7

The transponder road led him through the brown wind-torn days, crossing the broken land south of Margaritifer Sinus. John would have to drive it again some other time to see any of it, for in the storm it was nothing but flying chocolate, pierced by momentary golden shafts of light. Near Bakhuysen Crater he stopped at a new settlement called Turner Wells; here they had tapped into an aquifer that was under such hydrostatic pressure at its lower end that they were going to generate power by running the artesian flow through a series of turbines. The water released would be poured into molds, frozen, and then hauled by robot to dry settlements all over the southern hemisphere. Mary Dunkel was working there, and she showed John around the wells, the power plant, and the ice reservoirs. “The exploratory drilling was actually scary as hell. When the drill hit the liquid part of the aquifer it was blasted back out of the well, and it was touch and go whether we were going to be able to control the gusher or not.”

“What would have happened if you hadn’t?”

“Well, I don’t know. There’s a lot of water down there. If it broke the rock around the well, it might have gone like the big outflow channels in Chryse.”

“That big?”

“Who knows? It’s possible.”

“Wow.”

“That’s what I said! Now Ann has started an investigation into methods for determining aquifer pressures by the echoes they give back in the seismic tests. But there are people who would like to release an aquifer or two, see? They leave messages on the bulletin boards in the net. I wouldn’t be surprised if Sax is among them. Big floods of water and ice, lots of sublimation into the air, why shouldn’t he cheer?”

“But floods like those old ones would be as destructive to the landscape as dropping asteroids on it.”

“Oh, more destructive! Those channels downslope from the chaoses were incredible outbreaks. The best Terran analogy is the scab-lands in eastern Washington, have you heard of them? About eighteen thousand years ago there was a lake covering most of Montana, Lake Missoula they call it, composed of Ice Age meltwater and held in place by an ice dam. At some point this ice dam broke and the lake emptied catastrophically, about two trillion cubic meters of water, draining down the Columbia plateau and out to the Pacific in a matter of days.”

“Wow.”

“While it lasted it ran about a hundred times the discharge of the Amazon, and carved channels in the basalt bedrock that are as much as two hundred meters deep.”

“Two hundred meters!”

“Right. And this was nothing compared to the ones that cut the Chryse channels! The anastomosing up there covers areas—”

“Two hundred meters of bedrock?”

“Yeah, well, it isn’t just normal erosion. In floods that big the pressures fluctuate so much that you get exsolution of dissolved gases, you know, and when those bubbles collapse they produce incredible pressures. Hammering like that can break anything.”

“So it would be worse than an asteroid strike.”

“Sure. Unless you dropped a really big asteroid. But there are people who think we should be doing that too, right?”

“Are there?”

“You know there are. But the floods are better yet, if you want to do that kind of thing. If you could direct one of them into Hellas, for instance, you’d have a sea. And you might be able to refill it faster than the surface ice sublimed.”

“Direct a flood like that?” John exclaimed.

“Well, yeah, that would be impossible. But if you found one in the right spot, you wouldn’t have to direct it. You should check where Sax has sent the dowsing team lately, see what it looks like to you.”

“But it would be forbidden by UNOMA for sure.”

“Since when has that mattered to Sax?”

John laughed. “Oh, it matters now. They’ve given him too much for him to ignore them. They’ve tied him down with money and power.”

“Maybe.”

• • •

That night at 3:30 A.M. there was a small explosion in one of the well heads, and alarm bells ripped them from sleep and sent them stumbling through the tunnels half-naked, to be faced with a gusher that was shooting up into the night’s flying dust, in a column of white water torn to shreds in the unsteady glare of hastily directed spotlights. The water was falling out of the dust clouds as chunks of ice, hail the size of bowling balls. Wells downwind were being pummeled by these missiles, and the ice balls were already knee deep.

Given the discussion of the previous evening John found himself quite alarmed by the sight, and he ran around until he found Mary. Through the noise of the eruption and the ever-present storm, Mary shouted in John’s ear: “Clear the area, I’m going to set off a charge beside the well and try to snuff it!” She ran off in her white nightshirt, and John rounded up the spectators and got them back down the tunnels to the station habitat. Mary joined them in the lock, huffing and puffing, and fiddled with her wristpad, and there was a low boom in the direction of the well. “Come on let’s go see,” she said, and they got through the lock and ran back down the tunnels toward the window overlooking the well. There in a tumble of white ice balls lay the wreckage of the drill, on its side, and still. “Yeah! Capped!” Mary cried.

They cheered weakly. Some of them went down to the well area, to see if there was anything they could do to secure the situation. “Good work!” John said to Mary.

“I’ve read a lot about well capping since that first incident,” Mary said, still short of breath. “And we had it all set up to go. But we never actually had the chance. To try it. Of course. So you never know.”

John said, “Do your locks have recorders?”

“They do.”

“Great.”

John went to check them. He plugged Pauline into the station system, and asked questions, and scanned the answers as they appeared on his pad. No one had used the locks after the timeslip that night. He called the weather satellite overhead, and clicked into the radar and IR systems that Sax had given him the codes for, and scanned the area around Bakhuysen. No sign of any machines nearby, except some of the old windmill heaters. And the transponders showed that no one had been on the roads in the area since his arrival the previous day.

John sat heavily before Pauline, feeling sluggish and slow-witted. He couldn’t think of any other checks to make, and it seemed from those he had, that no one had been out that night to do the damage. The explosion could have been arranged days before, perhaps, although it would be hard to hide the device, the wells being worked on daily. He got up slowly and went to find Mary, and with her help talked to the people who had last worked on that well, the day before. No sign of tampering then, all the way until eight p.m. And after that everyone in the station had been at the John Boone party, the locks unused. So there really had been no chance.

He went back to his bed and thought about it. “Oh, by the way, Pauline— please check Sax’s records, and give me a list of all the dowsing expeditions in the last year.”

• • •

Continuing on his blind road to Hellas he ran into Nadia, who was overseeing the construction of a new kind of dome over Rabe Crater. It was the largest dome yet built, taking advantage of the thickening of the atmosphere and the lightening of construction materials, which created a situation where gravity could be balanced with pressure, making the pressurized dome effectively weightless. The frame was to be made of reinforced areogel beams, the latest from the alchemists; areogel was so light and strong that Nadia went into little raptures as she described the potential uses for it. Crater domes themselves were a thing of the past, in her opinion; it would be just as easy to erect areogel pillars around the circumference of a town, bypassing the rock enclosures and putting the whole population inside what would be in effect a big clear tent, with aerogel pillars.

She told John all about it as they walked around Rabe’s interior, now nothing but a big construction site. The whole crater rim was going to be honeycombed with sky-lighted rooms, and the domed interior would hold a farm that would feed 30,000. Earthmoving robots the size of buildings hummed out of the murk of the dust, invisible even fifty meters away. These behemoths were working on their own, or by teleoperation, and the teloperators probably had too little view of their surroundings to make nearby foot traffic entirely safe. John followed Nadia nervously as she strolled about, remembering how skittish the miners at Bradbury Point had been— and there they had been able to see what was happening! He had to laugh at Nadia’s obliviousness. When the ground trembled underfoot, they just stopped and looked around, ready to leap away from any oncoming building-sized vehicles. It was quite a tour. Nadia railed against the dust, which was wrecking a lot of machinery. The great storm was now four months old, the longest in years— and it still showed no sign of ending. Temperatures had plummeted, people were eating canned and dried food, and an occasional salad or vegetable grown under artificial light. And dust was in everything. Even as they discussed it John could feel it caking his mouth, and his eyes were dry in their sockets. Headaches had become extremely common, as well as sinus trouble, sore throats, bronchitis, asthma, lung distress generally. Plus frequent cases of frostnip. And computers were becoming dangerously unreliable, a lot of hardware breakdown, a lot of AI neurosis or retardation. Middays inside Rabe were like living inside a brick, Nadia said, and sunsets looked like coal-mine fires. She hated it.

John changed the subject. “What do you think of this space elevator?”

“Big.”

“But the effect, Nadia. The effect.”

“Who knows? You can never tell with a thing like that, can you.”

“It’ll make a strategic bottleneck, like the one Phyllis used to talk about when we were discussing who would build Phobos station. She’ll have made her own bottleneck. That’s a lot of power.”

“That’s what Arkady says, but I don’t see why it can’t be treated as a common resource, like a natural feature.”

“You’re an optimist.”

“That’s what Arkady says.” She shrugged. “I’m just trying to be sensible.”

“Me too.”

“I know. Sometimes I think we’re the only two.”

“And Arkady?”

She laughed.

“But you two are a couple!”

“Yes, yes. Like you and Maya.”

“Touché.”

Nadia smiled briefly. “I try to make Arkady think about things. That’s the best I can do. We’re meeting at Acheron in a month, to take the treatment. Maya tells me it’s a good thing to do together.”

“I recommend it,” John said with a grin.

“And the treatment?”

“Beats the alternative, right?”

She chuckled. Then the ground growled through their boots, and they stiffened and jerked their heads around, looking for shadows in the murk. A black bulk like a moving hill appeared to their right. They ran to the side, stumbling and hopping over cobbles and debris, John wondering if this were another attack, Nadia rapping out commands over the common band, cursing the teleoperators for not keeping track of them on the IR. “Watch your screens, you lazy bastards!”

The ground stopped trembling. The black leviathan no longer moved. They approached it warily. A Brobdingnagian dump truck, on tracks. Built locally, by Utopia Planitia Machines; a robot built by robots, and big as an office block.

John stared up at it, feeling the sweat drip down his forehead. They were safe. His pulse slowed. “Monsters like this are all over the planet,” he said to Nadia wonderingly. “Cutting, scraping, digging, filling, building. Pretty soon some of them will attach themselves to one of those two-kilometer asteroids, and build a power plant that will use the asteroid itself as fuel to drive it into Martian orbit, at which point other machines will land on it, and begin to transform the rock into a cable about thirty-seven thousand kilometers long! The size of it, Nadia! The size!”

“It’s big all right.”

“It’s unimaginable, really. Something completely beyond human abilities as we were brought up to understand them. Teleoperation on a massive scale. A kind of spiritual waldo. Anything that can be imagined can be executed!” Slowly they walked around the giant black object before them: no more than a kind of dump truck, nothing compared to what the space elevator would be; and yet even this truck, he thought, was an amazing thing. “Muscle and brain have extended out through an armature of robotics that is so large and powerful that it’s difficult to conceptualize it. Maybe impossible. That’s probably part of your talent, and Sax’s too— to flex the muscles that no one else realizes we have yet. I mean holes drilled right through the lithosphere, the terminator lit with mirrored sunlight, all these cities filling mesas and stuck in the sides of cliffs— and now a cable strung out way past Phobos and Deimos, so long that it’s both in orbit and touching down at the same time! It’s impossible to imagine it!”

“Not impossible,” Nadia noted.

“No. And now of course we see the evidence of our power all around us, we almost get run down by it as it goes about its work! And seeing is believing. Even without an imagination you can see what kind of power we have. Maybe that’s why things are getting so strange these days, everyone talking about ownership or sovereignty, fighting, making claims. People squabbling like those old gods on Olympus, because nowadays we’re just as powerful as they were.”

“Or more,” Nadia said.

• • •

He drove on into the Hellespontus Montes, the curved mountain range surrounding Hellas Basin. Somehow, one night when he was sleeping, his rover got off the transponder road. He woke up, and in breaks in the dust saw that he was in a narrow valley, walled with small cliffs that were cut by the typical fluting of ravines. It seemed likely that by staying on the valley floor he would cross the road again, so he headed on cross-country. Then the valley floor was disrupted by shallow transverse grabens like empty canals, and Pauline kept having to stop and turn and try another branch in her route-finding algorithm, defeated by one gulch after another as they appeared out of the murk. When John got impatient and tried to take over, it only got worse. In the land of the blind, the autopilot is king.

But slowly he closed on the valley mouth, where the map showed the transponder road descending to a wider valley below. So that night he stopped, unworried, and sat in front of the TV and ate a meal. Mangalavid was showing the premiere performance of an aeolia built by a group in Noctis Labyrinthus. The aeolia turned out to be a small building, cut with apertures which whistled or hooted or squeaked, depending on the angle and strength of the wind hitting them. For the premiere the daily downslope wind in Noctis was augmented by some fierce katabatic gusts from the storm, and the music fluctuated like a composition, mournful, angry, dissonant or in sudden snatches harmonic: it seemed the work of a mind, an alien mind perhaps, but certainly something more than random chance. The almost aleatory aeolia, as a commentator said.

After that came news from Earth. The existence of the gerontological treatments had been leaked by an official in Geneva, and had flashed around the world in a day; now there was a violent debate going on in the General Assembly concerning the matter. Many delegates were demanding that the treatments be made a basic human right, guaranteed by the U.N. for all, with funding from the developed nations placed immediately in a pool to make sure that financing for the treatments would be equally available to all. Meanwhile other reports were coming in: some religious leaders were coming out against the treatments, including the Pope; there were widespread riots, and some damage at certain medical centers. Governments were in a turmoil. All the faces on the TV were tense or angry, demanding change; and all the inequality, hatred and misery that the faces revealed made John flinch, he couldn’t watch. He fell asleep, and then slept poorly.

He was dreaming of Frank when a sound woke him. A knock on his windshield. It was the middle of the night. Groggily he locked the lock; sitting up he wondered that he had such a reflex action in him. When had he learned that one? He rubbed his jaw, turned on the common band. “Hello? Anyone out there?”

“The Martians.”

It was a man’s voice. His English was accented, but John couldn’t identify how.

“We want to talk,” the voice said.

John stood and looked out the windshield. At night, in the storm, there was precious little to see. But he thought he could pick out shapes in the blackness, there below him.

“We just want to talk,” the voice said.

If they had wanted to kill him they could have blown open the rover while he slept. Besides, he still couldn’t quite believe that anyone wished him harm. There was no reason for it!

So he let them in.

There were five of them, all men. Their walkers were frayed, dirty, patched with material that had not been made for walkers. Their helmets were without identification, stripped of all paint. As they took off the helmets he saw that one of the men was Asian, and young; he looked about eighteen. The youth went forward and sat in the driver’s seat, leaned over the steering wheel to look closer at the instrument array. Another got off his helmet; a short brown-skinned man, with a thin face and long dreadlocks. He sat on the padded bench across from John’s bed, and waited for the other three men to get their helmets off too. When they did they crouched on their haunches, watching John attentively. He had never seen any of them before.

The thin-faced man said, “We want you to slow the rate of immigration.” He was the one who had spoken outside; now his accent sounded Caribbean. He spoke in a low voice, almost in a whisper, and John found it very difficult not to emulate him.

“Or stop it,” the young man in the driver’s seat said.

“Shut up, Kasei.” The thin-faced man never took his gaze from John’s face. “There are too many people coming up. You know that. They’re not Martian, and they don’t care what happens here. They’re going to overwhelm us, they’re going to overwhelm you. You know that. You’re trying to turn them into Martians, we know, but they’re coming in a lot faster than you can work. The only thing that will work is slowing down the influx.”

“Or stopping it.”

The man rolled his eyes, appealed with a grimace for John’s understanding. The youth was young, his look said.

“I don’t have any say—” John began, but the man cut him off:

“You can advocate it. You’re a power, and you’re on our side.”

“Are you from Hiroko?”

The youth snicked his tongue against the roof of his mouth. The thin-faced man said nothing. Four faces stared at John; the other looked resolutely out the window.

John said, “Have you been sabotaging the moholes?”

“We want you to stop the immigration.”

“I want you to stop the sabotage. It’s just bringing more people here. Police.”

The man eyed him. “What makes you think we can contact the saboteurs?”

“Find them. Break in on them at night.”

The man smiled. “Out of sight, out of mind.”

“Not necessarily.”

They had to be with Hiroko. Occam’s razor. There couldn’t be more than one hidden group. Or maybe there could. John felt light-headed, and wondered if they were doctoring the air. Releasing aerosol drugs. He definitely felt strange, it was all surreal, dreamy; the wind buffeted the rover, sent a sudden burst of aeolian music coursing by, a weird drawn-out hoot. His thoughts were slow and ponderous, and he felt the edge of a yawn. That’s it, he thought. I’m still trying to wake from a dream.

“Why do you hide?” he heard himself say.

“We’re building Mars. Just like you. We’re on your side.”

“You ought to help, then.” He tried to think. “What about the space elevator?”

“We don’t care about it.” The kid snicked. “That isn’t what matters. It’s people that matter.”

“The elevator will bring a lot more people.”

The man considered that. “Slow the immigration, and it can’t even be built.”

Another long silence, punctuated by the wind’s eerie commentary. Can’t even be built? Did they think people would build it? Or maybe they meant the money.

“I’ll look into it,” John said. The kid turned and stared at him, and John raised a hand to forestall him. “I’ll do what I can.” His hand stood before him, a huge pink thing. “That’s all I can say. If I promised results, it would be lying. I know what you mean. I’ll do what I can.” He thought about it more, with difficulty. “You ought to be out in the open, helping us. We need more help.”

“Each in his way,” the man said quietly. “We’ll be going now. We’ll keep track to see what you do.”

“Tell Hiroko I want to talk to her.”

The five men looked at him, the young one intense and angry.

The thin-faced man smiled briefly. “If I see her I will.”

One of the crouching men held out a diaphanous blue mass— an aerogel sponge, barely visible under the night-running lights. The hand holding it made a fist. Yes, a drug. He lunged out and caught the young one unawares, clawed the youth’s bare neck and then fell, paralyzed.

When he came to they were gone. He had a headache. He fell back onto the bed, into an uneasy sleep. The dream about Frank made an improbable return, and John told him about the visitation. “You’re a fool,” Frank said. “You don’t understand.”

When he woke again it was morning, swirling a dim burnt umber outside the windshield. The winds had appeared to be lessening in the last month, but it was hard to be sure. Shapes in the dust clouds appeared briefly and then fell back into chaos, in little sensory-deprivation hallucinations. It really was sensory deprivation, this storm, and getting very claustrophobic indeed. He ate some omeg, suited up and went outside and walked around, breathing talcum and bending over to follow the tracks of his visitors. They crossed bedrock and disappeared. A difficult rendezvous, he would have thought; a lost rover at night, how had they found it?

But if they had been tracking him . . .

Back inside he called up the satellites. Radar and IR got nothing but his rover. Even walkers would have shown on the IR, so presumably they had a refuge nearby. Easy to hide in mountains like these. He called up his Hiroko map and drew a rough circle around his location, bulging it north and south in the mountains. He had several circles on the Hiroko map by now, but none of them had been searched by ground crews with any thoroughness, and probably they never would be, as most of them were in chaotic terrain, ravaged land the size of Wyoming or Texas. “It’s a big world,” he muttered.

He wandered around the inside of the car, looking at the floor. Then he remembered the last thing he had done. He looked under his fingernails;a little skin matter was stuck there, yes. He got a sample dish from the little auto-clave, and carefully scraped what was there onto the dish. Genome identification was far beyond the rover’s capabilities, but any big lab ought to be able to identify the youth, if his genome was on record. If not, that too would be useful information. And maybe Ursula and Vlad could identify him by parentage.

• • •

He relocated the transponder trail that afternoon, and came down into Hellas Basin late the next day. He found Sax there, attending a conference on the new lake, although it appeared that it was turning into a conference on agriculture under artificial lighting. The next morning John took him out in the clear tunnels between buildings, and they walked in a shifting yellow murk, the sun a saffron glow in the clouds to the east. “I think I met the coyote,” John said.

“Did you! Did he tell you where Hiroko is?”

“No.”

Sax shrugged. It appeared he was distracted by a talk he had to give that evening. So John decided to wait, and that evening he attended the talk with the rest of the lake station occupants. Sax assured the crowd that atmospheric, surface, and permafrost microbacteria were growing at a rate that was a significant fraction of their theoretical maximums— about at 2 percent, to be precise— and that they were going to have to be considering the problems of outdoor cultivation within a few decades. Applause at this announcement was nonexistent, because everyone there was absorbed by horrible problems engendered by the Great Storm, which they seemed to think had begun as a result of a miscalculation of Sax’s. Surface insolation was still 25 percent normal, as one of them waspishly pointed out, and the storm was showing no signs of ending. Temperatures had dropped, and tempers were rising. All the new arrivals had never seen more than a few meters around them, and psychological problems ranging from ennui to catatonia were pandemic.

Sax dismissed all that with a mild shrug. “It’s the last global storm,” he said. “It will go down in history as some kind of heroic age. Enjoy it while it lasts.”

This was poorly received. Sax, however, did not notice.

A few days later, Ann and Simon drove into the settlement with their boy Peter, who was now three. He had been, so far as they could tell, the thirty-third child born on Mars; the colonies established after the first hundred had been fairly prolific. John played with the boy on the floor as he and Ann and Simon caught up on news, and exchanged some of the thousand and one tales of the Great Storm. It seemed to John that Ann ought to be enjoying the storm and the horrendous knock it had put on the terraforming process, like some kind of planetary allergic response, the temperatures plummeting below the baseline, the reckless experimenters struggling with their puny clogged machines. . . . But she was not amused. Irritated as usual, in fact. “A dowsing team drilled into a volcanic vent in Daedalia and came up with a sample containing unicellular microorganisms significantly different from the cyanobacteria you released in the north. And the vent was pretty nearly encased in bedrock, and very far from any biotic release sites. They sent samples of the stuff up to Acheron for analysis, and Vlad studied it and declared that it looked like a mutant strain of one of their releases, perhaps injected into the sample rock by contaminated drilling equipment.” Ann poked John in the chest: “

‘Probably Terran,’ Vlad said. Probably Terran!”

“Probabry tewwan!” her little boy said, catching Ann’s intonation perfectly.

“Well, it probably is,” John said.

“But we’ll never know! They’ll end up debating it for centuries to come, there’ll be a journal devoted to that issue alone, but we’ll never really know.”

“If it’s too close to tell, it’s probably Terran,” John said, grinning at the boy. “Anything that evolved separately from Terran life would give itself away in an instant.”

“Probably,” Ann said. (“Probabry.”) “Except what if there’s a common source, the space-spores theory, for instance, or ejecta blasted from one planet to another with microorganisms buried in its rock?”

“That’s not too likely, is it?”

“We don’t know. We’ll never know, now.”

John had a hard time sharing her concern. “They might have come from the Viking landers for all we know,” he said. “There’s never been a very effective effort to sterilize our explorations here, that’s just the way it is. Meanwhile we’ve got more pressing problems.” Such as a global dust storm longer than the longest one ever recorded, or an influx of immigrants whose commitment to Mars was as minimal as their housing, or an upcoming treaty revision that no one could agree on, or a terraforming effort that a lot of people hated. Or a home planet going critical. Or an attempt (or two) to do one John Boone some harm.

“Yeah yeah,” Ann said. “I know. But all that’s politics, we’ll never get away from that. This was science, a question I wanted answered. And now I can’t. Nobody can.”

John shrugged. “We’ll never answer that one, Ann. No matter what. That was one of those questions that was fated always to remain unanswered. Didn’t you know that?”

“Probabwy Tewwan.”

• • •

A few days after that, a rocket landed on the little lake station spaceport pad, and a small group of Terrans emerged out of the dust, still bouncing around as they walked. Investigative agents, they said, here on UNOMA authority, to look into sabotage and related incidents. There were ten of them in all, eight clean-cut young men right out of the vids, and two attractive young women. Most had been assigned from the American FBI. Their leader, a tall brown-haired man named Sam Houston, requested an interview with Boone, and John agreed politely.

When they met after breakfast the next morning— six of the agents were there, including both women— he meekly answered every question without hesitation, though instinctively he told them only what he thought they knew already, plus a bit more to seem honest and helpful. They were polite and deferential, thorough in their questioning, extremely reticent if he asked them anything in return. They seemed unaware of much of the detail of the situation on Mars, and asked him about things that had happened in the first years at Underhill, or during the time of Hiroko’s disappearance. They obviously knew the events of that time, and the basic facts of the various relationships among the first hundred’s media stars; they asked him a lot of questions about Maya, Phyllis, Arkady, Nadia, the Acheron group, Sax . . . all of whom were well-known to these young Terrans, permanent fixtures on their TV. But it seemed they knew little beyond what had been taped and sent back to Earth. John, his mind wandering, wondered if that would be true of all Terrans. After all what other sources of information did they have?

At the end of the interview, one of them named Chang asked him if there was anything else he wanted to say. John, who had omitted an account of his midnight visit from the coyote, among many other things, said, “I can’t think of anything!”

Chang nodded, and then Sam Houston said, “We’d appreciate it if you’d give us access to your AI on these matters.”

“I’m sorry,” John said, looking apologetic. “I don’t give access to my AI.”

“You have a destruct lock on it?” Houston said, looking surprised.

“No. I just don’t do it. Those are my private records.” John stared the man in the eye, watched him squirm under the gaze of his associates.

“We, um, we can get a warrant from UNOMA, if you like.”

“I doubt you can, actually. And even if you do I won’t let you in.”

John smiled at him, almost laughed. Another moment where being the First Man On Mars was useful. There was nothing they could do to him without causing far more trouble than it was worth. He stood up and surveyed the little gang with as much easy arrogance as he could muster, which was quite a lot. “Let me know if there’s anything else I can do for you.”

He left the room. “Pauline, click into the building comm center and copy anything you can that they send out.” He called Helmut, remembering that his own calls would be opened as well. He kept his questions brief, as if just checking credentials. Yes, a team had been sent out by UNOMA. They were part of a task force, assembled in the last six months to deal with problems.

Police on Mars, then, as well as a detective. Well, it was to be expected. But it was a nuisance nevertheless. He couldn’t do much with them hanging around watching him, suspicious because he hadn’t given them access to Pauline. And really there wasn’t that much to do in Hellas anyway. There had been no incidents of sabotage there, and it seemed unlikely that any would occur now. Maya was unsympathetic, she didn’t want to be bothered with his problems, she had enough problems of her own, with the technical aspects of the aquifer project. “You’re probably their chief suspect,” she said irritably. “These things keep happening to you, a truck in Thaumasia, a well at Bakhuysen, and now you won’t let them into your records. Why don’t you just do it?”

“Because I don’t like them,” John said, glaring at her. It was back to normal with Maya. Well, not really; they went through their routines in a kind of high spirits, as if playing a good role in the theater, knowing they had time for everything, knowing now what was real, what lay at the base of the relationship. So in that sense it was much better. On the surface, however, it was the same old melodrama. Maya refused to understand, and in the end John gave up. After that he spent a couple of days thinking it over. He went down to the station’s labs, and had the sample of skin taken from under his fingernails cultured, cloned, and read. No one with that genome was in the planetary records, so he sent the information to Acheron requesting an analysis and any information they could give. Ursula sent their results back coded, with a single word added at the end. Congratulations.

He read the message again, swore out loud. He went out for a walk, alternately laughing and swearing. “Damn you, Hiroko! Damn you to hell! Get out of your hole and help us! Ah, ha ha ha! You bitch! I’m sick of this Persephone shit!”

Even the walktubes were oppressive at that moment, and he went to the garage and suited up, and went out the lock for a walk outside, the first in many days. He was out at the end of the northern arm of the town, on a smooth desert floor. He wandered around, staying within the fluctuating column of dust-free air that every city created, thinking the situation over as he surveyed the city. Hellas was going to be much less impressive than Burroughs, or Acheron, or Echus, or even Senzeni Na; located at the low point of the basin, it had no heights to build on, no prospect. Although the whipping dust made it a poor time to judge that. The town had been built in a crescent which would eventually become the shoreline of the new lake. That might look nice when it happened— a waterfront— but meanwhile it was as featureless as Underhill, with all the latest in power plant and service apparatus, intake vents, cables, tunnels like giant sloughed snakeskins . . . the old scientific station look, no aesthetics involved. Well, that was fine. They couldn’t put every town on a mountaintop.

Two people passed him, their faceplates polarized. Odd, he thought, it being so gloomy in the storm. Then they leaped on him, knocked him down. He shoved off the sand with a wild John Carter leap and threw his fists around him, but to his surprise they were running off into the clouds of dust whipping by. He staggered, stared after them. They disappeared behind the veils of dust. His blood jolted through him; then he felt his shoulders burn. He reached up and back; they had cut his walker open. He pressed his hand over the rip and began to run hard. He couldn’t feel his shoulders at all anymore. It was awkward to run with his arm up and behind his neck. His air supply appeared to be all right— no— a tear in the tube, at the neck. He took his hand from his shoulder long enough to dial maximum flow on his wristpad. The cold flowed down his back like ghost ice water. A hundred below zero Centigrade. He was holding his breath and could feel dust on his lips, caking his mouth. Impossible to tell how much CO2 was getting into his oxygen supply, but it didn’t take much to kill you.

The garage appeared out of the murk; he had run right to it, and was feeling mighty pleased with himself until he came to the lock door and pushed the open button and nothing happened. It was easy to lock a lock’s outer door, just leave the inner one open. His lungs burned, he needed a breath. He ran around the garage to the walktube that connected it to the habitat proper, reached it, stared in through the layers of plastic. No one in sight. He took his hand away from the rip on his shoulder and as quickly as he could opened the box on his left forearm and took out the little drill, turned it on and plunged it into the plastic, which gave without breaking and gathered up around the spinning bit, until the drill almost broke his elbow. He poked wildly with it and finally got the plastic to tear, then ripped downward, widening the hole until he could dive through it helmet first. When he was inside to the waist he held still, using his body as a rough plug for the hole. He unclipped his helmet and ripped it off his head and gasped for breath as if coming up from a long dive, out in out in out in. Get that CO2 out of the blood. His shoulders and neck were numb. Down at the garage an alarm bell was ringing.

After a twenty-second compressed burst of thought, he yanked his legs through the hole and ran down the quickly depressurizing tube toward the habitat, away from the garage. Happily the door there opened on command. Once inside he jumped in an elevator and dropped to the third floor below the ground, where he was staying in one of the guest suites. He let the elevator door open and looked out. No one in sight. He hustled down to his room. Inside he stripped off the walker and stashed it and the helmet in his closet. In the bathroom he winced at the sight of his whitened shoulders and upper back; a really horrible case of frostnip. He took some oral painkiller and a triple dose of omegendorph, put on a shirt with a collar, pants, shoes. He combed his hair, composed himself. The face in the mirror looked glassy-eyed and distracted, almost stunned. He threw his face through the most violent contortions, slapped it, resettled his expression, started breathing in a deep pattern. The drugs began to kick in, and his reflection looked a little better.

He went out into the hall and walked to the big trench-wall concourse, which extended downward three more stories. He walked along the railing looking at the people below, feeling a curious mixture of elation and rage. Then Sam Houston and one of his women colleagues approached him.

“Excuse me, Mr. Boone, but will you please come with us?”

“What’s up?” he said.

“There’s been another incident. Someone cut open one of the walkway tubes.”

“Cut open a walktube? You call that an incident? We have mirror satellites flying out of orbit, and trucks falling into moholes, and you’re calling a prank like that an incident?”

Houston glared at him, and Boone almost laughed at the man. “How do you think I can help?” he asked.

“We know you’ve been working on this for Dr. Russell. We thought you might like to be informed.”

“Oh, I see. Well, let’s go have a look then.”

And then it was a matter of going through the paces, for nearly two hours, his shoulders burning like fire the whole time. Houston and Chang and the other investigators spoke to him as if in confidence, and anxious for his input, but their gazes were coolly evaluative. John returned them with a little smile.

“Why now, I wonder?” Houston said at one point.

“Maybe someone doesn’t like you being here,” John said.

Only when the whole charade was finished did he have time to think about why he wanted to keep them from finding out about the attack. No doubt it would have drawn more investigators up, and that was bad; and certainly it would have become the top news story all over Mars and Earth, tossing him back into maximum fishbowl. And he was sick of the fishbowl.

But there was something more than that, that he couldn’t quite pin. The subconscious detective. He snorted with disgust. To distract himself from the pain he stalked around from dining hall to dining hall, hoping to catch some expression of poorly concealed surprise when he walked into each room. Back from the dead! Which one of you murdered me! And once or twice he saw someone flinch from his roving gaze. But the fact was, he thought dourly, many people flinched when he looked at them. As if avoiding the gaze of a freak, or a condemned man. He had never felt his fame in quite that way before, and it made him angry.

The painkillers were wearing off, and he returned early to his rooms. His door was open. When he rushed in he found two of the UNOMA investigators inside. “What are you doing!” he cried angrily.

“Just looking out for you,” one of them said smoothly. They glanced at each other. “Wouldn’t want someone to try something.”

“Like breaking and entering?” Boone said, standing in the doorway and leaning against it.

“Part of the job, sir. Sorry we’ve upset you.” They shuffled nervously, trapped in his room.

“Just who gave you authorization for this?” Boone said, folding his arms over his chest.

“Well.” They looked at each other again. “Mr. Houston is our superior officer—”

“Call him and get him here.”

One of them whispered into his wristpad. In a suspiciously short time Sam Houston appeared down the hallway, and as he hurried up glowering John laughed. “What were you doing, hiding around the corner?”

Houston walked right up to him and stuck his face forward, and said in a low voice, “Look, Mr. Boone, we’re in the midst of a very important investigation here, and you are obstructing it. Despite what you seem to believe you are not above the law—”

Boone jerked forward so that Houston had to flinch to avoid their bumping noses. “You aren’t the law,” he said. He unfolded his arms and poked Houston in the chest, driving him back farther down the hall. Now Houston was losing his temper, and Boone laughed at him. “What are you going to do to me, officer? Arrest me? Threaten me? Give me something good to include in my next report on Eurovid? Would you like that? Would you like me to show the world how John Boone was harassed by some tin-god tin-badge functionary who came to Mars thinking he was a sheriff in the Wild West?” He remembered his opinion that anyone who spoke of themselves in the third person was a self-declared idiot, and laughed and said, “John Boone doesn’t like that kind of thing! No he doesn’t!”

The other two had taken the opportunity to slip out of his room, and were now watching closely. Houston’s face was the color of Ascraeus Mons, and his teeth were revealed. “No one’s above the law,” he grated. “There are criminal acts occurring here, very dangerous ones, and quite a few of them happen when you’re around.”

“Like breaking and entering.”

“If we determine that we need to check your quarters, or your records, to pursue our investigation, then we’re going to do that. We have that authority.”

“I say you don’t,” John said arrogantly, and snapped his fingers in the man’s face.

“We are going to search your rooms,” Houston said, articulating each word very carefully.

“Get away,” Boone said contemptuously, and jerked at the other two and waved them back. He laughed, lip curled with scorn: “That’s right, go! Get out of here, you incompetents— go back and read the regs on search and seizure!”

He went in his room and closed the door behind him.

He paused. It sounded like they were leaving, but either way he had to act like he didn’t care. He laughed, and went to the bathroom and took some more painkillers.

They hadn’t yet gotten to the closet, which was lucky; it would have been hard to explain the torn walker without telling the truth, and that would have been messy. Curious how tangled things got when you concealed the fact that someone had tried to kill you. That made him pause. The attempt had been pretty clumsy, after all. There must have been a hundred more effective ways to kill someone out in a walker on Mars. So if they were just trying to scare him, or were perhaps hoping that he would try to conceal the attack, so that they could find him lying, and then have something on him…

He shook his head, confused. Occam’s razor, Occam’s razor. The detective’s primary tool. If someone attacks you they mean you harm, that was the basic, the fundamental fact. It was important to find out who the attackers were. And so on. The painkillers were strong, and the omegendorph was wearing off. It was getting hard to think. It was going to be a problem disposing of the walker; the helmet in particular was a big bulky thing. But now he was into it, and there was no graceful way out. He laughed; he knew he would think of something eventually.