The Martian Pendant

by Patrick Taylor

  “As they deposited the aircraft on the strip, we joined them in celebration, with dancing and singing. Then there was a feast, if you can call a meal of hotdogs and beer a feast. They loved the dogs, with ketchup and mustard, but politely told us that our beer was just so much cold cow urine. We were forced to agree when they produced their own skins of brew. Certainly not watery! You’ve probably tasted it. Thick, milky and almost overpoweringly yeasty. Most of us sampled it out of courtesy, and our big drinkers loved it, if only after several. Me, I cut it with our own Chicago Eidelweiss, and that helped. Everyone had a great time before the warriors left for their Kraal around midnight, singing and repeatedly shouting, ‘Bwana Lady! Bwana Lady!’”

  SIXTEEN

  Competition

  The Italian newcomers, six Mafiosi in all, were half a mile away busily digging where they had moved excavation equipment into the plain that was south of the oilrig. They had brought along drilling equipment, but when it became obvious that the Cartel had found no oil, those lengths of pipe and lumber were left piled on the rocky ground, to become shelter mostly for small rodents and their predators, the snakes.

  Their mining efforts created a virtual dust storm, so vigorous was their search with a bulldozer of the dry subsurface soil. It reminded Diana of a kind of strip-mining. Fortunately for those at the dig, the prevailing winds carried the silt-laden air away from camp. Diana and the others climbed to the top of the drilling tower, where the rival operation could be better seen. She felt sick as she watched their uncovering many fragments of the lost second spaceship.

  The Sicilian priest, Celestre, continued to come on Sundays, but in the absence of the truck-drivers, seemed more of a spy than ever. Conducting the confessional and Mass for a very few others from the camp, he spent more time snooping around the ship. Diana also noticed that he carelessly left his little confessional with the Italians to the south, and more than once was seen to drive to their headquarters tent.

  She was sure they were plotting something, and on a Sunday, with everyone at leisure, she visited their new neighbors. Confrontational as she was, they at first feigned inability to understand English in an attempt to avoid dealing with her. Celestre was able to convince them of her key status among the Americans, convincing their leader to finally produce the official documentation of their legal right to be there.

  Mail confirmed further that the surrounding sections had been lawfully won by the Italians. In the same packet was Kindred’s answer to their question regarding Dragunov. In a letter addressed to Diana, the Assistant Minister wrote that despite her concerns, his credentials as Krueger had checked out. It also stated that if they expected to be granted an extension of time to continue their exploration, they would have to afford the Minister all the courtesies due his rank, as long as he chose to stay with them.

  In the meantime, the subject of their suspicions had finally recovered from his head wound under the somewhat ambivalent care of Adina, who had initially exposed him as a sexual predator and confirmed him as a fraud. As soon as he was able, he again attended the exploration of the hulk of the spaceship. The first thing he noticed was that the propulsion unit of the second ship had been removed from where it had been kept after its unearthing. This led to a tirade on his part, when he marched from the dig into Max’s tent.

  “I say,” he fairly shouted as he confronted the professor, “Where is the remaining part that was excavated south of the ship?”

  Max, shocked by the abrupt confrontation, replied, “Why, we shipped it to Dar last week. Is something wrong with that?”

  Towering over Max, the Minister glowered down at him. “Anything removed from this site is subject to taxation, and must be appraised by the Ministry for its value. Neglecting to take care of that brings penalties and possible confiscation. You and your colleagues would then be subject to fines and deportation.”

  Max looked him in the eye, and through clenched teeth, angrily said, “You were incompetent at the time, so we sent a formal notice of our intentions to your office in Dar-es-Salaam by mail. That legally discharged our duty, pending arrival of the material at the port of departure there, where customs will assign a value to it. That will be a matter of public record, our attorneys assured us, allowing you to levy whatever taxes are legally due. In the meantime, you are free to monitor our operations, which, as you know, are allowed by the original permits granted us by the government, and not dependent on your whim.”

  Dragunov had no response to that, and left in a huff, going back to observing and photographing in detail the continued activity

  * * *

  Work continued in the hulk, the grad students and others laboriously chipping away at the concretions that covered everything. The hundreds of pods on the second deck were finally freed of their calcific deposits, but to their disappointment, they found every single one empty. Pumping at the main entry on the port side slowly drained the water down enough to allow unimpeded entry there, and another large opening, low and near the nose on the other side, was uncovered. Nowhere was there evidence of the crocodile, to everyone’s relief.

  Much time was spent clearing away mineral deposits on the top deck also, accessed best by the port entry door. That entire level apparently had been devoted to the guidance of the ship on its journey to earth. The protrusion just behind the nose contained what was obviously the control center. It had evidently been manned by the crew on blast-off and during atmospheric entry and landing, judging by the array of seats next to consoles containing what looked like viewing screens. Around the inside of the nose itself was a network of pipes projecting through the overhead, which were obviously not periscopes, but finally determined to be part of the heat shield mechanism.

  Diana found a ladder affording access to the mezzanine floor below, and thus was the first to come upon the pods used by the Martian crewmembers for sleep, not only during the long flight, but also after landing. This floor was accessible only from the control room, sequestered from the deck below, excluding passengers occupying the pods there. Because of the findings on the other decks, Max opined that those pods would be empty too, and that they should be ignored, their efforts directed instead to uncovering the secrets to be found in the ship’s technical equipment.

  “Max,” Diana said firmly, “Are we paleoanthropologists or mechanics? No extraterrestrial remains have yet been found. A demonstration of the advanced state of their technology has been made many times over. We should leave all that to the appropriate scientists--nuclear physicists and metallurgists. We’ve done our part for them. They’ll soon be getting the propulsion units, which may lead to their unlocking all those secrets. But what of us? As anthropologists, we’ve learned a little about the native tribesmen, but not one jot about the people who landed here a million years ago.” The professor looked at her, more with desire than professional interest. “God, you’re so sexy. Great-looking women are always wonderful, but combine that with brains, and well...”

  At that point she cut him off. “What rubbish! Do let us keep this professional, Max. I’m serious. You’re a man, and naturally can’t believe in intuition as being important. But beyond that, just look at the facts. Almost two thousand empty pods have been found. Obviously, all the passengers escaped the ship. But why did the craft become buried? It must have been that the crew became disabled, and unable to keep the ship and themselves from harm. You’ve seen what volcanic gases in low-lying land can do, and we’ve found that the ports were all open, except for screening, now crumbled away, that excluded animal pests and predators. Can’t you see? The toxic or suffocating gases could easily have overcome the crew as they slept, despite their sophisticated technology.”

  Max objected. “Don’t you think they would have had alarms rigged to warn them in time? H2S, SO2 and CO2 are easily detected, rudimentary as our knowledge is compared to theirs, so how could they have literally been caught napping?”

  “We know that the Martian atmosphere contains a much larger concent
ration of carbon dioxide than our own,” Diana explained. “They probably guarded against the toxic gases derived from sulfur, such as we frequently smell around here, but not overwhelming levels of CO2, heavier than air and odorless, which can totally exclude oxygen.”

  “Okay,” he grudgingly said, “We can spare a worker on a couple of those pods. But if nothing is found in those, we’ll have to return to examining the rest of the hulk.”

  Diana asked, “Only a couple? Max, we’ve explored both passenger decks completely, and you would stop short of the mere two dozen left? These would be where the crew and the command were quartered. I guarantee that if you leave any untouched, they will all be uncovered, if I have to do the work myself.”

  The next day, as Diana and Max directed the workers with their jackhammers, the first pod in the row was uncovered, and found to be empty.

  “See?” Max said, a little too gleefully. “I told you. They’ll all be vacant.” He then gave the order to start work on an adjoining mound.

  “Wait!” She cried, “You picked the empty one. Let me decide on the second.”

  Studying the 24 mounds, just as with detecting underground water, she let her muscles relax and cleared her mind of all thoughts other than of aliens. After a minute, holding her pendant, while the onlookers began to grumble impatiently, she pointed out one pod in the farthest corner.

  “This is it,” she mumbled. “Go to it, but be careful. This one contains bones.”

  She had to restrain the jackhammer operator, eager as the young worker was to uncover the contents of the mound. It took some time, with the crew knocking off for lunch just as the last thin shell of calcareous rock was breached at one point. The interior was dark and seemed empty, leading Max to triumphantly remark, “Well, so much for intuition!”

  Disgusted with him, she replied in anger, “You’re supposed to be a scientist, not an ass, Max. This is not a contest between us. What satisfaction can you derive from a failure to discover Martian remains? Go to lunch with the rest. I’m staying here with hammer and chisel.”

  Working on enlarging the opening, she found a subtle change in the mineral. As she adjusted the light, she chipped away the last calcium carbonate, and found what appeared at first to be a small dome of rock underneath the aft end of the exposed pod. She looked closely, and immediately recognized the characteristic woven suture lines of a human calvarium.

  “A fossil skull!” she shouted. “Come quickly!”

  The others dropped their sandwiches and coffee and came running, as she played the light into the cavity, revealing what appeared to be other bones. They were all thrilled as she gave each one a glimpse of the fossil skeleton, apparently intact, and in a contour position, as if asleep.

  Even Max was pleased, saying, “Now we have some real paleoanthropology to work on!” With that he gave the order to carefully explore the remaining pod mounds, while Diana happily ate her lunch. Eleven more fossilized skeletons, all complete, were subsequently uncovered. All were male, and in almost every way identical to modern humans and to the Cro-Magnons found in the caves of southern France. None had signs of disease, as all were relatively young. Their dentition revealed no carious teeth. They differed only in their apparent chest capacity, exceeding the average of both modern humans and that estimated for the early Homo sapiens specimens unearthed in France and Spain. This was thought most likely due to the increasingly rarified atmosphere of Mars. Interestingly, their fingertips were devoid of signs of pulmonary arthropathy, seen on earth in those with chronic conditions that cause a deficiency of oxygen in the blood. Increased lung tissue had apparently made up for the low oxygen tension on their home planet.

  All pods with human remains contained buckles, buttons and weapons, side-arms made of metal, apparently electronic in type. No weapons had been found in the many vacated pods on the passenger decks, and nothing remained in the dozen empty ones next to the control room. As the nearby bulkhead surfaces on the mezzanine were chipped free of the thick mineral coatings, racks were exposed, apparently for larger weapons, all of them empty. That evening in their meeting, discussing the find, it was concluded that most of the people on the ship had escaped, taking those weapons, before the last dozen were overcome in their sleep.

  Later, lingering by herself at the site of her initial discovery, Diana continued to comb through the debris beneath the fossil bones on the pod bottoms. Almost at the point of giving up, her fingers found in a far corner of one a flat object, colder than the bones and concretions. Shining her light on it, the object reflected brightly, leading her to think it might be a mirror, although thicker. And when she freed it from the rind of calcium salts, it proved to be a book. Its pages were of stiff fabric-like sheets, with one side covered with symbols of the type seen throughout the ship, the opposite page covered with a type of script resembling Greek.

  By Jove, she thought, this could give us the key to their language, and at the same time allow us to decipher the symbols seen on the bulkheads awaiting an acid wash to better define them. Elated, she stood up to run and tell the others, when she felt the firm push of a solid object in the small of her back. Turning around, she was confronted by Dragunov, holding his automatic pistol.

  “Don’t make a sound, little lady,” he said softly. “Just quietly hand over that book, and I’ll let you live for now.”

  She had no choice, and reluctantly handed him the thick, heavy tome. Taking it in his other hand, he swung the pistol, nearly breaking her jaw, sending her to the deck, unconscious. When she came to, he was still there, gloating over his booty, leafing through the pages.

  “This is priceless,” he mumbled. When he saw she had regained consciousness, he put his P-38 in his belt, and grasped her arm.

  “Not a sound, hear?” Through clenched teeth, he muttered, “Now I have two prizes.” With that, he began to drag her down the companionway to the port entry, with the precious book in his other hand.

  As he came to the opening, walking backwards as he pulled her along, she watched in horror as, with a roar, a gray flash of jaw and teeth took him by the shoulder, forcibly yanking him, screaming, out the door and down into the water-filled cavern below. The force of the attack caused him to drop both the book and her arm simultaneously. The last she heard was a huge splash, his final gurgling scream quickly stifled by the soft bubbling of the running stream.

  She was so intent on recovering the book, which had fallen outside onto a ledge at the water’s edge, that she forgot her fear. As she climbed hastily down to retrieve the prize, the waters began to take on a reddish cast. Only then did she feel alarm and scrambled back into the hulk. Hearing the screams, the dig crew came running, finding her shaken but relieved, standing in the entry and holding the book tightly against her breast.

  “Start the pumps! We’ll just have to run them continuously to keep that water level down,” she said groggily, “We can’t give that monster another opportunity such as it just enjoyed.”

  That evening after supper, no one, not even Adina, mourned the fate of the luckless agent, AKA Krueger, although Max had to report his death to the Minister’s office. Diana was appalled by the gruesome event, and reflected on what might have become of her had her attackerilived. After concluding that the crocodile saved her life, she was able to take time to write to her parents and her son details of the day’s adventures. She then turned her attention to the book, spending a couple of hours examining it. A virtual Rosetta Stone, she thought. I feel like that Frenchman must have before he figured it out. What was his name anyway? Of course! Champollion. But he had the advantage of knowing the third language, Greek, which had led him to the solution. This book has only two languages.

  She finally slept despite her headache and swollen jaw, but only after she realized that the alphabet-like script was matched in the book by symbols, as arcane as Egyptian hieroglyphs. But she had seen many of those same characters uncovered by freeing the ship’s interior surfaces of the calcium salts. The labeling on consol
es, switches, objects and items of equipment, plus posted directions, would be the key to getting started, she knew, as she drifted off.

  With the death of Dragunov, Kindred was promoted to the vacant post. It was soon thereafter that he received confirmation from British intelligence that “Krueger” had been a Soviet agent after all.

  “By Jove,” he remarked to his secretary, “I indeed owe that lass an apology. She was right all along. The fact that the Italians won the race to secure the mineral rights to the surrounding land smacks of skulduggery, in view of her plane having been sabotaged. That dig seems rather more important than a mere mineral or archeological exploration. The whole thing seems to be an earthshaking discovery.”

  It was in that frame of mind that, within a month, he was approached by the Chinese delegation that was in the process of surveying the coast south of Dar-es-Salaam for their proposed railroad. The project was vociferously supported by the revolutionary, Julius Nyrere, the leader of the opposition in the British Colonial administration. Foremost among his socialist plans was the modernization of the country he was likely to head.

  The British resented TANU’s anti-government stance. Had they not been enlightened rulers? And they did have plans to turn the government over when the Africans were ready. Why did they have to court the Chinese Communists? He knew the answer. The native leaders were weary of the white man’s influence. The Chinese promised them generous financial support, as well as technical input for building Tanganyika’s infrastructure and tapping its mineral wealth.