Quiet Invasion (2 page)

“Now that would be all we’d need,” muttered Helen. “Handing out extra money for a couple of computer ghosts.”

As she spoke, the desk chimed. All of them turned their attention back to the view screen. Helen’s stomach tightened. The star field cleared away to show a fashionably slim, young-looking woman with beige skin and a cloud of dark-blond hair, worn unbound under a pink scarf.

“Hello, Helen,” she said soberly. “I was expecting this. Listen, there are no complaints about the publicity, the facilities access, about anything. The problems are application, opportunity, and resource distribution. The comptrollers have decided our people are going to have to be content with St. Helens and Pelee for a while. The industrial research spillover is contracting, and there is just not enough to go around right now.” Her expression flickered from annoyed to apologetic. “There’s no more after this. Anything you send is going to my machine. I’m sorry, but there is nothing I can do.”

The stars faded back into view. For a moment, Helen met Ben’s gaze, but she looked quickly away. She didn’t want to see what he was thinking.
We could have done this,
he was thinking,
if you’d been willing to do it small. If you hadn’t insisted from the beginning on a full-scale base where people could live and raise their children and make a lifetime commitment to the study of this world.

She pressed her fingertips against her forehead. That was what he was thinking. That Venus was, at most, four weeks away from Earth. It wouldn’t have mattered if people had to come and go. Venera could have been made small and simple and then expanded if things worked out. But, oh, no. Helen Failia had her vision, and Helen Failia had to push it through. Helen had to make sure there were children like Michael who could lose their homes if the funding ever collapsed.

“There is a way out of this,” said Michael. “There has to be.”

“What?” Helen’s hand jerked away from her face. “Michael, I’m open to suggestions. I’ve just spent four months scavenging the whole of Mother Earth for additional funding. It’s not there.”

“Well.” Michael rolled his eyes toward the ceiling and then brought them back down to meet Helen’s gaze. “Have you tried a com burst out to Yan Su on the Colonial Affairs Committee? There might be some U.N. money we can dredge up.”

Ben snorted. “Oh, come on, Michael. The U.N. pay to keep a colony running? Their business is keeping colonies scraping and begging.” As a younger man, Helen knew, Ben had been strongly sympathetic with the Bradbury Separatist movement on Mars—the same movement that had blossomed into the Bradbury Rebellion and, for five short, violent years, Bradbury Free Territory. Because of that, he still took a very dim view of the United Nations and their off-Earth colonial policies.

She had to admit he was partly right. Since the Bradbury Rebellion, the C.A.C.’s sole function had been to make sure nothing like that ever happened again. Hence, the licensing restrictions. No colony could manufacture space shuttles or long-distance ships. No colony could manufacture communications satellites, although they were graciously allowed to repair the ones they had. There was a whole host of other hardware and spare parts that either never got licensed or were taxed to the Sun and back again.

Most of the time that didn’t bother Helen. She dealt with the C.A.C. through her friend Yan Su, and so far Su had been willing to help whenever she could. Now, though, they were coming head-to-head with the old, frightened public policies.

“You think they want to deal with ten thousand refugees?” countered Michael calmly. “It’s got to be cheaper to let us stay where we’re at than to pay for processing ten thousand new resident-citizen files.”

Helen nodded absently. She found, to her shame, she was not ready to admit that that avenue had been shut off almost a year ago. Maybe she could try again.
Now is not the time for pride,
she reminded herself firmly.
You’ve begged everybody else. Why not the government?

“Yan Su helped put us up here,” said Michael, more to Ben than to Helen. “Maybe she can help keep us up here.” Ben’s only response was to turn a little pinker and look sour.

As little as she liked to admit it, Michael was right. It was time for last resorts. Without their three major funding sources, they were not going to be able to meet their payroll. They could buy some time by laying off the nonpermanent residents and sending them back to Mother Earth, but then they wouldn’t be able to complete their research projects and they’d lose yet more money.

Helen looked at the time delay again. Venus and Earth were moving out of conjunction. If she put this off, the time delay was only going to get worse, and she didn’t want to have to conduct this conversation through the mail. “Why don’t you—”

Movement outside the office cleared the door’s view panel. Grace Meyer stood in front of the door with her arms folded and her impatience plain on her heavily lined face. Helen suppressed a groan. What she wanted to do was open the intercom and say, “We’re having a meeting, Grace. Not now.” But she held back. Grace had proven herself willing to make trouble lately, and Venera did not need more trouble.

“We’ll finish in a minute, gentlemen,” she said instead. “Door. Open. Hello, Grace,” she said, not bothering to put on a smile, as Grace would know it was false. “What can I do for you?”

Dr. Grace Meyer was a short woman with a milk-and-roses complexion. Her lab coat was no longer crisp, and her tunic and trousers were as rumpled as if she’d slept in them. She wore a green kerchief tied over her short hair, which was the same strawberry blond as when she’d moved to Venera fifteen years ago. Grace was a long-lifer. She was actually twice Helen’s age, even though she looked only half that old.

Grace nodded to Ben and Michael and then turned all her attention to Helen. “I heard about U Washington.”

Helen sighed. “The only thing that travels faster than bad news is bad news about you personally.” Ben and Michael did not smile. Ben looked grim. Michael looked like he was trying to calculate the probable outcome of this scenario so he could ready his responses.

“What about U Washington?” asked Helen.

Grace glanced at Ben and Michael. In that glance, Helen read that Grace would like to ask them to leave but couldn’t quite work out how.
And I’ll be damned if I’ll help you,
Helen thought.

“Helen,” Grace started again, “there are still sources of money out there. If we shift emphasis just a little—”

Here it comes.
“To the possibility of life on Venus?”

Grace leaned across the desk “You saw my new grant from Biotech 24. That’s good money, Helen. The absorbers—”

“Are a complex set of benzene rings with some strange sulfuric hangers-on under heat and pressure.”

Grace was a chemist who had come to Venera to help look for the ultraviolet absorber in the Venusian clouds. The clouds were mostly transparent to ultraviolet, but there were bands and patches that absorbed all but the very lowest end of the UV wavelengths. For years, no one had been able to work out what was happening. Grace and her team had isolated a large, complex carbon, oxygen, sulfur molecule that interacted with the sulfuric acid in the clouds and the UV from the Sun, so it was constantly breaking apart, re-forming and re-creating more of itself. Which was fine; it had won her awards and acclaim, and brought Venera a lot of good publicity.

The problem was, Grace was trying to get the compound, which she called “the absorber” for simplicity’s sake, classified as life.

Helen got slowly to her feet. She was not tall, but she had a few centimeters on Grace and didn’t mind using them. Especially now. She did not need this. “Your absorbers are not life. No funding university or independent research lab we’ve had on board for the last ten years has said it could be qualified as life, or even proto-life.”

Grace held her ground. “But there’s—”

“There’s one little company that’s got more of an existence in-stream than out in reality. It’s willing to gamble on your idea this is some kind of alien autocatalytic RNA.” Grace subsided just a little, but Helen wasn’t ready to. The past months had been too much on top of the past year, all the past years. All the fighting, all the frustration, all the time wasted,
wasted
on stupid, petty money-grubbing and useless personal projects. “I’ve read your papers, Grace. I’ve read them all, and you know what? I wish I’d tried harder to get you to leave it alone. You’ve directly contributed to the image of this base as a useless piece of dreamware. You have cost us, Grace. You personally have cost all of us!”

The intercom chimed again. “What is it?” demanded Helen icily. She needed to take the call. She needed to stop yelling at Grace. She was falling out of control, and she could not afford that. Grace could still make trouble—publicize internal dissension, that kind of thing. There was plenty she could do. Plenty she would do. Helen needed to stop.

“Ummm…Dr. Failia?” The screen flickered to life to show a slender young than with clear, sandy-brown skin and thick black hair. Behind him, a floor-to-ceiling view screen displayed the ragged gray cliff, possibly the edge of one of the continent-sized plateaus that broke the Venusian crust.

“Yes, Derek?” Helen tried to smooth the impatience out of her voice. Derek Cusmanos headed the survey department. Actually, Derek and his fleet of drones
were
the survey department. He always did his job well. He had done nothing to deserve her anger.

“I…I’m getting some pictures in from one of the drones near Beta Regio that you need to see, Dr. Failia.”

Helen’s fingers twitched as she tried not to clench her hands into fists. “This is not a good time, Derek. Shoot me up a file and I’ll go over it—”

“No, Dr. Failia.” Strain tightened Derek’s voice. “You really need to see this right now.”

Curiosity and concern surfaced together in Helen’s mind. She glanced back at Ben and Michael, who both returned blank stares. A glance at Grace produced a shrug and a pair of spread hands.

“All right, Derek,” said Helen. “Show me.”

Without another word, Derek pushed his chair back so they had a clear view of his wall screen. Helen heard him give soft orders to his desk to display the current uplink.

The screen’s view changed. The gigantic plateau wall receded into the distance. In its place stood a smaller, rounded canyon wall, the kind that typically bordered the ancient lava channels. On the canyon’s cracked floor, Helen saw something sticking up out of the ground. Derek gave another order. The view zoomed in.

The new, tighter view showed a perfectly circular shaft protruding from the Venusian ground.

“Oh my God,” whispered Michael. Helen just got out of her chair and walked slowly forward until her nose almost touched the intercom screen.

It was not anything that should have been there, but there it was. It was circular. It had a cap on it. Its gray sides glinted dully in Venus’s ashen light, and it sank straight into the bedrock.

“This is live,” said Derek from his post off-screen. “I’m getting this in right now from SD-25.”

“You’ve done a diagnostic?” cut in Ben. He supervised Derek’s “department.” “The drone is functioning on spec?”

“On spec and in the green,” said Derek “I…I didn’t believe what I was seeing, so I sent SD-24 down after it. This is what I’m getting from SD-24.” He gave another order and the view shifted again. Now they looked down from above, as if the camera drone perched on the canyon wall, which it probably did.

The capped shaft sat there, smooth and circular and utterly impossible. Even Venus, which had produced stone formations seen nowhere else in the solar system, had not created those smooth lines, that flattened lid.

“Well,” said Ben. “I don’t remember putting that there.”

“Derek,” said Helen quietly, “I want you to keep both drones on-site. I want that thing recorded from every possible angle. I want it measured and I want its dimensions and position to the millimeter. We’ll get a scarab down there to look at it.”

“Yes, Dr. Failia.” Derek sounded relieved that someone else was making the decisions.

“Well done, young man,” she added.

“Thank you, Dr. Failia.”

The intercom cut out and Helen turned slowly around. “Do I have to say it?” she asked dryly.

“You mean that if that’s what it looks like—” began Ben.

“We have evidence of life on Venus?” Grace folded her arms. Her green eyes gleamed brightly. “Oh, please, Helen. I’d love to hear you say it, just once.”

A muscle in Helen’s temple spasmed. “Now is not the time to be petty, Grace.”

Grace smiled. “Oh no, not petty, Helen. But you’ll have to allow me a little smugness. I’ve been shouting in the wilderness for years now. If this bears out—”

“
If
this bears out.” Ben emphasized the first word heavily. “Venus has thrown up some landscapes that make the old face on Mars look passé.’ He pushed himself to his feet. “Kevin is on shift. I’ll have him outfit us a scarab ay-sap.” Kevin Cusmanos was Derek’s older brother. He was also chief engineer and pilot for the surface-to-air explorer units known as scarabs, which transported people to and from the Venusian surface. “I assume you’re coming down to see what’s what?” Ben looked pointedly at Helen.

“Of course,” she answered. “And Michael’s coming with us.” She looked to him for approval and he nodded. His face held a kind of stunned wonder as the implications filtered through him. Helen knew exactly how he felt. If this was played out, it meant so many things. It meant human beings were not alone in the universe. It meant there was not only intelligent life out there somewhere but it had also left its traces on Venus.

It meant money for Venera.

Grace opened her mouth, but Helen held up her hand. “Not this run, Grace. Next one, if it turns out to be more than rocks and heat distortion.”
Keep up the patter, Helen. You do not know what’s really down there. You only know what it looks like.

Somewhat to Helen’s surprise, Grace just nodded and stepped aside for Ben as he hurried out the door. Helen did not, however, miss the purely triumphant smile that spread across her face.