No Way

26

At some point, Fan came back in. When Frank had finished his confession, the doctor eased Leland out of the way and stood at the head-end of the bench.

“Lance? We looked at your tablet. There’s nothing on it.”

Frank glanced from ceiling to Fan. “That would follow. They think of everything.”

“It’s not just that all the personal files have been deleted. Yun tells me that it’d be trivial—trivial for her, at least—to get those back in some form or other. It’s the whole thing. Even the operating system. It’s been erased. The entire memory’s been overwritten. It’s just zeros. Whatever was on there has been destroyed. Did you do that?”

“I might be Californian, but I’m not Silicon Valley.”

“He says he’s a builder,” said Leland.

“Did you wipe your tablet?”

“I wouldn’t know how.”

Fan gripped the edge of the bench. “OK, so how about this: we went looking for this other base. The photos have gone too. Everything in a two-degree block to the south of Ceraunius Tholus. We’ve asked for them to be reloaded, and we’re waiting for them now.”

“And when you get them back, they’ll be edited. They know. XO know.”

“What do they know, Frank? That you’ve deleted all your data, overwritten it, that you’ve wiped out the maps that would prove you wrong?” Fan leaned over him. “There’s nothing, anywhere, that verifies your version of events. Everything you say has an alternative explanation. Even your scars. But I would be personally very grateful if you could tell me, if you can, where Jim is, because we intend to bring him home, no matter what.”

Frank sat up and it brought him face to face with Fan. For the first time, he recognized how big he was. Tall, and broad and strong. Capable.

“I’ve told you the truth. I’ve told you everything.”

“No question as to whether you, when you went out on your own looking for Jim, that you found him, and you left him there and tore off his mission patch?”

“Fan, no.”

“Or that you found him alive? Unconscious? And somehow what you think happened got mixed up with what really happened?”

“No. Never.”

“You got Jim’s patch from Jim’s suit—that’s the only certain thing here.”

Frank and Fan were inches apart. “All I wanted to do was go home. That was it. That was what I was holding out for. And now I’m never going to do that.”

“Why not?”

“Because now you think I killed Jim. What are you and Leland going to do? Keep me sedated for the next year? Then again on the ship home? That’s not going to happen. If Lucy doesn’t put me out of the airlock, you’re all in constant danger. And you’re right, but not for the reasons you think: XO will want me out of the way because I’ve said too much, and they won’t care about how many of you they take out in the process.”

“You know that believing that someone wants to kill you has a clinical name?”

“I’m not mad.” He looked at his lap. “I am going to ask for one thing before you make a final decision. That someone drives over to M2 and takes a look for themselves. OK, two things. The second thing is easier than the first.”

“You want us to check for the gun,” said Leland.

“It’s right there. Under the pile of rock. While you’re digging for it, you can ask yourselves why a man alone on Mars would need a gun. And who might have let him bring it.” He brought his head back up, and said to Fan: “I know this isn’t looking good for me right now, but you know that there’s a chance that I’m telling the truth. And not just because that might mean Jim’s still alive.”

He could feel Fan’s breath on his skin.

“Leland thinks you’re full of crap.”

“That’s not my professional opinion,” said Leland quickly. “I’m going to take some time over that. Until then, I’m reserving judgment. Everybody is.”

“I know you want Jim back. So do I. That’s what I was doing.” Frank looked down at Fan’s balled fists. “You’re not going to beat on an old man, are you?”

Leland put his hand on Fan’s shoulder, dug his fingers in and pulled Fan back. “That’s not helping. We can do better.”

“What the hell is going on here?” Fan turned on Leland. “I don’t know what to believe any more.”

“We’re scientists. We’re all scientists. We look at the evidence and we look at the theories and we see what the best fit is. That’s what we do.”

Fan lowered his voice. “What if he’s right? What if he’s right about this M2 base at least? Shouldn’t we be taking a look, seeing if that’s where Jim’s at?”

“That’s Lucy’s call. It’s a long way. It’s not a risk-free journey. And currently we’ve only got one buggy on full charge. A trip of that distance, she’s going to insist on doubling-up on everything.”

“He did it!” Fan jerked his finger at Frank. “He went there on his own.”

“He says he did. We’ve no proof of that.”

“How can you be so, so reasonable? Jim is… gone.”

“Being reasonable is why I’m on the team. Let’s go and talk to Lucy.” Leland put his arm around Fan. “Lance, you going to stay here?”

“If that’s what you want. I’d rather be in the greenhouse. I’ve still got stuff to do there.”

“Pretty certain Lucy won’t wear that. The greenhouse is the very definition of mission-critical equipment. You need something to eat? Drink? The can?”

“I’m pretty tired. I can just get my head down for a bit.”

“That’s fine. I’ll come back if anything new comes up.”

Frank lay down and closed his eyes. He heard the door shut, and moments later, the lock click. It was OK. He’d done everything he could. He didn’t know if it was enough. What he had to do now was wait, and hope.

In all of that, he suddenly found himself falling asleep. He was even consciously surprised at the speed of it: I’m actually going to sleep. It had been such a long time coming.

Then he was awake again. The weak light leaking through the hab walls had changed in quality. It was later in the day. Afternoon, sometime. Leland was standing over him.

“’Sup?”

“There’s some things we need to talk about. In the kitchen.” His voice was… guarded. Frank wondered why.

“Give me a moment.”

“You want lunch?”

“I guess so. Condemned man and all that jazz.”

“No one’s reached a decision on anything yet.” Leland stood by the open door. “When you’re ready.”

Frank padded through to the kitchen. The crew were all there again, in the same seats. They all had their tablets on in front of them, and the remains of a meal, and mugs and bottles. And in front of Lucy, a couple of plastic bags, still dusty from outside.

“You want to sit down?” said Leland from behind him. “I’ll get you something. Coffee?”

“Sure.” Frank slid into his seat, and moved it forward. “You found it then.”

“We found it.” Lucy pulled the bags towards herself, and away from Frank. “We just don’t know what it means.”

“You told XO about it?”

“No. No, I haven’t.”

“Can I ask why?”

“You can ask. I probably won’t answer.”

Frank looked bemused for a moment, then shrugged. “OK.”

Yun slid her tablet across. It had a satellite picture on it.

Frank took it from her, and moved his head back slightly so that it came into proper focus. It was Ceraunius Tholus. He’d seen it often enough. Rahe at the top, the plains to the bottom.

“They gave you back the maps then,” he said.

“Yes,” said Yun. She leaned across and used a finger to recenter the image on the southern slope of the volcano. “Can you show me where you believe this second base is?”

Frank eased the map up slightly, and zoomed in on the trench. “Right there. The ship is at the western end, a couple of hundred feet from the cave.”

Yun expanded the map further, and Frank realized that she’d synced everyone else’s tablet to hers: they were seeing what she was. “This partially collapsed lava tube here?”

“That’s it. The hab is under the overhang. There are panels on the south side of the entrance.”

“You can see that there’s no sign of anything you described.”

“They’ve edited it out. I said they would.”

Yun nodded. “So I went looking for artifacts that might show that there’d been some degree of image manipulation. Cloned textures. Blurring. Artificial junctions. Differences in shadows. All within the single frame.”

“And did you find any?”

“No.” She inclined her head to one side. “However. These images are composites. Built up from strips of images taken when the satellite passes overhead. As you can see here.”

She shifted the whole image eastwards, and showed a brighter grayscale stripe of Mars sandwiched between two darker borders.

“You can also see that each strip is lined in the direction of travel of the camera. This is a feature of the motion of the camera relative to the surface. We see it so often, we just accept it.”

Then she brought it back to the trench, and Frank could see the lines cross from the plain, clearly over the floor of the trench, and continue again on the other side.

“If I make a layer, and match the direction of the lines by marking them…” Yun used a stylus to highlight the northern and southern ends of the lines. “You can see something very interesting. It’s very subtle. But if I fade this layer in and out, look at the underlying lines.”

Frank bent his nose closer. He didn’t get it. Then he did.

“This line here. It’s broken. It doesn’t follow all the way across.”

“No. Although there is a line. This isn’t to say that the original image doesn’t contain errors. But it might indicate that someone has very skillfully dropped a segment of another image into this one. There is no other flaw that I can see. This is only one, or perhaps two, pixels out.”

“But that’s where the ship was.”

“Which is interesting in itself, but not conclusive. There is more.”

“Are you dragging this out on purpose?” asked Frank.

“I’m not dragging anything out,” replied Yun. “I’m explaining what I’m doing.”

“Did you find something or not?”

Yun made a face. “No. I found the absence of something.” She scrolled north, almost all the way to the summit of the crater. She zoomed in, almost all the way, until the pixels were blocks and the image grainy. “You can just about make out Station two from the shadow the panels cast. I can draw it on a layer, like so.”

She outlined the shadow in the shape of the weather station, with its distinctive boom.

“Now, this is where Station eight ought to be.”

Yun zoomed out and in again. There was nothing to see but a bare patch of lava.

“This indicates that XO have sent us a series of replacement images which are not contemporaneous with each other. I know there was an image of Station eight. I saw it myself, when I was checking the latitude and longitude. Now, it might be, in the hurry to reload the deleted files, someone made a mistake, and uploaded an older image. I will ask them to try again, using the most recent images.”

“Let’s not do that for the moment,” said Lucy. She sat back in her chair. “The safety and well-being of everyone on the base is my priority. Right now, I don’t know how to best achieve that. On one hand, I’ve been told that Lance is in the middle of a psychotic episode and poses a genuine risk to us all. On the other, Lance has given a testimony that Leland has determined to be both coherent and internally consistent, but which cannot possibly be true, precisely because it’s so absurdly monstrous.”

“Thanks, Leland,” said Frank.

“You’re welcome.”

“And on the third hand, there are some disturbing inconsistencies cropping up. We have an automatic pistol. The trigger guard has been machined off. Its presence on the planet is inexplicable. I’m aware that early astronauts had survival knives, flares and even handguns in case they came down in hostile territory, and yes, there have been weapons on space stations. But I can’t think of any situation where a gun would be of any use on Mars. It sure as hell isn’t to scare the bears away. Neither was I made aware that MBO had one. And I should have been. And I don’t know why it was buried outside.

“Then there’s everything that Yun’s just told us. Mistake? Probably. Artifacts? Probably. Anything else would be preposterous. The mere idea that there’s another, simultaneous mission on Mars without us knowing about it, is inherently ridiculous. That it’s just over the hill from us is…

“Lance has requested that no final decision be made on his mental capacity until someone’s gone over and eyeballed the trench where M2 is supposed to be. I’ve thought long and hard about it. There’s no reason at all why I should entertain the idea. We’re looking at maps which show precisely nothing. But we still have the possibility—not a real possibility—that Jim might be there. Our missing friend. So I’m going to do that tomorrow, to settle it. I’ll take Isla with me. Lance, this is your last opportunity to tell me I’m wasting my time.”

“You won’t be wasting your time. Just be careful.”

Lucy blinked at him. “You busted up the buggy.”

“They tried to ram me. I rammed them back.”

Then she dropped her head. “I’ve said my piece. This is what we’ll do. Everything else is on hold until we get back. OK?”

Frank couldn’t help himself. “You going to tell Mission Control where you’re going?”

Lucy fixed Frank with a stare. “We got into this situation because we didn’t follow the rules. So we follow the rules.”

“You’re not telling them about the gun, though.”

“I haven’t decided yet. Don’t push it, Lance.”

“I’m done.” He looked at the plate of greens that Leland had edged onto the table by his elbow. He’d missed it until now, so he nudged back his chair and picked up the plate. And the coffee that was next to it. “You don’t need to set a guard or anything. But it’s probably in the rules that you have to.”

He took himself back to the consulting room, and sat on the bench, listening to the sounds of the base around him. He’d built this thing. There was that much to be proud of, at least.