Dreiser listened patiently. He then said, ‘We chose to make the announcement as informally as possible, hoping not to alarm people. You will find the strategy is largely successful. People will cluck like hens and then get on with their day-to-day business. And you, Tom, I trust, will regain your customary good humour.’
It was the meek answer that increases wrath. ‘You told me when we spoke about Olympus that it was in no sense alive.’
‘I never said that.’
‘When we were preparing to address the assembly over a year ago, did you or did you not tell me there was no life on Mars?’
‘No. I may have said we had found no life on Mars. Olympus was so big that it escaped our notice…’ He chuckled. ‘I may have said we should expect Martian life to be very different from life Downstairs. So it proves.’
‘You’re trying to tell me that this monstrous thing has just flopped out of the skies from space, or from another universe?’
‘I might try to tell you many things, Tom, if you were fit to listen. I merely tell you this for now – that Olympus is entirely indigenous to Mars.’
When I asked how it was that he had made this discovery, rather late in our second year of isolation on Mars, Dreiser replied that a study of satellite photographs had convinced him there was some movement in the region.
‘To whom did you first communicate this knowledge?’
He hesitated. ‘Tom, there are two things you should know. Firstly, we owe this perception – a perception I will admit I resisted at first – to the young genius you turned up, Kathi Skadmorr. What a clever young woman she is, what a quick brain!’
‘Okay, Dreiser. And the second thing?’
‘This object that Kathi insists on calling the “Watch-tower of the Universe” is definitely on the move. And it’s moving in our direction, slow but sure. More news later. Goodbye.’
He signed off. I felt mortified that I had spoken so ill advisedly, and that the conversation had been recorded.
I went to lie down.
The physicists proposed sending an investigative expedition to Olympus. They were told to wait. Caution was to be the order of the day. Olympus might have a slower time sense than biological beings and could be planning a counterattack, so any close approach might imperil human lives.
I held private discussions with Jimmy Dust and his scientific colleagues, including the young man who maintained that cephalopods possessed intelligence.
‘Human nature being what it is, the wish to believe in something bigger than themselves comes naturally to people,’ one of the women said. ‘But we need to discourage the idea already circulating in some quarters that Olympus is a god. As far as our limited knowledge goes, it’s just a huge lump of rather inert organic material.’
‘Yet we call it Olympus – traditionally the home of the gods.’
‘That’s just a semantic quibble. Our guess is that this being is of low intelligence, being rupicolous.’
‘Eh? What’s rupicolous?’
‘Means it lives off rocks. Not a bright thing to do.’
‘How so? At least there’s a generous supply of rock around right here…’
The discussion broke up without coming to any conclusion.
Adminex invited Hawkwood to come to the Hindenburg Hall and address an assembled crowd on the subject of Olympus. In particular we wished him to clarify its nature.
He agreed as long as his talk took the form of an interview. If I would ask the questions. I agreed. When we had both prepared for the talk, an assembly was called.
Since the occasion was so important, children were permitted to be present. In they streamed, carrying their tammies – tammies that had been fed and cosseted before their entry.
Dreiser arrived in style. He was prompt. He came with a retinue of four, the wispy Poulsen, another scientist, a blonde personal assistant whom we had met, as Cang Hai reminded me, in Dreiser’s office, and a fourth member whom I hardly recognised at first. Gone were her thick and curly chestnut locks. Her hair was now black, straight, and cut short. It was Kathi Skadmorr. When she shook my hand and smiled, I knew that smile.