Mars

by Ben Bova

  “He’s shown an aptitude for science,” Jerry said.

  “Then let him study science! They got fine scientists at Albuquerque. All kinds of geologists and whatnot.”

  Geology. Jamie had spent long hours collecting rocks in the arid hills and arroyos. Al had taken him up to Colorado to see the Mesa Verde cliff dwellings, and out to Arizona for the Grand Canyon and the big meteor crater.

  “Some of the finest scientists in the world are at Berkeley,” Lucille was saying stiffly. “In the physics department alone …”

  Al interrupted her. “Hell, here we are talkin’ about the boy’s future as if he wasn’t even here. Jamie! What do you think about all this? What’ve you got to say?”

  Jamie remembered the Grand Canyon. That vast chasm carved into the Earth. The colors of the different layers of rock, layer after layer. The whole history of the world was painted on those rocks, a history that went incredibly farther back than the span of time human beings had existed.

  “I like geology,” he said. “I’d like to study geology, I think.”

  More than an hour had passed since they had started off. Jamie was fingering the bear fetish in his coverall pocket as the rover climbed the slope of a ridge, laboring up a steepening grade that was strewn with smallish rocks and pebbles. The red soil seemed sandy, crumbly. Jamie could hear the electric motors that drove each individual wheel whining, struggling.

  Vosnesensky slowed the vehicle to a crawl. Looking out ahead, Jamie could see only the approaching top of the ridge and the pink sky beyond it. Not a cloud in that sky, it was as clear and empty as the deep blue skies he had known in New Mexico.

  “Can’t we go any faster?” Jamie urged. “The moisture’ll be all baked out of the air by the time we reach …”

  Abruptly Vosnesensky tramped on the brakes. Jamie lurched forward, reflexively jabbing his hands out to the control panel. He started to complain, then gaped at what lay outside the plastiglass canopy.

  “We are here,” Vosnesensky said.

  What Jamie had thought was the ridge line was actually the rim of the canyon. Beyond it there was a huge, vast, yawning emptiness. They were perched on the edge of a cliff that dropped away precipitously for miles and miles. Another few feet and the rover would have pitched over the rimrock and plunged down forever.

  “Jesus Christ,” Jamie breathed.

  Vosnesensky grunted.

  Jamie stood up in his chair, peering as far as he could into the depths of the enormity of Tithonium Chasma. It was dizzying, and knowing that this gigantic cleft was merely one arm of Valles Marineris, that the valley system stretched more than three thousand kilometers eastward, made his head swim even more.

  Then he felt his heart clutch in his chest. “Mikhail—it’s there. The mist …”

  Frail gray feathers of clouds were wafting through the vast canyon far below, like a ghostly river that glided silently past their round staring eyes.

  “The sunlight has not reached that deep into the canyon,” Vosnesensky said.

  “Yeah.” Jamie pushed out of his seat and started back toward the airlock and the hard suits. “Come on, we’ve got to get this on tape before the clouds evaporate. There’s moisture down there, Mikhail! Water!”

  “Ice particles,” the Russian said. He followed Jamie toward the suit locker.

  “They melt into liquid water.”

  “And evaporate.”

  “And form again the next night.” Jamie was struggling into the lower half of his suit. “The moisture doesn’t go away. It stays in the valley—for a while, at least.”

  He had never put on a hard suit so quickly. After the lower half, the boots (it was much easier that way), then the torso, finally the helmet. Vosnesensky helped him into his backpack and checked all the seals and connections while Jamie quivered like a bird dog on the scent.

  As he was grabbing for the video camera Vosnesensky said sternly, “Gloves! Think before you step outside. Go down the checklist no matter how excited you are.”

  “Thanks,” Jamie said, feeling sheepish.

  “In fact,” Vosnesensky said, sliding his helmet over his head and fastening the neck seal, “the more excited you are the more you must force yourself to stop and go through the checklist point by point.”

  “You’re right,” Jamie said impatiently.

  The Russian grinned at him, like a squat bear showing its teeth. “If you kill yourself here I will be in big trouble with Dr. Li and the controllers in Kaliningrad.”

  Jamie found himself grinning back. “I wouldn’t want to get you in trouble, Mikhail.”

  “Good. Now we are ready to go outside.”

  It was not fair to call it a canyon. Jamie could not see the other side, it was beyond the horizon. The abyss named Tithonium Chasma was so vast, so awesome, that at first Jamie merely stared out from behind his tinted visor, numb with excitement and an overpowering feeling of reverence.

  Unbidden, words from his long-forgotten childhood formed in his mind:

  These are the words of Changing Woman, wisdom she gave to the Holy People: The only goal for a man is beauty, and beauty can be found only in harmony.

  “The camera.” He heard Vosnesensky’s voice in his helmet earphones. “The sunlight is beginning to evaporate the mist.”

  Jamie shook himself inside the hard suit and got to work. He panned the vidcam up and down the valley, then from the lip of the rimrock where they stood out to the mist-shrouded horizon. Wherever the sun touched the clouds dissipated, dissolved into thin air. Like the old myths of ghosts that vanish when the sun comes up, Jamie told himself.

  “It’s not right to call this a valley,” he muttered as he worked the camera. “That’s like calling the Pacific Ocean a pond.”

  Vosnesensky said, “If you will be all right here for a while, I will set up a sensor unit.”

  “I’ll be okay,” Jamie said. “I’ll be fine.”

  For hours he watched the mists dissolving as the pale sun rose higher in the rose-pink sky. Down in the deepest recesses of the rocks there must be places where the mist clings, where the sunlight can’t reach, Jamie said to himself. Little oases where there are droplets of liquid water and warmth from the sun’s heating of the rocks. Little pockets down there where life might hang on.

  By noontime he had used up three videocassettes and was inserting a fourth one into the camera. The mists were almost entirely gone now and he could see the rock formations standing like proud ancient battlements, marching off in both directions from the spot where he stood. The valley floor was so far below that he could only see the distant part of it, curving off past the horizon. Misty shadows still Clung among the rocks down there.

  “They’re differentiated, Mikhail,” Jamie said into his helmet microphone. “The rock walls here are layered. There was an ocean here once, or maybe an enormous river. Look at the layers.”

  Vosnesensky, standing beside him once more, said, “All the rocks look red.”

  Jamie laughed. “And on Earth all the trees look green. But there are different shades, Mikhail.”

  He pointed with a gloved hand along the line of cliffs. “Look out there. See, this top layer is cracked vertically, weathered pretty badly. But the layer under it is smoother, and much darker in color.”

  “Ah, yes,” said Vosnesensky. “Now I see.”

  “And the layer under that is streaked with yellowish intrusions. Maybe bauxite, or something like it. This region must have been a lot warmer once, a long time ago.”

  “You think so? Why?”

  Jamie started to reply, then realized he was indulging in wishful thinking. “Good question, Mikhail. We’ll make a scientist out of you yet.”

  He heard the Russian’s deep chuckling. “Not likely.”

  Jamie squinted up at the sun. “Let’s set up the winch. I want to …”

  “Not down there!”

  “Just the first three layers,” Jamie said. “I know we can’t get down to the bottom or anywhere near it.
But I can reach that layer with the yellowish intrusions, at least. Come on, the sun’s starting to hit this side.”

  “No lunch?”

  “You can eat lunch after the winch is up. I’m too excited to eat.”

  In his stolid, immovable fashion Vosriesensky insisted that they both eat before breaking out the winch and climbing harness.

  “Nutrition is important,” the Russian insisted. “Many mistakes are made because of hunger.”

  Despite himself Jamie grinned. “You sound like a commercial for bran flakes, Mikhail.”

  Neither man bothered to take off more than his helmet and gloves once inside the rover. They each ate a hot meal perched on the edge of their facing half-folded bunks in their cumbersome hard suits. Vosnesensky brought the bottle of vitamin supplement pills from their little pharmaceutical cabinet.

  “We forgot at breakfast,” he said, handing the bottle to Jamie.

  “Right.” Jamie shook one of the orange-colored pills loose. “Wouldn’t want to miss the Flintstones.”

  Vosnesensky scowled, puzzled. “It is no joke. Our diet lacks vitamins; we get no sunshine on our skins. The supplement is necessary.”

  “Besides,” Jamie kidded, “it’s written into the mission rules.”

  Jamie popped the pill into his mouth and washed it down with the last of the coffee in his mug. God, what I’d give for a cup of real coffee instead of this instant crap!

  Then he saw that the sunlight was slanting into the rover through the canopy up in the cockpit.

  “Come on, Mikhail, we’re wasting time.”

  It took all four of their hands to work the harness over Jamie’s backpack and crotch, then fasten it across his chest. With the Russian standing guard at the winch, Jamie lowered himself gingerly down the steep face of the cliff. Far, far below some tenuous threads of mist still clung to the rocks, gray and ghostly, slowly rising and sinking like long ocean swells or the breath of a sleeping giant.

  There was no opposite wall of the canyon in sight, it was too far away beyond the horizon. Instead of the trapped feeling that had frightened him at Noctis Labyrinthus, Jamie felt as if he were working his way down the face of a mesa back home. Biggest goddammed mesa anybody ever saw, he said to himself as he peered down between his dangling feet toward the bottom, miles below. If this were New Mexico, the other end of this canyon would be in Newfoundland.

  Jamie had to consciously force himself to turn his attention to chipping out rock samples. Still, as he started his work, dangling in the harness, he wondered about the world at the bottom of the solar system’s largest canyon. We didn’t expect mists in the summertime, didn’t think there’d be enough moisture in the air for that. Down in the Hellas Basin, yes. But we didn’t expect it here. Wish we could have taken samples of the stuff. Maybe it’s ice crystals. But it doesn’t look like an ice fog. How can you tell, though? The rules are different here; at least the conditions are. Down toward the bottom of the canyon there must be a completely different ecosystem from what we see up on the surface. Maybe the air’s denser down there. Wetter. Warmer. Maybe there’s life down there, hiding out in warm little niches the way our ancestors used to live in caves.

  We should have set up base camp here, not out on that dumb plain. Then we could have spent our time exploring the canyon. This old rut in the ground has more to tell us than anyplace else on Mars.

  Dangling in the harness, suspended a few meters from the lip of the canyon and many kilometers from its mist-shrouded bottom, Jamie thrilled that the cliffs here were completely different from those at the Noctis Labyrinthus badlands. There the cliff walls were a uniform slab of iron-red stone. Here the cliffs were layered, tier upon tier, as weathered and seamed as the mesas back home, rich pages of a petrified book that told the entire history of this world to those with the skill and patience to read it.

  The topmost layer of the cliff, just under the caprock, had been almost soft; the rock there, crumbly, easily broken loose. On Earth it would have been weathered away by wind and rain in a geological twinkling. But here on dry, calm, gentle Mars it could remain for eons, undisturbed except for the slow erosion from the sun’s warmth and the night’s cold that eventually cracked it. Even so, there was no water in this layer, Jamie was willing to bet. Not even permafrost. If there had been, the water’s expansion and contraction during the day-night cycle would easily have crumbled such friable stone.

  The next tier was much tougher rock, its color a deeper red. More iron, Jamie guessed. Shergottite, like the meteor I found in Antarctica.

  Jamie whacked away with his hand pick until he had, several loose bits of the rock in his free hand. Chips and flakes fell clattering down, down beyond sight arid hearing toward the canyon bottom so far below. As he slipped the rock samples into a collecting bag Jamie realized he was soaked with sweat from the exertion. The suit’s fans were buzzing, sounding angry at him for pushing them so hard. He pulled in a deep breath of canned air as he carefully tucked the pick into its loop on his belt and then pulled out the ballpoint pen (guaranteed to work even in zero gravity) and labeled the sample bag precisely: date, time, exact distance from the rim. He got his depth, measured from the canyon’s edge, by having Vosnesensky read off the tick marks on the winch’s tether.

  “Not much daylight remaining.” Vosnesensky’s voice sounded as remote and unemotional as a computer.

  Jamie glanced up, then leaned a booted foot against the rock wall to turn himself around in the harness. His leg flared into a million pinpricks. Hanging in the harness, both legs had gone asleep. Jamie muttered and cursed to himself as he flailed his legs and wiggled his toes to get some circulation going again. He felt as if a whole colony of ants were gnawing at his legs.

  “What is it?” Vosnesensky’s voice was suddenly urgent. “Are you all right?”

  “My goddam legs are asleep,” Jamie answered.

  “I will pull you up.”

  “No … it’ll be okay in a minute or so. I want to get down to that third tier, where the yellow stuff is.”

  “Time is getting short.”

  “Isn’t it always?” Jamie looked out across the vast chasm, saw the shadows creeping toward him. “We’ve got another hour, at least.”

  “One hour,” said Vosnesensky, with implacable finality.

  “Yeah. Okay.”

  Jamie pushed the sample bag into the pouch strapped to his right thigh, next to his fetish, then started to reach up to the keypad on his chest that controlled the winch. And froze.

  His eyes caught a dark rift in the cliff wall a kilometer or more off to his left, a horizontal cleft with a flat floor and a slightly bulging overhang of rock above it. Like the cleft at Mesa Verde where the ancient ones had built their village of dried mud bricks.

  And there were buildings in the cleft.

  Jamie felt the breath rush out of him, felt his insides go hollow, drop away as if he had been suddenly pushed off the edge of the tallest mountain in the universe.

  They can’t be buildings, a part of his mind insisted. Yet as he stared he could make out square shapes, walls, towers. There was no haze to obscure his vision; the air was as clear as a polished mirror at this level.

  Fumbling at his belt without taking his eyes from the vision, Jamie found the video camera clipped there and yanked it free. He banged it against his visor, his head jolting back in surprise, then held it steady and adjusted its telescopic lens.

  His hands were shaking so badly all he could see at first was a blurry jumbled image. Fiercely, snarling inwardly, Jamie forced himself to a desperate calm, like a frightened man who knows he must aim his gun accurately or be killed.

  The dark cleft in the rocks steadied and pulled itself into sharp focus. Deep inside it, well into the shadows of the overhang, Jamie saw the flat surfaces and crenellated outline of whitish rocks.

  He was icy cold now. They’re rocks, he told himself. Not buildings. Just a formation of rocks that look roughly like walls and towers made by intelligent cr
eatures.

  And yet.

  Jamie cranked the lens to its fullest magnification, then squeezed the camera’s trigger until its tiny beeping told him the cassette had been used up. Only then did he take the vidcam from his eyes.

  “I’m coming up,” he said, shouting even though the microphone built into his helmet was bare centimeters from his lips.

  Vosnesensky sounded surprised. “Is something wrong?”

  “No, Mikhail, nothing’s wrong. Something’s right.”

  “What? What did you say?”

  It took more than fifteen minutes for the winch to lift him back to the rim of the canyon. Jamie had not realized he had traversed so far down. He spent the time trying to see more of the cleft, trying to convince himself not to let his imagination run loose, trying to stay calm and not babble once he got up there with the Russian again.

  From the rim he could not see the cleft. As he shrugged himself out of the harness he said hurriedly to Vosnesensky, “Get into the rig, Mikhail. Quick! There’s something down there you’ve got to see.”

  “Me? Why …”

  “No time for discussion,” Jamie urged as he slipped the harness over the Russian’s fire-red backpack and started buckling it across his chest.

  Puzzled, reluctant, Vosnesensky pulled the thigh straps tight and clicked them to the locking mechanism on his chest while Jamie reloaded the camera.

  “What is it?” he asked. “What have you found?”

  “A mirage, I think,” Jamie said. “But maybe …”

  Swiftly he described the cleft and the shapes inside it. Vosnesensky said nothing as he backed himself to the lip of the rimrock and stepped off.

  “Wait!” Jamie yelled. He shoved the camera into Vosnesensky’s gloved hands and fastened its tether to his equipment belt. “Use it as a telescope. But shoot the whole damned cassette. Keep shooting until it’s all used up.”

  “Where do I look?” Vosnesensky asked as he descended. To Jamie he looked like an old-fashioned deep-sea diver lowering himself into the abyss.