Mars

by Ben Bova

  Up above, Vosnesensky took an automated sensor beacon from the rover’s cargo bin and busied himself setting it up. The anemometer immediately began turning, fast enough to surprise him. The air was so thin that even a stiff breeze was negligible. Toshima will be happy to have another station reporting to him, Vosnesensky said to himself as he turned on the isotope-powered telemetry radio.

  Then he walked back to the winch. Planting his short legs as firmly as the machine’s on the dusty red ground, he took hours’ worth of video shots of the entire area.

  Jamie took pictures too, with the still camera he carried in the equipment belt around his waist.

  As he neared the bottom Jamie searched for signs of the actual fault line that had created the canyon. In vain. Eons of dust laid down by the winds that yearly billowed up into planetwide sandstorms had covered the canyon floor. Jamie smiled to himself, hanging in the climber’s harness. Give Mars another billion years or two and the canyons will be all filled in.

  He did not like to look up while he dangled in the harness. The rock wall loomed above him, much too high and steep to climb. The other walls were kilometers away, but the deeper down Jamie went the closer they seemed to squeeze in on him. It made him feel trapped, frightened in a deep unreasoning part of his brain. So Jamie busied himself chipping away at the rock as he descended and scanning the floor below for any evidence of the fundamental crack in the ground that had started this canyon. He never found it.

  What did you expect? he asked himself. Something as obvious as the San Andreas Fault?

  “Time to come up,” Vosnesensky called “Now.”

  Despite himself Jamie leaned back in the harness and looked up. For a dizzying moment he felt as if the rock wall were tipping over to fall in on him.

  But he heard himself complain, “I haven’t reached the bottom yet!”

  “It is getting dark.”

  Swaying in the harness, Jamie realized that the shadows from the opposite canyon wall were almost upon him. He shuddered. Mikhail’s right; I don’t want to be down here in the dark.

  “Okay, coming up,” he said into his helmet microphone. He felt the harness tighten about him as the cable began pulling him. He held onto the cable with both gloved hands and tried to gain some purchase on the rock face with his boots as he rose. The winch did all the real work.

  At last he reached the top. The sun was almost on the horizon. Even inside the heated suit Jamie shivered. The sky to the east was already dark.

  Vosnesensky helped him remove the harness and equipment belt; then they started back toward the rover.

  Jamie halted his companion with an outstretched hand.

  “Wait a minute, Mikhail. We’ve been on Mars almost a week and we haven’t really watched a sunset.”

  The Russian made a sound halfway between a grunt and a snort, but he stopped. The two of them stood there on the broad Martian plain, their hands filled with the climbing equipment, and watched the tiny pale sun touch the flat horizon. The sunset was not spectacular. No flaming colors of breathtaking beauty. The air was too thin, too dry, too clean. And yet …

  The pink sky deepened into red, then violet, uniformly, evenly, the way the dome of a planetarium softly dims when its lights are turned down toward darkness.

  “Look!” Jamie pointed as the sun dipped out of sight. A single lonely wisp of a cloud hung above the horizon, glowing like a silver ghost briefly. Then the sun disappeared and the cloud faded into the all-encompassing darkness.

  “This is more beautiful than I could have imagined.” Vosnesensky’s voice was softer, gentler than Jamie had heard before.

  “It sure is. I wonder …”

  Jamie’s words died in his throat. His heart began to pound. The sky was shimmering, glowing faintly as a spirit hovering above them, flickering colors so pale and delicate that for a breathless moment Jamie could not believe his eyes.

  “Mikhail …”

  “I see it. Aurora.”

  “Like the northern lights.” Jamie’s voice was hollow with awe, trembling. The lights pulsed and billowed across the sky, exquisitely ethereal pastels of pink, green, blue, and white. He could see stars through them, faintly.

  “But Mars has no magnetic field,” Vosnesensky said, sounding more puzzled than impressed.

  “That’s just it,” Jamie heard himself reply. “Particles from the solar wind must hit the upper atmosphere all across the planet. The gases up there glow when the particles excite them. This must be going on everywhere, every night. We’ve just never stayed out long enough to see it.”

  “Wouldn’t it be observable from orbit?” Mikhail was being more of a hardheaded scientist than Jamie.

  “Must be pretty faint, looking down against the background of the planet itself. But if they know what to look for I’m sure Katrin Diels and Ulanov will be able to observe it.”

  The colors faded away. The lights died slowly, leaving the sky calm and dark. Jamie felt a shudder race through him, though whether it was fear or ecstasy he could not tell. Probably some of both. His pulse was still thundering in his ears. As far as the eye could see in any direction, there was nothing but utter darkness now. As if the world had vanished, as if he were standing alone in a universe all his own, unpopulated, unoccupied except for himself.

  And the stars. Even through the tinted visor of his helmet Jamie saw the bright eternal stars looking down at him like faithful old friends, telling him that even on this strange empty world they were up there in their places, the guardians of universal order.

  One of the stars was visibly moving across the sky. “Is that our ships in orbit?” Jamie wondered aloud.

  Vosnesensky chuckled. “It is Phobos, so close it looks like a space station, going from west to east. Deimos is too faint to see unless you know exactly where to look for it.”

  Jamie recognized Orion and Taurus, with the cluster of the Pleiades in the bull’s neck. Turning, he saw both the Dippers. The North Star isn’t over the north pole of Mars, he remembered.

  “Look there.” Vosnesensky must have been pointing, but with nothing except starlight Jamie could not make out his form.

  The Russian took him by the shoulder and turned him slightly. “Just above the horizon. The bright blue one.”

  Jamie saw it. An incredibly beautiful blue star shimmering low on the horizon.

  “Is it Earth?” he asked, in a reverent whisper.

  “Earth,” replied Vosnesensky. “And the moon.”

  Jamie could not make out the fainter whitish star nearly touching the blue one. Vosnesensky insisted he could, but Jamie thought it might have been more the Russian’s imagination than superior eyesight.

  “We must get back inside the rover,” Vosnesensky said at last. “No sense freezing to death while admiring the sky.”

  He turned on his helmet lamp, immediately destroying their night-adapted vision, and then touched the controls on his wrist to remotely turn on the lights in the rover. Reluctantly, almost angry at the cosmonaut, Jamie followed Vosnesensky back to the vehicle.

  It took a surprisingly long time to get out of their hard suits in the confined space inside the rover’s airlock. The excitement of discovering the aurora gradually dimmed away. By the time they were down to their tubed skivvies, sitting on folded-up bunks facing each other with a pair of microwaved meals on the narrow table between them, Jamie’s pulse had returned almost to normal.

  Vosnesensky hoisted his water glass. “A very good day,” he said. “We accomplished much.”

  Jamie touched his plastic glass to the Russian’s. “You’ll have a good report to make to Dr. Li.”

  “Yes, after we eat.”

  “I’ll feed the data tapes into the computer.”

  “Good. Then we call the base and see what they have been doing.”

  Jamie leaned forward over the narrow table. “Mikhail, I have a suggestion about tomorrow.”

  The Russian also hunched slightly forward, until their noses were almost touching.
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  “No more than a day or so to the east of here, if we drive steadily, is Tithonium Chasma, part of the Valles Marineris complex—much deeper and wider than …”

  Vosnesensky was already shaking his head. “It is not on the excursion plan. It is too far for us to travel.”

  “It’s less than six hundred kilometers from here,” Jamie argued. “We could do it in twenty hours if we didn’t stop.”

  “Drive at night? Are you insane?” There was no fear in the cosmonaut’s sky-blue eyes, merely the unshakable firmness of a man who had already decided how many risks he was prepared to take.

  Jamie said, “Let me explain the geological necessity.”

  Strangely the Russian broke into a lopsided grin. “Fine. You explain geology. I will clear the table.”

  As Vosnesensky got up and took their dinner trays to the storage rack where they would remain until the rover returned to the main base, Jamie folded the table and slid it back into its place beneath the bunk.

  “The canyon walls here are undifferentiated,” Jamie began to explain. “Just one big slab of iron-rich rock that’s been worn away and exposed. That’s unheard-of, Mikhail. There’s nothing on Earth like that.”

  “So you have made a great discovery. Good.”

  “We’ve got to find out if the bigger canyons are like that! Is the whole canyon system that way? Three thousand kilometers of pure mantle rock? It can’t be! It just can’t be.”

  Vosnesensky was already sliding into the driver’s chair and checking to see that their communications antenna was locked onto the spacecraft up in synchronous orbit.

  “What do the satellite photographs show?” he asked.

  The sloping transparent roof of the cockpit was so low that Jamie had to bend over as he stood behind the driver’s chair. He could feel the cold of the Martian night seeping through the plastiglass even though Vosnesensky had drawn the thermal shroud for the night.

  He answered, “Not enough detail, Mikhail. We’ve got to be there firsthand and see the rock formations close up. Take samples for analysis.”

  “It would take us at least two days out of our way. A full day or more to get there and the same to return to where we should be. We don’t have enough food on board, and it would be an unnecessary strain on the air recycling system. And it would wreck the mission schedule.”

  “Come on, Mikhail! We can stretch the food. The fuel cells produce clean water and the air recyclers are good for months. You know that. And there’s a full week between this excursion and the next one.”

  “Twenty hours of driving, even without stops.”

  “I’ll help you with the driving,” Jamie said, grinning. “I’ve driven pickup trucks over worse terrain than this.”

  The Russian turned in his seat and fixed Jamie with those clear blue eyes. “This is not New Mexico.”

  “That’s right,” Jamie replied. “This is Mars. And we’re here to explore this new world. There’s important scientific work to be done here, Mikhail. …”

  “You scientists always want to break the rules.”

  “Damned right!” Jamie snapped. “We’re here for the sake of science. To explore. To learn, To seek out the truth wherever it leads us.”

  “Pretty words,” grumbled Vosnesensky.

  “Men have died for those ideas!”

  “Yes. That is exactly my point.”

  “We’ve come a hundred million kilometers—” Jamie was almost shouting—“What the hell is another day or two of travel?”

  “It is not authorized. It is not on the excursion plan. The mission controllers back on Earth would disapprove.”

  “Fuck ’em! We’re here, Mikhail. The reason we’re here is to learn. We can’t do that by sticking to plans written a year ago. They might as well have sent unmanned machines if they’re going to make us behave like goddammed robots.”

  Vosnesensky took a deep breath, then exhaled slowly, like a man trying to control his temper. “We are not robots, but we are responsible to higher authority. The purpose of this mission is to start the exploration of Mars. If we displease those in charge, there will be no more missions and the exploration will end.”

  Jamie squatted down on his heels, one arm on the back of Vosnesensky’s chair to steady himself. Forcing himself to sound more reasonable he said, “Mikhail, as far as I’m concerned all the politicians on Earth can take a flying leap into the Grand Canyon. What makes you think they’re going to authorize more missions to Mars, no matter how obedient we are? We’re here, now. Now’s the time to find out as much about this world as we can. The more knowledge we acquire now, the harder it’ll be for them to deny us follow-up missions after we return.”

  “You are skating on thin ice, Jamie.”

  “Maybe. I thought you Russians were all great gamblers,” Jamie coaxed.

  Vosnesensky stiffened visibly. “I am not here to gamble. Not with lives. Especially my own.”

  “But it’s not that big a risk,” Jamie urged, quickly switching tactics. “We can do it! We don’t have to stick to the plans they wrote for us on Earth. The mission orders allow us some flexibility. We’ve got an opportunity here to make a fundamental discovery about the geological history of this planet.”

  “It is an unnecessary risk.”

  Jamie made himself grin at the Russian. “Look at it this way, Mikhail—if we kill ourselves you won’t have to face Dr. Li or the mission controllers back at Kaliningrad.”

  Vosnesensky stared at him for a long moment, then burst into a peal of laughter. “You are a fatalist!” the cosmonaut said. “Just like a Russian.”

  “You’ll do it?”

  “It is not in the excursion plan.”

  “So we change the plan,” Jamie said. “The rover’s got the range and we’ve got enough supplies on board. If we get stuck, Mironov can come out with the other rover.”

  Vosnesensky’s beefy face returned to its normal scowl. He said, “We cannot deviate from the excursion plan. It is not allowed.”

  Jamie felt himself tensing. With deliberate care, he slowly rose from his squatting position. “In that case,” he said evenly, “mission regulations give me the right to go over your head and appeal directly to Dr. Li. I want to talk to Li.”

  Still frowning, Vosnesensky reached out across the control panel and flicked on the communications set.

  “Speak to the expedition commander then,” he growled. “Let him take the responsibility.”

  “To Tithonium Chasma?” Dr. Li was startled. “But that is a thousand kilometers away from your present position.”

  “Its western edge is less than six hundred kilometers from our present position,” replied James Waterman.

  Li sank back in his upholstered chair. He had retreated to his private quarters to take the expected check-in call from Vosnesensky, partly for his own comfort and partly because he felt he could deal with whatever problems arose more easily without the technicians and other team members crowding around him at the communications console of the spacecraft’s command center.

  His compartment was as luxurious as mission regulations allowed. Like all the other privacy cubicles aboard the two Mars spacecraft it was barely large enough to accommodate a narrow bunk, a tiny desk, and a single chair. Li’s chair could tilt back, however, like an astronaut’s acceleration couch. He often used it to sleep in, rather than the bunk, which he found uncomfortably short.

  While other team members had decorated their cubicles with photos of their families or maps of Mars or even computer printouts, Li had taped an exquisite set of small silk paintings onto his walls. Mountains shrouded in mist. Beautiful birds perched on a graceful tree limb. A pagoda by a lake. Touches of home. Even if he died in space, he reasoned, he wanted the comfort of those paintings beside him.

  But he did not so much as glance at them while he stared into the display screen that dominated his small desk. Waterman’s broad, onyx-eyed face looked back at him. A face that could be very stubborn, Li realized.

/>   “I wish to give you as much latitude as possible,” Li said, “but adding three extra days to your traverse seems excessive to me.”

  He did not add that Vosnesensky was not even supposed to be on this traverse. The Russian should have remained at the base camp, as the mission plan called for. He was already exceeding his directives.

  “It’s necessary,” Waterman replied. “For geological reasons.”

  Li almost let himself smile. Of course, for geological reasons. Naturally Waterman would have a sound scientific reason for pushing the limits. A born troublemaker.

  Steepling his fingers in his lap, out of range of the comm unit’s camera, Li waited for the geologist’s explanation. Waterman looked eager, black eyes wide and sparkling, lips slightly parted, energy fairly shining from his dark-skinned face.

  “We’ve calculated the rover’s fuel reserves and they are more than sufficient to take us to the Tithonium region and back to the base, sir. Plus a generous allowance for reserve.”

  Li did smile, thinly. Waterman is thinking only of the technical side. To him, the political ramifications simply are not of importance. I wonder if he thinks of them at all.

  “Dr. Li, you understand the principles of geology …” And without hesitation Waterman launched into a lecture about the rock formations on Mars.

  Li listened with one ear while another part of his mind felt amused at the scientist’s earnestness and the unthinking arrogance of this enthusiastic young man lecturing his elder.

  The young fool simply does not understand that he is on terribly shaky ground politically. He honestly believes that science is all that matters. Li wished he could live such an uncomplicated life, have such unhampered enthusiasms, pursue knowledge without worrying about those who controlled the purse strings—and the honors.

  On the other hand, he reasoned as Jamie continued his nonstop recitation, suppose he kills himself down there? He will become a hero, automatically. And cease to be a problem. He would most likely be killing Vosnesensky also, but that could not be helped.