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SATURDAY, 26 MAY: 0831 HOURS GMT
Cydonia Base, Mars
Sol 5634: 2045 hours MMT
The last pale glow of the sunset had long since faded from the sky outside, surrendering the desert below to the star-dusted black of the Martian night. Inside the common room, where Mark Garroway was sitting at the table along with Colonel Lloyd, David Alexander, and a dozen or so of the expedition’s senior people, the harsh and unrelenting glare of fluorescents gave scant warmth to air swiftly turning chilly and damp. It was always like this in these large habs, once the sun had set. Cydonia Prime’s environmental systems were being stretched to their operational limits with the demands being made on them just now. During the two weeks after Harper’s Bizarre had touched down, all fifty-four of the UN troops had ferried back from Candor Chasma, along with the new members of the UN science team, bringing the complement on-station at Cydonia Prime to 138.
Both Colonel Bergerac and the UN archeological team leader, Mireille Joubert, were present in the room now. Joubert had called the emergency meeting, in fact, apparently for the purpose of reading the riot act to Alexander.
“What do you mean,” Alexander was saying slowly, “we can’t tell anyone on Earth yet? This…this is the most incredible discovery in the history of—”
“Please, David, I know the importance, the possible significance of this discovery. And that’s precisely why we shouldn’t release it until we know more.”
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.
“And why not?” Joubert replied.
“Everything we think we understand about xenobiology,” Colt said, “suggests that when we meet extraterrestrials, they will look nothing like us.”
“Hell, the big mystery that drew us here in the first place,” Alexander added, “was the Face…and the question of what the representation of a human face was doing here. The fact that we found humans in that room suggests some extraordinary possibilities. If nothing else, it suggests that humans were here when this place was built. And that was…when, Dr. Graves?”
“It depends on the dating method you use. Somewhere between four and five hundred thousand years, though, is a close guess.”
“The recordings shot by Dr. Alexander and his people,” Colt added, “suggest that these…these people are not fully modern humans. Their facial features, the brow ridges, the receding chins, they show some characteristics that I would associate with archaic Homo sapiens…or even with late Homo erectus.”
“In other words, people from half a million years ago,” Alexander put in. “To find them…here…. That suggests to me that extraterrestrials took an interest in humans—or in what one day would become humans. They visited Earth in the mid to late Pleistocene, picked up some specimens of our ancestors, and brought them here.” He laughed. “My God! We have here proof that there was direct interaction between the Ancients and the dominant hominid species on Earth half a million years ago. More than interaction! Those bodies are wearing uniforms and carrying devices that might be
