“Dr. W?”
Jamie broke out of his thoughts and saw Billy Graycloud walking beside him.
“Had enough of the debate?” he asked.
Graycloud smiled shyly. “I figure they’ll start asking me about my religious beliefs pretty soon. I don’t want to get involved in it.”
“Smart lad,” Jamie said. “We’ve got enough to do without getting into arguments over religion. They’ll start yelling at each other pretty soon.”
“I guess. Nothing like religion to start people fightin’.”
Jamie smiled bitterly. “When you’re sure you’re right, when you’ve been told all your life that these beliefs are the absolute truth…” He shook his head. “People have done horrible things in the name of religion.”
They walked side by side toward Jamie’s quarters.
“I guess that’s why they’re scared of science,” Graycloud muttered, as much to himself as to Jamie. “Scientists don’t talk about truth. They look for facts.”
“And we change our minds, too, when new facts contradict what we believed.”
Graycloud nodded. He looked to Jamie as if he was about to say something, but he stopped himself and remained silent.
“Is there something else?”
Graycloud pursed his lips, as if searching his memory. “Well, yeah, there is.”
Jamie waited for the youngster to go on. After several silent steps he prodded, “What is it, Billy?”
Frowning slightly, Graycloud said, “The translation.”
“Getting anywhere?”
“Kinda. Maybe. I’m not sure.”
“What’s the problem?”
“Could you come over to the comm center? I can show you what I’ve done so far.”
Nodding, Jamie changed course and walked with Graycloud to the communications center. The place was silent except for the hum of the consoles. Two women were on duty, chatting quietly together, headphones clipped to their ears while their display screens flickered with routine messages. Graycloud sat at an unused console and booted up the computer. Jamie pulled one of the little wheeled chairs over beside him and sat on it.
The screen showed the inscriptions carved into the wall of the cliff structure. Graycloud scrolled the screen’s cursor to the image of a circle with short lines emanating from it, north, south, east and west.
“Okay,” Graycloud said, licking his lips. “That one I call the sun.
“Father Sun,” Jamie murmured. “Like the Navaho sun symbol.”
“Right. Okay. That one’s easy. Now this one…” The cursor drifted to a wriggly pair of lines and stopped. “This one might mean ‘water.’ Or ‘river.’ ”
“That’s reasonable,” said Jamie.
“And this one…” The cursor swung to a bulbous symbol that reminded Jamie of a head of broccoli. “Might be ‘tree’ or ‘plant.’ ”
“Or ‘crops,’ ” Jamie suggested.
Graycloud’s brows hiked up. “Yeah. Crops. Could be.”
Jamie patted the younger man’s shoulder. “You’re making progress, Billy.”
“Am I?” Graycloud turned toward him and Jamie could see the doubt and worry in his eyes. “Or am I just screwin’ around?”
“Progress,” Jamie said firmly.
Graycloud shook his head warily. “I don’t know, Dr. W. All I’m really doing is assigning our words to their symbols. Arbitrarily. How do we know the circle means the sun? It might mean ‘crater’ or ‘beach ball,’ for all we know.”
Jamie almost laughed. “Probably not ‘beach ball.’ ”
“But you see the problem?” Graycloud said, almost pleading. “I’m just assigning our meanings to their symbols. It’s GIGO: garbage in, garbage out.”
For a moment Jamie said nothing, thinking hard as he looked at this earnest young man and considered his problem. At last he said, “The proof will be in the message you get out of the symbols, Billy. When you run these meanings through the computer, will a meaningful message come out of them or will it be meaningless nonsense?”
“But we could be fooling ourselves.”
“How?”
“I mean, even if we get a message that seems to have some meaning to it, it could be just the meaning we put into it. It could have nothing to do with what the Martians wanted to say.”
“I see.”
“I could be wasting my time here.”
Jamie smiled. “Billy, you’ve got thesis blues.”
“Huh?”
“Every graduate student goes through this when they have to write their thesis. At some point in the project it all starts to look like nonsense, garbage, junk. You feel certain that you’re wasting your time, that what you’re doing is all gibberish and it’s never going to go anywhere. You start to wonder if you shouldn’t just toss it all down the chute and go out and sell used cars or paint houses or do something, anything, that’s more useful than the crap you’re working on.”
Graycloud stared at him for a long silent moment. Then, “Did you ever feel that way?”
Jamie nodded, remembering. “With my master’s thesis. And especially with the doctorate. Stratigraphy of the Potential Oil-Bearing Deposits of Northern New Mexico. I almost quit school altogether when I was working on that one.”
Blinking, Graycloud said, “But there aren’t any oil-bearing deposits in northern New Mexico. Are there?”
“Not much. Plenty of dinosaur fossils, though. I damned near changed my major to paleontology.”
“Really?”
“I thought about it. But I stayed with geology and that thesis earned me my Ph.D.”
Graycloud looked uncertain, troubled.
“Keep plugging at it, Billy. I know it looks like a mess now, but you’ll get there. It’ll be worth it in the end.”
“I sure hope so.”
Silently, Jamie replied, So do I, kid. So do I.
Tithonium Base: The Path
“Must’ve been some dreams you had, love,” Vijay said as she dressed for the day.
Freshly showered, Jamie looked up at her as he pulled on his softboots. “What do yon mean?”
“You were tossing all night. Nearly pushed me out of the bed, you did.”
“No!”
She sat on the edge of the bed beside him and put a hand on his shoulder. “What was it, Jamie? What were you dreaming about?”
Jamie tried to remember. “It was all pretty confusing.”
“You called out to your grandfather. More’n once.”
Nodding, he replied, “Yes, Al was there. And Billy Graycloud. And you, too.”
“That’s what you were moaning about?”
“It’s a jumble. It doesn’t make any sense. The more I try to remember it the blurrier it gets.”
Vijay got to her feet, smiling. “Well, whatever it is, I hope you resolve it. Kept me up most of the night.”
She waited while he finished dressing. As he took the bear fetish from atop the bed table and slipped it into his coverall pocket, Jamie thought about his dreams.
There was more than one, he remembered. I was with Al and Billy in the village, then I was at an airport somewhere with Dex. And then with Vijay, here on Mars again. And they were all dying. Everything was dying. The people in the village, Al, Billy, Vijay—everybody was dying and there wasn’t anything I could do about it.
“Where are you, love?”
He twitched with surprise and realized that he’d been standing by the bed table for several minutes, lost in thought.
“I’m sorry,” he mumbled.
Vijay smiled again. “Come on, mate. Breakfast time. Then I’ve got to write up a half dozen psych profiles.”
“And I’ve got to sort out the personnel files, see who wants to stay and who has to go.”
They left their quarters and started across the dome toward the cafeteria, Jamie plodding along like a schoolboy trudging unwillingly to class. Morning sunlight filled the dome with brightness.