Boundary

  "Alien?" Dr. Pinchuk finished, innocently.

  "Alien?" Glendale mused on that theatrically for a moment. "Certainly an excellent candidate, but I think we should stick with something for which there's anecdotal evidence, so to speak. How about another creature of myth? A unicorn? No, something like that actually could have existed. Ah, I know. A dragon! Your classic dragon, four limbs plus two wings, tail, and so on. Fire-breathing metabolism, the works. And to be proper about it, let's put him in the Age of Dinosaurs—always a favorite for sensationalism."

  "Perhaps right on the K-T boundary?" That suggestion came from a member of the audience. Helen couldn't quite see who it was.

  Glendale looked rather torn, but Dr. Pinchuk nodded. "Oh, come on, Dr. Glendale. It allows the demonstration of all the techniques in one example."

  He sighed. "Oh, very well, but the combination is ludicrous."

  The talk, now an exploration in theoretical paleontology gone bad, continued. Glendale and Pinchuk alternated conversation as elements of the phony dig were explicated. For authenticity, Pinchuk demonstrated the use of actual fossils and how they could be effectively "salted" to the dig. Glendale raised objections of mineral consistency and solidity, pointing out that in order to fool observers and the cameras one would have to effectively fake rock. Dr. Pinchuk countered with numerous exhibits of replicated stone from recent laboratory studies—including one sample which looked suspiciously like the stone from which Bemmie had been dug. If that part was possible, Glendale conceded, it would take care of many of the objections.

  "Now, the skeleton itself would be a problem," he pointed out. "Perhaps you could use similar techniques to replicate the fossilized bone. But how would you make a convincing design for the creature?"

  Pinchuk was tall, very skinny, and had outsized elbows. The way he seemed to stoop over that question, even while sitting, reminded Helen of nothing so much as a vulture. A vulture with disheveled graying red hair, just to make things worse.

  "Ah! Excellent question! Let me refer you to my earlier images, Figures 19 through 23. As you can see, combining a modern 3-D modeling package with data on fossil formation, then putting the model through the desired process, leaves a model of a fossil in all the detail you desire. In fact, you'd probably want to damage the model some to make it look believable—here, let's rip off part of our dragon's wing and leave it over here. Then we can arrange to find the dig through this piece."

  A little titter ran through the audience, at this latest of Pinchuk's none-too-subtle jabs at Helen's work.

  "Excellent thinking, Doctor," Glendale said approvingly.

  Glendale continued to analyze the phony dig, and Dr. Pinchuk eagerly supplied explanations for every objection. Finally, the entire structure was complete.

  "If I may say so, Dr. Glendale," Pinchuk triumphantly concluded, "I believe between us we have built an ironclad case. Such things are possible today."

  "Ironclad indeed, Doctor." Nicholas Glendale was smiling broadly. His gaze swept the audience. When it reached Helen, staring in paralyzed fury, she thought she saw one eyelid dip—ever so slightly—in a wink.

  What . . .?

  "I have, in fact, been verifying your facts as we went along." Glendale patted the glittering ornament which was his personal data center. "They check out very well, although you are considerably more optimistic with a few elements than I feel comfortable with. Still, you've made an excellent case. A large dig such as this could indeed be faked, even well enough to fool modern technological investigation. Of course, doing so would cost—at rock-bottom minimum—about . . ."

  He looked down to check his figures. "Forty-six million dollars. Or, to put it another way, approximately six hundred times the annual salary of a fully established paleontologist."

  Dr. Pinchuk's grin seemed to freeze on his face, and a hush fell over the audience.

  "Forty-six million . . . Well, it's true that—"

  "No matter," Glendale said breezily. "While it's clearly ludicrous to contend that any large and important dig could be faked in the real world"—his emphasis was sharply defined and unmistakable to everyone in the room—"your points still stand well on their own. Smaller fossils and digs are well within the capabilities of well-off notoriety seekers—millionaires, really, they'd have to be, to throw that much money around—and certainly should be watched for."

  The good humor seemed to fade a bit from his expression. "I just wished to caution the observers to draw no conclusions about large excavations from our admittedly overly ambitious example. Such a falsification, though within the realm of the theoretically possible, would be so expensive as to make it, in the real world, something out of science fiction. Fantasy, I should say."

  He gestured to the image of the falsified dragon fossil. "As fantastic as our draconic friend here. It would not only require money, but multiple coconspirators in laboratories and at the dig itself. The latter is what truly dooms any such attempt at fakery, of course. Money itself doesn't talk, but in conspiracies we must all remember what Benjamin Franklin said."

  He paused, smiling at the audience, and finished. "'Three can keep a secret—if two of them are dead.' So be suspicious when someone hands you a fossil of Tinkerbell, but don't worry about something much larger. It may be weird, and the discoverer may be misinterpreting the data. But it's real. Don't think for a moment it isn't."

  He shook Dr. Pinchuk's hand with great enthusiasm. Since Pinchuk's whole arm seemed to have gone completely limp, it looked as if Glendale was shaking hands with a very large rag doll.

  "Thank you very much for an entertaining diversion, Dr. Pinchuk! Well, I'd best leave you to finish up." He bowed to the audience. "And thank you all for your patience."

  There was thunderous applause as Dr. Nicholas Glendale left the stage. Helen would have added to the applause, but on forcing her hands to release their grip she'd found they hurt too much. A huge weight was lifting from her shoulders. She couldn't help but laugh as she saw Pinchuk, still shell-shocked, try to resume his speech.

  But his audience was already up and leaving. They knew what had been happening, under the surface. And now that Glendale had utterly demolished him, there was nothing left to see. She waved cheerily to Pinchuk, then headed for the exit herself.

  Chapter 10

  "Reactor cooking?"

  "Ruth's doing just marvelously, Joe." Reynolds Jones looked up from the readouts of the large atmosphere chamber. "Producing fuel and oxygen both at near-optimum efficiency in our little simulated Martian atmosphere."

  Jones was a tall, slender, black-haired man with a faint speech impediment that, combined with his prissy schoolmaster's vocabulary and gesticulating conversation style, made virtually everyone sure that he was gay. Or, as Joe's father used to put it, "walked the other side of the tracks."

  Joe had his doubts. First, because he was generally reluctant to typecast people. Secondly, because he didn't think anyone could be that much of a stereotype.

  It didn't matter, anyway. Whatever Ren's sexual orientation might be—and no one at Ares really knew—one thing that was sure and certain was that he was a master mechanical engineer. Better still, he had enough knowledge of chemistry to make him an ideal team member for designing and building all of the chemical reactors that would transform native Martian materials into everything human beings needed to live there.

  That made him, arguably, the single most irreplaceable member of the team. The strategy of the Ares Project pivoted on a premise advanced by Robert Zubrin long before: that an expedition to Mars only needed enough fuel and supplies to get there. Surviving on Mars, and returning to Earth, could be done using the materials found on the planet itself. If that premise proved to be unworkable, everything else became a moot point—and it was Reynolds Jones, more than anyone, who would be the person to make it work. Or find out that it wouldn't.

  "You can actually see the levels going up as we watch," Reynolds added.

  "Ruth," the reactor in ques
tion, was deceptively simple. A test version of a close relative had, in fact, been created by Zubrin himself to prove the basic concept. A ruthenium-iron-chrome catalyst in a long pipe combined hydrogen with Martian carbon dioxide, producing methane gas for fuel, along with water and carbon monoxide as useful byproducts.

  The reaction used was a variation of the Sabatier process. Once started, the process produced enough heat to maintain itself. The water was electrolyzed using an advanced solid polymer electrolyte (SPE) unit similar to those developed years before for use in nuclear submarines to produce oxygen and return hydrogen to the catalytic process in the reactor. Meanwhile, the carbon monoxide was led off to other processes or stored for later use. The various components— attachments for power; tubing for leading the gaseous and liquid products to their destinations of liquefaction, compression, storage, or transfer; the compact shape of the custom SPE unit; and the connections for control circuitry and valves—were carefully distributed to leave the unit clear of obstructions. That was critical, because it operated at significantly high temperatures.

  The basic tube-shape was still visible, however. Several other devices, of different construction, were set at separate locations around the atmospheric chamber.

  Jones turned towards Anne Calabrio. "Annie, watch that carbon dioxide flow. We have to keep the pressure just right, and I think the program's not handling the valves properly. Something's wrong, anyway. The ratio's fluctuating more than it ought to."

  "I'm on it, Ren. But with three experiments running at once, it's hard to maintain it all. I know we need to do this, checking for cross-interactions and all, but still, it's getting into pretty chaotic territory here."

  Anne frowned. "Lee, can you throttle Ferris back some?"

  "Throttle it back?" Grimes complained. "C'mon, Annie, I'm just gettin' started here!"

  Anne's blue-eyed glare pinned Lee to the wall. The former Marine Corps lieutenant winced and raised his hands.

  "Okay, okay. Gimme a sec. I was just starting to see some results here—and demonstrating iron production is going to be a pretty major experiment for us when we land, right?"

  "Sorry, Lee," Reynolds said soothingly, "but remember, they're all tied together. We have to coordinate. When you start drawing the gas out of the system, the others have to adjust their timing so that each of us manages to support the other. It won't do us any good at all if you pull down the carbon monoxide when it's supposed to be used for a cleaning cycle. Or, worse yet, take too much hydrogen out of the main cycle."

  Grumbling, the metallurgy specialist started shutting down the reactor that created iron by two separate paths. One combined hematite—an ore of iron that gave Mars its distinctive rust-red color—with carbon monoxide to produce iron and carbon dioxide. The other used hydrogen in a cycle that produced iron and water, with the water going to electrolysis to get more oxygen and return the hydrogen to work.

  Lee Grimes was justifiably proud of the design. It allowed them to test and demonstrate both methods for producing usable iron, in a very small space.

  "Part of the problem," Lee said, his tone conciliatory, "is that we're not really on Mars now. The damn chamber isn't big enough for us to drive things at full speed, at least not without a lot more ramp-up testing."

  "Well, that's what we're all here for." Ren turned to Buckley. "Joe, what do you think?"

  "I'd like to see if you can get Lee's experiment running again," Joe admitted. "Sure, our fuel-oxy reactor's big enough for primetime and combines reactions efficiently, but it's nothing spectacular. Making iron from Martian materials, now . . . That's going to be a demo that will make more investors really start thinking. And I'd like to see a demo of the ethylene reactor and the brickmaker, too."

  "Ethylene coming up!" Anne said cheerfully. "Lee, once I get Ethyl running, you can restart Ferris. Use the hydrogen reaction, so I can grab the carbon monoxide from Ruth. Once I get that all balanced, we can try Porky."

  "'Porky'?" Joe repeated, puzzled.

  Lee gave an explosive snort of laughter. "You haven't heard that one yet, have you? The heat cycle on the brickmaker was hogging all the energy, since we haven't got a nuke reactor right now. To use the waste heat to cook the bricks, we need to pull it off the mains and use electric heaters. When I said that to Annie, she said to me: 'Well, yeah, it's the Third Little Piggie.'"

  "Lee didn't get it immediately," Reynolds chuckled. "Until I pointed out it was making our house out of bricks."

  "You do realize we'll need more respectable names for our advanced technology than Ruth, Ferris, Porky, and Ethyl?"

  "Joe, stop worrying about the damn investors." Anne coded in several instructions to the system, causing Ruth to increase production and Ethyl to start in. "We've got perfectly good, dull, respectable names full of stupid acronyms for them."

  Meryl Stephenson and Bryce Heyers from the next lab poked their heads in. "Hey, guys, can we use some of the— Oh, hi, Joe. Big demo for the boss, eh?"

  Joe smiled. "Something like that. Look, I'll be by your lab in an hour or so. We need to—"

  A buzzing noise sounded from one of the panels. Reynolds' head snapped around. "That's—"

  Joe was just turning towards the panel when the world split open.

  Even through his headphones, A.J. heard the sharp boom of the explosion, and felt the floor jolt under his feet. The phones shut off as A.J. leapt from his chair and dashed for the door.

  "What happened?"

  "I don't know," said Melanie Sherry, standing indecisively. "But it sounded like it came from Engineering."

  Other people in the hallway blurred past as A.J. sprinted towards the doors. He burst out into the open.

  As he ran towards the testing area, he could see that it was bad. Black billows of smoke, lit from beneath by orange flames, curled upwards from the shattered Engineering wing, near the Atmospherics Testing area. He felt his stomach tighten. Joe had been planning to test some of the catalytic generation processes today.

  He skidded to a halt in a scattered jumble of stone and brick. A few others were hesitating, like him, before plunging into the yawning, smoke-belching ruin.

  "Joe!" he shouted. "Reynolds! Annie! Lee!" He could hear the distant wailing of fire and emergency medical vehicles approaching.

  Setting his jaw, A.J. started in. But then, startled, backed off almost immediately.

  Something loomed up in the smoke, emerging slowly, backlit by the flames, seeming almost to materialize like a monster in a bad action movie. It was too wide and squat to be human. A broad, blocky silhouette that wavered like a black ghost . . .

  A.J. gave a shout and charged forward. "Joe!"

  Joe Buckley gave a faint grin through the soot on his face, as did Reynolds Jones from beneath the reflective heat blanket the two had around their shoulders. "I don't believe it. We made it out alive."

  "Christ, what the hell happened? Never mind!" A.J. interrupted himself and reached for the blanket. "Give me that. The EMTs will be here soon."

  Wrapping the blanket around himself, he plunged into the building, ignoring the shouts of people behind him.

  Acrid chemical vapors spiked into his lungs as he reached into his pouch and grabbed a small, somewhat malleable ball. With all his strength he pitched it into the darkness ahead of him.

  His VRD lit up almost instantly, matching the data now coming in from the sensor motes being scattered through the shattered interior by the ricocheting "scatterball" against the filed building plan. The data was patchy but good enough to work with.

  The air was bad, very bad, but it wasn't going to kill him right away. Atmospheric chamber gone kablooey. Bodies . . .

  There! And alive!

  A.J.'s eyes stung terribly, but he blinked and fought the tears away. Then, suppressed a cough with desperate effort. If he started coughing now, he might not stop until he'd finished himself off.