AFTERNOON: SOL 150
“THAT’S WHAT MUST HAVE HAPPENED,” JAMIE SAID TO Vijay.
His image in the display screen looked grave, solemn. Vijay was running the comm center at the dome, Jamie was in his quarters aboard the L/AV out at the Canyon, from the looks of it.
“A meteor?” she asked, feeling the uneasy stir of an old memory, a childhood fear, within her.
“Meteoroid,” Dex corrected, leaning over Jamie’s shoulder to push his face into the picture.
“Maybe more than one,” Jamie said. “The disaster that wiped out the dinosaurs on Earth might’ve been more than one meteor strike.”
Vijay felt the old, old fear clutching at her.
“It must have been a swarm of them,” Dex said, his voice strangely flat, drained of emotion. “Big suckers, too.”
“On Earth three-quarters of every living species was wiped out, land, sea and air,” Jamie said.
“And here on Mars,” Dex went on, “nothing survived except the lichen and the bacteria underground.”
“What?”
“Shiva, the destroyer,” she said, remembering the tales of the ancient gods that her mother had told her.
Jamie’s brow furrowed slightly. “Is that—”
“Shiva is a god,” Vijay explained. “His dance is the rhythm of the universe. He destroys worlds.”
Dex pushed into the picture again. “Shiva is a bunch of big rocks, then.”
“His avatar,” said Vijay. “His presence among us.”
Jamie saw it with his inner Navaho’s eyes: The Martians working under a hot sun, their crops waving in the breeze, their villages dotting the fertile land. And then death comes roaring out of the sky. The explosions as the meteoroids impact. The ground quakes. Mushroom clouds billow into the blue sky. The Martians flee to their temples, begging their gods to end this rain of devastation.
The terrible bombardment from the sky goes on and on, without end, without mercy. The planet’s air is blown away almost completely, until a mere wisp remains. The seas freeze. The Martians die, every one of them, their crops, their herds, their very memory erased from the planet’s surface. Except for a rare temple here and there, in a protected spot, where the last dying members of the race desperately scratch the final chapter of their story into the stones.
Dust covers the frozen seas. Nothing alive remains except the hardy lichen and the bacteria that dwell deep underground. Death reigns over all of Mars.
With a shudder, Jamie forced his attention back to the present, to this moment. He could see on the little laptop screen that Vijay looked somber, almost frightened. Maybe we should all be scared, he thought. Another rock could wipe us out, too.
You don’t know that for certain, the rational side of his mind warned him. The data could be off by millions of years. The dating could be just a coincidence. But he could not believe in such a coincidence.
“So that’s what happened to the Martians,” Vijay said, her voice hardly above a whisper. “Shiva destroyed them. Without mercy. Without warnings. They were swept away as if they never existed at all.”
Nodding, Jamie said, “But they left this temple. Maybe there are other—”
The yellow priority message icon began blinking oh his computer screen.
“Hold on,” Jamie said, splitting the screen to see who was calling so urgently.
Dezhurova’s dour face appeared. She was obviously in the rover’s cockpit, and obviously unhappy.
“Stacy, what’s the matter?” Jamie asked.
“I am stopped about fifty kilometers from you,” the cosmonaut said.
“Stopped?”
“Wheel malfunction. Must be dust in the bearings. It is overheating badly. If I try to proceed it will probably burn out completely.”
“I’ll tell the dome,” Jamie said. “I’m already talking with Vijay.”
“Good. Tell Rodriguez to come in the number two rover with a replacement wheel bearing.”
Jamie glanced at the digital clock blinking in the screen’s lower right-hand corner. “You’ll be stuck there overnight.”
“Neh problemeh.”
“If we kept a rover here,” Dex pointed out, “we could go out and get you before sunset.”
“Perhaps,” the cosmonaut agreed glumly.
“That might be something to think about,” said Jamie. “We have the extra rover …”
“Tell Rodriguez to come in the old rover,” Dex said, “and then leave it here with us.”
“Perhaps a good plan,” Dezhurova said slowly. “I will discuss it with Tom.”
* * *
Close to midnight, as Jamie lay in his bunk, the yellow message light on his laptop began blinking again.
“Now what?” he muttered. It was late, he was tired, emotionally weary from the realization of what had wiped out the Martians. He had spent several hours looking over the archeologists’ reports on the age of the building. Then DiNardo had called in, a long, rambling monologue that boiled down to the Jesuit geologist’s doubts about associating the demise of the Martians with the extinction of the dinosaurs.
“The error bars on the archeologists’ dating for the Martian structure encompass several million years,” DiNardo said, his voice almost trembling with emotion. “It is fantastic to believe that the same event that caused the extinctions at the end of the Cretaceous on Earth also caused the extinction of the Martians.”
He’s frightened, Jamie saw as he studied DiNardo’s swarthy, stubble-jawed face. For some reason this idea scares him.
“Father DiNardo,” Jamie replied after watching the geologist’s message twice, “I have to admit that the data on the age of the building here are pretty shaky. But even if the K/T extinctions on Earth and the end of the Martians happened a few million years apart, they still might have been the result of a single cause. A swarm of big meteoroids could have swung through the inner solar system and collided with the planets over a span of millions of years. We should be looking for evidence of a bombardment around that era on the Moon, don’t you think?”
He sent his message to DiNardo, then saw more than a dozen members of the archeologists’ committee wanted to talk with him. And the ICU board wanted to discuss the replenishment mission that was going to be launched. And Tarawa was scheduling a media conference for tomorrow.
Jamie had been glad when he attended to the last of his waiting messages and could finally crawl into bed and try to sleep. Then the message light started blinking again.
Who could be calling at this hour? Tarawa wouldn’t unless there was some sort of emergency. Nobody at the dome, they’re all asleep by now.
Stacy? He sat up on the bunk. Is Stacy having trouble out in the rover?
Jamie reached out and tapped the keyboard. Mitsuo Fuchida’s face showed on the screen.
“What’s wrong, Mitsuo?” Jamie asked.
The biologist was obviously in his quarters in the L/AV, only a few feet from Jamie’s cubicle. Yet he chose to call rather than come over in person. The lighting was dim, but Jamie could see that Fuchida appeared troubled, worried.
“I am convinced we have a saboteur among us,” Fuchida said, almost in a whisper.
“What?”
“I have been reviewing the evidence associated with several so-called accidents,” Fuchida said, “and I believe they were deliberately caused.”
Jamie swung his legs off the bunk and hunched closer to the laptop screen. Great, he thought. Mitsuo’s playing Sherlock Holmes.
“What accidents?” he asked wearily.
“The puncturing of the garden dome during the dust storm, for one.”
“That was sabotage?”
“Those punctures were made from the inside, not by the storm.”
“We’ve been through all that …”
“And Tomas’ injury? Do you believe that the tray of molten glass just happened to give way while he was standing beside it?”
Jamie drew a deep breath. “Why are you telling me this? And why in the middle of the night?”
“Because you are the only one I trust,” Fuchida answered urgently. “The saboteur might be any of the others!”
“Why would anybody want to sabotage our equipment? Or hurt one of us?”
“I don’t know. Maybe he’s insane.”
There is that, Jamie admitted to himself. According to Vijay we’re all a little nuts.
Fuchida added, “And now this bearing malfunction in Stacy’s rover. Those bearings are sealed against dust penetration!”
Shaking his head, more in weariness than annoyance, Jamie said, “Okay, Mitsuo, tell you what. You and Wiley check out that faulty bearing when you go back to the dome. If you find any tampering with it, then tell Stacy about it. She’s the mission director now, not me.”
“But she might be the saboteur!”
“Stacy? That’s …” Jamie was about to say crazy, then realized that it would fit right in with Fuchida’s theory.
“She was on comm duty in the dome the night of the storm, while all the rest of us were sleeping. Remember?” the biologist insisted. “She helped to build the kiln for the glass bricks. She is alone in the rover and it breaks down.”
“You think she did it so she could spend the night alone out there?” Jamie asked.
“If she is insane her motives would not be rational,” Fuchida replied.
Despite himself, Jamie sighed. “Well, when you and Wiley inspect the bearing—”
“How do we know that Wiley isn’t the saboteur?”
How do we know you’re not off your tracks? Jamie wondered silently.
“It could be any one of them,” Fuchida added.
“All right, Mitsuo, all right. Check out the faulty bearing by yourself, then. If you find any evidence of tampering, tell me about it. Okay?”
Fuchida bobbed his head eagerly. “Hai!”
Jamie cut the connection and crawled back into his bunk. Just what I need. Either we have a crazy saboteur among us or Mitsuo’s going paranoid. Great.
Jamie did not get much sleep that night.