Reese looked at her again, tried to see past the distorted body to something more spiritual, and failed.“Molly said you might take me to breakfast,” he said at last.
Sarah—Verb—nodded, and Molly said,“I’ll catch up to you later. Be careful, will you? And keep a low profile. Curtis isn’t going to want you walking around.”
“Okay,”he said.“What about Kane and the others?What happens to them?”
“I don’t know,” she said, and walked away.
It was morning under the dome.To his left, high up on the open expanse of plastic, Reese could see a suited figure, hanging on the outside of the cylinder, polishing away the minute scratches left by windblown dust, scratches that could eventually turn the dome opaque. Beyond, the pale pink of the sky shaded upward to a blue flecked with stars and lit by the bright point of Deimos.
In front of him the fields and houses alternated in a checkerboard that covered more than three acres of land between the Center and the south wall. Reese remembered the work that had gone into making that soil arable, filtering out the salt and sulphur and lime, enriching it with treated sewage and nitrogen wrung out of the thin Martian air, remembered the first crops, the endless radishes.
Then everything had been new, bright, and hard-edged, a planned subdivision just poured out of the developer’s truck. In twelve years it had already passed into middle age, a Martian equivalent of rocking chairs on the porches and weeds in the yards, only here the faces sat behind pressurized windows, without even a highway to focus their attention on.
“Are you hungry?”Verb asked,and Reese nodded.“We can go to his place,” she said, and pointed to the boy sitting on a concrete bench a few yards away.“His mother’s working.” In the sudden awkwardness of her hands he saw unspoken messages, a need to communicate something whose words were denied her. He knew then intuitively what his rational brain had already determined. She was the one with the answers.
She called the boy over and introduced him. Reese shook his hand, wondering where the boy had unearthed the cliché of eyeglasses with electrician’s tape wound over the bridge, an obvious affectation when surgery or contact lenses were so easily available.
The three of them followed the red gravel walkway around the Center. Reese stopped at the east animal pen and stared through the pressurized plastic bubble at the goats, their brown eyes shifting past him with animal indifference. Beyond them were the crowded chicken cages, and Reese could almost smell their sour odor through the double insulation of the plastic and his own oxygen mask.
“How many goats are there now?” he asked.
“Goats?” The girl looked at him as if he’d asked her about dinosaurs. “I don’t do goats.”
“It’s not important,” Reese said, remembering Molly’s warning. Stranger than you can imagine. Not so strange, really, he thought. More as if they belonged here, as if Reese were the alien and they were the wise and mysterious lost race that everyone had dreamed of finding.
They led Reese across a newly mown alfalfa field and up to a pale yellow box, its durofoam shaped into ridges simulating clapboard, and through a swinging door with wire mesh set into its clear plastic panels. What a waste of ingenuity, he thought, to imitate a screen door between hundreds of millibars difference in air pressure.
He sat at a green Formica table in the kitchen, suddenly grateful to be off his feet.They felt swollen and undoubtedly were.
“There’s not a lot of stuff,” the boy said.“Eggs all right?”
“Eggs would be great,” Reese said.“You want me to fix them?”
“Maybe you better.”
Reese scrambled three eggs in a frictionless electric pan, keeping Verb in his peripheral vision.“Do you guys go to school or anything?”
After an awkward silence Verb said,“Not exactly.We study with the computers and stuff like that.”
“What are you interested in? Physics? Your mom was always into physics.”
“Lots of stuff.”
“You ever...build things? Like maybe some kind of transporter that could move things around over really large distances? Like light-year distances?”
The girl’s voice dropped to a whisper.“How much do you know?”
“Verb?” the boy said.“Hey,Verb, man, you said we weren’t supposed to talk about any of this.”
“I know what I said. Shut up, will you?” She looked back at Reese. “I made a promise, you understand? I promised I wouldn’t leak it to anybody.”
“It’s already leaked,” Reese said.“It’s too late to stop it now. Dian radioed stuff about it to Morgan, back on Earth, and that’s why he sent us here. I think Kane and maybe Takahashi know about it too.And I don’t know for sure whose side they’re on. But I don’t like Morgan and I’m not going to help him.”
“I don’t know. Maybe I should talk to Mom first.”
“Look,” Reese said. He could feel the desperation building up inside him, wanted to keep the girl from seeing it.“You care about physics, right? I mean, it’s the most important thing in your life.”
“What are you trying to say?”
“Suppose they took that away from you.Took your computers away and made you do something else.” The girl stared at him, blinking, and didn’t answer.“That’s what it’s like for me. I put a US flag into the ground here twenty years ago, and that was the high point of my life. Back then we thought we’d be going on to Ganymede and Titan at least, and all of us deep down thought somebody would come up with an antimatter drive or something, something that would get us out of this one crummy system and into the galaxy.
“But instead everything just fell apart. It’s like...it’s like somebody locked you in a closet in this big, beautiful house, and outside the house there’s trees and hills and rivers and cities and the rest of the world, and you can’t get to it.”
“You’re going to burn those eggs,” the boy said.
Reese put the food on a plate and forced himself to take a bite, even though his stomach was rollercoastering.You didn’t waste anything on Mars, especially real food.
He looked up at Verb. She was combing through her dirty, tangled hair with the fingers of one hand.“Well,” she said,“somebody did come up with an antimatter drive.We’ll have it, anyway, in a couple of years.”
“But there’s more, isn’t there?”
“The transporter, you mean. It’s a toy. It may not even work.We can’t be sure.”
“I can’t wait for an antimatter drive,” Reese said. His chest felt cold and the words came out without his thinking about them, because if he stopped to think he wouldn’t let them out at all.“If anything ever starts up again, I’m going to be too old. I’m already too old. If Morgan wasn’t desperate he wouldn’t have let me on this flight.”
“What do you want? What are you asking me?”
“I want to keep going,” Reese said.“A one-way ticket out.”
“We sent a couple of mice,”Verb said.“We sent them from...from where the machine is to my bedroom. One came through.The other one didn’t. Everything was the same both times.We don’t know what happened.We don’t know why.We’re out on the edge here, do you understand? This is crazy stuff, like part physics and part zen philosophy. Do you know anything about quantum theory?”
“A little, I guess.”
“Well, there’s stuff in it that doesn’t work.There’s the epr experiment and Bell’s Theorem that seem to imply action at a distance, and there’s nothing in quantum mechanics to explain it. It’s mechanics, see? It requires a mechanism.”
“And your physics doesn’t?”
“Mechanism is an assumption. So is cause and effect. People believe in them because they can explain most things that way, and the things they can’t explain they can forget about.We’ve got different assumptions. Quantum field theories get imbalanced at high momentum levels. They have to ‘renormalize’ the equations to get them to work. I don’t, because I’ve added another variable that they didn’t have.The objectivists used to believe there could be a ‘hidden variable’ that would complete quantum mechanics, and it turned out there was.A fourth-dimensional one.”