“The fanatics’ll make what they want out of things,” Pohl said, “whether we provide the fuel or not.”
“That’s right,” Alexander said. “Don’t you see, Van? What we found out there says some profound things about who we are, where we came from. Things we’ve got to know! These bastards could scramble things so badly we may never get at the truth!”
“I’d like to know where these people get off setting themselves up as the arbiters of the dissemination of information,” Druzhininova said.
“It’s worse than what happened to me in Cairo,” Alexander said. All of them were familiar with his expulsion from Egypt in ’37, and the reasons behind it. “If we let them get away with this—”
“Are you sure,” Vandemeer interrupted quietly, “that you’re not just worried about your chances for publication?”
Alexander lunged to his feet, overturning his lightweight, plastic chair and nearly knocking the table aside. “You take that back!”
Druzhininova put her hand on Alexander’s shoulder. “Easy, Dave.”
Pohl stepped between him and Vandemeer. “Yeah, Dave. We’re all in this together, right?”
“I’m not so sure about that,” he said, his eyes still locked with Vandemeer’s. He shook himself as the others released him. “I’ll try to forget you said that, Vandemeer. But you hear me, and hear me good. You too, Craig.”
“David…” Druzhininova began.
“It’s okay, Devora.” He kept his voice low and level. “If you two guys want to sit here and rot for the next three months, you’re free to do so. But our military friends here are working out a way to block the UN bastards, and I’m going to help them every damned way that I can. If that means giving me a gun and charging that Mars cat out there, that’s what I’m going to do. I’m sick of being shoved around, told what I can’t dig, or told what I can’t say, and I’m not going to sit still for it any longer, understand me?”
The odd part about it all was, Alexander still wasn’t sure what he thought of this whole idea. He still hated the military…the regimentation, the spit and polish, the regulations, the dehumanization, all the aspects of military life that had grated on him when he was growing up as a Navy brat in Charleston, Pensacola, Portsmouth, Roosey Roads, and all of those other bases and stations scattered up and down the East Coast of America where he’d lived until his father had been killed. The thought that he was now voluntarily helping a bunch of US Marines was as startling personally as the find beneath the sands of Cydonia the day before…something that couldn’t be, but was.
But he was going to follow through with the one, if that was what it took to uncover the truth about the other.
“I think you’re making a mistake,” Vandemeer said, “but it’s nothing worth fighting over.”
“That’s where you’re wrong, Louis,” Alexander told him. “The truth is always worth fighting for.”
THIRTEEN
SUNDAY, 27 MAY: 2308 HOURS GMT
Heinlein Station, Mars
Sol 5636: 1045 hours MMT
“So, you got your lines down?” Garroway asked. It was crowded in the hab’s single, small airlock, with seven Marines and several bundles of equipment. “It’s show time!”
“I’ll have ’em eating out of my hand, Major,” Staff Sergeant Ostrowsky replied.
“Just so you keep them drooling long enough for us to pull this off,” he replied.
“Hey, not a problem,” she replied, laughing.
He couldn’t share her exuberant, almost cocky enthusiasm. There was too much at stake here, and far too many things could go wrong.
Ostrowsky was wearing one of the civilian archeologist’s space suits. The name on the chest read DRUZHININOVA. It had been her idea, actually, and Devora Druzhininova had gone along with it. The Marines’ helmet visors were nearly opaque with the HUD displays up. The civilian suits were lighter, and they sported goldfish bowl helmets that were transparent save for a slight blue tint to screen out the ultraviolet.
It meant that the UN troops inside the Mars cat would be able to see that Ostrowsky was a woman. An attractive woman, buzz cut and all.
Sex, as Ostrowsky had reminded him, always sells.
The airlock’s pressure matched the air pressure outside, and a red light winked on overhead. “Okay, radio silence, everyone,” Garroway said. The hab walls would block the relatively weak UHF transmissions of their suits, but once they were outside the enemy would be listening to them. Turning, he touched the outer-hatch control. The door popped open, and they stepped out into the crisp, red-gold clarity of the Martian surface.
The scene was breathtakingly beautiful, gold sand beneath a cloudless sky that was pink on the horizon, but shaded to a deep and empty ultramarine overhead. All seven Marines—Garroway and Ostrowsky, Caswell, Donatelli, Foster, Jacob, and Kaminski—made their way in single file out of the airlock and around to the side of the hab that partly blocked the line of sight to the Mars cat, some fifty meters away.
They’d made several trips out through the airlock already, lugging along the pieces of the big Westinghouse portable drill unit…and some other things, carefully hidden with the bundles of tubing, condensers, heating coils, and batteries. The drill was portable in name only, a device weighing half a ton that could be assembled in an hour or so and had power enough to drill through tens of meters of hard-packed sand to reach the icy permafrost layer below. Once a hole had been opened, drill tubing with a heated head was lowered to the bottom and the permafrost melted to a thick slurry of mud and water. Most of the water vaporized as it melted into near vacuum; collectors at the drill head captured the vapor and condensed it into liquid, which was pumped into storage tanks for later use.
Such drills were responsible for opening Mars to large-scale human operations like the bases at Candor and Cydonia; besides drinking water, they provided both oxygen and the hydrogen for converting atmospheric CO2 into the methane used by the shuttles. A wellhead had already been set up a few tens of meters to the north of the hab, but the Marines would be expected to start a new well right away; since all water on Mars was frozen, no one well site lasted more than a few days—a week at the most, depending on how many people were based at a given hab—and new wells had to be constantly sited and drilled.
The point was that the watchers would not find their work particularly suspicious. After a few moments, Ostrowsky left them, walking toward the cat with her arms out from the sides of her body, a white cloth in her right hand. “Hello!” she called. “You in the cat! Can we talk?” At least one person in the UN detail must speak English.
“Remain twenty meters from the vehicle,” a heavily accented voice replied over the general talk channel. “What do you want?”
“A ride out of here,” Ostrowsky replied. “For the women. I was wondering if we could strike a deal with you guys.”
“What kind of a deal?”
“No deal,” a second voice added. “We have our orders.”
“Oh. Come on,” Ostrowsky said. “You think us girls want to be locked up with these guys for the next three months?”
“You’re Marines,” the second voice replied. “Didn’t you just spend months cooped up with them on the cycler?”
“At least we had some privacy! We had our own head! Look, there’s gotta be something we can work out. If you could take us back to Mars Prime, maybe we could, I don’t know, make it worth your while, y’know?”
“Well, you’re going to have to be more explicit than that. Exactly what did you have in mind?”
“Well,