Mars Life

The Old Ones knew that life is not rare, but precious; not fragile, but vulnerable. Life is as deep as the seas in which it was born, as strong as the mountains that give it shelter, as universal as the stars themselves.

Yet life is always in danger, threatened by the very forces that created it, imperiled by the whims of Coyote and the implacable workings of time itself. On the red world life was nearly extinguished by the howling Sky Demons. Yet life clung to existence. Life persisted. But slowly, slowly, the spark was guttering out. One day, inevitably, life would disappear from the red world forever.

Unless Lifebringer could return.

Tithonium Base: The Greenhouse

Jamie decided to hold the news conference in the greenhouse. He knew it was going to be grueling, but he wanted to show the viewers on Earth that the Martian explorers were safe and comfortable.

Edith Elgin had volunteered to moderate the news conference from Selene, for which Jamie was immensely grateful. She coordinated the reporters’ questions and acted as hostess for the show. She relayed the questions to Jamie, who planned to respond to each one in turn, then wait for backup questions to reach him on Mars. It was tedious, but when the various segments were spliced together the conference would appear almost seamless, almost as though it had taken place in real time.

So Jamie stood in the greenhouse dome with the long hydroponics trays and their lush green plants behind him. Off to one side was Kalman Torok’s little plot of a garden, tended now by Sal Hasdrubal and one of the new arrivals from Selene.

And up in orbit circling Mars, Monsignor DiNardo’s body waited for the fusion torch ship that would come from Earth and return him to the land of his birth.

Edith’s bright, youthful face filled the portable screen that one of the communications technicians had set up in the greenhouse. She couldn’t look glum if she tried, Jamie thought, watching her as she introduced him and explained how the conference would be handled.

“To you viewers,” she was saying, “it will look like this is a realtime interview. But remember that Dr. Waterman is really on Mars, about ninety-seven million kilometers from Earth as we record his statements.”

Behind the screen stood a pair of comm techs running the cameras and Vijay, her dark face serious, her radiant eyes fixed on Jamie. He tried to smile for her, then decided it wouldn’t look right for the cameras. “Serious, composed, distressed but determined,” Edith had told him earlier, smiling encouragingly. “That’s how you’ve got to come across. Show ’em some of that Navaho dignity and strength of character.”

Strength of character, Jamie thought. How can I tell the world that DiNardo deliberately kept the knowledge of his cardiac problem from us? How do I tell them that the medics who examined him missed the fact that he was taking blood-pressure pills? It makes us all look stupid, or at least too anxious to have the priest here to do a really careful job of examining him. I’ve got to avoid that. I’ve got to keep that out of sight.

The first question was from the famous Orlando Ventura of World Wide News: “Dr. Waterman, we understand that Monsignor DiNardo had a preexisting cardiac problem, yet he was allowed to go to Mars. Do you feel some responsibility for his death?”

Are you still beating your wife? Jamie asked himself. The screen froze on an image of Ventura’s lean, sculpted face. He looks like a coyote, Jamie thought: the same cold eyes.

Taking a breath, Jamie began, “The medical consensus is that being on Mars had nothing to do with Monsignor DiNardo’s death. He might have suffered a fatal stroke in the Vatican.”

Glad that there was no way for the interviewer to interrupt him, he went on, “Monsignor DiNardo wanted very much to come to Mars, to help in the exploration of this world. I guess you could say he gave his life for that purpose. He believed that he was doing god’s work, exploring a world and a people that god had created just as he created Earth, created us. He died in my arms, and I can tell you that he was smiling when he died. He was at peace.”

Ventura second question, scripted days earlier, was predictable.

“Has Monsignor DiNardo’s death forced you to reconsider the safety of all the other men and women on Mars? And if not, why not?”

So it went, for nearly four hours. Jamie stood there in the greenhouse, on Mars, answering their repetitive questions and trying to convince them—and ultimately their viewers—that the exploration of Mars was safe and important.

Over and again he stressed the same points as he answered the same questions.

“Our base here certainly isn’t luxurious,” he said, sounding weary in his own ears, “but it’s comfortable and quite safe. As you can see, we grow a fair amount of our own food. We produce water from the permafrost underground. We get our oxygen from the Martian atmosphere. As much as possible, we live on local resources.”

One reporter wanted to know how much it cost to run the operation on Mars.

Jamie forced a slow smile and replied, “Not nearly as much as Americans spend on pizza. And our funding comes entirely from private sources. No tax money is involved.”

At last it was over. The screen went dark. The technicians started to fold their cameras into their carrying cases. Vijay rushed around them and into Jamie’s arms.

“You look like a man who could use a drink,” she said, after kissing him soundly.

“I wish we had some beer,” he admitted.

They ate a brief, quiet dinner in the cafeteria by themselves, although Chang and several others came by their table to ask how the interview went. Jamie shrugged and said he thought it would be okay.

“It all depends on the editing,” he said to each of the questioners, knowing that a clever editor can snip statements out of context and make anyone look foolish, heartless, or even malicious. Edith’s doing the editing, he knew. She’ll do a good job. But once the vid is in the hands of the networks, what will they do to it?

Dead tired, he went with Vijay to their quarters. By the time they were crawling into bed a message from Selene came through.

“Thought y’all’d like to see the rough cut,” said Edith Elgin, with a gleaming smile. “You did a good job, Jamie.”

Almost two hours later, Jamie decided that Edith had done a good job, too. The questions and his answers were now arranged in a clear flow, with much of the repetition edited out.

“She’s awfully good, isn’t she?” Vijay said, sitting in bed beside Jamie.

“She sure is,” he said, feeling dog tired, heavy lidded. But he slid an arm around her bare shoulders. “You’re a lot better, though.”

Vijay smiled at him. “And a lot closer, eh?”

Selene: Governing Council

It’s funny, thought Douglas Stavenger as he took a seat toward the end of the long conference table. I haven’t been chairman of the council in years; I’m not even a voting member anymore. But wherever I sit, everybody turns to me as if I were still in charge.

Power. Some people spend their lives scrabbling for power. Others run away from it, from the responsibilities and the neverending pressure to make decisions. Stavenger shook his head in bemused wonderment. I never sought power. At least, I didn’t consciously. It just sort of fell into my lap. And I can’t get rid of it.

The conference room was in one of the two office towers that supported the massive concrete dome of the Grand Plaza. Through the long window that took up most of one wall, Stavenger could see the miniature trees and flowering shrubs that lined the plaza’s winding walkways, the curving shell of the open-air bandstand, the Olympic-sized swimming pool with its thirty-meter diving platform.

As the other council members took their seats, Stavenger glanced up the table at the chairman, sitting at the head of the table. He was a retired engineer who had come to Selene originally on a one-year contract to work on the solar energy farms spread out across the floor of the crater Alphonsus. He had never left the Moon. Assigned to a term on the governing council by the computer-operated lottery that picked new members from the general population, he had stayed through three terms and risen to the chairmanship.

He was a round-faced, smiling Swiss who made friends easily and handled administrative chores mainly by delegating responsibility to his minuscule staff. He would have to step down from the council at the end of this term, unless the entire population of Selene voted by a three-to-one majority to extend his time in office.

“Are we all here?” he asked, looking up and down the table. Every seat was filled. “All those who are absent will please raise their hands.”

A patter of weak laughs went around the table. It was the chairman’s standard joke, part of his sense of humor that had apparently taken root in his mind when he was in high school.

Stavenger settled back in the comfortably cushioned chair as the meeting commenced. He noted with wry amusement that even the chairman focused on him when he spoke, as if he were still in charge.

The meeting ran smoothly enough. No major problems outside of the usual disputes over water allocations and proposals to enlarge the underground city so that still more refugees from Earth could become citizens of Selene.

“We have enough of these refugees,” one of the councilwomen complained. “The more we let in, the more they influence our politics.”

“Well, that’s only fair, isn’t it?” said another woman, sitting on the other side of the table. “If they’re citizens they ought to influence our politics.”

“It’s time to shut the door,” the first councilwoman said, looking squarely at Stavenger.

He straightened up in his chair. “It’s hard to refuse people who’ve lost their homes on Earth.”

“It’s their own damned fault! They sat on their hands for years and years and let the greenhouse overwhelm them. Now they want to run away from it and come here.”

The debate grew hot, with some council members insisting that no more refugees be accepted for citizenship.

As their voices rose, Stavenger held up his hand and asked the chairman to recognize him. The angry arguing stopped and all eyes turned to him.

“Do you think it would be possible,” Stavenger asked mildly, “to have newcomers go through a waiting period before they’re allowed to apply for citizenship?”

“They have to wait six months,” said the chairman. “That’s in our constitution.”

“Could we stretch it to a few years? Give them enough time to learn how our community works? Let them integrate themselves into our society?”

The debate growled on for another half hour, but much more politely. Stavenger watched and listened, content that he had sucked the venom out of the argument. In the end, the council voted to extend the waiting period for citizenship to five years. And then immediately voted to enlarge the city’s underground living area by twenty percent.

The chairman nodded happily, then said, “That leaves only one item on the agenda: Mars.”

Again they all turned to Stavenger.

Clasping his hands together on the table, Stavenger said, “The explorers on Mars need our help. Funding from national governments Earthside has been cut to zero, and private donations to the Mars Foundation are running dry.”

“What can we do about it? We can’t spend billions on Mars, for god’s sake.”

“It won’t take billions,” Stavenger said, with a soft smile. “Basically, they need help with two things: transportation and supplies.”

“How many people are we talking about?”

“At the moment there’s just over two hundred people, all at one base in the Grand Canyon.”

“We’re supposed to feed two hundred people?”

“On Mars?”

“They grow some of their own food,” Stavenger replied. “Two of our people are there right now, studying—”

“Who sent two people to Mars?”

“They volunteered. One’s an agro-engineer and the other a logistics specialist—”

“A glorified accountant,” somebody said in a stage whisper.

Stavenger waited for the snickering laughter to die out, then admitted, “He does have a CPA ticket, in addition to his engineering degrees.”

“And he went to Mars?” asked the chairman, trying to move the discussion forward.

“Yes. He and the agro man want to see how the Mars base might be made self-sufficient, food-wise.”

“And we paid for their transportation?”

“They went on a fusion torch ship that the Mars Foundation paid for.”

“Hitchhikers, huh?”

A few council members laughed again.

“You might say that,” Stavenger replied.

The chairman asked, “Just what does the Mars team need? And how much of it can we afford to give them?”

Stavenger hesitated a heartbeat. Then, “I don’t think of it as giving them anything. I think we’d be investing in the exploration of a new world.”

“Damned expensive investment.”

“With no return.”

“No return?” Stavenger snapped. “They’ve found the remains of intelligent life! They’re uncovering villages and finding a whole ecology of living organisms! Isn’t that return enough?”

“It doesn’t buy any bread.”

With a shake of his head, Stavenger replied, “It wasn’t that long ago that we were the ones who needed help. This community of ours began as a collection of aluminum cans scattered across Alphonsus’s floor. We needed help from Earth in those days. Now the people on Mars need help from us.”

“That’s all well and good,” said one of the older men, “but the question remains: what’s in it for us? We can’t afford to run a charity operation.”

“We’re already doing that with the damned refugees,” grumbled one of the other councilmen.

For several heartbeats Stavenger didn’t reply. He looked up at the acoustic tiles of the ceiling, then broke into a grin as a teenaged girl flew past the window on colorful plastic wings. How to answer them? he was asking himself. How to make them see?

“Look,” he said at last. “We’re in a battle against the armies of ignorance.”

The other council members stirred with curiosity. Even the chairman’s perpetual grin faded into a puzzled, almost worried expression.

“Back on Earth most people are governed by those who are using religion to suppress freedom. They’re the ones who ignored the warnings about the greenhouse, who denied that the Earth’s climate was changing. They’re the ones who allowed this catastrophe to overwhelm the Earth.”

“What’s that got to do with Mars?”

“Hear me out, please. Those people tried to rule us. They sent troops here to force us to bend to their authority. They killed our citizens. If and when they feel strong enough, they’ll try it again.”

“No!”

“I can’t believe that!”

“Believe it,” Stavenger said firmly. “All through history human civilization has been a struggle between individual liberty and the power of the state. Whenever a religious movement has gained the reins of governmental power, individual liberties are strangled. That’s what’s happening on Earth today. Now.”

Several council members glanced uneasily at one another, but no one contradicted him.

“Why do you think so many refugees want to live here?” Stavenger continued. “If they’re wealthy enough to come to Selene they’re wealthy enough to take their pick of safe residences on Earth. They’re coming here for freedom! Not because they want to live in cramped underground quarters. Not because they want to worry about water allocations and air pressure regulations. They want to be free: socially, intellectually, even religiously free.”

The chairman said slowly, “Doug, I still don’t understand what this has to do with Mars.”

“It’s part of the battle. Part of the long war for human freedom. Oppression thrives on ignorance. The explorers on Mars are finding new facts, new ideas, that challenge the ideas of the oppressors. That’s why the fundamentalists are working so hard to end the exploration of Mars. That’s why we’ve got to do everything we can to support that exploration.”

For long moments the conference room was so silent that Stavenger could hear the faint whisper of the air circulation fans buried behind the ceiling’s panels.

Then the youngest member of the council, a molecular biologist who had come to Selene University to study genetic engineering, asked, “How much can we do?”

“Not much,” the chairman answered immediately. “But if I sense the feeling around this table, we’ll do whatever we can. Right?”

One by one, the other council members nodded agreement.

“Very well, then,” said the chairman. “In that case, we should listen to a proposal from one of our citizens who’s just returned from Mars.”

Stavenger felt his brows hike up. The chairman’s got something up his sleeve, he realized. And he never mentioned it to me.

He caught the chairman’s eye. The man was grinning slyly at him. Stavenger gave him a nod, admitting he was surprised.

“Would you ask Ms. McManus to come in?” the chairman said into his cell phone.

All eyes turned to the door as Doreen McManus, pencil thin and big eyed, looking almost frightened, entered the meeting room. Stavenger searched his memory and recalled that she was a nanotechnician.

“Ms. McManus has a proposal for enlarging the base on Mars, using nanomachines,” the chairman said.

Tithonium Chasma: The Dig

Usually Zeke Larkin was the gentlest of souls, yet the normal expression on his sharp-featured face was somewhere between a glare and a scowl. People expected him to have a volcanic temper, and he did—but he had spent most of his adult life struggling to control it.

Still Zeke grumbled to himself as he worked at the excavation. He regretted volunteering for the dig. I’m a biologist, not a shit-shoveling day laborer, he told himself. I should be in my lab, studying the SLiMEs, not working out here like an extra in some “curse of the mummy” flick. Besides, we ought to be looking for the farming area instead of poking into these ruins. Seen one collapsed building, you’ve seen ’em all.

Larkin’s expertise was in the forms of bacteria that lived deep underground, where they literally ate the iron-rich rock and excreted methane. When similar organisms had first been discovered on Earth, thriving in temperatures and pressures that biologists had assumed were far too extreme for living cells to survive, existing even without the need for sunlight, some waggish biologist had dubbed them subsurface lithotropic microbial ecosystems: SLiMEs. Deep drills had pulled up similar SLiMEs from kilometers below the surface of Mars.

Larkin’s career goal was to study these colonies of underground bacteria, to determine how long they had been living deep below the surface of Mars, to study how they were different—and similar—to the SLiMEs of Earth.

He was a postdoctoral student from the University of Michigan, lean and wiry, with sapphire blue eyes that looked at the world warily, as if expecting trouble. He worked very hard at being friendly and sociable, especially with his fellow scientists. He had even developed a sense of humor that they variously described as wry, dry, or devilishly clever.

But on this sunny Martian afternoon he saw nothing humorous about being out at Carleton’s dig, slaving away like an ordinary laborer with the rest of the volunteers. Instead of a pick and shovel, though, these laborers used digging lasers to break up the rock-hard ground, and then tiny chisels and whisks to slowly, carefully, patiently uncover the remains of the long-buried village.

There’s nothing here, Larkin saw. Twenty meters behind him a pair of postdocs were delicately brushing eons of dust off the remains of a broken, uneven wall, a wavering line of blackened stone that once was the foundation of a building. A Martian home, Larkin mused. Or maybe a barn for their livestock. He grinned inside his nanosuit’s bubble helmet. Maybe it was a bar, a saloon like in those western vids about the wild frontier.

But where he was standing there was nothing. No crumbled foundations, no remnants of ancient walls. No ancient pollen or seeds, even. Just bare, empty ground right out to the thirty-meter-high side of the excavation pit. Larkin leaned on the long-handled broom he had been using, wondering why he should bother to continue. We’ve run the dig out to the edge of the old village and beyond. There’s nothing more here to uncover, and Carleton’s too damned stubborn to move off to the area where the farms probably were. Time for me to get back to my lab and leave this bullshit behind me.

He saw Carleton standing off at the other end of the excavation, more than a hundred meters away, out where the village’s neat gridwork of buildings gave way to a pair of meandering lanes. The anthropologist was unmistakable at any distance; he was the only person in the crew who still wore a hard suit. Larkin thought he looked like an alien robot who had enslaved all these nanosuited humans and forced them into stoop labor for him.

Well, this slave is revolting, Larkin told himself as he hefted the metal-whiskered broom and started off toward the ramp that led up to the edge of the pit. Then he chuckled as he remembered the old joke: Revolting? He’s disgusting!

I suppose I could use a shower, he thought.

“You there!” Carleton’s peremptory shout rang in Larkin’s earphone so piercingly it made him wince. “Where are you going?”

“There’s nothing more out here, Dr. Carleton. We’ve gone past the edge of the village.”

“Let me see.”

Annoyed, Larkin let the broom fall languidly to the ground and waited for Carleton, hands on his hips.

Once the anthropologist reached him, clunking through the rows of building foundations and the people hunching over them, Larkin pointed to the area where he’d been working.

“It’s empty,” he said. “We’ve gone beyond the limits of the village.”

“What about the farm that you’ve been nagging me about?” Carleton said. He clumped past the biologist and looked out over the empty area.

“It’s not here,” said Larkin. “More likely on the other side of the village, upriver.”

For several moments Carleton said nothing. Larkin couldn’t see his face behind the tinted visor of his helmet, but he imagined the anthropologist was trying to find some reason to make him stay and work for him.

At last Carleton said, “You should go over with Macintyre and the others, then. There’s more to uncover there.”

“I’m finished for the day,” Larkin said. “I need to get back to my own research.”

“You agreed to work here,” Carleton said.

“Not at the expense of my own research. I’ve got to get back to my lab.”

“It’s still a couple of hours before sundown. We’ve still got plenty of time to work.”

“I’ve got to get back to my lab,” Larkin repeated.

“There’s still work to do here.”

“Dr. Carleton, may I remind you, sir, that I am a volunteer. I don’t owe you fealty and you don’t have the power to command me.”

Even though the gold-tinted helmet visor remained blank, Larkin could feel Carleton’s fury radiating from it. “I have the power to write a negative evaluation for your dossier.”

Once that would have worried Larkin, but now he was too tired to care. He let his anger seep through. “Go ahead and write whatever you want. Who’s going to accept your word about anything?”

And he strode forcefully away from Carleton, toward the ramp that led up to the valley floor and the dome of the base, leaving the broom in the dust like the symbol of his independence.

“You can’t leave while there’s still work to be done!” Carleton shouted. “You can’t just go!”

“The hell I can’t,” Larkin answered, without even looking back over his shoulder.

“I’ll ruin you!” Carleton yelled.

“Go rape a student,” Larkin retorted, without missing a step.

Carleton watched him go, white-hot rage boiling inside him. He tried to kick the broom but in the hulking hard suit all he managed was to scuff the ground and puff up a pathetic little cloud of dust. Glaring furiously, he saw that the other men and women working on the site all had their backs to him, all were bent over their tasks, none of them wanted any part of this conflict. They heard us yelling at each other, Carleton realized, but nobody’s going to say a word about it. Not to me, at least. They’ll talk about it among themselves, though, he knew. There won’t be any other subject on their lips at dinner tonight.

Larkin hiked up the ramp to the lip of the excavation, telling himself that he’d never volunteer for Carleton again. He doesn’t own me! he said to himself. He thinks he’s god almighty down there but he’s nothing but a disgraced former scientist. What kind of a science is anthropology, anyway? Digging up bones and making guesses, that’s all they do. Any real data they get comes from chemical analyses and radioactive dating.

The biologist walked alone along the edge of the excavation, heading for the dome. He glanced down into the pit, at the people working away down there. Slaves, he thought. You poor fools. You let him dominate you. He needs you a lot more than you need him. Maybe I should lead a slave revolt, Larkin said to himself. Let’s see how far the high and mighty ex-professor could go without the rest of us toiling away for him.

The late afternoon sun slanted into the excavation, throwing sharp shadows of the low crumbled remains of the building foundations against the red, dusty ground. Larkin looked out at the blank area where he’d been digging. It didn’t look exactly blank now, he saw. Some faint undulations here and there, just barely visible from up here with the sun at this angle. He shook his head. Too small to be building foundations; they’re just tiny little squares. Oblongs, really.

I ought to tell Carleton about it, he thought. Then immediately answered himself, To hell with that and to hell with him. Let him find it out for himself. He’s the big-shot anthropologist. Let’s see how smart he really is.

Tithonium Base: Airlock Hatch

Later that afternoon, Zeke Larkin was still irritated by his encounter with Carleton, but working hard to forget it. He saw the anthropologist in deep discussion with Sal Hasdrubal over by the suit lockers near the main airlock hatch and decided to go over and try to make amends with him.

I should’ve been more reasonable, he told himself. He’s a jerk, but I did volunteer to help him, I guess.

As he approached them, he heard Hasdrubal say, “But your volunteers have found half-a-dozen different varieties of seeds in the dig. If you could ask them to try to locate the farmland beyond the edge of the village—”

“Not possible,” said Carleton. “We’ve got our hands full as it is. We’ve only got about half the village uncovered.”

“But the farm area’d be a tremendous find for the biological study—”

“I said no,” Carleton snapped.

Larkin’s temper got the better of him. “Don’t waste your breath, Sal,” he said. “The high-and-mighty professor isn’t interested in biology or anything else except salvaging his own reputation.”

Carleton whirled on him. “You’re in a pile of trouble, mister! I’m your supervisor and—”

“Hey, I volunteered to help you,” Larkin countered, his voice rising loud enough to echo off the dome’s arched rafters. “I’m not your goddamn indentured slave!”

“You made a commitment, damn you!” Carleton hollered right back at him. “You can’t go back on it now!”

The two men were standing nose to nose in front of the suit lockers, by the main airlock hatch, both of them red in the face and glaring at each other. Their shouting brought everything in the dome to a stop. Hasdrubal looked completely stunned; he didn’t know what to say.

“You can’t make me stay in that damned pit of yours one goddam minute longer than I want to!” Larkin yelled, his shoulders hunching, hands balling into fists.

“The hell I can’t!” Carleton roared back.

Dr. Chang came scurrying across the dome and tried to get between them, but it was clear that he sided with Zeke. “All workers at the dig are volunteers,” he told Carleton, shaking a finger in his face. “Not contract laborers.”

Carleton threw up his hands. “I am a man surrounded by incompetence,” he shouted. “This is the curse of my life, chained to fellows of little mark nor likelihood.”

Chang started to get red in the face, too. “You are not director of this mission! I am!”

“You’re nothing but—”

“Hold it!” Jamie jumped in, practically running from his quarters across the dome to get between Carleton and Chang. “Let’s lower the voltage here before we start saying things we’ll really regret.”

Carleton glared at Chang, past Jamie’s shoulder, and Chang glared back. Larkin stood off to one side, looking just as furious as the two of them.

Jamie said, “Dr. Chang, can we use your office to continue this discussion?”

Chang looked as if he was going to choke, but he nodded wordlessly. The four of them—Carleton, Chang, Larkin and Waterman—went into Chang’s office and slid the door shut. Hasdrubal shrugged as he watched them go, then turned and walked away. Somebody’s gonna explode, he said to himself.

Once he’d gotten the three of them seated in Chang’s office, Jamie said quietly, “I hope you’ve got the shouting out of your systems. This is no place for a schoolyard brawl.”

Looking straight at Chang, Carleton said, “We had an agreement in place. The volunteers are committed to work the number of hours they agreed to. Nobody forced them to sign up to help me.”

“Volunteer is the operative word,” Zeke Larkin said, his voice much lower, though still quavering with anger. “A volunteer can put an end to his service whenever he wants to.”

Sitting rigidly behind his desk, his face a frozen mask, Chang dipped his chin in the slightest gesture of agreement.

Jamie was still on his feet. “You both have reasonable points,” he said. “But the important issue is this: there’s work to be done. We have this village to uncover, and there will be more villages, in time. Carter can’t get the job done without volunteers to help with the digging.”

“Volunteers,” Larkin repeated.

“But once you volunteer,” Jamie said, trying to make it sound reasonable, “you’ve committed yourself to a certain amount of man-hours.”

Chang puffed out a breath, then said, “I have spent many hours setting up work schedules for volunteers.”

Larkin shifted uncomfortably on his chair. “I have my own work to think about. I should be—”

“You should be living up to your commitments,” Carleton snapped.

Before the biologist could reply, Jamie said, “Look. We’re a team here. A family. Families have arguments all the time, but we shouldn’t let an argument get in the way of doing what we came here to do.”

“What we’re doing here,” Larkin said heatedly, “is rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.”

Jamie stared at him.

“This world is dying,” the biologist went on. “The endolithic lichen are dying off. There’s not enough water available to support—”

“Permafrost contains oceans of water!” Chang interrupted.

“Frozen. The SLiMEs can tap the permafrost, but nothing on the surface of Mars can. Eventually the last of the lichen will die off and the surface will be totally sterile. Then the SLiMEs’ll be next.”

He’s right, Jamie thought. Mars is dying. But he heard himself ask, “How long is ‘eventually’?”

Larkin shrugged his thin shoulders. “A hundred thousand years. A million. What difference does it make? The planet’s dying and there’s nothing we can do about it.”

Carleton said, “All the more important, then, to excavate what remains of the village. And anything else we can find.”

“Digging up the dead,” Larkin muttered. “While I ought to be seeing how long the SLiMEs can last.”

“It’s important!” Carleton insisted. “Vital!”

“So’s my own work,” Larkin retorted.

Surprisingly, Chang said, “I can rearrange schedule. It can be altered.”

“What?” Larkin looked astounded.

Chang almost smiled. “You will work same number of hours at the dig. I will stretch out your commitment, give you more time in your lab.”

Jamie asked, “Carter, is that agreeable to you?”

Carleton hesitated, then mumbled, “As long as I have the manpower I need to keep the excavation work going.”

“Zeke?”

Reluctantly, Larkin nodded. “Yeah, I suppose so. If I can spend more time in my lab.”

“Good,” said Chang.

“Thank you, Dr. Chang,” said Jamie gratefully. “You’ve solved the problem.” Silently he added, For the time being. Until the next flare-up.

Then Larkin muttered, “It doesn’t make any difference, anyway. We’ll all be packing up and leaving here before another year is up.”

Jamie didn’t have the heart to contradict him.

From her desk just inside the infirmary’s entrance Vijay could see just about the whole interior of the dome. She watched Larkin and Carleton leave Chang’s office and walk toward the cafeteria without so much as glancing at each other. As if each one of them is totally alone, she thought. Neither one of them wants to acknowledge the presence of the other. Well, at least they’re not screaming at each other.

Jamie was still in the mission director’s office with Chang. He’ll prob’ly be in there for a while yet, Vijay realized. They must have a lot to hash over.

Turning slightly, she saw Larkin get in line at the cafeteria’s counter. Carleton went past him to the coffee urn, poured himself a mug, then looked around for a place to sit. He found an empty table by the curving wall of the dome and sat there, alone, while Larkin filled his tray and joined three other men and women at a table on the other side of the cafeteria. As far away from Carleton as they could get, Vijay saw.

The cafeteria seemed unusually quiet, she thought, conversations muted, little knots of men and women talking in subdued tones, as if they were afraid of being overheard.

It took Vijay a few moments to decide, but then she shut down her desktop computer and went to the cafeteria’s trio of urns to make herself a cup of tea. The water wasn’t much more than tepid and the urns themselves looked dull, almost grimy. Maintenance is slipping, she thought, as she made her way through the tables toward Carleton.

“Mind if I join you?” she asked as she took the chair across the small table from him.

Carleton smirked at her. “You’re not afraid of catching it?”

“Catching? What?”

“Carleton’s disease. It’s something like leprosy. Nobody wants to be near you.” He gestured with one hand; all the tables next to theirs were empty, unoccupied.

“That’s a bit melodramatic, i’n’t it?”

“A bit, perhaps,” he admitted with a slightly sheepish grin. “But they all think of me as some kind of ogre now. The big, bad taskmaster who’s abusing his volunteer helpers.”

Vijay took a sip of the lukewarm tea, then asked, “How do you feel about it?”

He stared at her for a long moment. “This is a psych quiz, isn’t it?”

She lowered her eyes, then replied, “The emotional stability of this group is as important as its physical health. You know that.”

“And I’m a threat to the group’s emotional stability,” he muttered.

Vijay smiled at him. “It’s not about you, Carter.”

“Isn’t it?”

“Not entirely. There are two hundred and some other people here, y’know.”

“Most of whom would gladly push me out the airlock in my Jockey shorts.”

“You are a narcissist,” she said, laughing.

He cocked his head to one side. “It is the stars, the stars above us, govern our conditions.”

“What’s that from? Shakespeare?”

“King Lear, if I remember correctly.”

“Di’n’t Shakespeare also say that the fault is not in our stars, but in ourselves?”

Nodding, Carleton said, “That’s from Julius Caesar.”

“So which is it? The stars or ourselves?”

“Both,” he said, with a tired sigh. “Neither.”

More seriously, Vijay asked, “Are you going to be all right?”

“Me? I’m fine. Go do a psych profile on that hotheaded biologist if you’re looking for a troublemaker.”

“Maybe I should,” she said.

“There you are!” Turning, Vijay saw Jamie approaching their table. She broke into a big smile.

“I thought you were going to stay in Chang’s office all night,” she said.

Jamie pulled a chair from one of the unoccupied tables and sat between Carleton and Vijay. “He needed to have his feathers smoothed a little. He doesn’t show it much, but he gets just as worked up as any of us.”

“You don’t,” Carleton said. “You’re always as cool as a sea breeze.”

“Not inside,” Jamie said. Turning to Vijay, “Had dinner yet?”

“Not yet.”

Looking back at Carleton, Jamie asked, “Would you like to join us?”

Carleton’s eyes nickered from Jamie to Vijay and back again. Then he said, “No thanks. I’m not very hungry this evening.”

He got to his feet and walked away without another word.

Vijay watched him go. “He’s a ticking bomb,” she murmured.

“Just what we need,” said Jamie.

Heading toward his quarters, Carleton had to pass the table where Larkin was sitting with another man and two women. He nodded graciously to them; the lean-faced biologist gave him a wary nod back.

Halfway across the dome, Carleton looked back over his shoulder at Waterman and his wife, standing at the service counter loading their trays, smiling at each other.

She’s beautiful, and therefore to be woo’d, he quoted to himself. She is a woman, therefore to be won.

Tithonium Base: Midnight

Billy Graycloud sipped at a lukewarm mug of coffee as he watched the computer’s latest run scroll down the desktop monitor screen. Outside the partitions of the comm center the dome was dark, shadowy. Everybody else was asleep, Graycloud thought. He had volunteered for the night shift at the comm center so that he could work on his attempt to translate the Martian pictographs. No disturbances. The dome’s life-support systems were running smoothly enough and the occasional message from Earth was never so important that it couldn’t wait until morning to be read and acted on.

Volunteered. Graycloud mulled the word around in his mind. The idea of volunteering had caused a big blowup a few hours earlier. Zeke Larkin and Dr. Carleton were sore enough to start socking each other, Graycloud thought. Right there at the lockers alongside the main airlock. In front of everybody. For a while Graycloud thought that maybe one of them was high on drugs. Maybe both of them.

Even Chang got into it. But then Dr. Waterman came on the scene and calmed them all down. Sitting bleary eyed at the central console in the communications center, Graycloud wondered what Dr. Waterman had done, what he had said, to put an end to the fight. He had no doubt that Dr. W had been the peacemaker. No doubt at all.

Graycloud had been one of the volunteers out at the dig when Larkin had exploded. Dr. Carleton had been pretty bossy, Graycloud thought, but the anthropologist was always a hard-ass out there. He called it his dig and that’s the way he thought of it. Volunteers like me are just supposed to do what we’re told and not talk back.

So what? he asked himself. Why did Larkin get so uptight? Graycloud yawned and stretched his arms over his head. Forget about it. Dr. W smoothed things over. Get back to your own work and stop rehashing what happened this afternoon.

Yesterday afternoon, he corrected himself. It’s past midnight.

He returned his attention to the words scrolling down the desktop screen. Gibberish. No sense to them. “Sun, cook river, make house unknown word, unknown word.” With a shake of his head Graycloud decided that his latest stab at assigning words to the Martian symbols was a complete flop. With a touch of a key he blanked the screen, then called up the images of the Martian pictographs.

They mean something, Graycloud told himself. But what? He yawned again and noticed that it was actually well past one a.m.

Get some sleep, he told himself. The comm center doesn’t need you sitting here all night. Messages from Earth are routed automatically, and we don’t have anybody out on an excursion so there won’t be any calls from outside the dome. If anything goes wrong with the life-support systems the alarms will whoop everybody wide awake in two seconds.

He reached for the keyboard to shut down the computer, but the Martian images entranced him. They’ve been sitting on that wall for millions of years, he told himself. They can wait another couple of hours. Yet he kept staring at them as if he could make the symbols speak to him. He fell asleep in his chair in front of the computer screen.

Bright morning sunlight slanted through the dome’s transparent walls as Jamie stared at his desktop screen. His cubbyhole of an office was bare except for the laptop computer resting on the shaky folding table and the other, empty chair. The thin, flexible smart screens that he had taped to the cubicle’s partitions were blank, gray. Only his laptop showed Dex Trumball’s earnest face.

Dex had warned him to plug in the earphone for this message; he didn’t want anyone to overhear it. Now, as Jamie sat listening to his proposal, he understood why.

“I know it goes against the grain, Jamie,” Dex was saying, “but we’ve got to face the facts. If you want to keep the program going, this is the only way to get the funding you need.”

Dex was at his home on Boston’s North Shore, Jamie could see: in his darkly paneled den. Through the narrow window behind Dex, Jamie could see thickly leaved maple trees glowing red and gold in the afternoon sun. It must be autumn in New England, he thought in a separate part of his mind as he tried to digest what Dex was saying.

“It won’t be like a swarm of tourists, Jamie. This’ll be strictly a high-end operation. Rollie Kinnear figures he can get fifty million a pop. Fifty million each! If we ferry ten people to Mars for a week’s visit, that’s half a billion dollars, gross. Do that three, four times a year and we can support your people indefinitely.”

Ten wealthy tourists, Jamie thought. Then ten more. Then twenty, twenty-five. A hundred. A thousand. They’ll trample around here and ruin everything. We won’t be able to get any work done. They’ll want souvenirs: Be the first in your crowd to bring back a rock from Mars! Look, I brought a piece of pottery from the Martian village! Jamie shuddered.

“I’ve talked it over with the Navaho president and her council,” Dex was going on. “They’re not crazy about the idea but they’ll go along with it because it can bring in money for them.”

Let the palefaces have their little settlement by the water’s edge, Jamie thought with the bitterness of tribal memory. There’s only a few of them and the land is wide and free.

Dex was saying, “Um, the council voted to approve the plan, but only providing that you handle the operation from your end. You personally. They don’t trust anybody else to take care of the tourists properly, see that they don’t mess things up over there.”

You want me to be the Judas, Jamie answered silently. Open up Mars to tourism and let Jamie take the responsibility.

He listened to Dex’s words and watched his erstwhile friend’s face closely as the man spoke. Dex’s expression alternated from earnest enthusiasm to worried apprehension to an almost truculent insistence.

“I know you won’t like this idea, Jamie, but it’s the only way we can raise enough money to keep you guys going. Otherwise we’re going to have to shut down the whole operation and bring you all back home.”

And once we leave, your friends can come in and set up a wide-open tourism operation. See the Martian cliff dwellings! Plant your footprints where no human being has stood before! Walk through an ancient Martian village!

Strangely, Jamie felt no anger. Only a deep, aching, sullen remorse, the kind of pain that grips the heart when a dream is shattered.

Dex had finished talking. His image waited frozen on the laptop’s small screen.

Jamie looked out through the open doorway of his cubicle toward the rusty red, rock-strewn ground. Mars is dying, he heard Zeke Larkin say. And he knew that Zeke was right. This is a dying world. And we’re dying with it.

Fingering the communicator clipped to his ear, Jamie said, “Dex, the answer is no. Thanks for your effort. I know you think you’re doing what needs to be done. But no. Not now. Not while I live.”

He turned off the laptop, knowing it would take more than ten minutes for his reply to reach Earth. God knows how long it’ll take Dex to react. Jamie shook his head. It doesn’t matter what his reaction is. It doesn’t matter if he quits the program altogether and cuts off his foundation’s funding completely. None of that matters.

Yet Jamie feared he was wrong. He was cutting off the exploration team’s lifeblood. While it might take a million years for the last Martian lichen to shrivel and die from lack of water, the human explorers on Mars would disappear in a matter of months, for lack of funds.

Billy Graycloud had raised his fist to rap on the partition of Dr. Waterman’s office, but saw that Jamie was staring intently at his laptop screen, comm unit clipped to his ear.

He won’t want to be disturbed, Graycloud thought. He turned and went to the cafeteria, sipped briefly at a mug of weak coffee, then walked back to the cubicle. The laptop was closed now; Dr. Waterman was sitting stiffly in his little chair, staring at infinity.

“Uh… Dr. W?”

Jamie stirred and focused on Graycloud. “Billy. What is it?”

“Got a minute?”

With a nod, “Sure. Come in.”

Graycloud settled onto the only other chair in the cubbyhole, his long legs bumping the wobbly little table on which the laptop sat, his knees poking up awkwardly.

“It’s the translation, sir.”

“What about it, Billy?”

“It’s not goin’ anyplace. I’ve tried about a hundred sets of words, you know, definitions for each of the symbols—but they don’t make any sense.”

Jamie smiled tiredly. “Maybe the hundred and first.”

“Maybe.”

“Or the thousandth.”

Graycloud started to reply, hesitated, then asked, “Are we gonna be here that long?”

Selene: Nanolab

“I haven’t been in here since Kris Cardenas left for the Saturn habitat,” said Doug Stavenger.

“She was a great scientist,” Doreen McManus said.

“Still is, I suppose,” Stavenger replied. “Way out there in orbit around Saturn.”

Selene’s nanotechnology laboratory was quiet and almost empty at this time of the evening. All the regular staff had left for the day. The reactors where virus-sized nanomachines were working ran silently, turning raw materials such as carbon powder into sheets of pure diamond structural material for spacecraft. New nanomachines were incubating in other reactors, behind sealed hatches.

Faint bluish light strips ran along the ceiling: ultraviolet lamps whose light could deactivate any nanodevices that somehow escaped the confinement of the reactors and incubators. Safety was a paramount concern in the nanolab, even after many years of secure operation. No one wanted an accident that unleashed all-consuming nanomachines into the underground community of Selene. No one dreaded the “gray goo problem” more than the scientists and technicians of the nanolab staff.

“This is my cubbyhole, here,” Doreen said as she led Stavenger to a small desk at the end of a workbench.

He nodded, looked around, and pulled up a small wheeled chair as she sat in the padded desk chair.

She looks nervous, Stavenger thought: big gray-green eyes staring out like a frightened kid’s.

“There’s nothing to be frightened of,” he said, trying to reassure her. “Dex Trumball isn’t an ogre.”

She tried to smile. “I know. It’s just that… well, I know enough about Dr. Waterman. He’s not going to like my proposal. Not at all.”

Stavenger made a nonchalant shrug. “That’s his decision. Right now I think you owe it to the people working on Mars to let Trumball know what you can do.”

“Dr. Waterman’s going to hate it,” Doreen said in a small, almost whispering, voice.

“Be that as it may, your idea may save the entire Mars operation.”

The desk phone chimed. Doreen flinched visibly at the sound. Stavenger glanced at his wristwatch. “He’s right on time.”

Dex Trumball’s face took form on the phone screen. Stavenger introduced himself, then gestured toward Doreen. After the usual pleasantries, Stavenger got down to the point.

“Ms. McManus made a very interesting presentation to our governing board about the possibilities of using nanotechnology to enlarge the area on Mars where people can live and work. I thought that you and your Mars Foundation people ought to hear about it.”

Trumball’s sharp, hard eyes flicked from Stavenger to Doreen and back again. “Okay, I’m listening.”

Doreen began to speak, hesitantly at first but then with growing confidence and enthusiasm.

After half an hour, Dex interrupted, “Wait a minute. You’re saying that you can create a completely earthlike environment that’s kilometers wide?”

“As large as you want it,” Doreen said, nodding vigorously. “You can make it an ongoing operation, constantly enlarging the earthlike area.”

“Under a dome,” said Dex.

“Yes. It would have to be enclosed, of course.”

Stavenger interjected, “It wouldn’t be totally earthlike. The gravity would still be at the Martian level.”

“That’s not a problem,” Dex said. “As long as people could live under the dome in a shirtsleeve environment.”

“They could wear bikinis!” Doreen said.

Dex smiled. “Most of the tourists we’d bring to Mars would look awful in bikinis. But on the other hand…”

Boston: Trumball Trust Headquarters

More in sorrow than in anger, Dex said to himself. Remember that: more in sorrow than in anger. Jamie’s a stubborn sonofabitch but that’s who he is and there’s no sense getting sore about it. You just have to do what you have to do.

Despite the brilliant sunshine and crystal blue sky, it was chilly up on the windswept roof of the Trumball Tower. Roland Kinnear was trying to smile bravely, but it was clear that the gusts whipping in from the harbor cut through his light summer-weight suit jacket and turned his perpetual smile into something of a grimace.

“Not like Hawaii,” he said to Dex, raising his voice over the rush of the wind.

“You want to go back downstairs?” Dex asked. Kinnear shrugged. “In a minute or two. I figure you brought me up here for a reason.”

Dex studied his old schoolmate’s round, normally cheerful face. “I wanted this conversation to be strictly private, Rollie. Just between you and me.”

Kinnear’s light blond brows furrowed. “You don’t trust your staff?”

“Sure I do,” Dex said. “But I don’t want to run the risk of somebody accidentally overhearing us.”

Kinnear thought that over for a moment, then asked, “Can we get out of this wind, at least?”

Dex laughed, then took Kinnear by the elbow and led him to the other side of the roof where they were sheltered by the bulk of the structure that housed the building’s cooling tower. From this angle he could see the city’s busy streets, and across the Charles River the gray, utilitarian buildings of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Harvard’s redbrick Colonial-style campus was off to their left, half hidden among the flaming trees in their autumnal colors. Farther on toward the horizon, past more colorful trees and stately slim white church steeples, was Lexington and the common where a handful of Minutemen had tried to make a stand against the British army.

“It’s pretty,” Kinnear said, “with all the trees in color.”

“They say we might even get some snow this winter,” Dex said, wistfully. “It looks beautiful all in white.”

Out of the wind, Kinnear relaxed enough to put his pleasant smile back on. “So what do you want to talk about, Dex?”

“Mars. What else?”

“You’re in bad shape, from what I hear.”

“We’re bleeding to death,” Dex admitted. “That damned priest’s just about killed us.”

“He didn’t do himself any good, either.” Kinnear grinned.

“Yeah, yeah, but now we’ve got people blaming us for his death. We’re getting really nasty mail, calling us priest killers, making threats.”

“Anything serious?”

“I’ve doubled our security. There’s a lot of nuts out there.” Dex shook his head. “Priest killers,” he muttered.

“So your money flow…?”

“Down to a trickle. Less.”

“I still think the tourism idea could fly,” Kinnear said, obviously trying to brighten Dex’s mood.

“That’s what I want to talk to you about.”

“My people tell me Waterman turned you down flat.”

“You’ve got a line into my private office,” Dex said. “I figured as much.”

Widening his smile, Kinnear said, “We’re talking a ton of money here, Dex. I have to protect my investment.”

“You haven’t spent a dime, Rollie.”

“Well, I might have. But the Navaho chief nixed it, did he?”

Nodding, “I expected he would.”

“So, do you go over his head?”

“Can’t. The Navaho council has the final word on what we can or can’t do on Mars.”

“But they voted in favor of the tourist plan, didn’t they?”

“Yes, but they won’t go against Jamie. If he says no they’ll go along with him.”

“Shit. They’d turn down all that money?”

“They would and they will.”

Kinnear pursed his lips. “Well, that’s that, I guess.”

A jet airliner from Logan Aerospaceport, across the Inner Harbor, roared over them, making conversation impossible for a few moments. Dex used the time to frame the words he had to speak.

“Rollie, there’s a way we can get this done,” he said, as the airliner’s thunder diminished in the distance.

Kinnear looked askance at him.

“It works like this,” Dex said, wondering if he could really go through with it. “Without your tourist money, the Mars Foundation goes bust.”

“But you’ve got other sources of funding, don’t you?”

“It’s not enough. We’ve got enough in the bank to finance one more resupply flight to Mars. After that, if we don’t get an injection of new funding we’re going to have to shut down the operation on Mars and bring everybody home.”

“And that’s that.”

Dex shook his head. “No, that’s just the beginning. I’ll see to it that when the people leave Mars they mothball their base, you know, wrap up all the equipment, seal the domes they’ve been using, keep it all ready for somebody else to use.”

Kinnear’s smile widened. “You’re starting to interest me, Dex.”

“Once the last of them has left Mars, the Navaho no longer have their claim to the place. It’s open for grabs.”

“And we grab it!”

“We send a skeleton team to the base and reopen it, then claim exclusive use of the area for Kinnear Travel, Inc.”

“Holy shit! Would that be legal?”

“Perfectly legal. The Mars Foundation will be your partner, Rollie. You and me together. What’s more, I’ve got some experts from Selene who can build a completely shirtsleeve environment for the tourists. Let ’em wander through the village and the cliff dwellings without using a spacesuit.”

“Tourists on Mars. Hot damn!”

“Scientists, too,” Dex said quickly. “We’ll bring scientists back, but they’ll be working under our direction.”

“Sure, sure, we’d need a few scientists to work as guides for the tourists.”

“And to continue their own studies, Rollie. I want to carry on with the work they’re trying to do now.”

“Yeah, okay. We could even bring your pal Waterman back—but under our terms.”

“Jamie?” Dex was truly surprised at the thought. “No, he won’t go back. Not if we’re running the show. He hates the whole idea of bringing tourists to Mars.”

“So? What’s he going to do?”

Feeling truly sad, Dex said, “He’ll probably commit suicide. Or murder.”

Tithonium Base: Jamie’s Office

Sitting tensely in the little bungee-cord chair in his office cubicle, Jamie asked, “So what do you think?”

Maurice Zeroual looked equally tense. He was a logistics specialist from Selene who had come to Tithonium Base on the resupply flight a few weeks earlier. Born in Algeria, Zeroual had fled to the Moon when his nation dissolved into murderous sectarian violence. He had volunteered to study the possibilities of making the Mars base self-sufficient.

He did not look happy. Zeroual was a smallish man, wearing a loose-fitting white shirt and gray slacks. His skin was as dark as scorched tobacco leaf. A thin fringe of a beard outlined his jaw. Jamie thought he smelled a strange cologne: like mint, or some oriental spice.

“I haven’t completely finished my analysis,” Zeroual began, in a soft tenor voice with a definite British accent.

“But you’ve learned enough to ask to meet with me,” Jamie said, also softly, trying to encourage the younger man to speak freely.

“I can see the general picture clearly enough, yes.”

“And?”

Zeroual’s dark brown eyes shifted away from Jamie’s. “There’s no way you can continue to support two hundred people here. Not with the resources available to you.”

Jamie took in a breath. I expected that, he said to himself. Aloud, he asked, “How many?”

“At best, maybe thirty.”

“Thirty?”

“The optimal number would be somewhere around half that. Say, fifteen people. You could support fifteen people here indefinitely with the food you raise in the greenhouse and the amount of additional supplies that Selene can afford to send you.”

“Fifteen people.”

Zeroual leaned forward, rested his palms on his knees. “Of course, if you can obtain some continued funding from your Mars Foundation you could enlarge that number slightly.”

Nodding, Jamie said, “The Foundation can provide a trickle of money, I suppose. I don’t know for how long, though.”

“I’d advise that any funding you get from the Foundation should be devoted to enlarging your greenhouse,” Zeroual said earnestly. “If you can enlarge your resource base, even just a little at a time, you can support more people.”

“Like the Old Ones,” Jamie muttered.

“Excuse me?”

“The original people who settled in the southwestern United States, a thousand years ago or more,” Jamie explained. “They had to survive in a very harsh, very arid environment. They learned how to grow crops with precious little water. They learned to survive.”

Zeroual nodded. “Ah. Yes. Something like that. You’ll have to learn to survive in a harsh environment. With very little help from outside.”

Washington, D.C.: Senate Investigation Committee

“State your name and affiliation, please.”

“Franklin Haverford Overmire. I have the honor to be archbishop of the New Morality Church.”

Archbishop Overmire looked tanned, vigorously healthy and completely at ease at the witness table, smiling at the senators arrayed across the front of the room. He wore his customary custom-tailored black suit. His light brown hair was cut just short of his clerical collar.

The clerk offered a Bible to Overmire; the archbishop placed his beringed right hand lightly upon it.

“Do you swear that the testimony you are about to give this committee will be the entire truth?”

“Of course.”

Morning sunlight beamed through the long windows of the committee chamber. At the head of the room sat the senators; every member of the committee was there. Every row of spectators’ benches was filled. The side aisles were crammed with news media camera teams.

The committee chairman, a crusty white-haired veteran of decades of Washington infighting, hunched over his pencil-slim microphone and announced in a grating voice, “The purpose of this investigation is to determine if the death of a member of the exploration crew on Mars was caused by negligence.”

He paused dramatically, then added, “Or if the conditions on Mars are too dangerous to allow human exploration there to continue.”

Sitting in the front row of benches directly behind the witness table, Dex Trumball fingered the subpoena he had folded into his jacket pocket. The committee lawyer who had personally presented the subpoena to him in Boston had promised that Dex would be called on the first day of the hearings. But he wondered why Archbishop Overmire had been asked to appear. What’s he got to testify about? Dex asked himself. All he knows about Mars is that he’s against our exploring it.

Besides, this committee can’t shut down our program. The government isn’t funding us and they can’t stop us. This hearing is strictly public-relations crap, a chance for these politicians to get their faces on the news.

Sure enough, after the first few powder-puff questions, the senator from Overmire’s state of Georgia was granted the floor. She was a youngish-looking woman with ash blond hair, slightly plump, with a high voice that reminded Dex of the whining of a handheld power drill.

“Archbishop Overmire,” she began, smiling broadly enough to make dimples, “the official report of Monsignor DiNardo’s death on Mars states that he suffered a paralytic stroke.”

“So I understand,” said the archbishop.

“Our investigation has determined that he had a preexisting cardiac problem, yet he was allowed to make the journey to Mars.”

“Scientific hubris,” the archbishop replied.

“You mean that the scientists directing the exploration of Mars didn’t investigate his health deeply enough to determine that he was suffering from cardiac disease?”

“Not exactly.”

“Or they ignored the fact that Monsignor DiNardo was ill? They allowed him to risk his life knowingly?”

Overmire shook his head slightly. “I’m afraid that the late Monsignor DiNardo thought of himself as a scientist ahead of his being a priest of the Roman Catholic Church. He wanted to work on Mars so badly that he was willing to tempt God.”

Dex felt his face flame.

“Tempt God, Archbishop?” prompted the senator.

“Matthew, chapter 4, verse 7: Thou shalt not tempt the Lord your God.”

The senator’s smile changed subtly. “You believe that Monsignor DiNardo tempted God by going to Mars, despite his illness?”

“What else? He chose secular humanism over his, Lord and Savior and suffered the consequences.”

“Then his death wasn’t an accident?”

“It was divine justice.”

Dex fought down a sudden urge to puke. This isn’t an investigation, he realized. It’s a fucking inquisition.

Tithonium Chasma: The Dig

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.

Tithonium Base: Discussion

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.

The Village

It was the same dream.

Jamie walked through the village, an unseen ghost among the Martians. They were going about their various businesses as the warm sun baked their adobe structures. Try as he might, Jamie could not get a clear vision of them. He knew they were all around him, moving through the narrow packed-dirt streets, but he couldn’t quite make out what they looked like.

Up on the cliff face far above him the temple buildings stood white and clear in the sunshine. Jamie stood for a long time in the village’s central square and stared up at the temple complex.

Maybe I can go up there and ask them what their writing means, he said to himself. He saw that there were steps carved into the nearly vertical cliff wall. A rugged climb, he thought. They must be terrific climbers. “Ya’aa’tey!”

Whirling around, Jamie saw his grandfather Al, once again in his best black leather vest and the hat with the big drooping brim and silver band circling its crown.

“Ya’aa’tey,” Jamie replied happily, reaching both hands toward his grandfather.

“How’s it goin’, Jamie?” Al asked. “Makin’ any progress?”

“The whites want to bring tourists here,” Jamie said. In his own ears his voice sounded as if he were nine years old.

“Naw, they can’t get here. Not here.”

“That’s right,” Jamie said, feeling relieved. “This village doesn’t exist anymore, does it?”

Al grinned at him, dentures white and even in his weathered, seamed face.

“You don’t get it, do you, grandson? They can’t come here because this village don’t exist yet.”

Tithonium Chasma: The Graveyard

Fifteen people, Jamie thought as he stared at his computer display. Fifteen men and women. Who’s going to stay? Who’d want to stay, under these conditions?

I can’t ask Vijay to risk it, he told himself. She’d want to stay with me, but it’s not fair for me to keep her here. But I can’t send her away, either. I promised her we’d be together, whatever happened. If I stay, she stays. She won’t want to leave, not without me. And I’ve got to stay here. I’ve got to.

His pocket phone buzzed. Flicking it open, he saw Billy Graycloud’s face in the tiny screen. The kid was outside at the dig, clear nanofabric bubble over his head.

“Dr. W, we’ve cleared one grave. You oughtta see it before they start takin’ the bones out.”

“Right,” said Jamie. “I’ll be there in a minute.”

He jumped up from his chair so fast he banged a knee against the wobbly folding table and nearly knocked his laptop to the floor. Stuffing the phone back into his shirt pocket, Jamie rushed to the suit lockers by the main airlock hatch and hurriedly pulled on a nanosuit.

“Not so fast, please.”

Jamie looked up and saw the diminutive Kristin Dvorak, one of the astronauts.

“I am the safety officer today,” she said, in her Middle European accent. “You rush too much, you kill yourself.”

Jamie smiled sheepishly. “I know. It’s just—”

Kristin held up a finger. “I’ll check you out. Make sure you’re sealed up good.”

He stood there like a suspect in a police shakedown while she walked all around him, checking his suit seals, his life-support backpack and their connections to the suit’s metal collar.

“Hokay,” she said, her ballerina-slim face utterly serious. “Now pull up the hood and inflate it.”

Jamie did as he was told. Then she checked the transmission from the radio clipped to his ear. At last Kristin smiled and said, “You are clear for excursion. Have a pleasant day.”

Jamie grinned at her and ducked through the airlock hatch.

Once outside he loped across the stony ground to the edge of the excavation and down the ramp to its bottom. A small crowd was standing off at the far side of the pit, where the cemetery lay. Jamie couldn’t see Carleton among them.

“Dr. W!” Graycloud’s voice. “Come and see this!”

Jamie made his way along the central street of the long-buried village, ancient building foundations dark and low against the reddish ground on either side of him. Nobody was working among them, he saw. They’re all at the graveyard.

“We waited for you, Jamie,” said Carter Carleton. Jamie was surprised to see him in a nanosuit instead of his usual hard-shell.

“I’m sorry if I held you up,” he said, panting a little from his trotting.

Carleton seemed strangely subdued. “He’s waited sixty-five million years. A few more minutes won’t bother him.”

There were eight men and women standing at the edge of the grave, Billy Graycloud among them. Jamie was surprised to see Mo Zeroual, too. What’s a number cruncher from Selene doing out here? he asked himself. He must have volunteered.

Jamie looked down into the uncovered grave. It was filled with odd-looking bones, crushed by the weight of eons, flattened, distorted. But he thought he could make out what looked like a spine, and maybe those were limbs. Six of them?

“That’s a Martian?” he whispered.

“That’s a Martian,” Carleton replied, his voice also hushed, choked. “And more.”

Jamie glanced at the anthropologist, then looked back into the grave.

Pointing, Carleton said, “Those look like beads, don’t you think? And that little object there might have been a small vase or a cup of some sort.”

“It’s hard to tell,” said Jamie.

“It’s all been flattened by the overburden,” Carleton said, still half-whispering. “It’s going to take some time to put it all together and find out how they were actually built.”

“Six legs?” Jamie asked.

Carleton nodded inside his bubble helmet. “At least. Two of them end in grasping appendages. Hands. See?”

“Hard to tell,” Jamie repeated.

Graycloud spoke up. “They must’ve been built close to the ground. Like turtles.”

“Not necessarily,” said Carleton. “The skeleton’s been flattened by the weight of thirty meters of soil pressing down on it.”

Someone else made a comment, and Carleton answered. But Jamie stared into the grave and saw at last the Martians that he had dreamed about. They didn’t look human at all, but they had legs and arms and hands, eyes and ears, they spoke a language and wrote pictographs and built this village and the shrine high up on the canyon wall. They had minds. We could have communicated with them, if only…

Carleton sank to his knees and bent to reach into the grave.

“Careful!” one of the group gasped.

“I know,” said Carleton, leaning over. His gloved fingers reached for the flattened, odd-shaped bone at one end of the skeleton. It was only slightly larger than his hand, mottled rusty gray, hard looking.

Holding it up in his hands like a kneeling worshiper raising a holy grail, Carleton said, “This is a cranium. Got to be.”

“The brain case isn’t all that big.”

“Are those eye sockets?”

“They look straight ahead. Binocular vision.”

“They saw things in depth: three-dimensional vision, just like us.”

Resting back on his haunches, Carleton turned the fossil around in his hands. “Ha. See this?” He pointed with his free hand.

Jamie saw a hole in the back of the skull.

“Foramen magnum, I’ll bet my last breath on it,” Carleton said in a strangely hushed, almost worshipful voice. “This is where the spinal cord went through the cranium to connect with the brain.”

“If its brain was in its cranium,” one of the biologists said.

Ignoring the remark, Carleton went on, “It must have been four-legged.”

“Or six?”

“It held its body horizontal to the ground. It didn’t stand upright, the way we do.”

Jamie thought that was a lot to assume in the first five minutes of examination, but he said nothing. This was Carleton’s moment and he was entitled to his surmises. Who knows? Jamie asked himself. He might even be right.

Carleton slapped his gloved hands together, startling Jamie out of his musings. “All right,” he said, his voice loud and commanding now. “We start removing the bones, one piece at a time. I want a complete photographic record. Every clod, every molecule we remove has got to be recorded down to the nanometer. This is history, people! Let’s get to work!”

And Jamie heard his grandfather’s enigmatic words: This village don’t exist yet.

Tithonium Base: The Translation

Jamie helped Carleton and his team to tenderly lift the fossilized bones out of the grave, together with the beads and shards of pottery that lay with the body, and carry them inside the dome. Under Carleton’s exacting direction, they laid everything on the big stereo table in exactly the same positions as they had been in the grave.

Two technicians spent the next hour taking stereo photographs of the remains, while Carleton’s people gathered in the cafeteria to relax after a long, exciting, tension-filled day. Jamie went with them.

“Well, they buried their dead, all right,” said Alonzo Jenkins as he lounged back in a cafeteria chair, legs stretched out and a plastic glass of fruit juice in his hand.

“With trinkets,” added Shirley Macintyre, one of the medical technicians who had volunteered to help at the dig. She was in her midtwenties, and had dropped out of astronaut training in Britain to join the medical team on Mars. Tall, lean and muscular, she had been pursued by several of the men but stayed aloof from them all.

“They must have believed in an afterlife,” Billy Graycloud said softly. Eyebrows went up; people looked surprised that Graycloud would speak up.

Jamie smiled at the young man and said, “So they must have had some form of religion.” Everyone nodded.

“I wonder how much they were like us,” murmured one of the men.

“Or we’re like them.”

“Not physically,” said Jamie. “We don’t look anything alike.”

“But mentally?”

“Spiritually?”

“They lived in villages,” Jamie said, ticking off points on his fingers. “They had a rudimentary form of writing. They buried their dead—”

“With beads and pottery,” Macintyre interjected.

“Like Billy said, they believed in an afterlife,” said Jenkins. “So they must have had some kind of religion.”

“That’s the basis for religion, sure enough.”

They looked up to see Carter Carleton walking toward them from the juice dispensers, a glass in his hand, a happy smile on his handsome face.

“The promise of life beyond death,” Jenkins said. “That’s what religion’s all about.”

“It’s a powerful lure,” Carleton said, joining the conversation as he sat himself next to Macintyre. “It’s pure nonsense, of course, but it’s certainly suckered people into accepting religion everywhere, even on Mars.”

“What do you mean, it’s nonsense?” Macintyre asked. “How can you be sure?”

“Catholic, aren’t you?” said Carleton, frowning slightly. “You’ve had it pounded into your skull since before you could walk.”

Jenkins objected, “That’s not fair, Dr. Carleton. Everyone’s entitled to their beliefs.”

“Besides,” Macintyre said, “there’s a lot more to religion than the promise of an afterlife. There’s the whole ethical basis. Society would be impossible without religion’s ethical teachings.”

Carleton smirked. “Like ‘Thou shalt not kill’? Except when your church says it’s okay. Like the Crusades: kill the Saracens! Or the suicide bombers: kill the unbelievers!”

“They were extremists.”

“Were they? How about the good Christians back in the USA who’ve made homosexuality a crime in their states? Outlawed abortion. Hell, they’re even trying to make all forms of family planning illegal.”

“They’re acting on their beliefs,” Macintyre insisted.

Jamie got to his feet and left them arguing. To himself he thought, How about the religious believers who don’t want us here on Mars? How about the terrorists who set off those bombs back at the university? How about—

“Dr. W?”

Jamie broke out of his thoughts and saw Billy Graycloud walking beside him.

“Had enough of the debate?” he asked.

Graycloud smiled shyly. “I figure they’ll start asking me about my religious beliefs pretty soon. I don’t want to get involved in it.”

“Smart lad,” Jamie said. “We’ve got enough to do without getting into arguments over religion. They’ll start yelling at each other pretty soon.”

“I guess. Nothing like religion to start people fightin’.”

Jamie smiled bitterly. “When you’re sure you’re right, when you’ve been told all your life that these beliefs are the absolute truth…” He shook his head. “People have done horrible things in the name of religion.”

They walked side by side toward Jamie’s quarters.

“I guess that’s why they’re scared of science,” Graycloud muttered, as much to himself as to Jamie. “Scientists don’t talk about truth. They look for facts.”

“And we change our minds, too, when new facts contradict what we believed.”

Graycloud nodded. He looked to Jamie as if he was about to say something, but he stopped himself and remained silent.

“Is there something else?”

Graycloud pursed his lips, as if searching his memory. “Well, yeah, there is.”

Jamie waited for the youngster to go on. After several silent steps he prodded, “What is it, Billy?”

Frowning slightly, Graycloud said, “The translation.”

“Getting anywhere?”

“Kinda. Maybe. I’m not sure.”

“What’s the problem?”

“Could you come over to the comm center? I can show you what I’ve done so far.”

Nodding, Jamie changed course and walked with Graycloud to the communications center. The place was silent except for the hum of the consoles. Two women were on duty, chatting quietly together, headphones clipped to their ears while their display screens flickered with routine messages. Graycloud sat at an unused console and booted up the computer. Jamie pulled one of the little wheeled chairs over beside him and sat on it.

The screen showed the inscriptions carved into the wall of the cliff structure. Graycloud scrolled the screen’s cursor to the image of a circle with short lines emanating from it, north, south, east and west.

“Okay,” Graycloud said, licking his lips. “That one I call the sun.

“Father Sun,” Jamie murmured. “Like the Navaho sun symbol.”

“Right. Okay. That one’s easy. Now this one…” The cursor drifted to a wriggly pair of lines and stopped. “This one might mean ‘water.’ Or ‘river.’ ”

“That’s reasonable,” said Jamie.

“And this one…” The cursor swung to a bulbous symbol that reminded Jamie of a head of broccoli. “Might be ‘tree’ or ‘plant.’ ”

“Or ‘crops,’ ” Jamie suggested.

Graycloud’s brows hiked up. “Yeah. Crops. Could be.”

Jamie patted the younger man’s shoulder. “You’re making progress, Billy.”

“Am I?” Graycloud turned toward him and Jamie could see the doubt and worry in his eyes. “Or am I just screwin’ around?”

“Progress,” Jamie said firmly.

Graycloud shook his head warily. “I don’t know, Dr. W. All I’m really doing is assigning our words to their symbols. Arbitrarily. How do we know the circle means the sun? It might mean ‘crater’ or ‘beach ball,’ for all we know.”

Jamie almost laughed. “Probably not ‘beach ball.’ ”

“But you see the problem?” Graycloud said, almost pleading. “I’m just assigning our meanings to their symbols. It’s GIGO: garbage in, garbage out.”

For a moment Jamie said nothing, thinking hard as he looked at this earnest young man and considered his problem. At last he said, “The proof will be in the message you get out of the symbols, Billy. When you run these meanings through the computer, will a meaningful message come out of them or will it be meaningless nonsense?”

“But we could be fooling ourselves.”

“How?”

“I mean, even if we get a message that seems to have some meaning to it, it could be just the meaning we put into it. It could have nothing to do with what the Martians wanted to say.”

“I see.”

“I could be wasting my time here.”

Jamie smiled. “Billy, you’ve got thesis blues.”

“Huh?”

“Every graduate student goes through this when they have to write their thesis. At some point in the project it all starts to look like nonsense, garbage, junk. You feel certain that you’re wasting your time, that what you’re doing is all gibberish and it’s never going to go anywhere. You start to wonder if you shouldn’t just toss it all down the chute and go out and sell used cars or paint houses or do something, anything, that’s more useful than the crap you’re working on.”

Graycloud stared at him for a long silent moment. Then, “Did you ever feel that way?”

Jamie nodded, remembering. “With my master’s thesis. And especially with the doctorate. Stratigraphy of the Potential Oil-Bearing Deposits of Northern New Mexico. I almost quit school altogether when I was working on that one.”

Blinking, Graycloud said, “But there aren’t any oil-bearing deposits in northern New Mexico. Are there?”

“Not much. Plenty of dinosaur fossils, though. I damned near changed my major to paleontology.”

“Really?”

“I thought about it. But I stayed with geology and that thesis earned me my Ph.D.”

Graycloud looked uncertain, troubled.

“Keep plugging at it, Billy. I know it looks like a mess now, but you’ll get there. It’ll be worth it in the end.”

“I sure hope so.”

Silently, Jamie replied, So do I, kid. So do I.

Tithonium Base: The Path

“Must’ve been some dreams you had, love,” Vijay said as she dressed for the day.

Freshly showered, Jamie looked up at her as he pulled on his softboots. “What do yon mean?”

“You were tossing all night. Nearly pushed me out of the bed, you did.”

“No!”

She sat on the edge of the bed beside him and put a hand on his shoulder. “What was it, Jamie? What were you dreaming about?”

Jamie tried to remember. “It was all pretty confusing.”

“You called out to your grandfather. More’n once.”

Nodding, he replied, “Yes, Al was there. And Billy Graycloud. And you, too.”

“That’s what you were moaning about?”

“It’s a jumble. It doesn’t make any sense. The more I try to remember it the blurrier it gets.”

Vijay got to her feet, smiling. “Well, whatever it is, I hope you resolve it. Kept me up most of the night.”

She waited while he finished dressing. As he took the bear fetish from atop the bed table and slipped it into his coverall pocket, Jamie thought about his dreams.

There was more than one, he remembered. I was with Al and Billy in the village, then I was at an airport somewhere with Dex. And then with Vijay, here on Mars again. And they were all dying. Everything was dying. The people in the village, Al, Billy, Vijay—everybody was dying and there wasn’t anything I could do about it.

“Where are you, love?”

He twitched with surprise and realized that he’d been standing by the bed table for several minutes, lost in thought.

“I’m sorry,” he mumbled.

Vijay smiled again. “Come on, mate. Breakfast time. Then I’ve got to write up a half dozen psych profiles.”

“And I’ve got to sort out the personnel files, see who wants to stay and who has to go.”

They left their quarters and started across the dome toward the cafeteria, Jamie plodding along like a schoolboy trudging unwillingly to class. Morning sunlight filled the dome with brightness.

“How are you and Dr. Quintana getting along?” he asked as they got into line at the serving counter. Somebody was cooking up pancakes; Jamie savored the aroma of baking and maple syrup.

“No worries with Nari,” said Vijay. “We’re writing this paper together and I help her on her regular rounds in the infirmary. She likes to pretend she’s a tigress, but under it all she’s more like a little koala bear, actually.”

“No more lice patrol?”

Vijay laughed. “Not until the next resupply mission lands.”

In two weeks, Jamie knew. They’ll take back a few dozen people. Then Dex’ll send the evacuation flight to take the rest of the staff. We’ll only have fifteen people left here. Fifteen people. Unless… Unless…

After breakfast Jamie went to his cubicle of an office and pulled up the logistics and financial data that Mo Zeroual had amassed. Fifteen people, he thought. Fifteen men and women. Working here at the dome indefinitely, maybe for a year or more before we can afford another resupply flight.

Then he called up the detailed proposal that Dex had sent from Boston. Tourists. Jamie’s blood ran cold at the thought. Only ten at a time. Three times a year. Or four. If we go with four it could bring in two billion dollars a year. Enough to keep us going. We’d have to shave the operation a little, cut the number of people here by ten percent or so. But we could keep nearly two hundred people working here. We could keep going—as long as the tourists keep coming.

But now Dex wants to terraform the whole area here. Put a big glass dome over the village and the cliff structures so the tourists can tramp around in their shirtsleeves.

Damn! Jamie wanted to slam a fist on his desktop, but he knew that the flimsy folding table would collapse if he did. Instead, he got to his feet and paced out of his cubicle, walking blindly across the dome, wondering what to do, what to do.

We’re digging up the fossils of Martians! he screamed silently to himself. We’re learning how they lived, what they felt, the meaning of the pictographs they carved into the wall of their temple.

And nobody on Earth cares! Nobody gives a damn! Nobody who matters, at least.

How can I get us through this? Jamie asked himself. Fingering the fetish in his pocket, he wondered, What path should I choose, Grandfather?

“Jamie? Dr. Waterman?”

Jamie blinked to see tall, gangling Sal Hasdrubal looming before him, his dark face set in a hard, troubled frown.

Pulling himself out of his thoughts, Jamie said, “Sal. Good morning.”

“Can I talk with you? In private?”

“Sure.” Jamie gestured back toward his cubicle. “In my office.”

Hasdrubal’s lanky form nearly filled the cube; his long legs stretched almost the width of the small compartment.

“What’s on your mind, Sal?” Jamie asked. He had slid his own chair as far into a corner as he could.

“It’s the crater,” said Hasdrubal. “The one that the meteor impact made.”

“Crater Chang,” Jamie said.

Hasdrubal almost smiled. “Yeah, Chang.”

“What about it?”

Hasdrubal pointed toward Jamie’s laptop, resting on the folding table against one of the partitions.

“Can I use your computer?”

“Go right ahead.”

Within a few seconds the laptop’s screen displayed a series of graphs. Before Jamie could ask what they represented, Hasdrubal explained: “The crater’s still outgassing.” He traced one of the curves with a long, slim finger. “See, here’s the data from the sensors we left there. Water vapor, some trace elements. But no superoxides.”

Jamie understood. “The bottom of the crater is deep enough so that it’s below the superoxide layer near the ground’s surface.”

“Right. And there’s still enough heat to be boilin’ out some of the permafrost down there.”

“How deep is the crater?” Jamie asked.

“Twenty-eight meters at its deepest point.”

“And the permafrost is still boiling off? That can’t be from the heat of the impact, not after this many weeks.”

“Don’t know,” Hasdrubal said, with a shrug. “But I have a hunch.”

Jamie waited.

“It could be that the bacteria living that deep are melting the permafrost.”

“Bacteria?”

“Yeah. You know, SLiMEs. They get their water from the permafrost. They must be able to liquefy the ice.”

“How could they do that?”

“That’s one of the reasons I want to go back.”

“Chang won’t permit it?”

“I’ve tried to get him to okay a trip back to the crater, but he says you decided we hafta put all our efforts into Carleton’s dig.”

Jamie hesitated, then nodded. “That’s right. I did.”

“But that crater’s important,” Hasdrubal insisted. “Look. Look at this.”

The biologist flicked his long fingers across the keyboard of Jamie’s laptop. Photomicrographs appeared on the screen.

Squinting slightly, Jamie said, “Those look like bacteria.”

“That’s right! That’s just what they are. SLiMEs. From the soil at the bottom of the crater.”

“Living?”

Hasdrubal’s dark face was intense, demanding. “Not for long. They’re desiccating, drying out. Their natural environment is underground, where it’s safe from the radiation hitting the surface. And warmer. Now they’ve been exposed and it’s killing them.”

“So what can you do about it?”

Gesturing with his long arms, Hasdrubal replied, “Go to the crater, pack up some samples and bring ’em back here where I can keep them in an environmental chamber.”

“And study them,” Jamie finished for him.

“And study them, right,” Hasdrubal agreed. “They’ll be in a simulated environment instead of the real thing, but we can watch how they react, how they grow and reproduce, how they melt the permafrost.”

Jamie thought about it for a moment. “They eat rock?”

“Iron. These SLiMEs are siderophiles. But they need to be in a high-pressure environment, and protected from solar radiation.”

“And the harder stuff, too,” Jamie added. “X-rays and gammas.”

“Yeah,” said Hasdrubal. “Exposed on the surface they get a full dose of whatever hits the ground, even at the bottom of the crater.”

Looking up from the screen, Jamie asked, “So you want to go back to the crater and scoop up some samples of the bacteria.”

“I need to!” Hasdrubal said fervently. “It’s important for our work here. I mean, why the hell are we here if we can’t study the indigenous life forms?”

Jamie smiled, remembering when his two-year-old Jimmy discovered the difference between “I want some candy, Daddy” and “I need some candy, Daddy.”

“How long would you have to stay at the crater?”

“Haifa day, at most. Well, maybe a whole day.”

Nodding wearily, Jamie said, “Let me talk to Chang about it. Maybe we can squeeze in a quick excursion for you before the resupply ship arrives.”

Hasdrubal nodded knowingly. “And we start packing up to leave.”

Boston: Trumball Residence

“You really don’t have to do this,” she said.

Dex looked up from the small pile of data discs he was stuffing into his travel bag. “Yes I do,” he said tightly.

His wife sighed, a maneuver that never failed to stir Dex, even though she was wearing a loose-fitting casual blouse over a comfortable pair of dark slacks.

“Two weeks?” she bleated.

“Five days out, three days on Mars, five days back,” Dex replied. “Thirteen days, total. I’ll be back in time for election day.”

“And what am I supposed to do while you’re gone? Have you thought about that?”

Dex recognized the slightly veiled threat. He made himself grin at her. “Read our prenup,” he suggested.

“You’re rotten!”

“I know. I’m sorry. I told you you could come with me.”

“To Mars?” Her china blue eyes went wide.

“Sure. I’ve been there. It’s fascinating. It’d be fun to have you there with me.”

She shook her blond head. “Not me! I’ll stay home and wait for you, like those wives of whaling sailors in the old days.”

“Maybe I should build a widow’s walk up on the roof,” Dex muttered as he zipped up the travel bag.

“You’re really leaving?” she said, her voice going small, almost frightened.

“I’ll be back.”

“You’re risking your neck because of your Apache friend.”

“Navaho.”

“Whatever. I hate him.”

Dex looked squarely at her. She was really upset. “Look, honey, it’s no more dangerous than flying to London. Really.”

“But why do you have to go to frigging Mars just to tell him you’re sending everybody home?”

With a sadness that he’d kept under control until this moment, Dex said, “I can’t tell him any other way. It’s got to be face-to-face, man-to-man.”

“Stupid macho bullshit,” she muttered.

Dex shrugged. “When you have to kill a man,” he quoted Churchill, “it costs nothing to be polite about it.”

His wife dabbed at her eyes as he brushed past her and headed for the limousine waiting to take him to the aerospaceport.

It was the first time in more than two months that the president had invited Francisco Delgado to the Oval Office, and she wished she hadn’t.

The president of the United States sat behind her broad dark mahogany desk, smiling at Archbishop Overmire, who seemed perfectly at ease in the cushioned leather chair next to Delgado’s. Behind the president, through the long windows that looked out on the Rose Garden, the science advisor could see that last night’s rainstorm had stripped the last leaves from the trees. The Weather Service predicts a colder-than-normal winter, Delgado thought idly; maybe even a little snow up in New England.

“I’m very pleased that you could find the time to attend this meeting,” the president was saying to Archbishop Overmire. Her smile seemed genuine enough; much warmer than she had ever vouchsafed to her science advisor.

Overmire smiled back graciously. “Madam President, your slightest wish is my command.”

Three of Overmire’s aides sat back on the sofa by the unused fireplace, dressed, like the archbishop, in black clerical suits. Delgado thought they looked like clones: each of them ascetically thin and pale. Overmire himself glowed with pink-cheeked health and happy good cheer. On the facing sofa sat the president’s chief of staff and her chief counsel.

Delgado had wanted to bring a couple of his assistants to this meeting, especially the young geologist who monitored the work on Mars and the head of the Georgetown University anthropology department, a Jesuit who was closely following Carleton’s excavation of the Martian fossils. But the president’s assistants had said no: this was a small, informal meeting. No staff people.

Except for the archbishop’s three clones and the president’s two staff members. What they meant was that Delgado was not allowed to bring his own people with him.

After a few minutes of meaningless pleasantries, the president said to Overmire, “I take it you’ve seen the images from the Martian graves.”

“I have indeed,” said the archbishop. “They look more like the skeletons of dogs or pigs than people.”

“They’re Martians,” Delgado said. “We shouldn’t expect them to look like human beings.”

Overmire smiled tolerantly. “I’m not a scientist, of course, but it looks to me as if your people on Mars have uncovered a pet cemetery, not a graveyard where people are buried.”

Delgado felt his cheeks flame, but he immediately clamped down on his anger. The man’s trying to bait me, he told himself. Turning to the president, he said, “Whether the skeletons uncovered so far are the remains of the people who built the village or their pets, the fact remains that intelligent creatures lived on Mars, built their homes on Mars, and even believed in some form of afterlife.”

“They worshipped God,” the president breathed.

Overmire corrected, “They worshipped false gods, of course. They had no knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.”

“How can you know that?” Delgado demanded. “What evidence do you have—”

“Gentlemen,” said the president, “we’re not here to discuss religion. Or archeology, for that matter.”

“Of course,” said Overmire, smiling again.

Just what are we here to discuss? Delgado wondered silently.

As if to answer his unvoiced question, the president explained, “My secretary of education is making a fuss about these Martian fossils. She wants to encourage schools around the country to study what the scientists are discovering.”

Ahh, thought Delgado. Education’s doing her job and that’s got the president worried.

Overmire’s smile disappeared. “Use federal tax dollars to popularize godless humanism?” he said, his voice low and tight. “It’s bad enough that secular university scientists are giving seminars and holding conferences about these alleged Martians—”

“Alleged?” Delgado snapped.

“There’s no proof that the Martians were intelligent.”

“No proof?” Delgado’s temper snapped. “They built that village! They buried their dead! With funeral adornments! They built those structures up in the cliff! They carved writing into the walls!”

“One wall,” said Overmire. “And, quite frankly, it’s just as easy to believe that this Navaho scientist put up all these so-called structures just to wheedle more money out of us.”

Delgado sputtered, “That’s… that’s… it’s a goddamned lie and you know it!”

Unruffled, Overmire lifted one hand and replied, “You scientists have a saying about Ockham’s razor, don’t you? If you have more than one possible explanation for something, then the simplest one is the right one? Well, which is simpler, assuming that there was a race of intelligent people on Mars sixty million years ago, or assuming that some fanatical scientists have faked the evidence for them?”

It took all of Delgado’s willpower to keep from leaping at the archbishop’s throat and throttling him.

The president, behind her massive desk, made a curt gesture. “Now, listen,” she said. “My education secretary is priming herself for a run for the presidency in two years. I can’t let her use Mars as ammunition against me.”

Overmire’s smile turned crafty. He eased back in his chair and said, “Madam President, your administration has not been as fully cooperative with the Lord’s work as it might be.”

“I admit that,” said the president. “And I’m taking steps to change it.”

The archbishop beamed. “In that case, be assured that you will have the full backing of the New Morality—and every right-thinking, God-fearing voter in the land.”

The president smiled back at him.

“That is, if,” Overmire continued, “you ask for the resignation of your secretary of education and replace her with someone we can both work with.”

The president’s smile started to look forced, but she nodded.

“By their fruits you shall know them,” Overmire murmured.

Trying to contain his temper, Delgado said, “Madam President, you’ve got to see the whole picture here. We’re dealing with the difference between science and misplaced religious faith.”

“Misplaced?” Overmire looked shocked.

“We’re dealing,” Delgado went on, his voice rising, “with the struggle between free scientific inquiry and dogmatic dictates from people who cherish ignorance over understanding. It’s bad enough that we’ve stopped supporting the exploration of Mars, and we’ve got congressional committees investigating that priest’s death. Now you’re talking about preventing the Department of Education from helping school children learn about the cutting edge of scientific exploration!”

“I resent your attitude,” said the archbishop.

The president agreed. “You could notch it down a bit, Dr. Delgado. An apology wouldn’t be out of order.”

“Apologize? For the truth? I’d sooner resign!”

With a shrug, the president said, “If that’s the way you feel, I’ll expect your resignation on my desk before the end of the day.”

Overmire’s smile turned smug. And Delgado finally understood why he’d been invited to the Oval Office.

Tithonium Base: Resupply Flight 082

For the five days of the fusion torch ship’s flight to Mars Dex felt a growing apprehension about seeing Jamie again. He’ll try to talk me into keeping the operation going, Dex told himself. He’s got this cockamamie scheme for keeping fifteen people at the base and depending on Selene for supplies. He’ll never agree to shutting down the operation completely. He won’t want to leave Mars. Christ, when it comes down to it I’ll probably have to get a couple of guys to literally pick him up and carry him off.

Not this flight, thank god. All I’ve got to do on this flight is tell him we’re giving up. Tell him it’s finished, over. All I’ve got to do is rip his guts out.

By the time the torch ship took up an orbit around Mars Dex was in a thoroughly depressed mood. Not even the sight of the red planet gliding past the observation port of the ship’s lounge gladdened him.

Jamie was also apprehensive about Dex’s arrival. He paced tensely from his tiny workspace to the cafeteria, poured himself a mug of coffee, checked with the flight monitors in the communications center.

“Oh-eight-two is right on the mark, Dr. Waterman,” the flight controller told him, smiling up at him from her display screen. “I hope they remembered to bring the cosmetics we ordered.”

Jamie tried to smile for her. His thanks came out more as a grunt than anything else. Cosmetics, he said to himself as he headed back toward his cubicle. She must just be kidding, trying to cheer me up.

Hasdrubal’s excursion to Crater Chang had been okayed. Jamie himself would go with the biologist. He was looking forward to it, looking forward to doing something useful, something more than scowling at logistics numbers that wouldn’t change and hoping for a miracle.

Unbidden, Zeke Larkin’s bitter words rang in his mind. What we’re doing here is rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.

The PA speakers blared, “L/AV HAS MADE RENDEZVOUS WITH RESUPPLY FLIGHT 082.”

When they come down, Jamie knew, Dex will be with them. And he’ll be carrying our death warrant.

The time seemed to stretch endlessly. In the weightlessness of orbit, Dex stayed in his compartment and tried not to make any sudden motions. His head felt stuffy, as if he were coming down with a bad cold. His guts felt woozy.

That’s all normal, he told himself. You’ve been through this before. Twenty-three years ago, he remembered. It’s been twenty-three years since I left Mars. I swore I’d never return. Once was enough. But here I am. Why? For Jamie. Because of that goddamned stubborn redskin.

Because he’s my friend, Dex realized. Over all these years he’s been the one real friend I’ve got. Dex sat on the edge of his bunk, gripping its sides with both hands, suddenly aware of the truth of it. Rollie Kinnear, all the people he knew from business, from the Foundation, his social acquaintances, even his various wives—Jamie’s the only one among them who’s a real friend. A pain in the ass, that’s true, but all he’s ever wanted from me is to help him explore Mars. Nothing for himself, just Mars.

And I’m here to take that away from him.

“L/AV LANDING IN TEN MINUTES,” the PA speakers announced.

Jamie looked up from his laptop’s display. He’ll be here in ten minutes. Slowly he got to his feet and started for the main airlock hatch. Then he hesitated, and made a detour toward the infirmary.

Vijay was at the desk that they had shoehorned in next to the accordion-fold door.

“Would you like to come and greet Dex?” he asked her, trying to make it sound light.

“Need some moral support, love?” she countered.

He grinned despite himself. “Only a couple tons worth.”

Vijay closed her laptop gently and got to her feet. He saw that she was wearing a light peach-colored sweater and a knee-length skirt instead of her usual coveralls.

“You expected this, didn’t you?” Jamie said.

She smiled at him, dazzling white teeth against her dark skin, and he realized all over again how much smarter she was than he.

They stood off to one side of the airlock hatch, where they could look through the dome’s transparent wall out onto the bare, rust-red ground and the towering cliffs off in the distance. A broad area had been cleared of rocks and scoured smooth by uncounted landings of L/AVs. A pair of the spindly vehicles stood off by the edge of the landing area, looking like big metallic spiders. Sunlight glinted off their bulbous glassteel canopies.

“L/AV LANDING IN ONE MINUTE,” the overhead speakers announced. Then it switched to the computer synthesized voice of the automated countdown, “FIFTY-FIVE SECONDS… FIFTY-FOUR…”

Jamie felt his palms sweating. What if there’s a malfunction? What if they have to abort the landing? What if the landing struts fail? What if—

Vijay squeezed his arm and pointed with her other hand. “Look! There it is!”

The L/AV grew from a black dot against the yellowish sky and took on solid form. Jamie could even see the skinny landing struts sticking out from the corners of the boxy main body. The craft seemed to stagger momentarily as a burst of rocket exhaust flared from its main nozzle. Then it straightened, turned slightly in midair, and descended straight down. Even through the insulated wall of the dome Jamie could hear the thin screeching of its altitude jets. Dust and pebbles flew from the landing field as the L/AV settled down softly, its thin legs flexing.

“They’re down!” Vijay exclaimed.

Jamie let out the breath that he’d been holding for the past dozen seconds.

It took a seemingly endless time for the access tube to crawl out and connect with the L/AV’s airlock. The few dozen people clustered around the dome’s airlock hatch faded back as Jamie and Vijay went to the hatch. Jamie saw that Chang was already there, in a crisply fresh set of sky blue coveralls.

“Dr. Waterman,” said the mission director, with a slight bow.

“Dr. Chang,” Jamie replied, dipping his chin in return.

Jamie found himself licking his lips as a pair of technicians swung the airlock hatch open. What should I say to Dex? Should I let Chang greet him first? How’s he going to be after coming all this way?

Dex Trumball was the first person to come through the access tunnel. He was wearing a short-sleeved sports shirt of pale lemon hanging loosely over dark slacks, and carrying a black soft-sided travel bag in one hand.

He stepped over the sill of the hatch, glanced around. Jamie suddenly realized that Dex had worked just as hard as he himself to keep the exploration of Mars alive. He’s come all this way when he could have stayed home. He—

Dex walked past Chang and straight to Jamie. Jamie took a step toward him. Dex dropped his bag and the two men suddenly clasped each other in a profound embrace of warm friendship.

“Welcome back to Mars,” Jamie said, his voice strangely throaty.

Dex grinned the way he had twenty-three years earlier, when they had first explored the cliff structures together.

“I didn’t think it’d hit me this way, Jamie, but it’s good to be back. Damned good.”

Tithonium Base: Excursion

Jamie clutched Dex’s shoulders for several wordless moments. At last the two men stepped back from each other, both of them grinning broadly.

Dex recognized Vijay. “Well, how are you, gorgeous?”

“I’m fine, Dex. Glad to see you here.” She put her hands on his shoulders and bussed him on the cheek.

“And you know Dr. Chang, of course,” Jamie said, gesturing toward the mission director.

Chang stepped forward stiffly and offered his hand.

“A pleasure to see you again, Dr. Chang,” Dex said.

“Welcome to Trumball Exploration Center,” said Chang, using the base’s official name.

Dex nodded, then glanced around. “My father’d be very impressed with all this.”

“Please allow me to show you our humble base.” Dex glanced at Jamie.

“Go ahead,” Jamie said. “I’ll take care of your baggage.”

“Hey, this is it,” Dex said, bending to pick up his travel bag. “I leave when the torch ship goes.”

A sudden idea struck Jamie. “In that case, why don’t you come with us this afternoon?”

Chang’s eyes narrowed, but he said nothing.

“Come? Where?” Dex asked.

“We’re going out on an overnight excursion. To Crater Chang.”

“Safety regulations,” Chang murmured. “It is necessary—”

Dex interrupted, “Dr. Chang, I’m an experienced geologist. I’ve driven a camper more than a thousand kilometers overland.”

“More than twenty years ago,” Chang pointed out.

“The campers haven’t changed that much. And I’ve passed all my physicals.”

“So did Monsignor DiNardo.”

Dex’s expression tightened slightly. “I’m not going to die on you, Dr. Chang. And I’d like to get outside—after you show me around the base.”

Chang looked from Dex’s blue-green eyes to Jamie, then back again. “I know of your experience in overland excursion. No one has driven a camper farther.”

“Then it’s okay?”

“If the scientific director agrees.”

Jamie said, “I think it will be good for Dr. Trumball to accompany Hasdrubal and me on the excursion. It’s only overnight. We’ll be back tomorrow.”

“In time for the torch ship’s departure,” Dex added.

With a laugh, Jamie said, “We won’t leave you stranded here, Dex.”

“Good.” He hefted his travel bag. “I only brought a couple days worth of underwear.”

While Chang escorted Dex on a tour of the base dome, Jamie took Dex’s bag and, with Vijay beside him, carried it to the compartment that would serve as Dex’s quarters.

“D’you think it’s all that good an idea, taking him out on your excursion?” she asked.

Jamie tossed the bag on the compartment’s bunk, noting almost unconsciously how lightly it floated in the gentle Martian gravity.

“A very good idea,” he replied as they started back toward the infirmary. “I want Dex to see what we’re doing here.”

“But what about the village?”

“We’ll take a look at it on our way out to the cable lifts.”

Vijay shook her head ever so slightly. “Carleton’s going to be disappointed.”

“We’ll look at the village,” Jamie repeated. “But I want Dex to see this new crater and the work that Hasdrubal’s doing.”

“I hope you know what you’re doing.”

“Me, too,” Jamie said.

After a brief lunch with Chang in his office, Jamie bustled Dex to the main airlock, where they pulled on nanofabric suits.

“These things really work?” Dex asked, looking dubious.

Jamie nodded. “Everybody uses them now.”

“Pretty flimsy.”

The astronaut serving as safety officer almost scowled at him. “They’re the best damned protection you can have,” he said firmly. “A helluva lot better than those old clunkers. Even Dr. Carleton is using ’em now.”

As if on cue, Carter Carleton came striding up toward them. Jamie introduced the anthropologist to Dex.

“Coming out to see the excavation,” Carleton said as he reached for one of the suits hanging limply in their locker. It wasn’t a question.

“We’ll stop by and take a look,” Jamie replied. “We’re on our way out to see Crater Chang.”

“Chang.” Carleton’s voice went flat.

“I’ve been following your work on the village,” Dex said, suddenly diplomatic. “Fantastic stuff, especially the graveyard.”

“Yes,” said Carleton.

“Complete skeletons,” Dex went on, shrugging his arms into the suit’s backpack. “We’re trying to get the news nets to carry a special on your work.”

Carleton said nothing. He stepped into the leggings of the suit he’d chosen, pulled them up over his hips and then worked his arms into the sleeves.

Once all three of them were in their suits with the bubble helmets inflated and the astronaut satisfied that they were properly sealed up, Carleton asked:

“Just how much time can you spare to examine the village?”

Jamie recognized the sarcasm in his voice. The anger.

“An hour,” he said, stepping to the airlock hatch. “Then we’ve got to go up the cable with Hasdrubal and spend the night in the dome up on the plain.”

“One hour,” Carleton muttered.

Jamie glanced at Dex. From the expression on his face Jamie could see that even Dex recognized the bitterness in Carleton’s tone.

“That’s one pissed-off anthropologist,” Dex said as he walked between Jamie and Hasdrubal toward the cable lifts running along the cliff face.

“Did you want to stay longer?” Jamie asked.

With a small shrug, Dex said, “Might’ve been interesting, poking around those building foundations, looking into the graves.”

Hasdrubal said, “Carleton wouldn’t let you touch anything.”

“Yeah. I can understand why.”

And maybe, Jamie thought silently, you’ll be able to understand why we can’t have tourists poking around the village.

They reached the base of the cable and started to clip the harnesses over their suits. Jamie watched Dex closely. He had no problems with the harness and he seemed to be more at ease wearing the molecule-thin nanosuit.

“We gonna stop and look at the cliff structures on the way up?” Dex asked.

“Tomorrow,” said Jamie. “On the way down.”

Hasdrubal made a low, chuckling sound. “If we stopped now to look at the structures Carleton would shoot us in the back with one of the digging lasers.”

Jamie laughed, but when they started up on the cables he could see the team of people digging away industriously at the excavation. One person, though, was standing at the edge of the pit watching them, fists on his hips. Even at this distance Jamie could sense the anger radiating from the anthropologist.

Tithonium Base: Evening

Jamie’s gone daft, Vijay said to herself as she watched her husband, Dex and Hasdrubal striding from Carleton’s excavation out toward the buckyball cables that ran up the seamed sheer face of the cliff to the plain up at the top. It was almost sunset, and the shadows of the three men stretched out across the uneven, rock-covered ground like fingers straining for a prize they could not reach.

The three of them had stopped briefly at the excavation; at the edge of the pit Jamie pointed here and there while the other two stood beside him. Then they moved on. Jamie wants to get to the cable lifts before it gets dark, Vijay told herself.

But Dex is only here for two more days and Jamie’s spending more’n half that time trotting him out to that crater, Vijay thought. Why’s he doing that? With a shake of her head, she kept staring through the transparent wall of the dome, watching the three nanosuited figures walking away. Like three little boys going out on an adventure, she realized. Jamie’s turning his back on his responsibilities. Dex is, too. They ought to know better.

With a helpless sigh, Vijay commanded herself, Go back to your room. Wash your face. Get ready for dinner. Alone.

Yet she stood there and watched the three men moving away from her.

“He’s really a fanatic, isn’t he?”

Turning, she saw Carter Carleton standing beside her, his usual self-assured smile totally gone. He looked angry.

“No, Jamie’s not a fanatic,” she said. “He’s dedicated.”

“He’s supposed to be showing Trumball the work we’re doing here. Look at them. They hardly glanced at my excavation.”

“I know,” Vijay said. “I really don’t understand what Jamie’s up to.”

“Whatever it is, he doesn’t think my work is very important, does he?”

“It’s not that. There’s something going on inside his head but I don’t know what it is.” Vijay kept staring at the dwindling figures as she spoke. “I wonder if Jamie himself knows what it is.”

“A fanatic,” Carleton muttered. She could hear the resentment in his voice.

“Dedicated,” she repeated.

Carleton fairly glared at her. But then he made a tentative smile and said, “I see. I am dedicated. You are a fanatic.”

Vijay shook her head. “A fanatic is someone who doubles his efforts after he’s forgotten his aim. Jamie hasn’t forgotten his aim.”

“ ‘For if I should despair, I should grow mad,’ ” Carleton quoted.

“Jamie hasn’t despaired.”

“Not yet.”

“Not ever.”

He touched her back lightly, with just the tips of his fingers, and gestured toward the cafeteria with his free hand. “May I invite you to dinner?”

Vijay thought about it a moment, glanced again at the dwindling figures of the three men, then back at Carleton’s handsome face. The anger was still in his eyes, but he was making himself smile at her.

“I don’t like to eat alone,” he said, almost gently.

“Neither do I,” said Vijay. “Let me wash up first.”

“Certainly.” His smile broadened. “Meet you in the cafeteria in half an hour?”

“Fine.”

All through dinner Vijay tried to get a reading on Carleton. She knew his dossier by heart, knew how he’d been ruined by a charge of rape that he strenuously denied. He had been stripped of his professorship and tenure, his wife had left him, his fellow anthropologists treated him as a pariah. His career, his life, were ruined. So he came to Mars and made the biggest discovery since somebody stumbled over the bones of Neanderthal Man. The irony was cosmic.

“Something’s amusing you?” Carleton asked from across the table. Their dinners were long finished. Even the fruit pies they had taken for dessert were nothing more than crumbs now.

“Just thinking about the weird turns that fate takes,” she said. “You had to come all the way out here to Mars to find vindication.”

He steepled his fingers in front of his face. “Vindication? That’s a strange word to use.”

Vijay said, “I mean, if the fundamentalists believe in divine guidance, then they’ve got to admit that your discovery of the village here must be God’s way of showing that the accusations against you were false.”

Still half-hiding his face, Carleton replied in a low, strained voice, “No, they’d never admit that they were wrong. That they got that woman to perjure herself. Never.”

“But—”

“They’re the fanatics, Vijay. Real fanatics. They’d do anything to further their cause. Give them enough power and they’ll start burning people at the stake again.”

There was real fury in his tone now. Hatred. Good, she thought. Don’t repress it. Let it out.

“You’ll be cock of the walk when you return to Earth. You can wave your discovery under their noses.”

“If I return to Earth.”

“If?” Vijay felt startled.

“I decided when I came here to Mars that I wasn’t going to look backward, I wasn’t going to let them turn me into a bitter old man. Now—well, why should I go back? What’s back there for me except pain and sorrow?”

He feels sorry for himself! Vijay realized. Can’t say I blame him.

She said, “But you can go back in triumph. You can have your pick of university posts.”

He thought a moment. “I wonder. The New Morality controls most of the academic establishment these days.”

“But you—”

“Don’t you know that the Mars Foundation can’t even get the news nets to carry a documentary about my village? They’re blocking us out.”

“Jamie mentioned something about that,” she murmured.

“No, I think I’ll stay right here,” Carleton said. “I can do some really important work here, no matter how they ignore me back home. I can have some respect here, despite clowns like Larkin.”

Better to reign in hell, Vijay thought, than to serve in heaven.

But she asked, “What if Jamie has to close down the whole operation?”

With a shrug, “We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.”

Vijay couldn’t think of anything to say, except, “I don’t think that’s a very healthy attitude. You’ve got to prepare for problems before they hit you.”

He turned on his smile, but there was sadness in it. “Don’t worry about my attitude. I’m a healthy enough man, Vijay.”

She thought she detected just the slightest emphasis on the word man.

They picked up their dirty dishes and deposited them in the slowly revolving drum that fed the microwave cleaning unit.

As they started out of the cafeteria, toward the living units on the other side of the dome, Carleton asked, “My place or yours?”

Vijay looked sharply at him. He was smiling again, but it looked just a bit forced to her. You’d better stop this right here and now, she told herself. Don’t let him get any ideas about you. A different voice in her mind countered, Not that he doesn’t have ideas already.

“You go to your place and I’ll go to mine,” she said firmly.

Keeping pace beside her, Carleton said, “I thought we might have a nightcap. I still have some of that single malt I told you about.”

“No thanks, Carter.”

“Scared?”

She hesitated a heartbeat, then admitted, “Yes. A little.”

Strangely, he chuckled. I’ve stroked his machismo, Vijay thought. But that’s as far as this goes.

As they approached the living quarters, he gripped her arm and asked again, “Just a little scotch?”

“You are a persistent one, aren’t you?”

“But not a fanatic.”

Still walking toward her quarters, Vijay said, “Carter, there are lots of women here who’d be happy to share your bed.”

“Maybe. But none as beautiful as you.”

“Lots of unmarried women.”

Carleton grunted softly. “He’s run off with his buddy and left you here to fend for yourself.”

“ ’Kay. So now I’m fending.” Vijay tried to pry his fingers off her arm. He tightened his grip.

“I want you, Vijay.”

“No, Carter. Please let go of me.”

Vijay placed her back against the flimsy accordion-fold door of her quarters. Carleton took her other arm and pinned her against the door. She felt it shuddering behind her.

She could see the need in his eyes. Stand up to him, she told herself. Stay in control. If that doesn’t work, knee him in the groin.

“Come on, Vijay. Nobody’s going to get hurt.” He was pressing her against the sagging door, speaking faster now, his voice low and urgent. “Jamie won’t know. You’ve seen my medical dossier; you know I had a vasectomy more than twenty years ago.”

Vijay could see a few other people scattered across the dome. No one was looking their way, but a single shout would focus everybody’s attention on her.

Very firmly she said, “Carter, the answer is no. Now please let go of me.”

For a long moment he stood there frozen, leaning against her, staring down at her. Then he seemed to change. She saw the fire in his eyes tamp down. He released her arms and took a small step back from her.

“Thank you,” she whispered, rubbing her arms where his hands had clamped her.

“Sorry,” he muttered. “I got carried away.”

“Good night, Carter,” she said.

He nodded. “I’m not a rapist, Vijay.”

“I never thought you were,” she half-lied.

He turned and walked away, toward his own quarters, moving with the exaggerated precision of a man who’s trying to show the world he isn’t drunk.

Vijay slid her door open and quickly stepped into the quarters she shared with Jamie. She pushed the door shut again and clicked its flimsy lock, knowing that it would never stop a determined man.

Before undressing for the night she searched both bed tables until she found the emergency flashlight. Hefting it in one hand, she told herself it would make a decent weapon, if push came to shove.

Then she picked up the phone and asked the communications tech to contact Jamie. He ought to be in the dome up on the plain by now, she thought. Vijay had no intention of telling her husband about Carleton. Nothing happened, really, she told herself.

But she picked up the flashlight again with her free hand as she waited for her call to go through.

Tithoniae Fosse: Excursion

Jamie woke early, blinked a few times, then sat up in the bunk and remembered last night. He and Dex and Hasdrubal had reached the dome just a few minutes after sundown. Jamie had kept Dex outside long enough to see the aurora; he made some oohs and aahs but Jamie got the firm impression that the Sky Dancers didn’t impress Dex all that much. Then the three of them had a bland meal microwaved from the dome’s supplies and had gone to bed. Vijay had called, as he’d expected. She sounded a little tense, but Jamie ascribed that to her being worried about him being away on this excursion.

The last excursion we’ll be able to make, Jamie realized as he got out of the bunk and padded toward the communal lavatory. Unless Dex can find some more money for us.

No. He shook his head at his reflection in the lavatory’s metal mirror. Don’t put it on Dex. You’ve got to make the decision. This is your responsibility.

Through their brief breakfast in the dome Dex eyed Jamie warily, like a man trapped in an office with an insurance salesman, Jamie thought. He’s waiting for me to put the pressure on him. I guess I look the same way, come to think of it, waiting for him to try to sell me on his tourist scheme. We’ve got to decide on the future of our work here. Life or death.

After checking out the camper they were going to use in strained silence, Jamie, Dex and Hasdrubal started out for Crater Chang. The sun was barely above the ragged horizon as they slowly drove out of the dome. Hasdrubal did the driving; Jamie sat in the right-hand seat beside him, and Dex stood behind them, hunched between the two seats so he could watch the landscape rolling by.

For more than an hour Jamie tried to open the conversation lie wanted to have with Dex. But the words just wouldn’t come out. He sat in the cockpit and inwardly struggled to find the right words while Dex hung over his shoulder, equally quiet. Hasdrubal drove the camper in silence, wrapped in his own thoughts.

“Hasn’t changed much,” Dex said at last. “Rocks, rocks and more rocks.”

“Like watching a golf tournament on video,” said Hasdrubal. “They all look the same.”

“Miles and miles of nothing but miles and miles.”

Hasdrubal glanced over his shoulder at Dex. “You did that long-range trek, didn’t you, back on the Second Expedition. You and what’s-his-name.”

“Craig. Possum Craig. That was more than twenty years ago,” Dex said. “But it still looks the same. Mars doesn’t change very quickly.”

“Well, you’re gonna see somethin’ new in half an hour or so,” said Hasdrubal.

“The new crater. Bet it looks like all the other craters around here.”

“You’re a geologist, right?” Hasdrubal asked.

“Was, back in the day. Haven’t picked up a rock in a long time.”

Jamie listened to them chatting back and forth. Dex is pretending to be bored, he said to himself. Maybe it’s not a pretense. He’s spent half his life working to support the exploration of Mars but it just doesn’t excite him the way it gets to me. It’s not in his guts, not in his soul. Or if it is, he hides it a lot better than I do.

Dex tapped his shoulder. “Don’t you have anything to say, Chief?”

Jamie grimaced. He hadn’t heard Dex use that half-derogatory term in more than twenty years. Okay, he told himself, time to face the music.

Pushing himself up from the seat, Jamie said to Dex, “I have a lot to say, Dex. And I guess you do, too.”

He gestured to the cots that faced each other like benches. The upper cots were folded back against the camper’s curving walls. Dex went back and sat on one of them, Jamie took the one opposite.

With a knowing grin, Dex said, “I figure you brought me out here so we could talk.”

With a glance at Hasdrubal, up in the cockpit concentrating on the driving, Jamie said, “We have a lot to talk about.”

“Jamie, I know you hate the idea of tourists coming here, but—”

“We can’t do our work with tourists tramping through the base,” Jamie said.

Raising a hand, Dex said, “Hear me out, Jamie. Let me give you the full picture.”

Jamie pressed his lips into a tight line. He saw the quiet intensity on his old friend’s face. He’s dropped his mask. I was wrong: this is hitting him just as hard as it’s hitting me, almost.

“So give me the full picture,” Jamie said, almost in a whisper.

“There just isn’t any money!” Dex said. “The government, the private donors, even the big foundations—none of them are willing to put up funding for Mars.”

“The greenhouse warming…” Jamie muttered.

“That’s just a bullshit excuse. What we need for Mars is small change compared to the trillions they’re spending on the greenhouse effects.”

“But then why are we being shut out?”

“They’re out to get us.”

“They?”

“The fundamentalists. The New Morality. They’re taking control of the government. They’re putting pressure on our donors, on the universities and the foundations. They’re even shutting us out of the news nets!”

Jamie said, “Selene’s willing to help. It’s not much, but we could keep a dozen or so people working here. Fifteen, tops.”

“Big fucking deal.”

“It’s better than nothing.”

Dex shook his head. “Jamie, that’s why this tourism deal is so important. It could save the whole operation! You could keep a couple hundred people on Mars.”

“If we let tourists come here.” Jamie felt a lead weight in his guts.”

“Only a handful,” Dex said, almost pleading. “Five at a time. Ten, tops.”

“And then twenty. And then—”

“No! Ten at a time, maximum. I swear it! No more than that, ever.”

“Dex, I know you mean that, but once people start paying that kind of money to come here, how are you going to control them? They’ll turn the place into another Disney World.”

“Not if—”

“You want to terraform the area,” Jamie said, almost hissing the words. “You want to change it so the tourists can walk around in their shirtsleeves.”

“Would that be so bad?”

“And what happens to the Martian organisms? The endolithic lichen. It’ll kill them.”

“Move the damned rocks outside the terraformed area,” Dex said.

“And the village? The cemetery? The cliff structures?”

“Let the tourists see them! They’ll pay enough so you can send out teams to find other villages. There must be more of them.”

“I’d rather cut my arm off.”

Dex took a deep breath. “Christ, you’ve got to be the stubbornest goddamned redskin in the world. Jamie, you’ve got to listen to reason!”

Jamie closed his eyes and pictured the base with only fifteen people working in it. What could they do, what could they accomplish? he wondered. We wouldn’t be able to do much useful work. Just help Carleton clear away more of the village. No excursions beyond the immediate area around the dome. No new discoveries.

As if he could read Jamie’s mind, Dex said, “You know you can’t accomplish diddly-squat with just fifteen people. They’ll be caretakers, nothing more.”

“At least they’ll be taking care of the place, not trampling it into the dust.”

“Aw, shit, Jamie,” Dex groused.

Leaning toward him, Jamie asked, “How many of your billionaire friends will come to Mars, Dex? At fifty million a pop, how many will come?”

Taken aback somewhat, Dex muttered, “A couple dozen or so, at least. Forty, fifty, maybe.”

“Okay, that’s two and a half billion dollars.”

“That’ll keep you going for years.”

“How many years?”

Dex did some swift mental arithmetic. “Three, four. Maybe five.”

“And then what?”

“Then what?”

“After the high rollers have come and gone. How do we fund the operation then?”

Dex hesitated.

Jamie said, “I’ll tell you how. You’ll lower the price, right? Get more customers to come. More tourists visiting Mars. Lower prices means more people. That’s what you’ll have to do to keep the money flowing in.”

“Okay, but by then you’ll probably be finished excavating the village. You can leave it for the tourists and move on.”

“No! Never! That village isn’t a tourist attraction. It was the home of living, breathing, intelligent people! We have to protect it, honor it.”

“For chrissake, Jamie, this isn’t some goddamned religious crusade!”

“The hell it isn’t!”

Dex’s voice turned cold and hard. “Okay. You turn down the tourist idea and you run out of funding. What then?”

“Selene will keep us alive.”

“Barely.”

Jamie nodded, admitting it. “We’ll manage. Somehow.”

“For how long? A year? Two? Selene’s not going to support you indefinitely, especially if you’re not producing new results. They’ll shut you down sooner or later.”

“Maybe,” Jamie conceded.

“And you know what’ll happen once you shut down the base and bring everybody home?”

This is home, Jamie replied silently.

“Once the Navaho presence on Mars ends,” Dex went on remorselessly, “the Navaho Nation loses its right to control the territory. Somebody else will come in.”

“Your friends with their tourist operation,” Jamie replied woodenly.

“Damned right. And they won’t be interested in scientific exploration at all. They’ll be your worst nightmare come true, Jamie.”

Sullen resentment burning inside him, Jamie muttered, “And you’ll help them.”

“Damned right I will,” said Dex, with some heat. “You know why? Because I don’t want to see this work abandoned. I want to keep the exploration of Mars going.”

“By selling out to tourists.”

“Right! You think you’re the only one who cares about what we’re doing here? You think you’ve got a monopoly on righteousness? I’ll make a deal with tourists, I’ll make a deal with anybody, the devil incarnate, if I have to. The important thing is to keep this operation going—even if your people have to put up with tourists.”

Jamie stared into his friend’s face. He does care, Jamie realized. He’s so damned dead wrong, but he cares.

Then he heard his grandfather’s voice in his mind. There’s always more’n one path to get where you want to go, Jamie. Finding the right path is important, but sometimes you’ve got to travel a path that’s tougher, more roundabout. The important thing is to get where you want to go.

Before he could make up his mind to say anything, Hasdrubal called from the cockpit, “We’re almost there. Another ten minutes.”

“Think about it,” Dex whispered to Jamie. “Don’t be so goddamned stubborn.”

Jamie nodded wordlessly, but in his heart he knew he could never allow Dex or anyone else to ruin his life’s work.

Tithoniae Fosse: Crater Chang

“They’re dead. They’re all dead.”

Sal Hasdrubal was on his knees in the bottom of the crater, half a dozen sample cases scattered across the broken rocks. The steep sides of the crater were studded with sensor poles. Hasdrubal had scraped a meter-long trench in the looser ground between the rocks and was pouring some of the dirt into one of the insulated plastic boxes.

But as he worked he grumbled, “It’s useless. We’re too friggin’ late. They’re all dead.”

From up at the lip of the crater Jamie asked, “How can you be sure?”

Hasdrubal looked up at him, then shook his head. “They couldn’t take the radiation. The cold. The low pressure.”

“But maybe some of them—”

“Naw. We’re too damned late. They’re all dead.”

Dex came up beside Jamie in his nanosuit and peered into the crater. They could see Hasdrubal’s bootprints weaving through the sensor poles. The biologist had insisted on going down to the bottom alone, afraid that too many boots might damage the microbes living in the ground down there.

“They formed a crust of dead cells,” he said mournfully. “Like they were trying to shield themselves.”

“Then maybe some of them have survived,” Jamie said hopefully. “Beneath the protective crust.”

Dex added, “Bacteria have survived on the surface of the Moon for years, with no air, no water, and hard radiation pouring in on them.”

“Yeah, I know,” said Hasdrubal. He clicked the last of his sample cases shut. “Maybe you’re right. Maybe some of ’em have gone into a spore state.”

“You’ll have to get them under a microscope,” Jamie said, trying to sound encouraging.

“Yeah,” Hasdrubal replied glumly.

“Can we give you a hand carrying the cases back to the camper?” Dex asked.

Slowly rising to his feet, Hasdrubal said, “Sure. ’Preciate it. Come on down.”

Jamie and Dex scrambled down the loose rocks and soil of the crater’s steep walls. With each of them carrying a pair of sample cases, they made their way back up to the surface and trudged to the camper.

“Stow ’em in the outside bay,” Hasdrubal said. “Keep ’em at ambient temperature.”

Jamie glanced at the sun, still climbing in the yellowish sky. A few thin wispy clouds rode near the horizon. Nothing to worry about, he thought. No sign of a dust storm. Wrong season.

With a glance at the digital watch on the wrist of his nanosuit, Jamie said, “It’s not even noon yet. We could get back to the dome before sunset if we start out now.”

“Might’s well,” Hasdrubal agreed. “Nothin’ more here for me to do.”

Once they had vacuumed the dust off their suits, Jamie took the driver’s seat, with Hasdrubal at his right.

“I thought we had jump seats in the old campers,” Dex said, leaning in between them again.

“Nope,” said Jamie, engaging the superconducting electric motors that drove each individual wheel. “We always had to scrunch down like that.”

“Well I’m going to make a note about it. A jump seat would be a helluva lot more comfortable.”

“Do that,” Jamie said, thinking, That’s the least of our worries.

Hasdrubal looked morose, Jamie thought.

“Too bad we didn’t get here soon enough to study the microbes alive,” Jamie said.

“Yeah. I had hoped to bring ’em back to the dome, put them in a simulated environment, see how they made out, watch them adapt. But we were too late. Now we’ll never know.”

Dex said, “Don’t give up. Maybe some of them survived.”

The biologist made a halfhearted shrug. “Like you said, I’ll put ’em under the microscope, see what there is to see.”

“Then what?” Dex asked.

“Then I pack ’em up and ship ’em back to Chicago.”

“The University of Chicago?”

“Yeah. Biology department.”

“Who’ll be studying them there?” Jamie asked.

“Me. If I still have a job there.”

Jamie felt his brows hike up. “You? You’re leaving?”

“Not on the ship in orbit now,” Hasdrubal said, his voice heavy and slow. “The next flight.”

“The evacuation flight,” Jamie said.

“Yeah. Right.”

Dex asked, “What did you mean, if you still have a job there?”

“I been gettin’ messages from the university, and from a few friends in the bio department. I’m supposed to be up for tenure, but the university brass is puttin’ tenure appointments on hold.”

“Why the hell would they do that?” Dex asked.

Jamie said, “I’d think your work on Mars would guarantee you an appointment.”

Shaking his head, Hasdrubal said, “Just the opposite. There’s a move on to deny tenure to anybody who’s been away from the campus for more’n a year.”

“That’s ridiculous!” Jamie snapped. “You got a sabbatical for your time on Mars, didn’t you?”

“The sabbatical was up last year. My department head said he’d handle the paperwork so’s I could stay on Mars long as I needed to. But now the university administration is cutting the legs out from under him. Me, too, looks like.”

Jamie glanced back at Dex. He looked grim.

Hasdrubal went on, “If I can get back before the academic year ends next spring I oughtta be okay. But I can’t stay on Mars and keep my job. They’ve made that clear enough.”

“Son of a bitch,” Dex said softly, carefully pronouncing each word.

“I could talk to them.…” Jamie started to say.

“Wouldn’t do any good,” Dex said. “The university’s caving in to the fundamentalists. Just like Penn did to get rid of Carleton.”

“I can’t believe that,” Jamie said.

“Believe it. This is just another one of their cute little tricks to kill the Mars program.” Dex’s voice dripped acid. “I’ll have to start checking some of the other schools. Cute: stay on Mars and lose your job. Real cute.”

“That’s what I’m up against,” Hasdrubal said.

“That’s what we’re all up against,” said Jamie, feeling hollow inside.

“Naw, you got tenure,” Hasdrubal said. “You’re okay.”

Dex grunted. “How long do you think it’ll be before those psalm-singing sons of bitches get the universities to start reviewing their tenure appointments?”

Tithonium Base: Return

They were a glum trio as they rode the buckyball cables down to the valley floor and trudged to the dome, toting Hasdrubal’s sample cases. Jamie glanced at the people working on Carleton’s excavation as they passed by the pit in the dying light of the day. They all were working busily away at the dig. Like ants, Jamie thought.

The three men hardly spoke a word to each other as they went through the airlock, vacuumed the dust off their nanosuits, and then pulled the suits off and hung them on their racks.

Dex muttered something about meeting with Chang and headed off for the mission director’s office. Hasdrubal put all six sample cases on a cart and pushed it toward the biology laboratory. Jamie stood alone by the airlock hatch and gazed out across the dome. The place looked quiet, subdued. No excitement, no purpose to any of it. They all know they’re going to leave soon, he thought. They all realize that the best we can hope for is a caretaker operation. Their work here is finished. Their careers aren’t on Mars anymore. Their lives aren’t on Mars. He felt tired, utterly weary, defeated.

Where’s Vijay? he wondered. She’s usually at the airlock when I come back from outside. She knows we’re coming in. We sent the word to the excursion controller. Why isn’t she here?

Because she has her own work to do, the other side of his mind answered. She’s got more to do than run into your arms every time you come back from an excursion.

Still, he felt disappointed. She’s always there to greet me. Even when I’d fly home to Albuquerque she’d be at the airport. Even when I came back after Jimmy died.

He started out across the dome toward the infirmary, telling himself, She must be working. Maybe some emergency came up, somebody got hurt or something.

Several people nodded hellos at Jamie as he strode across the plastic flooring. He nodded back and gave perfunctory greetings.

“Hey, good to see you back, Dr. W,” said Billy Graycloud. “I’ve got something to show you—”

“Not now, Billy,” Jamie said, brushing past the young Navaho, not looking back to see the hurt expression on the kid’s face.

As he neared the entrance to the infirmary a new thought struck him. What if something’s happened to her? What if she got sick, or had an accident? He hurried to the infirmary.

Vijay was in Nari Quintana’s office, deep in earnest conversation with the chief medical officer, their two heads bending toward each other over Quintana’s little desk like two schoolgirls sharing a secret.

Jamie stopped at the office’s open doorway, feeling immensely relieved and more than a little exasperated. She’s all right. Nothing’s happened to her. Then why—

Before he could speak a word, Quintana noticed him and flinched like a woman caught by surprise. Vijay turned. Her eyes went wide and she leaped out of her chair.

“Jamie!” She flung herself into his arms. “Oh my god, I completely lost track of the time. I’m so sorry. I really wanted to be at the airlock when—”

He wrapped his arms around her and kissed her soundly.

“I’m sorry, Jamie,” Vijay repeated. “You must think…” She glanced at Quintana, who was leaning back in her desk chair with a knowing grin on her lean face.

“It’s okay,” he said. “I just wondered where you were.”

“Nari and I got to talking,” Vijay said, speaking faster than usual, embarrassed or upset or—what? Jamie wondered.

Quintana made a show of looking at her wristwatch. “It’s almost the dinner hour. You two go off and get something to eat. I have a lot of paperwork to do here.” She made a show of pecking at her keyboard and peering at her computer screen.

Arm in arm, Jamie and Vijay headed for the cafeteria. Jamie noticed that Carleton’s people were coming through the airlock. It’ll be sundown in a few minutes, he realized. The cafeteria was almost empty; dinner hour was just starting. He realized he was famished.

“How’d it go?” Vijay asked as they loaded their trays.

“Not good,” said Jamie. “Hasdrubal’s bugs have either died off or gone into a spore state.”

“I mean with Dex.”

“Even worse,” Jamie said. They walked through the mostly unoccupied tables, found a small one near the dome’s curving wall. As they pulled out their chairs the wall turned opaque for the night; suddenly there was nothing to see outside.

“The only way Dex can get any reasonable funding is to bring his big-spending friends here and turn this base into a tourist center.” He plopped down in his chair, his appetite suddenly gone.

Vijay started to reply, hesitated, then went ahead. “You’ll have to let him do it, then, won’t you?”

“No,” Jamie snapped.

She leaned toward him, placed her dark hand on his coppery one. “Jamie, if you want to stay here, if you want to keep on with the work you’re doing here, you’re going to have to make a compromise.”

He said nothing.

Vijay went on, “There must be some way to allow a few tourists here without ruining everything.”

“They’ll want to put up a huge dome to cover the whole area and fill it with air at Earth-normal pressure,” he said grimly. “That’ll kill the lichen. God knows what the oxygen will do to the ruins of the village, the bodies in the graves.”

It was Vijay’s turn to go silent.

Bitterly, Jamie said, “Those buildings in the cliff have stood there for sixty million years and more. How long do you think they’d last in a terrestrial atmosphere? With tourists chipping pieces off them? Writing graffiti on the walls?”

“Oh, come on, now, Jamie. It won’t be like that and you know it.”

He tried to frown at her, found he couldn’t. “Well,” he said softly, “maybe I’m exaggerating. A little.”

He saw Vijay look up and, turning, there was Billy Graycloud standing at his elbow.

“Uh, I’m sorry to interrupt, Dr. W, but if you have a couple-minutes after you’re finished eating could you come over to the comm center? I’ve got something I want to show you.”

A little irritated at the interruption, Jamie nodded. “Sure, Billy. After dinner.”

“Thanks!” The young man beamed a grateful smile and then quickly walked away.

Jamie noticed Carter Carleton and several others pushing two tables together. Carleton sat at the head, with several young women sitting at the places closest to him.

Vijay smiled. “Carter’s taking my advice.”

“Advice?”

“We had dinner last night.” Before Jamie could say anything she went on, “I told him there were plenty of young women here who’d be glad to be with him.”

“In bed,” said Jamie.

Vijay nodded.

“You had dinner with him. Did he come on to you?”

“Nothing serious. Nothing that I couldn’t handle,” she said. But she looked down at her plate of soymeat.

Jamie half-joked, “Should I go over there and punch him out?”

Vijay looked up. Totally serious, she replied, “No need for that, Jamie. His reputation is much worse than he really is. I can handle him, no worries.”

“Really?”

“Really.”

Jamie looked into her midnight eyes and decided to let the subject drop. I can trust Vijay. She’s the one person in the world I can rely on. The one person in two worlds. No, make it three, if we count Selene.

“The wheels in your head are turning,” Vijay said, with a smile that was almost impish.

He shook his head. “They’re spinning, but I’m not getting anywhere.”

“You will, love,” said Vijay. “You will.”

But when they were leaving the cafeteria, Jamie saw Sal Hasdrubal morosely pushing a half-filled dinner tray along the counter.

“What did the microscope show, Sal?” he asked.

The lanky biologist gave Jamie a somber stare. “They’re all gone. Just a few weeks out in the open killed them all.”

“They’re all dead?”

“Every last one of the cells. Dead.”

And so are we, Jamie said to himself. So are we.

Tithonium Base: Midnight

Midnight. Jamie stared at the numerals on the digital clock beside the bed. He couldn’t sleep. He couldn’t remember being so tied up, so tense. Never in his life. Not even when he was pouring every milligram of sweat and determination in him to get picked for the First Expedition. It had never been like this. Not all this pain. All this anguish.

He turned and looked at his wife, breathing softly beside him. In the shadows of the darkened room he could just make out the curve of her shoulder against the sheets. He’d been too wired even to try to make love with Vijay. Everything is falling apart, Jamie told himself. Everything I’ve ever wanted, ever worked for. It’s all falling apart.

It’s such a mess, Jamie thought. I can’t ask her to stay here when there’ll only be fifteen of us on Mars. That’s not enough people; it’ll be too risky for her. But she won’t want to leave if I stay.

He realized he’d said if I stay. For the first time he’d used that deadly little word. If. And he remembered his conversation after dinner with Dex. Maybe his last conversation with Dex, ever.

After dinner, as he and Vijay were walking back to their quarters, he had seen Dex leaving Chang’s office.

“I’ve got to talk to him,” he’d said. Vijay had nodded her understanding and continued walking to their quarters.

“Dex,” Jamie called, hurrying toward him. “Wait up a minute, will you?”

Trumball stopped and eyed Jamie, a quizzical expression on his face. “The final arm-twisting session?” he asked.

Jamie tried to smile, failed. “You’re leaving tomorrow.”

“Right. And so will you, buddy, sooner or later.”

He gripped Dex’s arm and led him aimlessly across the big dome, steering him unconsciously away from the busy cafeteria, toward the empty labs on the other side.

“Chang’s making preparations for the evacuation flight,” Dex said, his voice low, tight. “Looks like just about everybody’s going to leave in a couple of months.”

“Dex, isn’t there any way—”

“There is, Chief, but you won’t allow it. You’d rather sit here with a couple of dozen people and twiddle your thumbs until even Selene’s funding runs out and you have to abandon this place altogether.”

Jamie felt a hot iron smoldering in his guts. “And then you move in. With your tourists.”

“Damned right. Better than leaving Mars abandoned altogether.”

“Turn this place into a Disney World.”

Dex pulled his arm free of Jamie’s grip. “You just don’t get it, do you, Jamie? You’re just as fanatical as those suicide bombers who hit your campus. You’d rather die than bend a little.”

“Maybe,” Jamie said tensely.

“And you’re willing to risk Vijay’s life, too.”

“That’s not fair!”

“Fair my ass! You want everything your own way. Well, there’s more than one way to run this operation and once you’re gone from Mars I’ll come back and do what needs to be done to keep exploring this planet.”

“With tourists.”

“With the frigging Seventh Cavalry, if that’s the only way to do it.”

“Yeah, I imagine you would.”

“This isn’t some holy crusade, Jamie,” Dex insisted. “You see Mars as some kind of sacred shrine. Only the truly devout may set foot upon it. Well, that’s not the way the world works, friend. Never was and never will be.”

“I believe it’s our duty to preserve this place from people who’d wreck it.”

“Christ, you’re like a father who’d rather send his daughter to a convent instead of letting her live in the real world.”

“This is the real world!” Jamie fairly shouted, spreading his arms out wide. “I don’t want to see it ruined!”

“Then stay here and help protect it. Stay here and take charge of the tourists who’ll bring in the money you need to keep going.”

“I can’t. Dex. I just can’t do it!” Jamie pleaded, his insides knotting.

“Then we’ll do it without you, after you leave.”

“I’m not leaving.”

Dex drew in an exaggerated, exasperated sigh. “So you’re going to stay here. You and fourteen other fools.”

“As long as I can.”

With a shake of his head, Dex said softly, “I just hope you don’t kill yourself, pal. Or your wife.”

He turned abruptly and strode away, leaving Jamie standing there, furious, his insides clenched. He realized the dome was utterly silent. The people in the cafeteria were as immobile as rocks, staring at him. Feeling alone and friendless, Jamie walked off toward his quarters.

Now he lay in bed, realizing that he might never speak to Dex again. He also realized that Dex was right. There was no other way: no other path that led out of this quagmire. But it was a path he could not take.

As quietly as he could, Jamie slipped out of bed. He padded to the lavatory and pulled on a fresh set of coveralls, then tiptoed to the door.

“Jamie?” Vijay called drowsily.

“I’ve got to go out for a little while,” he whispered to her. “I’ll be back. Go to sleep.”

Without waiting for her reply he slid the door back and stepped out into the dome’s open common area. Barefoot. Like a skulking redskin, he said to himself. Sneaking around in the night.

The dome was dimly lit. Just about everybody was asleep, except for the people monitoring the communications equipment. No one was outside in the bitter Martian night. No one was out on an excursion. They were all asleep, Jamie thought, waiting for the inevitable day when they would leave Mars. For good.

As he padded softly toward his office Jamie heard the soft sighing of the breeze wafting by. On any other night it would have comforted him. Not tonight. Mars is saying good-bye to us. Goodbye to me.

He reached his office, sat on the yielding little chair, and sank his head in his hands.

It’s finished, he thought. Dex is right. What can fifteen people do here? I’d be putting Vijay’s life in danger. I can’t do it. I can’t do it.

They win, Jamie told himself. I have to leave Mars. Forever.

He wanted to cry. He wanted to sob and tear his hair and mourn the death of all that he had hoped for, all that he had worked for. But tears would not come. Not even that solace was allowed him.

“Uh… Dr. W?”

Jamie looked up, feeling his cheeks flare hot with embarrassment.

It was Billy Graycloud standing at the entrance of his cubbyhole, looking more than a little embarrassed himself.

Tithonium Base: The Prayer

“Billy,” Jamie said softly, suppressing an urge to wipe his face, straighten his hair.

“I… uh, saw the light on in your office.…”

Some office, Jamie thought. A cubicle with flimsy partitions that’ll collapse if you lean on them.

“Do you have a minute?” Graycloud asked. His voice was soft, but Jamie heard some urgency in it.

Remembering, Jamie apologized, “I said I’d see you after dinner, didn’t I? I’m sorry. I got… tied up, sort of.”

Graycloud nodded minimally. “You and Mr. Trumball.” Jamie nodded back, realizing that everybody in the dome must have heard their shouting.

“So what do you want to tell me, Billy?” he asked wearily.

Shifting uneasily on his feet, Graycloud replied, “Can you come over to the comm center? It’d be easier if I show you what I’ve got so far.”

“The translation?” Jamie got up out of his chair.

“I’d like to get your reaction to it, if you’ve got a couple minutes.”

“Okay.” Jamie got to his feet slowly.

As they started across the shadowy dome, Graycloud said, “I think maybe I’m getting some sense out of the writings.”

“You are?” Despite himself, Jamie felt a tendril of excitement pulse through him.

“I think so. I might be foolin’ myself, you know, putting words in their mouths, kinda.…”

“Let’s see.”

Leading the way toward the comm center, Graycloud explained, “I assigned specific words to each of the symbols, and then sort of filled in to make sense of each line. Like the Egyptologists did to translate the ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics, back in the nineteenth century.”

Jamie felt an increased respect for the young Navaho. “You’ve been doing some research, haven’t you?”

Graycloud lowered his eyes bashfully. “Yessir. Some.”

Two women were monitoring the consoles in the communications center. Graycloud booted up an unused computer while Jamie pulled over a wheeled chair and sat beside him.

“It’s pretty rough,” Graycloud said, his fingers working the keyboard. “And like I said, I’m prob’ly putting words into their mouths, kinda. But I haven’t changed the sequence of their pictographs; each word stands in the same place as its symbol carved on the wall.”

“Let’s see what you’ve got, Billy.”

The display screen showed an image of the Martian pictographs. Then words in English began to print over it.

“The words in brackets are what I put in. The rest is straight from the symbols themselves, in the same order as they appear on the wall,” Graycloud explained.

Jamie barely heard him. He was focused on the translation as it came up on the screen.

“The rest is pretty much the same,” Graycloud said, almost whispering. “Lots of repetition. It’s kinda like a poem, sort of.”

“It’s a prayer,” Jamie said, also in a near-whisper, his eyes still staring at the words.

“A prayer,” Graycloud echoed. Then he raised his voice slightly, breaking the spell. “Or maybe it’s just all garbage. You know, maybe I just put in words that have nothin’ to do with what the Martians really meant to say.”

“No, Billy, I don’t think so. You’ve made contact with them. You’ve touched their spirit.”

“You think so?”

More excited now, Jamie said, “You’ve got to write this up and get it published. And let Dex Trumball see it, too, before he takes off tomorrow.”

Graycloud looked embarrassed. “Dr. W, the professional journals won’t publish this. The real philologists will say it’s crap-by an amateur.”

“Then we’ll have the Foundation publish it. We’ll get it in front of the public. Get it on the Net, in the news.”

“You really think…?”

Jamie patted the youngster’s shoulder. “Billy, you’re going to become famous. Your translation’s going to cause a stir, one way or the other. The more controversy, the better.”

“But they’ll say I don’t know what I’m doing! They’ll laugh at me.”

“Pioneers always get laughed at. Look at Wegener and the theory of plate tectonics. The geologists laughed him to scorn, but he turned out to be right.”

Graycloud looked down at his shoes and muttered, “I don’t know if I could deal with that, Dr. W.”

“You will, Billy.” Silently, Jamie added, You’ll have to.

His face showing clearly the conflict inside him, Graycloud asked, “If I write this up, you know, make a formal paper for publication, would you put your name on it, too?”

Jamie felt surprised. “I didn’t do any of this work, Billy.”

“I did it under your supervision. And if your name’s on the paper people’ll take it more seriously.”

“And I’ll take some of the heat,” Jamie said with a smile.

“Yeah. I guess.”

Nodding, Jamie said, “Okay, Billy. I’ll write a preface for your paper. Explain the background. We’ll include images of the pictographs and the cliff structures.”

“And you’ll put your name in as coauthor?”

“If that’s what you want.”

“Thanks, Dr. W!”

We’ve got to get this to Dex before he leaves, Jamie thought. Maybe it’ll turn him around, convince him we’ve got to push ahead with our work here.

But then the reaction set in. Billy’s right. The academics will rip this translation to shreds. Nobody will pay any real attention to it. The news nets will claim it’s a desperate attempt to draw support for exploring Mars. A dying gasp. Which it is.

Graycloud broke into his dismal thoughts. “Dr. W? How long do you intend to stay here? On Mars?”

Jamie looked into the youngster’s earnest face. “As long as I can, Billy.”

Graycloud’s eyes shifted away momentarily. Then he said, “I’ll go back on the evacuation flight, then. You’ll be the resident Navaho, okay?”

Wearily, Jamie said, “Going back to Arizona?”

“New Mexico first. I’ll take a little vacation in Taos. That’s where my family lives.”

“Not on the Navaho lands?”

“Naw. My father owns an art gallery in Taos.”

Jamie almost smiled. “My grandfather had a shop on the Plaza in Santa Fe.”

“You wouldn’t recognize Taos,” Graycloud said. “Last time I was there the whole state was green as Ireland, just about. You couldn’t walk along the sidewalks in town because the bushes had grown so thick.”

“From the greenhouse climate shift,” said Jamie. “Some regions get drought, some get floods, but the southwestern desert is getting good rain.” He thought about the president of the Navaho Nation and her problems with squatters encroaching on their land.

“Yep. Just give that old desert scrub some rain and it blooms like the Garden of Eden.”

A memory popped into Jamie’s consciousness. “When Arizona was admitted to the Union, back around nineteen-twelve, one of the men appointed to the U.S. Senate gave a speech about the new state. He ended it by saying, ‘All that Arizona needs to make it heaven is water and society.’ ”

Graycloud grinned. “And somebody in the audience said, ‘That’s all that hell needs to make it heaven.’ ”

They both chuckled at the story.

“Wish we could say the same for Mars.”

“Water and society,” Graycloud echoed. “Yeah.”

For several moments neither of them said anything. Jamie looked past Graycloud, at the two communications technicians sitting at their consoles, at the humming, blinking screens, at the curved beams of the dome high above, lost in shadows. How long will we stay here? he asked himself. How long can we hold on?

He had no answers. At last he got to his feet.

“You’ve done a good job, Billy,” he said to the younger man. “I’m proud of you, son.”

Graycloud actually blushed.

Jamie left the younger man sitting there, with his translation on the display screen, and padded barefoot and alone back to his quarters.

Tithonium Base: The Path

Jamie tried to enter the room as quietly as possible, but still Vijay stirred awake.

“You okay?” she asked drowsily.

“More or less,” he replied.

She lifted her head slightly and squinted at the digital clock. “Try to get some sleep before the sun comes up, love.”

“Billy Graycloud’s translated the pictographs,” he said, sitting on the edge of the bed. “He might be on to something.”

“That’s good.”

“He’s going back on the evacuation flight. Back to New Mexico.”

“Almost everybody is.”

“Yeah.” Jamie stretched out on the bed beside her, too tired and worn down even to take off his coveralls. But something was playing in his mind. A thought, an idea, fragile, elusive. He almost had it, but it kept slipping away from his conscious grasp. Something Billy said, he remembered. Something about rain and the desert…

Just give that old desert scrub some rain and it blooms like the Garden of Eden.

Turn the desert into a Garden of Eden, Jamie said to himself. Easier said than—

He sat bolt upright in the bed. “Why not?” he said aloud.

Vijay turned toward him. “Why not what?”

“We could do it!”

“Do what?” She sat up beside him.

“We could do it!” he repeated, almost shouting. “I’ve got to tell Dex! And Hasdrubal.”

Jamie jumped off the bed and ran to the door, leaving Vijay in the bed, startled and confused.

“Chrissake, Jamie, it’s not even six o’clock!” Dex complained.

Jamie had waited as long as he could. He’d never felt so excited, not since the moment when he’d first set foot on Mars, back in the First Expedition.

Still barefoot, Jamie had gone from his bedroom to the cafeteria and started up the coffeemaker. He fidgeted around impatiently, mentally reviewing what he had to do. Billy Graycloud came out of the comm center, yawning, together with the two technicians who had been on duty there. Their replacements shuffled in, looking surprised that the aroma of brewing coffee was already wafting through the dimly lit dome.

Jamie had laughed and waved at Graycloud, then taken a mug of coffee and sat impatiently in the cafeteria, thinking, planning, hoping, waiting for the sun to come up. At last the dome’s wall depolarized and became transparent again. Jamie saw the rusty surface of Mars out there, rocks scattered everywhere, the massive cliffs rising almost perpendicularly, so high their top was cut off by the edge of the dome’s transparent section.

He couldn’t wait any longer. Sitting at the cafeteria table, his insides fluttering, he yanked out his pocket phone and buzzed Dex.

A sleepy, “Whassamatter?”

“Come on out to the cafeteria, Dex. I’ve got something to tell you. Something important.”

“Jamie?”

“Yes! Get up! Now!”

“Chrissake, Jamie, it’s not even six o’clock!”

“Coffee’s waiting for you.”

Dex mumbled something and cut the connection. Jamie laughed inwardly. If he doesn’t come out in a few minutes I’ll go over and drag him out of bed.

He thought about calling Hasdrubal. And Chang. No, Jamie said to himself. Dex first. Just Dex. One-on-one. I’ll tell the others afterward.

Dex came out of his quarters, squinting unhappily at the sunlight lancing through the dome as he trudged slowly toward Jamie in the cafeteria. Jamie bolted out of his chair and sprinted toward him.

“What’s going on? What’s happened? Christ, you don’t even have shoes on!”

Steering Dex toward the coffee machine, Jamie said eagerly, “We’ve been looking through the wrong end of the telescope! All this time you’ve been thinking about terraforming the area for your tourists.”

“And you’ve been dead against it,” Dex muttered.

“I was wrong. We both were wrong. We don’t terraform Mars for human visitors. We terraform for the Martians!”

Dex squeezed his eyes shut for a moment. “It’s too damned early for jokes, Jamie.”

“It’s no joke! Take a piece of Mars and terraform it so that Martian organisms can live in it!”

“Terraform for Martians?”

“Terraform’s the wrong word. Areform it. Ares is the astronomical term for Mars, isn’t it?”

Dex reached for the coffeepot with one hand, a mug with his other.

“Jamie, what the hell are you talking about?”

“You went out with us to Hasdrubal’s crater yesterday.”

“Yeah. His bugs are all dead.”

Guiding Dex to a table, Jamie said, “Well, suppose we had another crater, deep enough to expose the microbes living below the permafrost.”

“They’d die off from the cold and radiation, just like the ones—”

“Not if we domed over the crater!” Jamie said as they sat down. “Let the air pressure build up inside it naturally. Protect it from the cold and radiation.”

Dex opened his mouth, closed it. At last he said, “You think the bugs could live?”

“In a Martian environment! Yes!”

With a slow shake of his head, Dex asked, “How do you know what kind of environment they’d need? They live deep underground, don’t they?”

“We’ll make several craters. Five, ten, whatever. Make slightly different environments in each of them. Vary the air pressure, the temperature—and watch the microbes adapt to the new conditions.”

“They’ll all die.”

“Hasdrubal’s microbes survived for a couple of weeks,” Jamie countered. “If we protect them, give them better conditions, some of them might survive. It’s worth trying!”

“And study them as they adapt,” Dex muttered.

“It’s a chance to begin repopulating Mars!”

“They’re only bacteria, Jamie.”

“But they’ll evolve, over time.”

“Millions of years.”

“So we do a long-term experiment!”

Dex leaned back in his chair and took a long swig of coffee. “You’re crazy, you know.”

“So was Archimedes,” Jamie said, laughing.

“Eureka and all that.”

“We can do it, Dex! The greatest experiment of all time! We can bring life back to Mars! Instead of watching the planet die, we can repopulate it!”

“And who’s going to pay for it?”

Jamie hesitated, then answered, “Your tourists, I guess.”

Sitting up straighter, Dex said, “You’ll let tourists here?”

“This area only,” Jamie said, his old reluctance giving way only slightly. “The village, the cliff structures. Five at a time. They stay for one week.”

Before Dex could respond, Jamie added, “And no terraforming. They go out in nanosuits, just like the rest of us.”

Dex pursed his lips, then said, “Might make them enjoy the trip better, using the suits, make them realize they’re really on Mars.”

“I’ll take charge of the visitors,” Jamie said. “Personally.” That’s the price I’ll have to pay, he told himself.

Dex grinned at him. “Yes, warden.”

“And, Dex, can you add into their price a fellowship for students who want to spend a year on Mars?”

“Maybe.” Dex thought about it for a moment. “Yeah, I don’t see why not.”

Jamie sucked in a deep breath. “Okay. Now let’s tell Hasdrubal. And Chang.”

“You tell them,” said Dex. “Soon’s I finish this coffee I’m going back to my room and pack.”

With a laugh, Jamie said, “I’ve got something for you to take back with you. Billy Graycloud’s translated the Martian writing.”

“Translated—?”

“It’s a prayer, Dex. A beautiful Martian prayer to the sun.”

“Jesus Christ.”

“You can stir up some interest with it. Get some media attention.”

Dex nodded slowly. “Sure.”

“Good.”

Getting slowly to his feet alongside Jamie, coffee mug in one hand, Dex asked, “Can I go pack my bag now?”

“You don’t want to stay?”

“Hell no. I’ve got a lot to do back on Earth. You stay here, Jamie. This is home for you.”

Tithonium Base: The Million-Year Experiment

Jamie fingered the bear fetish in his coveralls pocket as he stood between Chang Laodong and Carter Carleton watching the access tube disconnect from the squat, squarish body of the L/AV and roll back toward the dome.

So long, Dex, Jamie said silently. Pick your tourists carefully. I’ll be here waiting for them.

“LIFTOFF IN FIFTEEN SECONDS,” the overhead speakers announced, “FOURTEEN… THIRTEEN…”

Saleem Hasdrubal came up beside them. Looking out at the L/AV, he said, “I hear you’ve been talkin’ about my work.”

“…TEN… NINE… EIGHT…”

Jamie said, “That’s right.”

“Mind tellin’ me about it?”

“…FIVE… FOUR…”

Jamie held up a finger, his eyes on the landing/ascent vehicle, his other hand squeezing the fetish. Rocket launches always had an element of danger, he knew.

“…TWO… ONE… LIFTOFF.”

The L/AV hurtled out of sight, the hot exhaust from its ascent engine spraying grit and pebbles across the landing area.

“Liftoff nominal,” they heard the astronaut pilot’s voice, almost as emotionless as the computer. “On track for orbital rendezvous.”

Jamie relaxed his grip on the stone bear. Turning to Hasdrubal, he began explaining his idea for repopulating the dying Mars. Together with Carleton and Chang they started walking slowly away from the airlock area.

The biologist’s eyes widened as he grasped what Jamie was saying. “It’d take a million years before you saw any development,” he said, his voice slightly hollow with awe.

Jamie replied, “It’ll be a long-term experiment, that’s for sure.”

Chang asked, “Can it be done?”

“Blasting out some new craters and doming ’em over?” Hasdrubal asked. “Yeah, sure. Make ’em deep enough to expose the SLiMEs. Why not?”

The mission director almost smiled. “Then watch bacteria adapt to new conditions.”

“Watch them evolve,” said Carleton. “The fundamentalists are going to go wild over that.”

“Let them,” Jamie said tightly. “Tourism will keep us funded.” And he realized, “Every tourist who comes here will be a walking advertisement for our work when he gets back home.”

Carleton grinned mischievously. “I’ll put them to work at the dig. That should give them something to talk about when they return to Earth.”

“Let them take souvenirs home?” Jamie asked.

The anthropologist shrugged. “Martian rocks. Or pebbles, more likely.”

Chang spoke up. “When a tourist digs up something of significance, artifact or fossil, attach his or her name to it. Give them pride.”

“Good idea,” said Carleton. “We’ll keep a running catalogue of all the bits and pieces, with the names of the people who found them.”

Hasdrubal still seemed somewhat dazed by Jamie’s idea. “A million-year experiment. There’s never been anything like it.”

“Yes there has,” Jamie replied. “You and me, all of us, all the life on Earth.”

“And Mars, too, I guess,” the biologist admitted.

“But now we can do a controlled experiment.”

“And take notes.” Hasdrubal laughed, a little shakily.

They had reached the cafeteria.

Chang gestured to the nearest table. “A proper ceremony is in order,” he said. “Please wait here.”

The mission director hurried back toward his office.

“What’s he up to?” Jamie wondered.

Carleton said, “I bet I know.”

Chang reemerged a moment later, carrying a slim green bottle in one chubby hand.

“Rice wine,” he explained once he reached their table. “From my home province.”

They drank a toast to the new project: Chang, Carleton, Hasdrubal and Jamie. To the future. To the million-year experiment.

Then Carleton got to his feet.

“Going to excavation?” Chang asked, an almost amiable smile on his chunky face.

“In a while,” the anthropologist said. “First I’m going to put in a call to Selene. We’re going to need a nanotechnology expert to oversee building the domes over the craters. I know just the right person.”

As he hurried off toward his quarters, they heard Carleton almost singing, “Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediments.…”

It was a long and exhilarating day. Chang actually laughed as he cancelled the evacuation flight. Carleton and his crew went out to the dig with renewed spirit. Hasdrubal gathered most of the biologists and began planning the first steps of what they all called the million-year experiment.

As darkness fell and the dome’s transparent windows went opaque, Jamie stood by the entrance of his office cubicle and listened to the hum of activity. The cafeteria was filling up. People were laughing and joking. The overhead speakers blared up-tempo pop tunes.

He and Vijay had dinner with Hasdrubal and Zeke Larkin.

“I asked Carleton about blowing out new craters,” Larkin said over his plate of soymeat. “He’s the local expert on explosives.”

“And?” Jamie prodded.

“He said he’d help us all he could.”

Hasdrubal chuckled. “Maybe he’s hopin’ you’ll blow your head off.”

Larkin grinned back at him. “Yeah. Maybe so.”

“The important thing,” Jamie pointed out, “is that you can work together on this.”

“That we will do,” Hasdrubal said firmly.

All through dinner Vijay said very little, and as she and Jamie walked back to their quarters he asked, “Anything wrong? You’ve been a quiet little mouse all evening.”

“You had a lot to say,” she countered.

“Guess I did,” he admitted.

Vijay slid her arm into his. “You’ve done it, Jamie. You’ve found the right path.”

The memory of his grandfather flickered through Jamie’s awareness. This village don’t exist yet, Al had told him in his dream. But it will, Jamie said to himself. We’ll bring it to life.

“I don’t know if it’s the right path,” Jamie replied to Vijay, “but I think it’s a path that we can all follow. A path that will lead to where we want to go.”

“Even if it takes a million years?” she teased.

“Even if takes longer,” he said, totally serious.

“The important thing is, you’re going to keep the operation going,” she said. “You’re going to make it better than ever.”

Jamie nodded. “At least we’ll be able to stay on Mars.”

“People will be on Mars all the time.”

“Even tourists,” he said.

“You’ll handle them. You’ll put them to work, won’t you?”

“That’s the plan.”

Later, as they were undressing for bed, Jamie came to a realization. “You know, all through dinner you were looking at me in a kind of funny way.”

Vijay’s brows rose questioningly.

“It wasn’t just that you were quiet most of the time. You had this funny expression on your face.”

As she slipped her naked body under the sheet Vijay asked, “A funny expression?”

“Funny as in strange.” Jamie sat on the edge of the bed, then stretched out beside her and pulled up the sheet. He switched off the light. Vijay cuddled her body against his.

“What kind of expression?” she whispered into his ear.

He turned toward her, and in the darkness he answered, “I don’t know. Kind of like you knew something I didn’t. Kind of like you had a secret.”

“I don’t have any secrets from you, love.”

“I know. It’s weird, isn’t it?”

For a moment Vijay said nothing. They lay together, bodies pressed tight.

Then, “We’ll be staying on Mars permanently, won’t we, Jamie?”

“Looks that way.”

“I’ve been talking it over with Nari. There’s no reason why we shouldn’t have another baby.”

“Another…? What? Here on Mars?”

Vijay laughed softly in the darkness. “Think of it as a biology experiment; a nine-month experiment.”

“That’s some experiment,” Jamie muttered. “It’s a big decision, Vijay. Are you sure—”

“I was sure when we left New Mexico, love. I just had to wait until you got everything sorted out in your head. And now you have, so… why not?”

“At our age?”

“That’s no problem.”

“But… on Mars?”

“Children have been born on the Moon. It’s perfectly natural.”

“But—”

“Nari will take good care of me. I’ll be fine and we’ll have a healthy child. It’ll be good publicity for Dex to use.”

Despite himself, Jamie laughed. “A publicity stunt.”

“A baby. Our baby. It’s time we did it.”

“A nine-month experiment.”

She nuzzled her cheek against his. “Mars forever,” Vijay whispered.

“Forever,” he whispered back.