He stared at the little box, suddenly realizing that it was Sax Russell’s lectern — that if checked, it would give him away. It was like-carrying around a genuine passport.
He dismissed the thought, as there was nothing to be done about it now. He concentrated on the color of the sky. In clean air, sky color was caused by preferential light scattering in the air molecules themselves. Thus the thickness of the atmosphere was critical. Air pressure when they had arrived had been about 10 millibars, and now it averaged about 160. But since air pressure was created by the weight of the air, creating 160 millibars on Mars had taken about three times as much air over any given spot than would have created such a pressure on Earth. So the 160 millibars here ought to scatter light about as much as 480 millibars on Earth; meaning the sky overhead ought to have something like the dark blue color seen in photos taken in mountains about 4,000 meters high.
But the actual color filling the windows and skylight of their rover was much more reddish than that, and even on clear mornings after heavy storms, Sax had never seen it look anywhere near as blue as a Terran sky. He thought about it more. Another effect of Mars’s light gravity was that the air column lofted taller than Earth’s. It was possible that the smallest fines were effectively in suspension, and had been blown above the altitude of most clouds, where they escaped being scrubbed out by storms. He recalled that haze layers had been photographed that were as much as fifty kilometers high, well above the clouds. Another factor might be the composition of the atmosphere; carbon dioxide molecules were more efficient light scatterers than oxygen and nitrogen, and Mars, despite Sax’s best efforts, still had much more CO2 in its atmosphere than Earth did. The effects of that difference would be calculable. He typed up the equation for Rayleigh’s law of scattering, which states that the light energy scattered per unit volume of air is inversely proportional to the fourth power of the wavelength of the illuminating radiation. Then he scribbled away on his lectern screen, altering the variables, checking handbooks, or filling in quantities by memory, or guesswork.
He concluded that if the atmosphere was thickened to one bar, then the sky would probably turn milk white. He also confirmed that in theory the present-day Martian sky ought to be a lot bluer than it was, with its scattered blue light about sixteen times the intensity of the red. This suggested that fines very high in the atmosphere were probably reddening the sky. If that was the correct explanation, one could infer that the color and opacity of the Martian sky would for many years be subject to very wide variation, depending on weather and other influences on the cleanness of the air…
And so he worked on, trying to incorporate into the calculation skylight radiance intensities, Chandrasekhar’s radiative transfer equation, chromaticity scales, aerosol chemical compositions, Le-gendre polynomials to evaluate the angular scattering intensities, Riccati-Bessel functions to evaluate the scattering cross sections, and so on — occupying the better part of the drive to Arena Glacier, concentrating hard and steadfastly ignoring the world around him and the situation in which he now found himself.
Early that afternoon they came to a small town called Bradbury, which under its Nicosia-class tent looked like something out of Illinois: treelined blacktop streets, screened-in porches fronting two-story brick houses with shingle roofs, a main street with shops and parking meters, a central park with a white gazebo under giant maples…
They headed west on a smaller road, across the top of Syrtis Major. The road was made of black sand that had been cleared of rocks and sprayed with a fixative. This whole region was very dark — Syrtis Major had been the first Martian surface feature spotted through Earth telescopes, by Christiaan Huygens on November 28, 1659, and it was this dark rock that had allowed him to see it. The ground was almost black, sometimes a kind of eggplant purple; the hills and grabens and escarpments that the road twisted through were black; the fretted mesas were black, the thulleya or little ribs were black, ridge after ridge after ridge of them; the giant ejecta erratics, on the other hand, were often rust-colored, reminding them forcibly of the color from which they had temporarily escaped.
Then they drove over a black bedrock rib and the glacier lay before them, crossing the world from left to right like a lightning bolt inlaid into the landscape. A bedrock rib on the far side of the glacier paralleled the one they were on, and the two ribs together looked like old lateral moraines, although really they were just parallel ridges that had channelized the outbreak flood.
The glacier was about two kilometers across. It appeared to be no more than five or six meters thick, but apparently it had run down a canyon, so there were hidden depths.
Parts of its surface were like ordinary regolith, just as rocky and dusty, with a kind of gravel surface that revealed no sign of the ice below. Other parts looked like chaotic terrain, except clearly made of ice, with knots of white seracs sticking up out of what looked like boulders. Some of the seracs were broken plates, bunched like the back of a stegosaurus, translucent yellow with the setting sun behind them.
All was motionless, to every horizon — not a movement to be seen anywhere. Of course not; Arena Glacier had been here for forty years. But Sax could not help remembering the last time he had seen such a sight, and he glanced involuntarily to the south, as if a new flood might burst out at any moment.
The Biotique station was located a few kilometers upstream, on the rim and apron of a small crater, so that it had an excellent view over the glacier. In the last part of sunset, as some of the regulars got the station activated, Sax went with Claire and the visitors from Armscor, including Phyllis, up to a big observation room on the top floor of the station, to look at the broken mass of ice in the waning moments of the day.
Even on a relatively clear afternoon like this one, the horizontal rays of the sun turned the air a burnished dark red, and the surface of the glacier sparked in a thousand places, the recently broken ice reflecting the light like mirrors. The majority of these scarlet gleams lay in a rough line between them and the sun, but there were a few elsewhere on the ice, where the reflecting surfaces stood at odd angles. Phyllis pointed out how much larger the sun looked, now that the soletta was in position. “Isn’t it wonderful? You can almost see the mirrors, can’t you?”
“It looks like blood.”
“It looks positively Jurassic.”
To Sax it looked like a G-type star about one astronomical unit away. Of course this was significant, as they were 1.5 astronomical units away. As for the talk of rubies, or dinosaur’s eyes …
The sun slipped over the horizon and all the points of red light disappeared at once. A great fan of crepuscular rays stretched across the sky, the pinkish beams cutting a dark purple sky. Phyllis exclaimed over the colors, which were indeed very clear and pure. She said, “I wonder what makes those magnificent rays,” and automatically Sax opened his mouth to explain about the shadows of hills or clouds over the horizon, when it occurred to him that a, it was a rhetorical question (perhaps), and b, to give a technical answer would be a very Sax Russell thing to do. So he shut his mouth, and considered what Stephen Lindholm would say in such a situation. This kind of self-consciousness was new to him, and distinctly uncomfortable, but he was going to have to say things, at least some of the time, because long silences were also fairly Sax Russellish, and not at all like Lindholm as he had been playing him so far. So he tried his best.
“Just think how close those photons came to hitting Mars,” he said, “and now they’re going to run all the way across the universe instead.”
People squinted at this odd observation. But it drew him into the group nonetheless, and so served its purpose.
After a while they went down to the dining room, to eat pasta and tomato sauce, and bread just out of the ovens. Sax stayed at the main table, and ate and talked as much as the rest, striving for the norm, doing his best to follow the elusive rules of conversation and of social discourse. These he had never understood well, and less so the more he thought
about them. He knew that he had always been considered eccentric; he had heard the story of the hundred transgenic lab rats taking over his brain. — A strange moment, that, standing outside the lab door in the dark, hearing the tale being promulgated with much hilarity from one generation of postdocs to the next, experiencing the rare discomfort of seeing himself as if he were someone else, someone strikingly peculiar.
But Lindholm, now: he was a congenial fellow. He knew how to get along. Someone who could partake of a bottle of Utopian zinfandel, someone who could do his part to make a dinner party festive. Someone who understood intuitively the hidden algorithms of good fellowship, so that he would be able to operate the system without even thinking about it.
So Sax ran a forefinger up and down the bridge of his new nose, and drank the wine which did indeed suppress his parasympathetic nervous system to the point of making him less inhibited and more voluble, and he chattered away very successfully, he thought, although several times he was alarmed by the way he was drawn into conversation by Phyllis, sitting across the table from him — and by the way she looked at him — and by the way he looked back! There were protocols for this kind of thing too, but he had never understood them in the slightest. Now he recalled the way Jessica had leaned on him at the Lowen, and drank another half glass and smiled, and nodded, thinking uneasily about sexual attraction and its causes.
Someone asked Phyllis the inevitable question about the escape from Clarke, and as she launched into the tale she glanced frequently at Sax, seeming to assure him that she was telling the story principally to him. He attended politely, resisting a certain tendency to go cross-eyed, which might indicate his dismay.
“There was no warning of any kind,” Phyllis said to the questioner. “One minute we were orbiting Mars at the top of the elevator, just sick at what was happening down on the surface, and doing our best to figure out some way to stop the unrest, and then the next minute there was a jerk like an earthquake, and we were on our way out of the solar system.” She smiled and paused for the laugh that followed, and Sax saw that she had told the story many times before in just this way.
“You must have been terrified!” someone said.
“Well,” Phyllis said, “it’s strange how in an emergency there isn’t really time for any of that. As soon as we understood what had happened, we knew that every second we stayed on Clarke diminished our chances of surviving by hundreds of kilometers. So we convened in the command center and counted heads and talked it over and took stock of what we had available. It was hectic but not panicked, if you see what I mean. Anyway, there turned out to be about the usual number of Earth-to-Mars freighters in the hangars, and the AI calculations indicated we would need the thrust of almost all of them to get ourselves back down into the plane of the ecliptic in time to intersect the Jovian system. We were on our way out as well as up, and in the general direction of Jupiter, which was a blessing. Anyway, that was when it got crazy. We had to get all the freighters outside the hangars and flying beside Clarke, and then link them together and stock them with everything they could hold of Clarke’s air and fuel and so on. And we were off in that jury-rigged lifeboat only thirty hours after launching, which now that I look back on it, is almost unbelievable. Those thirty hours …”
She shook her head, and Sax thought he saw a real memory suddenly invade her tale, shaking her slightly. Thirty hours was a remarkably fast evacuation, and no doubt the time had flashed by in a dreamlike rush of action, in a state of mind so different from ordinary time that it might pass for transcendence.
“After that it was just a matter of cramming into a couple of crew quarters — two hundred and eighty-six of us, there were — and going out on EVAs to cut away inessential parts of the freighters. And hoping there would be enough fuel to get us on course down to Jupiter. It was more than two months before we could be positive we would intercept the Jovian system, and ten weeks before we actually did. We used Jupiter itself as a gravity handle, and swung around toward Earth, which at that time was closer than Mars. And we swung so hard around Jupiter that we needed Earth’s atmosphere and Luna’s gravity to slow us down, because we were almost out of fuel at the very same time that we were the fastest humans in history, by a factor of two. Eighty thousand kilometers an hour, I think it was when we hit the stratosphere the first time. A useful speed, really, because we were running out of food and air. We got really hungry near the end. But we made it. And we saw Jupiter from about this close,” holding thumb and forefinger apart a couple of centimeters.
People laughed, and the gleam of triumph in Phyllis’s eye had nothing to do with Jupiter. But there was a tightening at the comer of her mouth; something at the end of her tale had darkened the triumph, somehow.
“And you were the leader, right?” someone asked.
Phyllis held up a hand, to say she could not deny it though she wanted to. “It was a cooperative effort,” she said. “But sometimes someone has to decide when there’s an impasse, or simply a need for speed. And I had been head of Clarke before the catastrophe.”
She flashed her big smile, confident that they had enjoyed the account. Sax smiled with the rest, and nodded when she looked his way. She was an attractive woman, but not, he thought, very bright. Or maybe it was just that he did not like her very much. For certainly she was very intelligent in some ways, a good biologist when she had done biology, and certain to score high on an IQ test.-But there were different types of intelligence, and not all of them were subject to analytic testing. Sax had noticed this fact in his student years: that there were people who would score high on any intelligence test, and were very good at their work, but who at the same time could walk into a room of people and within an hour have many of the occupants of that room laughing at them, or even despising them. Which was not very smart. Indeed the most giddy of high school cheerleaders, say, managing to be friendly with everyone and therefore universally popular, seemed to Sax to be exercising an intelligence at least as powerful as any awkward brilliant mathematician’s — the calculus of human interaction being so much more subtle and variable than any physics, somewhat like the emerging field of math called cascading recom-binant chaos, only less simple. So that there were at least two kinds of intelligence, and probably many more: spatial, aesthetic, moral or ethical, interactional, analytic, synthetic, and so forth. And it was those people who were intelligent in a number of different ways who were truly exceptional, who stood out as something special.
Phyllis, however, basking in the attention of her listeners, most of them much younger than her and, at least on the surface, in awe of her historicity — Phyllis was not one of those polymaths. On the contrary, she seemed rather dim when it came to judging what people thought of her. Sax, who knew he shared the deficiency, watched her with the best Lindholm smile he could muster. But it seemed to him a fairly obviously vain performance on her part, even a bit arrogant. And arrogance was always stupid. Or else a “ mask for some kind of insecurity. Hard to guess what that insecurity might be, in such a successful and attractive person. And she certainly was attractive.
After supper they went back up to the observation room on the top floor, and there under a glittering bowl of stars the crowd from Biotique turned on some music. It was the kind called nuevo calypso, the current rage in Burroughs, and several members of the group brought out instruments and played along, while others moved to the middle of the room and began to dance. The music was paced at about a hundred beats a minute, Sax calculated, perfect physiological riming for stimulating the heart just a bit; the secret to most dance music, he supposed.
And then Phyllis was there by his side, grabbing for his hand and pulling him out among the dancers. Sax only just restrained-himself from jerking his hand away from her, and he was sure that his response to her smiling invitation was sickly at best. He had never danced in his life; as far as he could recall. But that was Sax Russell’s life. Surely Stephen Lindholm had danced a lot. So Sax began to hop gently up and dow
n in time with the bass steel drum, wiggling his arms uncertainly at his sides, smiling at Phyllis in a desperate simulation of debonair pleasure.
Later that evening the younger Biotique crew were still dancing, and Sax took the elevator down to bring some tubs of ice milk back up from the kitchens. When he got back into the elevator Phyllis was already inside, coming back up from the dorm floor. “Here, let me help with those,” she said, and took two of the four plastic bags hanging from his fingers. Then when she had them she leaned down (she was a few centimeters taller than him) and kissed him full on the mouth. He kissed back, but it was such a shock that he didn’t really start to feel it until she pulled away; then the memory of her tongue between his lips was like another kiss. He tried to look less than befuddled, but by the way she laughed he knew he had failed. “I see you’re not as much of a lady-killer as you look,” she said, which given the situation only made him more alarmed. In point of fact, no one had ever done that to him before. He tried to rally, but the elevator slowed and the doors hissed open.
Through dessert and the rest of the party Phyllis did not approach him again. But when the timeslip began he went to the elevators to go back to his room, and as the doors began to close Phyllis slipped through them and in, and as soon as the elevator began to drop she was kissing him again. He put his arms around her and kissed back, trying to figure out what Lindholm would do in this situation, and if there was any way out of it that wouldn’t lead to trouble. When the elevator slowed, Phyllis leaned back with a dreamy unfocused gaze and said, “Come walk me to my room.” Reeling a bit, Sax held her upper arm like a bit of delicate lab equipment, and was led to her room, a tiny chamber like all the rest of the bedrooms. Standing in the doorway they kissed again, despite Sax’s strong feeling that this was his last chance to escape, gracefully or not; but he was kissing her back pretty passionately, he noticed, and when she pulled back to murmur, “You might as well come inside,” he followed without protest; indeed his penis was snagged halfway up in its blind grope toward the stars, all his chromosomes humming loudly, the silly fools, at this chance at immortality. It had been a long time since he had made love to anyone except Hiroko, and those encounters, though friendly and pleasant, were not passionate, more an extension of their bathing; whereas Phyllis, fumbling at their clothes as they fell onto her bed kissing, was clearly excited, and this excitement was transferring to Sax by a kind of immediate conduction. His erection sprang free eagerly from his pants as Phyllis got the pants down his legs, as if in illustration of the selfish gene theory, and he could only laugh and tug at the long ventral zipper of her jumpsuit. Lindholm, free of any worries, would certainly be aroused by the encounter. That was clear. And so he had to be too. And besides, although he did not especially like Phyllis, he did know her; there was that old First Hundred bond, the memories of those years together in Underbill — there was something provocative in the notion of making love to a woman he had known so long. And every one else in the First Hundred had been polygamous, it seemed, everyone but Phyllis and him. So now they were making up for it. And she was very attractive. And it was something, actually, just to be wanted.
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