Jack Dann - Dangerous Games

He wrenched out of Laci’s grip and scooped up the microscope. It was dusty, but looked okay. He looked through it. The slide was out of position, but he could still see. He reached for the focus knob…

The microscope was torn out of his hands. He looked up to see Laci standing in front of him, holding the microscope behind her back.

“Give it back!” he said. “This is important. I’m right…”

She punched his header. Hard. He could see the soft transparent plastic actually conform to her fist. It didn’t quite touch him, but the kinetic energy of the blow knocked him to the ground.

“Go,” she said. “Help Wende. You’ll get your toy back when you’re done.”

“Give it back!”

Laci raised the instrument and made as if to smash it on a boulder. Geoff lunged forward at her, but she danced away. “No,” she said. “Go help. I’ll give it back later.”

“Laci, this is important!”

“Yeah, and so is surviving. Go help.”

Geoff knew when he was beaten. He sighed and joined Wende atop the Wheel, where they quickly discovered another problem: the epoxy they’d provided for quick repairs wasn’t setting in the Martian cold.

“What do we do now?” Wende asked.

Geoff stopped looking longingly at the microscope-now sitting on top of their hydrazine engine-and inspected the problem. The strut was one of the main load-bearers that held them suspended under the top of the Wheel.

“What about the Kite?” Geoff said. “Doesn’t it share components with this? Maybe it has a strut with the right connector on it.”

“What about when we have to fly?”

“We make sure we don’t forget the damn thing.”

They dug into the bundle of struts and fabric. The components were the same, and many of them were the same length. When Geoff found one with the right connector on the end, he pulled it out and handed it to Wende.

“Just like Ikea,” he said.

“They aren’t the sponsor!”

“Same idea.”

Then he noticed that Laci was frantically tightening the straps that held the little engine in place. “We’re late!” she said. “Check the time! Come on come on come on! Let’s go!”

Laci started the engine. Near the Wheel, his microscope was still parked on top of a rock.

“Wait!” he said, running to get it.

The Wheel was already moving. “Hurry up!” Laci said.

He grabbed the microscope and ran back, throwing himself up the scaffold toward the perch by the cabin. The landscape sped by. The soft rim of the Wheel bounced over rocks and boulders.

But he had his microscope. Between that and the IBM package, he would surely find something. He would still be famous.

The IBM package!

Oh, shit, no! No no no!

He’d never picked it up.

“Stop! he cried. “You have to go back! I left the IBM package.”

Laci gave him a disgusted look. “How could you be that stupid?”

“Go back.”

She just looked at him. A slow smile spread on her face. “Sorry,” she said.

Geoff looked back at the remains of their transpo pod, but it had already disappeared over a hill. They were moving. And he was lost.

“It seems like a lot of work for just a show,” said the shithead from P &G. He was looking at the model of the Can, sprouting its ring and eleven pods.

God save me from executives who think they’re smart, Jere thought. Send them to the golf course and the cocktail lounge, where the conversational bar is comfortably low.

They were in the Neteno boardroom, which had been transformed into a neomodern interpretation of a 70s NASA workroom, redone on a much greater scale and budget. A movingink banner was cycling though imagined Mars-scapes and the logo for Neteno’s Winning Mars, and models of the Can, the drop and transpo pods, the Kites and the Wheels and the Returns, hung from the ceiling or were suspended with cheap magnetic trickery.

But there were a lot more people than the P &G guy in today. There was Altria, and J &J, and Foodlink, and a whole bunch of other guys who wanted to have product placed on the show.

So he was playing to an audience when he answered:

“Not really,” he said. He pointed at the ring. “Take the ring. It’s a standard component of the new RusSpace orbital hotels. And we’re saving four module drops by incorporating all the Return pods into a single big softlander. The transpo pods are as simple and reliable as they get, just a big bouncing ball. We’re actually using a lot of proven technology for this, just in new ways.”

“Probably what they said about the Titanic,” P &G shithead said, grinning at the other execs. “Once you drop them on the surface, you have a road course, or something like that?”

“Five courses,” Jere said, changing the graphics on the movingink banner. “All of them have three phases of travel: on foot, rolling on a Wheel, and flying in a Kite. We’ve picked routes that will highlight some spectacular scenery, like parts of the Valles Marineris…”

“What?”

“Think Grand Canyon. Times ten.”

“Oh.”

“And we have a vertical climb of 2000 feet set for one group. We’re hoping to get some extreme-sports aficionados in the audience.”

“Is that safe?” the P &G guy asked.

“We don’t claim infallibility.” And you’re not complaining, Jere thought. Don’t think we don’t notice that.

“Who’s signed so far?” shithead asked.

“That’s confidential. If you want to buy a prospectus package, we’ll discuss that further.” And you aren’t saying anything about that, either, are you? Because you know this is the deal of the century.

“What you don’t see is the most important part,” Jere said. “The people who will actually make this happen.”

“You already have your team picked?”

“No. I just want to show you what the teams might look like. Because I know you have this idea of a bunch of spacesuit-clad guys hopping around on a dead planet. Boring, right? Well, no.”

At that moment, Evan McMaster entered the boardroom through the double doors at the back, accompanied by a trio of young women wearing cosmetic squeezesuits and headers. The suits hugged every one of their curves, making them seem impossibly perfect, unattainable, unreal.

There was a collective gasp from the execs, and Jere smiled. It always worked that way.

“I don’t see how it will work.” Not the asswipe. Another one. This one from Altria.

“Mars does have a thin atmosphere,” Evan said. “We can provide pressurized air through a small backpack only to the face. The pressure required to maintain body integrity is provided by the squeezesuit.”

“Showboating,” muttered the original P &G geek.

“Which would you rather look at-this, or some old Russian cosmonaut in a wrinkled-up body sock?”

“Your contestants may not look that good.”

Evan smiled. “The squeezesuit is of variable thickness. We can make a wide variety of body types look good. And it provides an excellent palette for logo placement.”

He snapped his fingers, and logos appeared at strategic spots on the suits. Spots with high visual magnetism, to use the geek phrase. One of the girls spun to reveal a P &G competitor’s logo emblazoned over her buttocks.

Oh, they loved it. Jere could see it in their eyes. They were sold. They would talk tough and haggle, but they had them. Just like Panasonic and Canon and Nikon fighting over the imaging rights, Sony and Nokia and Motorola fighting over the comms deal, Red Bull and Gatorade fighting over the energy drink part of it, hell, damn near every single nut and bolt was being fought over.

Go ahead, Jere thought. Talk. Then shut up and give us your fucking money.