To the Stars -- And Beyond

by Robert Reginald

  Ino represented Mr. Matsuzaki. Certainly Mr. Matsuzaki’s standing was greater than Mr. Matsuda’s. But Ino himself was not of rank equal to Mr. Matsuda’s.

  Mr. Matsuda poured the sake himself. Ino watched him. He filled his own cup nearly to the rim. He filled Ino’s barely halfway.

  “I welcome you to Phobos, Mr. Ino.” Matsuda downed his sake.

  “I thank you for your kindness,” Ino said. He downed his own half-cup of sake. He reached for the jug, filled Matsuda’s cup two-thirds of the way to the rim, then filled his own cup to the very rim. “Mr. Matsuzaki sends his compliments.”

  Matsuda’s eyes narrowed as he watched Ino’s actions. He remained silent and motionless for a time. Finally he emptied his cup.

  Following the sakazuki, Ino asked to see all records regarding the disappearance of Miss Inada. He reviewed the files, then personally interviewed Jiricho Toshikawa. By now, Toshikawa was tired of telling his story.

  “I have told everything to Mr. Okubo, to Mr. Sekigawa, to Mr. Sumiyoshi, and to Mr. Matsuda. What more is there to say?”

  Mr. Ino sat facing the kitchen helper. Toshikawa was even taller and more gangling than Ino’s boss, Mr. Matsuzaki. The image of Jizo-bosatsu and Shaka-nyorai returned, only now Jiricho Toshikawa rather than Toshimitsu Matsuzaki played the role of the tall, gangling ascetic.

  “Please,” Ino said to Toshikawa, “if you would go over it once more. Perhaps, by hearing what you told the others, I will think of some question they omitted. Perhaps then you can tell me something new.”

  Toshikawa shrugged. He would rather be in his bunk with a jug of sake and a story record. On the other hand, that pleasant banishment had ended and he would now be back at work, suffering the abuse of Mr. Okubo, if he were not with Mr. Ino. He went over his story once more.

  At the end of Toshikawa’s story, Ino steepled his fingers and said, “No one ever asked you what Miss Inada was doing at the crater?”

  Toshikawa looked puzzled. “No one.”

  Ino nodded. “Well, then, I shall ask you.”

  “Ask me what?”

  “What Miss Inada was doing when she was stabbed.” He thought, This fellow is not very bright after all—but he might be able to help me nonetheless.

  “I don’t know.”

  “But you were in love with her.”

  Toshikawa grew red. “I was not.”

  “But you told the others that you dreamed of her. And that you approached her one day in the dining commons.”

  “I liked her.”

  “Not loved her.”

  “No.”

  “Yet you had sex dreams about her?”

  Toshikawa grew even redder. “I could not help it. I think about...things. About women. But....” He became silent, clearly miserable.

  “That’s normal, Toshikawa. Many men want women that they cannot have. But to kill her….” He raised his eyebrows.

  Toshikawa said, “I did not kill her!”

  “Where is her body now?”

  “I don’t know!”

  Ino tried a while longer, but Toshikawa stuck with his story. Ino knew that if he worked on the kitchen helper long enough, he could break him down, get a confession from him.

  But it would be a false confession. It would not lead to the recovery of Miss Inada’s body. And, most important, it would not lead to the identity of her killer.

  He dismissed Toshikawa, who scrambled away like an ungainly long-legged crab.

  Next, Ino sought out Tamiko Itagaki. He knew that she had been Miss Inada’s superior. Perhaps information as to Miss Inada’s work would help him in his investigation of her murder. Yes, her murder.

  Officially, he was merely investigating her disappearance. Officially, Miss Inada might have fallen victim to an accidental death. She might even be alive and well, the mystery being merely one of where she had gone, and why. But in his heart, Mr. Ino believed that Miss Inada had indeed been done in. Murder was murder.

  Ino was not, himself, very comfortable with women, and when Mrs. Itagaki entered the storeroom that had been cleared as a temporary office for Ino, he was momentarily flustered.

  Mrs. Itagaki was herself upset. Her eyes and nose were reddened, as if she had been shedding tears. Still, she bowed to him and he returned the bow and asked her to be seated.

  “Are you all right?” Ino asked.

  Mrs. Itagaki said, “I am sorry. I was crying.”

  Ino’s eyebrows rose. “Crying? But why?”

  “Fumiko. Fumiko—Miss Inada.”

  “You cry because one of your workers is missing?”

  “We were also friends. Very close friends.”

  “But why would you weep? You don’t think she will show up?”

  Mrs. Itagaki shook her head. She raised a hand to her mouth and seemed to chew on her knuckle.

  Mr. Ino said, “Why wouldn’t she show up? She is an exoarchaeologist, is she not? Maybe she is digging for artifacts.”

  “Maybe.”

  “You don’t think so.”

  “Everyone thinks she’s dead. That poor Mr. Toshikawa who found her—says he found her. How could she be alive?”

  Ino made a gesture with his right hand, holding it before his shoulder with the fingers extended, the palm down. He twitched it to the side, as if shaking off water—or the previous subject, for he now changed the matter of the conversation.

  “What can you tell me about Miss Inada’s work?”

  “She was an outstanding scientist. She had searched for alien artifacts on Luna, Mars, and Phobos.”

  “And had she found very many?”

  Mrs. Itagaki lowered her face and shook her head. “No one has.”

  “The Face.”

  “The Face is just an oddity. A natural phenomenon.”

  Mr. Ino nodded. “So we are told.”

  Mrs. Itagaki raised her eyes. “Is it otherwise?”

  “Did Miss Inada really believe there were alien artifacts to be found?”

  “I do not know.”

  “What do you think? You were her very close friend.”

  “She believed there were artifacts.”

  “On Phobos?”

  “I don’t know. She thought the asteroids were the most likely locale. Especially the asteroids with eccentric orbits. She was interested in the Apollo asteroids. And in Hidalgo. Her favorite was Hidalgo.”

  “Then why was she searching on Phobos?”

  “How could she visit Hidalgo? Maybe someday.”

  “Mrs. Itagaki, who would want to kill Miss Inada?”

  “No one.”

  “But you told me that you think someone did.”

  “Toshikawa found her. She had been stabbed.”

  “You know this for a fact?”

  “No. Only that he said so.”

  “Did you know that he has been under suspicion for her murder?”

  “No.”

  “Do you think he might have done it?”

  “I don’t know.”

  There was a long silence. At last Mrs. Itagaki moved as if to rise and leave the room, but she stopped herself and faced Mr. Ino once more. “You said that the Face was not a natural feature.”

  “Did I say that?”

  “Have Mr. Matsuzaki’s investigators learned that it is artificial?”

  “Mrs. Itagaki, people have been arguing about that for almost 200 years.”

  Now she remained silent. For a while they conducted a battle of silence. Finally Ino let out a sigh and said, “I’m surprised you did not learn this from Mr. Matsuzaki himself. Perhaps he wishes to withhold the information for reasons of his own.”

  “I deserve to know. I have given my life to this work. If he has found something out, I should know it.”

  Mr. Ino rubbed his bald pate with one hand. This was supposed to promote circulation of the blood in the scalp and encourage the growth of hair. It did not work. “Can you believe in a human face almost two kilometers long, carved in Martian rock, gazing straight up at t
he sky?”

  “A scientist does not say, I cannot believe that, never mind the evidence. That’s what a political fanatic, or a religious one, says. A scientist looks at the evidence and tries to figure out what it means.”

  “Fair enough. And what do you think the Face means?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t think it was carved by people from another star? Or maybe by the ancient Martians? You know the cults on Earth, that believe we’re all descended from Martians.”

  “I know them.”

  “They lived in the lush valleys of the ancient riverbeds. When Mars grew dry, they emigrated to Earth. Those great ancestors of ours. Of course, they landed first on the islands of Japan, and spread to the rest of the world.”

  “And left behind the Face as their last and greatest achievement,” Mrs. Itagaki supplied. “Staring eternally at the sky to remind their descendents of their ancestral home. Which is why we worship our ancestors, while most of the other nations have forgotten their origins.”

  “You think it’s true?” Mr. Ino’s scalp was definitely tingling. Perhaps the massage treatment was going to work at last.

  “A scientist doesn’t believe in such things without evidence, any more than she refuses to believe in the evidence that is before her.”

  “But the Face is there.”

  “Happenstance. How many rocks are there on Mars? Millions upon uncounted millions! Sheer chance dictates that here and there we will find one with a meaningful shape. With a shape that we interpret as meaningful, I should say, because it resonates with our own experience. If octopuses had invented space travel instead of humans, the Face would be meaningless.”

  “Spacefaring octopuses!” Mr. Ino burst into laughter. “Hinin in space. Unhuman creatures!”

  “Laugh. I think hinin far more likely than Martian humans. What are the odds of identical intelligent species rising on two planets?”

  “But I thought we did not originate on Earth. If we are all Martians….” He looked up at Mrs. Itagaki. She was the same height as he, or at least she seemed to be when they were both sitting.

  “I thought you were investigating the disappearance of Miss Inada, Mr. Ino. If you wish me to conduct a seminar on the subject of theoretical exobiology or exoarchaeology, that can be arranged.”

  Mr. Ino sighed. “Very well. I’m sorry we have not been able to help each other.”

  Mrs. Itagaki rose and walked glidingly to the doorway. Once again she stopped and turned back to face Mr. Ino. The quarrelsomeness had left her demeanor. In a serious voice she asked, “Has there been an important discovery at the Face?”

  Mr. Ino said, “Yes.” He would say no more, and Mrs. Itagaki returned to her work.

  Mr. Ino obtained a spacesuit and left the station. He carried with him a small kit of tools that he had brought from the Martian settlement at Nirgal Vallis. The kit attached easily to the belt of the spacesuit. Although he had not previously visited the site of Mr. Toshikawa’s alleged discovery of Miss Inada’s body, he had heard the locale described several times. He walked carefully to the place near the edge of the Stickney crater, where the regolith should be disrupted.

  It was clear that some events had taken place to alter the natural condition of the regolith, but its present condition would be of little help in solving the problem that perplexed Mr. Ino. If Miss Inada’s body had been left undisturbed in situ, the condition of the ground surrounding tbe body and beneath it might well have told Mr. Ino much that he could use. But simpleminded Toshikawa had moved the body and disturbed the surface on which it lay. Mr. Ino studied the ground nonetheless, but at length he sighed and stood up straight. There was nothing left that would tell him the story of Miss Inada’s tragic end.

  Eventually it would be desirable to return the regolith to its original state, or as near to that state as was possible. Some worker, perhaps even Jiricho Toshikawa himself, would be assigned the simple task. Like a gardener in Japan, he would take a rake and smooth the dust and pebbles back to the appearance they had shown before the tragedy of Miss Inada.

  Phobos had turned so that, as Mr. Ino stood near the lip of Stickney crater, Mars filled the sky overhead. Phobos’ equatorial orbit had brought it near the terminator, and Ino watched dawn creep its way across the face of the planet even as Phobos raced toward the rising sun.

  Mr. Ino opened the small case that he had carried with him and extracted an electronic telescope. With this he scanned the surface of the planet until he located the enigmatic Face. The Face had been called the Martian Sphinx, and its fascination and its long silence justified the name.

  Lowering the telescope from its nearly vertical position to a horizontal one, Mr. Ino brought it to focus on the abandoned Russian space station on the far side of Stickney crater. The station’s irregular shape stood in silhouette against distant stars. Mr. Ino set out, walking carefully around the rim of the crater, toward the Russian station.

  The walk was a long one, more than a dozen kilometers, but against Phobos’s miniscule gravity it was easy. From the opposite side of Stickney crater, the station had appeared tiny, no bigger than a child’s toy. But as Ino approached it, he realized that it was sizable indeed.

  He paused beneath the looming bulk of the Russian station and turned back toward the research station. He flicked on his suit radio and raised Mr. Matsuda’s office. Mr. Matsuda was away from his desk at the moment, but his deputy, Mr. Sumiyoshi, spoke with Ino.

  Mr. Ino told Mr. Sumiyoshi where he was, and asked him to make contact in four hours if Mr. Ino had neither returned to the station nor called in. Mr. Sumiyoshi agreed.

  Mr. Ino made his way to the door of the Russian station. He opened his kit and checked the tools that might be used to gain entry to the long-abandoned station, but before using them he attempted to operate the controls manually.

  The Russian station was heavily built, its design astonishing in its crudity. Yet, even as Mr. Ino marveled at the rough, massive workmanship, he realized that the Russians and the even earlier Soviets had made great contributions to the exploration of space.

  In those early years, the Americans were overrefining their spacecraft—and gutting their programs to waste their huge resources on self-indulgent luxuries and bizarre weapons that would never be used. The Japanese, meanwhile, were building a great technological and industrial plant, not yet ready to undertake ambitious goals.

  It was then that the Soviets, with neither the wealth of the Americans nor the technology of the Japanese, had achieved astonishing things by sheer will and brute force.

  The tools available to Ino, aside from the telescope he had already used, included a collapsing ladder, miniature lights and recorders, and a power grapnel. But none of these was needed. To Mr. Ino’s surprise, the door was not locked.

  He drew a light from his kit, switched it on, and stepped inside the vacant station. The station was larger than he had expected. The first chamber was little more than a control station from which the long-ago cosmonauts had operated the airlock and docking mechanism.

  Mr. Ino’s light revealed blackened stanchions, long-dead instruments, control levers left in whatever positions they had been set to when the last Russian left the station to climb aboard the rescue ship that carried him and his comrades back to Earth.

  Why had the Russians abandoned their station of Phobos? No living person knew. Was it the political turmoil and economic distress of Russia itself? Had the Russians simply drawn back from space, like the ancient Romans from Britain? Or had they encountered something that frightened them? Were there indeed hinin—unhuman beings, alien life-forms? Was exobiology not ultimately a discipline without a subject, but merely a discipline whose subject was yet to be located?

  He had taunted Mrs. Itagaki about the matter. But in fact he was far from convinced that hinin were chimeras. He had never seen convincing evidence of their existence, but in the vastness of the universe, it was absurd to rule them out.

  And ther
e was the Face.

  He stepped into the next chamber. It was utilitarian in nature, clearly a sleeping room. The Russians had rigged bunks, not the sleeping hammocks used in free-fall, but flat supports like those used on submarines of the same era, a century or more ago.

  The third chamber had once been a scientific work station, and someone had restored it to its former use. When had this been done? No dust settled, no uneaten snack spoiled. It was hard to tell whether the restoration had taken place a few days ago or half a century.

  Rock samples lay in cases. Scientific instruments were protected by transparent hoods. One of the instruments was a scanning electron microscope. So much for one puzzle: this instrument could not have been placed here more than a few months ago: it was a model only recently developed and still more recently made available on Mars. Whoever had brought it to Phobos was involved, wittingly or otherwise, in this unhappiness. Clamped into position in the microscope was—a replica of the Face.

  The model—Ino estimated—was only 200 millimeters from crown to chin, perhaps eighty-five millimeters across. Ino ducked and turned to see its back. Would it be flattened, or—no! It was a complete head. It might have been removed from a miniature statue.

  His fingers reached toward the Face. It might indeed be the handiwork of an alien artist, a thing unmeasurably old and unimaginably exotic. It might even—he drew back—be a fossilized hinin rather than an artificial creation.

  He reached toward it again. Through the sensitive fabric of his glove he ran his fingertips across the Face.

  Finding a seat, Ino composed himself to contemplate his find. Someone had set up an exoarchaeology laboratory inside the Russian space station. Exoarchaeology was Miss Inada’s field of study, and Miss Inada was missing under mysterious circumstances, probably murdered.

  In all likelihood, then, Miss Inada and her disappearance were connected with this laboratory. Perhaps it was her workplace, and someone had learned of it, coveted it, disposed of Miss Inada. Perhaps her own superior, Mrs. Itagaki?

  Ino shook his head in consternation.

  The other likelihood was that someone other than Miss Inada had created this laboratory. If Miss Inada had then discovered it, her rival might have disposed of her.