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Chapter 54

Three days later, after watching the latest news transmission sent down from Nike, A.J. shook his head. "Jeez, who woulda guessed? It never occurred to me that transmission of yours would stir up such a hornet's nest. Honestly, I thought you and Joe were joking about taking it on the lam."

By then, Helen and Bruce had finished clearing the table of the dining ware and cleaning it. That was always an obnoxious chore, given the water regimen in Thoat, and thus one that was scrupulously and fairly rotated. The task done, they returned to the table.

"What is your situation?" Helen asked quietly. "I mean . . .?"

Madeline waggled her hand back and forth. "Not too bad, all things considered. Think of me as skating on very thin ice—but I'm an excellent skater, if I say so myself, and I've got a great pair of skates." She reached out and patted the interior wall of the rover. "Bless Thoat. And all the rest. It's just awfully hard—especially in Washington—to skin alive Ye Heroine of Ye Day. Even if half of them are sharpening the knives and would like nothing better."

She lowered the hand and patted the table with it. "Anyway. Here I am and here I'll stay. For a veddy veddy long time, I imagine. The director made it pretty clear that as long as I stayed out here he could cover my ass—even keep me in charge—but if I ever returned . . ."

She shrugged. "That's fine with me. This is the best assignment I've ever had or could hope to have. The work is fascinating and important, I like almost all the people around me—boy, is that a change from my usual situation—and . . ."

She lifted her hand, admiring the ring. Across from her, as if by involuntary reflex, Helen held up her own hand, which had an identical one on the ring finger. Except that no Fairy Dust ring would ever be identical, the way the motes shimmered and shifted their colors.

"I'm even getting a husband out of the deal." Sighing softly, happily, she leaned against Joe sitting next to her and nestled her head into his shoulder. His arm came around to hug her close.

"Well, you've got guts, lady," A.J. said. "Of course, I've known that for a long time. But I have to admit I never expected you to go against the grain like that."

Madeline raised her head a little and gave A.J. a serene smile. "What? You think I did it because I've gotten converted to your libertarian viewpoint? 'Information wanna be fwee' and all that twaddle. Ha! Dream on, Mr. Baker. I did it for the same reason I do everything professionally. I'm a security officer and I saw a major threat to national security. I grant you, that required me to meddle with issues of policy that I wouldn't normally stick my nose in. But . . . the situation was unusual. The threat involved was potentially the worst our nation has ever faced."

"National security? Worst threat?" It was obvious from the expression on A.J.'s face that he had no idea what she was talking about.

Madeline lifted herself up from the comfortable embrace. "Tell you what. How about we forego the usual word games after dinner—and the lousy jokes—and go outside a bit early? There's something I'd like to show you all out there, that I think would make what I did more sensible to you. Well, maybe. But we'd be putting on the damn suits anyway, before too long, to go to bed."

"Suits me," said Helen. "I'm getting sick of playing Ghost and Botticelli anyway. Whatever possessed us not to tell Jackie to include a deck of cards in Care Package?"

"Well, I thought of it," insisted Madeline. She gave Joe and A.J. the saccharine smile they so detested. "But I knew our engineers would get offended if I suggested they couldn't just make something that simple."

Joe chuckled. "Hey, look. No wood, no paper. No paper, no cardboard. There are limits to ingenuity, when you run up against Grandpa and his stubborn ways. But Jackie says she'll include a deck in the next package."

Rich Skibow had been unusually silent since the meal began. Now, he cleared his throat. "Uh . . . actually, I was going to ask all of you if you'd be willing to leave early, anyway. I, uh, have a personal communication I need to make."

Everyone stared at him. The elderly linguist seemed to flush a little. "If you don't mind."

"No, of course we don't," said Helen, using her boss-of-the-dig tone. "Everybody, up. Let's go outside and see whatever Madeline wants to show us, and give Rich some privacy."

A few minutes later—putting on even those state-of-the-art spacesuits was never a quick affair—all five of them came out of the rover and took a few steps to get out onto open ground. Above them, with only the horizon blocked off by the dark mass of the cliffs of Valles Marineris, the Martian starblaze was its usual glory.

"D'you think . . ." mused A.J.

"Oh, I'd say so," Helen chuckled. "As you've pointed out yourself any number of times, they bicker like an old married couple anyway. So why not get all the benefits, too?" More briskly, in the boss-of-the-dig tone: "But it's none of our business, until and unless Rich wants to talk about it. So. What did you want to show us, Madeline?"

"That." Madeline pointed up, to the stars. "I'd like each of you to tell me what you see there."

That took another few minutes, once she got them going. The phrases used were sometimes prosaic, sometime poetical. The words "wonder" and "awe" came and went like people passing through the revolving door of a busy office.

When they were done, Madeline nodded. "That's about what I thought. Not one of you—not once—used any of the words I'd use. Words like 'fear' and 'terror.'"

She gazed up, silent for a moment. "You want to know what I see—and have seen, every time I've looked at the stars, since we arrived at Phobos and first learned the truth? I see a cold, frightening, hostile universe. A universe that once sent an alien species into our solar system, who, for whatever reasons—which we still don't know and may never—fought a war that almost destroyed our planet and did destroy most of its advanced life-forms."

"Jeez, Madeline," A.J. started to protest, "that was—"

"Sixty-five million years ago. Yes, I know—and don't think I haven't taken great comfort in the knowledge. Because what it means to me is that I think we've still got plenty of time to prepare, if we use the time wisely. But ask yourself, A.J.—or Helen, rather, since she's the expert—how long is sixty-five million years? Really? Measured on a geological scale, or a galactic one?"

Helen pursed her lips. "Well . . . it's not short. Not even for paleontologists or geologists. Not even for astronomers, really, although for them it's starting to get into the small change area. Still . . . yes, I see your point. It's about one tenth of the time since complex life first began emerging on Earth in the Cambrian Explosion. And a still smaller portion of the time since the galaxy formed."

"Right. So who's to say it can't happen again? In fact, is almost bound to happen again—hopefully later rather than sooner; but eventually, no matter what."

The sight of everyone staring at her made Madeline chuckle. At night, in their suits, their eyes looked very beady indeed.

"Yeah, sure, I know it's a paranoid way of looking at things. Folks, that's what I do. Security. In a way, I guess, you could say that's what I am."

By now, they all knew her personal history. She felt herself shiver, slightly. "Not since I was a child have I ever been able to forget that the universe produces Washington LaFayettes just as surely and just as inexorably as it produces butterflies and buttercups. So it's my job—my life, if you will—to keep an eye out for them."

Silence, for a minute or so. Then A.J. said: "Now, I see. Jesus, you are one smart cookie."

"Thanks. Like I said, I had to meddle in policy issues I normally wouldn't touch with a ten-foot pole. But I didn't see where my responsibilities—even my oath, when you got right down to it— gave me any choice." She took a deep breath, letting it out almost like a long, protracted sigh. "They would have fiddled and faddled and done their best to keep a lid on it. Put the brakes, as soon as they could, on the space program of our country because they wanted the money for something else—and put them on, even harder, on any other country's. Now, they can't. With every American citizen—the whole world—knowing of the tremendous advances we could get from studying the Bemmie base on Phobos and here in Melas Chasma . . ."

"And Rich and Jane say there are plenty of indications there may be other installations on the moons of Jupiter and Saturn," Helen added.

Madeline nodded, still looking up. "They can't keep a lid on it, now. If nothing else, even if it turns out we can't decipher any of the Bemmie secrets, we'll have several interplanetary ships built that'll last for decades and an ongoing and self-sustaining presence on Mars. The genie will be out of the bottle. It'll be a mess, I know. But at least it'll be a dynamic mess, that gets us out into space and starts providing us with protection before anything happens."

She shrugged, the gesture being as difficult as it always was in the tight-fitting suits. "I'll still keep any military secrets restricted. But that's never more than a short-term business, anyway. The main thing is that the human race will now come boiling out into space. Where we won't be sitting ducks, any longer. Hopefully, my country will remain in the lead, but if it stops being so at some point . . . Well, in the end, I figure that the national security of the United States doesn't mean much if it isn't part of the security of the whole human race. So piss on it. These things all tend to even out in the wash, give it long enough."

Finally, she lowered her head. She could never stare at that starblaze, for too long. As glorious as it undoubtedly was, eventually she started seeing LaFayette's face in the constellations of a maniac galaxy.

"I'd like to go to our bubble now, Joe. I love it, in there."

"Sure, sweetheart." He took her by the hand and started leading her away. "Me, I'm just happy to still be here. My notion of 'security' is a lot more tightly-defined than yours, I'm afraid. After all that's happened—two crashes, exploding lab, collapsing tunnel—Joe Buckley is mainly just wondering why he's still alive."

"Oh, look!" exclaimed A.J. "Is that a meteor I see streaking toward us?"

The chorus responded. "SHUT UP, A.J.!"

Rich Skibow emerged from the rover. "Hey, A.J.—can you make up another of those rings? Jane said 'yes'!"

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Framed