Return to Mars (47 page)

VIJAY FELT THE PRESS OF THEIR BODIES AS ALL SIX OF THE EXPLORERS crowded into the comm center. Rodriguez sat at the console with his bandaged hand tied against his chest by a sling. Stacy Dezhurova sat beside him. No one made a sound, not even a breath, as they stared at the main display screen.

“We’ve got to get back up to the rover now,” Jamie was saying, his voice sounding tired, drained. “I just wanted to make sure that you all saw this. It’s a building, for certain. There were intelligent Martians here.”

Vijay’s throat felt dry, even though she was perspiring in the hot, crowded cubicle.

“I did not think it was real,” Dezhurova admitted, her voice low, hollow. “Not until your imagery started to come through did I believe it is real.”

“It’s real,” Jamie said. “Better send the news to Tarawa.”

Pete Connors was dozing peacefully in his aluminum-and-plastic beach lounge chair. It was Sunday afternoon. The sun was hot, but the breeze coming in off the reef was brisk and delicious. He had been watching the Kansas City Chiefs playing a night football game against the Philadelphia Eagles on his little portable TV, but had fallen asleep in the middle of a scoreless defensive struggle.

He awoke to his wife rudely shaking his shoulder. “Wha … whatsamatter?”

She was frowning. “It’s the office. They want you to come over right away. Top priority, they say.”

Connors scrambled out of the lounge chair, nearly tripping himself.

“What the hell’s gone wrong now?” he muttered.

With a peck for his wife’s cheek he ran from the lanai around the corner of the tile-roofed house to the garage, hopped on his electric motorbike, and started pedaling furiously down the housing tract street that led to the island’s main road.

In less than ten minutes he was gawking at Jamie’s footage of the cliff dwelling.

“Oh my good lord,” said former astronaut Pete Connors, sinking into a chair in front of the display screen. “This is the big one.”

The people crowding around him in the cinderblock-walled comm center were staring too, some grinning, some open-mouthed with awe.

“Feed this to ICU headquarters right away,” Connors said.

“It’s Saturday evening in New York,” one of his assistants reminded him. “They’ll be closed.”

“Maybe we ought to send it directly to the news media?” someone suggested.

“No!” Connors snapped. “ICU’s got to make the announcement, not us. Get the board chairman on the phone, wherever he is. And Li Chengdu, at Princeton.”

“What about Mr. Trumball?”

Connors took in a deep breath. “Yeah, Trumball, too. He’d get pretty pissed if we didn’t tell him right off.”

Walter Laurence was sipping a martini as he supervised the trimming of the family Christmas tree, a chore that he once dreaded, but now that he was a grandfather it was actually enjoyable to watch his grown children struggling to keep their tykes from breaking the ornaments and messing everything up beyond recall.

He sat in his favorite wingchair by the fireplace, wishing it would snow. There hadn’t been a white Christmas in simply ages, and Central Park always looked so pretty in the snow. Now it was gray and bare and grimy-looking outside his twentieth-floor window.

The butler brought the phone to him and placed it gently on the sherry table beside the wingchair. “Tarawa, sir.” He still pronounced it Ta-RA-wa, instead of properly, Laurence realized with some annoyance.

Wondering what kind of catastrophe would prompt Tarawa to call on the Saturday before Christmas, Laurence touched the keypad.

Pete Connors’ dark face appeared on the tiny screen, split from ear to ear by a toothy grin.

“Sorry to disturb you, but I thought you’d want to see this right away.”

It took several moments for Laurence to understand what he was looking at. Once he grasped that it was a village built by Martians, he leaped to his feet and gave a war whoop that startled his family so badly they nearly knocked the Christmas tree over.

Dr. Li Chengdu watched his neighbors preparing for Christmas with the cool detached eye of an alien observer. They struggled to string colored lights over their houses, put up elaborate decorations on their lawns, and drove themselves deeper into debt by buying elaborate gifts and throwing too many parties.

Now and then they talked about the religious significance of the holiday, but as far as Li could determine the true purpose of the occasion was to boost retail sales. No matter. He enjoyed the fuss and merriment, even though much of it was underlaid with a kind of desperate determination to do everything right and be happy no matter what the family tensions.

When Connors called from Tarawa, the black former astronaut seemed more excited than the neighborhood children.

“Jamie did it!” Connors blurted. “It’s really a village! Built by Martians!”

Li half collapsed into his favorite chair, the comfortable yielding recliner that had been his one luxury on the First Mars Expedition, and stared open-mouthed at the phone screen’s display of the Martian building.

His heart thudded beneath his ribs. Intelligent creatures lived on Mars. We are not alone in the universe! Not only life, but intelligent life exists elsewhere!

His gaze wandered to his living room window and the twinkling lights on his neighbor’s house and lawn, across the suburban street.

What will they feel when the news reaches them? Frightened? Excited? Eager to meet their peers? Or afraid of meeting their superiors?

Darryl C. Trumball was at home on Saturday evening, struggling with the decision of whether to go downtown to his club for dinner, or tell his wife to have the cook fix something for the two of them.

Connors’ phone call ended all thoughts of dinner. Trumball gaped at the views from Mars, then immediately snapped, “Get off this line! I’ve got six dozen people to call right away!”

Connors said, “The news media—”

“Never mind the stupid media! Let Laurence and his flunkies take care of that. I’m calling money people, man. They’ll be begging to back the next expedition now!”

“Is this a crank call?” asked the news director.

“Young lady,” said Walter Laurence, “I am the executive director of the International Consortium of Universities. My people are phoning all the major networks and print outlets. I chose to call your network personally because your CEO is a close friend of mine.”

Then why didn’t you call him? The news director wondered. She was a bone-thin, sharp-featured woman of thirty-seven who had seen her share of hoaxes and scams. Intelligent Martians my ass, she thought.

“Look, what you showed me looks like an adobe housing project. You claim it’s on Mars?”

It took Laurence fully fifteen minutes and all the patience he could engender to convince her that he was telling the truth. Still, she did not fully believe him until the monitors above her desk—which showed what the other networks were running—all suddenly started showing footage of the Martian cliff dwelling. Even the Saturday night football game was preempted.

That’s what finally convinced her.

The President of the United States was startled when his science advisor phoned to tell him the Mars explorers had found intelligent Martians.

“Have you notified DoD?” the president asked immediately.

The science advisor shook her head. She had not had access to the president for weeks, and she was surprised at how much older he looked on her office wall screen without his makeup.

Her office was crowded with grinning, partying young men and women. Champagne corks were popping. People were toasting the Mars explorers. Martian jokes were buzzing through the group: How many Martians does it take to replace a light bulb? Why do Martians have headaches?

”Mr. President, the Martians no longer exist. Their village is empty. They pose no threat to us.”

The president blinked his baggy eyes. “Well, this one village may be abandoned, but there might be others, mightn’t there?”

The science advisor nodded thoughtfully. He’s got a point there. If Waterman and his people have found one village, there must be others, elsewhere on the planet.

The Zieman family sat hunched together on the sofa in their Kansas City living room, staring at the wall screen. It was showing the same view of the Martian dwelling for the twelfth time.

The five-year-old girl said, “How many times are they gonna show that same picture?”

“That’s on Mars, stoop-face,” her older brother snapped.

“Be quiet,” Mrs. Zieman hushed.

Again the screen showed a long, slow panning shot of the wall as the announcer’s voice intoned, “… built by intelligent creatures who lived on the planet Mars, our next-door neighbor in space. It’s night on Mars now, but with tomorrow’s dawn, scientists James F. Waterman and C. Dexter Trumball will return to this Martian village to begin the scientific exploration of the first discovery of intelligent life beyond our own world.”

It was nearly midnight in Rome. Fr. DiNardo had struggled through the swarming, beeping, lurching preholiday traffic to reach the Vatican, summoned by no less than Cardinal Bryan, reputed to be closer to the pope than anyone else on Earth.

Now he sat in a small office, its walls covered with Renaissance frescoes of saints and martyrs, while Cardinal Bryan paced restlessly back and forth.

“So what does this mean, Father?” the cardinal asked. “What should I tell His Holiness?”

Bryan was an American, in line perhaps to be the first American pope. His Irish ancestry was easy to see in his heavy-jawed, fleshy face.

“It means, apparently,” DiNardo answered slowly, “that God was pleased to create intelligent creatures on more worlds than just our own.”

“Intelligent, you say.”

“They must have been, to build such a village for themselves.”

“Intelligent.” Cardinal Bryan seemed to muse on the word as he paced.

“Intelligent,” Fr. DiNardo repeated firmly.

The cardinal turned toward him. “Intelligent, yes. But did they have souls?”

GRANDFATHER AL WAS WAITING FOR HIM WHEN HE RETURNED TO THE VILLAGE, smiling from beneath his droop-brimmed hat, the black one with the silver band that he liked to wear when he went out to the pueblos.

“I told you it was here, didn’t I?” Al said. He was bundled up in a fleece-lined leather jacket, hands dug deep into the pockets of his jeans. It was cold on Mars.

Jamie, still in his hard suit, shook his head inside the helmet. “As a matter of fact, Al, I don’t remember you saying anything about it.”

“Aw, I must’ve,” Al said. “Hell, I’ve been leading you here ever since you were a kid.”

“I know, Grandfather,” said Jamie. His hard suit had disappeared. Like Al, he was in jeans and windbreaker. And a sky-blue baseball cap. “I’m grateful.”

Al laughed delightedly. “Come on, Jamie, let me show you around the old place.”

From somewhere behind him, Jamie could hear water running freely.

Jamie woke up with a start. He sat up, saw that Dex’s bunk was empty, heard the water recycler running in the lavatory.

The dream dwindled away. Jamie felt disappointed that it had ended too soon, that Al would never be able to show him the village, that they would not be able to discover its secrets together.

Dex came out of the lav looking bright and shining. “Hey, y’know it’s going to be Christmas in just two days?”

Jamie grunted as he swung his feet onto the floor. “That’s right. I hadn’t thought about it.”

“You’ve given the world a helluva Christmas present, Jamie boy.”

He looked at the younger man. “Not me. Us. We. You and the rest of the team back at the dome.”

Dex grinned at him. “You, pal. You drove us here. We wouldn’t be here if you hadn’t pushed it.”

Standing, wiggling his bare toes on the cold plastic flooring, Jamie said, “Well, we’re here now. Let’s get to work.”

“Right.”

They grabbed a pair of snack bars and drank some juice in lieu of a real breakfast, anxious to get out and down to the village. While Dex started putting on his hard suit, Jamie checked their overnight messages. The list scrolled for what seemed like halt an hour.

“Everybody and his uncle has something to say to us,” he called back to Dex.

Trumball came clumping up to the cockpit in his hard suit boots and leggings.

“Anything from dear old Dad?” he asked.

Jamie scrolled up and down the list, then shook his head. Connors— or whoever was working the comm console—had starred the messages he considered important. Every news network was starred. Two messages had double stars next to them; Jamie opened them. One was a flowery congratulations from Walter Laurence of the ICU; Jamie suspected it was written more for the media’s appreciation than his own. The other was from the chief of the ICU’s archeology division, a parched-faced bald middle-aged man with piercing green eyes.

“Do not touch anything,” he warned, four times in a row. “Whatever is in or around those structures, touch nothing. I want that understood with crystal clarity. Touch nothing. Do not disturb anything.”

Trumball laughed. “I think he doesn’t want us to touch anything.”

Jamie grinned back at him. “Looks that way, doesn’t it?”

“Why don’t you send him a reply asking if it’s okay if we pick up a few souvenirs?”

“And give him apoplexy? No thanks.”

Laughing, Trumball headed back for the rear of the module, to finish suiting up. Jamie scrolled through the message list one more time; there was nothing from Dex’s father, although he saw personal messages for himself from Li Chengdu and Fr. DiNardo.

They’ll have to wait, Jamie thought. We have work to do, even if we’re not supposed to touch anything.

The long descent down the cable was like a pilgrimage, Jamie thought. Gives you time to cleanse your mind of everything else and prepare for the experience.