Айзек Азимов: The Fourth Science Fiction Megapack: 25 Modern and Classic Science Fiction Stories

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,” she 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.”