MORNING: SOL 150
JAMIE SAT ON THE LIP OF THE CLEFT, HIS LEGS DANGLING OVER the edge, morning sunlight flooding over him and washing against the stone wall at his back. The pale, shrunken Sun brought him no warmth. The floor of the Canyon spread far, far below his booted feet, strewn with rocks, but otherwise cold and empty and barren.
He bent forward slightly to peer at the Canyon floor and tried to see it as it once was. A stream must have meandered through it, perhaps a full-sized river, he thought. He pictured the Martians living down there in neat, orderly villages with fields of crops between them. Everything squared off, streets lined up straight, precise rows of the Martian equivalent of corn growing in the sunshine.
Now it was dead, bare, a frozen desert where the air temperature barely rose above zero on the longest day of the summer.
But not quite empty any longer. Hall and Fuchida were riding the cable down to the Canyon floor, ready for a day of working on the sparse few colonies of lichen that clung desperately to life down there.
Suddenly the bulky form of a spacesuited figure came lumbering into view, dangling on the cable and lowering slowly from the overhanging ceiling of rock. Dex, coming down for the day’s work. The day’s frustration.
“Stacy called from the rover,” he said as Jamie pulled himself to his feet.
“I thought Tomas was driving this run.”
“Nope. The boss lady decided to do it herself.”
Dex planted his boots on the rock floor as Jamie reached him and started to help him out of the climbing harness.
“You bring the day’s task list?” Dex asked.
Jamie tapped on the readout screen of the computer on his suit’s wrist. “M.O.S.,” he said glumly.
“More of the same.”
“Right: More photomicrographs. More rock samples to chip out.”
“At least we’ve got all the dust cleared away,” Dex said, heading for the cameras and other gear they had left on the ground overnight.
Nodding inside his helmet, Jamie said, “We ought to start putting up plastic sheets to protect the doors and roof openings.”
“Why now? No dust storms in sight.”
“There’s still some wind. A little dust blows in here every day. Sooner or later it’ll accumulate enough to be a problem again.”
Dex huffed, then admitted, “I guess you’re right. I’ll tell Wiley to put together a pile of sheeting for the next rover run.”
Jamie picked up the set of tools they used for taking samples of the rock and started for the nearest opening in the wall.
“Still no sign of any other buildings anywhere,” Dex said. “I spent half the night going over the imagery from the soarplane. Nothing.”
“We wouldn’t have noticed this site if we hadn’t seen it for ourselves,” Jamie said. “The planes and the satellites could be overflying a hundred buildings and we’d never realize it.”
“Yeah,” Dex admitted. “Local rock at ambient temperature. Doesn’t give you anything that stands out for the sensors, does it?”
“Not much.”
“When’s Tarawa going to get the fission-track data to us?” Dex complained. “They ought to have at least a preliminary correlation by now.”
Jamie replied, “From what Pete tells me, the archeologists have been arguing with the geologists. I don’t know if it’s a turf battle or an honest disagreement about the data.”
“Flatheads,” Dex grumbled.
They crawled through the low doorway and got to their feet again. As they headed for the opening that led to the next level, Dex said, “I got another message from my father, too.”
“Oh?”
“He’s getting to be real chummy.”
“That’s good,” Jamie said. “I guess.”
“Y’know the real reason he’s coming out here?”
Walking toward the light well, Jamie answered, “You said he wants to start commercial operations.”
“Yeah, but to do that he’s got to clear a legal claim to the area.”
“Legal claim?”
“Sure. So nobody can set up a competing operation in this area.”
“He can’t claim ownership of Mars,” Jamie said.
“He doesn’t have to.”
Jamie stopped and turned to face the younger man. All he could see in Dex’s visor was the reflection of his own faceless helmet and hard-suit shoulders.
“The thing is,” Dex explained, “you can claim priority of use for a region. Like the people at Moonbase and the other lunar settlements. They’re not allowed to claim ownership of the territory, but they can claim that they’re using the area and the International Astronautical Authority gives them the legal right to that use.”
Jamie felt confused. “They don’t actually own the territory—”
“But they can use it, legally, and keep competitors out.”
“That’s the law?”
He could sense Dex nodding inside his helmet. “Yep. The Space Utilization Treaty. My father explained it all to me last night.”
“It sounds pretty weird,” Jamie said.
“Lawyers.”
“So your father’s coming here to stake a legal claim to using this region of Mars?”
“That’s his plan. He wants to claim all the territory we’ve been working in, which would include this site, the Canyon floor where the lichen are, even Mount Olympus.”
Jamie felt his heart sinking. In his mind’s eye he saw hotels springing up, tour buses, swimming pools filled with shouting kids. His nightmares come true.
“We’ve got to stop him, Dex. We can’t allow that kind of a precedent to be set here.”
“I know.”
“I know we’ve had our differences about this …”
Dex said nothing.
“But—” Jamie hesitated, searching for words. “But, Dex, can you see that we can’t allow tourists here?”
For long moments Dex remained silent. He turned slowly in a full circle, as if to take in every corner of the ancient empty chamber in which they stood.
“Not here,” Dex agreed, his voice low and serious. “They’d wreck this place in a week.”
“Not to Mars,” Jamie said. “Not to any part of it.”
“You don’t understand,” Dex muttered.
“No, we can’t allow them to come to Mars,” Jamie insisted. “We mustn’t permit it. We’ve got to explore this planet, find the other building sites, find out what happened to the people here—”
“Whoa, whoa!” Dex held up a gloved hand. “I understand how you feel about this, Jamie. I even agree with you. But you’ve got to understand something: This is all my fault.”
“Your fault?”
“My father spearheaded the funding for this expedition because I talked him into it. I told him the expedition could pay for itself, even make a profit.”
Dex said, “Right. By making a commercial operation that would bring high-end tourists here for the trip of a lifetime. The same kind of people who go to that sex palace in orbit. The same kind of people who can afford to go to the Moon and put their footprints where nobody’s stepped before.”
“But the Moon’s dead,” Jamie said. “There’s no danger of disturbing anything there.”
With a bitter laugh, Dex countered, “Tell that to the geophysicists! They go apeshit whenever a busload of tourists churns up the regolith.”
“Well, you see what I mean, then,” Jamie said. “We have living organisms here, and the ruins of an intelligent civilization. They’ve got to be protected.”
“I know. I understand that now.”
They were standing beneath the squared-off opening in the ceiling, the light well that allowed morning sunlight to brighten the windowless chamber.
“So how do we go about protecting it? How do we stop your father?”
“What’s this ‘we,’ red man?”
“He’s your father, Dex.”
“So?”
“So you’ve got to stop him.”
“Me? Are you kidding? He’s never listened to me in his life.”
“Then at least you can help me.”
“How?”
Jamie had no ready answer. “I don’t know,” he admitted.
“Well,” Dex said, reaching up for the edge of the square opening in the ceiling, “when you figure out what to do, let me know.”
He pulled himself up. Jamie followed him, thinking, There must be some way to stop Trumball. Something that can make him see, make him understand. But what?
* * *
They spent the morning going through their assigned tasks, carefully chipping still more rock samples from random blocks of stone in the walls on the three different floors. Once they were back on the ground level they went outside again and collected more samples from the outside of the wall.
“How about some samples from the quarry, out back?” Dex asked.
“They haven’t asked for that.”
“Well, why don’t you take this batch up to the rover while I bang out a couple more samples from back there, just for the hell of it”
Jamie knew the samples from the quarry gave them a date for the age of the undisturbed rock. Maybe Dex is onto something, he thought. Maybe the samples from the building will show some difference in the amount of radiation they’ve absorbed from infalling cosmic particles: a sort of subatomic weathering that might allow us to pin down the age of the building.
But it’s the rates of weathering that we don’t know, don’t even have a feeling for, Jamie knew. All the data we’ve accumulated don’t mean anything because we don’t know how fast the weathering action took place.
Not yet, he told himself. The geologists back on Earth have much more sophisticated equipment than we do here. If they can get a fix on the rates, then maybe we can figure out just how old this building really is.
“Okay,” he said to Dex. “You take more samples from the quarry. I’ll see you in the rover.”
“Don’t start lunch without me,” Dex called as Jamie headed for the climbing harness.
Once in the L/AV’s hab module, Jamie checked with Fuchida and Hall down on the Canyon floor, then started testing the morning’s rock samples. The sooner our data get to Earth the better, he thought. Give them as much data as we can.
Dezhurova called in; she would be at the site before nightfall, at her present rate of travel. Good.
Jamie was bent over the computer screen in the makeshift lab they had put together when Dex clomped in through the airlock below. Jamie could hear the thin buzz of the hand vac as Dex cleaned the dust off his suit.
He finished the analysis program and sent the data Earthward, then ducked through the hatch into the galley. Dex wasn’t there. Jamie found him in the command center, sitting at the comm console, apparently talking with Tarawa. The face on the screen was unfamiliar, but the scenery through the window behind her was unmistakably South Sea island.
“Ready for lunch?” Jamie asked.
Dex quickly signed off and turned in his seat. Jamie saw that the younger man’s face was white, his eyes wide and staring.
“What is it?” Jamie asked. “What’s happened?”
“They came up with a preliminary date for the building,” Dex said, his voice shaking a little.
“Tarawa?”
“The geologists and archeologists weren’t fighting about it. They just didn’t believe it could be possible, so they checked the work several times before they decided it must be right.”
Jamie felt a tendril of anxiety worming through his gut. “They didn’t believe the date they got?”
“It’s a rough number. Very rough.”
“What is it?” Jamie thought he knew what the answer would be.
“Near as they can pin it down, the building was put up about sixty-five million years ago.”
“Sixty-five million?” Jamie’s voice sounded hollow, far away, even in his own ears.
Dex nodded somberly. “That’s it. Sixty-five million years ago.”
Jamie’s legs felt rubbery. He sat on the chair next to Dex. “The K-T boundary.”
“The meteor strike that killed the dinosaurs.”
“Something hit here, too,” Jamie said. “It killed off the Martians.”
“That lopsided sketch on the wall … it’s a mushroom cloud.”
“From the meteor strike.”
“They were wiped out the same way the dinosaurs were,” Dex said, his voice trembling.