NOON: SOL 147
“NO TROUBLES?” VIJAY ASKED.
Trudy Hall’s image on the comm screen looked slightly puzzled by the question. She shook her head. “No, no problem at all.”
“That’s good,” said Vijay.
“It’s rather like being the baby sister with three grownup brothers,” Hall went on. “Mostly, I’m treated with a certain amount of tolerance, actually.”
Vijay was sitting at the tiny desk in her personal quarters. She was recording their conversation, of course; part of her ongoing psychology files.
“And none of them have made any sexual approaches?”
“Not a one.” Hall almost pouted. “Perhaps I should be disappointed?” Then she quickly added, “Don’t let Tommy know I said that!”
With a laugh, Vijay assured her these psych sessions were strictly private. “Unless you have a complaint to make, naturally.”
Hall shook her head again. “Actually, Dex and Jamie are moping around as if the weight of the world is on their shoulders. And Mitsuo … well, Mitsuo’s always given me the feeling he thinks I’m not entirely human.”
A subtle form of racism, Vijay thought. Lord knows you’ve seen enough of it from the WASPs.
But she kept her thoughts to herself. She ended her session with Hall and signed off, then spent half an hour dictating her own thoughts and impressions for the mission record.
These reports will add up to a series of papers in the psych journals when we get back home, she thought as she dictated. My career will be made; I’ll be able to take my pick of tenure-track positions at the best universities on Earth.
Sexual attitudes and behaviors in an isolated environment over an eighteen-month period. That could be the title of the key paper. Might even make a racy book of it: Sex on Mars. A bestseller, without a doubt.
But even as she formed the ideas in her mind, she wondered about Jamie. And Dex. And herself. What a mess I’ve made of everything. What a stupid forlorn mess.
Vijay had spent whole evenings searching through the scientific literature about human relationships on other expeditions, especially the scientific teams that wintered over at Antarctic stations. There had been plenty of information about interpersonal stress and the effects of loneliness and boredom mixed with physical danger, but almost nothing that helped her. Men had attempted murder at Antarctic stations. Men had gone berserk in nuclear submarines during months-long patrols underwater.
But the reports said little about the way relationships between men and women could form and mutate. Nothing about how sex twists everything into different perspectives.
The dome seemed empty with only Craig and the two astronauts in it with her. Sitting in her little cubicle, staring into the now-blank screen of her laptop, Vijay wondered for the thousandth time if she should accompany Rodriguez on his next run out to the Canyon and spend a day or two with the four scientists there.
With Jamie, you mean. Or Dex. Is it Jamie you want? she asked herself. Despite everything, despite his bloody selflessness, is Jamie really the one you care for? You’ll have to settle for second-best with him; he’s really in love with Mars.
What about Dex? He’s … powerful. Dynamic. Vijay shook her head. She didn’t want to think about Dex. He was a complication. Too upsetting.
She jumped up from her chair and walked swiftly out of her compartment. Get the blood circulating, she told herself, striding hard enough across the plastic flooring to send the staccato of her footsteps echoing across the dome.
Stacy was outside with Rodriguez, loading one of the rovers for the next run to the Canyon. Craig was on duty in the comm center. Glancing at her wristwatch, Vijay saw that it was almost time for her to relieve Craig and let him get back to his geology work.
I could go on the rover with them, Vijay said to herself. They don’t need me here; Tommy’s hand is healed up nicely and there aren’t any medical emergencies to worry about. She realized that her medical work on Mars had been almost entirely pharmaceutical. I’ve been pushing pills, handing out vitamins and nutritional supplements—and compiling psych profiles.
More psychology than medicine, she told herself. But when it comes to your own emotional problems, you’re a hopeless muddle. Physician, heal thyself!
Three of the twelve rooms in the dwelling had writing on their walls: one room on each level. Jamie thought about that as he stared at the latest appraisal of the stone samples they had sent back to the dome. Wiley Craig had worked up a very nice spectrographic analysis of the chips and flakes he and Dex had scraped off the stone walls of the building.
There was enough potassium in the stone to get a reasonably firm date from radioactive decay rates, If the decay rates are the same on Mars as they are on Earth, Jamie thought. No reason why they shouldn’t be; atoms are atoms, and they behave the same way all over the universe. But there might be other factors at work here, factors we don’t recognize, subtle factors that are different from Earth.
We just don’t know, Jamie had to admit to himself.
At any rate, the stone was more than a hundred million years old. Same as the stone stratum at the rear of the niche, where the Martians had quarried the blocks that they used to build the dwelling.
And that doesn’t tell us much, Jamie thought. The age of the stone isn’t what we’re after; it’s the age of the building. When did the Martians cut those stones and use them to build their … temple.
Leaning back in the padded chair of his compartment, Jamie realized that he no longer thought of the building as a dwelling place. They didn’t live in it. It was a temple of some sort, a place where they came to perform sacred rites.
Like writing their history on the walls? If that’s what the wall markings are, they had a damned short history. Three walls inscribed with elaborate figures, some of them pictographs, most of them looking more like letters or whole words.
And each of them deteriorating into scrawled, scratched messages that looked like the work of children. Or desperate, harried people in a deathly hurry.
A single rap on his compartment door startled Jamie out of his thoughts. Before he could reply, the accordion door slid open and Dex stepped in.
“You’ve got Wiley’s analysis on-screen, too,” Dex said, without preamble. “Good.”
“It’s good work, all right,” Jamie agreed, “but it doesn’t help us much.”
Dex perched himself on the edge of Jamie’s unmade bunk. “No, you’re right. We’ve got to come up with some way of dating the building itself.”
“Any ideas?”
Dex shook his head. “I’ve been going through the literature and talking to archeologists back home.”
“No joy.”
Jumping impulsively to his feet, Dex said, “The thing is, back on Earth we’ve got the stratigraphy, the radioactive dating, even written records we can decipher. Here, everything’s so damned uncertain.”
“It’s new territory.”
“Tell me about it.” Dex ran both hands through his dark hair. Jamie noticed it was looser, less curly than it had been when they’d first met No humidity on Mars, he thought. Bad for your ’do.
“Maybe we should be talking with astronomers instead of archeologists,” Jamie suggested.
Dex shot him a puzzled glance.
“The astronomers who date meteorites,” Jamie explained. “They deal with rocks that are hundreds of millions of years old. Billions, even.”
Sitting back on the edge of the bunk, Dex said slowly, “Yeah, that’s right. They can tell when a meteorite was formed and when it was broken apart by collisions with other meteoroids, can’t they?”
Jamie nodded. “Maybe they can help us.”
“Call DiNardo,” Dex said. “He ought to be able to find the right people.”
“Or Pete, back at Tarawa. He put in a lot of years with NASA. They should have a lot of background data about meteoroids.”
Dex made a huffing sound, halfway between a snort and a laugh. “At least it gives us something to do, a straw to grab for.”
“You’re not optimistic.”
“We’ve got a mystery on our hands, all right.”
“More than one,” Dex said fervently. “How old is the building? What happened to the people who built it? What does all that writing mean? Why does it degenerate into those chicken scratches at the end?”
Jamie made a rueful grin back at him. “What was that old line about a mystery inside a riddle wrapped in an enigma?”
“Kennedy, I think. Or maybe Churchill.”
“Whoever.”
“Where the hell did they go?” Dex growled. “What happened to them?”
Jamie spread his arms and tried to look cheerful. “Listen, Dex: you can’t do really good science unless you’re tackling really tough questions.”
Trumball looked at him askance. “We ought to be in line for the fucking Nobel Prize, then,” he muttered.
“That would be nice,” Jamie said.
“There’s got to be an answer!” Dex insisted. “Maybe if we could cut out a few of the characters they inscribed on the wall and test the potassium-argon ratios along the faces of the incisions …”
“The archeologists would burn you at the stake if you even touched one of those walls with your gloved fingers.”
“We’re going to have to touch ’em sooner or later. We can’t get any more information out of them by just staring at the damned writing. Or taking pictures of it.”
“DiNardo’s got the top cryptologists in the world studying the writing,” Jamie said.
“Big deal. How’re they going to decipher a code when they don’t even know what language it’s written in?”
Jamie shrugged. “Like you said, it’s something to do. It beats sitting around and staring.”
“Busy work.”
The two men sat in gloomy silence for a few moments. Jamie tried to relax his mind, tried to deliberately not think about the Martians and their temple and the writings on the wall. Neat trick if you can do it, he groused to himself. Try not thinking about an elephant.
Instead, he remembered that there were other things to worry about.
“Dex, we’ve got another problem to deal with, too,” he said.
“My old man.”
“Yes. I don’t want him here. I don’t want him leading the way for shiploads of tourists to come trooping through the temple—”
“Temple? Who says it’s a temple?”
With a patient sigh, Jamie answered, “That’s the way I think of it.”
“A temple.”
Waggling one hand in the air, Jamie said, “The Martian equivalent.”
Dex grinned at him. “I don’t want dear old dad here, either, but how in hell can we stop him? He’s got the ICU buffaloed, for chrissakes.”
“I’ve asked both DiNardo and Li to intervene.”
“And?”
“No answer yet,” Jamie admitted. “From either of them.”
“Don’t hold your breath.”
“He can’t come here!” Jamie snapped. “We can’t allow him to turn this site into a tourist attraction!”
Dex let his head droop between his hands. “When you figure out a way to stop him, pal, let me know. I’ve been trying to get out from under his thumb all my life, and now he’s chasing me all the way here to Mars to get his paws back on me.”