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about, and the other half, the evidence, seemed as if it might evaporate if
exposed to a hearing.
It wouldn't be an unveiling, really, Philippe continued, unaware of their
urgency. The crane had already emplaced the huge basalt boulders and slabs he
had brought in, making a pseudo-Japanese garden around the tree site a Tharsis
garden, he called it. It was a combination of a Zen garden and the English
standing stones that had inspired his Martian Stonehenge. He loved stones that
whispered of paleolithic mysteries. For new visitors, arriving at the Mars
City gate, it would be a foreshadowing of the
Stonehenge installation, which they might see later during their stay on Mars.
Everyone would be invited to see the tree being emplaced into the center of
the new garden.
"Look, Philippe, we've got something to tell you," Carter said finally, as
Philippe ran down. "We've all got to go to the Polar Station. You should come.
Something is going on there. We don't know what it is, but we need all of us,
together." They told the story of Phobos the impersonal part. The thermal
image, the theory that a hopper had picked up Stafford, that Braddock had
instructed his own hopper deliberately to obliterate the pickup site, that
someone had tampered with the stored images that Carter had seen on Phobos,
that the hopper that picked up Stafford must have come from the Polar Station.
"Couldn't the hopper have come from Hellas?" Philippe asked.
"I went through the whole manifest of hopper flights from Hellas as soon as I
got there. I called down there again yesterday and talked to maintenance
people. There were only two hoppers out on the forty-third and I talked to the
two pilots; they were at the seismic installation the whole time. The seismic
crew verifies it. Everything sounds kosher. And remember, you and Annie
interviewed all the people who outfitted Stafford when he went out; you said
there was nothing fishy there. I just don't believe you could start making
secret flights out of Hellas without it getting around.
"The Polar Station is different. Small, tight, exclusive. And it's the only
other place besides Hellas close enough to reach Stafford's crater in a
hopper...."
"Unless there's a station somewhere on Mars we don't know about," Philippe
said.
"Come on. A conspiracy theory is bad enough. Let's not make it fantastic. It
had to come from the Polar
Station; that's the place to start. But we don't know what we're getting into.
We may need all the help we can get. You're the only person I can trust. We
don't know who all is trying to cover this up, or who is watching us, to see
what we do next. We need to be fast and decisive, without advertising in
advance. I'll requisition one of the shuttles that can get us there. I'll make
it Tuesdaymorning, the day after your tree is unveiled. No one will expect us
to descend on the pole the day after your tree goes up. Meanwhile, we've got
to make it look like business as usual, like we're starting to put the
Stafford thing behind us.
Your tree is a great diversion."
"Oh, thank you very much."
"You know what I mean."
Philippe looked thoughtful. "How could this hopper be from the Polar Station?
It makes no sense. Elena would know...."
Annie responded, "Maybe she's in on it. She can do anything she wants down
there. Nobody's looking over her shoulder. If she wants to send one of their
hoppers out to pick up Stafford in secret, and if she's got a pilot who will
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keep his mouth shut, who's going to know?"
Philippe: "But she was helping in the search."
Annie: "Interesting lady, huh?"
Carter said nothing, but his mind was racing. He had been wrestling with that
one in private for forty-eight hours.
Philippe finally headed back to his studio, leaving Carter and Annie at their
table. He didn't look back.
"I've got to gowork on my stories," Annie said.
Carter didn't want her to work on anything; he wanted her to be with him. He
didn't examine this feeling;
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