John Sandford - Saturn Run

There was no response to the doorbell. Crow leaned on it again, and this time, heard a muffled bellow from inside; unintelligible, but not panicked or in pain. Crow tried the doorknob, which was unlocked, and as the door swung open he heard a more intelligible bellow: “…open, let yourself in!”

“Mr. Clover?”

“I’m in the kitchen. Come on back. Don’t kick the cat.”

Crow stepped inside, closed the door, stepped over an old, scruffy gray cat sleeping on the floor next to an ottoman, and threaded his way through a mass of paper—books, magazines, journals, legal pads—that occupied all visible surfaces but one: an easy chair.

The kitchen was at the rear of the house, and the man in the kitchen, his wide back to Crow, called, “Who is it?”

Crow found the question interesting: first, “Come in,” followed by “Who is it?”—he’d never in his life done things in that order. The man hadn’t even turned to check him out: he was stirring something on a stove, and whatever it was, smelled wonderful.

“My name is Crow,” Crow said. “I work for the President. We’ve been trying to get in touch with you.”

Now Clover turned, a wooden spoon in his hand. He was a heavyset man, but not overly fat. He’d played pro football for a couple of years, a tackle, and had stayed in okay but not great shape. He had a beard and was wearing eyeglasses; the combination suggested a taste for anachronism.

He looked at Crow for a few seconds, then said, “Sonofabitch, you’re real? I thought you were a spammer.”

Crow began, “Maybe you should have—”

“Give me a minute. I just started sautéing the tomatoes and I don’t want them to burn. Take that green wooden chair there—not the red one, that’s for the cat.”

The air was faintly blue with smoke, and smelled of cumin, pepper, oregano, and marijuana. Crow picked up a copy of Nature that was sitting on the green chair, sat down, looked for a place to put the magazine, and finally put it on the cat’s chair. Crow’s stomach rumbled; he hadn’t had a decent meal since Darlington had taken him to a Mexican restaurant in Pasadena.

He said, “So… do you usually assume the Office of the President of the United States is a spammer?”

“Well, wouldn’t you?” Clover asked. “You’re sitting in a restaurant in the French Quarter, your mouth is open, you’re about to stick the most delicate cream puff into it, with the flakiest butter crust, your computer dings, and it says, ‘Greetings from the President of the United States.’ What would you do? I deleted it and ate the bun.”

“I see a certain logic in that,” Crow admitted, “which is why we have authentication certificates.”

“Yeah, well, my neighbor boy could produce one of those in about five minutes.”

“Anyway, Mr. Clover—”

“Call me John.”

“We’d like you to go to Mars with us.”

Clover didn’t say anything, but turned and gave Crow a long, steady look, then said, “Bullshit.” And, “One more comment like that, I’ll kick you out of here and eat by myself. So don’t lie to me anymore. Just tell me the truth about what you want, and we’ll work from there.”

Crow crossed his legs and said, “That was the truth.”

“Bullshit… well, hmm. Give me a minute. What you’re telling me is, the reason the Chinese are going to Mars is that you’ve all found out that Deimos is a hollow shell left there by the LGMs, and so the race is on.”

“What’s Deimos? What’re LGMs?”

“Deimos is the smaller of Mars’s two moons and has some oddities. LGMs are Little Green Men. If you really don’t know what Deimos is, then you were lying to me. Actually, you’re lying to me either way—either you know about Deimos, or you don’t want me to go to Mars.”

“You’re confusing me here.”

“You don’t look confused. By the way, do you have a badge?”

“Sure.” Crow took an ID out of his pocket, held it up. Clover had a wrist-wrap on the kitchen counter and picked it up, waved it toward the ID, and a line in the wrap turned green. The ID was real.

“Okay, you’re something,” Clover said.

“Tell me why I’m lying,” Crow said.

“Because there are two things I’m known for. The first is my studies of ancient Mayan hydraulic technology. It’s brilliant work, if I do say so myself—and I often do. But it wouldn’t be of much interest to the President of the United States.” Clover took another sip of the jambalaya, swirled it in his mouth, swallowed, and continued. “The second is my entirely hypothetical work on how technologies and cultures might develop in alternate ways from ours, especially given different starting points, culturally, psychologically, and even physically. In other words, how alien civilizations might turn out. Mars has no LGMs. Mars doesn’t even have living bacteria, as far as we know. We’ve mapped everything on the surface bigger than a baseball, and there are no hatches, doors, portals, ducts, or discarded pizza boxes. So there’s no reason for an anthropologist to go there.”

“All right.”

Clover picked up the remnants of a joint, touched it to a flame from a burner, took a drag, adding to the mix of aromas in the room. “So what do you want, Mr. Crow?”

“We want you to sign a bunch of security regs that say you’ll go to prison if you talk about what we tell you. Believe me, if you talk, you go to prison. If you don’t talk, you become, in due time, the richest and best-known anthropologist on Earth.”

“Wait: something popped out of the ice in Antarctica…”

“No. Nothing popped out of any ice.”

“You found something on the sea floor?”

“No.”

“Shit. I don’t need the money—I mean, what could be better than this place?—but I wouldn’t mind being famous,” Clover said.

“That could happen,” Crow said.

“You want some jambalaya?”

“Yes.” Crow did; his meal schedule was leaning heavily on McDonald’s.

“You want a hit on the joint?”

“No.”

Clover carefully stubbed out the joint, saving the best for last. “Although Louisiana is one of only six states that outlaws weed for anything but medicinal purposes, I want you to know, I don’t use weed for medicinal purposes. I use it strictly to get stoned.”

“That confirms our research in choosing you for the Mars trip,” Crow said. “We’ve got a specific slot for a weeder. Without that qualification, we’d have approached Jeb Rouser.”

Clover bristled. “That charlatan? Let me tell you about Mr. Rouser, Mr. Crow. Anthropologically speaking, Rouser couldn’t find his own asshole with both hands and a searchlight. He thinks—”

“He’s the Morton K. Brigham Professor of Anthropological Research at Yale University.”

“Fuck Morton K. Brigham and Yale University,” Clover said. “You ever been to that place? You have to have a pole stuck up your ass before you’re allowed to walk on campus. Seriously, they have a booth with poles. Before they hire you for a job, they stick a second pole up there.”

“We were told you were perhaps the better choice, but there was an argument—”

“I’m better by a very wide margin, especially if this involves LGMs,” Clover said. “But enough about me.” The jambalaya smelled so good that Crow thought he might faint. “Give me what I need to sign, and fill me in.”

Crow reached into his inside jacket pocket, extracted a mini-slate, and pushed it across the table to Clover.

“You can read them if you want, but I gotta tell you, they’re pretty boring.”

Clover was already flipping pages, dating and thumbing them. “Doesn’t matter. I want to hear the whole story, and you know I want to hear the whole story, and if I don’t sign our little tea party never happened and you don’t exist. Anything else important?”