Day 8

"It's not possible." Beth repeated, firm in the knowledge that she was correct, as much as she wished she were wrong.

"Talk me through it again," Venkat prodded, "Maybe it's not as hopeless as that. I mean, they managed to build one, we know it's theoretically possible. What elements are we missing?"

"All of them," she replied bluntly. "I helped Mark to refine his communicator menus; he wanted them to voice-activate and auto-translate things. That took some doing, but we managed it, eventually. I can not build something, from scratch, to duplicate technology that I don't understand. And even if I did understand how it worked, even if I did have the means to build another one, even if I had a blueprint of the thing, it would still be impossible to use it to send out a message to Oaiea.

"Why?"

"Because I wouldn't be able to key it to anyone that the system would recognize. I don't know how Mark's communicator recognized him, but I can assure you that it sure as hell refused to recognize me." She shrugged. "And since we have neither Mark nor his communicator..." she trailed off, silent for a moment. "Even if we did. Even if I were able to stop by Alien Radio Shack this afternoon or clone myself another one, magically." She rolled her eyes. "I still wouldn't be able to contact Oaiea with it; because a newly-built communicator wouldn't know who she was. Or where to find her. And I wouldn't have any way to supply it with that information."

Venkat frowned. "And what about the President's passport tablet device, here? Could this be hacked? Could you turn it into a communicator?"

She sighed, and shook her head. "No. It's a completely different piece of technology. It exists for two reasons-to send messages to the bigwigs back home to tell them what's going on; and, presumably, if we were close enough, to receive some sort of digest version of their digital newspaper. It doesn't have the capacity for anything else."

"It doesn't send the same sort of signal." Venkat said it like a statement, but his eyebrows were quirked into a question.

"This thing is a Speak & Spell from 1980, and a communicator is your modern cellphone." She passed the tablet from one hand to the other. "If you want a metaphor for how different they are."

Venkat was silent, as he contemplated that.

The Oval Office

"The consensus was, that we would wait for any ransom communications, before we made any further public announcements. For Watney's safety. But it's been a week," Collins argued, "and it's becoming more and more apparent that he was, in fact, taken by extraterrestrials."

"Well?" President Roberts looked at Mitchell. "Are we in agreement on that then? No other explanation makes sense?"

Mitchell nodded. "It adds up. First, there's the cellphone triangulation. The way it faded out. Then, you've got the paint anomaly. Paint doesn't just crystalize and crackle like that for no reason. Forensics haven't been able to duplicate the effect. Finally, you've got that USGS data, so similar to the data for the other two known extraterrestrial landings. Right where he disappeared."

He paused for a moment, thinking. "It's been established that Oaiea's ship is capable of doing a stealthed landing; other than the minor tremor that we didn't catch until later, nobody heard or saw a thing that first time, either. From there, it's not too far a leap to assume that any ship from her planet could do the same. No reason not to assume that they have suits that could do the same thing, enabling them to get to Watney undetected."

President Roberts nodded, gravely.

"So we just call off the search, then?" Collins asked. "That feels disloyal to Watney, doesn't it?" She looked at President Roberts keenly. This was his son-in-law, after all.

"Mark wouldn't want us spinning our wheels. I'm not sure what exactly we should be doing to find him, but wasting man-hours searching for him here won't help anything. Call it off." He spoke decisively, but in reality he was unsure. What if they were wrong?

Collins nodded, uncomfortably. "Public statement?"

"Not yet," he closed his eyes. "I don't think we should say anything else yet. Is there any compelling reason that we should?"

"Other than the fact that more than a dozen people do know, and eventually word is going to get out." Mitchell frowned, "But it doesn't have to be today, no." He pushed back his chair.

"What are we supposed to do with this," Collins wondered out loud, standing up. "If they've got him, and he's unable to communicate with us, the odds can't be very good that he'll be coming back alive, can they?"

"I'd say it's fairly likely that we'll never know what happened to Watney," Mitchell opined, "other than he's probably not going to be coming back this time."

The other two people in the room didn't like hearing him say it, but they couldn't disagree.

NASA

"I can not believe that we are having this conversation again. Teddy. Think this through. It's been over a week. Martinez needs to know. Ares 4 needs to know."

"You want to call Ares 4 up and tell the commander that his best friend was, to the best of our knowledge, abducted by aliens?"

"They need to know." Mitch looked at him steadily.

Teddy was silent for a long time. Finally, he said, "You're right. We need to tell them." He had a look of dread on his face.

"Right away." Mitch stood up, nodding his thanks to Teddy.

"Warn them," Teddy said. "You need to warn them that they might be next."