Jack Dann - Dangerous Games

“No.”

“They’ll die. That will be on your conscience.”

“They can’t prosecute me for it.” It would be just like them, to dredge up the fact that he was the only former felon, even though he was pardoned, even though it was just a simple carjacking thing, nothing much.

Long pause. “No.”

“I think I’ll ignore you now.”

“Keith…”

Keith looked up at the thin sky, as if to try and see the Can spinning overhead. “A million is not thirty. A million and promises is not thirty. Sorry, no can do.”

“You may not win.”

“I will.”

Another pause. This one longer. “We can go two million.”

“Did you fail math? Two million is not greater than thirty. Give me an offer more than thirty, and they’re saved.”

“We… probably can’t do that.”

“I… probably can’t save them,” Keith said, mocking his tone.

Silence. Blissful silence. Long yards passed and the transpo pod swelled in his view. As he reached its smooth, unmarred surface, Frank’s voice crackled to life again.

“Even if you win,” he said. “People will hate you.”

“That’s all right,” Keith said. “I love myself enough for all of them.”

“I thought they found life on Mars,” Jere said.

Evan rolled his eyes heavenward. It was 4:11 AM, and they were screaming down the 5 at triple-digit speeds in Jere’s Porsche. The scrub brush at the side of the road whipped by, ghostly grey streamers disappearing into taillight-red twilight. They were in that no-mans-land between Stockton and Santa Clarita, where the land falls away and you could believe you were the only person in California, at least for a time.

Jere frowned, seeing the look out of the corner of his eye. “What? They didn’t? Talk, you fucking know-it-all.”

“They still don’t know. They’re still arguing about it.”

“Funny thinking of Mars as a science thing.”

Evan shook his head, and then said, “It’s too bad we can’t do it this year. Do the whole fortieth-anniversary shindig.”

“Fortieth anniversary of what?”

“Viking. 1976.”

We put shit on Mars way back then? Jere thought. “We’re still on for ’18?”

“So far.”

Silence for a long time. In front of them there was nothing but darkness and stars and the dim outline of mountains. Jere pushed the car to 120, 130, 140. The blur became a haze of motion, almost surreal.

“So what do you think about Berkeley?” Jere said.

“It’s crap.”

“Why?”

“Like, duh. Berkeley probably can’t even design the right experiments package. They’re a liberal arts school.”

“So we get another school.”

“No.”

“What?”

“Industry,” Evan said. “That’s where the money really is. We go to industry.”

“Who?”

“Siemens. Or IBM. Someone big, with deep pockets.”

Jere nodded. Berkeley had offered them quite a bit of money. With IBM in on a bidding war, how high could the stakes get? This idea was looking better and better all the time.

Being paired with two beautiful women was, well, distracting, Geoff Smith thought. Their squeezesuits left almost nothing to the imagination, and every time he looked up, his thoughts were shattered by the simple beauty of the feminine form.

And what thoughts they were! Here he was, Geoff Smith, on an alien planet! And he was going to prove there was life on it! He would do what a million scientists back on earth wanted to do! Him, with nothing more than a bachelor’s degree in chemistry, would do what all the PhDs told him he couldn’t do. He would put Martian life under a microscope for the first time! He would look at it with his own eyes! He would be famous!

Because the big problem was that nobody had ever really looked. They’d tried the Carbon-14 tagging trick on Viking, they’d tried spectrographic analysis, but they’d never just taken a sample of dirt, put it on a microscope slide, and looked at it.

“Damn!” Wende Kirkshoff said. She was hanging from the top curve of their Wheel, holding a strut and looking at it disgustedly. She was a pretty blonde girl with freckles and a pleasant demeanor, but Geoff always thought she was avoiding him.

“What’s the matter?” Laci Thorens said. She was on the ground, assembling the engine into a subframe with a grim intensity.

“This strut doesn’t have the little fitting on the end,” Wende said. “It won’t stay in.”

“Aren’t there spares?”

“Uh, no, I don’t think so.”

Geoff shook his head and bent back to his work. Who cared about the prize? With his discovery, he would be so famous that he could name his price.

He’d set the IBM box in the lee of the transpo pod like the instructions said, digging down like they told him. He was supposed to let it go for a half hour, then take the whole thing with them.

Which was stupid. IBM was doing the same old thing, when all they had to do, really, was give him a bag and a microscope.

So he’d brought his own. Now it was just a matter of getting some dirt, throwing some water on it, putting it on the slide, and looking for wrigglies.

“There aren’t any spares,” Wende said.

“Shit. Let me see.” Laci hopped up to the top of the Wheel.

He fumbled the little vial of water out of the tiny pocket of his squeezesuit. The microscope was already out, sitting perched on top of a medium-sized rock, away from the dust and grit.

How had Viking done it? It had moved a rock, hadn’t it? And this new one from IBM was digging down. Probably best to just combine both techniques, Geoff thought, and shoved a medium-sized boulder out of the way.

He dug down into the dust with his fingers, feeling the chill seep through his squeezesuit. At about six inches down, he struck another rock and decided that was enough. The dust was clinging to his transparent header, and the front half of his suit was pink.

He took a pinch of dust from the shallow hole and dropped it onto a glass slide. The water had gone frosty around the top. He dropped a couple of drops on the slide and they froze almost instantly, making something that looked like red ice cream.

Damn, I didn’t think of that . There was no way he was going to see something with the microscope through all that gunk.

He sloshed some more water on it and pushed it around with the tip of his finger, trying to get the mixture thin enough to see through. After a couple of tries, he managed to get a thin pink film that looked reasonably transparent.

“Geoff!” Laci said. “We need your help!”

“Can’t,” he said. “In the middle of an experiment.”

“We need your help or we ain’t rolling anywhere!”

Geoff slid the slide into the microscope and looked at the watch embedded in his suit. “We have time.” And in fact, they did have almost twenty minutes left.

“We have to do it now!” Wende said.

“Wait a minute,” Geoff said. Slide in place. Microscope to eye. Nothing but fuzzy grey darkness. Focus. Dark, dark. Sliding into focus. Becoming great boulders.

“Geoff, now!” Laci said.

“Just a few seconds,” Geoff said. “Then you can have me.” Focus. Ah. Crystal-clear. Scan it over a bit and find a brighter area. There. Ah.

Water crystals. Boulders. Bright light. Nothing else.

Well, of course it wouldn’t move. But where was the rounded wall of a bacterium, or the jelly of an amoeba?

“Now,” Laci said, and strong hands picked him up. He felt his grip on the microscope slipping. He grabbed it tighter, and it popped from his hands. He was jerked back as he watched it fall, with agonizing slowness, into the dust and grit.