Mars

by Ben Bova

  “The horizon looks awfully close, doesn’t it?” he said to Vosnesensky.

  The Russian bobbed his head once. “The smaller the planet the shorter the horizon. It is even closer on the moon.”

  “I’ve never been to the moon.”

  “Much closer than here. And much more barren.”

  DiNardo had been on the moon, Jamie knew. I was called in so suddenly I never got farther off the Earth than the space stations until we started out for Mars.

  He forced his attention away from the too-close horizon and concentrated on the land they were driving through. To anyone but a geologist the scenery would have looked dull, monotonous, barren. But Jamie’s mind was leaping from rock to fault crack, crater to sand dune, trying to puzzle out the forces that had shaped this land, sculpted it into its present form.

  “I have flown over New Mexico,” Vosnesensky said, almost as if to himself. “In the Mir 3 space station, while training for this mission.”

  “Then you saw how much it looks like Mars.”

  “I did not realize it at the time. I did not pay sufficient attention.”

  Jamie studied the Russian’s face. He was dead serious, as always. Somber. Grim.

  “Did you always want to be a cosmonaut?” Jamie asked suddenly. “Ever since you were a little child?”

  Vosnesensky swiveled his head toward Jamie for an instant, then immediately turned back to look ahead. The expression on his face, fleetingly, was almost angry.

  I shouldn’t have asked, Jamie thought. He resents my prying into his personal history.

  But the Russian muttered, “When I was very little, before starting school even, I wanted to be a cosmonaut. To me it meant everything. Gagarin was my hero; I wanted to be like him.”

  “The first man in space.”

  Vosnesensky nodded again, another single curt bob of his head. “Gagarin was first in orbit. Armstrong was first on the moon. I told myself I would be first on Mars.”

  “And you were.”

  “Yes.”

  “You must feel very proud about it.”

  The cosmonaut glanced at Jamie again. “Proud, yes. Maybe even happy. But that moment has passed. Now I feel the responsibility. I am in charge. I am responsible for all your lives.”

  “I see.”

  “Do you? You are a scientist. You are happy to be here, to explore. You have a new world to play with. I am the man of authority. I am the one who must say no to you when you want to go too far, when you might endanger yourself or the others.”

  “We all understand that,” Jamie said. “We accept it.”

  “Yes? Does Dr. Malater accept it? She hates me. She goes out of her way to annoy me every chance she gets.”

  “Ilona isn’t …” Jamie’s voice trailed off. He realized he had no defense for her.

  “She is a Jewish bitch who hates all Russians. I know that. She has made it very clear to me.”

  “Her grandparents fled Hungary.”

  “So? Was that my fault? Am I to be blamed for things that happened in our grandparents’ day? She risks the success of this mission because of a grudge that is two generations old?”

  Jamie laughed softly. “Mikhail, I know people who have kept grudges going for two centuries, not just two generations.”

  The Russian said nothing.

  “There are American Indians who’re still righting battles from colonial times.”

  “The Yankee imperialists took your land from you,” Vosnesensky said. “They engaged in genocide against your people. We learned this in school.”

  “That happened a long time ago, Mikhail,” said Jamie. “Should I spend my life hating all the whites? Should I hate my mother because she’s descended from people who killed my ancestors? Should Pete Connors hate Paul Abell because his ancestors were slaves and Paul’s were slave owners?”

  “You feel no bitterness at all?”

  The question stopped Jamie. He did not truly know what he felt. He had hardly ever considered the matter in such a light. Was Grandfather Al bitter? No, he seemed to accept the world as he found it.

  “Use what’s at hand, Jamie,” Al would say. “When they hand you a lemon, make lemonade. Use what’s at hand and make the best of what you find.”

  At length Jamie answered, “Mikhail, my parents are both university professors. I was born in New Mexico and went back there to spend summer vacations when I was a kid, but I grew up in Berkeley, California.”

  “A hotbed of radicalism.” Vosnesensky said it flatly, as if reciting a memorized line. Jamie could not tell if the Russian were joking or serious.

  “My father has spent most of his life trying not to be an Indian, although he’d never admit it. Probably doesn’t even realize it. He earned a scholarship to Harvard University. He married a woman who’s descended from the original Mayflower colonists. Neither one of them wanted me to be an Indian. They always told me to be a success, instead.”

  “They deny your father’s heritage.”

  “They try to. Dad’s scholarship came through a program designed especially to help minority groups—such as Native Americans. And the history texts he’s written have sold to universities all around the U.S. mainly because they present American history from the minority viewpoint.”

  “Hmp.”

  “They were never active in Indian affairs and neither was I. If it weren’t for my grandfather I’d be more white than you are. He taught me to understand my heritage, to accept it without hating anybody.”

  “But Malater, she hates me.”

  “Not you, Mikhail. She hates the idea of Russians. She doesn’t see you as an individual. In her eyes you’re part of an inhuman system that hanged her grandfather and forced her grandmother to run away from her native land.”

  Vosnesensky muttered, “That is not much help.”

  “Just like people who don’t see individuals among the Indians, or even tribes,” Jamie went on. “There’s a lot of whites who still see ‘the Indian’ instead of individual men and women. They don’t understand that some people want to live in their own way and don’t want to become white.”

  “And you? How do you want to live?”

  Jamie no longer had to think it over. “I’m the descendant of Indians. My skin is darker than yours. But if you take our brains out of our skulls, Mikhail, you wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between them. That’s where we really live. In our minds. We were born on opposite sides of the world and yet here we are together on a totally other planet. That’s what’s important. Not what our ancestors did to one another. What we’re doing now. That’s the important thing.”

  Vosnesensky nodded somberly. “Now you must give that little speech to Malater.”

  Jamie nodded soberly. “Okay. Maybe I will.”

  “It won’t do any good.”

  “Probablv not,” Jamie agreed. “But there’s no harm trying.”

  “Perhaps.”

  A new thought struck Jamie. “Mikhail—is that why you decided to come out on this traverse with me, instead of letting Pete do it? Just to get away from Ilona?”

  “Nonsense!” spat the Russian with a vehemence that convinced Jamie he had hit on the truth. Ilona’s hurting him, Jamie realized. She’s really hurting the poor guy.

  DOSSIER: M. A. VOSNESENSKY

  “Why can’t you be reasonable, like your brother?”

  Mikhail Andreivitch had heard that cry from his father all his life, it seemed. Nikolai was the older of the two boys, the paragon of the family. He studied hard at school and won excellent marks. He was quiet; his favorite pastime was reading books. His friends were few, but they were as studious and well mannered as Nikolai himself.

  Mikhail, the second son (there was a younger daughter), sailed through school hardly even glancing at his textbooks. Somehow he got good grades; not quite as good as his older brother’s, of course, but good enough to send him to the engineering college. Instead of studying, Mikhail listened to music, imported American rock mostly
. The noise drove his father wild. Mikhail had lots of friends, girls as well as boys, and they all liked to listen to loud rock music and dress in blue jeans and leather jackets like bikers.

  And he gambled. “The curse of the Russians,” his father called it. His mother wept. Mikhail played cards with his friends and, sometimes, with older men who dressed well and had faces of stone. His parents feared the worst for him.

  “You’re turning your mother gray!” his father shouted when Mikhail announced he was going to buy a motorbike. He had worked for two years in secret, spending his afternoons in a garage helping the mechanic instead of attending classes. Somehow he had still managed to pass his examinations at school. Even so, two years’ wages were not enough to buy the handsome machine he coveted. Mikhail had risked every ruble on a card game, vowing that if he won he would never gamble again. He won, mainly because he had been willing to take greater risks and had more money to put up than the other gamblers that night.

  True to his self-imposed discipline, he never gambled again. He bought the bike over his father’s objections and his mother’s flowing tears. It did not matter to them that Mikhail could now drive from their apartment to his college classes without spending two hours a day on city buses. They only saw him zooming along the streets of Volgograd with pretty young girls shamelessly showing their legs as they rode behind Mikhail, clutching him tightly.

  His mother was already gray, and his father almost totally bald. The old man had been a civil servant, one of the numberless apparatchiks who had been pushed out of the government bureaucracy in the name of perestroika and forced to find another job. Briefly he had worked as an administrator in one of the largest factories in Volgograd, but only briefly. He entered politics and soon was elected to a seat on the city council, where he settled down in comfortable anonymity for the remainder of his working life.

  “Why can’t you be reasonable, like your brother?” his father cried when Mikhail announced that he was going to take flying lessons. He had done well that school year, even winning academic honors now that he had given up the mechanic’s job.

  That was the summer Mikhail learned that he loved flying, and flying loved him. He was good at it, very good. He took to the air as naturally as an eagle, his instructor told him. He was actually in the air on his first solo flight when his older brother was killed in a senseless accident. A drunken truck driver smashed into the city bus he was riding. Fourteen injured and one killed. Nikolai.

  Somehow his parents seemed to blame Mikhail for Nikolai’s death. They raised no objection when he told them he had been accepted for cosmonaut training and would be leaving Volgograd. It was while he was in training that his mother quietly passed away in her sleep. When he went home for her funeral his father and sister treated him so coldly that Mikhail never returned.

  Mikhail had not even been born when Yuri Gagarin made his epochal first flight in orbit. Vaguely, from early childhood, he recalled seeing blurry television pictures of the Americans on the moon. All through the long years of growing up he nursed the secret ambition of being the first man to set foot on Mars.

  He told no one of his dream. Except once, when he was still a child, one dark autumn night while the first snow of the year gently sifted out of the sky to cover grimy old Volgograd with a clean coating of white, he spoke of it to his brother, half asleep in the bed next to his.

  “Mars,” his brother said dreamily, drowsily.

  “I want to be the first man on Mars,” Mikhail whispered.

  “The first, no less.” Nikolai turned in his bed. “All right, little Mickey. You can be the first. I give you my permission. Now let me sleep.”

  Mikhail smiled in the darkness, and when he dreamed he dreamed about Mars.

  SOL 6: AFTERNOON

  They arrived at the edge of the canyons in the middle of that afternoon, exactly where Jamie had wanted, at the juncture of three broad fissures in the ground that reminded him of arroyos carved out of the desert by wildly rushing waters.

  But bigger. Gigantic. Like the Grand Canyon, except that there was no river down at their distant bottom. Jamie stood on the level ground where the three huge gullies joined together and he could barely see the other side. Peering down into their depths, Jamie guessed the canyon floors must be more than a kilometer below him, perhaps a full mile down, nothing but red-tinged rock cracked and seamed by eons of heating in the sun and freezing every night.

  He felt suddenly small, insignificant, like an ant poised on the lip of a normal arroyo in New Mexico. For a dizzying moment he was afraid he would topple over and fall in.

  The ground up here had fewer rocks strewn across it, as if it had been swept clean at one time and the rocks had only partially returned. Strange, Jamie thought. We’re closer to the heavily cratered territory to the south, yet there’s not as much impact debris here as farther north.

  He returned his attention to the canyons, feeling an excitement trembling within him that he had never known before. The first man to look into a Martian canyon! There might be a billion years of the planet’s history written into those rocks down there. Two billion. Maybe four. It was scary.

  The canyon wall was a nearly vertical drop. The thought of climbing down that rock wall thrilled him and frightened him at the same time. The bottom was so far down! Yet he could see it with absolute clarity. The thin air had not the faintest hint of haze in it.

  To his geologist’s eye it seemed clear that this labyrinth of canyons had been caused by a splintering of the ground, a gridwork of faults in the underlying rock that had weakened the crust, cracked it. When water had flowed here, however long ago it was, it had followed along those cracks, widening and deepening them. Or more likely the permafrost beneath the crust melts from time to time and undermines the ground until it collapses.

  “Is that the way it happened?” Jamie asked the silent arroyos in a barely vocalized whisper. “How long ago was it?”

  The twisted gullies remained mute.

  The more Jamie stared into the deep ravines the more he realized that there had been no great rushing flood here. Mars is a gentle world, he told himself. The ground doesn’t quake. There are no storms. If there ever was a flood on this planet it didn’t happen here.

  He straightened up and looked across the huge gulf toward the other side of the canyon. Our ignorance is even wider, he knew. Every geologist on Earth could spend a lifetime here and still it wouldn’t be enough to get all the information these tired old canyons have to yield. All I’ve got is the rest of today and tomorrow. Unless I can get Mikhail to change the excursion plan.

  He turned to the Russian, who was standing between him and the rover, looking down into the canyon. The rover’s bright aluminum finish was coated with reddish dust now, especially around the wheels and fenders. It made the vehicle look as if it were rusting.

  Fighting down a tiny irrational fear that nagged at the back of his mind, Jamie called, “Mikhail, I’ve got to climb down to the bottom. I’ll need your help.”

  The Russian, in his red hard suit, started walking toward Jamie. “That is an unnecessary risk.”

  Jamie made himself laugh. “I’ve done a lot of rock climbing. And in full gravity, too.”

  “It is an unnecessary risk,” Vosnesensky repeated.

  “Then why did the mission planners allow us to stow climbing gear in the rover? Come on, Mikhail, with the winch and all it won’t be much of a risk at all. If you think I’m in danger you can haul me up whether I like it or not.”

  “The sun is setting. It will be too cold to work. Tomorrow you can have the whole day.”

  “I’m okay in the suit. We’ve got three-four hours before sunset,” Jamie said. “Besides, the sun’s hitting this side of the canyon now. Tomorrow morning this side’ll be in shadow.”

  It was impossible to see the Russian’s face behind the gold-tinted visor of his helmet. He was silent for a long time, obviously thinking, weighing the options. Finally he said, “Very well. But whe
n I say to come up, you do not argue.”

  “Deal,” said Jamie.

  Jamie spent the next hour inching slowly down the sheer rock face of the canyon wall, stopping every ten meters or so to chip out samples. He wore a climber’s harness over his hard suit, attached to the electrical winch at the canyon rim by a thin cable of composites stronger than steel. Jamie himself controlled the winch with a set of buttons built into the harness, although Vosnesensky could override him by using the controls on the winch itself or even hauling him up manually, if necessary.

  The rock’s not stratified, Jamie saw. Seems to be all the same, all the way down to the bottom. That puzzled him. One thick slab of undifferentiated stone? How can that be? He remembered a novel he had read years ago, a scene where an infantry division had been assembled on a parade ground that was described as solid iron one mile thick. Had that scene been set on Mars? Jamie could not remember.

  This is different from the area around the dome. There’s never been an ocean here to lay down silt deposits and have them turn into rock layers over the years. I’m looking at the actual mantle of the planet, the original material that made up the planet from its very beginning. One enormous slab of rock that must go down not just one lousy mile, it must be a hundred miles deep! Or even more!

  Jamie dangled in midair, twisting slightly in the harness, staring at the reddish gray wall before his eyes. This stuff has been here since the planet was born, since it cooled off and solidified. It could be more than four billion years old! He was panting as if he had run a mile, as if he had just found the most precious diamond in the universe.

  There was nothing like this on Earth. Mantle rock was always buried beneath miles of crust Even the ocean beds were covered with sediments. You never saw exposed mantle rock on Earth. But Mars is different, Jamie said to himself. The old assumptions don’t apply here.

  It’s riot differentiated, he realized. That’s why there’s so much iron in the sand oh the surface. The iron never sank into the core the way it did oh Earth. It’s spread all over the surface. Why? How?