“Twelve twenty-two.”
“We’re just getting ready for our sunset cocktail here.”
Kinnear was at his home on Hawaii’s Big Island, Dex knew. Relaxed. Easygoing. But Rollie had a steel-sharp mind for business underneath his smiles and pleasantries.
Looking past Kinnear’s image to the breeze-tossed palm trees and the surf rolling up on the beach, Dex said, “So, are you really retired or is this just a smoke screen?”
Laughing, Kinnear said, “I’m no more retired than you are, Dex. You and your Mars Foundation.”
“Glad to hear it.”
“Oh?”
“I want to run an idea past you. Do you mind?”
Without an instant’s hesitation, Kinnear said, “Go right ahead.”
“I was thinking about that tourist operation you run in Arizona.”
“The Grand Canyon operation? It’s a money-loser. The Parks people won’t let me expand the facility. Took years to get them to okay the bridge, and we still get protesters now’n then. Some day the bastards’ll blow up the bridge, you wait and see.”
“How’d you like to work with the Navaho Nation instead of the feds?”
“What’re you planning to do, build housing on their reservation land?”
“No, no. Tourism.”
“Tourism?”
“On Mars.”
For the first time Dex could remember, Kinnear went absolutely speechless.
Dex went on, “We’ve got a Grand Canyon on Mars, you know. A hundred times bigger than yours.”
“On Mars?” Kinnear echoed.
“Transportation’s easy,” Dex said, stretching the truth. “The new fusion ships get you there in a few days. You’re not in zero gee at all, hardly: it feels like regular Earth gravity most of the way.”
“Dex, have you dipped into the cooking sherry? On flickin’ Mars? Who the hell’s going to pay the kind of money that’d take?”
Be careful with him, Dex warned himself. Don’t let him know how desperate you are.
“Listen,” he said lightly. “When space tourism started, people paid twenty million bucks, American, to spend a few days on a space station in Earth orbit.”
“How many people?” Rollie asked. “Five? Six?”
“More than that. But within a couple of years guys like Branson were selling tickets for rides into orbit for twenty thousand bucks apiece. He made millions on it.”
“And now people go for vacations on the Moon,” Kinnear murmured.
Dex realized his old friend had done some homework, after all. Good. Now reel him in slowly.
“How much do you think people would pay for a two-week vacation on Mars?” he asked.
“Anybody can make a virtual reality visit to Mars for a few dollars, Dex. You sell ’em, remember?”
“How much would you pay for a real visit to Mars?” Dex asked, dangling the bait. “Walk through the buildings in the cleft in the valley wall. See the remains of the village that they’re digging up. Plant your footprints where no human being has ever stepped before.”
Kinnear looked thoughtful. “It’d be strictly a high-end operation. Very expensive. Only a small market.”
“But a highly profitable market. Big ticket price.”
“The scientists will allow it? I thought they’re keeping Mars off-limits to tourism.”
“I’ll handle the scientists,” Dex said.
“And the Native Americans?”
He has done his homework, Dex realized. He replied, “They want to make money out of Mars just as much as we do. They’ll go for it, if we control the operation carefully.”
“Visit Mars,” Kinnear mused. Then he broke into a beaming grin. “Could be the big prestige item among the glitterati, couldn’t it?”
“We could invite some big shot politicians,” Dex suggested.
“Go for stars instead. Better publicity. Might get lucky with some of those big-busted twits.” Kinnear laughed.
Same old Rollie, Dex said to himself. He hasn’t changed.
Then he thought: But neither has Jamie.
BOOK II
Visitors
The Old Ones knew that The People had come to the blue world after a long struggle. Once they had lived on the red world, but Coyote—the Trickster—led them to their downfall and then brought on a devastating flood that drove them away.
First Man and First Woman emerged into the blue world and carried all the memories of The People with them. But in time the memories faded and the younger generations began to doubt that they were anything more than dreams and visions. What they forgot was that dreams and visions show a reality that is as strong and certain as the greatest tree or the highest mountain.
What they forgot was that without dreams and visions.
The People wither into mere husks.
Crater Malzberg
Well, y’know, a watched pot never boils.”
“Oh lord, spare me your stupid clichés.”
Itzak Rosenberg and Saleem Hasdrubal were unlikely partners. Izzy was an Oxford-educated Londoner, small and soft-looking, with the frizzy reddish blond hair of his distant ancestors from Poland and Belarus. Sal was from Chicago, tall and lanky enough to have made his way through school playing basketball.
They argued about everything, from international politics to ethnic cuisines. They even argued about the importance of geology versus biology. Izzy, a geologist, had been blown away when he was nine years old by his first visit to the chalk cliffs of Dover; the secret history that they contained in their layered striations set him on his life’s course. Sal had been equally thrilled with his first visit to the dinosaur reconstructions at Chicago’s Field Museum, on a class trip when he was in the seventh grade. He won a basketball scholarship to Purdue, then went on to the University of Chicago for an eventual doctorate in cellular biology.
Now they stood glumly in their nanosuits on the surface of Mars, near the minor crater Malzberg, disappointed that the geyser they were hoping for had so far refused to erupt.
They had been living at the crater’s edge for more than a week in one of the campers, a bullet-shaped vehicle with a big, bulging windshield that looked like an insect’s eyes; it rode on a set of eight springy metal wheels. It looked to Sal’s city-raised eyes like an urban bus, although he’d never seen a bus so coated and smeared with reddish dust.
All around them stretched the barren rusty plain, cold and silent except for the faint whisper of a thin breeze. The Sun hung high in the cloudless butterscotch sky, but the thermometer on the wrist of Izzy’s nanofabric suit read thirty-six below zero. Summer weather, he thought wryly.
Dr. Chang, the mission director, was stretching the safety regulations to allow these two scientists to go out on this Excursion without an astronaut to drive the camper. But there were only nine astronauts at Tithonium Base and they were committed to other, larger excursions along the floor of the rift valley and out to the huge volcanoes of the Tharsis highlands.
Originally, Chang had sent an automated rover to the Malzberg crater, a small six-wheeled robot that was supposed to go into the crater and deploy a set of sensors that would monitor the heat flow and other conditions at the site. But the doughty little rover had broken down inside the crater. Rosenberg and Hasdrubal had been sent to repair it, but the machinery was too old, too worn, too clogged with years of Martian dust, for them to get it working again. Despite the detailed advice from technicians back at the base, they could not bring the rover back to life.
So now they stood at the edge of the crater waiting like expectant fathers for a geyser that had so far failed to materialize. They had come out as repairmen but had urged Chang to let them stay and observe as scientists. Chang had reluctantly allowed it; not all that reluctantly, actually: he wanted to capture a geyser as much as they did.