"Okay. I’ll set up the computer to receive your transmission."
He’s not even mentioning the cliff dwellings, Jamie realized. Not a word about them.
"Can I talk with Dr. Patel, please?" he asked Connors. "Is he there?"
"Sure."
In a few moments Connors’s image was replaced by the round, dark face of the geologist from India. Both the geologists on this mission are Indians, Jamie thought without humor. We can thank Columbus and his wacky sense of direction for that.
Patel’s dark skin seemed to shine always, as if covered with a fine sheen of perspiration or newly rubbed with oil. His eyes were large and liquid, giving him the innocent look of a child near tears.
"I would appreciate it, Rava, if you’d get O’Hara to put the videotape footage we shot today through the image-enhancement program," Jamie said to his fellow geologist.
"Is there something in particular you wish me to examine?"
Jamie realized his fellow geologist had not bothered to listen to his oral report. Probably too busy gossiping with the rest of them about the accident.
"You’ll see a formation in a cleft set into the cliff face," he said. After a moment’s hesitation, "It— it almost looks like buildings erected there deliberately."
Those liquid dark eyes went even rounder. "Buildings?" Patel squeaked. "Artificial buildings?"
Jamie forced himself to state calmly, "The odds against them being artifacts are tremendous; you know that as well as I do." He took a breath. "But they sure remind me of the cliff dwellings I’ve seen in the southwest."
Patel blinked several times. Then he said, "Yes, of course. I will study the tapes most carefully. I will ask Dr. O’Hara to put them through the image-enhancement program. By the time you return here we will have the data thoroughly analyzed, I assure you."
Jamie said, "Thanks." In his gut he felt an irrational suspicion that they would distort the data, mess up the images, fix it so that the cliff dwellings he had seen would look like nothing more than weathered old rock.
He crawled into his bunk at last. Vosnesensky turned out all the lights except the dim telltales on the control panel up in the cockpit.
"Sleep well, Jamie," the Russian said, yawning as he stretched out in the bunk on the opposite wall.
"You too, Mikhail."
The soft night wind of Mars brushed past the parked rover, stroking its metallic skin mere inches away from Jamie’s listening ears. He strained to catch a hint of a voice in the wind, even the moaning wail of a long-dead Martian spirit. Nothing.
No ghosts haunting the night here, Jamie said drowsily to himself. He felt disappointed.
DEATH
The red world was not only farther from Father Sun than the blue world. It was also much closer to the small worldlets that still swarmed in the darkness of the void, leftover bits and pieces from the time of the beginning. Often they streaked down onto the red world, howling like monsters as they traced their demon’s trails of fire across the pale sky.
Small, cold, bombarded by sky-demons, its air and water slowly wasting away, if the red world bore any life at all its creatures must have struggled mightily to keep the spark of existence glowing within them.
Even so, death struck swiftly, and without remorse.
One of the biggest of those devil worlds drifted close enough to the red world to feel its pull. It was a huge mountain of rock roaming through the darkness of space, a thousand times bigger than the rock that caused the Meteor Crater to the south of the land where The People live. For a thousand thousand years it danced a delicate ceremony with the red world, approaching it and then slipping away into the outer depths of the emptiness. Like the ritual dancers of The People it moved to the rhythm of eternity. Each time it approached the red world it skimmed closer, each near-miss a temporary reprieve, a promise of what was to come.
Finally it plunged down into the red world, roaring like all the furies of hell as it smashed into the crust. Under that titanic violence the rocks turned liquid almost down to the very core of the red world. An enormous cloud of burning dust boiled high into the atmosphere and spread swiftly from pole to pole. The shock rang through the whole body of the poor tortured red world, lifting up the ground on the opposite side of the globe into a gigantic bulge. The very air of the red world was blown away almost completely.
Darkness covered the face of the red world. There was no day; only black night. The waters froze, later to be covered by the red dust sifting down through the pitifully thin air. The crust hardened over once again, but deep below, the rocks were still white-hot, liquid, seething. Volcanoes erupted for thousands of centuries afterward.
When the skies cleared at last, the red world was a scene of utter devastation. The seas were gone. The atmosphere was nothing more than a thin wisp of what it had once been. The ground was barren. Life, if it had ever existed on the red world at all, was nowhere to be seen.
EARTH
NEW YORK: Alberto Brumado squinted when the overhead lights were turned on; then his eyes adjusted to the brightness. How much of my life have I spent in television studios? he asked himself. It must be years, many years, if you add up all the minutes and hours.
For the first time in his memory, though, he felt nervous about the impending interview. Not because it was American network television. Not because he would have to face a trio of experienced senior interrogators from the most prestigious newspaper, news magazine, and television network news department in the United States. He had fenced with such before.
The anxiety that rippled through his heart was that the interviewers smelled blood. The death of Dr. Konoye had brought the sharks out, circling, circling what they perceived as a wounded and bleeding Mars Project. There would be no gentility about this interview, no kid gloves. Brumado knew that he was in for a rough ordeal.
The technical crew had been uniformly kind, as usual. The matronly makeup woman smiled and chatted with him as she patted pancake on Brumado’s browned face. While he was still in the barber-type chair, the harried-looking producer had come in. Standing behind him and speaking to Brumado’s reflection in the big wall mirror, she assured him that all he had to do was to be natural, be himself, and the audience "will love you up." The young assistant producer, younger than his own daughter, had done everything she could to put Brumado at ease. Accustomed to smilingly evasive politicians and brash entertainment stars who hid their anxieties behind banalities, she offered Brumado coffee, soft drinks, even a Bloody Mary. Smiling tensely, he refused everything except water.
Now he was in the studio with the crew hiding behind their cameras and the electrician pinning the cordless microphone to his necktie just under his chin.
The show’s moderator walked onto the brightly lit set, up the carpeted two stops to the chair next to Brumado’s.
Extending a hand, he said, "Please don’t get up, Dr. Brumado. It was good of you to come on such short notice."
"I want to dispel any doubts that may be in the public’s mind about this unfortunate tragedy," Brumado replied as the moderator sat down. His microphone was already in place, hardly visible against his dark blue tie. He also wore a minuscule flesh-toned earphone like a hearing aid.
"Good, good," said the moderator absently, his eyes focused on the notes scrolling across the small display screen cleverly built into the coffee table in front of them so that it could not be seen by the cameras.
The three inquisitors arrived in a group, smiling, chatting among themselves. Two men and a woman whose ebony hair glowed like a steel helmet. Handshakes all around. Brumado thought of a prizefight. Now go to your corners and come out punching.