Mars

by Ben Bova

  “So what?”

  “Half my family was murdered by Russians in nineteen fifty-six. My grandmother barely escaped the country. My grandfather was hanged. As if he were a criminal, the Russians hanged him.”

  “That wasn’t Vosnesensky’s fault. Russia’s changed a lot since then. So has Hungary. It all happened half a century ago.”

  “It’s easy for you Americans to forgive and forget. Not so easy for me and my people.”

  Jamie did not know what to say. There’s nothing I can say, he realized. For several moments they stood facing each other while the stars arced around them and the background buzz of electrical equipment hummed its faint note like a distant chorus of Tibetan lamas droning a mantra.

  Ilona shuddered. “It is cold up here.” She moved closer to Jamie, pressed against him.

  “We could go back,” Jamie said. Yet he slid one arm around her waist. It seemed the right thing to do.

  “No, not yet. I have been worried about you,” said Ilona. Her voice was low, sensuous. Her face so close to Jamie’s that he could smell the faint perfume in her honey-blonde hair.

  “Worried about me?”

  “You seem … withdrawn. Lonely.”

  He made half a shrug. “We’re a long way from home.”

  “You avoid us.”

  “Avoid you?” Jamie felt stupid repeating her words, but she was catching him unprepared.

  “Joanna and me. Katrin. You avoid us. Didn’t you realize that?”

  “We’re not supposed to get emotionally involved with one another.”

  “Another rule, I know. But does that mean you can’t sit next to us at meals? I’ve been watching you very carefully. You deliberately stay as far from us as you can.”

  A hundred thoughts raced through Jamie’s mind. He muttered, “Lead us not into temptation.”

  “Are you in love with Joanna?”

  “No! Of course not.”

  “Of course not,” Ilona mimicked, smiling at him. “The rules forbid us to fail in love, don’t they.”

  “Not just the rules,” Jamie replied.

  “You don’t want to get involved emotionally, is that it?”

  He nodded, thinking of Edith back in Houston, wondering suddenly where she was, who she was with now.

  Ilona wrapped her arms around Jamie’s neck. “When is the last time you made love?”

  “What? I don’t think …”

  “I’ll wager you haven’t made love since the last time you went home to California, have you?”

  “No, you’re wrong.”

  “Certainly not since we arrived at the assembly station. Not since then.”

  Jamie’s mind was telling him to disengage from her and get away but his arms were clasping Ilona close to him, holding her tightly against his body. Their lips were almost touching.

  “I want to make love with you, Jamie. Right here and now. I want to make love with my strong silent friend here among the stars. I want your strength, your warmth.”

  She kissed him fiercely, then whispered, “The rules say nothing against fucking, Jamie. Fuck me, red man, fuck me.”

  Slowly, languidly, almost like a man hypnotized, Jamie pulled open the front of Ilona’s coveralls; the Velcro seam split with the same noise as ripping fabric. As if in a dream he watched himself slide the garment over her shoulders and down her long arms. She wore nothing at all beneath the coveralls. The skin of her bare shoulders and slight breasts looked milky white in the starlight. All the long months of denial exploded in a sudden frenzy as Jamie pulled Ilona to the hard metal flooring, impervious to the cold, uncaring about Mars or Gaia or anything else except this eager tigress. The stars wheeled impassively about them.

  2

  The next morning at breakfast Jamie felt terribly embarrassed. He could not face Joanna at all, and found that it was difficult for him even to look into Ilona’s face. She smiled at him, though, from across the narrow wardroom table as he sat down with his tray between Tony Reed and Tadeusz Sliwa, the golden-haired Polish backup biochemist.

  Jamie hurried through his breakfast and headed quickly up toward the communications console, where he intended to contact the growing library at Houston and bury himself in reading more details about the odd, oxygen-rich chemistry of the soil of Mars.

  “You seem to be in a hurry.”

  It was Tony Reed, striding up the narrow passageway behind him.

  “I’ve got some reading to do,” Jamie said.

  “Afraid I have to conduct some official business with you, my friend.”

  Jamie stopped and turned around to face Reed. “Official business?”

  “As the ship’s resident physician, yes.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Please come with me to my office,” said Reed, smiling crookedly.

  The ship’s infirmary was situated just behind the exercise room. It was a cubicle no larger than any of the individual quarters for the personnel, cramped and crowded even with only two people in it.

  Reed slid the accordion-fold door shut and carefully latched it in place. Jamie could hear the groaning squeal of the weight machine from the other side of the partition and the puffing grunts of whoever was working out with it.

  “We missed you yesterday afternoon,” Tony said, a sly grin on his face.

  “I needed some privacy,” he said.

  “So did Ilona, apparently.”

  Reed squeezed past Jamie and sat on the edge of the built-in desk, folding his arms across his chest. He nodded toward the stool resting beside the locked medicine cabinet.

  Jamie remained standing. He wondered who might be in the exercise room next door and how much he could hear through the thin partition wall.

  Reed was practically leering. “You seemed to disappear right after she did. And then you both returned to us at about the same time.”

  “Hoffman’s had a nervous breakdown,” Jamie said. “I was pretty upset by the news.”

  “So you consoled yourself by taking your turn with our in-house sexual therapist.”

  “My turn …?” Jamie’s insides went hollow, as if he had suddenly become weightless.

  The grin on Tony’s face was positively evil. “Didn’t you know? Ilona’s decided to have her fun with each of the males aboard. Except for Vosnesensky and Ivshenko, of course. She hates the Russkies. I think she’s doing what she’s doing merely to drive our poor Russian leader and his backup insane with jealousy. It might work, too.”

  Jamie felt as if he were gasping for air.

  “Now then.” Reed cleared his throat and put on a more serious, professional face? “There’s the matter of your sexual Conduct.”

  Jamie frowned. “My sexual conduct?”

  “I am required to give you standard lecture number double-ought one: sexual responsibility and its consequences.” The grin had come back to Reed’s face.

  “Do you give this lecture to Ilona, too?”

  “Yes, of course.” He was smirking. “With some variations, of course.”

  “Every time?”

  “Every time I can.”

  Jamie glowered at the Englishman.

  “Seriously, James, I must warn you that if your sexual conduct threatens to create a problem aboard ship, it is my duty to report to Dr. Li—and to take certain steps.”

  “Make me take saltpeter?”

  “Oh, we have much better stuff than saltpeter,” Reed said. “Pharmacology has come a long way. The only trouble is, whatever suppressant we dose you with will shrink your gonads.”

  “Shrink …!”

  “Can’t be helped. They’ll grow back to normal once the medication is stopped, of course. We won’t castrate you, not even chemically.”

  Jamie asked, “What if I won’t take the medication—assuming I’m going to be such a lecher that you’ll want to dose me.”

  “Oh, you’ll take it, one way or the other. I can always doctor your meals, you know. Or spike the drinking water. Just as I would do if you
refused to take your vitamin supplements. It wouldn’t be difficult.”

  Jamie heard himself mutter, “Son of a bitch.”

  “That’s exactly what we’re trying to prevent, actually,” said Reed. Then he laughed out loud at his own little joke.

  3

  “I wish these bunks were just a bit wider.”

  “You don’t like being so close?”

  “My arm’s fallen asleep.”

  “As long as nothing else on you has gone asleep.”

  “So what did you think of our wild Indian?”

  “He was quite wild, once he got started.”

  “As good as I?”

  She laughed softly. “As a famous film star once said, ‘Goodness had nothing to do with it.’”

  “That completes the roster, doesn’t it? Except for the Russkies.”

  “I will not let them touch me!”

  “Pity. Poor Mikhail Andreivitch looks as if he’ll explode any day now.”

  “Let him. I don’t care.”

  “And Ivshenko seems like a jolly chap. Perhaps if I accompanied you we could make a threesome out of it.”

  “You’re already complaining about the bunks being too narrow.”

  “Um, yes, there is that.”

  “I will not approach the Russians. Let them stew in their own juices.”

  “But otherwise …”

  “Waterman was the last holdout.”

  “And now he’s fallen.”

  “What about you? How successful have you been?”

  “Actually, Katrin and I had a little workout in the gymnasium again.”

  “But what about Joanna?”

  A long silence.

  “Well?”

  “One has to be very circumspect with Joanna, you know. I believe she’s still a virgin.”

  “Only three women on the ship and you’ve failed with one of them.”

  “I’m working on it.”

  “I’ve succeeded with every one of the men now.”

  “Except the Russians.”

  “Pah! You fuck the Russians if you’re so worried about them.”

  “Hardly! It’s little Joanna I want.”

  “Then you’re going to have to try harder, aren’t you?”

  “You mean this isn’t hard enough to suit you?”

  “Hmm … well … I suppose it will do for now.”

  Hours later, alone and still sleepless, Tony Reed told himself that it was all a game, a pleasant way to pass the boring weeks while they were all packed together inside the spacecraft. We’re harming no one. Except perhaps the Russians, but that’s not my doing. Perhaps Katrin is accommodating them, a little Russo-German friendship pact.

  He turned in the bunk, trying to find a more comfortable position. It’s only a game, a delightful game. Yet a deeper voice in his mind reminded him that soldiers on their way to battle play a similar game. Fear is the spur, the voice said to Tony. You go through the motions of creating life because you are so terrified of impending death.

  Nonsense, Tony replied to his inner voice. We’re perfectly safe inside this spacecraft. We’re protected by the work of the best minds in the world. There is a certain element of risk, of course. That’s what makes it all so interesting.

  The voice was not placated. Death is waiting a mere few centimeters from you, on the other side of this spacecraft’s thin metal skin. Play your game, try to get the fear out of your mind or expiate it with bursts of lovemaking. But death is waiting for us all, and we are flying toward it.

  SOL 6: MORNING

  Strangely, Jamie felt more relaxed and free cooped up in the cramped rover with Vosnesensky than he had at their base camp’s dome.

  The rover was a segmented trio of aluminum cylindrical canisters, each of them mounted on spindly, springy wheels that trundled across the sandy, rock-strewn surface of Mars. One of the cylindrical segments held a fuel tank big enough to allow the rover to remain out in the field for a week or more. The middle segment held equipment and supplies. Up front, the largest of the three cylindrical canisters was pressurized like a spacecraft so that humans could live inside it in shirtsleeves. There was a bulbous plastiglass cockpit at its front end and an airlock at its rear, where it linked with the second segment.

  The rover was designed to carry four comfortably, and could squeeze in twice that many in an emergency. Jamie had expected to feel tense, alone with Vosnesensky; two men from very different backgrounds, almost entirely different worlds. Yet their first day in the rover went smoothly enough, even though they hardly spoke to one another.

  The Russian did most of the driving; Jamie did most of the outside work. They covered little more than a hundred kilometers the first day out, driving only during the daylight hours. The dull upland plain of their landing site quickly gave way to the rougher terrain of Noctis Fossae, crisscrossed with cracks and faults like the battlefield of two entrenched armies.

  The badlands grew much more rugged, until they were threading through a jagged stony forest of rock spires that loomed high above them; rock pillars carved into eerie sculptures that reminded Jamie of wildly abstract totem poles. The wind’s eroded away the soft stone and left these pillars of granitic stuff standing, he told himself. Then he realized that the gentle winds of Mars had to work for hundreds of millions of years to carve their magic this way.

  For hours they drove through the towering spires of stone. Jamie sat fascinated, staring, waiting to see symbols of eagles or bears scratched into the rock.

  The crevasses ran generally north-south, which made their southward journeying easier, but with the rocks that seemed to cover the ground everywhere, and the craters and spires and sand dunes, they seldom reached a speed of even thirty kilometers per hour.

  Like driving a pickup on reservation land, Jamie said to himself as they rode jouncing through the desolate country. Except there are no roads at all. Not even a trail or an animal track.

  They stopped virtually every hour. Jamie would go outside in his sky-blue hard suit to take rock and soil samples and plant an automated meteorology/geology beacon that would measure air temperature and pressure, humidity, wind velocity, and record heat flow coming up from underground, as well as any seismic activity. The beacon sent its signal to the pair of spacecraft hovering in synchronous orbit some twenty thousand kilometers above the equator. The communications equipment aboard the spacecraft automatically relayed the signals both to their base camp and back to Earth.

  Despite the rover’s pressurized interior both Jamie and Vosnesensky found themselves living inside their hard suits. The Russian went strictly by the mission rules that said he had to be suited up whenever Jamie went outside, in case an emergency arose. More often than not, the cosmonaut came out with Jamie. At first he busied himself with inspecting the rover’s exterior: the wheels, the antennas, the way the iron-rich Martian sand powdered the finish of the rover’s skin.

  By the second morning, though, it seemed to Jamie that Vosnesensky came outside merely to have some human company and to enjoy the scenery.

  “You say your New Mexico looks like this?” the Russian asked.

  Jamie heard his voice in his helmet earphones. Bent stiffly over a waist-deep gully that exposed a seam of basaltic rock, he said, “Yep. Cliffs and arroyos—canyons. Clear skies. Not much rain.”

  “It must be very barren, then.”

  Smiling to himself, Jamie replied, “Compared to this it’s the Garden of Eden.”

  The Russian fell silent.

  Jamie straightened up and took the video camera from his belt. The gully ran all the way out to the horizon, almost as straight as train tracks except for some slumping here and there where the ground had slid down to partially fill it in. A fault line, Jamie recognized. The area’s crisscrossed with them. But this one’s been eroded by running water. Had to be. Or mass wasting, permafrost melting beneath the surface and undermining everything. But when? There’s been no liquid water around here for hundreds of millions of years,
most likely. Could a rill remain unchanged all that time?

  He returned the camcorder to its clip on his belt and went to work chipping at the exposed rock ledge. Then he put the samples into a pouch and picked up the drill. As usual, the drill bit into the ground easily for the first meter or so, then hit resistance. Permafrost, thought Jamie. This whole region is sitting on top of a frozen ocean just a few feet below the surface. Once he had pulled the core sample from the drill bit and carefully deposited it in a sample case, he started back toward the rover.

  Vosnesensky was standing there watching in his fire-engine red hard suit.

  “Okay,” Jamie said. “I’m finished here. All I’ve got to do is …”

  He realized that the Russian had already taken one of his sensor beacons from the equipment bay in the rover’s middle section. Jamie took it from him.

  “Thanks, Mikhail.”

  He could sense the man’s shrug. “I had nothing better to do.”

  “Thanks,” Jamie repeated.

  Minutes later they were back in the rover’s cockpit, Vosnesensky in the left seat. They had both removed their helmets and gloves; their hard suits bulked in the cockpit’s bucket seats like a pair of brightly colored armor-plated polar bears.

  Vosnesensky steered between a boulder the size of a small house and a shallow circular depression that looked to Jamie like the weathered fossil of an ancient meteor crater. The Russian had small, almost delicate hands, Jamie noticed. He maneuvered the tiny steering wheel with nothing more than a fingertip’s pressure.

  “We should reach the canyons today,” he said, “if we do not have to make more stops.”

  Jamie took the hint. “We’ll stop only to fill in the net of beacons. Of course, if there’s some important change in the landforms …”

  Vosnesensky smiled slightly without turning his eyes away from his driving. “Of course.”

  Jamie tried to settle back and get comfortable, but the hard shell of the pressure suit was not meant to sit in. The damned armpit was still chafing despite the padding he had packed into it. He watched the landscape unrolling as they drove slowly toward the strangely close horizon. It bothered him, seeing the horizon so near. Almost frightened him down at the subliminal level where nightmares take root. Jamie felt as if they were driving toward the edge of a cliff.