Red Mars - Kim Stanley Robinson [164]
“Or stopping it.”
The man rolled his eyes, appealed with a grimace for John’s understanding. The youth was young, his look said.
“I don’t have any say—” John began, but the man cut him off:
“You can advocate it. You’re a power, and you’re on our side.”
“Are you from Hiroko?”
The youth snicked his tongue against the roof of his mouth. The thin-faced man said nothing. Four faces stared at John; the other looked resolutely out the window.
John said, “Have you been sabotaging the moholes?”
“We want you to stop the immigration.”
“I want you to stop the sabotage. It’s just bringing more people here. Police.”
The man eyed him. “What makes you think we can contact the saboteurs?”
“Find them. Break in on them at night.”
The man smiled. “Out of sight, out of mind.”
“Not necessarily.”
They had to be with Hiroko. Occam’s razor. There couldn’t be more than one hidden group. Or maybe there could. John felt light-headed, and wondered if they were doctoring the air. Releasing aerosol drugs. He definitely felt strange, it was all surreal, dreamy; the wind buffeted the rover, sent a sudden burst of aeolian music coursing by, a weird drawn-out hoot. His thoughts were slow and ponderous, and he felt the edge of a yawn. That’s it, he thought. I’m still trying to wake from a dream.
“Why do you hide?” he heard himself say.
“We’re building Mars. Just like you. We’re on your side.”
“You ought to help, then.” He tried to think. “What about the space elevator?”
“We don’t care about it.” The kid snicked. “That isn’t what matters. It’s people that matter.”
“The elevator will bring a lot more people.”
The man considered that. “Slow the immigration, and it can’t even be built.”
Another long silence, punctuated by the wind’s eerie commentary. Can’t even be built? Did they think people would build it? Or maybe they meant the money.
“I’ll look into it,” John said. The kid turned and stared at him, and John raised a hand to forestall him. “I’ll do what I can.” His hand stood before him, a huge pink thing. “That’s all I can say. If I promised results, it would be lying. I know what you mean. I’ll do what I can.” He thought about it more, with difficulty. “You ought to be out in the open, helping us. We need more help.”
“Each in his way,” the man said quietly. “We’ll be going now. We’ll keep track to see what you do.”
“Tell Hiroko I want to talk to her.”
The five men looked at him, the young one intense and angry.
The thin-faced man smiled briefly. “If I see her I will.”
One of the crouching men held out a diaphanous blue mass— an aerogel sponge, barely visible under the night-running lights. The hand holding it made a fist. Yes, a drug. He lunged out and caught the young one unawares, clawed the youth’s bare neck and then fell, paralyzed.
When he came to they were gone. He had a headache. He fell back onto the bed, into an uneasy sleep. The dream about Frank made an improbable return, and John told him about the visitation. “You’re a fool,” Frank said. “You don’t understand.”
When he woke again it was morning, swirling a dim burnt umber outside the windshield. The winds had appeared to be lessening in the last month, but it was hard to be sure. Shapes in the dust clouds appeared briefly and then fell back into chaos, in little sensory-deprivation hallucinations. It really was sensory deprivation, this storm, and getting very claustrophobic indeed. He ate some omeg, suited up and went outside and walked around, breathing talcum and bending over to follow the tracks of his visitors. They crossed bedrock and disappeared. A difficult rendezvous, he would have thought; a lost rover at night, how had they found it?
But if they had been tracking him . . .
Back inside he called up the satellites. Radar and IR got nothing but his rover. Even walkers would have shown on the IR, so presumably they had a refuge nearby. Easy to hide in mountains like these. He called up his Hiroko map and drew a rough circle around his location, bulging