by Isaac Asimov
They did so, and explained the radioactivity problem. The image on the screen was wary. Hesperson sighed. “I wish I could tell you what to do. There’s a big decontamination mission near Equatorial City—”
“Our rover would take twenty days to get there! And we would run out of consumables first.”
“Let me get back to you on this.” And Hesperson was gone.
“The Centimes,” Zora said. This couldn’t be happening. Couldn’t. It was a crazy nightmare, and soon she’d wake up. “We’ll contact the Centimes at their summer habitat and ask them to let us use their Pharm. They can send us codes to unlock it.”
Krona Centime’s face, on the monitor, looked distracted and her hair was sticking up as if she hadn’t combed it in several days. Maybe something had happened during the Centime’s trip to the southern hemisphere to derange her mind. “Yes! Yes, of course. No, wait, I ought to ask Escudo.” Without waiting for an answer, she logged off.
Marcus was staring at a life-support monitor. Some of the rover’s functions ran much better when the sun was in the sky, and it wasn’t up very much in Winter-March. Zora pressed his hand, a gesture he could barely appreciate through the thickness of their gloves.
Sekou’s voice cut through the silence like a tiny flute. “Those people have a little girl. Could I play with her?”
Zora had forgotten that Sekou had a com with him when she’d scooped him up to evacuate the hab. Now she was glad—it might come in very handy. Especially if they were to become homeless, landless people in a Martian city where they would be forced to scrape or beg for the very oxygen they breathed.
“She won’t be there,” said Marcus, and patted his head through the thick membrane. “But I’ll ask if you can play with some of her toys.” The Centimes were known as spendthrifts and were rumored a vast store of luxury items and gadgets. Zora hoped they were also generous.
Escudo Centime’s dark, strong-jawed face appeared in Zora’s monitor. “Help yourself. I sent a command to the entry airlock to let you in. It should recognize your biometrics.”
And so, in the cramped rover, confined to their environment suits with Sekou in his rescue bubble, they set off.
* * * *
Centime Pharm was almost invisible, most of it underground, its sharp angles softened by sand settled out of the tenuous atmosphere.
“That’s it, thank heaven,” said Zora.
Marcus said nothing, just drove the rover toward the hab entrance. Zora could read nothing of his expression through his helmet.
Sekou’s voice broke the silence. “When can we go home? I want my Croodelly.”
The Croodelly was a piece of worn-out shirt Zora had fashioned into a stuffed animal of indeterminate species. She wished once more that they had had time to pack.
More time? They had none at all. She was totting up in her head the costs of decontaminated the hab and discarding everything damaged within. Their experiments would have to go; the radiation would start mutations and blight even the most vigorous plants and bacteria.
Marcus, reading her mind, said, “Rehabilitation may be possible.”
“If it isn’t done properly, we’d be in danger. In the end, we’d shorten our lives and our science would be suspect.”
“Or it may be impossible. We can’t know now. Here’s the airlock. Get ready.”
Zora waited for Marcus to approach Centime Pharm’s outer airlock. It was silly to be afraid of an empty hab, but she thought, irrationally, of creatures, runaways, ghosts, inside.
Marcus opened the rover hatch and slid out. He plodded a few paces from the rover, then turned and looked back, his suit dusty under the low autumn sun. He couldn’t have seen her face through her faceplate, but he stood stock still and looked at the two of them, his wife and his son, standing out in the Martian dessert. His voice came through the com. “What are you afraid of, Zora?”
“You feel it, too, don’t you? I keep thinking there are things on Mars—no, people on Mars—who don’t like us. It’s so cold out there, and that hab—it seems haunted.”
Marcus turned back to the hab and plodded on.
Zora said, “I know it’s irrational, but the darkness—we’re so far from New Jersey, aren’t we?”
Marcus spoke softly, still marching toward the dark hab entrance. “This was a decision we made. Can’t unmake it. But for your sake, if I could, I’d change.”
“No, love. We’re here. We wanted this, both of us. However it turns out, we’ll play it as it lays.”
But Sekou, she thought. Sekou is the innocent passenger.
“Mama,” he said. His voice sounded near, even though a thick plastic membrane separated him from her.
“Hush,” she said. “Papa’s trying to get us a place to stay.” Sekou couldn’t see the readouts. They had enough consumables in the rover to get back to their own hab, but what good did that do? If they went back, they’d fry.
Because she was watching the rover readouts, she didn’t notice at first that Marcus had turned and sprinted back toward the rover. Then she heard the shrill alarm relayed through his com.
He pushed through the rover door and sat down facing forward, not looking at her. “Radiation there, too.”
She stared at his helmeted face, in shock. Then she laughed, shakily. “What is this, an epidemic?”
“Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” he asked.
“Yeah. Our visitors.”
“Might could be Hesperson has something for us,” he said. He accessed the contact, and Hesperson’s assistant answered the call.
“How could this have happened?” asked the assistant “You think your nomad visitors had something to do with it?”
Zora shook her head. “It could be. There was a new woman with them, Valkiri. No last name, of course. She seemed more—fanatical than the rest.”
“New? You know some of these people from before?”
“We trade with them,” said Marcus. “Chocko, the one we know the best, he wasn’t there, but the other three, except for this Valkiri, were—” he hesitated.
“Friends,” Zora said.
Hesperson’s assistant looked glum. “So you could be carrying some nanosaboteur or even a big chunk of something radioactive—”
“No, no, the rover has no signs, except of course for the power plant—”
“There could be a problem with your suit sensors. The radioactive contaminants could be traveling with you.”
“The rover sensors—”
“The software in your suit sensors could have damaged that.” The assistant smiled a phony, nervous smile into the screen. “Why not just go back to your hab and wait. I’m sure if you contact your corp they’ll have some advice for you.”
Zora and Marcus stared at each other. The Corp that owned their contracts was the last entity in the world they wanted to contact right now. The Vivocrypt Corp had paid for four intensive years of education on Earth for each of them, equivalent to doctoral degrees, then financed their journey to Mars and bankrolled the their hab and Pharm.
This was not charity on the part of the Vivocrypt Corp. The microbiology courses they had taken were very specifically oriented to engineering certain useful substances and organisms that could survive only in extreme conditions. The Vivocrypt Corp had very specific uses for these discoveries.
And Zora and Marcus, who had married and started a family with the prospect of living off the Corp, had allowed their science to take some twists and turns that didn’t lead directly to what the Corp wanted. Because the training they had received on Earth had aroused in each of them a fierce, shared delight in science for science’s sake.
The Vivocrypt Corp would not be pleased that the expensive hab and Pharm was no longer of any use as a research and development extension of the Corp.
Zora looked down at Sekou, who was rocking back and forth in the rescue bubble hard enough to bang it against the bulkhead of the rover. His face seemed to be just two big eyes. “We can’t go back,” s
he whispered.
“Call the Corp.”
The computer avatar that was their usual communication link with the Corp appeared: a young woman dressed in a black suit. She was pretty and imperious. “Your hab is destroyed? Do you have the funds to cover this?” This computer avatar was apparently programmed for heavy irony. The Smythes were so deeply in debt that only a major technological breakthrough would get them in out of the cold again.
Marcus sent a private message to Zora. “Think they know there’s a problem? Their satellite imagers might have seen us carrying the bubble.”
Zora exhaled sharply. “If the corp saw something like that, they’d think we were running, maybe planning to sell out to another corp. We’d be talking to a live human corpgeek, not this avatar.”
Marcus unmuted the com and spoke to the corporation avatar. “We’re in trouble, honcha. We need shelter and atmosphere.”
The avatar smiled brightly. “We suggest you go back to the hab and see what can be salvaged. Of course the Vivocrypt Corp values you highly, but your laboratories contain priceless equipment shipped from Earth orbit.”
“We’ll be fried!” Zora hadn’t expected quite this level of cold-heartedness.
“Corp estimates your life expectancy will be shorted only by about fifteen years, on the average. That’s just a statistical average. One or both of you might sustain no more damage burden than you suffered in the trip to Mars.”
“What about our son? What about our future children?” Marcus was shouting.
The avatar’s smile broadened idiotically. These things were so badly programmed, Zora wanted to scramble the software that ran her. But the avatar was mouthing Corp policy. “No guarantees are made as to reproductive success in Corp hires, as you will find in your contracts. My memory provides me with a vid showing that you were advised of this policy when you originally sold your contracts to Vivocrypt Corp.”
Marcus voice was low and dangerous. “Let us speak to a human corpgeek.”
“Of course,” said the avatar, nodding gravely, like a cartoon character. The image froze for fifteen seconds, then she came alive with renewed joviality. “I have consulted with Bioorganism Resource Assistant Director Debs. She confirms the advice I’ve given you.”
“We want to talk to this Debs geek.”
“One moment, please.” The avatar froze again. Then, “I’m so sorry, Assistant Director Debs is finishing her daily solitaire game and will return your call tomorrow or the next sol. Thanks for calling the Vivocrypt Corporation. May Father Mars and the bright new sol bring you fresh inspiration to serve the Corp.” The image vanished.
Zora fingertipped furiously to link again to the corp, but access was rejected.
“I hate that religious stuff about Father Mars,” she said to Marcus. “Avatars don’t believe in the supernatural, or in having a ‘bright new sol.’”
“Corp doesn’t either. Using spirituality as mind control. As if they need any more control over us.”
“They hope we’ll stop thinking, just go back and work until we die of cancer or radiation burns.” She noticed that Sekou was listening to them on his com. “We gave them our time, our whole lives. They owe us at least shelter.”
Marcus’s tone turned flat and almost brutal. “Machine minds. Machine hate. Use us as if we were the machines. We run down, they dump us.”
To her horror, she realized she was starting to cry. She turned her face so Sekou would not see it.
“Mama, I have to go.”
Startled, she turned her face back to him. “Go where?”
“You know. Go potty.”
“Darling, just wait.”
Marcus seemed to be deliberately holding his helmet so she couldn’t see his expression, but her guess was that it was grim. He said, “I’m calling Hesperson again.”
The assistant answered again this time. “Mister Hesperson said he was working on your problem, trying to come up with some ideas. Meantime, he said to proceed as we discussed before.”
“We have a child with us, Mister—” Zora couldn’t remember the assistant’s name. She stopped, took a deep breath and said, “We have credit, you know. And equity in the Pharm and hab, because it’s held on a lien in our names. Our Corp purchased twenty years of our labor for each of us, and that’s gone to pay for the physical plant. We can borrow against that—”
The assistant held up a hand. “If it were only that, Dr. Smythe. But Mister Hesperson has information from Krona Centime that somehow you’ve contaminated or infected their Pharm and labs.”
“How could they know—?”
Marcus spoke up. “The Centimes must have remotely read the reading on their outermost airlock. But it was hot before we got here.”
“Still, you seem to be carrying something—”
“What crap,” Zora broke in. “This is not an contagious agent. This is a problem with the coolant in our nuclear power plant. I don’t know what the Centimes told you, but we are not ‘carrying something.’”
Marcus said, “Get Hesperson. He will talk to us. He’s no trifling fool to hide behind his bots and hires.”
Hesperson came on. “It’s beginning to look like something happened back there, something to do with those Land Ethic Nomads you entertained overnight.”
“Didn’t want to think that,” said Marcus.
Zora bit her lip. “Not all of them. That Valkiri woman.”
“She may have done something to the nuke at the Centime’s Pharm, as well, Dr. Smythe. You understand the implications of this.”
Zora squeezed her eyes shut, then opened them and blinked to clear her mind. “Yes, ombudsman Hesperson. There’s a killer on the loose.”
He grimaced and nodded. “Exactly. And if seems you are not her only victims.”
Marcus said, “Then best shelter us until she’s apprehended.”
Hesperson continued smoothly. “And draw fire here? If this woman follows you into Borealopolis, several thousand lives will be at risk. The entire population of our city would be endangered.” He leaned into the viewscreen. “Let me put a proposition to you, Drs. Smythe. Bring me this woman, give her up to us, and we will allow you shelter. Perhaps I can even persuade the Borealopolis citycorp to reward you somehow.”
Marcus said, “How? How can we stop her.”
Hesperson made a cage of his fingers and looked over it at them “I assume you have the usual homesteader’s aversion to visual monitoring of your hab?”
“We left Earth to avoid that kind of violation. “Zora snapped.
Hesperson’s mouth twitched. “Then let me remind you that you are the only ones who have seen her face.”
* * * *
Zora felt exhausted. The sols were short this time of year, and the sky had darkened several hours before. Sekou’s whimpers cut her like little blades, and she herself was getting hungry. “My brain is shutting down, Marcus. What can we do? Land Ethic Nomads are many of them unregistered. We don’t know Valkiri’s last name, or even if she was born in a place where she would be given one. Valkiri is probably an alias. We don’t even know the legal names of the tribe members we’ve sheltered and traded with before.”
“We’ve seen her face.”
“Yes, briefly and in bad light.” In respect for the Land Ethic Nomad’s desire to conserve resources, the lights in the hab had been dimmed. Of course, that served Valkiri’s purposes very well. “But we could download face reconstruction software and create a picture. Or—”
“Mama,” said Sekou quite reasonably, “I really have to go now. Can’s we go home now?”
“No, honey.”
“You promised we could go visit Mr. and Mrs. Centime and that little girl. Please, mama. They have a bathroom, don’t they?”
Zora turned to him. “You’ll just have to hold it! This is an emergency, Sekou.”
“Mama, I can’t!”
“Well, then you’ll have to go in your pants. We have more important problems.”
“Mama—”
She turned to Marcus. “We can’t pressurize the rover just to let him urinate. We just can’t.” The rover passenger compartment had no airlock. It took a long time to pressurize and they might have a much greater need later to pressurize, if for example they had to consume water or food. Of course they’d have to find water and food, which they hadn’t had time to pack.
Marcus squatted down in his cumbersome environment suit and looked at Sekou, bent in a cramped ball inside the bubble. “Listen, Sekou. Your daddy and mama understand. We ran into a problem and we’re trying to solve it fast. Now, take a deep breath and tell me if there’s enough air in there.”
Sekou made a great show of inflating his chest as far as was possible while bent double, then blowing out. “I think it’s okay, Daddy.”
“Good. That’s a good boy. Now close your eyes and keep trying the air in there. Breath big deep breaths, that’s right.”
“But if I—?”
“If you have an accident, we can clean it up soon as we get where we’re going. Okay? Are you a big guy?”
“No, Daddy.”
“Oh yes. Big, brave guy. Breathe again, let’s see you puff out those cheeks.”
Sekou breathed in and out again, eyes closed.
Zora felt again the pang of being not very good with kids. When a girl leaves her family at fifteen and the earth itself at nineteen, as Zora had, maybe she doesn’t pick up the knack of being good with kids. “He’ll pee himself if he falls asleep,” she sent on a private channel to Marcus.
Marcus said, “Yeah, and what harm is there in that, considering the ice we’re on?”
That crumbled Zora’s sense of reality, and she began laughing, in a kind of relief at having let go some of the pettier fears of their situation. Then something occurred to her. “We could use the photograph that Sekou took.”
Marcus turned his eyes to her. “Use—”
“To find her. If we have an image, we don’t need to try to recognize her face. We can upload it to Marsnet and let their biometrics identify her.”
“Girl, I thought I married you for your pretty face, but I’ll love you forever for your brain. Wait, though. What if she’s not registered?”
