The Fourth Science Fiction MEGAPACK ®. Айн Рэнд

face, in shock. Then she laughed, shakily. “What is this, an epidemic?”

      “Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” he asked.

      “Yeah. Our visitors.”

      “Might could be Hesperson has something for us,” he said. He accessed the contact, and Hesperson’s assistant answered the call.

      “How could this have happened?” asked the assistant “You think your nomad visitors had something to do with it?”

      Zora shook her head. “It could be. There was a new woman with them, Valkiri. No last name, of course. She seemed more—fanatical than the rest.”

      “New? You know some of these people from before?”

      “We trade with them,” said Marcus. “Chocko, the one we know the best, he wasn’t there, but the other three, except for this Valkiri, were—” he hesitated.

      “Friends,” Zora said.

      Hesperson’s assistant looked glum. “So you could be carrying some nanosaboteur or even a big chunk of something radioactive—”

      “No, no, the rover has no signs, except of course for the power plant—”

      “There could be a problem with your suit sensors. The radioactive contaminants could be traveling with you.”

      “The rover sensors—”

      “The software in your suit sensors could have damaged that.” The assistant smiled a phony, nervous smile into the screen. “Why not just go back to your hab and wait. I’m sure if you contact your corp they’ll have some advice for you.”

      Zora and Marcus stared at each other. The Corp that owned their contracts was the last entity in the world they wanted to contact right now. The Vivocrypt Corp had paid for four intensive years of education on Earth for each of them, equivalent to doctoral degrees, then financed their journey to Mars and bankrolled their hab and Pharm.

      This was not charity on the part of the Vivocrypt Corp. The microbiology courses they had taken were very specifically oriented to engineering certain useful substances and organisms that could survive only in extreme conditions. The Vivocrypt Corp had very specific uses for these discoveries.

      And Zora and Marcus, who had married and started a family with the prospect of living off the Corp, had allowed their science to take some twists and turns that didn’t lead directly to what the Corp wanted. Because the training they had received on Earth had aroused in each of them a fierce, shared delight in science for science’s sake.

      The Vivocrypt Corp would not be pleased that the expensive hab and Pharm was no longer of any use as a research and development extension of the Corp.

      Zora looked down at Sekou, who was rocking back and forth in the rescue bubble hard enough to bang it against the bulkhead of the rover. His face seemed to be just two big eyes. “We can’t go back,” she whispered.

      “Call the Corp.”

      The computer avatar that was their usual communication link with the Corp appeared: a young woman dressed in a black suit. She was pretty and imperious. “Your hab is destroyed? Do you have the funds to cover this?” This computer avatar was apparently programmed for heavy irony. The Smythes were so deeply in debt that only a major technological breakthrough would get them in out of the cold again.

      Marcus sent a private message to Zora. “Think they know there’s a problem? Their satellite imagers might have seen us carrying the bubble.”

      Zora exhaled sharply. “If the corp saw something like that, they’d think we were running, maybe planning to sell out to another corp. We’d be talking to a live human corpgeek, not this avatar.”

      Marcus unmuted the com and spoke to the corporation avatar. “We’re in trouble, honcha. We need shelter and atmosphere.”

      The avatar smiled brightly. “We suggest you go back to the hab and see what can be salvaged. Of course the Vivocrypt Corp values you highly, but your laboratories contain priceless equipment shipped from Earth orbit.”

      “We’ll be fried!” Zora hadn’t expected quite this level of cold-heartedness.

      “Corp estimates your life expectancy will be shorted only by about fifteen years, on the average. That’s just a statistical average. One or both of you might sustain no more damage burden than you suffered in the trip to Mars.”

      “What about our son? What about our future children?” Marcus was shouting.

      The avatar’s smile broadened idiotically. These things were so badly programmed, Zora wanted to scramble the software that ran her. But the avatar was mouthing Corp policy. “No guarantees are made as to reproductive success in Corp hires, as you will find in your contracts. My memory provides me with a vid showing that you were advised of this policy when you originally sold your contracts to Vivocrypt Corp.”

      Marcus voice was low and dangerous. “Let us speak to a human corpgeek.”

      “Of course,” said the avatar, nodding gravely, like a cartoon character. The image froze for fifteen seconds, then she came alive with renewed joviality. “I have consulted with Bioorganism Resource Assistant Director Debs. She confirms the advice I’ve given you.”

      “We want to talk to this Debs geek.”

      “One moment, please.” The avatar froze again. Then, “I’m so sorry, Assistant Director Debs is finishing her daily solitaire game and will return your call tomorrow or the next sol. Thanks for calling the Vivocrypt Corporation. May Father Mars and the bright new sol bring you fresh inspiration to serve the Corp.” The image vanished.

      Zora fingertipped furiously to link again to the corp, but access was rejected.

      “I hate that religious stuff about Father Mars,” she said to Marcus. “Avatars don’t believe in the supernatural, or in having a ‘bright new sol.’”

      “Corp doesn’t either. Using spirituality as mind control. As if they need any more control over us.”

      “They hope we’ll stop thinking, just go back and work until we die of cancer or radiation burns.” She noticed that Sekou was listening to them on his com. “We gave them our time, our whole lives. They owe us at least shelter.”

      Marcus’s tone turned flat and almost brutal. “Machine minds. Machine hate. Use us as if we were the machines. We run down, they dump us.”

      To her horror, she realized she was starting to cry. She turned her face so Sekou would not see it.

      “Mama, I have to go.”

      Startled, she turned her face back to him. “Go where?”

      “You know. Go potty.”

      “Darling, just wait.”

      Marcus seemed to be deliberately holding his helmet so she couldn’t see his expression, but her guess was that it was grim. He said, “I’m calling Hesperson again.”

      The assistant answered again this time. “Mister Hesperson said he was working on your problem, trying to come up with some ideas. Meantime, he said to proceed as we discussed before.”

      “We have a child with us, Mister—” Zora couldn’t remember the assistant’s name. She stopped, took a deep breath and said, “We have credit, you know. And equity in the Pharm and hab, because it’s held on a lien in our names. Our Corp purchased twenty years of our labor for each of us, and that’s gone to pay for the physical plant. We can borrow against that—”

      The assistant held up a hand. “If it were only that, Dr. Smythe. But Mister Hesperson has information from Krona Centime that somehow you’ve contaminated or infected their Pharm and labs.”

      “How could they know—?”

      Marcus spoke up. “The Centimes must have remotely read the reading on their outermost airlock. But