Semper Mars(102)
TWENTY
TUESDAY, 12 JUNE: 1606 HOURS GMT
Candor Chasma
Sol 5651: 1830 hours MMT
“So,” Mark Garroway said in what he’d intended to be a conversational way, but which came out more like a grunt. “What’s so damned important about this shit you found at Cydonia?”
He was sitting in the Mars cat’s lounge, tightly wedged in between Sergeant Knox on his left and Lieutenant King on his right, with David Alexander squeezed in with Pohl and Druzhininova on the other side of the vehicle.
His lips were dry and cracked, making conversation difficult. The entire force had gone on short rations of water four days ago, when two of the cat’s fuel-cell recycler condensers had gone bad. Water was more important for power now than even for drinking. Without power, the cat would die, their armor life support would fail a few hours later, and they would be stranded, dead unless a UN patrol happened to find them.
“That’s rather a difficult question to answer, Major,” Alexander said. His voice cracked. “Obviously, it has a bearing on what Man is, where he came from, how he evolved. I’d say the question touches on just about every aspect of human history, physiology, psychology, and evolution.”
“Isn’t that what science is all about?” Druzhininova said. She shrugged inside her suit. “To find out who we are, where we are going, and why.”
“Not necessarily why,” Pohl said. “I’ve always thought that was a question for the theologians and the philosophers.”
“There is no question that can be excluded by science,” Alexander replied. “Not if there is hard evidence that allows us to look at the question in the first place.”
The walls of the Mars cat shuddered, and all of them looked up. A full-blown dust storm was howling outside. Technically, it was daytime, but the black pall of dust thrown up by the winds screeching across the Martian surface had blotted out the sun as effectively as nightfall, forcing them—yet again—to halt their journey. The Marines on watch outside were all gathered, at Garroway’s orders, in the narrow space beneath the Mars cat, taking advantage of a new technique they’d developed almost a week ago. By digging into the sand beneath the vehicle, the Marines forced to stay outside could huddle together in a narrow space that quickly warmed with the heat radiated from their armor and from the bottom of the crawler. It still wasn’t comfortable, exactly, but they wouldn’t freeze.
And in a howling Martian dust storm, it meant the others would know where to dig when the thing was over.
Dr. Druzhininova had pointed out that some Martian dust storms during the early summer could cover the whole northern hemisphere of the planet and last for months. If that happened, the MMEF and their civilian charges would die here, and their mummified bodies would remain for some far-future archeologist to wonder at.
Garroway reached up and scratched the bristle at his chin. The last tube of nobeard had given out five days ago, and all of the men were showing the effects now. There wasn’t water to spare for shaving, and the male members of the MMEF were beginning to take on a distinctly piratical air as their beards started growing out.
Alexander’s beard was fuller, almost neat-looking. He and Dr. Pohl had stopped using facial depilatories from the start and now looked like something halfway approaching distinguished.
Garroway was thoughtful for a time. “How long would it take you, Doctor,” he said finally, “to write up a paper on the subject? Something you could transmit over the Spacenet?”
Alexander’s face worked for a moment behind his sandy beard. “You mean…publish? It’s what I’ve been dreaming of. You know that. But, well, I don’t have much to say, yet. It’d be premature.”
“You discovered those bodies back at Cydonia. That seems to be what the UN scientists want to keep under wraps. Can’t you just publish that?”
“Well, yes. Certainly. But, well, we don’t know anything about who those…those people were, or why they’re on Mars. How they got here. I’d want to do a lot of excavating first, just to see if we could come up with any preliminary hypothesis.”
“We find dead humans, or…what did you call them?”
“Archaic Homo sapiens,” Druzhininova said. “Or possibly very modern Homo erectus.”
“That’s part of what we need to do more research on,” Alexander added, “to nail down just what it is we’re dealing with here.”
“It strikes me, Doctor,” Garroway said carefully, “that just the fact that ancestors of ours were brought here to Mars, that they seem to have been living here when the climate was, hell, a shirt-sleeve environment…wouldn’t that warrant some kind of initial wake-up call? ‘Hey, Earth! Mankind’s prehistory is a lot different than you thought it was!’”