The speech had ended with a plea for donations, of course. The audience was wealthy: most of them were getting even wealthier on government contracts to build housing and roads and all the infrastructure that was needed to shelter the refugees and start them on new lives.
Now Dex sat in the plush quiet bar, nursing a scotch and water, listening to the architect drone on and on. His wife had excused herself and hurried off to their hotel. Thinking of her in bed watching TV as she waited for him, Dex wondered why he was going through the motions of being polite to this bore.
“We’ve learned quite a lot from the life-support systems they’ve developed on the Moon,” she was saying, emphasizing each word with the clicking tap of a manicured finger on the polished mahogany of the bar. She was rail thin and her voice had an irritating nasal twang to it. “We’ll be recycling the water and all the waste systems, turning garbage into electricity.”
Dex nodded absently, wondering how he could escape her determined enthusiasm without being boorish about it. The architect was swiveling slightly on the stool to one side of him; on the other was an old friend of his late father’s, a dimwitted old coot who thought that anyone under the age of eighty was a flighty kid who needed firm direction from his elders.
“You still involved in this Mars business?” the old man asked. Dex thought that a century ago he would have been a poster boy for communist propaganda about bloated capitalists: the man was bald and corpulent, several chins lapping over the black tie of his tuxedo. His eyes were narrow, squinting, piggish.
Nodding, Dex said, “The Trust funds the Mars Foundation.”
“Damn luxury we can’t afford anymore,” the old man said, his voice grating, harsh. “Cut your losses, Dexter, and turn your attention back here to Earth, where it’s needed.”
Dex bit back his first impulse to tell the old fart to go to hell. Instead, he replied mildly, “Mr. Younger, you could afford to fund the entire Mars operation out of your own pocket, you know that?”
“What? Me?”
“The team we’re supporting on Mars costs a lot less than one of the cities Ms. Battista here wants to build.”
“But people need my cities!” cried the architect.
“Sure they do,” Dex said. “And we need to continue exploring Mars, too.”
He wished he believed his own words.
It wasn’t until he and Vijay were sitting together on the sofa and the dishwasher was chugging away in the kitchen that Jamie said, “Pressure’s building to shut down the program.”
“Close it? You mean bring everybody home?”
He nodded, tight-lipped. “We’ve already had to shut down the new base at Hellas.”
Varuna Jarita Shektar had been the physician on the Second Expedition. She and Jamie had met in training, traveled to Mars together, and slowly but irrevocably fallen in love. The two of them stayed alone on the red planet for four months after the rest of the team had left for Earth and before the replacement team had arrived, Adam and Eve in a barren, frigid new world that was to them a Garden of Eden.
“But they can’t shut down the entire operation,” Vijay said, her luminous dark eyes blazing with indignation. “They simply can’t. They mustn’t!”
Jamie wished he could work up such righteous wrath so easily. But he couldn’t. It was all bottled up inside him. Everything. Including Jimmy’s death. Especially Jimmy’s death.
“Vee…” he started to say. But the words caught in his throat.
She was still incensed. “How can they even think about shutting down the program? After all you’ve done, all you’ve discovered.”
“Vijay,” he said, grasping her by the shoulders. “If I hadn’t been on Mars… if I’d been here with you… and Jimmy…”
She stared at him, her eyes wide with sudden understanding. “Jamie, no.”
“If I’d been here, the way a father should’ve been, he wouldn’t have—”
“No!” she snapped. “Don’t say it. Don’t even think it!”
“But—”
“It’s not going to bring him back.”
“I know. But still… I feel responsible. It’s my fault.”
It had taken him nearly two years to say those words.
“It’s not your fault any more than it’s mine,” Vijay said.
“Yours? How could it be your fault?”
“I was here. I should’ve kept a better watch on Jimmy. I should’ve…” Her voice faltered and tears misted her eyes.
He pulled her close, heard her sobbing softly, her head on his shoulder.
“Vee, we’ll get through this. Together. The two of us.”
“That’s all that’s left, isn’t it? The two of us.”
“I don’t want to lose you, Vijay.”
“You’ll never lose me, love. We’re one person, the two of us. Together always.”
“You’re all I have in the whole world.”
She pulled away from him slightly, blinking tears away as she smiled sadly and said, “No, Jamie. That’s not true. You have Mars, don’t you, love?”
He couldn’t reply to that. But inwardly he thought, I might not have Mars much longer. They’re going to take that away from me, too.
Tithonium Base: The Fossil
Nearly everyone in the base crowded around the big stereo table. Ordinarily used to show three-dimensional views of Martian terrain, now it was a blank, unlit white—with the palm-sized fossil vertebra resting in front of Carter Carleton. It was light gray, the color of ashes; bits of dirt still clung to it here and there.
Carleton surveyed their eager faces as they pressed close, felt the heat of their bodies, the scent of their excitement. Directly across the table from him stood Chang Laodong, the mission director, bald and dour in his dumpy-looking blue coveralls with their mandarin collar, looking, as usual, as if he’d been sucking on a lemon.
Trying to suppress the supreme delight of this moment, Carleton spread his hands and, smiling, said, “Well, it’s a vertebra. No doubt of it.”
Chang forced a pale smile. “We must obtain verification of your identification from qualified paleontologists.”
Nodding, Carleton replied, “I’ve already sent stereo images of the fossil to half a dozen of the top universities.”
“And to program headquarters in New Mexico?”
“Of course,” Carleton replied. In his excitement he hadn’t initially thought about Waterman, back in Albuquerque, but then Doreen had reminded him of the mission protocol.
Chang stared hard at the fossil, as if he could force it to give information by sheer willpower.
“It certainly looks like a vertebra,” said Kalman Torok, running a hand through his thick mop of hair. “See the ridges?”
“And the central cavity where the spinal cord runs through,” added one of the other biologists.
“What kind of an animal is it from?” someone asked.
“Who the hell knows? This is all brand-new territory!”
“From what I know of physiology,” Carleton said slowly, deliberately working to keep his voice calm, “this looks like it came from a quadruped. Bipedal vertebrae don’t have such thick walls.”
“Then it’s not from a Martian. One of the intelligent species, I mean.”
“How do you know?”
“If it’s not bipedal—”
“Intelligent species don’t have to be bipedal.”
Washington, D.C.: Reflecting Pool