Mars gt-4

by Ben Bova

“I have learned to deal with him. We women help each other, you know.”

  Reed fought to keep himself from frowning. “What’s your problem, then?”

  Joanna’s faint smile disappeared. She looked troubled once again. Glancing around the room before replying, she finally said, “It is Dr. Waterman.”

  “Jamie?”

  “He has given up his chance to go on the mission in order to help me.”

  “As I understand it,” Reed said stiffly, “he did not volunteer for that. Dr. Li ordered him to do it.”

  “Yes, I know,” Joanna said. “But still — he is very kind, very helpful. Under other circumstances…”

  “Good lord, young lady, you’re not telling me that you’ve fallen in love with him!” Reed was aghast.

  “No, no, of course not,” she answered too quickly. “We have only been together a few days. But…” Her voice trailed off again; she looked away from Reed.

  Feeling a puzzling confusion roiling inside him, Tony said, “It would be extremely unwise to become emotionally involved with a man you will probably never see again, once your tour here at McMurdo is finished.”

  “I know. I understand that.”

  “Then what is your problem?” Reed demanded.

  “I feel terribly guilty that he is giving up his chance to make the mission because of me.”

  “I see.” Reed relaxed, leaned back again and steepled his fingers. “Of course you do. It’s a perfectly natural reaction.”

  “What should I do?”

  He spread his hands vaguely. “Do? There’s nothing for you to do. The decision to keep Waterman here was not made by you; you’re not responsible for his fate.”

  “But I am! Don’t you see?”

  Pointing to the computer screen and smiling, Reed said, in his most persuasive doctor-knows-best manner, “My dear young lady, Waterman was picked to help you — and the others, I might add — because Li and the selection board had already decided he would not be included in the Mars team. Do you think for one moment that they would take someone already chosen for Mars and scratch him from the roster merely to help you here? No. Certainly not. Waterman’s fate was already decided. You had nothing to do with it.”

  Joanna stared at him for a long wordless moment. Finally she asked, “You are sure of this?”

  Nodding toward the silent computer once more, Reed said, “I do have access to all the personnel files, you know.”

  She breathed out a deeply relieved sigh.

  Watching her blouse, Reed felt seething disappointment burning in his gut. Hoffman’s so inept that he doesn’t frighten her. And now she’s allowed herself to form a romantic attachment to this red man from the wild west. This isn’t what I had planned for her. Not at all.

  SOL 2: MORNING

  Standing out in the open, Jamie realized once more how much Mars reminded him of the rocky, mountainous desert of northwestern New Mexico. In the dawn’s slanting light the cliffs to the west glowed red, just as they did at home.

  But the sky was pink, not blue, and the rock-strewn ground was utterly bare. Not a twig or a leaf. Not a lizard or a spider or even a patch of moss to break the endless rusty reds and oranges of the desert. The sun was small and weak, too far away to give warmth.

  Magnificent desolation. An astronaut had said that about the moon, decades ago. Jamie thought it more appropriate for Mars. The world he saw was magnificent, beautiful in a strange, clean, untouched way. Proud and austere, its desert harsh and totally empty, its cliffs stark and bare, Mars was barren yet splendidly beautiful in its own uncompromised severity.

  Looking out to the horizon, Jamie felt an urge to walk out as far as he could, just keep on going forever across this magnificent landscape that was so alien yet so much like home. He snorted angrily to himself. Leave the mysticism behind you, he chided himself. You don’t want to be the first man to die on Mars.

  Yet it looked like a good place for dying — a dead world. On Earth life has crawled into every crevice and corner it can find, from pole to pole. Even in the dry Antarctic deserts there’s life hidden inside the rocks. But this place looks dead. Dead as the moon. If any life at all exists here it should have changed the way the place looks.

  Jamie recalled tales of creatures made of silicon and green-skinned Martians with six limbs. Don’t judge without evidence, his scientific conscience warned. Be patient, said a deeper voice within him. The rules of life may be different on this new world.

  He shook his head inside his helmet as if trying to clear away the argument within. The suit had acquired that faintly acrid, not unpleasant odor of his own body now. We’ve personalized our suits, Jamie thought, as he carried another bulky crate of medical supplies from the lander to the airlock hatch of their dome, balancing it on his shoulder as if it weighed no more than a sack of cornmeal.

  “Look! There they are!”

  It was Connors’s voice, high with excitement. Jamie and the American astronaut were unloading the last of the supplies from the lander. Vosnesensky and Reed were carrying them from the airlock to their proper storage places inside the dome. The two women had been assigned to checking off the stores on the computer’s inventory lists. So much for equal rights, thought Jamie.

  He straightened up and tried to follow Connors’s pointing outstretched arm. The top of his helmet blocked his view for a moment, but by tilting his head inside the helmet slightly, Jamie managed to see the thin streak of a contrail blazing across the pink sky.

  “Right on time,” Connors said, holding his left wrist up in front of his visor. “They’ll be landing on schedule.”

  As if to confirm the observation, Vosnesensky’s heavy voice came through Jamie’s earphones. “Team two is in reentry trajectory. We must be finished off-loading by the time they land, in… fifty-eight minutes.”

  Fifty-eight minutes later all six members of the first team stood between their own lander and the inflated dome, watching the fiery descent of the second lander.

  Everything about the Mars expedition was done in pairs. There were two landing parties, two backup teams who remained in orbit around the planet, duplicates of every piece of equipment and milligram of supplies.

  The expedition had been planned around the “split-sprint” mode of operation, which meant (stripped of the technical jargon) that the expedition took the quickest possible route to Mars and planned to stay at the planet for a minimal length of time — two months. That was the “sprint” mode. The scientists had fought against it with logic and economics; they had failed in the face of the politicians’ desire for quick and spectacular results.

  For while it was true that the sprint mode was more costly overall than a more gradual approach that would permit a longer stay time at Mars, the politicians knew that a quick mission would require fewer years of wrangling and painful budgetary crises than a longer one. Moreover, practically every politician involved in the Mars mission wanted to see humans on the red planet while he or she might still be in office to take the credit.

  So the expedition sprinted to Mars.

  The “split” mode simply meant that the expedition rode across the interplanetary gulf in two sets of spacecraft. The rationale was that if disaster hit one set, the other was self-sufficient and could complete the mission.

  Now Jamie and the others stood waiting for the second half of their expedition to touch down on the dusty surface.

  “There!” Vosnesensky blurted, and they all turned to see a dot in the sky hurtling toward them. Shapeless, formless, it was still too high to be anything more than a dark blur falling across the pink sky like a rock, dragging a bright flaming contrail behind it like a falling star.

  My god, Jamie thought, that’s what we looked like yesterday.

  Then a streak of color streamed from the top of the speck and billowed into a trio of broad white parachutes. The lander slowed, coasted, swaying slightly, gliding toward the ground with the three huge chutes spread above it like angels’ wings or the shade awnings
of a desert tribe. But it was still falling fast, too fast. Jamie watched for several minutes, his heart in his throat, as the lander floated rapidly downward.

  It grew and grew into an ungainly looking combination of saucer and teacup: the circular aeroshell drag brake topped by the cylindrical body of the landing vehicle. Jamie saw that the ceramic underside of the aeroshell was blackened and streaked from its burning flight through the upper Martian atmosphere.

  Abruptly the parachutes separated from the lander and flapped away, lost angels wandering across the Martian landscape. The craft seemed to stagger in midair. Puffs of gray-white steam spurted from its control jets as the lander teetered and righted itself, hovering for an instant.

  The retro-rockets fired fitful short bursts, blasting grit and swirling dust devils up from the ground as slowly, slowly the oversized saucer and teacup settled downward, cushioned by the hot rocket exhaust. Through his helmet Jamie could hear the intermittent screeching of the retros, like the staccato shrill of a frightened bird.

  The lander was coming down more than a hundred meters away, yet a miniature sandstorm was pelting against his hard suit. He resisted the Earth-trained impulse to lean into the wind; there was no real pressure pushing against him in this thin atmosphere.

  Finally the noise ceased, the sand stopped blowing, and the segments of the aeroshell drooped to the ground like wilted petals of a huge metal flower.

  Jamie heard in his earphones, “That’s it! We’re down!”

  There had been surprisingly little argument over the language to be used on Mars. For more than half a century scientists had used English as their common worldwide tongue. As had aircraft pilots and their ground controllers. A few of the politicians had put up something of a struggle, more for their own national egos than for any serious reason. The French had been especially difficult. Yet in the end they had to face the fact that the one language all of their prospective explorers understood was English.

  Still, Vosnesensky spoke in Russian through his suit radio to the pilot of the second lander, Aleksander Mironov, while Ilona Malater and Tony Reed set up the hand-sized video cameras on their tripods.

  Joanna Brumado, in her dayglo-orange hard suit, turned toward Jamie. “I suppose we are just the spear carriers.”

  “Waterman!” Vosnesensky’s voice rang in Jamie’s earphones. “Take the still camera and photograph the aerobrake structure.”

  Jamie said to Joanna, “One spear carrier.”

  “Brumado!” the Russian called. “Monitor the gas emissions from the landing craft.”

  He heard the Brazilian woman’s laughter. “No spear carriers.”

  After slightly more than a quarter hour, the hatch of the landing vehicle popped open and the slim metal ladder slid down to the red dust. A figure encased in a brilliant red pressure suit appeared at the hatch. Must be the other Russian, Jamie thought as he snapped photos for the expedition’s official history.

  Six hard-suited figures trooped slowly down the ladder, one after the other, and gathered in front of the video cameras with their lander behind them. They too spoke solemn words about the triumph of the human quest and the glories of human intelligence and drive.

  Jamie knew the six to be a Russian, an American, a Japanese meteorologist, a fellow geologist from India, an Egyptian geophysicist, and a French geochemist who was the only woman among the second landing team.

  The politicians had worked frantically to please as many nations as possible — and to get as many as possible to help fund the quarter-trillion-dollar Mars Project. To their credit, where it was necessary for them to balance national pride against scientific needs, national pride did not win every round. But if an Israeli biochemist was selected to go to Mars, then it became absolutely necessary to send a follower of Islam along. It was imperative that both Japan and France be represented. And of course, there must be the same number of Russians and Americans.

  Jamie’s last-minute substitution for Father DiNardo had upset the Soviet-American balance, and while that could not be helped, it was not accepted gladly either in Moscow or, strangely, in Washington.

  The first team started to help the second team unload their landing/ascent vehicle. More equipment would be sent later in the day by automated, unmanned one-way landers from the spacecraft in orbit. Vosnesensky was in charge of all the ground team, with Pete Connors his ostensible second-in-command. But Jamie heard a lot of Russian chatter in his earphones; the two cosmonauts were already talking to each other to the exclusion of the others.

  Jamie was surprised, then, when Vosnesensky tapped him on the shoulder of his hard suit.

  “Come to the communications center,” the Russian said. “The expedition commander wishes to speak to you.”

  Without a word, Jamie hefted the crate of chemical analysis equipment he was already carrying and followed Vosnesensky into the airlock. After it cycled and they had vacuumed the red dust off their boots, they stepped inside the dome. Jamie put the equipment crate down just inside the hatch and unconsciously slid his helmet visor up as he walked alongside the Russian to the comm console.

  His ears popped again. The air inside the dome was an Earth-normal mix of oxygen and nitrogen, pumped up to normal terrestrial pressure and heated to a comfortable temperature. The hard suits operated at almost normal terrestrial atmospheric pressure. Almost, but not quite. The transition from suit to “regular” air made itself felt in Jamie’s inner ear. It was one of those minor maladies that no Mars explorer would even whisper about during training, for fear of being scratched from the team. Here on Mars, though, it was already annoying. And this was only the second day.

  Dr. Li Chengdu, the expedition commander, was exceedingly angry with Jamie Waterman. The only visible sign of his anger was the slight throbbing of a vein in his forehead above the left eye. Otherwise his face was a mask of calm. The olive drab coveralls he wore were not quite standard issue: Dr. Li affected a stiff collar instead of the open-necked style everyone else wore. In the back of his mind Jamie wondered if that was supposed to be symbolic.

  Puzzled, Jamie sat at the comm desk in front of the main display screen. The six other screens flanking it showed views of the unloading chores going on outside. Vosnesensky stood behind Jamie like a policeman guarding a prisoner about to be interrogated.

  “Dr. Li,” said Jamie, still in his blue suit and helmet.

  “Dr. Waterman.”

  “You wanted to speak to me?”

  Li took in a silent breath, nostrils flaring as if in distaste. “I have just received a most unhappy transmission from Kaliningrad, which was relayed from Houston.”

  Jamie tried to keep his face as stiffly unemotional as the expedition commander’s.

  “Your American mission controllers are quite upset that you did not speak the words they gave you for your first statement from the surface of Mars.”

  “Yes, I suppose they are.” Of course they’d be upset. The Anglos in Washington always get upset when a red man doesn’t follow their script.

  “Why did you say what you did? And what does it mean? Apparently it has caused a sensation in the media in the United States.”

  With a slight shake of his head Jamie replied, “I had no intention of causing a sensation. I didn’t know I was going to say that until I heard myself speaking. The words… they simply popped out of my mouth.”

  “What do they mean?”

  “It’s an old Navaho greeting. Like ‘aloha’ among the Hawaiians or the Italians’ ‘ciao.’ Literally it means something like, ‘It is good.’ ”

  Li’s stiff shoulders relaxed visibly. The throbbing vein eased. “Your government people are very angry with you.”

  Jamie tried to shrug inside the hard suit and found that it could not be done. He said, “What can they do about it? Send me home?”

  “They can instruct me to remove you from the ground team and bring you up here!” Li’s voice flared. “They can insist that I send Dr. O’Hara to the surface and keep you i
n orbit for the remainder of the mission!”

  Jamie felt his guts lurch. “You wouldn’t do that!” It was more of a question than a statement.

  “They have not ordered me to do so. Not yet.”

  Thank god, Jamie breathed silently.

  “However, they want a clarification of your words: a written statement from you as to what they mean to you and why you said them instead of what you had been instructed to say.”

  It suddenly struck Jamie as ludicrous. Sitting inside a space suit on a world a hundred million kilometers from Earth, he was being told that he had to write an apology for three words he had blurted unthinkingly. Or be punished like a truant schoolboy.

  “You will write such a statement?” Li prompted.

  “If I don’t…?”

  “They will insist on removing you from the ground team, I fear. You must recall that your assignment to the landing team at the last minute caused some anxious moments in Washington and elsewhere. Please do not jeopardize your position any further.”

  Jamie remembered that frantic weekend of hurried telephone conferences and impromptu visits with his family. And Edith saying good-bye to him.

  The expedition commander seemed to draw himself up into a taller, calmer, more regal posture. “My advice, for what it is worth, is to write a brief statement that explains how you were overwhelmed with emotion upon stepping onto the surface of Mars and lapsed into the language of your ancestors. No one can fault you for that.”

  “It’s even the truth,” Jamie said.

  The Chinese allowed himself a fatherly smile. “You see? A soft answer turns away wrath.”

  Jamie nodded. “I see. Thank you.”

  DOSSIER: JAMES FOX WATERMAN

  Jamie was nine years old the first time he was sent back to New Mexico to spend the summer with his grandfather Al. His mother did not like the idea, but she and her husband had a summer of foreign travel ahead of them, lectures and seminars that would take the two professors across the Pacific to Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, and Hong Kong. They had little desire to drag their nine-year-old with them, and no intention whatever of turning down the all-expenses-paid junket.