He listened to Boone’s report with his usual impassivity. Such a parody of the scientist, John thought. He even wore a lab coat. Seeing his characteristic blink made John think of a story he had heard one of Sax’s assistants tell, to a laughing audience at a party: in a secret experiment gone awry, a hundred lab rats that had been injected with an intelligence booster became geniuses. They revolted, escaped from their cages, captured their principal investigator, and strapped him down and retro-injected all their minds into his body, using a method they invented on the spot— and that scientist was Saxifrage Russell, whitecoated, blinking, twitching, inquisitive, lab-bound. His brain the sum of a hundred hyperintelligent rats, “and named for a flower like lab rats are, it’s their little joke, see?”
It explained a lot. John smiled as he finished his report, and Sax cocked his head at him curiously. “Do you think this truck was meant to kill you?”
“I don’t know.”
“How do the people there seem?”
“Scared.”
“Think they’re in on it?”
John shrugged. “I doubt it. They’re probably just worried about what happens next.”
Sax flicked a hand out. “Sabotage like that won’t make the slightest dent in the project,” he said mildly.
“I know.”
“Who’s doing this, John?”
“I don’t know.”
“Could it be Ann, do you think? Has she become another prophet, like Hiroko or Arkady, with followers and a program and the like?”
“You have followers and a program too,” John reminded him.
“But I’m not telling my followers to wreck things and try to kill people.”
“Some people think you’re trying to wreck Mars. And people will certainly die as a result of terraforming, in accidents.”
“What are you saying?”
“Just reminding you. Trying to get you to see why someone might do this.”
“So you do think it’s Ann.”
“Or Arkady, or Hiroko, or someone we’ve never heard of in one of the new colonies. There are a lot of people here now. A lot of factions.”
“I know.” Sax walked over to a countertop, drained his battered old coffee mug. Finally he said, “I’d like you to try to find out who it is. Go where you need to go. Go talk to Ann. Reason with her.” There was a plaintive note in his voice: “I can’t even talk to her anymore.”
John stared at him, surprised at the display of emotion. Sax took this silence for reluctance, and went on: “I know it isn’t exactly your thing, but everyone will talk to you. You’re practically the only one left we can say that about. I know you’re doing the mohole work, but you can get your team to do your part of that, and keep visiting the moholes as part of this inquiry. There really isn’t anyone else who can do it. There’s no real police to turn to. Although if things keep happening, UNOMA will provide some.”
“Or the transnationals.” Boone considered it. The sight of that truck, falling out of the sky . . .”All right. I’ll go talk to Ann, anyway. After that we should get together and talk about security for all the terraforming projects. If we can stop anything more from happening, that will keep UNOMA out.”
“Thanks, John.”
Boone wandered out onto his suite’s balcony. The concourse was filled with Hokkaido pines, the chilled air stiff with resin. Copper figures walked below, among the tree trunks. Boone considered the new situation. For ten years now he had worked for Russell on terraforming, managing the moholes and doing PR and the like, and he enjoyed the work, but he wasn’t on the cutting edge of any of the sciences involved, and so he was out of the decision-making loop. He knew that many people thought of him as a figurehead only, a celebrity for consumption back on Earth, a dumb space jock who had gotten lucky once and was living off that for good. That didn’t bother John; there were always knee-high people hacking away, trying to get everyone down to their size. That was okay, especially since in his case they were wrong. His power was considerable, although perhaps only he could see the full extent of it, as it consisted of an endless succession of face-to-face meetings, of the influence he had over what people chose to do. Power wasn’t a matter of job titles, after all. Power was a matter of vision, persuasiveness, freedom of movement, fame, influence. The figurehead stands at the front, after all, pointing the way.
Despite all that, there was something to be said for this new task. He could feel that already. It would be problematic, difficult, perhaps risky . . . above all, challenging. A new challenge; he liked that. Going back into his suite, getting into bed (John Boone Slept Here!) it occurred to him that now he was going to be not only the first man on Mars, but the first detective. He grinned at the thought, and the last action of the omegendorph set his nerves aglow.
• • •
Ann Clayborne was doing a survey in the mountains surrounding the Argyre Basin, which meant John could check out a glider and fly from Senzeni Na to her. So early the next morning he took the elevator balloon up the mooring mast to the stationary dirigible floating over the town, exulting as he rose in the ever-expanding view of the big Thaumasia canyons. From the dirigible he lowered himself into the cockpit of one of the gliders hooked to its underside. After securing himself he unhooked, and the glider dropped like a stone until he ran it into the mohole thermal, which tossed it violently upward. He fought for control and banked the big gossamer craft into a steep rising gyre, whooping as he battled the intense buffeting; it was like riding a soap bubble over a bonfire!
At 5,000 meters the plume cloud flattened and spread out to the east. John swooped out of his spiral and headed southeast, playing with the glider as he went to get a feel for it. He would have to ride the winds carefully to make it to Argyre.
He aimed into the sun’s smeary yellow blaze. Wind keened over the wings. The land below him was a dark rough orange, shading to a very light orange at the horizon. The southern highlands were wildly pocked in every direction, with the raw primordial lunar look that saturation cratering always had. John loved flying over it, and he piloted unconsciously, concentrating on the land below. It was precious to sit back and fly, feeling the wind as if under his elbows, watching the land and not thinking a thing. He was sixty-four years old in this year 2047 (or “M-year 10” as he usually thought of it), and he had been the most famous man alive for almost thirty of those years; and nowadays he was happiest when he was alone, and flying.
After an hour had passed, he started thinking about his new task. It was important not to get caught up in fantasies of magnifying glasses and cigar ash, or gumshoe with handgun; there was work he could do even as he flew. He called up Sax and asked if he could connect his AI into the UNOMA emigration and planetary travel records, without alerting UNOMA to the connection. After some investigation Sax got back to him and said that he could manage that, and so John sent a sequence of questions through, and then continued to fly. An hour and many craters later, Pauline’s red light blinked rapidly, indicating a downloading of raw data. John asked the AI to run the data through various analyses, and when she was done he studied the results on the screen. Patterns of movement were confusing, but he hoped that when matched with the sabotage incidents, something might turn up. Of course there were people moving around off the record, the hidden colony among them; and who knew what Hiroko and the others thought of the terraforming projects? Still, it was worth a look.
The Nereidium Montes popped over the horizon ahead. Mars had never had much tectonic movement, and so mountain ranges were rare. Those that existed tended to be crater rims writ large, rings of ejecta thrown out by impacts so great that the debris fell in two or three concentric ranges, each many kilometers wide, and extremely rugged. Hellas and Argyre, being the biggest basins, therefore had the biggest ranges; and the only other major mountain range, the Phlegra Montes on the slope of Elysium, was probably the fragmentary remains of a basin impact later inundated by the Elysium volcanoes, or by an ancient Oceanus Borealis. Debate
raged over that question, and Ann, John’s final authority in such matters, had never expressed an opinion on it.
The Nereidium Montes made up the northern rim around Argyre, but currently Ann and her team were investigating the southern rim, the Charitum Montes. Boone adjusted his course southward, and in the early afternoon he soared low over the broad flat plain of the Argyre Basin. After the wild cratering of the highlands, the basin floor seemed smooth indeed, a flat yellowish plain bounded by the big curve of rim ridges. From his vantage he could see about ninety degrees of the arc of the rim, enough to give him a sense of the size of the impact that had formed Argyre; it was an amazing sight. Flying over thousands of Martian craters had given Boone a sense of the sizes they came in, and Argyre was simply off the scale. A quite big crater named Galle was no more than a pockmark in Argyre’s rim! A whole world must have crashed in here! Or, at the very least, a damn big asteroid.
Inside the southeast curve of the rim, on the basin floor against the foothills of the Charitum, he spotted the thin white line of a landing strip. Easy to spot human constructs in such desolation, their regularity stood out like a beacon. Thermals were rising hard off the sun-warmed hills, and he turned down into one, dropping with a vibratory humm, the craft’s wings bouncing visibly as it stooped. Dropping like a rock, like that asteroid, John thought with a grin, and he pulled up for the landing with a dramatic last flourish, putting down with as much precision as he could muster, aware of his reputation as a hot flyer, which of course had to be reinforced at every opportunity. Part of the job…
But it turned out there were only two people in the trailers by the strip, and neither of them had watched him land. They were inside watching TV news from Earth. They looked up when he came in the inner lock door, and jumped to their feet to greet him. Ann was up one of the mountain canyons with a team, they told him, probably no more than two hours’ drive away. John ate lunch with them, two Brit women with North accents, very tough and charming. Then he took a rover and followed the tracks up a cleft into the Charitum. An hour’s twisting climb up a flat-bottomed arroyo brought him to a mobile trailer, with three rovers parked outside it. Together they gave it the look of a dessicated café in the Mojave.
The trailer was unoccupied. Footprints led away from the camp in many directions. After thinking it over Boone climbed a knoll west of camp, and sat down on its peak. He lay on the rock and slept until the cold penetrated his walker. Then he sat up and tongued a capsule of omegendorph, and watched the black shadows of the hills creep east. He thought about what had happened at Senzeni Na, running through his memories of the hours before and after the accident, the looks on people’s faces, what they had said. The image of the falling truck gave his pulse a little surge.
Copper figures appeared in a cleft between hills to the west. He stood and descended the knoll, and met them down at the trailer.
“What are you doing here?” Ann said over the first hundred’s band.
“I want to talk.”
She grunted and switched off.
The trailer would have been a bit crowded even without him. They sat in the main room knee-to-knee, while Simon Frazier heated spaghetti sauce and boiled water for pasta in the little kitchen nook. The trailer’s sole window faced east, and as they ate they watched the shadow of the mountains stretch out over the floor of the great basin. John had brought along a half-liter bottle of Utopian cognac, and he broke it out after dinner to moans of approval. As the areologists sipped he cleaned the dishes (“I want to”) and asked how their investigation was going. They were looking for evidence of ancient glacial episodes, which if found would support a model of the planet’s early history that included oceans filling the low spots.
But Ann, John thought as he listened to them; would she want to find evidence of an oceanic past? It was a model that tended to lend moral support to the terraforming project, implying as it did that they were only restoring an earlier state of things. So probably she would not want to find any such evidence. Would that disinclination bias her work? Well, sure. If not consciously, then deeper. Consciousness was just a thin lithosphere over a big hot core, after all. Detectives had to remember that.
But everyone in the trailer seemed to agree that they weren’t finding any evidence for glaciation, and they were all good areologists. There were high basins that resembled cirques, and high valleys with the classic U-shape of glacial valleys, and some dome-and-wall configurations that might have been the result of glacial plucking. All these features had been seen in satellite photos, along with one or two bright flashes that some people had thought might be reflections from glacial polish. But on the ground none of it was holding up. They had found no glacial polish, even in the most wind-protected sections of the U-shaped valleys; no moraines, lateral or butt; no signs of plucking, or of transition lines where nanatuks would have stuck out of even the highest levels of ancient ice. Nothing. It was another case of what they called sky areology, which had a history going back to the early satellite photos, and even to the telescopes. The canals had been sky areology, and many more bad hypotheses had been formulated in the same way, hypotheses that were only now being tested with the rigor of ground areology. Most collapsed under the weight of surface data, got tossed in the canal as they said.
The glacial theory, however, and the oceanic model of which it was part, had always been more persistent than most. First, because almost every model of the planet’s formation indicated that there should have been a lot of water outgassing, and it had to have gone somewhere. And second, John thought, because there were a lot of people who would be comforted if the oceanic model were true; they would feel less uneasy about the morality of terraforming. Opponents to terraforming, therefore . . . No, he was not surprised that Ann’s team was not finding anything. Feeling the cognac a bit, and irritated by her unfriendliness, he said from the kitchen, “But if there were glaciers the most recent would have been, what, a billion years ago? That much time would take care of any of the superficial signs, I should think, glacial polish or moraines or nanatuks. Leaving nothing but the gross landforms, which is what you have. Right?”
Ann had been silent, but now she said, “The landforms aren’t unique to glaciation. All of them are common in Martian ranges, because they were all formed by rock falling out of the sky. Every kind of formation you can think of is out here somewhere, bizarre shapes limited only by the angle of repose.” She had refused any cognac, which surprised John, and now she stared at the floor with a disgusted look.
“Not U-shaped valleys, surely,” John said.
“Yes, U-shaped valleys too.”
“The problem is that the oceanic model isn’t very falsifiable,” Simon said quietly. “You can keep failing to find good evidence for it, and we are, but that doesn’t disprove it.”
The kitchen clean, John asked Ann to go out for a sunset walk. She hesitated, unwilling; but it was one of her rituals and everyone knew it, and with a quick grimace and a hard glance she agreed.
Once outside he led her up to the same peak he had napped on. The sky was a plum-colored arch over the black serrated ridges surrounding them, and stars were popping into existence in a flood, hundreds per eyeblink. He stood by her side; she stared away from him. The ragged skyline might have been a scene from Earth. She was a bit taller than him, a gaunt, angular silhouette. John liked her, but whatever reciprocal liking she may have had for him— and they had had some good talks in years past— had dissipated when he chose to work with Sax. He could have done anything he liked, her hard looks said, and yet he had chosen terraforming.
Well, it was true. He put his hand before her, forefinger raised. She punched her wristpad and suddenly her breathing sighed in his ear. “What,” she said, without looking his way.
“It’s about the sabotage incidents,” he said.
“I thought so. I suppose Russell thinks I’m behind them.”
“It’s not so much that—”
“Does he think I’m stupid?
Does he imagine I think a little bit of vandalism will stop you from your boys’ games?”
“Well, it’s more than little bits. There’ve been six major incidents now, and any of them could have killed people.”
“Knocking mirrors out of orbit can kill people?”
“If they’re doing maintenance on them.”
She hmphed. “What else has happened.”
“A truck was knocked off one of the mohole shaft roads yesterday, and almost landed on me.” He heard her breath catch. “That’s the third truck to go. And that mirror was knocked into a spin with a maintenance worker on it, and she had to do a free solo to a station. It took her more than an hour to get there, and she almost didn’t make it. And then an explosives dump went off by accident at the Elysian mohole, a minute after a whole crew left it. And all the lichen at Underhill were killed by a virus that shut down the whole lab.”
Ann shrugged. “What do you expect from GEMs? It could have been an accident, I’m surprised it doesn’t happen more often.”
“It wasn’t an accident.”
“It all adds up to peanuts. Does Russell think I’m stupid?”
“You know he doesn’t. But it’s a matter of tipping the balance. A lot of Terran money is being invested in the project, but it wouldn’t take much bad publicity to get a lot of it to drop out.”