Mars Life (28 page)

Jamie ran to the priest, Hasdrubal a few steps behind him. In the slanting light of the setting sun he peered at DiNardo’s face. It looked ashen, sweaty.

He scooped up the body in his arms and trotted toward the camper.

“Lemme take his legs,” Hasdrubal said, coming up beside him.

“It’s okay. I’ve got him. Get the hatch open.”

Hasdrubal sprinted to the camper, long legs covering the ground in loping strides as Jamie carried DiNardo’s inert body. In the easy gravity of Mars the priest weighed only about thirty kilos. He pushed the body into the open airlock, then clambered up the little ladder and squeezed into the chamber with him.

Hasdrubal eyed him as Jamie slammed the control panel. It seemed to take hours for the hatch to close, the airlock to cycle, and the inner hatch finally to pop open.

“We’re in the camper,” he called to Vijay. “What should I do?”

She didn’t answer.

As he opened DiNardo’s helmet and unsealed the front of his nanosuit Jamie asked again. “Vijay! What should I do?”

“There’s nothing you can do, Jamie,” her voice replied. “According to these readouts, he’s dead.”

A part of Fulvio DiNardo’s mind was angered at the silliness of it. I can see, I can hear, but I can’t move, can’t speak, can’t even blink my eyes. This would be terrifying if it weren’t so stupid.

He realized that he was about to die. The specialist he had seen privately in Rome had warned him more than a year ago that he was at risk for a cerebral hemorrhage. That’s what the pills were for, weren’t they?

But to die on Mars. What a cosmic irony. You spend half your life working to reach this place and you have a fatal stroke within a week of your arrival. What a test of faith this is!

Waterman is shouting at me. I can’t make out the words. He’s speaking in English, of course, but his voice seems slurred, distorted.

And I’ll die without ever finding out why God wiped out the Martians. I’ll have to ask Him personally. Assuming that I get to heaven. Of course I will. But that’s the sin of presumption, isn’t it. What did that American humorist say: It’s not over until it’s over. The devil waits, always. Satan bides his time and seizes the opportunity to drag souls down to damnation.

He had the feeling that they were carrying him, laying him down on one of the cots, straightening his legs and arranging his arms across his chest. I’m not dead, he tried to tell them. Not yet.

But they could not hear him.

Why did you kill them, Lord? They were intelligent. They must have worshipped You in some form or other. Why kill them? How could You —

And then DiNardo understood. Like a calming wave of love and peace, comprehension flowed through his soul at last. As Waterman and Hasdrubal fussed about him DiNardo finally understood what had happened on Mars and why. God had taken the Martians to Him! Of course. It was so simple, so pure. I should have seen it earlier. I should have known. My faith should have revealed the truth to me.

The good Lord took the Martians to Him. He ended their trial of tears in this world and brought them to eternal paradise. They must have fulfilled their mission. They must have shown their Creator the love and faith that He demands from us all. So He gave them their eternal reward.

DiNardo tried to blink his eyes. The light was getting so bright it was difficult to see Waterman and the other one. Glaring. Brilliant. I thought it would all go dim at the end, the priest thought, but it’s getting brighter and brighter. Dazzling. Brilliant. Like staring into the sun. Like looking upon the face of. . .

Jamie straightened up, his arms and back aching after trying to pound DiNardo’s heart back to life.

“It’s no use, Vijay,” he said.                                 

“I can see that,” she answered through the communicator still clipped to his ear. “You might as well give it up.”

Jamie heard Hasdrubal, standing behind him, make a little grunt. “He looks peaceful enough. Almost like he’s smiling.”

Commonwealth Avenue had gone through many cycles of urban evolution, from posh residential neighborhood for Boston Brahmins of the nineteenth century to seedy rundown apartments for students and welfare families, dangerous with drugs and street crime. Now, in the middle of the twenty-first century, the area was on the upswing again: the stately old houses had been gutted and remodeled; the wealthy and prominent had driven out the poor and needy.

Dex Trumball owned a whole block of residences on Commonwealth Avenue and used one of them himself as his town house. It saved him the helicopter commute from the family estate on the North Shore, near Marblehead, to the downtown financial district where he ran the Trumball Trust.

He sat in his darkly paneled entertainment center, surrounded by wall screens, nursing a tumbler of scotch as he watched the documentary segment that Monsignor DiNardo had recorded from the excavation site on Mars.

The priest was standing in the pit, amidst the low dark rows of building foundations that the digging had uncovered. Through the bubble helmet of DiNardo’s nanosuit, Dex could see that his swarthy, stubble-jawed face was smiling happily. His hands were behind his back. To Dex he looked like a kindly uncle who was about to present a surprise gift to a favorite niece or nephew.

“I am on Mars,” DiNardo said. “That is why I must wear this protective suit. The air here is too thin to breathe. Besides, it contains very little oxygen.”

Turning slightly, DiNardo gestured with one hand while keeping the other behind him. “This once was a village where Martian people lived. They built their homes here and grew crops nearby. A stream flowed past their village. They raised families and went about their daily lives here, in this place.”

Dex nodded to himself. Good. He’s being very positive, very firm about it. No maybes or probablies. Good.

The priest took his hand from behind his back and opened it. The camera view closed in on the object he held in his palm.

“This is a fossil. It once was part of a Martian’s backbone. Once, some sixty-five million years ago, this was part of a living, breathing, intelligent Martian creature.”

Terrific, thought Dex.

“What happened to these people?” DiNardo asked rhetorically. “They were wiped out in a cataclysm that destroyed nearly all the life on Mars, some sixty-five million years ago, long before human beings arose on Earth. At the same time, a similar cataclysm struck the Earth and destroyed many, many living creatures, including the mighty dinosaurs. Giant meteors struck both worlds, bringing death and devastation.”

We’ll need to splice in some computer animation, Dex said to himself. Show the village as it was before the meteors struck. Show what the Martians probably looked like.

The camera view had pulled back to show DiNardo’s face again. “On Earth, more than half of all the creatures on land and sea perished, driven to extinction. On Mars, the people who built this village and every other form of life more complex than lowly lichen was wiped out.”

Okay, Dex urged silently. Now get to the point.

“I am a priest of the Roman Catholic Church,” DiNardo said, as if in answer. “I am here on Mars to learn more about God’s creatures. To me, searching the universe to understand the works of God is a form of worship. The twenty-fourth psalm begins with, ‘The Earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof; the world and they that dwell therein.’ To the men who wrote the Bible, the Earth was the only world they knew. To you and me, the universe is much larger, much grander, and God’s immense creativity inspires us to seek out His handiwork wherever we may find it.”

“Terrific!” Dex shouted as the screen went blank. “Just what we need.” He thought about calling the priest, checked the computer’s display of the local time at Tithonium Base. Five-fifteen in the afternoon there. Good enough.

But as he started to instruct the voice recognition phone system lo put through a call to the base on Mars, it interrupted him.

“Incoming call, sir,” the phone announced with the carefully modulated voice of a polished British butler. “From Dr. Waterman.”

“Put him on,” Dex said, leaning back in his stress-free recliner and reaching for the half-finished scotch with one hand.

Jamie’s face looked awful. Dex immediately knew that something was terribly wrong.

“Dex, Monsignor DiNardo has died. He had a stroke. He was outside on an excursion with me and one of the biologists and he just sort of keeled over and died. There was nothing we could do for him.”

Dex felt a sudden surge of hot anger. Dead? The priest’s dead? How the hell are we going to use his footage if Mars killed him? Of all the stupid goddamned fucked-up asshole things to do, the dumb bastard dies on us!

“We found a bottle of pills on him,” Jamie was going on, “and more pills in his personal effects. Heart medication of some sort, Vijay thinks. We’re checking into it. Whatever his condition was, he kept it secret from us. He got through the physical exams without letting us know about it. We wouldn’t have let him come to Mars if we’d known, of course.”

Great! Dex smoldered. Just motherfucking great! Once the news media finds out that we let a sick priest go to Mars and he died there, we’re toast. The whole fucking program will be just as dead as that idiot priest.

I‘ve made arrangements with the Vatican,” Jamie was saying softly. “They’ll beam a funeral mass to us. The Pope himself will say it.”

Chang asked, “When?”

“Tomorrow morning. Nine a.m., Rome time.”

“Eight in the morning here,” said Nari Quintana.

Despite the fact that the Martian sol was slightly more than forty-one minutes longer than a day on Earth, Tithonium Base and all space operations kept to Zulu Time, the standard clock setting for Greenwich, England. The extra minutes were added each night, while most of the base personnel slept.

Immediately upon returning to the base Jamie had asked Chang to call Quintana and the team’s contamination expert for a meeting to decide what to do with DiNardo’s body. Now they sat glumly in Chang’s office, in the sofa and chairs around the low serving table. Jamie had been surprised to realize that Hasdrubal was the top contamination expert.

“I’m the man,” the biologist had admitted, with a rueful smile. “Ustinov beat it back to Russia on the resupply flight last month.”

“We have to decide,” Jamie said, looking from Hasdrubal to Chang, “what to do with the body.”

“Catholics prefer burial,” said Quintana, unconsciously fingering the silver crucifix she wore around her neck.

“No way,” Hasdrubal snapped. “We can’t let his body decompose in the ground out there. I’ve got enough of a contamination problem with that garden Torok left.”

Jamie felt surprised. “The garden’s contaminated?”

“Other way ‘round,” said Hasdrubal. “I gotta make sure no terrestrial organisms get loose in the local environment.”

Chang said, “I agree that we must not bury Dr. DiNardo outside.”

“There are no scavenger microbes in the Martian soil,” Quintana said.

“You know that for a fact?” Hasdrubal challenged.

Quintana’s expression hardened. “None in the shallow layer in which we would bury the man. Besides, we could seal him into an empty cargo container.”

Hasdrubal shook his head stubbornly. “Look, we gotta think about the long term here, centuries. That body already contains armies of microbes that’ll decompose him. Those microorganisms will eventually worm their way out of whatever container you put him in.”

Jamie almost grimaced at the word 
worm.

Quintana glared at the biologist. “Do you honestly believe that terrestrial microbes could survive in the superoxides that pervade the ground out there? Without water? Without oxygen?”

“We can’t take the chance. Hell, bacteria have survived for years out on the Moon’s surface without water or air!”

“I know that, but—”

Jamie broke into their growing argument. “The Vatican has asked that the body be shipped to Rome.”

Chang looked relieved. “Of course. He must have a family.”

“Or the Jesuits want him.”

“There is a resupply flight due in two months,” Chang said. “He can be sent home then.”

The last resupply flight for a long time, Jamie knew. Most of the base personnel will have to go home on that one. All except fifteen of us. Unless I can come up with some alternative.

“We can’t keep the body here for two months,” Quintana said. “We have no means of embalming him.”

“He’ll rot away,” Hasdrubal grumbled.

“That will be a health hazard inside the dome,” Quintana pointed out, tapping a finger on the cushioned arm of the sofa. “We’ll have to place him outside.”

“Can’t do that,” Hasdrubal countered. “It’s a contamination risk.”

“Better to risk contamination than endanger the health of everyone here.”

“No!” Hasdrubal insisted. “We have to protect the local environment. We can’t spread terrestrial microbes out there!”

“And I will not permit his body to be kept here,” Quintana declared, equally inflexible.

Chang scowled at them both. “The only alternative, then, is to burn the body.”

“The Vatican’ll 
love 
that,” said Hasdrubal. “Besides, burning might not kill off all the microorganisms in his body. If even only a few survive we’ll have problems.”

“You’re being foolish,” Quintana said to the biologist.

“I’m doin’ my job, lady.”

Jamie suddenly grinned, understanding what they must do. “Wait,” he said, raising his hands to calm them. “There’s another alternative.”

Chang turned toward him questioningly.

“Put the body in orbit until the resupply ship from Earth arrives,” Jamie said.