Warren knelt down to examine it. It was stained.
“I think we’re off to a good start,” said Maureen. She sliced a strip off her steak, tasted it, and nodded her approval. We’d secured a corner table, away from the Baranovians. Down on the beach, a few die-hard bathers were still in the water, even though the evening was turning cool.
“We should be,” I said. Her artifacts had been damned good to start with, and she’d taken my suggestions and improved on them. “How long did it take you to bury the stuff?”
She looked out across the open field at the awning which marked the dig site. The ground was muddy. Unfortunately, the dome that held back the Martian vacuum could not keep out a terrestrial rainstorm. They’d all got drenched, and some had even retreated to the dining hall or their individual quarters. (An outdoor wedding had also taken a hit that afternoon.) But a half-dozen of the hardier Baranovians had hung on, cutting down through the soil until the urns and tools and gadgets had been recovered and recorded. And until the altar lay exposed.
There’d been visitors. Neighbors of Skyhawk, and guests from the wedding party, all curious as to why these people were digging a large hole in the lawn, had gathered outside the perimeter. Sam had set himself to intercept them, to keep them at a distance. He’d answered their questions as best he could. Some had seemed interested; others had smiled and moved on.
“The blood on the altar,” Sam said. “That’s a great idea. Where are we going with this?”
Only Maureen and I knew the scenario. “You think it’s blood?” I asked innocently.
“Sure,” he said. “What else? I’ve seen your work, Jake. You never miss a chance to spill blood.”
I was hurt by the comment, and I was trying to think how to respond when Bryan joined us. His plate was heaped high with roast beef and mashed potatoes. “Interesting afternoon,” he said. “Do you expect we’ll be able to finish with the dig tomorrow?”
Maureen was slow to respond. She approved of Bryan, who was bright and intense. The kind of young man who would go far. “Yes,” she said finally. “If we were doing this in real time, this kind of excavation might take weeks. But we’ll wrap it up about noon.”
“Then what?”
She glanced at me. “Then,” I said, “we’ll withdraw into the field station and try to see what we have.”
Bryan was wearing a T-shirt with a silhouette of Abraham Baranov, the dates of the seminar, and the motto Mars or Bust. Several of the participants had them by now. He nodded, tried the roast beef, stirred some sweetener into his iced tea, and buttered a roll. “When do we get to the AI?” he asked.
Startled, I looked suspiciously at Maureen. She shook her head no. She hadn’t told him. But nobody else knew the scenario.
“Bryan, what makes you think there’s an AI?”
“Well,” he said, “I don’t see where else you could go with all this. Anyway, I’ve read your work.” He shrugged.
I was insulted again. But I hid my feelings behind a casual smile. “There are all kinds of possibilities,” I said.
When Maureen and I were alone again, a half hour later, she let her dismay show. “What do we do?” she asked.
I’d been thinking about little else. “It’s too late to change the scenario. We’ll stay with it.”
But I didn’t sleep well that night. Sam had suggested I was predictable. Bryan had demonstrated it.
The field station consisted of dormitory-style sleeping quarters for eight, a lab, a maintenance shack, a kitchen and dining room, a communication center, and a rec room. Additional support modules had been established outside. Their domes gleamed in the ruddy sunlight.
In the morning, there was fresh news: preliminary analysis of the North Ridge disks suggested they had been electrically powered. Two more had been found; and they were all in a straight line, horizontally placed, approximately fifty meters apart.
Sam, manning the radio console, picked up a series of UPI Worldline bulletins that suggested the Earthside situation was deteriorating. President Martin had declared a national emergency, promised a war on terrorists, and mobilized the entire array of federal agencies in the effort. In a related development, Congress passed a joint resolution calling for a mandatory death penalty for anyone convicted of a terror crime, or for any accessories in a terror crime. The president, vacationing at the Tampa White House, was quoted as saying he might consider calling for a suspension of habeas corpus until calm had been restored.
That all seemed far away. Warren thought how well distance lends perspective. The home world was a violent, angry place. And somehow, against the eternally placid stars, its virulence was more apparent. And less real.
Meantime, the team had spent the morning at the site, where they’d unearthed several more tablets, some with images, some without. All had inscriptions. The characters were unlike anything Warren had seen before, little more than squiggles and dots. But Judy said she thought they had enough to attempt a translation.
“How do we even begin?” asked Warren.
“Actually,” she said, “it might be fairly easy. We should be able to assume the text is connected to the images. So first we try to figure out what the images are about.”
There were eleven tablets. Eight had images; all had inscriptions. The reptilian figure was portrayed in various poses: it gazed contemplatively past the observer’s shoulder; it walked casually through a corridor; it drank from a flagon, through which a lightning strike passed; it even leaned casually against a wall, as if waiting for a bus. (In the latter depiction, the lightning was again present, this time a bolt drawn diagonally across the lizard itself.)
“Hey,” said Sam, pulling his earphones down around his neck. “They took out the Holland Tunnel.”
“Blew it up?”
“Yeah. During rush hour. They’ve got a couple thousand casualties.”
They stood around for a time in stunned silence, the curious Martians all but forgotten. “I wonder,” said Jason at last, “if they ever knew what kind of neighbors they had?”
A half hour later, Sam announced that a lab report had come back on the altar stains. “There’s DNA,” he said, “and plasma, oxygen, fructose, proteins, urea—”
“Blood,” said Patti.
Sam shook his head. “They’re saying there are some differences, but it’s a decent approximation.”
Meantime, Murray thought he had the meaning of one of the tablets—The one with the creature leaning against the wall. “No loitering,” he said. “And this one, no littering.”
Somebody laughed. Snorted. But every image with a lightning bolt contained the same cluster of characters at the beginning. Do not—? Warren knew instinctively that Murray was right. But he was disappointed that the first other-worldly translation would be so prosaic. No littering. My God.
Toward the end of the afternoon, they heard that Congress had voted Pesident Martin broad emergency powers.
They worked through dinner, reading increasingly ominous bulletins, which Sam was now posting. The FBI were rounding up suspects. The National Guard had been placed on standby. The President, promising action against “cowards,” made good on his threat to suspend habeas corpus. The ACLU warned against overreacting.