Mars

by Ben Bova

  Now he removed the plug from his ear and yanked out the hair-thin wire that connected it to his computer. So Jamie’s forcing them to send him back to Tithonium Chasma. Good! It can’t be soon enough.

  SOL 14: AFTERNOON

  Jamie had been unusually silent and moody at lunch, Tony Reed thought. Even for our stoic red man he’s being awfully quiet and withdrawn.

  Reed was sitting at his infirmary desk, mulling over Jamie’s conversation with Brumado. The man has cheek, Tony thought, almost admiringly. Whatever inner demons are driving him, he has the gall to make demands on Brumado himself. And the Vice-President of the United States.

  Smiling to himself, Reed thought, With any luck at all he’ll be banished to the orbiting spacecraft and leave Joanna to me.

  Humming tunelessly, Reed tapped at his computer keyboard, calling up the afternoon’s schedule. Six of the seven scientists were supposed to be continuing the tedious business of mapping the depth and extent of the underground permafrost layer. Toshima, the seventh, would remain inside the dome working with his meteorology instruments. Reed had no responsibilities for outside work; one of the advantages of being team physician, he told himself.

  Tony punched up his personal mission task schedule on the computer screen and saw that it was time for his weekly inventory of pharmaceutical supplies. With a barely suppressed moan of boredom he started by checking out the stocks of analgesics and vitamins. Next would come the uppers and downers. Have to be especially careful with them. Can’t have these people depending on drugs.

  Pock!

  The sound startled him. What on earth was that? Reed cocked his ears, but heard nothing, more than-the usual hums of machinery and the distant muffled voices of the others. With a shrug, he turned his attention back to the task at hand.

  Wearily he went through the computer’s file on the analgesics. Every aspirin tablet must be accounted for. No one was allowed to take even one on his own; only the team physician could dispense the pills, and he had to keep a strict record of who received what.

  Everyone took vitamins, of course. Reed slid the box of vitamin bottles out of its rack in the container bin and toted it to his desk. Four big bottles of five hundred each. Just one of the pills provided all the daily vitamin supplement a person required; carrying two thousand of them to the surface was typical mission overkill.

  With a light pen Reed began to check the bar codes printed on the lids of each jar, like a supermarket clerk checking out groceries. Damned silly busywork, he grumbled to himself. Yet if the computer did not show a bottle-by-bottle check of the inventory, Vosnesensky would be up in arms. All mission tasks must be accomplished, as far as the Russian was concerned, no matter how trivial or boring.

  Then a new thought struck him. If Jamie has his way and returns to the Grand Canyon he’ll probably want to take Joanna with him. She’s the mission biologist, after all. Damn him! Reed snarled silently. There’s got to be a way to get this insolent red man separated from the Brazilian princess. Let’s hope they banish him to orbit.

  Pock! The same sound again, only fainter this time. What could it be? Reed asked himself as he unscrewed the first of the vitamin bottles. Might as well transfer them to the smaller bottles while I’ve got them out. Tony grumbled to himself about the efficiency experts who had planned the mission logistics; they had overlooked the fact that these giant-sized bottles did not fit in the galley shelves. He had to transfer the vitamin capsules by hand to smaller bottles that did. Utterly stupid nonsense.

  Pock! Pock!

  Reed jumped to his feet, knocking over the open bottle. Vitamin pills spilled across his desk, rolled onto the floor.

  “Everyone into your suits!” Vosnesensky’s heavy voice roared through the dome. “At once! Into your hard suits! Now!”

  • • •

  Cosmonaut Leonid Tolbukhin was on duty in the command center of Mars 2 when the first pinging noise made him sit up rigidly in his chair. Cold sweat beaded across his upper lip.

  My god, it must be me, he thought. I’m a Jonah, a jinx. First Konoye and now this.

  But while his mind raced, his hands moved almost as fast. He flicked on the radar display and almost immediately, with the speed of a reflex action, he hit the alarm.

  “Meteors! We’re running into a swarm of meteors!” he yelled into the ships’ intercom microphone, so excited that he said it in Russian.

  Will Martin, the American geophysicist, happened to be at the comm console, in the middle of taping a long report back to Earth.

  “What is it?” he shouted over the hooting of the alarm. “Speak English, dammit!”

  “Meteors!” Tolbukhin shouted back. “Get into your hard suit at once!”

  Vosnesensky was at the dome’s command center, locked in an earnest conversation with Mironov and Abell about the logistics of the upcoming traverse to Pavonis Mons, while ostensibly monitoring the scientists who were outside with Pete Connors. He had not heard the first soft warning sounds of meteoroids striking the dome’s exterior shell.

  Both the dome and the orbiting spacecraft were double walled: the ships of metal, the dome of plastic. Although Mars’s atmosphere was almost vanishingly thin by terrestrial standards, it still offered enough resistance to incoming meteors to burn most of them to ashes long before they reached the ground.

  The greatest danger, according to the mission planners, came from meteors plunging almost straight in from overhead: they would have the most energy and be most likely to survive the blazing heat of their atmospheric ride and reach the ground sizable enough to do damage. Meteors coming in from lower angles would have to traverse a longer path in the atmosphere, burning every centimeter of the way. Therefore the dome’s double walls were filled in along its top half with spongy plastic material that could absorb the energy of an impact.

  Tolbukhin’s warning blared in the dome’s radio speakers, as well as throughout the orbiting ships.

  Vosnesensky stopped in midword and bellowed, “Everyone into your suits! At once! Into your hard suits! Now!”

  Only after he started running for the suit lockers by the airlock section did the Russian feel the fear that squeezed inside his chest like a cold fist.

  Connors was the first to notice the tiny puff of dirt spouting out of the ground as if a rifle bullet had struck. The astronaut blinked, watching the dust settle slowly back to the ground, thinking, Good thing that didn’t hit any …

  Anotherpuff sprouted ten meters away.

  “Jesus Christ!” he yelled into his helmet microphone. “Meteors! Everybody back to the dome! Double quick!”

  All six of the geology and biology scientists were spread across several hundred meters of the rock-strewn plain, trying to survey in detail the depth of the permafrost layer beneath the ground. The mapping work was slow, since they were doing it on foot. All excursions in the rovers were on hold until the mission controllers decided exactly where the rovers would be allowed to go.

  Jamie was holding a digging pole whose toothed bit end drilled into the ground. He jerked to attention at Connors’s shouted warning. The pole’s bit stopped as soon as his gloved hands released the control stud, and the pole leaned lop-sidedly out of the hole in the ground.

  Jamie took in the locations of the five other scientists with a swift glance. Connors was to his right, halfway between him and the dome’s airlock. Joanna was farther off, struggling with her corer.

  “Now! Move it! Move it!” Connors was yelling so loud that it hurt Jamie’s ears. “Come on! Into the dome!”

  Jamie angled off toward Joanna, watching the other hard-suited figures start into clumsy motion like a small herd of brightly colored hippos. A spurt of dust erupted near her, but she did not seem to notice. He ran as fast as he could toward her, feeling like a galumphing tortoise while he fiddled with the radio controls on his wrist to turn down the volume of Connors’s urgent voice.

  He reached Joanna as she finally started to move toward the dome. Slowing to her pace, Jamie
knew he could not speak with her because Connors was flooding the suit-to-suit frequency with his hollering. Instead, he reached out to touch her shoulder. He could not see her face through the tinted visor of her helmet, could not see how frightened she was. Then Jamie realized he himself was scared, sweating cold, innards shaking.

  The ground was erupting into puffs of dust, as if a squad of riflemen had them under fire. Something banged at the back of his helmet, just a tap, really, but it startled him as if he’d been shot. He looked up and saw that the dome was dimpling here and there as meteoroids struck its surface. Oh my god, if one of them breaks through …

  One did. Jamie saw the transparent fabric on the lower level of the dome pucker for an instant, and then a small geyser of spray erupted into the dry thin air, like a whale spouting.

  “The dome’s punctured!” somebody screamed.

  The hole spread into a growing rip as moisture-laden air geysered out into the Martian atmosphere and the plastic fabric of the dome began to sag noticeably.

  After that first moment of near panic Vosnesensky turned coldly calm. While the others rushed for their suits, he veered aside and trotted around the inner periphery of the dome, checking to see if the repair patches were in their proper places. He had checked the patches only a day earlier, part of his regular inspection routine. But now he checked them again, while a patter of pock, pock sounds rained gently over his head, almost drowned out by the fearful voices of Toshima and the fliers as they struggled to don their hard suits.

  He never saw the dome punctured. The meteoroid that punched through both layers of the plastic was a nearly microscopic grain of dust. But Vosnesensky heard a different sound, like a sudden gusting intake of breath, the kind of sound a man makes when he’s been stabbed in the chest.

  He felt the breeze as the dome’s air rushed toward the puncture. Books fluttered open in the wind; loose papers flew across the dome like a covey of frightened birds. The hissing noise grew louder, a moan, a rushing torrent of air.

  Vosnesensky whirled and saw dozens of the lightweight repair patches lifting off the floor to be sucked up against the wall of the dome. They flattened there, edges fluttering madly as the air rushed past them to escape the dome. The plastic walls began to sag between the dome’s stiff supporting ribs. The surface of the wall was ripping faster than the patches could cover it.

  Ears popping, heart triphammering, Vosnesensky rushed to the spot, bent down to scoop up more of the repair patches, and slammed them over the widening hole. They slipped down, would not stay. They still fluttered, and Vosnesensky could hear the dome’s air roaring now as it rushed into the near-vacuum outside. In a few minutes it would all be gone. The force of the escaping wind was tugging at him, trying to suck him through the wall and out into the deadly open.

  Without a word or a call to anyone, he braced himself and began to struggle back toward the center of the dome, leaning against the wind, staggering like a drunk, threading his way painfully past the scientists’ workstations, dodging chairs in the wardroom carelessly left scattered about the floor. His ears were screaming with pain, as if someone had jabbed icepicks into them.

  The life-support equipment. Pumps that sucked in the dry cold air of Mars. Separators that culled the scanty nitrogen and even scantier oxygen out of the native atmosphere. More pumps to make the nitrogen/oxygen mix thick enough for humans to breathe. Cylinders of spare oxygen, in case of emergency.

  He had to reach the oxygen. Vosnesensky went down the row of green, man-tall oxygen tanks, twisting their valves to the full open position, overpressurizing the dome as quickly as he could with pure oxygen. Force oxygen into the dome; replace the air being lost. It was a race, and he had no intention of losing. Higher pressure might even push the repair seals firmly against the hole. At the very least it would buy them a few more minutes.

  Yet even over the hissing rush of the escaping oxygen he could hear pock, pock.

  He clawed his way back toward the tear in the wall in a blizzard of papers swirling through the dome. By the time he got back to the place where the meteoroid had broken through, Abell was there in his white hard suit, spraying epoxy over the repair patches as calmly as a painter doing a living-room wall.

  “I have turned on the emergency oxygen,” Vosnesensky said, almost breathless, his chest aflame.

  “Right,” said Abell. It was standard emergency procedure.

  The wind had died down. The shriek of escaping air had quieted. Vosnesensky was panting, but from fear and exertion, not lack of oxygen.

  “Are the others in their suits?”

  Abell turned toward him, a faceless robot in rust-stained white. “Uh-huh. You should be too, Mike.”

  “Yes, yes.” Vosnesensky saw that the patches were no longer fluttering. They were glued flat to the curving wall. “What about the people outside?”

  “They’re coming through the airlock. Nobody’s been hurt, far as I know.”

  “Good. Now, if we are not struck again …”

  “You should get into your suit,” Abell reminded him.

  “Yes. Of course.”

  By the time Vosnesensky was fully suited up, though, he heard no more sounds of meteoroids striking the dome. He clumped awkwardly to the communications console and saw on the screen that Tolbukhin was still on duty up in orbit, and still in his coveralls. His armpits were dark with sweat.

  Dr. Li stretched his long legs as far as he could, considering the pain, and wriggled his bare toes until the cramp in his left calf began to subside. Two hours in a space suit that had never fit his lanky frame properly was more than his body could endure.

  He sighed as he tried to relax in the reclining chair. He sipped tea from the one delicate porcelain cup he had brought with him and gazed at the silk paintings on the walls of his quarters, waiting for them to work their calming magic.

  No one was hurt, he repeated to himself for the hundredth time. All the emergency procedures had worked just as they were designed to; all the emergency equipment had functioned properly. We survived the meteor shower without even any damage to our equipment, except for one minor puncture in the dome that was quickly sealed and one strike on the Mars 1 ship’s main communications antenna, which the astronauts will go EVA to repair.

  The odds against meteoroid danger had been carefully calculated on Earth; they were something on the order of a trillion to one. And this particular meteor shower had been a renegade, unknown and uncharted until it suddenly struck at them. At least we should not be bothered again for another hundred million years or so, Li told himself.

  He almost smiled, realizing that he could claim discovery of a new meteor swarm, so small and insignificant that it had never even been noticed on Earth. But not so small and insignificant here. No, not at all. We are very vulnerable here, Dr. Li realized. Extremely vulnerable.

  He had ordered that regular radar sweeps be made as they orbited around Mars. We cannot avoid meteors, but we may be able to give ourselves some warning time if another shower develops. And we can produce data on the density of meteoroids in the vicinity of Mars; that should please the astronomers back home.

  He rubbed the back of his neck, still trying to relax after the long, terrible, terrifying day. No one was killed, he said yet again. No one even hurt, except for this damnable leg cramp. No equipment damaged, except for the antenna. The team on the ground survived without any problems greater than a single small puncture and a spilled bottle of vitamin pills.

  Now to report it all to Kaliningrad.

  It had taken hours to clean up the mess inside the dome. Mironov and Connors went outside to seal the rip in the dome’s outer wall, while Vosnesensky and Abell checked every square centimeter of the inner wall for damage. They found none.

  Now all twelve of the team were sitting in the wardroom, physically and emotionally spent after the adrenaline surge of their wild afternoon. The schedule said it was time for dinner, but no one thought about food. Instead, Vosnesensky had brought fro
m his quarters the bottle of vodka he had not touched since their second night on Mars.

  “For medicinal purposes,” he said when Tony Reed arched a questioning eyebrow. The others immediately rushed to their quarters to ferret out their own stashed bottles.

  The first toast was to Vosnesensky.

  “To our intrepid leader,” said Paul Abell, his hand raised high, “who ignored his own safety to turn on the oxygen tanks and save the dome from collapse.”

  “At great risk to his own life,” added Toshima.

  “And even greater risk to his own safety rules,” Connors joked.

  Vosnesensky frowned slightly. “We must modify the oxygen tanks so that their valves open automatically if the air pressure in here drops below a certain point.”

  “I don’t think we’ve got the equipment even to jury-rig a setup like that,” Connors said.

  “I will check the inventory,” Mironov volunteered. “Perhaps between our spares here and what’s left up in the spacecraft we can do it.”

  Vosnesensky nodded, satisfied. But the scowl did not leave his face.

  “Are you still in pain, Mikhail Andreivitch?” Reed asked.

  The Russian looked almost startled. “Me? No. My ears feel fine.”

  “You’re certain? I don’t think your eardrums ruptured, but perhaps I should check you over again.”

  “No. I am all right. No pain.”

  They sat tiredly at the wardroom tables, slowly unwinding from the terror of the meteors. Joanna had offered Jamie a share of her half bottle of Chilean wine. “The last I have until we return to the spacecraft,” she confided. “I hid another bottle of champagne there for the day we start home.”

  Jamie sipped at the wine gratefully. He had put his helmet on the table in front of him. Its curving back held a long thin gouge, blackened as if a miniature incendiary bullet had grazed it. If it had been a little bigger, a little more energetic, it would have blown my head off, he knew. Jamie stared at the damaged helmet, his insides hollow. Just a little bigger …