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John stood and looked out the windshield. At night, in the storm, there was precious little to see. But he thought he could pick out shapes in the blackness, there below him.
“We just want to talk,” the voice said.
If they had wanted to kill him they could have blown open the rover while he slept. Besides, he still couldn’t quite believe that anyone wished him harm. There was no reason for it!
So he let them in.
There were five of them, all men. Their walkers were frayed, dirty, patched with material that had not been made for walkers. Their helmets were without identification, stripped of all paint. As they took off the helmets he saw that one of the men was Asian, and young; he looked about eighteen. The youth went forward and sat in the driver’s seat, leaned over the steering wheel to look closer at the instrument array. Another got off his helmet; a short brown-skinned man, with a thin face and long dreadlocks. He sat on the padded bench across from John’s bed, and waited for the other three men to get their helmets off too. When they did they crouched on their haunches, watching John attentively. He had never seen any of them before.
The thin-faced man said, “We want you to slow the rate of immigration.” He was the one who had spoken outside; now his accent sounded Caribbean. He spoke in a low voice, almost in a whisper, and John found it very difficult not to emulate him.
“Or stop it,” the young man in the driver’s seat said.
“Shut up, Kasei.” The thin-faced man never took his gaze from John’s face. “There are too many people coming up. You know that. They’re not Martian, and they don’t care what happens here. They’re going to overwhelm us, they’re going to overwhelm you. You know that. You’re trying to turn them into Martians, we know, but they’re coming in a lot faster than you can work. The only thing that will work is slowing down the influx.”
“Or stopping it.”
The man rolled his eyes, appealed with a grimace for John’s understanding. The youth was young, his look said.
“I don’t have any say— ” John began, but the man cut him off:
“You can advocate it. You’re a power, and you’re on our side.”
“Are you from Hiroko?”
The youth snicked his tongue against the roof of his mouth. The thin-faced man said nothing. Four faces stared at John; the other looked resolutely out the window.
John said, “Have you been sabotaging the moholes?”
“We want you to stop the immigration.”
“I want you to stop the sabotage. It’s just bringing more people here. Police.”
The man eyed him. “What makes you think we can contact the saboteurs?”
“Find them. Break in on them at night.”
The man smiled. “Out of sight, out of mind.”
“Not necessarily.”
They had to be with Hiroko. Occam’s razor. There couldn’t be more than one hidden group. Or maybe there could. John felt light-headed, and wondered if they were doctoring the air. Releasing aerosol drugs. He definitely felt strange, it was all surreal, dreamy; the wind buffeted the rover, sent a sudden burst of aeolian music coursing by, a weird drawn-out hoot. His thoughts were slow and ponderous, and he felt the edge of a yawn. That’s it, he thought. I’m still trying to wake from a dream.
“Why do you hide?” he heard himself say.
“We’re building Mars. Just like you. We’re on your side.”
“You ought to help, then.” He tried to think. “What about the space elevator?”
“We don’t care about it.” The kid snicked. “That isn’t what matters. It’s people that matter.”
“The elevator will bring a lot more people.”
The man considered that. “Slow the immigration, and it can’t even be built.”
Another long silence, punctuated by the wind’s eerie commentary. Can’t even be built? Did they think people would build it? Or maybe they meant the money.
“I’ll look into it,” John said. The kid turned and stared at him, and John raised a hand to forestall him. “I’ll do what I can.” His hand stood before him, a huge pink thing. “That’s all I can say. If I promised results, it would be lying. I know what you mean. I’ll do what I can.” He thought about it more, with difficulty. “You ought to be out in the open, helping us. We need more help.”
“Each in his way,” the man said quietly. “We’ll be going now. We’ll keep track to see what you do.”
“Tell Hiroko I want to talk to her.”
The five men looked at him, the young one intense and angry.
The thin-faced man smiled briefly. “If I see her I will.”
One of the crouching men held out a diaphanous blue mass: an aerogel sponge, barely visible under the night-running lights. The hand holding it made a fist. Yes, a drug. He lunged out and caught the young one unawares, clawed the youth’s bare neck and then fell, paralyzed.
When he came to they were gone. He had a headache. He fell back onto the bed, into an uneasy sleep. The dream about Frank made an improbable return, and John told him about the visitation. “You’re a fool,” Frank said. “You don’t understand.”
When he woke again it was morning, swirling a dim burnt umber outside the windshield. The winds had appeared to be lessening in the last month, but it was hard to be sure. Shapes in the dust clouds appeared briefly and then fell back into chaos, in little sensory deprivation hallucinations. It really was sensory deprivation, this storm; and getting very claustrophobic indeed. He ate some omeg, suited up and went outside and walked around, breathing talcum and bending over to follow the tracks of his visitors. They crossed bedrock and disappeared. A difficult rendezvous, he would have thought; a lost rover at night, how had they found it?
But if they had been tracking him …
Back inside he called up the satellites. Radar and IR got nothing but his rover. Even walkers would have shown on the IR; so presumably they had a refuge nearby. Easy to hide in mountains like these. He called up his Hiroko map, and drew a rough circle around his location, bulging it north and south in the mountains. He had several circles on the Hiroko map by now, but none of them had been searched by ground crews with any thoroughness, and probably they never would be, as most of them were in chaotic terrain, ravaged land the size of Wyoming or Texas. “It’s a big world,” he muttered.
He wandered around the inside of the car, looking at the floor. Then he remembered the last thing he had done. He looked under his fingernails; a little skin matter was stuck there, yes. He got a sample dish from the little autoclave, and carefully scraped what was there onto the dish. Genome identification was far beyond the rover’s capabilities, but any big lab ought to be able to identify the youth, if his genome was on record. If not, that too would be useful information. And maybe, John wasn’t sure, Ursula and Vlad could identify him by parentage.
He relocated the transponder trail that afternoon, and came down into Hellas Basin late the next day. He found Sax there, attending a conference on the new lake, although it appeared that it was turning into a conference on agriculture under artificial lighting. The next morning John took him out for a walk in the cleartunnels between buildings, and they walked in a shifting yellow murk, the sun a saffron glow in the clouds to the east.
“I think I met the Coyote,” John said.
“Did you! Did he tell you where Hiroko is?”
“No.”
Sax shrugged. It appeared he was distracted by a talk he had to give that evening. So John decided to wait, and that evening he attended the talk with the rest of the lake station occupants. Sax assured the crowd that atmospheric, surface, and permafrost microbacteria were growing at a rate that was a significant fraction of their theoretical maximums – about two percent, to be precise – and that they were going to have to be considering the problems of outdoor cultivation within a few decades. Applause at this announcement was non-existent, because everyone there was absorbed by horrible problems engendered by the Great Storm, which they seemed to think had begun as a result of a miscalculation of Sax’s. Surface insolation was still twenty-five percent normal, as one of them waspishly pointed out, and the storm was showing no signs of ending. Temperatures had dropped, and tempers were rising. All the new arrivals had never seen more than a few meters around them, and psychological problems ranging from ennui to catatonia were pandemic.
Sax dismissed all that with a mild shrug. “It’s the last global storm,” he said. “It will go down in history as some kind of heroic age. Enjoy it while it lasts.”
This was poorly received. Sax, however, did not notice.
A few days later, Ann and Simon drove into the settlement with their boy Peter, who was now three. He had been, so far as they could tell, the thirty-third child born on Mars; the colonies established after the first hundred had been fairly prolific. John played with the boy on the floor as he and Ann and Simon caught up on news, and exchanged some of the thousand and one tales of the Great Storm. It seemed to John that Ann ought to be enjoying the storm and the horrendous knock it had put on the terraforming process, like some kind of planetary allergic response, the temperatures plummeting below the baseline, the reckless experimenters struggling with their puny clogged machines … But she was not amused. Irritated as usual, in fact. “A dowsing team drilled into a volcanic vent in Daedalia and came up with a sample containing unicellular micro-organisms significantly different from the cyanobacteria you released in the north. And the vent was pretty nearly encased in bedrock, and very far from any biotic release sites. They sent samples of the stuff up to Acheron for analysis, and Vlad studied it and declared that it looked like a mutant strain of one of their releases, perhaps injected into the sample rock by contaminated drilling equipment.” Ann poked John in the chest: “‘Probably Terran,’ Vlad said. Probably Terran!”
“Probabry tewwan!” her little boy said, catching Ann’s intonation perfectly.
“Well, it probably is,” John said.
“But we’ll never know! They’ll end up debating it for centuries to come, there’ll be a journal devoted to that issue alone, but we’ll never really know.”
“If it’s too close to tell, it’s probably Terran,” John said, grinning at the boy. “Anything that evolved separately from Terran life would give itself away in an instant.”
“Probably,” Ann said. (“Probabry.”) “Except what if there’s a common source, the space spores theory, for instance, or ejecta blasted from one planet to another with micro-organisms buried in its rock?”
“That’s not too likely, is it?”
“We don’t know. We’ll never know, now.”
John had a hard time sharing her concern. “They might have come from the Viking landers for all we know,” he said. “There’s never been a very effective effort to sterilize our explorations here, that’s just the way it is. Meanwhile we’ve got more pressing problems.” Such as a global dust storm longer than the longest one ever recorded, or an influx of immigrants whose commitment to Mars was as minimal as their housing, or an upcoming treaty revision that no one could agree on, or a terraforming effort that a lot of people hated. Or a home planet going critical. Or an attempt (or two) to do one John Boone some harm.
“Yeah yeah,” Ann said. “I know. But all that’s politics, we’ll never get away from that. This was science, a question I wanted answered. And now I can’t. Nobody can.”
John shrugged. “We’ll never answer that one, Ann. No matter what. That was one of those questions that was fated always to remain unanswered. Didn’t you know that?”
“Probabwy tewwan.”
A few days after that, a rocket landed on the little lake station spaceport pad, and a small group of Terrans emerged out of the dust, still bouncing around as they walked. Investigative agents, they said, here on UNOMA authority, to look into sabotage and related incidents. There were ten of them in all, eight clean-cut young men right out of the vids, and two attractive young women. Most had been assigned from the American FBI. Their leader, a tall brown-haired man named Sam Houston, requested an interview with Boone; John agreed politely.
When they met after breakfast the next morning – six of the agents there, including both women – he meekly answered every question without hesitation, though instinctively he told them only what he thought they knew already, plus a bit more to seem honest and helpful. They were polite and deferential; thorough in their questioning, extremely reticent if he asked them anything in return. They seemed unaware of much of the detail of the situation on Mars, and asked him about things that had happened in the first years at Underhill, or during the time of Hiroko’s disappearance. They obviously knew the events of that time, and the basic facts of the various relationships among the first hundred’s media stars; they asked him a lot of questions about Maya, Phyllis, Arkady, Nadia, the Acheron group, Sax … all of whom were well-known to these young Terrans, permanent fixtures on their TV. But it seemed they knew little beyond what had been taped and sent back to Earth. John, his mind wandering, wondered if that would be true of all Terrans. After all what other sources of information did they have?
At the end of the interview, one of them named Chang asked him if there was anything else he wanted to say. John, who had omitted an account of his midnight visit from the Coyote, among many other things, said, “I can’t think of anything!”
Chang nodded, and then Sam Houston said, “We’d appreciate it if you’d give us access to your AI on these matters,” he said.
“I’m sorry,” John said, looking apologetic. “I don’t give access to my AI.”
“You have a destruct lock on it?” Houston said, looking surprised.
“No. I just don’t do it. Those are my private records.”
John stared the man in the eye, watched him squirm under the gaze of his associates.
“We, um, we can get a warrant from UNOMA, if you like.”
“I doubt you can, actually. And even if you do I won’t let you in.”
John smiled at him, almost laughed. Another moment where being the First Man On Mars was useful. There was nothing they could do to him without causing far more trouble than it was worth. He stood up, surveyed the little gang with as much easy arrogance as he could muster, which was quite a lot. “Let me know if there’s anything else I can do for you.”
He left the room. “Pauline, click into the building comm center and copy anything you can that they send out.” He called Helmut, remembering that his own calls would be opened as well; he kept his questions brief, as if just checking credentials. Yes, a team had been sent out by UNOMA. They were part of a task force, assembled in the last six months to deal with problems.
Police on Mars, then, as well as a detective. Well, it was to be expected. But it was a nuisance nevertheless. He couldn’t do much with them hanging around watching him, suspicious because he hadn’t given them access to Pauline. And really there wasn’t that much to do in Hellas anyway. There had been no incidents of sabotage there, and it seemed unlikely that any would occur now. Maya was unsympathetic: she didn’t want to be bothered with his problems, she had enough problems of her own, with the technical aspects of the aquifer project. “You’re probably their chief suspect,” she said irritably. “These things keep happening to you, a truck in Thaumasia, a well at Bakhuysen, and now you won’t let them into your records. Why don’t you just do it?”
“Because I don’t like them,” John said, glaring at her. It was back to normal with Maya. Well, not really; they went through their routines in a kind of high spirits, as if playing a good role in the theater, knowing they had time for everything, knowing now what was real, what lay at the base of the relationship. So in that sense it was much better. On the surface, however, it was the same old melodrama. Maya refused to understand, and in the end John gave up. After that he spent a couple of days thinking it over. He went down to the station’s labs, and had the sample of skin taken from under his fingernails cultured, cloned, and read. No one with that genome was in the planetary records, so he sent the information to Acheron requesting an analysis and any information they could give. Ursula sent their results back coded, with a single word added at the end. Congratulations.
He read the message again, swore out loud. He went out for a walk, alternately laughing and swearing. “Damn you, Hiroko! Damn you to hell! Get out of your hole and help us! Ah, ha ha ha! You bitch! I’m sick of this Persephone shit!”
Even the walktubes were oppressive at that moment and he went to the garage, suited up and went out the lock for a walk outside, the first in many days. He was out at the end of the northern arm of the town on a smooth desert floor. He wandered around, staying within the fluctuating column of dust-free air that every city created, thinking the situation over as he surveyed the city. Hellas was going to be much less impressive than Burroughs, or Acheron, or Echus, or even Senzeni Na; located at the low point of the basin, it had no heights to build on, no prospect. Although the whipping dust made it a poor time to judge that. The town had been built in a crescent which would eventually become the shoreline of the new lake; that might look nice when it happened – a waterfront – but meanwhile it was as featureless as Underhill, with all the latest in power plant and service apparatus, intake vents, cables, tunnels like giant sloughed snakeskins … the old scientific station look, no aesthetics involved. Well, that was fine. They couldn’t put every town on a mountaintop.
Two people passed him, their faceplates polarized. Odd, he thought, it being so gloomy in the storm. Then they leaped on him, knocked him down. He shoved off the sand with a wild John Carter leap and threw his fists around him, but to his surprise they were running off into the clouds of dust whipping by. He staggered, stared after them. They disappeared behind the veils of dust. His blood jolted through him; then he felt his shoulders burn. He reached up and back; they had cut his walker open. He pressed his hand over the rip and began to run hard. He couldn’t feel his shoulders at all any more. It was awkward to run with his arm up and behind his neck. His air supply appeared to be all right – no – a tear in the tube, at the neck. He took his hand from his shoulder long enough to dial maximum flow on his wristpad. The cold flowed down his back like ghost ice water. A hundred below 0°C. He was holding his breath and could feel dust on his lips, caking his mouth. Impossible to tell how much CO
was getting into his oxygen supply, but it didn’t take much to kill you.
The garage appeared out of the murk; he had run right to it, and was feeling mighty pleased with himself until he came to the lock door and pushed the open button and nothing happened. It was easy to lock a lock’s outer door, just leave the inner one open. His lungs burned, he needed a breath. He ran around the garage to the walktube that connected it to habitat proper, reached it, stared in through the layers of plastic. No one in sight. He took his hand away from the rip on his shoulder and as quickly as he could opened the box on his left forearm and took out the little drill, turned it on and plunged it into the plastic, which gave without breaking and gathered up around the spinning bit, until the drill almost broke his elbow; he poked wildly with it and finally got the plastic to tear, then ripped downward, widening the hole until he could dive through it helmet first. When he was inside to the waist he held still, using his body as a rough plug for the hole. He unclipped his helmet and ripped it off his head and gasped for breath as if coming up from a long dive, out in out in out in. Get that CO
out of the blood. His shoulders and neck were numb. Down at the garage an alarm bell was ringing.
After a twenty second compressed burst of thought, he yanked his legs through the hole and ran down the quickly depressurizing tube toward the habitat, away from the garage. Happily the door there opened on command. Once inside he jumped in an elevator and dropped to the third floor below the ground, where he was staying in one of the guest suites. He let the elevator door open and looked out. No one in sight. He hustled down to his room. Inside he stripped off the walker and stashed it and the helmet in his closet. In the bathroom he winced at the sight of his whitened shoulders and upper back; a really horrible case of frostnip. He took some oral painkiller and a triple dose of omegendorph, put on a shirt with a collar, pants, shoes. He combed his hair, composed himself. The face in the mirror looked glassy-eyed and distracted, almost stunned; he threw his face through the most violent contortions, slapped it, resettled his expression, started breathing in a deep pattern. The drugs began to kick in, and his reflection looked a little better.
He went out into the hall and walked to the big trench wall concourse, which extended downward three more stories. He walked along the railing looking at the people below, feeling a curious mixture of elation and rage. Then Sam Houston and one of his women colleagues approached him.
“Excuse me, Mr Boone, but will you please come with us?”
“What’s up?” he said.
“There’s been another incident. Someone cut open one of the walkway tubes.”
“Cut open a walktube? You call that an incident? We have mirror satellites flying out of orbit, and trucks falling into moholes, and you’re calling a prank like that an incident?”
Houston glared at him, and Boone almost laughed at the man. “How do you think I can help?” he asked.
“We know you’ve been working on this for Dr Russell. We thought you might like to be informed.”
“Oh, I see. Well, let’s go have a look then.”
And then it was a matter of going through the paces, for nearly two hours, his shoulders burning like fire the whole time. Houston and Chang and the other investigators spoke to him as if in confidence, and anxious for his input; but their gazes were coolly evaluative. John returned them with a little smile.
“Why now, I wonder?” Houston said at one point.
“Maybe someone doesn’t like you being here,” John said.
Only when the whole charade was finished did he have time to think about why he wanted to keep them from finding out about the attack. No doubt it would have drawn more investigators up, and that was bad; and certainly it would have become the top news story all over Mars and Earth, tossing him back into maximum fishbowl. And he was sick of the fishbowl.
But there was something more than that that he couldn’t quite pin down. The subconscious detective. He snorted with disgust. To distract himself from the pain he stalked around from dining hall to dining hall, hoping to catch some expression of poorly-concealed surprise when he walked into each room. Back from the dead! Which one of you murdered me! And once or twice he saw someone flinch from his roving gaze. But the fact was, he thought dourly, many people flinched when he looked at them. As if avoiding the gaze of a freak, or a condemned man. He had never felt his fame in quite that way before, and it made him angry.
The painkillers were wearing off, and he returned early to his rooms. His door was open. When he rushed in he found two of the UNOMA investigators inside. “What are you doing!” he cried angrily.
“Just looking out for you,” one of them said smoothly. They glanced at each other. “Wouldn’t want someone to try something.”
“Like breaking and entering?” Boone said, leaning against the doorway.
“Part of the job, sir. Sorry we’ve upset you.” They shuffled nervously, trapped in his room.
“Just who gave you authorization for this?” Boone said, folding his arms over his chest.
“Well.” They looked at each other again. “Mr Houston is our superior officer—”
“Call him and get him here.”
