We retired to The Hawk’s Nest and reviewed our plans over rum and Coke. Then we walked out to the dig site, which was located about a quarter mile from Harper Hall. (Harper would serve as the team’s mobile field station.) The site was about sixteen feet on a side, shielded by a canvass awning.
“Are the Baranovians here yet?” I asked.
“Some are,” said Sam. “Most of them will straggle in during the night.” He consulted a clipboard. “Altogether, we’ll have twenty-four.”
Skyhawk is located in deep forest on the shores of a glacial lake. Green-carpeted mountains rise on all sides. On that first night there was a brilliant full moon, the wind was loud in the spruce, and the woods smelled of mint and cold water. A half-dozen lights lined the far shore. Nothing could have been farther from Mars.
Warren Hatch was glad to get off his hands and knees, and give his place to Judy Conroy. “I never knew archeology was so mind-numbing,” he told Maureen. A dozen or so members of the team were working meticulously over the site, removing the crumbly Martian soil a half-inch at a time, brushing it off rocks, turning it over to others who strained it to be sure nothing was being overlooked. “Whatever happened to Indiana Jones?” he asked. “To buried temples? Secret doors? That sort of thing?”
Maureen smiled. “Real archeology would make a slow movie,” she said.
Warren looked out past the dig site, through the plasteel shell that shielded them from the near-vacuum. Low red hills rose in the north, and he could see a dune buggy moving across the horizon.
“Got something here.” Patti Kubik’s voice. She brushed the object and held it up. It was a knife. Long and slightly curved, it had a metal blade and handle, and was still in good condition.
“No telling how old it is,” said Cobblemere. “It could have been in the ground for centuries without showing any real deterioration.”
They noted where the knife had been found and placed it beside the two urns they’d recovered earlier.
“Here. Look at this.” Eddie Edwards, short, squat, barrel-shaped, bent close to the ground. He was on his knees, rear end stuck up, face red with effort, working with brush and fingers to clear a rectangular tablet about the size of a dinner plate. “It’s got a picture on it,” he said. That brought a crowd.
The tablet depicted a vaguely reptilian-looking creature with long teeth and crocodilian eyes. The stuff of bad science fiction films. For all that, it maintained an aspect that seemed almost pious. It wore a robe, and it seemed to have just dropped something that might have been a stone or a crumpled piece of paper. A jagged line resembling a lightning bolt was drawn through the dropped object. A string of exotic characters lined the top and right side of the tablet.
“This can’t be right,” said Jason Kelly, the team’s senior member in terms of age and service. Kelly was almost seventy, but he was a physical fitness freak and he could probably have run most of his associates into the ground. He claimed to be the world’s lone exobiologist. “It’s a hoax. Has to be.”
“Why?” asked Warren.
“If this is supposed to be a Martian, it’s all wrong. Martians couldn’t possibly look like this. These creatures would have evolved in a swampy environment.”
“Here’s another.” Murray Fineberg, this time. Murray was middle-aged, overweight, a man who looked as if he would have been more at home running a publishing business than kneeling in Martian silt. His tablet revealed the same sort of creature, this time bowing before a pyramid from which lines of light seemed to emanate.
“It just doesn’t figure,” said Jason. “We know surface conditions were never adequate to support anything more complicated than a bacterium.”
“Then why,” asked Patti Kubik, “are we out here in the first place?” Patti was middle-aged, prematurely gray, possibly the most personable individual on Mars. Among a group of people who considered one another egomaniacs, she managed to maintain a good-humored humility. “We’re all idiots much of the time,” she’d told Warren once. “If you recognize that, it explains a lot.”
Sam Wynn was wearing a headset. He was tall, thoughtful, deliberate, dressed in an ivory-colored jacket with an Oakland Raiders logo. His brows drew suddenly together and he pressed both earphones. After a moment he nodded and then called for attention. “I’ve got some news,” he said. “The Delta team just found two metal disks on the north ridge. They’re approximately five meters in diameter, and they’re mounted on cradles that permit both lateral and horizontal movement.”
“Sounds like satellite dishes,” said Bryan Trahan. Bryan was among the younger members of the team. He was in his early twenties, tall, quiet, with clear handsome features and bright brown eyes.
“That’s what Clancey thinks,” said Sam. Clancey was the leader of Delta team.
“So where are the satellites?” asked Patti.
“Negative,” said Sam. “No satellites. We know that for a fact.”
Eddie pushed his thick fingers into the soil and nodded to himself. “Another tablet,” he said.
There was more: pots, cups, primitive tools. More tablets. Beads. Jewelry. A paperweight-sized pyramid that might have been made of diamond. (The diamond, if indeed that’s what it was, had a scarlet tinge in its depths.) And a long metallic rod with markings. Not unlike a gauge. They also dug up a strip of cable, which appeared to be made of plastic. Odd.
At the edge of the excavation, they found the remains of a wall. The wall was a high-tech alloy, and must once have enclosed the site, even as their own plastic dome now sealed it off.
Sam was listening to his earphones again. He was frowning. “Okay,” he said into the mike. “We’ve got something else.” He raised his voice so all could hear. “Somebody blew up Union Station in Chicago. During rush hour. They’ve got several hundred dead. Almost a thousand people hurt.” It was the latest in a wave of terrorist attacks by all kinds of disgruntled groups. Anybody with a grudge and enough money to buy a bombmaker could now make his irritation felt. (His was the correct usage, because to date no women had been charged.)
“Mars is starting to look good.” Judy Conroy was from Chicago. She was diminutive, with classic features and dark brown hair, cropped in a pageboy. Her blue eyes, which were usually bright and penetrating, smoldered.
“Crazies everywhere,” said Warren. Two weeks earlier, one group had bombed a nuclear power plant upwind of New York City in an unsuccessful effort to cause a meltdown.
“What’s this?” asked Murray. He was brushing soil away from a long, smooth stone surface.
“Careful,” said Maureen.
It was roughly one by three meters. Maureen took over direction, and within an hour they’d uncovered a tabletop with a solid base about a meter and a half deep.
“You know what it looks like?” said Bryan.
“Yeah.” Murray rubbed his hand across his balding scalp. “It looks like an altar.”