Mars

by Ben Bova

  He shuddered beneath his light blanket.

  I’m not a coward. Tony almost said it aloud. He pictured his father standing over his cot, glowering at him. I’m not a coward. It isn’t cowardly to fear real danger. We’re constantly on the edge of death here. Each breath we draw might be our last.

  He squeezed his eyes shut and tried to force himself to sleep. Unbidden, the memory of his mother came to him: all the times she let him crawl into bed with her when a clap of thunder or some other noise had frightened him.

  He wished his mother were here to comfort him now. Ilona had refused to come to his bed once they had landed on Mars. If he suggested it to Monique she would smile and pat his cheek and walk away, laughing softly to herself. He was certain of that.

  Joanna. If only Joanna would come to him, comfort him. He needed her warmth here on this world of cold and danger. He longed to feel her arms enfold him in safety.

  DOSSIER: ANTONY NORVILLE REED

  Tony Reed was barely four years old, lying in a hospital bed feeling very small and very frightened. His father bustled in, bundled in a heavy dark overcoat and a muffler striped gray and red, his nose and cheeks pinkly glowing from the winter’s cold that frosted the hospital windows.

  “And how are you, my little man?” his father asked, sitting on the edge of the bed.

  Tony could not speak. He was in no pain, but his entire throat felt frozen, numb. His father was a big man, physically imposing, with a loud insistent voice and a constant air of urgency about him. His father frightened him more than a little. The two of them had never been close. Tony, an only child, was never allowed to have dinner with his parents when his father was at home. Only when his father was gone could he sit at the big dining room table with his mama.

  “They tell me you were crying all night,” his father said sternly.

  Tony could not answer, but tears sprang up in his eyes. They had left him alone in the strange hospital room, without Mama, without even his nanny.

  “Now listen to me, Antony,” said his father. “These people here in the hospital are my colleagues. They look up to me and respect me. It wouldn’t do for them to think that my son is a coward, now would it?”

  Slowly, reluctantly, Tony shook his head.

  “So we’ll have no more of this crying, eh? Chin up. Brave lad. Do what you’re told and don’t give the sisters any difficulty. Right?”

  Tony nodded.

  “Good! That’s the spirit. Now look what I’ve brought you.” His father pulled a small packet from his overcoat pocket. It was wrapped in bright gold paper.

  “Open it up, go on.”

  Tony pulled at the paper ineffectually. His father’s smile withered into an exasperated frown; he took the packet into his big, deft-fingered hands and swiftly removed the wrapping. Then he opened the slim box and showed Tony what was inside it.

  A hand-sized telly! Tony goggled at it. Lifting it from the little box, he turned it over in his trembling fingers until he found the postage-stamp screen and the red power button. He pressed the button and the screen came to life instantly.

  His father showed him how to pull the earphone from its all-but-invisible socket. Tony wormed it into his left ear.

  The picture on the screen was of the red planet, Mars. The voice he heard was that of a young Brazilian scientist named Alberto Brumado, who was saying in a softly beguiling Latin accent, “Someday human explorers will travel to Mars to unravel the mysteries of its red sands …”

  His father tousled his hair roughly and then left Tony watching the tiny pictures of Mars.

  Tony’s parents lived entirely separate lives under the single roof of their Chelsea home. As he grew up, Tony began to understand that his father kept a series of mistresses elsewhere in London. He changed them every year or so, like buying a new outfit of clothes for the spring. But he was never without a mistress for long.

  His father paid Tony almost no attention whatever; the big gruff man always seemed preoccupied, busy, on his way out of the house somewhere. And when he did notice his son it was:

  “Tennis? That’s a damned silly game. When I was your age I was all for football. Now there’s fun!”

  No matter that Tony was slim and lithe where his father was bulky and powerful.

  “Tennis,” the old man fumed. “Game for foreigners and effeminates.”

  It was easy to get his graying mother’s attention. She was a sweet, porcelain-white woman with the grace and beauty of a china doll. She looked frail, long-suffering, but Tony knew she could protect him from his cold yet demanding father. Everyone who met her loved her, and Tony loved her most of all. All he had to do to get her attention was to pretend to be ill. A cough or a sneeze would bring her fluttering to him. Before he was nine Tony learned how to fake a fever by holding the thermometer under the hot water tap. As he grew up he began to suspect that his mother knew all his little tricks, and forgave him unconditionally. He was the man of the house most of the time. He had his mother all to himself except when his father was home.

  Tony had been secretly frightened at the thought of going away to university, but he quickly found that campus life was unalloyed joy. It was ludicrously easy to become the center of everyone’s attention, the undisputed leader of his set. The other students seemed mostly dull, fit only to be the brunt of his practical jokes or the victims of his cruel wit. The more he humiliated them, the more they kowtowed to him, seeking his favor, turning themselves into lackeys to escape his annoyance.

  It was something of a surprise to Tony that women fell for him so easily. They mistook his disguise of self-assurance and his utter self-interest for sophistication. Tony delighted in this reaffirmation that women could be manipulated more easily than men.

  The only one in his class who did not bow to him was a stubborn, stolid son of a Manchester factory worker who ignored the campus’s social life and stuck to his books with the single-minded intensity of desperation. He seemed as unimaginative and cautious as a peasant, yet he never fell for any of Tony’s little schemes. He always detected the bucket of water balanced atop the half-opened door. He never fell for the compliant young ladies that Tony sent to tempt him. When he found his bed soaked in beer he patiently, uncomplainingly turned over the mattress and changed the linen and showed up in class the next morning as if nothing had happened.

  Tony graduated second in his class. The peasant somehow took first honors. He infuriated Tony. Yet they had never exchanged more words than the common civilities in all the four years of college. Tony never saw him again after graduation and he was glad of it.

  “Travel to India?” His father was nearly apoplectic. “You’re going to medical school, young man! You’ve been accepted at my old college and, by damn, that’s where you are going and nowhere else!”

  “But I don’t think I’m ready yet …”

  “Bah! I know you, you schemer. You’re terrified that you might actually have to knuckle down and study. Frightened of hard work, that’s what you are. Do you good, a bit of hard work. It’s medical school for you, my boy. I won’t listen to another word.”

  Thus Tony went to medical school. His father had been right; he was filled with trepidation. Once there, however, Tony found it was even more of a lark than the university. There were crib books and test cassettes for sale almost openly. Yet after the first few months Tony found himself becoming genuinely fascinated with the study of the human body. To his utter surprise he found that he enjoyed learning. He actually began to work hard at his studies. He wanted to excel.

  And there was always Mars—hovering in the background of his thoughts, hanging just over the horizon of his existence. He would forget about it for long months, for years even, and then suddenly a news broadcast would show another rocket lifting off in a roar of flame and steam to carry a robot landing vehicle to the red planet. Or a guest lecturer would speak on the problems of medicine in the microgravity environment of a space station and mention in passing the similar problems to b
e encountered on a mission to Mars. Or Alberto Brumado, gray now but still sparkling with youthful zeal, would host a telly special about the origin of life on Earth and ask wistfully if it were possible that life had arisen on Mars too.

  His father was shocked and angered when Tony refused to step into the family practice.

  Red-faced, portly with years and too much living, sputtering with rage, his father roared, “I’ve spent my entire life building up this practice! You must carry it on!”

  Tony smiled coolly, trying to hide the terror that his father’s wrath always stirred inside him. “Father, there’s nothing for it. I am not going to follow in your sacred footsteps.”

  “What’s the matter with you?” his father roared. “Afraid of a little blood? Is that it? Surgery scares the liver out of you, eh? Damned sniveling coward!”

  Tony stood his ground.

  “By god, at your age I was sewing up wounded men on a hospital ship in the middle of the South Atlantic winter storms.”

  “You’ve told us of your glorious exploits in the Falklands War many times, Father.”

  “You’re a coward! A damned trembling, shaking little coward!” The old man turned on his wife. “You’ve raised a coward for a son.”

  Tony felt his blood turn to flame. “Don’t bully her!”

  His father stared at him for a long moment, then with an exasperated grunt he stormed out of the room. Tony turned to his mother, sitting silently, patiently. They heard the front door open and then slam shut.

  “You don’t think I’m a coward, do you?” Tony asked his mama.

  “Of course not, dear.”

  Two days later Tony applied for a post in the British government’s space program. Within a fortnight he received notification that he had been tentatively accepted; he was to report to the training center for tests and evaluation. His father was not home when the letter came; there was no one in the house except Tony and his mother.

  “They need physicians,” he told her, still aching with wounded pride. “I may very well be selected for the Mars training team if Britain joins the program.”

  He had expected that she would be horrified, break into tears, beg him to reconsider. Instead his mother smiled and kissed him on the forehead and told him that whatever he wanted to do was what he should do.

  In the end Tony was accepted by the Mars Project, a stranger bought the lucrative practice when his father retired, and his mother dragged the old man off to Nassau where he suffered an incapacitating stroke their first year in the sun, leaving him helpless and totally dependent on the loving care of his long-neglected wife.

  Tony loved being part of the Mars Project. Most of the other trainees were either astronauts or scientists, dullard technicians or researchers so narrowly specialized that they knew practically nothing of the larger world of the arts and society. Tony enjoyed himself immensely, the sophisticated center of attraction and interest at all times. While others worried themselves into near hysteria over the selection process, Tony never doubted that he would be picked to go to Mars. If he feared the thought of riding millions of miles through space to an empty, harshly inhospitable world, he kept such apprehensions to himself. Only in his dreams did such terrors confront him, and then it was always in the shape of his father looming over him like a horrible devouring ogre, while his mother wept helplessly.

  During his waking hours Tony made only one move that he would consider a mistake. He helped Joanna to get rid of Hoffman and bring the Navaho along with them to Mars. A blunder, Tony considered it in retrospect. The Navaho has become the center of everyone’s attention. Even Joanna’s. Especially Joanna’s.

  SOL 24: NOON

  Aleksander Mironov hummed softly as he checked Jamie’s backpack. The rover’s airlock was crowded with just the two of them in it:-Mironov in his fire-engine red hard suit, Jamie in his sky-blue, with a gray spare helmet to replace his meteorite-gouged original.

  Mironov’s visor was up, and Jamie could see that the Russian was smiling as he clomped back into his view. Mironov’s face looked chunky, almost compressed in his helmet, as if stuffed into a container a half size too small. It was a broad-cheeked, snub-nosed face, slightly ruddy, sprinkled lightly with freckles, with pale blue eyes and eyebrows so fair they were barely visible.

  “Gloves?” Mironov asked.

  “Right here on my belt, Alex.” Jamie tugged them on. Of all the equipment on the mission, the gloves were the most advanced piece of technology. Thin enough to be easily flexible and give the wearer a good feel for whatever he grasped, yet tough enough to protect the hands against the near vacuum of the Martian atmosphere.

  “Visor down,” Mironov said. Only after they had both sealed their helmets did he turn to the pumps and start them chugging.

  “You look tired,” the cosmonaut said over the suit-to-suit radio.

  Surprised, Jamie said to the gold-tinted visor, “I feel okay.”

  “You were outside four hours yesterday, then you stayed up very late last night. You were outside all morning, and now you go again.”

  The pumps stopped. The indicator light turned red. Mironov pushed the hatch open.

  “We’ve only got three days here,” Jamie replied as they stepped through the hatch and down the short ladder to the rough, blackened ground. “We’ve got to make the most of them.”

  “Patel makes you feel guilty.”

  Jamie forgot himself and tried to shrug inside the suit. All he got for his effort was a fresh irritation under his armpit, where the suit chafed him.

  “You must not drive yourself so hard,” Mironov went on. “When you are tired you make mistakes. Mistakes can kill a man.”

  “I’ll be all right. The others are pushing just as hard,” Jamie said.

  “I gave them the same lecture,” said the Russian. His voice sounded more disappointed than distressed.

  “And?” Jamie asked.

  Mironov pointed a gloved finger toward the butter yellow and dark green figures of Patel and Naguib. “They ignored me just as you arc ignoring me.”

  Patel and Naguib were already chipping samples of the dark basaltic rock that spread as far as the eye could see. Old lava flow, Jamie knew. Pavonis Mons had erupted over and over again, red-hot magma flowing in all directions. How long ago? The samples they were taking would give them the answer. They had decided to spend these three precious days at the base of the volcano’s shield, collecting as many samples from as many different locations as possible. They would start to analyze them on the trek back to the base, they had agreed.

  Yet none of the three scientists could resist testing the samples they had collected. Last night they had stayed up for hours, while Mironov reminded them of the mission schedule like an ineffectual camp counselor. They ran a dozen samples through the portable GC/MS in the rover’s lab module.

  The mass spectrometer told them that their samples were iron-rich basalts, no more than five hundred million years old, based on their ratio of potassium to argon.

  “But the argon might have outgassed,” Jamie warned. “Some of it may have escaped into the atmosphere.”

  “Much of it may be missing,” Naguib agreed.

  “Which means that the samples could be much older,” said Jamie.

  Patel, still refusing to meet Jamie’s eyes, said to the Egyptian, “We will run more definitive tests back at the base, where we can irradiate the samples in the power reactor.”

  Naguib nodded and said, “Yes. If the remote handling system is working. It was down …”

  “Pete said he’d have it running by the time we got back,” Jamie said.

  “Astronaut Connors!” Patel almost snorted. “He spends all his time flying the RPV instead of attending to maintenance.”

  “Pete will have the remote handlers working by the time we get back,” Jamie insisted.

  Finally they folded down their bunks for sleep: Patel and Naguib on the uppers, Mironov and Jamie below. Jamie fell asleep quickly, only to be awakened by a
whining, almost sobbing sound from above: One of them’s having a nightmare, he realized. He turned his face toward the curving wall of the rover and went back to sleep. His last conscious thought was that the metal skin of the vehicle felt cold; the freezing night of Mars waited outside, less than an inch away.

  Over breakfast they had agreed that their best strategy was to work along the line of fissures and sinkholes that ran up one side of the volcano’s massive base. They would go as far as they could up the gentle slope of the shield, with Mironov driving the rover behind them so they would not exceed the safe walk-back distance specified in the mission regulations.

  All three of these volcanoes sit astride this big fault line, Jamie said to himself as he laboriously chipped away at the tough black basalt. Looking back toward the rover, he saw Mironov planting another beacon into the ground. It was not easy work; this was real rock, not the compacted sands they had found around their domed base. The thin layer of reddish dust that covered the rock was easily scuffed away. Jamie wondered why the wind did not remove it entirely.

  Inside his hard suit Jamie could not feel any wind, and there were no clouds in the salmon sky to show air movements. Yet the meteorology instruments on their beacons showed a fairly steady breeze of more than forty miles per hour running up the long gradual slope toward the volcano’s distant summit. At night the wind direction reversed to downslope and slowed to little more than twenty miles per hour.

  Forty miles per hour would be a stiff gale on Earth, Jamie knew. But in the thin air of Mars there was no strength in the wind, not even enough to scour the last layer of sand off the rocks.