Writers of the Future, Volume 28 Page 6

  He wouldn’t hesitate to tell me if he’d found a huge underground aquifer or a large platinum deposit. So he’d found something momentous. Was it some kind of moss or lichen living under the sand? Or a fossil of some long-dead plant or animal? I itched to question him, to threaten or coerce him into telling me, but knew that wouldn’t work with Jack. He’d tell me or he wouldn’t, and nothing I said or did at this point would change that.

  By midafternoon we came to a low ridge. We were almost on top of it before I realized it was the ejecta blanket from an ancient crater. I followed him up the gentle slope and looked down on a chaotic scene.

  The crater floor was covered with boot prints, Nellie’s tracks and piles of stone that formed a ring, easily a hundred yards across. I had a sinking feeling. Jack had obviously arranged the stones.

  “Wow, Martian crop circles?”

  He ignored me and followed the rim until he and Nellie turned into a narrow opening where the crater wall had collapsed. Their past traffic had packed the fall into a hard ramp that led down to the floor. As we descended, I saw a hole surrounded by darker, finely spread sand. I recognized the robot’s handiwork. Jack had slept there at some point.

  He went directly to the hole, mounted a collapsible ladder already inside and disappeared into the dark interior.

  My excitement grew as I followed, nearly falling off the ladder twice in my haste to get to the bottom. About halfway down, the hole opened into the upside-down mushroom shape where Nellie’s inflatable shelter had once expanded.

  “Careful,” Jack said. “There’s a big hole in the floor.”

  I stepped off the ladder and in the dim light could see the bottom littered with gravel and several large discarded bags made from rope and a cut-up plastic tarp. I turned on my helmet lamp and saw a large hole in the floor, nearly two yards in diameter just a few feet from the ladder. Wispy steam floated from inside. I looked up to ask Jack why, but he was gone. I spun around and saw a large opening in one wall. Light flickered inside.

  “Jack?”

  “In the tunnel. This will be easier to explain if you see it.”

  The tunnel was narrow and just tall enough to clear my helmet, but ran about ten feet, then teed left and right. I stopped. The wall before me curved and twinkled in my headlamp. When I moved the light, I saw parts of the surface were translucent. Blues, grays and whites flowed together, making odd shadows. I moved slowly along the tunnel, one side of which was the strange material, until it opened into a small chamber. Only then did I realize I was looking at a large cylinder that disappeared into the ceiling and floor. Jack waited on the far side.

  “Jack. Please tell me you didn’t make this.”

  “Nope.”

  “What’s it made of? Have you analyzed it yet?”

  “Water ice,” he said.

  My hammering heart slowed and I relaxed a little. Of course, it would be something natural. For a moment I’d envisioned beautiful stone pillars holding up the roof of an ancient Martian temple. But then I realized, even if it didn’t match my wild imagination, he’d still made an amazing find. I touched it again.

  “There’s so much. How deep do you think it goes?”

  “Nellie estimates another forty feet or so beyond this.”

  “Holy crap.”

  “They’re all that deep. All thirty-six of them.”

  “I don’t . . . thirty-six what?”

  Jack dragged his hand along the ice and moved to face me. “Thirty-six ice pillars. I’ve only uncovered five, but those stones up top show the pattern Nellie found. These five are all perfectly smooth and exactly the same diameter. And I’d bet they are all the same depth too.”

  I stared at him. A lump formed in my throat and I felt a weight on my chest. I was a scientist. I couldn’t let myself believe the conclusions my mind formed. I wanted something like this too bad. It had to be studied.

  “It has to be some natural formation,” I said with an overly dry mouth. “Nature does strange things, like those creepy basalt shapes.”

  He shrugged. “I’m not saying otherwise. But these things are also equally spaced, thirty-five forming a ring, with another one in the center.”

  I turned and rushed back out to the hole in the floor.

  “Is this one of them too?” I asked, dreading his response.

  “Yeah,” Jack said and came up behind me. “Nellie sensed the water ice and stopped here to dig. I wouldn’t have thought to even look back in the hole after we were done except she’d filled her nearly empty water tanks with this single dig and threw extra ice out onto the surface to evaporate. That never happened before.”

  “And the hole is—”

  “Because it’s sublimating. The light hits it during the day. I tried covering it up, but that created a heated pocket and made it worse.”

  My hands shook. If his claim was true, Jack had stumbled across what might be the largest single find in human history . . . and he was letting it vaporize. “You’re digging the others out?”

  “I’m not exposing them to the light. They haven’t lost anything from their diameters.”

  My respiration peaked so rapidly an alarm sounded in my helmet as the suit adjusted my gas levels.

  “Jack! We . . . we . . . have no idea how old these things are or what the open air will do to them. We have no right. We’re not qualified to make this kind of decision for the entire human race.”

  “Why not?” Jack said. “No one on Earth has ever encountered alien artifacts, so we’re the new experts.”

  I had a panicky feeling about losing more of this material. I had to stop him. But I took a deep breath and tried to focus. Jack wasn’t an idiot, so I needed to listen to what he was saying. I entered the tunnel and checked the ambient temperature inside. Minus sixty-three Celsius, which might be fine since it wasn’t in direct sunlight.

  “We don’t know what’s in that ice,” I said. “Maybe there were sculptures, or carved instructions or some kind of microorganisms. Maybe even cold-suspended Martian DNA. We could be losing hundreds of painfully preserved Martian species.”

  “This one was an accident. And it’s too late to save it.”

  “Maybe not. We could fill it back up with dirt, then call it in and get all of mankind’s resources behind us.”

  “And lose them forever to MarsCorp?”

  I paused, not sure what he meant. “No one will take this away from you, Jack. You’ll still get all the credit.”

  He slapped a dusty glove against my helmet, making my ears ring. “Credit? You just don’t get it, do you? I don’t care about getting credit. This is a message. It’s a puzzle and I want to figure it out. I feel like I’m so close.”

  The swat on my helmet made me furious, but I held back. I still wanted to convince him it was right before I reported this to the base. “You’ll still be able—”

  “No!” he said and bumped his visor against mine, putting his face as close to me as possible. “If we report this, MarsCorp will turn it into a Martian Disneyland. Most of those idiots on Earth care about nothing but making money, so this will become a cash cow vacation spot.”

  “Oh, come on. You don’t think—”

  “There’s dignity in this place, Malcolm. It’s a serious message, aimed directly at humanity, not some damned tourist attraction.”

  “A message? You don’t know that. If these were put here by some other intelligence, it could have just been a water cache.”

  “It’s a message designed for us. What better way to signal Earthlings coming to Mars? We’d be looking for water. Even if this is several million years old, and they didn’t know what we would be like, they would still know any species coming from Earth would need water.”

  I swallowed and tried to control my building frustration. “You may be right, but we have tools at the base to protect these artifacts while
we study them. If there’s a message, we’ll find it. I’m going to call it in.”

  He stared at me, but there was no anger in his eyes, only cold determination.

  “I have to, Jack.”

  He nodded inside his helmet and then grabbed both of my arms in an iron grip. “I knew I couldn’t trust you with this, so I guess we’ll do it the hard way,” he said. “Into the hole.”

  “What?” I was confused.

  He started pushing me backward toward the opening in the floor. “I don’t want to damage your suit, but, if you don’t jump down into that hole, I’ll throw you in.”

  “Oh, come on! You can’t—”

  “Now, Malcolm!”

  I turned my torso enough so I could look down into the hole. The ice floor was easily twenty feet down, much too deep to jump out, even with Martian gravity.

  “Jack, don’t be—”

  He gave me a little shove and I staggered backward toward the hole. I had no choice but to jump or would have fallen in butt first. I landed on the slick surface with a bone-jarring thump, but kept my feet.

  He stared down at me, still wearing that cold, blank expression. I considered the possibility that my best friend was about to kill me. It would be easy enough and hard to prove.

  “Jack, what—”

  “I doubt that you can contact base from down there, but I’ll call in your location. Your MarsCorp lackeys will be here to rescue you in a couple of hours. And, boy, will they be surprised at your spectacular find.”

  Before I could answer, he disappeared from view.

  He was wrong. Reception was bad down in the hole, but I did make contact with the base. My call generated equal amounts of excitement and incredulity. I wished I’d thought to record video, but hadn’t planned on reporting from a hole within a hole. I could tell by their carefully phrased responses that they only half believed me, but would hold their skepticism in check until they could see it themselves.

  They also gave me bad news. A large dust storm was rolling in and would prevent launching a dirigible. Courtney said they were sending the ground trucks immediately, but it would be four hours minimum, depending on the storm’s severity.

  The link faded into static. I looked up and could only see pale powder spiraling into the hole. Sandstorms on Mars carried millions of tons of the talc-fine dust that could easily bury me. I pulled the climbing axe from my belt and tried to hack hand- and footholds into the hard-packed wall.

  Ten minutes and three handholds later, I paused to check my oxygen usage. Five hours and twenty minutes at my current rate. I had to slow my breathing.

  I looked up and saw only dust swirling in my helmet lamp, then caught a metallic glint. Jack had not taken the ladder. I fumbled the line from my utility pouch and tied on two chisels about ten inches apart. On my fifth try, the makeshift bolo did not come back. I pulled and tugged. The ladder jerked suddenly and sailed into the hole, hitting my shoulder on the way down. I cursed, then held my breath waiting for my suit alarms to tell me I had a tear, but had been lucky.

  Once on the surface, with wind driven sand pelting my suit, I had a decision to make. I could wait down in the hole, safe from the ravaging storm, and probably die as my air ran out. Or I could go find Jack. The wind was steady and mild at the moment, but even tired old Mars could drive abrasive grit at 200 mph on the open plains. My suit’s tough outer skin was all one piece and could stand that abuse for a long time, but my helmet seal was at risk.

  I pulled the aluminum ladder from the hole and attached an antenna wire. Much to my surprise, I established an immediate satellite link through the static-charged dust. I called Jack and got no response. I tried to get his suit’s transponder location and failed. So I called base.

  “The trucks had to stop and wait for better visibility,” Courtney said through static. “You need to hunker down and conserve your air until they arrive.”

  My tank level read less than five hours remaining. If the trucks started moving now and had no more delays, they might make it to me in time. My decision was now easy. I had to find Nellie.

  “Can you contact Jack for me?”

  “He called in to give us your location about ten minutes after your first call. He wanted to make sure we could find you. But we haven’t been able to contact him since. And his transponder stopped transmitting right after that.”

  The bastard dumped me in a hole so he could run off and hide? It made no sense. Even if I died, my suit transponder would eventually lead rescuers to me and the pillars. His secret was out. Why let me die?

  “Can you give me a line between my position and his last call so I’ll have a direction?”

  “Sure,” she said. The static was worsening.

  If Jack didn’t want to be found, he would have changed course immediately after his call, but it was a starting place. If I could get close enough, maybe he would hear my call. Staying here and waiting wasn’t a real option.

  “I just sent the coordinates from Jack’s last call and his last five transponder pings. I had no idea he’d covered so much ground on his walkabouts.”

  “How do you know that?” I asked.

  “I’m looking at a map of his ping locations for all of his excursions. I have one for everyone who—”

  “Can you send me that map?” If I could see where Jack had been, I might get an idea where he could hide.

  Courtney paused. “Sure. It might take several tries with this bad connection, but it’s on the way.”

  “Thanks,” I said and started to sign off.

  “Malcolm? Why did Jack leave you there?”

  “I pissed him off.”

  “He’s lost it,” she said, with obvious anger in her voice. “Well, if he wasn’t already going home, he would be now. Stay put. The ground trucks are moving again, but slowly. We’re also rigging a flier to bring you some O2 canisters.”

  The robotic fliers were more like powered gliders with long fragile wings. They wouldn’t get one even close to me in this wind.

  “Don’t waste the flier, Courtney. I’m going to try and find Jack. Malcolm out.”

  I broke the connection and pulled up the ping map on my helmet’s HUD screen. Thousands of random dots covered a topographical map with location numbers on a grid. The widely scattered dots made my eyes hurt, but I could see some patterns. Many dots were arranged in snaky lines, obviously sent while he was on the move, but there were also heavy clumps representing locations where he’d spent time.

  I zoomed the view out and as the dots converged, I saw it. Most were in clumps that formed a pattern. I added in a red dot for my location and it appeared atop one of the heavy traffic clusters.

  The wind buffeted me, some gusts threatening to knock me down, and dust had drifted around my feet, but I ignored it as my pulse raced and my heart thudded. I instructed my suit’s computer to ignore the noise data and only chart those points where twenty or more appeared in close proximity. Seventeen clumps appeared, evenly dispersed along a broad arc. I told the computer to consider each cluster a single point and extrapolate the pattern based on the existing group.

  The new pattern formed a ring nearly forty miles across and contained thirty-five points. The ring of pillars Jack had marked in the crater contained thirty-five with one in the middle. The center of the large ring fell in the canyon where we’d seen the basalt formations earlier that morning.

  Even though his actions might kill me, I had to appreciate Jack’s devious mind this time. He’d shown me these ice pillars as bait, to get me excited and keep me and the base off his back while he explored the real find. And this was his last trip before being sent home, so it had to be now. I fixed the canyon location on my map, pulled the patching tape from my repair kit and wrapped my helmet seal for extra protection, then started walking.

  I carried the ladder with me, using it both as antenna and a po
le to feel out terrain made invisible by the thick whirling dust. I also kept broadcasting directly to Jack. “I know you’re in the center with your Martian friends and I’m on my way to meet you. I need oxygen.” As an added incentive, I also said, “This is encrypted, but my transponder is still broadcasting.”

  An hour into my trek, Courtney called to tell me their specially rigged flier had crashed. With a voice strained by grief, she rattled off the standard oxygen conservation litany and again begged me to stay put. I told her I could find Jack, then signed off and kept walking.

  When the one-hour oxygen warning dinged, I checked my position and realized I couldn’t make it to the basalt formations, even if I’d guessed Jack’s location correctly. The wide plain between canyon and crater would have been safe enough to allow running, with only a slight chance of falling, but my slow, cautious advance through the storm had killed me. I tossed the ladder aside and started running.

  Less than a minute later, my radio crackled to life with Jack’s voice. “Turn on your emergency strobe and stop moving, Malcolm. According to your transponder blip on my map, I should be right on you.”

  I stopped and fumbled for the strobe switch on my helmet, but before I could flip it, Nellie materialized out of the dust and nearly ran over me as she shot past. I turned as she skidded to a halt amid scattered sand and gravel.

  Tears formed, blurring my vision, and warm relief flowed through me like very old Scotch. Jack jumped down from Nellie’s back and started detaching oxygen canisters from her side.

  “This whole Jack arriving like the cavalry to save Malcolm thing is getting kinda old,” he said as he turned me around, opened my pack and switched out my tanks.

  I swallowed, trying to clear the lump in my throat. “Thanks,” I said. “Did you hear my calls to you?”

  “Yeah, but I started back as soon as I realized your MarsCorp friends were going to let you die.”

  “So I was right? The basalt formations are at the center of a larger pattern?”

  “Yeah,” he said with a grim expression. “How’d you know?”