Larkin hiked up the ramp to the lip of the excavation, telling himself that he’d never volunteer for Carleton again. He doesn’t own me! he said to himself. He thinks he’s god almighty down there but he’s nothing but a disgraced former scientist. What kind of a science is anthropology, anyway? Digging up bones and making guesses, that’s all they do. Any real data they get comes from chemical analyses and radioactive dating.
The biologist walked alone along the edge of the excavation, heading for the dome. He glanced down into the pit, at the people working away down there. Slaves, he thought. You poor fools. You let him dominate you. He needs you a lot more than you need him. Maybe I should lead a slave revolt, Larkin said to himself. Let’s see how far the high and mighty ex-professor could go without the rest of us toiling away for him.
The late afternoon sun slanted into the excavation, throwing sharp shadows of the low crumbled remains of the building foundations against the red, dusty ground. Larkin looked out at the blank area where he’d been digging. It didn’t look exactly blank now, he saw. Some faint undulations here and there, just barely visible from up here with the sun at this angle. He shook his head. Too small to be building foundations; they’re just tiny little squares. Oblongs, really.
I ought to tell Carleton about it, he thought. Then immediately answered himself, To hell with that and to hell with him. Let him find it out for himself. He’s the big-shot anthropologist. Let’s see how smart he really is.
Tithonium Base: Airlock Hatch
Later that afternoon, Zeke Larkin was still irritated by his encounter with Carleton, but working hard to forget it. He saw the anthropologist in deep discussion with Sal Hasdrubal over by the suit lockers near the main airlock hatch and decided to go over and try to make amends with him.
I should’ve been more reasonable, he told himself. He’s a jerk, but I did volunteer to help him, I guess.
As he approached them, he heard Hasdrubal say, “But your volunteers have found half-a-dozen different varieties of seeds in the dig. If you could ask them to try to locate the farmland beyond the edge of the village—”
“Not possible,” said Carleton. “We’ve got our hands full as it is. We’ve only got about half the village uncovered.”
“But the farm area’d be a tremendous find for the biological study—”
“I said no,” Carleton snapped.
Larkin’s temper got the better of him. “Don’t waste your breath, Sal,” he said. “The high-and-mighty professor isn’t interested in biology or anything else except salvaging his own reputation.”
Carleton whirled on him. “You’re in a pile of trouble, mister! I’m your supervisor and—”
“Hey, I volunteered to help you,” Larkin countered, his voice rising loud enough to echo off the dome’s arched rafters. “I’m not your goddamn indentured slave!”
“You made a commitment, damn you!” Carleton hollered right back at him. “You can’t go back on it now!”
The two men were standing nose to nose in front of the suit lockers, by the main airlock hatch, both of them red in the face and glaring at each other. Their shouting brought everything in the dome to a stop. Hasdrubal looked completely stunned; he didn’t know what to say.
“You can’t make me stay in that damned pit of yours one goddam minute longer than I want to!” Larkin yelled, his shoulders hunching, hands balling into fists.
“The hell I can’t!” Carleton roared back.
Dr. Chang came scurrying across the dome and tried to get between them, but it was clear that he sided with Zeke. “All workers at the dig are volunteers,” he told Carleton, shaking a finger in his face. “Not contract laborers.”
Carleton threw up his hands. “I am a man surrounded by incompetence,” he shouted. “This is the curse of my life, chained to fellows of little mark nor likelihood.”
Chang started to get red in the face, too. “You are not director of this mission! I am!”
“You’re nothing but—”
“Hold it!” Jamie jumped in, practically running from his quarters across the dome to get between Carleton and Chang. “Let’s lower the voltage here before we start saying things we’ll really regret.”
Carleton glared at Chang, past Jamie’s shoulder, and Chang glared back. Larkin stood off to one side, looking just as furious as the two of them.
Jamie said, “Dr. Chang, can we use your office to continue this discussion?”
Chang looked as if he was going to choke, but he nodded wordlessly. The four of them—Carleton, Chang, Larkin and Waterman—went into Chang’s office and slid the door shut. Hasdrubal shrugged as he watched them go, then turned and walked away. Somebody’s gonna explode, he said to himself.
Once he’d gotten the three of them seated in Chang’s office, Jamie said quietly, “I hope you’ve got the shouting out of your systems. This is no place for a schoolyard brawl.”
Looking straight at Chang, Carleton said, “We had an agreement in place. The volunteers are committed to work the number of hours they agreed to. Nobody forced them to sign up to help me.”
“Volunteer is the operative word,” Zeke Larkin said, his voice much lower, though still quavering with anger. “A volunteer can put an end to his service whenever he wants to.”
Sitting rigidly behind his desk, his face a frozen mask, Chang dipped his chin in the slightest gesture of agreement.
Jamie was still on his feet. “You both have reasonable points,” he said. “But the important issue is this: there’s work to be done. We have this village to uncover, and there will be more villages, in time. Carter can’t get the job done without volunteers to help with the digging.”
“Volunteers,” Larkin repeated.
“But once you volunteer,” Jamie said, trying to make it sound reasonable, “you’ve committed yourself to a certain amount of man-hours.”
Chang puffed out a breath, then said, “I have spent many hours setting up work schedules for volunteers.”
Larkin shifted uncomfortably on his chair. “I have my own work to think about. I should be—”
“You should be living up to your commitments,” Carleton snapped.
Before the biologist could reply, Jamie said, “Look. We’re a team here. A family. Families have arguments all the time, but we shouldn’t let an argument get in the way of doing what we came here to do.”
“What we’re doing here,” Larkin said heatedly, “is rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.”
Jamie stared at him.
“This world is dying,” the biologist went on. “The endolithic lichen are dying off. There’s not enough water available to support—”
“Permafrost contains oceans of water!” Chang interrupted.
“Frozen. The SLiMEs can tap the permafrost, but nothing on the surface of Mars can. Eventually the last of the lichen will die off and the surface will be totally sterile. Then the SLiMEs’ll be next.”
He’s right, Jamie thought. Mars is dying. But he heard himself ask, “How long is ‘eventually’?”
Larkin shrugged his thin shoulders. “A hundred thousand years. A million. What difference does it make? The planet’s dying and there’s nothing we can do about it.”
Carleton said, “All the more important, then, to excavate what remains of the village. And anything else we can find.”
“Digging up the dead,” Larkin muttered. “While I ought to be seeing how long the SLiMEs can last.”
“It’s important!” Carleton insisted. “Vital!”