Ventura: “So is this odd-shaped piece of rock really the remains of a living creature?”
DiNardo: “I believe it probably is. It appears—”
Ventura: “Probably?”
DiNardo: “Very likely.”
Evangelist: “It’s all a matter of what the Lord expects us to believe: either His word as revealed in the Bible or the doubtful guesses of scientists all the way out on Mars.”
Ventura: “What do you think, Becky? Is it a fossil or just a funny-shaped rock?”
Actress: “It’s hard to tell, isn’t it?”
Author: “Look, I proved in my book, The Mars Hoax, that all this baloney about intelligent Martians is just hype by scientists trying to increase their funding.”
DiNardo: “Then how do you explain the buildings? The cliff dwellings?”
Author: “Built by some of the Navahos that that guy Waterman brought to Mars.”
DiNardo: “That is nonsense! Preposterous!”
Ventura: “You heard it here, folks. But remember, Mr. Quentin’s opinions are his own, and not necessarily the view of Worldwide News.”
Author: “You can read the truth in my latest book, The Mars Hoax Revisited.”
And so it went, for a solid hour. DiNardo was glad that he had been in Rome, in the Vatican’s TV studio, and not in New York or wherever Ventura’s show originated. The temptation to throttle that idiot author would have overpowered his self-control.
He almost smiled as he rushed up the marble stairs to his office. That would have made a spectacular television moment: Jesuit priest strangles popular author. I wonder what penance Cardinal Castiglione would have given me for that?
DiNardo’s smile faded as he stepped into his cramped little office and dropped his bulk into his desk chair. The parts of the Vatican that tourists saw were adorned with frescoes by Titian, Raphael and other Renaissance masters. Vatican wallpaper, some wags called it. But here at the Academy of Sciences the walls were plain, bland eggshell white: economical and not distracting.
I must word this memorandum carefully, DiNardo told himself as he stared at his blank computer screen. It must be logical and convincing. Yet although he placed his fingers on the grubby keyboard, smudged with years worth of his banging on it, no words came to him. And his mind drifted, turned without his conscious volition to the problem that had become the central focus of his existence.
How could a just and merciful God have created a race of intelligent creatures and then snuffed them out in the flicker of a moment? All right, it was longer than a moment, but geologically speaking the Martians perished virtually overnight. How could God allow that?
An intelligent race, knowledgeable enough to build structures, to erect cliff dwellings high up in the walls of Mars’s Grand Canyon. Intelligent enough to worship God, undoubtedly. Perhaps their vision of God was different from ours; certainly it must have been. But they were intelligent! God gave them the brains to build a civilization, just as He did for us.
DiNardo’s breath caught in his throat. God sent the Flood to us. He destroyed all of humankind except for Noah and his family. Or is that merely a metaphor, a faint remembrance of an ecological disaster that caused widespread devastation?
It was no metaphor on Mars, he knew. A giant meteor came crashing down out of the sky and blasted the poor Martians into extinction. Dead, every last one of them. Killed.
Why? DiNardo cried silently. Why did God permit this to happen? Why did He make it happen?
As a lesson to us? Could a loving God be so cruel as to extinguish an entire race, just to teach us to fear Him?
Could the fundamentalists be right? Is this greenhouse warming we’re suffering now a retribution from a God grown angry at our evil ways? Did He create the Martians merely to show us what He can do when we displease Him?
No. DiNardo shook his head. That I cannot accept, cannot believe.
But why, then? Dear Lord, why did You wipe them out?
He realized with a sudden flash of inspiration that there was only one way for him to find the answer to that question. The answer lay millions of kilometers away, buried beneath the red sands of Mars. I’ve got to go there! he told himself. I’ve got to find out for myself what happened to those creatures, why they perished.
You had your chance, more than twenty years ago. God sent Waterman to Mars instead of you. Looking up at the plain wooden crucifix above his office door, DiNardo asked fervently, Lord, may I have another chance? May I get to Mars at last? Is it Your will that I reach Mars and seek out the truth of what happened to those souls?
I’m nearly ten years older than Jamie Waterman, he thought. But if Carter Carleton is young enough to go to Mars, then why not me? I’m in presentable physical condition. My blood pressure is under control as long as I take my medications. The fusion ships travel there in a matter of mere days. It’s no more difficult than flying from Rome to Los Angeles, really.
Monsignor DiNardo began pecking at his keyboard, his passionate yearning to go to Mars burning all other thoughts out of his mind, even the tightness of breath he felt as he bent over the keyboard and poured out his soul.
I’ve got to get to Mars, he told himself. I’ve got to!
Tithonium Base: Number Crunching
Jamie sat at the desk in the cubicle that Dr. Chang had given him to use as an office. It was a minuscule enclosure, barely big enough for a couple of bungee-cord chairs and a fold-up writing table that served as a makeshift desk. Like all the other cubicles in the dome, its walls were two-meter-high plastic partitions. Only the pie-slice personal quarters and Dr. Chang’s office had real walls that extended to a real ceiling.
Jamie had spent the morning out at the dig, actually helping the learn patiently excavate Carleton’s pit, using modified laser drills to break up the rock floor and then old-fashioned whisk brushes to carefully, tenderly clean eons of dust from the fragments. Most of the pieces they uncovered were meaningless lumps of stone, as far as Jamie could see, but every once in a while Carleton would exclaim:
“This could be a knee joint!”
Or: “Looks like the end of a handle to me.”
The anthropologist was amassing a small but growing collection of what could be fossils and ancient artifacts. The geologists dated them all to between sixty-seven and sixty-three million years old, the right approximate age for the time when the meteor bombardment had wiped out almost all life on Mars. Jamie wondered if the dating was accurate. Sometimes even the most unbiased of scientists saw what they wanted to see, instead of what was before their eyes.
He thought of Percival Lowell, the wealthy Bostonian who built an observatory in the clear mountain air of Flagstaff, Arizona, and spent the rest of his life studying Mars. Lowell saw canals on Mars and wrote popular books about the possibility—the certainty, as far as he was concerned—that Mars was inhabited by intelligent engineers who built a planetary system of canals to save their cities from global drought. Lowell’s canals turned out to be mostly eyestrain, and his own zealous desire to prove that intelligent Martians existed.
They did exist, Jamie thought wryly, sixty-some million years before Lowell’s time. But they weren’t clever enough to build a global network of canals. It wouldn’t have helped them, anyway. The catastrophe that wiped them out would have buried their canals along with their villages and every trace of them, except for the cliff dwellings.
Yet Lowell was right in one sense, Jamie knew. Mars is dying. A long, slow, agonizing death. The hardy little lichen that have made an ecological niche for themselves inside the rocks strewn across the valley floor are dying away. The atmosphere’s faint trace of moisture is dwindling. Unless we step in and intervene, the lichen will go extinct, just like all the other life on the cold, dry surface of Mars.