So they would explain it all away.

I left the room feeling sick. They would admit what they had to, and twist everything else to fit their new story, which would constantly change, constantly protect them. I tasted defeat like copper coating my tongue. Every thing I stabbed them with they would accommodate with elastic facts, until the thing was absorbed and dissolved.

But I had expected it. I was prepared for something of the sort; I had already made plans to keep stabbing away. Still, it had been a shock to hear Shrike lie like that. My old heart fluttered and my stomach clenched, and though I wanted to leave the main tent I had to sit down for a while first. Even though I had known perfectly well they would do something like this.

The computer link-up to Alexandria told me a little about Emma Weil. She was born in the Galle Crater camp on the rim of the Argyre basin, in 2168. Her parents divorced and she lived with her father. She studied mathematics on the campus in Burroughs, led the ecologic engineers designing the Hellas basin complex, broke records in four middle- distance runs. When the Committee took over the mining fleets in 2213 she was shifted from Royal Dutch to the center for development of life-support systems, then shifted again to active duty on the miners. The records for the asteroid mining projects were incomplete, because of damage to offices and archives in the Unrest; I found no account of Rust Eagle, or of Emma after 2248. And there was no comment on her disappearance.

For Oleg Davydov, I could find only a listing in the Birth Registry (born on Deimos in 2159) and an appointment as a rocketry and guidance cadet in the Soviet mining fleet. After that, nothing: no appointments, no trial, no command of Hidalgo. No mention of Hidalgo, either.

And I could find nothing whatsoever concerning the Mars Starship Association. Not a single word about it.

Clearly the censors had been at work. But the documentation of Martian history was damaged and disorganized for good by the Unrest. Pockets of information exist in odd places, and it is seldom the censors can catch everything. It would take a more extensive, on-site search than I could make from New Houston, but I thought that if I had some time in Alexandria, I might be able to ferret out more. I had done it before.

I gave up on that aspect of things and switched back to Emma. I had a picture of her sent out, one taken at the beginning of her mining service. She had an oval face, a serious mouth, brown hair and eyes, fine cheekbones and jaw; I liked her look. I stared at that photo for many a night, and read her journal, I hated the Mars Development Committee as much as I hated anything, I hated their lies; that they were taking over power to make a better life on an alien planet etc. etc. Everyone knew that was a lie. But we kept our mouths shut; talk too much and you might get relocated in Texas. Or on Amor. The members of the MSA had compensated with a stupid plan, but they resisted! And me? I didn’t even have the guts to tell my friends how I felt. I had thought cowardice was the norm, and that made it okay, and so I sat in my plush university apartment writing papers about events three hundred years past, pretending I was the fiercest anti-Committee man on the planet, while I lapped up every sop they threw me, and fawned for the favors of a Committee member. What kind of resistance was that? What had I ever done but gesture and shout, before rulers who tolerated me and smiled behind their hands to hear one of the professors at it again. Oh Emma! I wanted to be like her, I wanted to be able to act.

Nakayama and Lebedyan and several others rose up in protest against the Committee’s claim that what we had found in New Houston could be squared with the Aimes Report. Criticisms were flying in from every direction, and I only needed to stand aside and help orchestrate it, and keep records. Parts of Emma’s journal were released by the university to the newspapers, and the whole thing was published soon after; it became a bit of a best-seller. It seemed there was a public intrigued by this news from their own forgotten pasts, at least for a week or two. Anya Lebedyan gave me a call to congratulate me and ask some questions, and without hesitation she began the conversation in Russian; I felt a thrill to speak in the language of the samizdat. I found I spoke Mars’s underground language as fluently as I read it, though I could not remember the long-ago life in which I had learned it.

Out on the rim on a cloudy day: chocolate thunderheads scudded north, and thick bolts of lightning alternated with shafts of buttery sunlight. Then the clouds flattened out and covered everything like a rumpled blanket, and it was evening all afternoon. Below me my team worked in the dead city. Strolling the rim ridge I examined its texture as if I could see the world beneath the rock. Samuel Barber’s “Adagio for Strings” floated through my mind. Down at the physical plant Hana and Bill discussed something intently. They paid more attention to each other than to their work. I hiked down the rock ledges to Spear Canyon, descended the canyon to the field car. Climbed in and sat down.

Here Emma Weil had once sat, perhaps in the very seat I was occupying. It had been night; their lights would have been off as they inched down the road with the canyon dropping away to their left. Police artillery hammering at the city. Hearts hammering inside spacesuits that are no shield against shrapnel or bullet or heat beam. The electric motors are silent, and no helicopters fly in the primal atmosphere; but somewhere, on the rim perhaps, heat-seeking automatic artillery has turned in its bed, aimed and fired, and some cars explode, others are damaged and halt, still others, perhaps, turn off their motors and coast down the canyon, rolling to freedom.

Some of them undoubtedly were killed. But there had been no bodies in this car. If the police had removed the bodies, they would have taken the papers as well. The same was true of the rebels. Since we found the papers, no bodies had been removed. Thus the explosion that stopped the car had not killed the occupants. Or so one line of reasoning could lead one to conclude. And it appealed to me, oh yes, it appealed to me. Sitting there on the crackly frozen plastic seat I tried to feel what had happened to her; and in my vision she lived. There was no sense of death in that car. Perhaps she had only lived long enough to crawl out of the car, so that her body lay in the soil of her beloved planet just meters from me. But no. The metal detectors would have indicated her suit. No, she had escaped. Escaped to the hills. Not dead, not my Emma.

I took out the small photo of her that I carried in my suit pocket, and smoothed it over my thigh. They had been headed for refuges in the chaos, where they very well might have hidden, from that day to this. Emma still alive, working with her biogeocenosis on the planet she loved.

And it occurred to me that I might find her.

Impact crater — with a diameter of 2,000 kilometers, Hellas Basin is the largest impact crater on Mars.

Then came the discovery on Pluto. It was Strickland who brought word out to us in the city. We were digging out a defensive center that had been bombed flat, and I was down with Xhosa attaching crane cables to a beam we had cleared. “Dr. Nederland! Hana! There’s news in from Burroughs,” and crunch he jumped over the rubble and into the cellar with us. We stared at him, surprised, and he drew up like a policeman at attention.

“What is it,” I said.

Hana looked into the cellar and Bill turned to her. I thought that in his agitation there was a certain pleasure. “They’ve found a monument on Pluto. The Outer Satellites Council sent the first manned expedition out last year, and they’ve just arrived and found some sort of monument. Rectangular beams of ice set on their ends, in a big circle. Apparently it looks very old—”