Free Saturn Run by John Sandford, Ctein Page B

his mouth, swallowed, and continued. “The second is my entirely hypothetical work on how technologies and cultures might develop in alternate ways from ours, especially given different starting points, culturally, psychologically, and even physically. In other words, how alien civilizations might turn out. Mars has no LGMs. Mars doesn’t even have living bacteria, as far as we know. We’ve mapped everything on the surface bigger than a baseball, and there are no hatches, doors, portals, ducts, or discarded pizza boxes. So there’s no reason for an anthropologist to go there.”
    “All right.”
    Clover picked up the remnants of a joint, touched it to a flame from a burner, took a drag, adding to the mix of aromas in the room. “So what do you want, Mr. Crow?”
    “We want you to sign a bunch of security regs that say you’ll go to prison if you talk about what we tell you. Believe me, if you talk, you go to prison. If you don’t talk, you become, in due time, the richest and best-known anthropologist on Earth.”
    “Wait: something popped out of the ice in Antarctica . . .”
    “No. Nothing popped out of any ice.”
    “You found something on the sea floor?”
    “No.”
    “Shit. I don’t need the money—I mean, what could be better than this place?—but I wouldn’t mind being famous,” Clover said.
    “That could happen,” Crow said.
    “You want some jambalaya?”
    “Yes.” Crow did; his meal schedule was leaning heavily on McDonald’s.
    “You want a hit on the joint?”
    “No.”
    Clover carefully stubbed out the joint, saving the best for last. “Although Louisiana is one of only six states that outlaws weed for anything but medicinal purposes, I want you to know, I don’t use weed for medicinal purposes. I use it strictly to get stoned.”
    “That confirms our research in choosing you for the Mars trip,” Crow said. “We’ve got a specific slot for a weeder. Without that qualification, we’d have approached Jeb Rouser.”
    Clover bristled. “That charlatan? Let me tell you about Mr. Rouser, Mr. Crow. Anthropologically speaking, Rouser couldn’t find his own asshole with both hands and a searchlight. He thinks—”
    “He’s the Morton K. Brigham Professor of Anthropological Research at Yale University.”
    “Fuck Morton K. Brigham and Yale University,” Clover said. “You ever been to that place? You have to have a pole stuck up your ass before you’re allowed to walk on campus. Seriously, they have a booth with poles. Before they hire you for a job, they stick a second pole up there.”
    “We were told you were perhaps the better choice, but there was an argument—”
    “I’m better by a very wide margin, especially if this involves LGMs,” Clover said. “But enough about me.” The jambalaya smelled so good that Crow thought he might faint. “Give me what I need to sign, and fill me in.”
    Crow reached into his inside jacket pocket, extracted a mini-slate, and pushed it across the table to Clover.
    “You can read them if you want, but I gotta tell you, they’re pretty boring.”
    Clover was already flipping pages, dating and thumbing them. “Doesn’t matter. I want to hear the whole story, and you know I want to hear the whole story, and if I don’t sign our little tea party never happened and you don’t exist. Anything else important?”
    “Nope. That’s about it.”
    “It’ll be a while before the jambalaya is just right,” Clover said. “I’ve got some chairs in there, somewhere.” They moved into the other room, where Clover made another overstuffed chair appear out of the clutter. “So what’s up?”
    They sat down and Crow laid it out. Fifteen minutes later, Cloverpushed himself out of his chair and asked, “You want a large bowl or a gigantic bowl?”
    “Gigantic.”
    “Good man.”
    —
    Clover came back two minutes later with the jambalaya and two bottles of beer, and said, “If I didn’t miss anything, the short version goes like this: