Mars Life (3 page)

The paperless office is still nothing more than a distant daydream, Jamie said to himself. No matter how hard he tried to keep his office neat and tidy, the clutter always crept in to drown him. His office was no bigger than any of the others along the corridor of the Planetary Sciences Department building. Its door bore a modest sign:

J. WATERMAN
SCIENTIFIC DIRECTOR
MARS PROGRAM

Inside, the office had space only for a regular university-issue desk of genetically engineered faux maple, littered with papers, a bookcase stuffed with reports and folders, and a single plastic chair for visitors. The room had a window that looked out at the elevated interstate highway that ran through the heart of Albuquerque. This early in the morning, the rush-hour traffic was just beginning to build up.

Jamie had come in early to try to get some work done before his conference call was scheduled. He squeezed around his desk and slid into the swivel chair, booted up his desktop computer. He shook his head at the litter that threatened to engulf him. Got to clean this place up, he thought as the computer ran through its self-check and then announced with a sharp beep that it was ready for work.

Scanning the morning’s schedule, he saw that he had more than two hours before the conference call would come through. He started to review the latest reports from the teams on Mars.

It’s been nearly two years, he realized. Two years since I left Mars. Two years since Jimmy died. Skydiving. Of all the stupid things a teenager could do, he had to get his kicks by jumping out of an airplane. Why? Because his father had, years before. But I did it because I had to: it was part of my training for the Mars mission. I didn’t do it for fun. The Russians wouldn’t okay me for the mission if I didn’t jump. I wasn’t there to guide Jimmy, to make him understand, to protect him. I wasn’t there for my son. Or for Vijay.

I know it’s hit her hard. She tries to put a good face on it, pretends she’s gotten over it. For my sake. She doesn’t want me to see how she’s hurting. But I know the pain is there. I feel it. Mothers get sick when their sons die. They wither away. They get cancer.

He shook his head, trying to clear away the past. Focus on today, he told himself. This morning.

The exploration of Mars was proceeding slowly. Not like those breathtaking heady weeks when they had first landed, when every day seemed to bring an exciting new discovery. Now the exploration went more slowly. That’s the way science works, Jamie told himself. You break through into a new area, new ideas, and it’s mind-blowing. But then you get bogged down digging out the details, searching for the clues, building up the evidence.

It takes time, exploring a whole world.

The original Mars base had been at the edge of the Tharsis highlands, but once they discovered the lichen clinging precariously to life at the floor of Tithonium Chasma, and Jamie discovered the ancient ruins notched into a cleft in the cliffs there, they moved the base to the canyon floor and enlarged it. A smaller base had been established almost halfway across the planet in the enormous impact crater called the Hellas Basin, but Jamie knew that they couldn’t afford to keep it going. Nearly three hundred men and women were working on Mars, resupplied regularly by flights from Earth and the lunar nation of Selene. That’s about a hundred more than we can maintain on our current funding, he admitted silently.

Yet we don’t know much more about the Martians than we did twenty years ago, Jamie grumbled to himself, when I first glimpsed the remains of their cliff dwellings. Just that they’re gone, wiped out in the same cataclysm that killed off the dinosaurs here on Earth sixty-five million years ago.

An intelligent species, destroyed by the impersonal, implacable crash of a meteor big enough to blow away Mars’s atmosphere and wipe out all life more complex than those hardy little lichen.

They never knew what hit them, Jamie thought. Then he corrected himself. They knew. They realized that death had come screaming out of the sky. They were intelligent enough to understand. But they didn’t have the level of technology to do anything about it. All they could do was die.

“Christ,” he muttered, “I’m getting morose in my old age. Death and dying is all I think about anymore.”

At least we’ve got those big telescopes watching for asteroids heading toward Earth. We can spot them years in advance. We can send rockets out to them, divert them away from a collision course. We won’t be wiped out the same way the dinosaurs were. The way the Martians were.

With a shake of his head he turned his attention to the morning’s reports. There was a lengthy analysis of the lichen that lived in the rocks strewn along the valley floor. Jamie scanned the abstract, frowning, then studied the graphs that summarized the authors’ findings. The lichen are dying off, he saw. Slowly, slowly, but there’s less and less water vapor in the atmosphere, less water to keep them alive.

Mars is dying. The whole planet is dying. Jamie leaned back in his chair and rubbed his aching eyes. Who isn’t dying? he asked himself.

His phone buzzed. Startled, Jamie glanced at his desktop clock and saw that more than two hours had passed since he’d arrived at his office. I’ve just pissed away two hours, he scolded himself.

The phone buzzed again.

Thoroughly disgusted with the news about the lichen and his own failing, Jamie tapped the phone’s keypad. The face of the President of the Navaho Nation appeared on the flat screen mounted on the wall to his right. She was older than Jamie, her hair dead white, pulled back off her face and tied into a long queue that draped over her shoulder. She was wearing a plain blouse of light tan, with turquoise and coral beads sewn along the edge of the collar. Her face was wrinkled, as weathered as the mesas of the Navaho land where she lived, but her dark eyes sparkled with warmth and lively intellect. She had the same broad cheekbones and stocky build as Jamie.

He glanced again at the digital clock and grinned, despite himself. She’s right on time. Unusual for a Navaho.

“Ya’aa’tey,” Jamie said, dipping his chin slightly.

“Ya’aa’tey,” she replied. It is good.

“Our friend in Boston is late.”

The president smiled. “He must be learning Navaho ways.” They both laughed.

“Everything goes well for you?” Jamie asked. “Almost everything.”

“Almost?”

With a shrug, she replied, “The Anglos are trying to buy more of the reservation’s land. They say they need it for the people who were driven from their homes by the big floods. If we don’t sell they say they’ll go to court and take the land anyway.”

“Refugees.” Jamie knew that the greenhouse warming that had flooded coastal cities and driven out millions of now-homeless refugees was also bringing rains to the lands of the Navaho people, turning stark brown desert into inviting green pastures. White politicians and real estate developers coveted those newly green acres. The pressure to open the reservation to settlement by the refugees was growing every day, every hour.

“There’s plenty of open land in other places,” the president said, “but they’re putting a lot of pressure on—”

The phone buzzed once more, interrupting her. Jamie touched the keypad and his wall screen split into two images. The new one showed C. Dexter Trumball, in his office high up in one of Boston’s financial district towers.