Jamie said, “Selene’s willing to help. It’s not much, but we could keep a dozen or so people working here. Fifteen, tops.”
“Big fucking deal.”
“It’s better than nothing.”
Dex shook his head. “Jamie, that’s why this tourism deal is so important. It could save the whole operation! You could keep a couple hundred people on Mars.”
“If we let tourists come here.” Jamie felt a lead weight in his guts.”
“Only a handful,” Dex said, almost pleading. “Five at a time. Ten, tops.”
“And then twenty. And then—”
“No! Ten at a time, maximum. I swear it! No more than that, ever.”
“Dex, I know you mean that, but once people start paying that kind of money to come here, how are you going to control them? They’ll turn the place into another Disney World.”
“Not if—”
“You want to terraform the area,” Jamie said, almost hissing the words. “You want to change it so the tourists can walk around in their shirtsleeves.”
“Would that be so bad?”
“And what happens to the Martian organisms? The endolithic lichen. It’ll kill them.”
“Move the damned rocks outside the terraformed area,” Dex said.
“And the village? The cemetery? The cliff structures?”
“Let the tourists see them! They’ll pay enough so you can send out teams to find other villages. There must be more of them.”
“I’d rather cut my arm off.”
Dex took a deep breath. “Christ, you’ve got to be the stubbornest goddamned redskin in the world. Jamie, you’ve got to listen to reason!”
Jamie closed his eyes and pictured the base with only fifteen people working in it. What could they do, what could they accomplish? he wondered. We wouldn’t be able to do much useful work. Just help Carleton clear away more of the village. No excursions beyond the immediate area around the dome. No new discoveries.
As if he could read Jamie’s mind, Dex said, “You know you can’t accomplish diddly-squat with just fifteen people. They’ll be caretakers, nothing more.”
“At least they’ll be taking care of the place, not trampling it into the dust.”
“Aw, shit, Jamie,” Dex groused.
Leaning toward him, Jamie asked, “How many of your billionaire friends will come to Mars, Dex? At fifty million a pop, how many will come?”
Taken aback somewhat, Dex muttered, “A couple dozen or so, at least. Forty, fifty, maybe.”
“Okay, that’s two and a half billion dollars.”
“That’ll keep you going for years.”
“How many years?”
Dex did some swift mental arithmetic. “Three, four. Maybe five.”
“And then what?”
“Then what?”
“After the high rollers have come and gone. How do we fund the operation then?”
Dex hesitated.
Jamie said, “I’ll tell you how. You’ll lower the price, right? Get more customers to come. More tourists visiting Mars. Lower prices means more people. That’s what you’ll have to do to keep the money flowing in.”
“Okay, but by then you’ll probably be finished excavating the village. You can leave it for the tourists and move on.”
“No! Never! That village isn’t a tourist attraction. It was the home of living, breathing, intelligent people! We have to protect it, honor it.”
“For chrissake, Jamie, this isn’t some goddamned religious crusade!”
“The hell it isn’t!”
Dex’s voice turned cold and hard. “Okay. You turn down the tourist idea and you run out of funding. What then?”
“Selene will keep us alive.”
“Barely.”
Jamie nodded, admitting it. “We’ll manage. Somehow.”
“For how long? A year? Two? Selene’s not going to support you indefinitely, especially if you’re not producing new results. They’ll shut you down sooner or later.”
“Maybe,” Jamie conceded.
“And you know what’ll happen once you shut down the base and bring everybody home?”
This is home, Jamie replied silently.
“Once the Navaho presence on Mars ends,” Dex went on remorselessly, “the Navaho Nation loses its right to control the territory. Somebody else will come in.”
“Your friends with their tourist operation,” Jamie replied woodenly.
“Damned right. And they won’t be interested in scientific exploration at all. They’ll be your worst nightmare come true, Jamie.”
Sullen resentment burning inside him, Jamie muttered, “And you’ll help them.”
“Damned right I will,” said Dex, with some heat. “You know why? Because I don’t want to see this work abandoned. I want to keep the exploration of Mars going.”
“By selling out to tourists.”
“Right! You think you’re the only one who cares about what we’re doing here? You think you’ve got a monopoly on righteousness? I’ll make a deal with tourists, I’ll make a deal with anybody, the devil incarnate, if I have to. The important thing is to keep this operation going—even if your people have to put up with tourists.”
Jamie stared into his friend’s face. He does care, Jamie realized. He’s so damned dead wrong, but he cares.
Then he heard his grandfather’s voice in his mind. There’s always more’n one path to get where you want to go, Jamie. Finding the right path is important, but sometimes you’ve got to travel a path that’s tougher, more roundabout. The important thing is to get where you want to go.
Before he could make up his mind to say anything, Hasdrubal called from the cockpit, “We’re almost there. Another ten minutes.”
“Think about it,” Dex whispered to Jamie. “Don’t be so goddamned stubborn.”
Jamie nodded wordlessly, but in his heart he knew he could never allow Dex or anyone else to ruin his life’s work.
Tithoniae Fosse: Crater Chang
“They’re dead. They’re all dead.”
Sal Hasdrubal was on his knees in the bottom of the crater, half a dozen sample cases scattered across the broken rocks. The steep sides of the crater were studded with sensor poles. Hasdrubal had scraped a meter-long trench in the looser ground between the rocks and was pouring some of the dirt into one of the insulated plastic boxes.
But as he worked he grumbled, “It’s useless. We’re too friggin’ late. They’re all dead.”
From up at the lip of the crater Jamie asked, “How can you be sure?”
Hasdrubal looked up at him, then shook his head. “They couldn’t take the radiation. The cold. The low pressure.”
“But maybe some of them—”
“Naw. We’re too damned late. They’re all dead.”
Dex came up beside Jamie in his nanosuit and peered into the crater. They could see Hasdrubal’s bootprints weaving through the sensor poles. The biologist had insisted on going down to the bottom alone, afraid that too many boots might damage the microbes living in the ground down there.
“They formed a crust of dead cells,” he said mournfully. “Like they were trying to shield themselves.”
“Then maybe some of them have survived,” Jamie said hopefully. “Beneath the protective crust.”
Dex added, “Bacteria have survived on the surface of the Moon for years, with no air, no water, and hard radiation pouring in on them.”
“Yeah, I know,” said Hasdrubal. He clicked the last of his sample cases shut. “Maybe you’re right. Maybe some of ’em have gone into a spore state.”
“You’ll have to get them under a microscope,” Jamie said, trying to sound encouraging.