exactly what he thought of them. His crowning words, his first major televised fuck-you-all.
And he would win. No doubt about that. Teams were for pussies. He’d been able to skin the Wheel and string the Kite faster than any team back when they were training. He didn’t have arguments with himself, or forget where something went.
No, everything was great. He allowed himself to look up at the light blue sky. Really not that different from Earth. There was only one creepy thing. Nothing moved. It felt old and ancient and unnatural, and the sun looked small and dim. He kept wiping at his header’s visor to clear it, but it wasn’t cloudy or tinted. That was just the way Mars looked. Because it was farther away from the sun.
“We need to make a request,” said the voice of the Can. Not the breathy one, but the cute little girl that the breathy asshole was sleeping with.
“What?” They always had requests.
“The Ruiz team’s transpo pod had a landing, um, malfunction. They have no transport.”
“So?” Tough shit.
“We’d like you to divert your Wheel and collect them.”
“I haven’t even reached my transpo yet.”
“After you get there.”
“And you’re going to give me extra time for this?”
A pause. “No.”
“Then how the hell am I supposed to win?”
Another pause. “They’ll die if you don’t pick them up.”
“So?”
Finally, a new voice, deep and resonant. Frank Sellers, that John Glenn fuck that had rode them out here.
“Keith, we’d really like you to consider this. Even if you don’t win the prize money-and you still might-the act of rescue will create its own reward.”
“Like, they’ll pay me more than thirty million bucks for it?”
“I’m sure our sponsors will be very generous.”
“More than thirty million generous?”
Another pause. For a while, Keith thought they’d given up on him. But Frank started in as he caught the first glimpse of his transpo pod, glittering in the distance.
“Keith, we’ve got buy-in from several of the sponsors. We can get you a million. Plus other things. Cars…”
“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.”
“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.
