Mars

by Ben Bova

  “You are a fortunate fellow, Jamie,” Vosnesensky called from the other end of the table. “A very lucky fellow.”

  Pete Connors said, “Well, the suits are built to take small meteorite hits. Jamie was in no real danger.”

  Not much, Jamie said to himself.

  Vosnesensky made a rare grin. “I did not mean he is lucky to have survived. I know the suits can protect against such things. He is lucky to have been hit! Do you know the odds against being struck by a meteorite? Fantastic! Astronomical! I salute you, Jamie.”

  And the Russian raised his plastic glass again, while the others chuckled tolerantly.

  “Perhaps you should place a bet on the next Irish Sweepstakes,” Reed suggested.

  Jamie shook his head. “No thanks. One stroke of luck like this is enough for me.”

  “To think of the odds,” Vosnesensky kept muttering.

  Mironov said, “Even long shots pay off, sometimes. What would you say were the odds against the only elephant in the Leningrad zoo being killed by the first cannon shell the Nazis fired into the city during the Great Patriotic War? Yet that is exactly what happened.”

  “They killed the eléphant?” Monique asked.

  “Exactly.”

  “No!”

  “It is an historical fact.”

  “How long will we have to breathe pure oxygen?” Naguib asked. “I think it is giving me a headache. My sinuses hurt.”

  “A day or two,” Vosnesensky said. “Virtually all of our nitrogen escaped. We must wait until the pumps accumulate enough nitrogen from outside to return the air mixture to normal.”

  “Let me take a look at you,” Reed suggested.

  Suddenly Naguib seemed reluctant, wary. “Oh no, it’s nothing. Just a bit of a headache. Tension, most likely.”

  “Still,” Reed said, “if you wake up with it tomorrow I’d better examine you.”

  Jamie fingered the gouge on the back of his helmet. It was not deep, nowhere near serious enough to threaten the helmet’s integrity. He could wear it again if he had to. But he would use one of the spares instead. Katrin Diels had demanded that it be put aside so that she could examine it on the trip back to Earth. So had the mission controllers, once they learned of it. The hard-suit manufacturers would want to study the damage, to see how, well the helmet had protected its wearer.

  You’ll be famous, Jamie said to the helmet. They’ll put you in the Smithsonian. He thought of what the inside of the helmet would have looked like if the meteorite had gone all the way through. And shuddered.

  “But I’m much too valuable to risk outside,” Tony Reed was saying.

  Looking up, Jamie realized that Ilona was teasing the Englishman.

  “You haven’t been outside the dome since our second day here, Tony,” she said, smiling slyly at him. “One would almost think you’re afraid-to go outside.”

  “Nonsense!” Reed spat. “I am the team physician. I’m needed here, in my infirmary.”

  “Safely barricaded behind your pills and instruments,” Ilona needled him. “And you even spilled all the pills, didn’t you?”

  “Only one bottle,” Reed answered stiffly.

  “Five hundred vitamin capsules, all over the floor.”

  “Only a few hit the floor! Most of them stayed on my desktop, which is clean enough to eat from, I assure you.”

  “Yes,” said Ilona mockingly. “Certainly it is. Just be certain that you don’t feed us the dirty ones.”

  The others were grinning, Jamie saw. Enjoying the entertainment. Usually Tony’s the one who does the needling. He’s damned uncomfortable when he’s the victim instead of the attacker.

  Joanna pushed her chair back and got to her feet. “I believe I will lie down for a while.”

  Grateful for a way to escape Ilona’s scalpel, Reed asked swiftly, “Don’t you feel well?”

  “Oh, I’m just tired,” Joanna replied. “I think I’ll try to sleep.”

  “Without dinner?” Vosnesensky asked from down the table.

  “I don’t believe I could eat anything right now. Perhaps later.”

  The Russian glanced at Reed but said nothing more.

  As Joanna left the table, Reed turned toward Jamie. “I think we should name this meteor swarm after Jamie, here. After all, it seems to be attracted to him. The James F. Waterman Meteor Swarm.”

  Rava Patel said seriously, “Dr. Diels and Dr. Li are attempting to plot out its orbit. The swarm is obviously the remains of an ancient comet.”

  “Obviously,” said Reed.

  “It will be quite difficult, however,” Patel went on, “to plot its orbit with so little data. The swarm is so small that it does not return radar signals very well.”

  Reed’s old smirk returned. “Perhaps we can stand Jamie outside again. The meteors seem to like him. Perhaps they’ll come back if he’s standing out in the open like a lightning rod.”

  “Or you could go out,” Ilona said.

  “Oh no, not me,” said Reed. “Let Jamie do it. It would be the American Indians’ first contribution to the science of astronomy, you see.”

  “Not the first,” Jamie said.

  “Oh? Really?”

  “The Aztecs and Incas were fine astronomers. They built observatories …”

  “I don’t mean them,” Reed interrupted. “They were civilized, somewhat. I meant your people, Jamie. The savages of North America.”

  All eyes had turned to him, Jamie realized. Tony’s got the needle out of his hide by sinking it into me.

  “My ancestors watched the stars,” he said, measuring his words carefully.

  Reed said, “Of course they did. In the desert where they lived, what else was there to do once the sun went down? But what did they accomplish, outside of some tribal mumbo-jumbo?”

  Jamie hesitated a heartbeat’s span, then answered, “They recorded the great supernova of 1054, for one thing. Carved the data into petroglyphs. Even decorated pottery bowls with accurate drawings of where and when the supernova appeared.”

  “Really?”

  “Really.” Jamie turned to the others. “The supernova of 1054 is the one that created the Crab Nebula; you can see it in a telescope today. The only other astronomers to observe the supernova were in China.”

  “Japan also,” said Toshima.

  Jamie nodded at him gravely. “Japan also. Nobody in Europe paid any attention, apparently.”

  “It was probably too cloudy that night,” Reed said.

  “The supernova was visible to the naked eye for twenty-three days,” Jamie countered. “The Chinese records show that. So do the drawings my ancestors made. Even in England the sky must have been clear for part of that time, but nobody there bothered to look up. Either that, or they were too ignorant of the stars to notice a new one blazing away each night.”

  Ilona made a low whistle. Naguib chuckled softly. The others grinned and nodded.

  Tony Reed got slowly to his feet and made a slight bow in Jamie’s direction. “Touché,” he said. “And now, if no one objects, I think I’ll make myself a spot of dinner.”

  One by one the others got up and began to prepare their evening meals. Jamie sat alone at the table, staring at his damaged helmet, wondering why human beings had to inflict pain on one another to gain respect.

  MARS ARRIVAL

  For all the months that they had coasted across the dark emptiness between worlds, the members of the expedition had watched Mars steadily grow from a bright red star to a ruddy disc to a fully three-dimensional globe that hung before their eyes like a gigantic prize waiting to be seized.

  Once the two spacecraft established themselves in orbit around the planet Jamie found himself spending hours at the observation port watching the strange world of rust and brick and almost bloody reds. The window bristled with instruments now, but peering between them Jamie could see Mars sliding past his feasting eyes slowly as the spacecraft turned in its stately revolutions. Jamie saw massive volcano cones projecting upward like
the turreted eyes of lizards, staring at him impassively. The vast twisted gash of Valles Marineris called to him with memories of river-carved canyons back home.

  He saw dust storms spring up and sweep across a quarter of the globe before dying away as mysteriously as they had started. Huge craters smashed out by ancient meteor strikes; some of them had blasted out the smaller meteoroids that had eventually made their way to Earth to be found on the Antarctic ice.

  “Are you ready to go down there and start to work?”

  Jamie recognized Ilona Malater’s throaty voice even before he turned his head.

  He nodded solemnly. “Aren’t you?”

  She gave a wintry smile. “After nine months in this concentration camp I’d be willing to run along the sand dunes in the nude.”

  Jamie laughed.

  In the reflected reddish light of Mars Ilona’s haughty face looked almost as coppery as Jamie’s. Her short-cropped golden hair took on glints of fire.

  “Haye you remained celibate?” she asked, the corners of her lips curving upward slightly.

  It was more of a challenge than a question, Jamie thought. He nodded once more.

  “You must have interesting dreams,” Ilona said.

  He felt a surge of anger heating his face. “You know, Ilona, you have a reputation for being the local sex therapist.”

  Her smile widened. “And why not? Tony Reed assures me that no one aboard is carrying any communicable diseases worse than the cold you gave us all. Why not make life a little less tedious?”

  “Less tedious, maybe, but a lot more tense.”

  “Really?” Ilona arched a brow. “I would think that sex lowers tensions among us.”

  “Not among the Russians.”

  “Oh, them! Let them jerk each other off.”

  Jamie huffed and turned away from her.

  “You’re such a prude, Jamie,” Ilona said, still smiling. “I thought that once we made love you would relax, but you’re not the kind who can take sex casually, are you?”

  “That’s why we’re here,” he shot back, jabbing a finger toward the observation window and the red bulk of Mars hanging beyond. “To explore that planet. Not for high-school fun and games.”

  “My god, you’re so serious!”

  “We’re on a serious mission, Ilona. Very serious.”

  “I’m not hurting anyone. In fact, I think the tensions aboard this prison would have been a lot worse.” Her eyes were dancing with amusement. “Tony agrees with me; he says my contributions to the team’s morale have been invaluable.”

  “Tell it to Mikhail and Dmitri.”

  “Come on, now, Jamie. You could use some relaxation yourself.”

  “No thanks.”

  “Think of it as research,” Ilona teased. “I think you don’t really get to know a man until you see him with his pants down.”

  He stared at her for a wordless moment. Then, “Do Katrin and Joanna feel the same way?”

  “You mean, are they doing what I’ve been doing?”

  He started to reply, but heard voices drifting toward them from the passageway. Tony Reed and Joanna Brumado turned the corner and stepped into the observation area.

  “I thought it was you, Ilona,” Reed said amiably. “I’d recognize that sexy voice anywhere.”

  Jamie realized his eyes were fixed on Joanna. With an effort he pulled them away.

  The four of them chatted about the landing they would make the next day, keeping their talk strictly on the business of the expedition. Reed seemed casual and relaxed, as ever. Joanna was serious, as usual, her dark eyes focused on Mars as if she realized for the first time that she was actually going to go down to the surface of that alien world.

  Jamie felt almost like an automaton. He answered questions they addressed to him; he spoke the correct words and kept up his end of the four-way conversation. But his mind was racing, remembering the brief moments of wild animal heat he had shared with Ilona, remembering the sad, solemn expression on Joanna’s face when he had kissed her, wondering why he could not relax and play with Ilona and forget about everything else.

  “I must get back to my quarters,” Joanna said quietly, almost timidly. “My father will be calling in another few minutes.”

  Tony Reed held out his arm for her. “I’ll escort you there, if I may.”

  She glanced toward Jamie, then back to Reed. “Of course. Thank you.”

  Ilona watched them leave the observation blister, an enigmatic smile playing across her face. Once they were out of earshot she turned back to Jamie.

  “The answer to your question is that Katrin has been much more discreet about her amours than I. And little Joanna, as far as I know, has been completely virtuous. Does that make you happy, Jamie?”

  He nodded, trying to keep his face from betraying his emotions.

  “But have you noticed,” Ilona added devilishly, “that Tony follows her wherever she goes?”

  Jamie blinked, surprised. “He does?”

  “Watch him,” she said. “He trails after her like, a dog following a bitch in heat.”

  That sly, smiling bastard, Jamie thought. Who lectures him? Who doctors his food?

  “Tony’s not satisfied with me or Katrin,” Ilona went on. “He wants the unobtainable.”

  And so do I, Jamie realized. So do I.

  SOL 15: AFTERNOON

  “This is kind of awkward, Edith,” Jamie said into the camera.

  He was sitting on the bunk of his privacy cubicle, the vidcam perched on the flimsy little desk opposite him, focused on his face. First thing in the morning, before his scheduled work hours, he had suited up and gone outside to take a few minutes’ worth of panoramic shots of the rocks and dunes and distant mountains in the area around the dome. Now he sat on his bunk, wondering what he should say to Edith.

  “Yesterday we had a bit of a scare. Things still aren’t quite back to normal yet. A stray meteorite punctured our dome. Just a little puncture. We never even found the meteorite; it must’ve been so small it evaporated from the energy of the impact. But it leaked out some of our air and for a couple of minutes everything was pretty tense.”

  He looked upward. The dome was bathed in sunlight. The pumps and fans were throbbing their usual low notes. Jamie could hear voices and the cowboy twang of a country-and-western song from somebody’s tape player.

  “We’re still breathing pure oxygen in here. We’ve got to tiptoe around and be extremely careful. In a pure oxygen atmosphere, the slightest spark could set the whole dome on fire. The separators are accumulating nitrogen from the air outside, but we won’t be back on normal air for another day or two.

  “There wasn’t any damage, except for the puncture itself, which Vosnesensky and Paul Abell fixed inside of a couple of minutes. I was outside when it happened and another micro-meteorite scratched my helmet. Oh yes, Tony Reed knocked over a whole bottle full of vitamin pills. He’s getting kidded about being so clumsy.”

  Jamie turned off the camera with the remote control box in his hand and made a wide, long, exaggerated yawn. The pure oxygen atmosphere seemed to be affecting his ears. They felt clogged, as if they needed to pop. The yawn helped, but not much.

  Turning the camera on again, he continued, “The meteors were probably the last remains of an old, ancient comet. Just a bunch of stray pebbles floating around the solar system that happened to drift right into our spot on Mars. Couldn’t happen again in a million years.”

  Jamie hesitated for an instant. There was hardly any more news to tell her.

  “I sure appreciated the tape you sent. And I’m glad you’re moving up in the world. Going to New York must have taken a lot of guts. If there’s anything I can do, like an interview or some background information about our work here on the surface, just send a request through the mission directors and I’ll be happy to tell you whatever you need to know.”

  Jamie stopped the vidcam again, thinking, How much can I really tell her? How much would the mission directors
let me tell her? He decided for now to stick to science and stay away from politics and personalities.

  “It turns out that there’s a lot more water beneath the ground than the earlier unmanned landers led us to believe. It’s frozen, of course. We’re sitting on top of an ocean of permafrost that probably extends all the way down to the Valles Marineris—the Grand Canyon of Mars, that is. Maybe farther, but we haven’t crossed the canyon and investigated the other side.”

  Jamie described the brief traverse to the canyon and his hopes that he would be able to return there, skipping over the arguments and debates he had triggered. He carefully avoided mentioning the “village”; time enough for that when we’ve got definite evidence, one way or the other, he thought. Instead, he told Edith about the copper-green rock they had found. Then he ran out of things to say.

  Fingering the remote control nervously, he finally flicked the camera on again. “I’m glad all that nonsense about my speaking Navaho has settled down. At least, I presume it has. We haven’t seen much in the way of news here—mostly BBC stuff.”

  He clicked it off again, licked his lips while he thought of what else he could tell Edith.

  “Well, I guess that’s about it for now. We haven’t found any signs of life yet, living or fossils, but maybe conditions down in the Grand Canyon will be more conducive. Monique Bonnet has a nice little garden growing out of Martian soil, using Martian water for it. I don’t know what a few days of pure oxygen is going to do for her plants, though. We all go over and breathe on them now and then, to give them some carbon dioxide. It was nice of you to call me, Edith. I’ll be talking with you some more, later on.”

  He turned the vidcam off for good, thinking, I can edit this tape for A1 and for my parents and have mission control send it to them. That’ll surprise them. Maybe my parents will even send me a message in return.

  Seiji Toshima had listened to all the arguments raging between Waterman and the rest of the team without once opening his mouth. Their fight had nothing to do with him, and he had been trained from earliest childhood to refrain from interjecting his own opinions where they had not been specifically requested.