“Life on Mars.”
“Life found on Red Planet.”
“Martian microbe makes human history.”
“Crimsy: Discovery of the Century. Any Century.”
And those were just the mainstream headlines. I scrolled through the news sites hovering over my lap in the Cloud, reclining on the post-doc couch, waiting for our weekly meeting. I read the best of breed, the Cosmic American piece, “University of Washington Team Discovers Life on Mars,” which I’m sure Molly Cukor was delighted to have finally seeing daylight. And all because of William Marcum, our wonderful loose cannon, wandering unfettered in the land of politics and policy, like a scientific D. B. Cooper, one step ahead of the authorities, but with a far more precious loot.
Dr. Marcum was on the fifth day of a two-day excursion. At the invitation (and expense) of the United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs, he’d flown from Washington to New York for a meeting with the United Nations Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space. Alexander Sparks was reportedly furious about something, and Nathaniel Hawthorn was doing figurative somersaults: calling, emailing, popping in for updates, unable to reach Dr. Marcum. We were able to reach him just fine.
“Still no word from the space station, I presume,” Marcum teleparted this morning.
“No,” Dr. Levitt said.
“Want to have my facts straight when I make my pitch.”
“Of course,” Shonstein said. “So, um, what pitch are you making?”
“What do we want?” Marcum asked. “I have some ideas, but—”
“I don’t know if you should be making demands,” Levitt said. “That’s not really our place, is it?”
“Keeping one’s place keeps one in place,” Marcum said.
Dr. Brando walked in with guess who: Lexi!
“Hey,” I whispered to her.
“Hey,” she said. I motioned her over and hugged her, cheek to cheek.
“What am I missing?” Brando asked.
“Your opportunity to take a stand,” Marcum said.
“Bill is meeting with the U.N.,” Shonstein said. “I still can’t believe it.”
Dr. Cooper came in next.
“Nice of everyone to be on time today,” Levitt said.
“Hey—apologies. Totally. Hale is heading out of town and he’s got me wrapping a grant app.”
“Okay—so.” Levitt said. “What do we want Bill to say to the United Nations on our behalf?”
“Get Crimsy a green card,” Brando said.
“Or at least a temporary worker’s visa,” Shonstein said.
“An easy, simple ask,” Marcum said. “Speaking from experience, of course.”
“Demand that they tell us why she’s being kept up there,” Cooper said.
“What if they say no? Or that they can’t help with any of that?” I asked.
“There is no ‘no,’” Shonstein said. “‘No’ means no project, no meaning, a wholesale descent into complete insanity. We need to be done fu—” She looked at Lexi. “Messing around and stand up for the integrity of our work.”
“I’d like to think we haven’t been messing around,” Levitt said.
“I didn’t mean us, per se. More like our lawyer,” Shonstein said. “And whomever he answers to. I had such high hopes for him. Where is he, by the way? Isn’t he supposed to be here?”
“Scheduling conflict,” Dr. Levitt said. “Mine.”
“Good,” Brando said. “I wish I had the same luxury with my lawyer.”
“So, it’s bring Crimsy back, or here, or to Earth, or some variation on that theme, or—” Marcum said.
“Bring her here, to the Levitt Lab, University of Washington, Department of Astrobiology, Physics-Astronomy Building, Seattle,” Shonstein said. “We’ll even spring for postage.”
“This all still legal, right?” Levitt asked. “You’ve still managed to avoid the cease and desist order muzzling the rest of us?”
“So far,” Marcum said. “Fingers crossed.”
“Before we wrap, has anyone here not seen the Mars dust and rock exhibit?” Levitt asked. “It’s opening at the Pacific Science Center.”
“I read that, or heard it, or something,” Shonstein said. “But I saw it last year in New York.”
Cooper saw it too, in Boston. Brando and Levitt were part of the Odysseus mission that brought the samples back.
“I haven’t seen it,” Marcum said.
“I haven’t seen it, either,” I said.
“I need to take Lexi,” Brando said.
“Mom wants to take me,” Lexi replied.
“It’ll be here a while and I have tickets,” Levitt said. “Compliments of Alexander Sparks.”
Down the hall, I overheard Dr. Levitt tell Dr. Brando something like “it’s okay, fine, understand.” I also saw Lexi peak out of his office in their direction. It seemed like a good cue.
“Hey, girlfriend,” I said, walking up to her.
“Hey,” she said. We went into her dad’s office. “Wanna go somewhere?”
I wasn’t sure what to say. “If it’s okay...I guess, I mean, okay with your dad.”
“How ‘bout even if it’s not.”
“Hmm,” I said.
Dr. Brando walked in. “Good morning again,” he said. “I read your abstract, got about twenty pages in.” He was referring to the first draft of my dissertation. He looked at me in the most quizzical way. “Wanna know something that really sucks? It’s not gonna work, not one page of it, unless we get Crimsy here. You need hands on her as much as we do, maybe more.”
“I know,” I admitted.
Painful truth. I was spinning my wheels. Sure. We all were. But I gathered what Brando was trying to say was that everyone else could move on. They had their doctorates, their reputations, their grants, their titles, their awards and accolades. I had six years work hanging on a microscopic thread. If that thread broke, I had nothing.
“You think about another approach?” he asked.
“How? My diss is our compendium. Our hypothesis. Our tests. Our theories. Our proof.”
“Yeah,” Brando said. “I get it. Lex—you are witnessing science inaction. Inaction. One word.”
“Can Jennifer and I go somewhere?” she asked. “Maybe Gas Works Park?”
Brando looked out the window. “Little drizzly for that, isn’t it? Jennifer?”
“I told her it was up to you.”
Brando looked at the door. “I wish you could take her down the hall and show her our magnificent find. I’ve never done that. I can’t believe it. We could have come in here over the weekend, whenever. Flip on the projector and voila! Now—too late.”
“I’d love to see Crimsy,” Lexi said. “Let’s do that.”
“We can’t,” I said.
“Why not?”
“They won’t let us.”
“Who won’t let you?”
“We don’t know.”
Brando laughed. “So absurd.”
“So can we, dad? Go somewhere?”
“Yeah.” He caught himself. “Hold it. This is a teacher work day and you don’t have any homework?”
“Nope.”
“Just a sec.” He made a phone call to a woman named Janie—they sounded like old friends. And about an hour later, Lexi and I were at the Pacific Science Center staring at their just-arrived traveling exhibit, which wasn’t open yet: “The Red Planet: Will Humans One Day Inhabit It?”
Before us was a large round glass-enclosed diorama of sorts. Sand and rocks from the Odysseus mission in transparent, hermetically-sealed glass containers helped recreate the planet surface in strategic positions—this kind of rock here, that kind of dust there, complete with miniatures of the various rovers, the Capris Chasma launch pad, and a frozen lake lightly covered with Martian sand. I looked at the sand and swore I saw individual grains I somehow knew were finer than talc. Finer than any Earthly powder, in fact.
“How’s things with your dad?” I asked Lexi.
“Effed up,” she said.
“You’re with him a lot.”
“So’s the custody lady.”
“She’s still evaluating?”
Lexi rolled her eyes. “Yes. Dad says if she weren’t, I wouldn’t even see him.”
“I don’t believe that,” I said.
“Jennifer.” I turned to see a woman in a lab coat with a name tag I read walking toward us. “Lexi.” She extended her hand. “Janie Sawyer. Your dad and I have known each other since grade school.”
“This is amazing,” I said. “I’ve never seen any of it.”
“It’s taken this long to get to Seattle,” she said. “And it isn’t even the pièce de résistance,” she said. “Come with me.”
She led us through a door, down a hallway, and into a room marked Curation Preparation. I immediately saw it, under a glass enclosure on a stainless steel table. We walked up to it.
“Stromatolite,” she said. A delicately layered rock with feathery fans of faded blue and green in red sandstone.
“From Odysseus?” I asked.
“No,” she said. “From your mission. MarsMicro.”
“How is that possible? They won’t release anything.”
“Mike doesn’t even know about it,” she said, referring to Dr. Brando. I saw an empty Styrofoam container marked “Astromaterials Acquisition and Curation, NASA” on the floor.
Lexi looked at the alien fossil. “What is it?” she asked.
“It’s a rock formed over billions of years from layers of dead bacteria,” I explained.
“From Mars?” Lexi asked.
“From Mars,” Sawyer said. “Too bad we only have the fossil, huh?”
“How did you guys get this?”
“Friends in high places,” she said. “Well, one friend. Alexander Sparks.”
Unbelievable. As in, thanks for the heads up, Mr. Sparks. Thanks for letting us know. Thanks for getting the dead but not the living off the space station.
“Is it okay if I tell Dr. Brando?” I asked.
“I don’t know why not,” Janie said. “It’ll be on display. We’re having our opening gala next Saturday. You should come.”
I saw another piece of the planet, more dust, in vials. I walked to it and instinctively, like the lab rat I am, picked up a vial.
“Careful,” Sawyer said. “That stuff is nasty. It’s so fine, it acts like a gas. But once it gets into your lungs, it doesn’t get out like gas.”
I carefully put the vial back.
Speaking of the proverbial devil, I saw Alexander Sparks entering our elevator with a large man I assumed was a bodyguard. I had the snap thought it’d be fun to catch up with them and ran through the parking garage and landed beside them. Bodyguard guy eyed me.
“Jennifer, isn’t it?” Sparks said.
“Yes.”
Bodyguard guy leaned into the retina scan, got cleared, and up we went. I looked up at him warily, wondering why his biometric features were in our system.
“He couldn’t hurt you if he wanted to,” Sparks told me. What an odd thing to say. They let me out ahead of them, and seemed to disappear in the vicinity of Dr. Levitt’s office.
“Our benefactor had nice things to say about you,” Levitt told me a few hours later.
“Who?”
“Alexander Sparks. He came by to thank me—us—for not ‘feeding the lies’ about Crimsy,” she said.
“I don’t like him,” I said.
“Join the club.”
“Haven’t some of us fed the lie?” I asked. “Nathaniel Hawthorn told me the Executive Research Committee encouraged him to claim Crimsy was classified.”
“We never told him any such thing,” she said. She ran her hand through her hair. “Why didn’t you tell me this earlier?”
“I didn’t think—” I searched for the right words. “I didn’t think it was my place.”
She put her hand on her hip, all serious like. “You don’t have a ‘place’,” she said. “We’re equals.”
“I’m not an equal,” I said.
“You’re equal in every way but the degree after your name. Understand?”
Whoa. I nodded.
“I’ll be talking to Mr. Hawthorn about this,” she said. “If he was my lawyer, I’d fire him.
I awakened with beating in my chest. My heart’s raced before, but this didn’t feel like what I remembered. I called David.
“You okay? It’s four in the morning,” he said.
“I don’t know.”
“You sound out of breath. You been out running at, what is it, two your time?”
“No,” I said. “I just wanted to call. Remember when I was in the hospital?”
“Of course. You were pretty banged up.”
“I remember mom. How she handled it. She got all orderly and businesslike.”
“That’s a good description,” David said. He yawned.
“Brian freaked out.”
“They didn’t expect—” David said.
“I remember you. Steady Eddie. Sitting with me, holding my hand.”
“I did?”
“You told me everything was gonna be fine. Doctors said I was going to live.”
David didn’t say anything. I heard him yawn again. Then a little cough.
“You there?”
“I’m here,” he said.
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing, I guess.”
“You guess?”
“I don’t want to take credit for something I didn’t do,” he said. “I was the biggest mess of all.”
“When I got hurt?”
“Yeah. I couldn’t go to the hospital. I mean, for the first over, like a week, they wouldn’t allow visitors. Then when mom told us how you looked, what was broken, I don’t know. I just...I just couldn’t—”
“You were right there,” I said. “Either that, or I was hallucinating on pain meds.”
“Had to be the latter,” he said. “I was there when you got out, and the one time mom and Brian came by with a bouquet. But that’s it.”
“Wouldn’t you know it,” I said. “I remember you holding my hand, but I don’t remember any flowers.”
“They were in the room, I mean, I guess they were. That’s where the nurse told us to leave them. She let us come in and personally deliver them. You weren’t awake.”
I went to the window and looked out at the street. The rain had lifted, leaving the clean wet look that brightens the street lights and cloaks the night in her shadowy, glistening finest. A few cars passed.
“I remember Ron being like, totally shocked when he saw me.”
“When you went in or when you got out?” David said.
“Day before I got out. He couldn’t believe it. He touched my face, my head, took my hands and held them up and looked at them. ‘This is unbelievable. Goddamn you’re lucky,’ he said. Marjorie and Caroline just stared.”
“Docs did great work, Jen. I don’t understand mom hating on them.”
“Has she seen anyone yet?” I asked.
“She has,” David said. “But she asked me not to say anything.”
“About what?”
“She doesn’t know anything, or at least, says she doesn’t know anything, and she wants to be the one to tell you if there is anything,” he said.
I saw a woman in a long coat walking with an open umbrella across the street. It must have been drizzling. Yes, I could see them now. The finest rain mist drops imperceptible to all but discerning Seattle eyes.
“All right. Okay. I get it,” I said. “I need to call her anyway. I’ve been avoiding it.”
“She still slips,” David said. “I think it’s gotten worse, but it’s so hard to tell. Sharp as a tack one day, forgets my name the next.”
“That bad?”
“Totally lights up about this Hale guy, though,” David said. “He’s coming out next week.”
“Thanks for keeping me so well-informed, big brother.”
“I don’t want to...I know...your plate’s pretty full, Jen. I figured you needed a break from mom drama for a while.”
“Steady Eddie,” I said. “Even as a hallucination.”