Identity Theft and other stories (collection)

Don shrugged a bit. “Maybe. Maybe not. There’s weather on Mars, including sandstorms that last for months. All the large-scale water-erosion features we see on Mars are at least a billion years old, judging by the amount of cratering over top of them. That suggests that whatever Martian civilization might have once existed did so at least that long ago. In a billion years, wind erosion could have destroyed every trace of an ancient civilization down there.”

“Ah,” said Sas, grinning. “But not here! No air; no erosion to speak of. Just the odd micrometeoroid impact.” He paused. “That dish must have been here an awfully long time, to get buried under that much dust.”

Don smiled. “You know,” he said, “every space station humanity has ever been involved with has been inhabited by successive crews—Skylab, Mir, Alpha. One crew would go down; another would come up.”

Sas raised his eyebrows. “But there’s never been such a long hiatus between one crew leaving and the next one arriving.”

* * *

When they knew the sun would be up on Deimos farside, Don and Sas headed back to the site of the alien antenna dish. They had almost finished making their way around its perimeter when they found a spoke, projecting outward from the rim of the antenna. They kept digging down, following it away from the dish, until—

“Allah-o-akbar!” exclaimed Sasim.

“God Almighty,” said Don.

The spoke led to a buried building, and—

Well, its inhabitants had been astronomers. It made sense that they’d have a glass roof, a clear ceiling through which they could look up at the stars.

As Don and Sas brushed away more and more dust, they were better able to see in through the roof. There was furniture inside, but none of it designed for human occupants: several bowl-shaped affairs that Don imagined were chairs, and low work tables, covered with square sheets of something that seemed to serve the same purpose as paper. Scattered about were opaque cylindrical units that looked like they might be for storage. And—

Slumped against the wall, at the far end—

It was incredible. Absolutely incredible.

A Martian, perfectly preserved for countless millennia. Either they had no such thing as bacteria leading to decay, or everything had been sterilized before coming to Deimos, or perhaps all the air had leaked out somehow, preserving the being in vacuum.

The former resident of the building was vaguely insectoid, with rusty exoskeletal armor, four arms and two legs. In life, he would have walked proud and upright. His mandible was tripartite; his giant eyes, lidless behind crystal shells, were a soft, kind blue.

“Amazing,” said Sas softly. “Amazing.”

“There must be a way inside,” said Don, looking around. For all they knew from what they’d exposed of the transparent roof so far, the building might be no bigger than a single room. Still, it had been carved into the rocks of Deimos, so the airlock, if there was one, should be somewhere on the roof.

Don and Sas worked at clearing debris, and, after about twenty minutes, Don found what they were looking for. It was a transparent tube, like the one George Jetson shot up through, stretching between the glass roof and the floor. The tube had an opening in its circular walls at ground level, and a hatch up on the roof, forming a chamber that air could be pumped into or out of.

Any space station had lots of electrical parts, but doors were something sane engineers would make purely mechanical. After all, if the power went out, you didn’t want to be trapped inside or outside. It took Sas and Don a few minutes to work out the logic of the door mechanism—a central disk in the middle of the roof had to be depressed, then rotated counterclockwise. Once that was done, the rest of the hatch irised open, and the locking disk, attached by what looked like a plastic cord, dangled very loosely at one side.

Don glided down the tube first. He wasn’t able to open the inside door until Sas closed the upper lid; a safety interlock apparently prevented anyone from accidentally venting the habitat’s air out into space.

Still, it was immediately obvious to Don, once he was out of the airlock tube, that there was no air inside the habitat. The rigidity of his pressure suit didn’t change; no condensation appeared on his visor; there was no resistance to waving his arms vigorously. Doubtless there had been some air once, but, despite the safety precautions, it had all leaked out. Perhaps a small meteor had drilled through the roof at some point they hadn’t yet uncovered.