“Doreen, good morning!” Carleton looked up to see a dark-haired, thickset younger man approaching them. With a glance at Carleton, he plunked his tray on the table as he asked, “All right to sit here, Dr. Carleton?”
Kalman Torok, Carleton saw: one of the biologists. There were only two hundred and some people at Tithonium Base and Carleton—with his long years of memorizing students’ names—knew most of them on a first-name basis. Name tags helped, of course.
Behind him came an older woman whom Carleton recognized as Nari Quintana, the base’s chief medical officer, a diminutive, spare older woman with a bony, hard-edged face and mousy dull brown hair. She sat down without asking permission and began unloading her tray onto the table.
As he picked up his steaming mug of coffee Torok asked gloomily, “Have you heard the latest? They say they’re going to shut us down and ship us back to Earth.” He spoke in British English with a decided Middle European accent.
“Who says that?” Carleton snapped.
Torok raised his heavy black brows.
“It’s the buzz. Everybody’s talking about it.”
He talks with his eyebrows, Carleton said to himself. They’re more expressive than his whiny voice.
“I don’t believe it,” said Doreen.
“They’re closing the base over in Hellas, but not here.”
“Here,” said Torok, as if he had superior knowledge.
“They can’t shut us down,” Carleton said.
“That would be stupid.”
“Criminal,” Quintana agreed. “I’d have to return to Caracas.”
“Not to Caltech?” Doreen asked. “I thought you were on the medical staff there.”
She shook her head sadly. “I gave up my position at CalTech to come to Mars.”
“And what happens to your work?” Carleton asked Torok.
The biologist sighed. “It would be the end of my experiment on growing plants in the indigenous soil. I would write a paper on it when I got back to Budapest, I suppose.”
“Couldn’t you bring soil samples back to Budapest?” Doreen asked.
“What good would that do?” Torok countered, those thick dark brows knitting. “I’d have to start all over again and the university would never pay to build a simulation chamber large enough to be useful.”
He fell into a morose silence. Quintana picked listlessly at her plate of eggs and soymeat bacon while Torok took a sip from his mug.
“God, what I’d give for a decent cup of coffee,” the Hungarian groused, thumping the mug onto the tabletop. “Instead of this crap.”
“It has to be decaffeinated,” Quintana replied sharply. “Caffeine denatures vitamin C. You know that.”
“Yes, I know. Still—”
“Do you want to come down with scurvy, like they did on the First Expedition? You’re on Mars! Keep that in the front of your mind every day, every minute.”
Torok started to glare at the harsh-tongued physician, but shrugged instead and muttered, “I won’t be on Mars for much longer. Neither will you.”
Trying to make it sound bright, Doreen said, “Well, if we’re sent home you’ll be back with your wife and kids again, Kal.”
Torok’s face grew even more somber. “She prefers to have me here.”
“Oh?”
Carleton asked, “What about you, Doreen?”
“If we have to leave I’ll go back to Selene and work in the nanolab.”
“On the Moon?”
“You can’t do nanotech work anywhere on Earth,” she replied.
“Not legally.”
“And you, Professor?” Torok asked. “Where will you go?”
Carleton still winced inwardly when anyone addressed him by the title that had been stripped from him.
“I’m staying right here,” he said firmly. “And so are all of you. They can’t shut us down. Waterman won’t let that happen.”
San Simeon, California: Board of Education
“Meeting will come to order,” said chairperson Lisa Goodfellow. The four other men and women sitting around the oval table stopped their conversations and turned their attention to the chairperson.
Seated at the opposite end of the table from the chairperson was Oliver Maxwell. While the board members were dressed in California casual clothes—open-neck shirts and relaxed, comfortable jeans—Maxwell wore a sky blue sports jacket over his shirt and tie.
“In deference to Mr. Maxwell, who has a plane to catch, I propose we consider his item on the agenda before anything else. Any objections?”
No one said a word. The chairperson smiled at Maxwell. “The floor is all yours, sir.”
Maxwell remained in his chair, smiling back at the board members. He was a stocky man in his late forties, with crinkles around his deep-set eyes.
“This won’t take long. I represent the Mars Foundation, as most of you already know. The Foundation wants to make its package of learning materials available to the schools of your district.” Almost as an afterthought, he added, “For free, of course.”
“A package of learning materials?” asked one of the board members.
“About Mars. About the exploration work going on there,” Maxwell said. “The life forms that they’ve found. The cliff dwellings. The ancient volcanoes. The kids’ll love it.”
“About Mars,” said the chairperson, almost in a whisper.
“Videos, texts, pictures … the kids’ll love it,” Maxwell repeated.
One of the two male board members, tanned and sun-blond as a beachcomber, knit his brows. “This is science stuff, isn’t it?”
Nodding, Maxwell replied, “The exploration’s being done by scientists, yes. But it’s exciting. It’s an adventure in discovery!”
The beachcomber shook his head. Turning to the chairperson, he complained, “Look, they tried to ram Darwin down our throats years ago. These scientists are always trying to sneak their ideas into the school curriculum. It’s our duty to protect our children from their secularist propaganda.”
“But it’s not propaganda!” Maxwell cried, sounding genuinely hurt. “It’s real. They’re actually searching for the remains of a village that intelligent Martians lived in millions of years ago!”
“Yeah. And I’m descended from a monkey.”
“There’s no proof that intelligent people lived on Mars,” said the woman across the table. “It’s all unproven theories.”
“But—”
The chairperson smiled sweetly at Maxwell once more. “We thank you for the Foundation’s very generous offer. The board will take it under consideration.”
“But—”
“I know you have a plane to catch. We’ll get in touch with you once we’ve come to a decision.”
Reluctantly Maxwell got to his feet and shuffled out of the meeting room. He knew what the board’s decision would be. And he didn’t look forward to the next stop on his itinerary: Salt Lake City.
Albuquerque: Duran Condominiums
Jamie Waterman awoke slowly from his dream about the Martian village. For long moments he lay unstirring in his bed, looking up at the soft eggshell white of the ceiling, his eyes focused on the past.
Al’s been dead more than twenty years, he said to himself, and still I dream about him. Turning his head, he saw his wife sleeping beside him. Vijay’s beautiful dark face looked relaxed, untroubled. Jamie wished he could feel that way.
I was there when Al died, when the Sky Dancers took him away, Jamie remembered. Not like when Jimmy died. Vijay was alone then. I was a hundred million kilometers away. She had to deal with our son’s death by herself.
Slowly he blinked away the memory of his dream, the memories of the dead, and slipped quietly out of bed. Vijay stirred slightly but didn’t wake up, her long dark hair tousled, her lustrous eyes softly closed. I’ll never leave you again, Jamie promised silently. Not for anything.