the frontier."

"Frontier?" Ronindella said. "Do you really expect me to slave away with a bunch of common criminals for the rest of my life, mister?"

"It would be good for the boy." The old man smiled at Smitty, revealing gleaming white dentures. "A healthy environment, unsullied by the corruption of our tired home planet."

Ronindella eyed the old man suspiciously. "Are you a Connie?"

"I am indeed a member of the Conservation Party, Miz. Perhaps you've heard of me. I am Herbert L. Silver, elected representative from Mid North America."

"Sinner," Ronindella hissed.

"I beg your pardon." Mr. Silver looked indignant.

"You people promote the ways of Satan," Ronindella said. "You've held back progress for far too long."

"Madame, the Conservation Party has tried to preserve what is best about the Earth."

"Now you're trying to stop progress on the other planets and the Belt. I know what you're all about."

"Stuff and nonsense." The old man was looking at her with fire in his eyes.

"I'm not going to let you use your evil influence over my son," Ronindella said, her voice rising.

"I assure you—" The Connie Rep's protests were cut off by the whining of the carrier's motors.

Smitty was sure that they were nowhere near the outpost the tour was supposed to visit next, and yet they were stopping. Something had happened. Maybe there were Martians after all, and the pilot had seen one.

No such luck. He could see five people in pressure suits standing on an outcropping a little to the left up ahead. They were waving their arms wildly, as if they were afraid the carrier would pass on by without stopping to pick them up.

The carrier slowed down and began to descend the few meters to the ground. The passengers were jostled slightly as it landed, and Smitty watched the five people climbing down from the outcropping to get aboard.

The cabin was sealed off, and the pilot got into her pressure suit so the hatch could be opened. They came in one by one, and the last one, a woman, was holding a gun in her right hand.

Through the transparency, the passengers watched in horror as the woman took off her helmet and pointed the gun at the pilot. She was a pretty, thin woman with short, dark hair—and she was hijacking the carrier.

"Oh, my God," his mother and the Connie said in unison.

The other passengers were babbling away, too. They were all scared shitless. Smitty felt a little scared, but he thought this was kind of neat at the same time.

The cockpit was pressurized again, and the transparent seal was lifted. The alien odor of Mars wafted in as one of the hijackers entered the cabin. He reached up to remove his helmet.

"Please keep calm," he said.

It was only then that Smitty realized what he was seeing.

His Dad saw him at the same time.

"Dad!" Smitty cried.

"Smitty!"

"Johnny!" Ronindella screamed.

"Ronnie!" Johnsmith exclaimed.

The Connie rep glared at Ronindella. "So
I'm
the criminal, am I?"

Smitty was in the aisle, running to his father. Johnsmith stooped to embrace him.

"Son!" Johnsmith said with tears in his eyes. "I can't believe it!"

"What I can't believe, sir," said an indignant Representative Silver, "is that you have hijacked this vehicle, violating the laws of the Conglomerated United Nations of Earth."

"Another few hours, and we would have died out there," Johnsmith said. "And we're not going back to Elysium, now that we're considered criminals."

"Perhaps you should consider giving yourselves up," the Connie said. "It will probably be a lot easier on you in the long run."

"We've been on Mars for years," Johnsmith said, "and none of us have found anything easy here."

Two of the other hijackers were coming into the cabin now, a man and a woman.

"But how do you know?" the woman was saying. "How can you possibly know it's going to happen, that it isn't just an illusion?"

"I know," the man said simply.

The woman had a funny expression on her face, as though she had never run into anybody like this before. Smitty thought that was odd, because the man was very ordinary looking, short with a shaved head.

"Where are you taking us?" a woman in the back of the cab asked.

"To Olympus Mons," the man with the shaved head told her.

"Oh, I was hoping we'd get to see that," the woman said drily.

The engines whined again, and the carrier began to lift off the dry seabed. As soon as it was through the pass, Frankie instructed the pilot to fly to the northwest at top speed. The carrier accelerated, and soon the orange desert was an indistinct blur beneath them.

Ronindella would not speak to Johnsmith. She hadn't forgiven him for becoming an Arkie, and she wanted him to know it. It was amazing to Smitty that they could have been apart all these months and start fighting as soon as they saw each other. His Dad didn't seem to care, though. He seemed happy just to be sitting here talking to Smitty, and that was great. Let her sit there sulking; that would give Smitty all the more time with his Dad.

"How did you get to Mars?" Johnsmith asked, grinning at Smitty.

"I won a contest."

"What? That's incredible!"

"Yeah, it was a Kwikkee-Kwizeen contest, and I—"

Smitty was cut short by one of the Arkies, a sweaty, fat black man, coming down the aisle.

"Johnsmith," the man said. "Something has happened."

"What?" Johnsmith leaned forward in his seat. "What is it, Alderdice?"

"Frankie's punched in a code to talk to Olympus . . . ." Alderdice seemed very worried.

"Yes, and what happened?" Johnsmith said.

"There's no answer."

Johnsmith didn't wait to hear more. He got up and went through the cab, ducking his head to get into the cockpit.

"Alderdice says you can't get through to Olympus," Johnsmith said. "Are you sure you've got the correct code?"

"We're getting through now," Frankie said.

"Well, that's good news." Johnsmith saw that Frankie did not look relieved. "Isn't it?"

"Well, it would be, except that there's nobody home."

"Nobody home? I don't understand."

"We're getting a recorded message." She lifted a tiny earpiece to his face. "Listen."

Johnsmith held it to his ear. He heard a man's ecstatic voice saying, " . . .the Viking Monument." A pause followed. "The signs have been observed . . .the Ship is on its way . . .gather at the Viking Monument . . ."

"It's on a continuous loop," Johnsmith said, after listening to the message twice more. "It says the Ship is on its way to the Viking Monument."

"Yes." Jethro Pease's eyes were glazed with delight and wonder.

"What is the Viking Monument?" Prudy asked.

Johnsmith stared at her blankly, trying to remember if she had ever spoken to him before, except to order him around. "I think it must mean the monument where the first Viking lander set down almost a hundred years ago."

Nobody spoke for a few seconds, giving Johnsmith time to consider the implications of the message. The Viking Lander Monument as the site of a Viking ship's arrival—a ship that existed only as a fantasy on an archecoded oneiric sphere the size of a ball bearing? Insane.

"Why don't we go see for ourselves?" Frankie said. "It should be easy enough to do."

"Yeah," the pilot said. "There's an automatic guidance program that hits all the touristy spots. The Viking Monument is definitely on the agenda, almost due west in Chryse."

"Then punch it in," Johnsmith said.

Alderdice, Pease, Felicia, and Frankie all looked at him curiously. He assumed that they were responding to his commanding tone, which surprised him, too. Johnsmith had never been a believer in destiny or fate, and yet it now seemed that just such an entity was beckoning.

"Do as he says," said Frankie.

"But how do we know . . .?" Felicia trailed off.

"We don't know anything," Johnsmith said. "But we don't have anyplace else to go."

Felicia looked frightened and confused, like a little girl who had just walked in on her parents having sex.

"The Ship, the Ship," Jethro Pease chanted. "We're going to see the Ship."

The pilot had finished punching in the coordinates. The whine of the engines changed pitch, and the hijackers were thrown against one another as the carrier pointed to the west.

Johnsmith went back and sat down with his son.

"Where are we going, Dad?" Smitty asked eagerly.

"We're going to see something nobody's ever seen before, Smitty."

"Yeah, what is it?"

"I don't know exactly. Let's just call it the Ship, for now."

"The Ship!" Smitty remembered the onee he had touched in his Dad's effapt, on that sad day when they had come to clean the place out. He didn't know if he should tell his Dad about it, though. After all, he wasn't supposed to use onees, not even by accident. Not even one he found among his Dad's belongings . . . .

"Smitty, there's something happening on Mars. I first got a glimpse of it through an onee, the night before I was drafted."

Smitty couldn't believe it. Here was his Dad, confessing that he had used onees, too. In fact, they might even have used the same one.

"It was a ship," Johnsmith said. "A Viking, or Geatish, ship. I saw it, not knowing that the onee had originated in an illegal plant on Mars. I thought it was just a hallucination, but now I'm beginning to think there's more to it."

"Dad," Smitty whispered, not wanting his mother to hear.

Johnsmith leaned closer to his son.

"Dad, I touched one of those onees, too."

A strange look came over Johnsmith Biberkopf's face. His brow furrowed, and he frowned. But his expression gradually changed. He smiled at Smitty. "Then you know all about it, don't you, son?"

Smitty grinned. It was okay, after all. All the bullshit about onees didn't matter. He and his Dad had both taken them, and they were together now, and it was going to bring them even closer together. Smitty felt like yelling at the top of his lungs, telling everybody in the carrier, everybody on Mars, everybody in the whole frigging solar system.

"This is great, Dad," he said.

"Yeah, it sure is."

They both threw back their heads and laughed, two guys who loved each other, and who shared a very special secret.

Ronindella turned and glared at her husband. "Oh, I hope you're having fun, Johnny," she said. "I just hope you're having a wonderful time subverting your own son, because when they catch up with you, they'll lock you up and throw away the key."

"Maybe so, heart of my heart," Johnsmith said, his voice dripping with sarcasm, "but I will at least have known something you'll never know."

Ronindella sneered, clearly not interested in what he had to say. "Asshole," she said.

"You think I'm a fool," Johnsmith said. "But the truth is, I've loved someone besides myself, and you never have."

Ronindella turned on him in a rage. "I love God," she snarled.

"That's a convenient excuse for acting with almost complete selfishness," he said calmly. "As long as you can convince yourself that you're closer to God than the rest of us, then you can treat us like shit. Well, I'm not buying that anymore."

"Look who's talking about selfishness," Ronindella screamed. "You lost your job and got drafted, leaving your wife and child to shift for themselves."

"You got almost all the money I've earned on Mars," he said. "And as for losing my job . . .well, at least I had one once."

Ronindella pursed her trembling lips. He had never talked to her like this. What had happened to him? Had he gone totally mad here on Mars? "How dare you speak to me like that?" she said, but the fire was no longer in her.

"I dare to talk like that, because it's the truth. You live here as a Conglom slave for a while, honey, and it makes you see a lot of things clearly that you never saw on Earth."

Smitty was looking up at his Dad admiringly. He had dreamed of a moment like this a thousand times, but he had given up on ever actually seeing it. It was so neat to see his Dad fighting back, telling his Mom off, just as she deserved.