by Allen Steele
In any case, we still needed to uncouple the locomotive, and there was only way left to do that. Someone would have to put on a vacuum suit, go out through the airlock, and do the job manually, from the top of the car. Floyd and Rich couldn’t leave the control room, though, and I just didn’t have that kind of experience. But Joe had been spacewalking a couple of times already, and as I said, he knew the train like no one else.
It wasn’t a matter of picking a short straw, which is one part of the legend that’s untrue. This was his job, and he went about it without argument or complaint. Joe and I went down below, where I helped him suit up while telling the passengers to remain in their cabins and stop asking silly questions. Once he’d put on the airtight rubber garment and sealed the deep-sea diver’s helmet, he entered the airlock. The last I saw of him was after I closed the inner hatch and dogged it tight; he waved to me through the window while I turned the wheel to depressurize the compartment.
At first, everything went just as it was supposed to. As soon as the outer hatch was open, Joe clipped his safety line to the outer hull, then attached the magnetic soles of his boots and began to slowly walk up the side of the car. Those old Mark I spacesuits didn’t have their own radios, but from inside we could hear the steady clunk-clunk-clunk as he made his way to the roof.
When he got there, Joe began to make his way around its circular edge, approaching each stanchion where the tow cables were attached, and using a monkey wrench to unfasten their big lug nuts. He was halfway around the circumference when he suddenly stopped. When he didn’t move for a minute or two, Floyd went to the little porthole in the control room ceiling and peered out to see what was going on.
What he saw made him cuss out loud. Joe’s safety line had become wrapped around the radio mast, and rather than spend precious time untangling it, he’d simply detached the line from his suit. Which was dangerous as hell. If his boots lost their grip, he’d float off and there would be no way to save him. But no one could tell him not to take this risk, so all Floyd could do was hold his breath and pray that Joe kept both feet firmly planted.
Which he did, right up until the moment he set free the fourth and final tow cable. And that’s when the third mysterious thing happened.
The locomotive drifted away from the car, and Joe went with it.
Some people think he just made a mistake, and grabbed hold of the cable thinking that it was his safety line. But I know different, and so did the pilots. Joe was too smart to do something like that. Besides, his safety line was a dozen feet away, at least.
You want to know what I think happened? Joe saw his chance to go to the Moon and he took it. That’s why he grabbed the cable. The locomotive was going the way he wanted to go, so he went along for the ride. Sure, it was suicide, but…well, who knows what was going on inside his head? In any case, the last anyone saw of Joe Welch and No. 4, they were falling toward the Moon, our chief engineer a small white figure clinging to a tow cable.
We got the rest of the train safely back to Earth and managed to make an emergency splash-down in the Indian Ocean. That was the last time a space train left the ground. The newspapers called Joe Welch a hero—some reporter called him Locomotive Joe, and that’s how the nickname got stuck—but the government decided that trains were too dangerous and laws were passed against them being used again. By the time the Goddard Rocket Company went bankrupt, I was back to my old job, punching tickets on the Long Island Railroad.
Did Joe make it to the Moon? I doubt it. He didn’t have enough air in his tanks, and when the locomotive’s wreckage was located many years later in the Mare Imbrium, his body was nowhere to be found. All the same, moonwalkers in that region will occasionally report spotting someone in a Mark I suit who doesn’t respond to comlink hails.
Locomotive Joe’s ghost? Perhaps that’s another unsolved mystery.
This is the first of four stories from my Near Space series to appear in this book…which makes me feel rather guilty, because the last collection I published, the expanded second edition of Sex and Violence in Zero-G, was subtitled “The Complete Near Space Stories.” And almost as soon as it was published, what did I do but go out and write a handful of new stories in the series, thereby making the subtitle less than accurate.
It wasn’t my intent to deceive anyone. This isn’t the first time I’ve ended a series, only to return to it later, and I doubt it will be the last. I go where my imagination takes me, and so long as my readers or editors have no objections, I’m just as happy to do so. Consistency is overrated.
This story has its genesis in a couple of adventures my wife and I had in 2012. We had our 25th anniversary that year, and since Linda was also having a significant birthday, we celebrated with a vacation trip to France. I underwrote the expenses in part by doing a little research for my novel V-S Day, but it was while visiting the royal palace at Versailles that I got the notion for this story. When I saw the Mars Vase, I realized at once that I’d later want to put it in a story, I took pictures and made notes, and it appears here exactly as described.
I was still playing with the idea later that summer when, on the day of our anniversary, we took the zipline tour of a mountainside at the Berkshire East ski resort in western Massachusetts. Riding a zipline is described pretty much as I experienced it…I just moved the action to Mars. Who says research can’t be fun?
SIXTEEN MILLION LEAGUES FROM VERSAILLES
Louis XIV lived in splendor beyond imagination. Far from the squalor of the Paris streets, the royal palace at Versailles possessed an opulence that bordered on the grotesque. From the ornate fountains and statues of its vast gardens to the marble pavement of the courtyard, from the ceiling frescoes of its dining rooms to the elaborate murals and sculptures of its bed chambers, Versailles was a gilded world in which the Sun King spent his days surrounded by luxury unmatched by any other monarch of the 18th Century.
One of the palace’s more important rooms was the Council Study. Located just off the Hall of Mirrors, this was where Louis XIV met Sundays and Wednesdays with the Council of State, and Tuesdays and Saturdays with the Council of Finances. During these meetings, the monarch sat at a table beneath an immense crystal chandelier. Behind him was black marble fireplace upon which rested a golden clock. Two matching vases stood at either end of the mantle; one was a tribute to Minerva, the goddess of wisdom, the other to the war god Mars.
Long after the Sun King’s great-great-great-grandson, Louis XVI, placed his head upon the guillotine, the twin vases remained in Versailles, just two of the palace’s many treasures. And then one day the vase on the right was removed from the mantle, carefully placed in a specially-made container, and sent to a world even Louis the Great couldn’t have imagined…
And vanished.
Baynes was supervising repairs to Arsia Station’s solar farm when Jenkins called him to the office. He would have rather stayed with the work crew—the dust storm that swept across the Martian equator the day before had caused considerable damage—but the general manager insisted that he join him inside, so he returned to the Hab 1 airlock, took off his suit, and headed for the office the two men shared next to the operations center.
“Hi, Will,” Jenkins said as he walked in. There was a young woman sitting across from him: small and slender, with boyishly-cut black hair and a pleasant but solemn face. “Let me introduce you, if you haven’t already met. This is Camille Bacquart, a curator from the Museum and National Estate at Versailles. Ms. Bacquart, this is Will Baynes, our associate general manager.”
“Pleased to meet you, Ms. Bacquart.” Baynes stepped past her to sit down at his desk. The office had just enough room for both Jenkins and him. With a visitor, it could be crowded, but Camille Bacquart was so petite that they were able to sit next to each other without having their knees touch.
“Dr. Bacquart,” she said pointedly, with just enough of a pout to embarrass him.
“Sorry…Dr. Bacquart.” As soon as Jenkins told Baynes who she was,
he knew why she was there. “And I’m also sorry for the loss of the cargo lander. I wish it hadn’t happened, but…” He fumbled for words. “Well, it just did.”
The pout deepened into an angry glare, and he realized at once that he’d said the wrong thing. “It shouldn’t have ‘just happened,’ Mr. Baynes,” she replied, the edge in her voice just slightly sharper than her dark brown eyes. “I’m hoping that you and Mr. Jenkins—” Murray’s last name rolled off her tongue, becoming Zhenkins “—will be able to rectify matters.”
There’s nothing like the displeasure of a pretty woman to make a man feel like a jerk. If he hadn’t been Arsia’s second-in-command, Baynes might have excused myself and retreated to the Mars Hotel for a nice, stiff drink. But Camille Bacquart had every right to be upset, so he kept his mouth shut and simply nodded.
“Dr. Bacquart came in on the Bradbury a couple of days ago,” Jenkins said. “She was sent to escort the Versailles exhibit back to France. Fortunately, she was scheduled fly up with everyone else on the next shuttle, so she wasn’t aboard the lander when it went down.”
“That’s lucky.” Baynes looked at her again. “There’s a reason why we send cargo and passengers into orbit on separate craft, y’know. Cargo has more mass than people, generally speaking, so it takes more fuel to get it into low orbit. More fuel means bigger engines, and big engines are more prone to failure. When we lose a spacecraft…it doesn’t happen very often, but sometimes it does; that’s what I was trying to say…it’s usually been the cargo boat that goes down. And we’d sooner lose freight than people.”
“I understand what you’re saying, but…” Letting out her breath as a long sigh, Bacquart shook her head, a gesture that barely disturbed her boyishly cut black hair. “Forgive me to saying so, but the Mars vase is more valuable than mere human life. People can be replaced, but this…this is a priceless piece of history.”
When Bacquart said this, Baynes’ feelings for her changed. Like many colonists, he had originally come to Mars on a short-term contract, but after those two years were up he’d decided to remain a permanent resident. The planet sometimes did that to people. Yet life here was challenging and often dangerous, and he’d seen people die enough times to know that nothing could replace a friend who’d been lost. He didn’t care how valuable the vase was; it wasn’t worth dying for.
“Perhaps.” Seeing the look on Baynes’ faces, Jenkins tactfully cleared his throat. “Did you get a chance to see the vase while it was here, Will?”
“No. I’ve been busy with a lot of stuff lately.” He didn’t add that museum exhibits had little appeal to him, even those which had travelled more than seventy-eight million kilometers.
“Maybe you should see what we’re talking about. Camille…?”
She’d already pulled out her pad and opened it. Moving a finger across its screen, she interfaced with the holo projector above the general manager’s desk. The three-dimensional map globe which perpetually hovered there vanished, to be replaced by the artifact. A covered urn about sixty centimeters tall, it was made of dark blue porcelain trimmed with bronze filigree. Four maidens in Roman togas supported its lid, upon which sat Mars, plumed war helm on his head and an oval shield draped across his right arm.
Baynes had to admit that it was beautiful. The vase had been the centerpiece of a special exhibit, “The Mars Room of Versailles,” which had been brought here two years ago by the Bradbury during the cycleship’s last voyage. Some time ago, ConSpace’s board of directors had become concerned that, although the Mars colonies had grown and were now self-sufficient, their inhabitants were becoming culturally deprived, their children having little or no knowledge of the world their parents had come from. Someone who’d recently visited France lit upon the idea of asking the French cultural ministry if they’d be willing to put together a travelling exhibit which would feature one of Versailles’ more interesting features, the Mars Drawing Room where chamber quartets had often performed for Louis XIV’s entertainment. Since the room had originally been built for the palace guards, its motif was classically military…hence its name and décor, which was principally red and featured elaborate murals of the God of War.
The exhibit had featured a scaled-down representation of the drawing room which visitors could walk through, showing them what they’d see if they visited the real palace at Versailles. Since none of the room’s furniture could be sent to Mars—it was both too big and too delicate—it was decided that another artifact would be included. True, the Mars vase belonged in a different room entirely, but at least it shared the same theme. And it would be a tangible object that people could see as an authentic museum piece.
Over the past two years, the exhibit had travelled across Mars, spending a few months at a time at each of the Seven Colonies. After leaving Zubrinville it had returned to its starting place at Arsia Station. By then the Bradbury had come back, and the vase had joined the mural reproductions and holo projectors in the cargo lander.
But then a foolish decision was made. Although a violent dust storm was grinding its way eastward across the Tharsis region west of Arsia Station, the lander had been launched anyway. It should have stayed put until the storm was over. However, the Bradbury would be in orbit for only a few days, and its window for the return flight to Earth wouldn’t last very long. So the lander was sent up, and less than a minute after it left the ground, a strong gust of wind from the storm’s leading edge caught the spacecraft broadsides, throwing it off its bearings and sending it careening into the Valles Marineris west of Arsia.
At least the lander was unmanned; there weren’t any pilots aboard, so no one was killed. Yet its instruments indicated that, although the emergency parachutes had automatically deployed, they hadn’t been done so in time to prevent a catastrophic crash landing. There was little doubt that the lander had been destroyed on impact, and with it…
“Dr. Bacquart—” Baynes hesitated “—what makes you think that the vase survived the crash? When we lose a lander during a launch or landing accident, there’s usually not much left.”
“The museum anticipated that something like this was possible, even though we’d been assured that it wouldn’t happen.” Again she gave him an accusatory look, which Baynes chose to ignore. “Its container was specially designed for just this sort of occurrence. Not only was its interior padded by gelatin cells, but its outer shell was fitted with airbags which had their own shock-detection system. The airbags were supposed to inflate the moment the system detected a sudden change of motion, like that of a spacecraft about to make an uncontrolled descent. Before it left Earth, we tested the container by placing a replica of the vase inside and dropping it from an airplane at six kilometers. The vase was intact when we opened the container.”
Baynes nodded. He was still unconvinced that there was anything left of the vase except pretty bits of porcelain and bronze, but she’d made a good argument otherwise. “The GPS transponder remained functional until impact,” Jenkins said. “It appears that it came down somewhere in the Ius Chasma. Ever been there?”
“I’ve flown over it. Rough country, but it could be worse. I take it you want me to go out there and see if…”
“If there’s anything at all, we need to have it brought back. And you won’t be travelling alone. Camille will be going with you.”
Baynes winced. The last thing he wanted to do was bring along someone who had no marswalking experience. “I’ve worn a skinsuit before, if that’s what you’re thinking,” Bacquart said. “And I’ve done quite a bit of hiking in the Alps.”
“That’s not…”
“Camille, will you please excuse us a moment?” Jenkins asked.
Bacquart frowned, but she got up from her chair and left the office without another word. Jenkins waited until she closed the door behind her, then let out his breath. “Look, I know she’s a pain, but it can’t be helped. Like it or not, we’re responsible for what happened to the lander. It’s up to us to help her recover the v
ase.”
“Yeah, well…” Baynes stretched out his legs. “I’d bet my next paycheck against your next paycheck that she won’t find enough to glue back together.”
“You’re probably right, but that’s not for us to decide.” Jenkins paused. “I want to send someone with you who has outback experience. Someone who knows the Valles Marineris like the back of his hand. Do you know Lincoln McGrath?”
Baynes closed his eyes. “Murray, please…not him.”
A wry smile. “Oh, so you have met Link…”
“I can handle one pain in the ass. Not two.”
“Oh, I agree…he’s as obnoxious as they get. But he’s the best guide in the colonies, and he’s also spent more time in the Valles Marineris than anyone else. If there’s anyone who can get you to the wreckage in time…”
“In time?” Then Baynes realized what Jenkins was saying. “Oh, right…the Bradbury is still in orbit, isn’t it?”
Jenkins nodded. “It’s scheduled to break orbit in about seventy-four hours—” approximately three days by Mars reckoning “—but I’ve spoken with the captain, and she’s willing to delay departure a little to accommodate us. But that means you have to get there and back again in four days, max, or the ship leaves without Dr. Bacquart. I don’t think she’s going to be very happy staying with us until the next ship comes six months from now, though, and we’re already in enough trouble with the front office.”
“Got it.” Baynes pushed back his chair and stood up. No time to waste; he’d have to leave this morning. “I’ll get us packed and ready to go. Where do I find McGrath?” Then he saw Jenkins’ smile. “Oh, hell…you called him already, didn’t you?”
“Uh-huh. He should be at the airfield by now, waiting for you and Camille.” The smile became a wide grin. “Good luck.”
The Valles Marineris stretched out before them like an unhealed scar across the face of Mars. From an altitude of one hundred and fifty meters, the Noctis Labyrinthis of its western end passed beneath the airship gondola as a scarlet maze of gorges, buttes, and box canyons. The morning haze had burned off several hours earlier, but even the midday sun couldn’t penetrate the shadows that lay upon its narrow floor. There was a good reason why this region was called the Labyrinth of Night; gazing into its depths, Baynes was just happy that this wasn’t where the lander had gone down.
