Icehenge (15 page)

“So you look around when you walk in this district! I should think you would turn away, to keep your conscience clean.”

“My righteous professor,” Shrike said with a wide grin. “My holy professor who shuns all the privileges of his class, and devotes every moment of his life to ending social injustice—”

“Shut up—”

“Who can't imagine any other way of working for change than moaning and groaning from the top of his ivory tower, and digging about in the dirt.” By the width of his grin I saw I had angered him, and that surprised me.

“So I've hit a sore spot,” I said.

“No! You've hit unfairly, as usual. You bitch at me every time we meet, as if it's impossible for me to be in pursuit of anything but personal power. And then you take advantage of my work every day of your life. So un
grate
ful.” He grinned again. “Perhaps I am tired of you, Hjalmar. Perhaps I am tired of working for your good and being nagged about it too. Perhaps you should not have bothered me this evening at all.”

But even in the dusk he could see the fear on my face, and after a moment's scrutiny he laughed. “Come back to my place, Hjalmar, and teach me some more ancient history. And leave the righteousness in the canal. You're doing no better than any of the rest of us.”

And later that night, in bed, I woke from a doze and said, “Can you get rid of Satarwal for me? He's dangerous, I think.”

“How so?” He was half asleep.

“He hates me. It's gone beyond obstructing my efforts, he wants to destroy them—he'll do anything. He's plotting with Petrini against me.”

“We'll see. Maybe I've put him out there to keep you on your toes, eh, Hjalmar? To keep you sharp?” And he fell asleep.

*   *   *

Olympus Mons—the tallest volcano in the solar system; its peak is 27 kilometers above the datum, and its volume is one hundred times that of the largest terran volcano, Mauna Loa.

One day I ordered my team over the crater rim and into the rift once called Spear Canyon, to do a survey. Bill Strickland gave me an aggrieved look, as if because he had once mentioned the canyon I was obliged to acknowledge him every time the matter came up. Irritably I sent him packing, to complete the gathering of equipment; for this Hana gave me a piercing glare.

New Houston was set in a “splosh crater,” meaning the ejecta shield is made of lobes of what was fluidized material directly after the impact. The shield is thus an even surface, except for a narrow rift created by two lobes of fluid being split by some prominence that was later buried by the falling ballistic ejecta of the rim. This rift or canyon broadens to split the shield's low outer rampart, so it opens up directly onto the surrounding plain. Altogether it seemed to me a promising avenue of escape for any party trying to slip away from the crater unobtrusively.

I led my team down the outside of the rim, switchbacking from ledge to ledge down the broken slope. The drop was about one in two, but the use of ledges as ramps made it an easy walk, down pitted rock sheets that lapped over each other like insulating tiles. Behind me the others remarked at the cold; it was a windy day, and most of them wore masks and goggles. But I enjoyed the chill of the harsh wind on me (Dr. Laird would be angry). The sky was the color of old paper; it made a fine dome to hike under.

We explored the length of the canyon, through the break in the rampart and onto the boulder-covered plain. In several places we found remnants of a road that had been cut into the south slope of the canyon. Landslides covered the majority of this road, but near the upper end of the canyon a good stretch of it was clear. The entire team stood on this trace and looked back up at the rim. “It must have switchbacked to the top,” Bill said.

“Or stopped in this little cirque,” I suggested, “where an escalator could take them up to the dome.”

“Possibly,” said Bill with a shrug.

“I wonder why they cut the road into the slope when the landslide danger was so great,” Hana said.

“Mass wasting is a hundred times faster now,” I said irritably. “They built for the erosion of their time.”

Bill and Xhosa took off down the course of the road with metal detectors and seismic probes, intent on mapping what they could. The others dug away at the edges of the slides, and searched the bottom of the canyon, where intermittent ice creeks alternated with slides that had filled the canyon and pushed up the other side. We would have stayed until dark, but the wind was rising. Plumes of sand spindrifted off the rim above us, turning the sun a dull copper and obscuring its troop of mirrors entirely. “We'd better get back,” I shouted. “We can continue when the weather improves.” For the weather satellite photos had shown a cyclonic system approaching.

So we hiked back over the rim, across the city and over the escalator to camp, swathed in masks and goggles for the final descent down a slope made invisible by the flow of wind-driven sand. The next day the storm broke in earnest, and we were trapped in camp for ten days while thick sandhail pummeled the tents and drifted against their windward sides. For my group it was a long wait, particularly since none of the old maps showed a road in Spear Canyon, implying that it had been built in the city's last days. When the storm broke we were ordered by Satarwal to help dig the camp out of the mud, and that took three more days.

On the afternoon of the third day Hana and Xhosa and I went up to the crater rim to look at the dome foundation above Spear Canyon, and check for signs of an escalator. The foundation was battered in this area, and Hana was giving one of her munitions lectures when something caught my eye. I stared down Spear Canyon, which snaked away from its head about half a kilometer down from the rim. There in the clear post-storm light, had something blinked? Some light had winked at me. I moved my head about experimentally, and there it was again:
blink.
Reflected sunlight, as yellow as fire. On the south slope. “Have either of you got a pair of binoculars?” I said, interrupting Hana.

“There's one in my tool box,” Hana said. “What is it?”

“Something down there.” I took the binoculars from their case. “Do you see a mirror down there, reflecting light at us? Here, stand where I was standing. On the road, about halfway down what we can see.” I looked through the binoculars and focused them, fingers slipping in my haste.

“No light,” Xhosa said.

“No, but the sun's moved, and it was small. Look there. There's a new slide, just above the road.” Magnified twenty times, the slide was clearly a fresh one, dark brown and sharp-edged at the top and sides. “You should be able to see it even without the glasses, it's dark—”

“About halfway down,” Hana said. “I think I see the slide, anyway.”

The newly exposed face had the shimmery holographic look of things seen through binoculars. Something floated through the superimposed rings of vision, and I veered back to it. Near the upcanyon edge of the slide
something
—a regular shape, rust-colored, just darker than the smectite clay … something smooth, rounded, with a shiny patch in it, like glass. I moved from side to side, and the patch flared gold.

“By God.” I cleared my throat. “I think it's—a hut or something. Take a look.” I gave the glasses to Xhosa. Hana was shading her eyes, staring at it. “I definitely see the slide.”

“I see it,” Xhosa said. “Close to the upper end of the slide?”

“Yes.”

“That's about where the road would be,” he said, and handed the glasses to Hana. He and I looked at each other.

“Let's get down there,” I said.

“I'll radio for help,” Xhosa said, hurrying to the tool box. “It won't take long for them to catch up.”

“I see it!” Hana said. “It looks like a field car to me.”

When Xhosa was done radioing for reinforcements we hopped down the ledges of the rim slope like we were in a race. When we got to the head of the rift we jogged down the road. Halfway there we had to slow down and catch our breath. I turned up the oxygen supply from my suit and instructed the others to do the same. We hurried again, and after a short scramble came to the wet, rime-crusted rubble at the bottom of the new slide. A stiff climb up the canyon's side brought us as close to the object I had spotted as we could get without stepping on the new slide.

“It is a car,” Hana said.

“Looks like burn marks on the front end there, see?” Xhosa pointed.

That stopped us for a moment; the implication was clear, and I saw foreboding mix with the anticipation on the others' faces. We had all found too many bodies.

I stepped onto the broken clay to test the stability of the slide. The clay was soft, and it seemed possible I might start another slide by walking on it. The car was only five or six meters from the slide's edge, and I wanted badly to reach it before anyone else arrived. Carefully I tamped a footprint down until it was ankle deep; stepped onto it, and tamped down the next one.

“Maybe you should wait,” Hana said.

“We'll still have to do this.”

“But it would be safer if you were roped to us.”

“It seems solid enough.”

And so it was. I continued very slowly, and was only a meter or two from the car when a large group came bounding down the canyon, all talking at once. “We scanned this section with a metal detector,” Bill said peevishly. “I wonder how we missed this.”

“Did you bring any rope?” I called.

“We brought everything,” Petrini said. “Have you found buried treasure?”

“Maybe so,” Hana said sharply.

“An old field car, slightly burned,” I said. “Throw me one end of a rope, please.” Now that a rope was available I felt exposed. Bill threw an end to me, and I tied it around my chest, just under my arms. Upcanyon McNeil and two students were hurrying to reach us. I stepped the final distance to the car, checked beneath a rear wheel to see what kind of ground it rested on, and found it was on the edge of the buried road. I hiked back over the slide, finding it solider than it felt before the rope's arrival, and took a holo camera from McNeil. Then I retraced my steps.

The door of the car still had its plastic window intact; it was this that had reflected the sunlight and drawn my eye. I cleared the window of a film of dirt, and peered inside. An empty interior; it looked like a little cave in the canyonside. The windshield was crazed but still intact. The opposite door's window was gone, and dirt spilled through it onto the floor of the car.

“Any bodies?” Petrini asked. Always the first question at New Houston.

“No bodies.” It was an eight-passenger car, and the last two seats held boxes. I tried the door; it gave and opened with a loud creak. I reached in and put the holo camera on its stand, set for six holos. When the six beeps had sounded I took the camera out, and carefully tested the floor of the car with my foot. “Don't disturb anything!” McNeil said.

“Oh, McNeil!” several voices cried in unison. The car was firm as bedrock, and I stepped in to look at the boxes in the back.

“They're full of papers,” I said, but no one heard me. I could hear my pulse hammering in my ears. Folders, notebooks, plastic sheaves, computer disks, folded maps, blueprints. I picked up a box and carried it outside, hefted it and walked on my prints one more time.

“There's going to be a time when you'll want it all in the position you found it, that's all I'm saying,” McNeil muttered. But he looked in the box as curiously as the rest of us when I set it down. And when I returned with the next one he was on his knees with Petrini, poring over the contents.

As I picked up the last box, I noticed a notebook on the floor of the car, nearly buried by the spill of dirt from the broken window. It was a little plastic-covered spiral bound thing, and I almost missed it. I pulled it free, knocked some dirt from it, and carried it across the slide clamped in between glove and box. When I put the box down I kept the notebook in my hand, and showed it to the others. “This was free on the floor.”

“Here's a news poster signed at the bottom by an Andrew Jones of the Washington-Lenin Alliance,” Hana said from her crouch over one of the boxes. She showed it to Petrini, who read it swiftly, eyebrows lifted.

I was shivering; from the cold, from my excitement, I couldn't tell. I put the notebook in one of the boxes. “Let's get all this back to camp,” I said. “I'm running low on oxygen.” I looked at the group of clay-smeared people around me, and I couldn't help smiling. “There's a lot of work here.”

*   *   *

Lava Channels

Plans for the city's defense; tapes and xeroxes of communications with the Washington-Lenin Alliance in other cities, and in space; lists of people, casualties, weapons, supplies; partial accounts of the revolution in New Houston and the Nirgal Vallis, and around Mars; memos from the Johnson still stations; and maps, including one of the east or lower end of Valles Marineris.

McNeil organized and catalogued as the little boxes were emptied, and he handed each piece or bundle of paper to an eagerly waiting scientist. Almost everyone in the expedition was in the main commons, helping to figure out what we had. Two Xerox machines were working full time to copy everything, several computer consoles were in action, and a cassette player suddenly spoke in voices obscured by radio crackle. The excitement in the air was as palpable as the smell of the copiers. Satarwal was there too, grimly working to appear unconcerned. Few people met his eye, or addressed a comment to him.

As for me—I felt as if I were dreaming. Kalinin and McNeil clapped me on the shoulders, and Kalinin said, “This is it right here, Nederland. You've got your proof.”

Hana heard this and looked downcast. I didn't understand this; but then, reflecting on it, I thought I did. I followed her to the coffee machine in the hall.