“Or panicked for some reason and then suffered the stroke,” Vosnesensky said, heavy with gloom.
Connors was also deeply somber. “Whatever happened, the politicians are going apeshit. It doesn’t look good to have somebody killed.
“He wasn’t killed,” Jamie snapped. “He died.”
“D’you think that matters in Tokyo? Or Washington?” Connors growled.
“No, I guess it doesn’t.”
Vosnesensky said, “We will start back at first light tomorrow morning, as ordered. In the meantime, I will transmit to you all the videotape and other data we have accumulated.”
“Okay. I’ll set up the computer to receive your transmission.”
He’s not even mentioning the cliff dwellings, Jamie realized. Not a word about them.
“Can I talk with Dr. Patel, please?” he asked Connors. “Is he there?”
“Sure.”
In a few moments Connors’s image was replaced by the round, dark face of the geologist from India. Both the geologists on this mission are Indians, Jamie thought without humor. We can thank Columbus and his wacky sense of direction for that.
Patel’s dark skin seemed to shine always, as if covered with a fine sheen of perspiration or newly rubbed with oil. His eyes were large and liquid, giving him the innocent look of a child near tears.
“I would appreciate it, Rava, if you’d get O’Hara to put the videotape footage we shot today through the image-enhancement program,” Jamie said to his fellow geologist.
“Is there something in particular you wish me to examine?”
Jamie realized his fellow geologist had not bothered to listen to his oral report. Probably too busy gossiping with the rest of them about the accident.
“You’ll see a formation in a cleft set into the cliff face,” he said. After a moment’s hesitation, “It-it almost looks like buildings erected there deliberately.”
Those liquid dark eyes went even rounder. “Buildings?” Patel squeaked. “Artificial buildings?”
Jamie forced himself to state calmly, “The odds against them being artifacts are tremendous; you know that as well as I do.” He took a breath. “But they sure remind me of the cliff dwellings I’ve seen in the southwest.”
Patel blinked several times. Then he said, “Yes, of course. I will study the tapes most carefully. I will ask Dr. O’Hara to put them through the image-enhancement program. By the time you return here we will have the data thoroughly analyzed, I assure you.”
Jamie said, “Thanks.” In his gut he felt an irrational suspicion that they would distort the data, mess up the images, fix it so that the cliff dwellings he had seen would look like nothing more than weathered old rock.
He crawled into his bunk at last. Vosnesensky turned out all the lights except the dim telltales on the control panel up in the cockpit.
“Sleep well, Jamie,” the Russian said, yawning as he stretched out in the bunk on the opposite wall.
“You too, Mikhail.”
The soft night wind of Mars brushed past the parked rover, stroking its metallic skin mere inches away from Jamie’s listening ears. He strained to catch a hint of a voice in the wind, even the moaning wail of a long-dead Martian spirit. Nothing.
No ghosts haunting the night here, Jamie said drowsily to himself. He felt disappointed.
DEATH
The red world was not only farther from Father Sun than the blue world. It was also much closer to the small worldlets that still swarmed in the darkness of the void, leftover bits and pieces from the time of the beginning. Often they streaked down onto the red world, howling like monsters as they traced their demon’s trails of fire across the pale sky.
Small, cold, bombarded by sky-demons, its air and water slowly wasting away, if the red world bore any life at all its creatures must have struggled mightily to keep the spark of existence glowing within them.
Even so, death struck swiftly, and without remorse.
One of the biggest of those devil worlds drifted close enough to the red world to feel its pull. It was a huge mountain of rock roaming through the darkness of space, a thousand times bigger than the rock that caused the Meteor Crater to the south of the land where The People live. For a thousand thousand years it danced a delicate ceremony with the red world, approaching it and then slipping away into the outer depths of the emptiness. Like the ritual dancers of The People it moved to the rhythm of eternity. Each time it approached the red world it skimmed closer, each near-miss a temporary reprieve, a promise of what was to come.