Mars

by Ben Bova

  He sensed her smiling in the darkness. “Ahh, but suppose we find that your village is nothing more than a natural rock formation? What then?”

  Her voice was sad. Jamie had no answer for her.

  SOARING

  Pete Connors felt relaxed for the first time since the expedition had left Earth orbit.

  He leaned back in the cockpit seat and looked out at the pink and red landscape gliding by nearly ten miles below. The little soarplane was flying like a dream, as deftly responsive to his hands as a loving woman.

  She was a tiny gossamer aircraft, as light as plastic ribs and Mylar skin could make her. The heaviest part of the soarplane was the miniature electric engine that drove her lazily purring propeller. The engine was powered by solar cells of plastic and silicon that hugged the curves of the soarplane’s broad long wings, converting the plentiful Martian sunlight into electricity steadily, noiselessly, as she flew through the clean, bright, thin atmosphere of Mars.

  The soarplane’s official designation was RPV-1 There was an RPV-2 stowed in the cargo bay of one of the unmanned landers, wings folded, patiently waiting its turn to fly. Connors had his own name for the plane, however. He called it Little Beauty. And that is the way he thought of her.

  To him, Little Beauty was a thing of delight. Connors luxuriated in the feel of her controls in his hands, the broad beautiful expansive views of the passing Martian landscape he could see in panorama all around him.

  One section of the view suddenly went blank. The video screen there hinged upward and Paul Abell’s frog-eyed face appeared, high forehead wrinkled quizzically.

  “Aren’t you coming out for lunch?” Abell asked his fellow astronaut.

  Connors shook his head. “Naw, I’m having too much fun with her. Could you make me a sandwich?”

  Abell glanced at the control panel and the other video screens with their views of the distant Martian landscape. “Okay. But I want a turn with her, too, you know.”

  “Later,” Connors muttered. “You can fly her on the leg back.”

  Abell looked doubtful, but he lowered the screen back down into its place. Connors felt alone again, as if he were actually soaring over Chryse Planitia, the Plain of Gold, instead of sitting inside the dome of the base in the teleoperator mockup of the soarplane’s cockpit.

  In an electronic sense Connors truly was flying his Little Beauty. He was linked so thoroughly to the remotely piloted vehicle that he felt every tremor of her slender frame, every slight gust of air buoying up her gossamer wings. Nearly a thousand kilometers separated plane from pilot, but Connors was as much in control of RPV-1 as if the tiny plane actually were carrying him through the sky.

  The engineers called it teleoperation, the technique of linking man and machine electronically even though they were not physically together. Thanks to teleoperation, an aircraft could range thousands of kilometers across Mars without the need to carry a pilot and all the life-support equipment that a human operator requires. The pilot could remain safely on the ground or in one of the orbiting spacecraft while the plane braved the unknown dangers of the unexplored planet.

  Deep in his mind Connors felt almost the exact opposite of the symptoms of space adaptation syndrome. In zero gravity your ears screamed that you were falling while your eyes told you that you were safely bundled inside a spacecraft cabin. Flying Little Beauty, Connors’s eyes told him he was soaring ten miles high, but his butt and all his other body senses reminded him that he was sitting on the ground.

  Never mind. He smiled boyishly to himself. This is as good as it’s going to get here on this rust ball. Good enough for now. Not bad for a minister’s son. He remembered his first flights in the backseat of an ancient crop duster’s biplane over the flat wheat fields of Nebraska. Everything square and neat, precise. The barren red ground below him now had never known the touch of human purpose.

  Abell opened the hatch abruptly and stuck in a badly made sandwich as he asked again for a turn at the controls. Connors put him off and once more shut himself inside the cockpit.

  Far, down below he saw a shadow of darker red inching across the barren land. He banked the little plane slightly to get a better view of the ground.

  A dust storm. Big one. Must be several hundred kilometers across its front. Connors knew that whatever his cameras saw was automatically relayed to the ships up in orbit and, through them, back to Earth. He made some mental calculations of his own, anyway, and spoke into the microphone of his headset. Toshima would appreciate all the information he could get; the Japanese meteorologist was trying to build a network of weather sensors all around the planet.

  “Looks like a major dust storm blowing from northwest to southeast. Front’s at least three-four hundred klicks wide.” He checked his navigation screen, to his right on the control panel. “Location about longitude sixty, latitude thirty, thirty-one. Speed of advance must be fifty to a hundred kilometers per hour.” Then he grinned and added, “Tether the camels.”

  In addition to its usual complement of sensing instruments, RPV-1 carried beneath its belly a special payload, a tiny oblong aluminum box. Inside was a stainless steel plaque, small enough to fit into the palm of a man’s hand. On it was inscribed:

  DEDICATED TO THE MEMORY OF TIM MUTCH,

  WHOSE IMAGINATION, VERVE, AND RESOLVE

  CONTRIBUTED GREATLY TO THE EXPLORATION

  OF THE SOLAR SYSTEM.

  Connors had never met Thomas A. Mutch. The NASA scientist had been killed in a mountain-climbing accident only a few years after the first automated lander had set down on the surface of Mars, in 1976. That primitive lander, known originally as Viking 1, had been renamed the Thomas A. Mutch Memorial Station shortly afterward. The plaque had been made then, when Connors was still a kid just starting to buzz the farms of Cheyenne County, Nebraska.

  Now he guided the remotely piloted Little Beauty to longitude 47°; 97’, latitude 22°; 49’ north, the location where the faithful old Viking still stood on its spraddling legs after more than thirty years. Connors was to land the little plane there and detach the box with the plaque inside it, then wait until morning to take off and return to home base.

  There was one further line etched into the stainless steel plaque. It read: “Emplaced,” with the space following it left blank. The date was to be filled in when human explorers finally reached the Viking lander, a feat that was not in the schedule for this first exploration mission.

  Connors’s face clouded slightly. He wished he were truly flying this plane, actually on board at its controls, really there so he could land her and bolt that plaque to the old spacecraft and scratch in the date.

  SOL 14: MORNING

  There’s no such thing as a private communication here, Jamie thought as he sat at the comm console. Vosnesensky was at his side, Tony Reed, Patel, Naguib, and Monique Bonnet standing behind him.

  On the display screen in the center of all the communications equipment was the neatly bearded face of Alberto Brumado, his hair slightly tousled as usual, his smile just a little desperate.

  For most of the day they had reviewed the arguments for and against returning to Tithonium Chasma to investigate Jamie’s “village.” Like jail the others, Brumado had been against it.

  “All the available evidence,” he had said in his mild, fatherly way, “points toward its being a natural phenomenon. We cannot upset the mission schedule with another unplanned excursion.”

  That word another rankled Jamie. If it hadn’t been for my insisting on going out to the canyon in the first place we would never have seen the village at all.

  Then Brumado had surprised them all by saying, “I would like to speak with Dr. Waterman in private, if I may.”

  Jamie felt the others stir behind him. He glanced at Vosnesensky, who pursed his lips, his face glowering with suspicion.

  But he said, “Of course,” as if Brumado could hear him without waiting another dozen minutes. Turning to Jamie, the cosmonaut said, “You can speak with Dr. B
rumado in your own quarters. I will see that no one else uses this frequency.”

  “Thanks, Mikhail.” Jamie hurried back to his cubicle, thinking of how many hours of useful work had already been ruined in debate.

  He pulled his laptop computer from the tiny desk and stretched out with it on his bunk. There was no way to scramble a conversation; if anyone wanted to eavesdrop all they had to do was turn on their own unit to the same frequency. But the other scientists were heading for their various duties, already behind schedule, and Vosnesensky would guard the main comm console with the single-minded fervor of a cossack protecting his tsar.

  So Jamie hoped.

  Brumado’s face took form on the laptop’s small screen. For an instant Jamie felt almost ridiculous. Alone at last, he wanted to say.

  Instead, “You can go ahead now, Dr. Brumado. No one else is on this frequency.”

  Then the minutes ticked by. It took more than ten minutes now for a transmission to span the widening gulf between the two planets; twenty-some minutes of lag in each two-way conversation. Jamie watched Brumado carefully; the man merely sat there looking into the screen, waiting with the patience of a true Indian. Maybe he’s using his screen to display other data while he’s waiting for my transmission to reach him, Jamie thought. But Brumado’s eyes did not scan back and forth as they would if he were reading.

  Jamie got up from the bunk, found the earphone attachment in his desk drawer and plugged it into the laptop. At least nobody could eavesdrop on Brumado’s end of their conversation, he thought as he settled back on the bunk again.

  I ought to answer Edith’s message, he remembered. And send something to Mom and Dad. He had not expected his parents to try to contact him; they would expect him to call them, he knew. It always worked that way. Why should Mars be any different? And Al. What can I say to him that will mean anything? Having a wonderful time, wish you were here? Jamie grinned to himself. Al would play the tape in his store; the only shop on the plaza that gets messages from Mars.

  At last Brumado came to life with a slow smile. “Thank you, Jamie. You don’t mind if I call you Jamie, do you? Joanna told me that is the name you prefer.”

  “Sure, that’s fine.”

  Again the wait. Jamie put Brumado’s image into a small window in one corner of the little computer’s screen and called up the mission schedule. He spent the time studying the schedule, looking for tasks that might be delayed or deleted altogether to make room for another traverse to the Grand Canyon.

  “I must speak to you about politics,” Brumado said at last. “Because of the long transmission lag, please bear, with me and hear what I have to say. When I am finished you can tell me how my proposal strikes you.”

  Jamie nodded and muttered, “Okay,” even though Brumado did not wait for a reply.

  “I have spoken directly with your Vice-President,” Brumado went on, “and several times more with her senior aides. She is willing to make a major commitment to the continued exploration of Mars—if you will make a statement supporting her candidacy for the White House in next year’s election.”

  Jamie felt his eyebrows crawling toward his scalp. Me? Make a statement supporting her? Why me? Why do they think anything I have to say would be important?

  “What she wants is a written statement from you,” Brumado went on, “which she will hold until your expedition returns to Earth. At that time, when you are safely back home, she will expect you to make your statement public. In the meantime she will go on record as supporting further expeditions to Mars. I have suggested that she make a speech on the fiftieth anniversary of the first American satellite launch. I believe she will agree to that.”

  Jamie felt confused. All this because of the Navaho words I spoke when we landed? How in hell could this kind of maneuvering come out of three words?

  Brumado had stopped talking. He was watching the screen expectantly.

  Jamie took a deep breath. “I don’t understand what’s going on, or how things got to be this way. I sure want to see further expeditions come to Mars, but I don’t see what my political support has to do with it.”

  In the two weeks they had been on Mars Jamie had been asked to submit to only the one media interview, on the second day after their landing. All the others in the landing party had been interviewed at least twice already. Jamie thought that national politics had been at the root of it: with two American astronauts on the surface of Mars, the project administrators did not want to upset the Russians by having a third American in the limelight.

  Now he wondered if his reasoning had been naive.

  Brumado began to look uncomfortable as Jamie’s questions registered on his face. He ran a hand across his neatly clipped graying beard before replying.

  “I’m glad this conversation is not being overheard,” he said with a slow smile. “For the first few days after your landing the American media was in a furor about the fact that you were a Native American. A red man on the red planet: that was the mildest of their stories about you.”

  Jamie realized that the mission controllers had practically blacked out all news transmissions from Earth. For the first time he understood that Kaliningrad—and Houston—were censoring the news from home.

  “The Vice-President is very sensitive to political nuances,” Brumado was going on. “She thought that the radical branch of the ethnic activist groups in the States might use you as a weapon against her. She wanted you removed from the ground team.”

  But Dr. Li wouldn’t let that happen, Jamie said to himself. The mission controllers wouldn’t stand for such blatant political interference.

  “I have tried to convince her that you could become an asset to her campaign for the presidency—if she will support further Mars expeditions instead of opposing them.”

  Jamie’s head was spinning. Even before Brumado stopped speaking he said, “So you worked out a deal for me to make a statement supporting her, and then she makes a statement supporting continued exploration.”

  Brumado kept on talking about how difficult the Vice-President could make everything if she insisted on Jamie’s being removed from the ground team. It would even make Australia happy, he pointed out, to have O’Hara sent down to replace Jamie.

  Then at last he heard Jamie’s words. He stopped short, muttered, “Wait …”

  Jamie realized that Brumado had an instant-replay feature on his console, wherever on Earth he was. He watched Brumado’s face as the Brazilian listened to his words.

  “Ah. Yes. That is the deal. You send me a statement supporting the Vice-President. I hold it until she makes a public announcement of her support for further Mars missions. Then I give her people your statement. When you return from Mars you announce your support of her candidacy. Everyone gets what they want. Everyone is happy.”

  Not quite everyone, Jamie thought. Then he heard himself say, “There’s one thing more. I want the schedule rearranged so we can go back to Tithonium Chasma before we leave. Otherwise no deal.”

  Alberto Brumado felt his jaw drop. He was accustomed to demands and counterdemands from the politicians, even from the academics who ruled universities. But to get one from this young pup of a scientist was something of a shock.

  “Rearrange the mission schedule? But that would be impossible.”

  He watched Waterman’s stolid broad-cheeked face as his words raced to Mars with the speed of light. It seemed to take forever.

  Finally Waterman replied, “Either we go back to Tithonium Chasma and take a good look at that rock formation or there’s no deal. I know that she’ll demand that I be taken off the ground team and O’Hara brought down to replace me. Okay. If she does that I’ll yell my head off once we’ve returned to Earth. I’ll tell the media that I was removed from the ground team because I’m a Native American and she’s against full political rights for ethnic minorities.”

  Brumado felt perspiration breaking out across his forehead. “You are putting me—the entire project administration—in a ver
y difficult situation.”

  Waterman’s reply, when it came, was, “That can’t be helped. This is important, much more important than who gets elected next year. We’ve got to go back to the canyon.”

  “All right,” Brumado said reluctantly. “I’ll see what I can do.”

  He waited long, long minutes before he saw Jamie Waterman’s answering smile.

  The deal was done. Now to get the project administrators to agree to it and then implement it with the Vice-President’s aides. And make certain that she has no way to back out of it.

  Brumado ended his transmission to Mars and rose from his chair, weary, drained, more than a little fearful. Like an athlete who had given his last ounce of strength and now waited for the judge’s verdict. There must be a second expedition sent to Mars. There must be. At least that. At the very least.

  Glancing down at the blank gray screen of the communications console he realized that Waterman was both an asset and a liability. It’s a mistake to get him involved in the politics of this thing. He does not think politically; all he is interested in is the science. He is aflame to make a great discovery on Mars. So much so that he could ruin everything.

  Thank god we could speak in private, Brumado said to himself. With the time lag between us it was difficult enough to get anything agreed to. It would have been impossible if others had been listening in.

  More than a hundred fifty million kilometers away, Tony Reed stared thoughtfully at the dead screen of his own laptop. He had gone from the dome’s communications center to his infirmary, slid the accordion-fold door shut, and immediately tuned in on Jamie’s conversation with Brumado.

  As the team’s physician and psychologist I have every right to know exactly what is going on, he had told himself. Secrecy be damned! They have no right to keep secrets from me.