Return to Mars (54 page)

There was enough potassium in the stone to get a reasonably firm date from radioactive decay rates. If the decay rates are the same on Mars as they are on Earth, Jamie thought. No reason why they shouldn’t be; atoms are atoms, and they behave the same way all over the universe. But there might be other factors at work here, factors we don’t recognize, subtle factors that are different from Earth.

We just don’t know, Jamie had to admit to himself.

At any rate, the stone was more than a hundred million years old. Same as the stone stratum at the rear of the niche, where the Martians had quarried the blocks that they used to build the dwelling.

And that doesn’t tell us much, Jamie thought. The age of the stone isn’t what we’re after; it’s the age of the building. When did the Martians cut those stones and use them to build their … temple.

Leaning back in the padded chair of his compartment, Jamie realized that he no longer thought of the building as a dwelling place. They didn’t live in it. It was a temple of some sort, a place where they came to perform sacred rites.

Like writing their history on the walls? If that’s what the wall markings are, they had a damned short history. Three walls inscribed with elaborate figures, some of them pictographs, most of them looking more like letters or whole words.

And each of them deteriorating into scrawled, scratched messages that looked like the work of children. Or desperate, harried people in a deathly hurry.

A single rap on his compartment door startled Jamie out of his thoughts. Before he could reply, the accordion door slid open and Dex stepped in.

“You’ve got Wiley’s analysis on-screen, too,” Dex said, without preamble. “Good.”

“It’s good work, all right,” Jamie agreed, “but it doesn’t help us much.”

Dex perched himself on the edge of Jamie’s unmade bunk. “No, you’re right. We’ve got to come up with some way of dating the building itself.”

“Any ideas?”

Dex shook his head. “I’ve been going through the literature and talking to archeologists back home.”

“No joy.”

Jumping impulsively to his feet, Dex said, “The thing is, back on Earth we’ve got the stratigraphy, the radioactive dating, even written records we can decipher. Here, everything’s so damned uncertain.”

“It’s new territory.”

“Tell me about it.” Dex ran both hands through his dark hair. Jamie noticed it was looser, less curly than it had been when they’d first met. No humidity on Mars, he thought. Bad for your ‘do.

”Maybe we should be talking with astronomers instead of archeologists,” Jamie suggested.

Dex shot him a puzzled glance.

“The astronomers who date meteorites,” Jamie explained. “They deal with rocks that are hundreds of millions of years old. Billions, even.”

Sitting back on the edge of the bunk, Dex said slowly, “Yeah, that’s right. They can tell when a meteorite was formed and when it was broken apart by collisions with other meteoroids, can’t they?”

Jamie nodded. “Maybe they can help us.”

“Call DiNardo,” Dex said. “He ought to be able to find the right people.”

“Or Pete, back at Tarawa. He put in a lot of years with NASA. They should have a lot of background data about meteoroids.”

Dex made a huffing sound, halfway between a snort and a laugh. “At least it gives us something to do, a straw to grab for.”

“You’re not optimistic.”

“Not much.”

“We’ve got a mystery on our hands, all right.”

“More than one,” Dex said fervently. “How old is the building? What happened to the people who built it? What does all that writing mean? Why does it degenerate into those chicken scratches at the end?”

Jamie made a rueful grin back at him. “What was that old line about a mystery inside a riddle wrapped in an enigma?”

“Kennedy, I think. Or maybe Churchill.”

“Whoever.”

“Where the hell did they go?” Dex growled. “What happened to them?”

Jamie spread his arms and tried to look cheerful. ‘ ‘Listen, Dex: you can’t do really good science unless you’re tackling really tough questions.”

Trumball looked at him askance. “We ought to be in line for the fucking Nobel Prize, then,” he muttered.

“That would be nice,” Jamie said.

“There’s got to be an answer!” Dex insisted. “Maybe if we could cut out a few of the characters they inscribed on the wall and test the potassium-argon ratios along the faces of the incisions …”

“The archeologists would burn you at the stake if you even touched one of those walls with your gloved fingers.”

“We’re going to have to touch ‘em sooner or later. We can’t get any more information out of them by just staring at the damned writing. Or taking pictures of it.”

“DiNardo’s got the top cryptologists in the world studying the writing,” Jamie said.

“Big deal. How’re they going to decipher a code when they don’t even know what language it’s written in?”

Jamie shrugged. “Like you said, it’s something to do. It beats sitting around and staring.”

“Busywork.”

The two men sat in gloomy silence for a few moments. Jamie tried to relax his mind, tried to deliberately not think about the Martians and their temple and the writings on the wall. Neat trick if you can do it, he groused to himself. Try not thinking about an elephant.

Instead, he remembered that there were other things to worry about.

“Dex, we’ve got another problem to deal with, too,” he said.

“My old man.”

“Yes. I don’t want him here. I don’t want him leading the way for shiploads of tourists to come trooping through the temple—”

“Temple? Who says it’s a temple?”

With a patient sigh, Jamie answered, “That’s the way I think of it.”

“A temple.”

Waggling one hand in the air, Jamie said, “The Martian equivalent.”

Dex grinned at him. “I don’t want dear old dad here, either, but how in hell can we stop him? He’s got the ICU buffaloed, for chrissakes.”

“I’ve asked both DiNardo and Li to intervene.”

“And?”

“No answer yet,” Jamie admitted. “From either of them.”

“Don’t hold your breath.”

“He can’t come here!” Jamie snapped. “We can’t allow him to turn this site into a tourist attraction!”

Dex let his head droop between his hands. “When you figure out a way to stop him, pal, let me know. I’ve been trying to get out from under his thumb all my life, and now he’s chasing all the way here to Mars to get his paws back on me.”

JAMIE SAT ON THE LIP OF THE CLEFT, HIS LEGS DANGLING OVER THE EDGE, morning sunlight flooding over him and washing against the stone wall at his back. The pale, shrunken Sun brought him no warmth. The floor of the Canyon spread far, far below his booted feet, strewn with rocks, but otherwise cold and empty and barren.

He bent forward slightly to peer at the Canyon floor and tried to see it as it once was. A stream must have meandered through it, perhaps a full-sized river, he thought. He pictured the Martians living down there in neat, orderly villages with fields of crops between them. Everything squared off, streets lined up straight, precise rows of the Martian equivalent of corn growing in the sunshine.

Now it was dead, bare, a frozen desert where the air temperature barely rose above zero on the longest day of the summer.

But not quite empty any longer. Hall and Fuchida were riding the cable down to the Canyon floor, ready for a day of working on the sparse few colonies of lichen that clung desperately to life down there.

Suddenly the bulky form of a spacesuited figure came lumbering into view, dangling on the cable and lowering slowly from the overhanging ceiling of rock. Dex, coming down for the day’s work. The day’s frustration.

“Stacy called from the rover,” he said as Jamie pulled himself to his feet.

“I thought Tomas was driving this run.”

“Nope. The boss lady decided to do it herself.”

Dex planted his boots on the rock floor as Jamie reached him and started to help him out of the climbing harness.

“You bring the day’s task list?” Dex asked.

Jamie tapped on the readout screen of the computer on his suit’s wrist. “M.O.S.,” he said glumly.

“More of the same.”

“Right. More photomicrographs. More rock samples to chip out.”

“At least we’ve got all the dust cleared away,” Dex said, heading for the cameras and other gear they had left on the ground overnight.

Nodding inside his helmet, Jamie said, “We ought to start putting up plastic sheets to protect the doors and roof openings.”

“Why now? No dust storms in sight.”

“There’s still some wind. A little dust blows in here every day. Sooner or later it’ll accumulate enough to he a problem again.”

Dex huffed, then admitted, “I guess you’re right. I’ll tell Wiley to put together a pile of sheeting for the next rover run.”

Jamie picked up the set of tools they used for taking samples of the rock and started for the nearest opening in the wall.

“Still no sign of any other buildings anywhere,” Dex said. “I spent half the night going over the imagery from the soarplane. Nothing.”

“We wouldn’t have noticed this site if we hadn’t seen it for ourselves,” Jamie said. “The planes and the satellites could be overflying a hundred buildings and we’d never realize it.”

“Yeah,” Dex admitted. “Local rock at ambient temperature. Doesn’t give you anything that stands out for the sensors, does it?”

“Not much.”

“When’s Tarawa going to get the fission-track data to us?” Dex complained. “They ought to have at least a preliminary correlation by now.”

Jamie replied, “From what Pete tells me, the archeologists have been arguing with the geologists. I don’t know if it’s a turf battle or an honest disagreement about the data.”

“Flatheads,” Dex grumbled.

They crawled through the low doorway and got to their feet again. As they headed for the opening that led to the next level, Dex said, “I got another message from my father, too.”

“Oh?”

“He’s getting to be real chummy.”

“That’s good,” Jamie said. “I guess.”

“Y’know the real reason he’s coming out here?”

Walking toward the light well, Jamie answered, ”You said he wants to start commercial operations.”

“Yeah, but to do that he’s got to clear a legal claim to the area.”

“Legal claim?”

“Sure. So nobody can set up a competing operation in this area.”

“He can’t claim ownership of Mars,” Jamie said.

“He doesn’t have to.”

Jamie stopped and turned to face the younger man. All he could see in Dex’s visor was the reflection of his own faceless helmet and hard-suit shoulders.

“The thing is,” Dex explained, “you can claim priority of use for a region. Like the people at Moonbase and the other lunar settlements. They’re not allowed to claim ownership of the territory, but they can claim that they’re using the area and the International Astronautical Authority gives them the legal right to that use.”

Jamie felt confused. “They don’t actually own the territory—”

“But they can use it, legally, and keep competitors out.”

“That’s the law?”

He could sense Dex nodding inside his helmet. “Yep. The Space Utilization Treaty. My father explained it all to me last night.”

“It sounds pretty weird,” Jamie said.

“Lawyers.”

“So your father’s coming here to stake a legal claim to using this region of Mars?”

“That’s his plan. He wants to claim all the territory we’ve been working in, which would include this site, the Canyon floor where the lichen are, even Mount Olympus.”

Jamie felt his heart sinking. In his mind’s eye he saw hotels springing up, tour buses, swimming pools filled with shouting kids. His nightmares come true.

“We’ve got to stop him, Dex. We can’t allow that kind of a precedent to be set here.”

“I know.”

“I know we’ve had our differences about this …”

Dex said nothing.

“But—” Jamie hesitated, searching for words. “But, Dex, can you see that we can’t allow tourists here?”

For long moments Dex remained silent. He turned slowly in a full circle, as if to take in every corner of the ancient empty chamber in which they stood.

“Not here,” Dex agreed, his voice low and serious. “They’d wreck this place in a week.”

“Not to Mars,” Jamie said. “Not to any part of it.”

“You don’t understand,” Dex muttered.

“No, we can’t allow them to come to Mars,” Jamie insisted. “We mustn’t permit it. We’ve got to explore this planet, find the other building sites, find out what happened to the people here—”

“Whoa, whoa!” Dex held up a gloved hand. “I understand how you feel about this, Jamie. I even agree with you. But you’ve got to understand something: This is all my fault.”

“Your fault?”

“My father spearheaded the funding for this expedition because I talked him into it. I told him the expedition could pay for itself, even make a profit.”

“By selling tourist tickets?”

Dex said, “Right. By making a commercial operation that would bring high-end tourists here for the trip of a lifetime. The same kind of people who go to that sex palace in orbit. The same kind of people who can afford to go to the Moon and put their footprints where nobody’s stepped before.”

“But the Moon’s dead,” Jamie said. “There’s no danger of disturbing anything there.”

With a hitter laugh, Dex countered, “Tell that to the geophysicists! They go apeshit whenever a busload of tourists churns up the Regolith.”

“Well, you see what I mean, then,” Jamie said. “We have living organisms here, and the ruins of an intelligent civilization. They’ve got to be protected.”