Dr. Graves laughed. “Until we know more? My God! We’ve found four naturally mummified humans on Mars! Isn’t that worth at least the cost of an e-mail to Earth?”
Garroway looked away as the argument continued, distractedly studying the vaulting, strut-lined interior of the building. Most of the habitats on Mars looked like the interior of a Shuttle II’s main fuel tank…probably because most of them were Shuttle II fuel tanks, hauled out to Mars orbit by one or another of the cyclers, fitted with small, methane-fueled deorbit boosters, and lowered the last few kilometers to the Martian surface by parachute…a process far cheaper than hauling the building materials all the way out to Mars and then assembling them in place. This habitat possessed an upper and a lower deck—the lower given over to stores and a reserve of liquid water, the upper divided between living quarters, a rec facility, and the common room. Pressurized tunnels led to other habs nearby, including Ops, the big, pressurized ex-fuel tank next door that housed the communications center, the Central Operational Node or CON—essentially the facility’s main AI computer—and the control center. The main tanks-turned-habitats were far more spacious than were needed yet within the growing colony, but they still lacked a few of the basic amenities…such as windows.
Not that Garroway was that interested in watching the sere and barren Martian landscape; he’d seen quite enough of it already during the past two weeks, as the Marines had gotten themselves settled in. But the interiors of the habitats were all the same, and, roomy or not, they forced your attention inward, to your own thoughts and to the people you were with. The idea of another year or more locked up in close quarters with Mireille Joubert was not exactly a solid inducement to emigrate to Mars. She might be nice to look at, but she’d become strident and overbearing since they’d landed. Worse, she was wielding the opinion that she was in charge of the expedition’s science team like a weapon. Garroway generally tried to arrange things so that he could be where she wasn’t.
Sometimes though, like during these department-head meetings, that just wasn’t possible. Garroway had already decided his first day on the beach that the only way to keep his sanity over the next few months was to keep his head down and to say as little as possible. He allowed himself a private smile. The never-volunteer philosophy was generally the prerogative of enlisted men, rather than officers.
This was the worst such meeting he’d run into yet. He hadn’t heard the whole story, but he gathered that Alexander had done something to put Joubert really out of sorts. The discovery—four beings that looked human or damned close to it—would seem to have been worth whatever risk or shortcut the man had taken, but Joubert had been raking him over the coals for it.
The funny part was, he didn’t think she even had the authority to do so.
“A discovery of such potential,” Joubert said, “demands extraordinary care in just how the announcement is made to the general public.”
“We’re not suggesting a release to the public,” Alexander pointed out. “We’re talking about transmitting text and images of what we found to Mission Control. They can decide what to say, if anything.”
She rolled her eyes toward the chamber’s ceiling. “Please, David, don’t assume that I am stupid! I know how your press works…and your politicians. Transmitting this data to Earth is the same as plastering it all over every netnews download on the Web.”
“I don’t understand,” Graves said. “What do you want…for us to just sit on this find? To run more tests?”
“Yes, just what more would you suggest, Doctor?” Alexander asked reasonably. “We don’t have the equipment to run sophisticated tests, and I’m afraid that just touching those bodies will make them crumble away into dust.”
“For one thing, we should try to establish scientifically what all of you seem to be taking for granted…that the bodies are human and that they are associated with the Builders.”
“They’re inside that room,” Kettering said. He was leaning back in his chair, his arms folded across his chest. “The four of them looked like they were trying to claw their way right through that door. That looks pretty damned associated to me.”
“And you can’t seriously be suggesting that those bodies are not human,” Dr. Patricia Colt said. She was Cydonia Prime’s Life Sciences Department head, a rather broad job description that included the study of Martian parabiological soil chemistry, cataloguing microfossils, and running the base med lab.