“Sickbay’s full. I don’t know what they’re doing with them.” Her eyes stared down into her glass, telling Reese she didn’t particularly care, either.
He reached across the table and gently touched her hair. She jerked her head away, startled. Reese wanted to console her somehow, but all he could find to say was,“I’m sorry.”
He turned left on his way out, intending to cut through the main dining hall to sickbay. Instead he heard familiar voices from one of the meeting rooms off the hallway.The door was open and he could see Molly and Curtis at the far side of the room, their backs toward him. Across the table from them sat three others: Blok, the senior survivor of the Marsgrad disaster, and another woman and man.The woman saw Reese and stood up.
“Reese! Come over here.”
He stood behind Molly and reached across the table to shake her hand.“Colonel Mayakenska.They finally let you fly one.” He’d only met her in person once before, but her photograph was well known at nasa. She was a well preserved fifty, tall and thin, each small muscle perfectly defined. She had been a body builder, Reese remembered, and evidently she’d kept it up. Even her face showed the effects of exercise, her cheeks hollow and her chin firm, despite the months of free-fall. Her brown, Mongol eyes had only a trace of puffiness and she’d left her khaki-colored hair long enough to curl under her chin.
It was intimidating, Reese thought, to have somebody get off a spacecraft looking that good. He had no doubt she’d intended it just that way.
“Why don’t you sit with us?” she said.“What we’re talking about concerns you, too.”
Reese sat next to Molly, trying to pick up the mood of the table. Mayakenska exuded calm authority; Curtis and Molly seemed withdrawn and frightened, waiting for some figurative axe to fall. Blok was openly nervous, and Reese could feel the unspoken pressure the Russians were exerting on his loyalties.
“I don’t see any need to talk around the edges of this thing,” Mayakenska said.“We know of your discoveries, at least some of them. Unfortunately, your political position is somewhat...tenuous. Neither the US nor the Soviet Union, um, I believe the exact language was, ‘makes, or recognizes any claims’ on other planets of the solar system. Since the population here is a mixture of Russian, Japanese and American—”
Curtis cleared his throat.“Is there a point to this?”
“These discoveries,” Mayakenska went on,“are clearly the property of all humankind.Therefore we have come to participate in a joint endeavor to develop and exploit this new technology.”
“So,” Curtis said,“you’re a scientific expedition, then.”
“In a manner of speaking, yes.”
“And you thought you’d just drop in, like this was some kind of Video Expo, and take a look at the new gear? Come on. Let’s just move on along to the next tissue of lies.”
“Do I understand,” Mayakenska said,“that you are refusing to share your knowledge?”
“One,” Curtis said,“I don’t even know what knowledge it is that you’re so eager to get your hands on, and two—”
“You know perfectly well what it is,” Mayakenska said.“Even Reese knows, don’t you Reese?”
“Two,” Curtis said, nearly shouting now,“nobody asked you here. Where were you when your own people were hiking across the Sinai Planum in shuttle suits, for Christ’s sake? Where were you when we were trying to squeeze nitrogen out of a vacuum? Sorry, Mayakenska, I don’t buy it. I can’t believe for an instant you thought I would buy it.”
“I don’t suppose I did,” Mayakenska said.“Okay, let’s try it this way.” She brought her wrist up dramatically and looked at her watch.“We all have these nice Seikos that keep time in sols rather than days.” Reese had one himself; the electronics of the watch allocated the extra 7 minutes of the Martian day over a 24-hour period, lengthening each second by a factor of .0257.“Right now mine says it’s 13:52 and a few seconds. Our ship is in synchronous orbit overhead, in continuous radio contact with us.They’re expecting to get a coded signal from us each hour. If they don’t get it, or if we don’t send another, very specific coded signal tonight at midnight, they’re going to open up with a narrow-beam heat laser. If you want a demonstration we can set one up for you.”
She leaned back in her chair.The plastic creaked. Reese could hear his own breathing.
He felt his fear as a hollow ache near his stomach, almost like hunger, except that it was vibrating, and the vibration was moving into his hands.
When his brain began to function again, his first thought was, I was right, I was right to find a way out of this.This is a sickness, and now that there aren’t any countries to blow each other up, the corporations have caught it and now they’re going to finish the job.
Mayakenska stood up.“You’ll need some time. Blok tells me there’s an empty house, S-23.We’ll be there when you’re ready to talk about this.”
For a second Blok was the focus of Curtis’s hatred, and Reese wondered that the weight of it didn’t crush him flat.Then Blok got jerkily to his feet and followed Mayakenska and her silent countryman out of the room.
Molly’s head sank onto her folded arms.“It’s all over,” she said, rubbing her forehead against the spherical bones of her wrist.“It’s finished. Let them have the damned thing. It’s not worth it.”
“Right,” Curtis said, barely louder than a whisper.Against the darkness of his five o’clock shadow, his puffy lips were turning up at the ends.A stranger, Reese thought, might innocently mistake that look for a smile.“Then they’ll just go away and leave us alone. Right? Sure they will.” His arm blurred as he spun around and hurled the chair next to him the length of the room. It slid across a tabletop and banged into the wall with maniac force.The violence of it had brought him to his feet, but only a tiny tic in his left eye betrayed his emotions.“You just bet they will,” he said in the same even tone, and then he walked away.
“I’m sorry,” Reese said to Molly.
“I know you are,” she said. She sat up, brushed ineffectually at the tangles in her hair.There were fine, brittle lines of white now, Reese noticed, in the straw-colored mass.“It wasn’t your idea. Maybe it wasn’t anybody’s idea. Maybe it’s just the semiotics, you know? Once Verb built the machine, it changed our own ways of thinking about it.”
“You can look at it that way,” Reese said.“If it’s easier.”
“I don’t think it is.” She put her hands in her lap, as if they needed protective custody.“It’s Curtis I’m worried about. He’s not just going to lie down, and...” She trailed off into a shrug.
“Fight him, then,” Reese said, feeling like a hypocrite.“You’ve fought for things before.You fought to get a place on the colony ships.”
“Yeah, right.And look how that ended up.”
“Would you rather have been stuck on Earth? Maybe gotten killed in the riots? Or spent three years in the breadlines like Lena did, because there wasn’t any work?”
“Okay,” she said, letting her head fall back, taking in a noisy breath. “Things are tough all over.And what am I talking to you for, anyway? You’re the enemy too.”
“I’m not the enemy.”
“Aren’t you? Then what are you here for?”
“For myself,” Reese said.“I’m neutral. I’m a bystander.”
“There aren’t any bystanders,” Molly said.“What was it your father used to say? ‘If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem?’”
“That was a long time ago.”
“I guess it was.”
Reese started for the door.
“Reese?” She was standing up, arms at her sides.
He walked back to her and she put her arms around his chest.“You’re getting fat,” she said.
“I’m getting old.”