The Hard SF Renaissance

by David G. Hartwell

  Most of the high school teachers were zeroes, but one—the weary old man who taught math—encouraged him to apply for a scholarship to college. To Tmas’ enormous surprise, he won one: full tuition to UCSD. Even so, he could not afford the other expenses, so he again listened to his mentor’s advice and joined the Air Force. Uncle Sam paid his way through school, and once he graduated he became a jet fighter pilot. “More fun than sex,” he would maintain, always adding, “Almost.”

  Never show fear. That meant that he could never back away from a challenge. Never. Whether in a cockpit or a barroom, the stocky Hispanic kid with the big smile took every confrontation as it arose. He got a reputation for it.

  The fear was always there, constantly, but he never let it show. And always there was that inner doubt. That feeling that somehow he didn’t really belong here. They were allowing the chicano kid to pretend he was as smart as the white guys, allowing him to get through college on his little scholarship, allowing him to wear a fly-boy uniform and play with the hotshot jet planes.

  But he really wasn’t one of them. That was made abundantly clear to him in a thousand little ways, every day. He was a greaser, tolerated only as long as he stayed in the place they expected him to be. Don’t try to climb too far; don’t show off too much; above all, don’t try to date anyone except “your own.”

  Flying was different, though. Alone in a plane seven or eight miles up in the sky it was just him and God, the rest of the world far away, out of sight and out of mind.

  Then came the chance to win an astronaut’s wings. He couldn’t back away from the challenge. Again, the others made it clear that he was not welcome to the competition. But Tmas entered anyway and won a slot in the astronaut training corps. “The benefits of affirmative action,” one of the other pilots jeered.

  Whatever he achieved, they always tried to take the joy out of it. Tmas paid no outward attention, as usual; he kept his wounds hidden, his bleeding internal.

  Two years after he had won his astronaut’s wings came the call for the Second Mars Expedition. Smiling his broadest, Tmas applied. No fear. He kept his gritted teeth hidden from all the others, and won the position.

  “Big fuckin’ deal,” said his buddies. “You’ll be second fiddle to some Russian broad.”

  Tmas shrugged and nodded. “Yeah,” he admitted. “I guess I’ll have to take orders from everybody.”

  To himself he added, But I’ll be on Mars, shitheads, while you’re still down here.

  Following his astronaut teammate, Mitsuo Fuchida clambered stiffly down the ladder from the plane’s cockpit and set foot on the top of the tallest mountain in the solar system.

  In the pale light of the rising sun, it did not look like the top of a mountain to him. He had done a considerable amount of climbing in Japan and Canada and this was nothing like the jagged, snow-capped slabs of granite where the wind whistled like a hurled knife and the clouds scudded by below you.

  Here he seemed to be on nothing more dramatic than a wide, fairly flat plain of bare basalt. Pebbles and larger rocks were scattered here and there, but not as thickly as they were back at the base dome. The craters that they had seen from the air were not visible here; at least, he saw nothing that looked like a crater.

  But when he looked up he realized how high they were. The sky was a deep blue, instead of its usual salmon pink. The dust particles that reddened the sky of Mars were far below them. At this altitude on Earth they would be up in the stratosphere.

  Fuchida wondered if he could see any stars through his visor, maybe find Earth. He turned, trying to orient himself with the rising sun.

  “Watch your step,” Rodriguez’s voice warned in his earphones. “It’s—”

  Fuchida’s boot slid out from under him and he thumped painfully on his rear.

  “ … slippery,” Rodriguez finished lamely.

  The astronaut shuffled carefully to Fuchida’s side, moving like a man crossing an ice rink in street shoes. He extended a hand to help the biologist up to his feet.

  Stiff and aching from a night of sitting in the cockpit. Fuchida now felt a throbbing pain in his backside. I’ll have a nasty bruise there, he told himself. Lucky I didn’t land on the backpack and break the life-support rig.

  “Feels like ice underfoot,” Rodriguez said.

  “It couldn’t be frost, we’re up too high for water ice to form.”

  “Dry ice.”

  “Ah.” Fuchida nodded inside his helmet. “Dry ice. Carbon dioxide from the atmosphere condenses out on the cold rock.”

  “Yep.”

  “But dry ice isn’t slippery …”

  “This stuff is.”

  Fuchida thought quickly. “Perhaps the pressure of our boots on the dry ice causes a thin layer to vaporize.”

  “So we get a layer of carbon dioxide gas under our boots.” Rodriguez immediately grasped the situation.

  “Exactly. We skid along on a film of gas, like gas-lubricated ball bearings.”

  “That’s gonna make it damned difficult to move around.”

  Fuchida wanted to rub his butt, although he knew it was impossible inside the hard suit. “The sun will get rid of the ice.”

  “I don’t think it’ll get warm enough up here to vaporize it.”

  “It sublimes at seventy-eight point five degrees below zero. Celsius,” Fuchida recalled.

  “At normal pressure,” Rodriguez pointed out.

  Fuchida looked at the thermometer on his right cuff. “It’s already up to forty-two below,” he said, feeling cheerful for the first time. “Besides, the lower the pressure, the lower the boiling point.”

  “Yeah. That’s right.”

  “That patch must have been shaded by the plane’s wing,” Fuchida pointed out. “The rest of the ground seems clear.”

  “Then let’s go to the beach and get a suntan,” Rodriguez said humorlessly.

  “No, let’s go to the caldera, as planned.”

  “You think it’s safe to walk around?”

  Nodding inside his helmet, Fuchida took a tentative step. The ground felt smooth, but not slick. Another step, then another.

  “Maybe we should’ve brought football cleats.”

  “Not necessary. The ground’s OK now.”

  Rodriguez grunted. “Be careful, anyway.”

  “Yes, I will.”

  While Rodriguez relayed his morning report from his suit radio through the more powerful transmitter in the plane, Fuchida unlatched the cargo bay hatch and slid their equipment skid to the ground. Again he marvelled that this plane of plastic and gossamer could carry them and their gear. It seemed quite impossible, yet it was true.

  “Are you ready?” he asked Rodriguez, feeling eager now to get going.

  “Yep. Lemme check the compass bearing … .”

  Fuchida did not wait for the astronaut’s check. He knew the direction to the caldera as if its coordinates were printed on his heart.

  Rodriguez felt a chill of apprehension tingling through him as they stared down into the caldera. It was like being on the edge of an enormous hole in the world, a hole that went all the way down into hell.

  “Nietzsche was right,” Fuchida said, his voice sounding awed, almost frightened, in Rodriguez’s earphones.

  Rodriguez had to turn his entire torso from the hips to see the Japanese biologist standing beside him, anonymous in his bulky hard suit except for the blue stripes on his arms.

  “You mean about when you stare into the abyss the abyss stares back.”

  “You’ve read Nietzsche?”

  Rodriguez grunted. “In Spanish.”

  “That must have been interesting. I read him in Japanese.”

  Breaking into a chuckle, Rodriguez said, “So neither one of us can read German, huh?”

  It was as good a way as any to break the tension. The caldera was huge, a mammoth pit that stretched from horizon to horizon. Standing there on its lip, looking down into the dark, shadowy depths that dropped away for who knew how
far, was distinctly unnerving.

  “That’s a helluva hole,” Rodriguez muttered.

  “It’s big enough to swallow Mt. Everest,” said Fuchida, his voice slightly hollow with awe.

  “How long’s this beast been dead?” Rodriguez asked.

  “Tens of millions of years, at least. Probably much longer. That’s one of the things we want to establish while we’re here.”

  “Think it’s due for another blow?”

  Fuchida laughed shakily. “We’ll get plenty of warning, don’t worry.”

  “What, me worry?”

  They began to unload the equipment they had dragged on the skid. Its two runners were lined with small Teflon-coated wheels so it could ride along rough ground without needing more than the muscle power of the two men. Much of the equipment was mountaineering gear: chocks and pitons and long coiled lengths of Buckyball cable.

  “You really want to go down there?” Rodriguez asked while he drilled holes in the hard basalt for Fuchida to implant geo/met beacons. The instrumentation built into the slim pole would continuously measure ground tremors, heat flow from the planet’s interior, air temperature, wind velocity and humidity.

  “I spent a lot of time exploring caves,” Fuchida answered, gripping one of the beacons in his gloved hands. “I’ve been preparing for this for a long time.”

  “Spelunking? You?”

  “They call it caving. Spelunking is a term used by non-cavers.”

  “So you’re all set to go down there, huh?”

  Fuchida realized that he did not truly want to go. Every time he had entered a cave on Earth he had felt an irrational sense of dread. But he had forced himself to explore the caverns because he knew it would be an important point in his favor in the competition for a berth on the Mars expedition.

  “I’m all set,” the biologist answered, grunting as he worked the geology/meteorology beacon into its hole.

  “It’s a dirty job,” Rodriguez joked, over the whine of the auger’s electric motor, “but somebody’s got to do it.”

  “A man’s got to do what a man’s got to do,” Fuchida replied, matching his teammate’s bravado.

  Rodriguez laughed. “That ain’t Nietzsche.”

  “No. John Wayne.”

  “They finished all the preliminary work and headed back to the lip of the caldera. Slowly. Reluctantly, Rodriguez thought. Well, he told himself, even if we break our asses poking around down there at least we’ve got the beacons up and running.

  Fuchida stopped to check the readouts coming from the beacons.

  “They all transmitting OK?” Rodriguez asked.

  “Yes,” came the reply in his earphones. “Interesting …”

  “What?”

  “Heat flow from below ground is much higher here than at the dome or even down in the Canyon.”

  Rodriguez felt his eyebrows crawl upward. “You mean she’s still active?”

  “No, no, no. That can’t be. But there is still some thermal energy down there.”

  “We should’ve brought marshmallows.”

  “Perhaps. Or maybe there’ll be something to picnic on down there waiting for us!” The biologist’s voice sounded excited.

  “Whattaya mean?”

  “Heat energy! Energy for life, perhaps.”

  A vision of bad videos flashed through Rodriguez’s mind: slimy alien monsters with tentacles and bulging eyes. He forced himself not to laugh aloud. Don’t worry, they’re only interested in blondes with big boobs.

  Fuchida called, “Help me get the lines attached and make certain the anchors are firmly imbedded.”

  He’s not reluctant anymore, Rodriguez saw. He’s itching to go down into that huge hole and see what kind of alien creatures he can find.

  “You all set?” Rodriguez asked.

  Fuchida had the climbing harness buckled over his hard suit, the tether firmly clipped to the yoke that ran under his arms.

  “Ready to go,” the biologist replied, with an assurance he did not truly feel. That dark, yawning abyss stirred a primal fear in both men, but Fuchida did not want to admit to it himself, much less to his teammate.

  Rodriguez had spent the morning setting up the climbing rig while Fuchida collected rock samples and then did a half-hour VR show for viewers back on Earth. The rocks were sparser here atop Olympus Mons than they were down on the plains below, and none of them showed the intrusions of color that marked colonies of Martian lichen.

  Still, sample collection was the biologist’s first order of business. He thought of it as his gift to the geologists, since he felt a dreary certainty that there was no biology going on here on the roof of this world. But down below, inside the caldera … that might be a different matter.

  Fuchida still had the virtual reality rig clamped to his helmet. They would not do a real-time transmission, but the recording of the first descent into Olympus Mons’s main caldera would be very useful both for science and entertainment.

  “OK,” Rodriguez said, letting his reluctance show in his voice. “I’m ready whenever you are.”

  Nodding inside his helmet, Fuchida said, “Then let’s get started.”

  “Be careful now,” said Rodriguez as the biologist backed slowly away from him.

  Fuchida did not reply. He turned and started over the softly rounded lip of the giant hole in the ground. The caldera was so big that it would take half an hour to sink below the level where Rodriguez could still see him without moving from his station beside the tether winch.

  I should have read Dante’s Inferno in preparation for this task, Fuchida thought to himself.

  The road to hell begins with a gradual slope, he knew. It will get steep enough soon.

  Then both his booted feet slipped out from under him.

  “You OK?” Rodriguez’s voice sounded anxious in Fuchida’s earphones.

  “I hit a slick spot. There must be patches of dry ice coating the rock here in the shadows.”

  The biologist was lying on his side, his hip throbbing painfully from his fall. At this rate, he thought, I’ll be black-and-blue from the waist down.

  “Can you get up?”

  “Yes. Certainly.” Fuchida felt more embarrassed than hurt. He grabbed angrily at the tether and pulled himself to his feet. Even in the one-third gravity of Mars it took an effort, with the suit and backpack weighing him down. And all the equipment that dangled from his belt and harness.

  Once on his feet he stared down once more into the darkness of the caldera’s yawning maw. It’s like the mouth of a great beast, a voice in his mind said. Like the gateway to the eternal pit.

  He took a deep breath, then said into his helmet microphone, “OK. I’m starting down again.”

  “Be careful, man.”

  “Thanks for the advice,” Fuchida snapped.

  Rodriguez seemed untroubled by his irritation. “Maybe I oughta keep the line tighter,” he suggested. “Not so much slack.”

  Regretting his temper, Fuchida agreed, “Yes, that might help to keep me on my feet.” The hip really hurt, and his rump was still sore from his first fall.

  I’m lucky I didn’t rupture the suit, he thought. Or damage the backpack.

  “OK, I’ve adjusted the tension. Take it easy, now.”

  A journey of a thousand miles must begin with a single step. Mitsuo Fuchida quoted Lao-tzu’s ancient dictum as he planted one booted foot on the ground ahead of him. The bare rock seemed to offer good traction.

  You can’t see the ice, he told himself. It’s too thin a coating to be visible. Several dozen meters to his right, sunlight slanted down into the gradually sloping side of the caldera. There’ll be no ice there, Fuchida thought. He moved off in that direction, slowly, testing his footing every step of the way.

  The tether connected to his harness at his chest, so he could easily disconnect it if necessary. The increased tension of the line made walking all the more difficult. Fuchida felt almost like a marionette on a string.

  “Slack off a lit
tle,” he called to Rodriguez.

  “You sure?”

  He turned back to look up at his teammate, and was startled to see that the astronaut was nothing more than a tiny blob of a figure up on the rim, standing in bright sunlight with the deep blue sky behind him.

  “Yes, I’m certain,” he said, with deliberate patience.

  A few moments later Rodriguez asked, “How’s that?”

  The difference was imperceptible, but Fuchida replied, “Better.”

  He saw a ledge in the sunlight some twenty meters below him and decided to head for it. Slowly, carefully he descended.

  “I can’t see you.” Rodriguez’s voice in his earphones sounded only slightly concerned.

  Looking up, Fuchida saw the expanse of deep blue sky and nothing else except the gentle slope of the bare rock. And the tether, his lifeline, holding strong.

  “It’s all right,” he said. “I’m using the VR cameras to record my descent. I’m going to stop at a ledge and chip out some rock samples there.”

  “Hey, Mitsuo,” Rodriguez called.

  Automatically Fuchida looked up. But the astronaut was beyond his view. Fuchida was alone down on the ledge in the caldera’s sloping flank of solid rock. The Buckyball tether that connected him to the winch up above also carried their suit-to-suit radio transmissions.

  “What is it?” he replied, grateful to hear Rodriguez’s voice.

  “How’s it going, man?”

  “That depends,” said Fuchida.

  “On what?”

  The biologist hesitated. He had been working on this rock ledge for hours, chipping out samples, measuring heat flow, patiently working an auger into the hard basalt to see if there might be water ice trapped in the rock.

  He was in shadow now. The sun had moved away. Looking up, he saw with relief that the sky was still a bright blue. It was still daylight up there. Rodriguez would not let him stay down after sunset, he knew, yet he still felt comforted to see that there was still daylight up there.