Mars

by Ben Bova

  Come on, Jamie urged silently. Let’s get this show on the road.

  Vosnesensky’s face pulled together in a morose little frown. He puffed out a deep breath, more of a snort than a sigh. “Very well,” he said at last. “You are cleared to proceed.”

  Jamie let his own breath out as Connors nodded and replied, “Right. Here we go.”

  “Dahsvedahnya. Good luck.”

  “Thanks, Mike,” Connors said. He licked his lips, then nudged the accelerator pedal. The rover surged forward. Jamie turned off the comm screen before Vosnesensky could change his mind.

  “We’re off,” Ilona murmured.

  “Next stop, Tithonium Chasma,” said Connors, trying to sound cheerful.

  Their excursion plan called for them to go directly to the canyon, stopping only at sundown and starting again at the next sunrise. There were to be no EVAs, no stops along the way to go outside and explore. Their goal was Tithonium Chasma and nothing less. Jamie wanted them to have as much time and as much food and water and other consumables at the canyon as they possibly could.

  The impromptu maps that had been stitched together from the photos taken by the remotely piloted airplanes had shown that it might be possible to descend to the canyon floor along the slope of an ancient landslide that had partially filled in one section of the canyon’s cliff wall. It would be tricky going at best. Most of the old landslides had slumped down below the canyon rim, leaving a drop too steep for the rover to handle. Some of the avalanches completely filled in the canyon floor and even rode up the southern cliff face.

  This one, though, seemed usable, and was within the range of their rover. Not too steep, it extended from the lip of the cliff wall down to the bottom without totally covering the canyon floor. It was narrow, compared to most of the others, barely a kilometer wide. But that would be plenty of room for the rover. If the rubble was firm enough to ride over without getting bogged down. If the slope was gentle enough all the way to the bottom; the aerial photos could not catch all the details of every inch of the slide.

  To Jamie it looked like a recent landslide, newer and fresher than the older, bigger ones that had gouged huge alcoves out of the canyon walls. Recent, he knew, meant that it might be only a few million years old.

  “Looks like a nice day,” Connors joked.

  The sky was a delicate salmon pink and as cloudless as always.

  Jamie cracked back, “I don’t know. Might rain in another hundred thousand years or so.”

  “Damn! I left the umbrella back in Houston.”

  Joanna, still standing behind the driver’s seat, said quite seriously, “Toshima said there have been an unusual number of dust storms farther north.”

  “How does he define unusual?” Ilona asked.

  “Compared to satellite observations over the past ten years, I suppose.”

  “No storms this close to the equator, though,” Jamie said.

  “Not so far,” Joanna replied. “But we do not know what causes the storms to start.”

  “Or stop,” said Ilona.

  Connors said, “Hell, we don’t even know what starts storms on Earth, and the meteorology guys have been studying ’em since Ben Franklin’s time.”

  They stayed precisely on schedule, stopped when the Shrunken sun touched the red horizon, and called in their position to Vosnesensky back at the dome. Some of the old strangeness seeped into Jamie’s soul as the four of them ate their precooked dinners. We’re out in the middle of a frozen desert, surrounded by air we can’t breathe at a temperature that can freeze our blood in seconds. How safe and homey the dome seemed now!

  They sat on the padded benches that unfolded into bunks, two by two, the men on one side of the narrow table and the women on the other. Jamie took the first turn on the cleanup detail while Connors went back to the cockpit to check all the rover’s systems before retiring for the night. The women slid the table into its niche below the bottom right bunk, chatting together, then took turns in the lavatory.

  Once all four bunks were unfolded the rover’s compartment became impossibly crowded. The two women took the uppers, leaving Jamie and Connors to slide into the lowers like a pair of sewer workers crawling into a tunnel. Jamie could hear Joanna and Ilona whispering together over his head like a pair of schoolgirls. No giggling, though. They seemed totally serious, whatever it was they were confiding to each other.

  A sudden thought pulsed through him. Suppose Ilona tells Joanna about making out with me during the transit here! Damn! He did not want Joanna to know that.

  Ilona wouldn’t do that, he told himself. It doesn’t make sense for her to talk about that. Why would she tell Joanna? It’d make a complete mess of our relationships here, cooped up in this aluminum can. She wouldn’t do that. Ilona’s smart enough to know she shouldn’t.

  But there’s a strange streak in her, he realized. She has a weird sense of humor. Maybe she thinks it’d be funny.

  Jamie strained his ears but could hear nothing except the wind sighing outside. The women had gone to sleep. Or at least stopped talking. It took a long time before Jamie fell into a troubled sleep, dreaming of school all over again.

  Li Chengdu felt relaxed for the first time since they had taken up orbit around Mars.

  We have weathered the political storms, he told himself. We are even doing some good scientific work. Despite the tragedy of Konoye’s death, the Americans and Russians have proved that they can actually extract water from the Martian moons. The next expedition will be able to refuel here and replenish most of its consumables. There will be no more need to carry every gram of water and air and rocket propellant for the entire two-way journey. Things will be easier the next time. We will even be able to establish a replenishment depot on Phobos.

  He eased back in his comfortable chair and watched Vosnesensky’s heavy, dour face in his communications screen as the Russian made his evening report. The man’s normal expression is a scowl, Li thought. I don’t believe I have ever seen him so much as smile.

  Vosnesensky was reporting that everything was proceeding normally. The traverse was going according to schedule; Waterman’s team should reach the lip of the canyon before sundown tomorrow. Patel and Naguib were analyzing the lava flow samples that they had brought back from Pavonis Mons. Monique Bonnet was testing other rock samples from Pavonis for evidence of life. She had found some interesting microscopic formations in the samples, but no organisms, not even organic chemicals.

  Tsoshima was fretting about a series of dust storms up north, almost at the edge of the melting polar cap. The Japanese meteorologist insisted that such storm activity at this time of the year was unusual and bore careful watching. Especially with a traverse team out in the open. Li Chengdu nodded absently. He agreed totally. The storms bore watching. But there was little else that could be done about them.

  Finally Vosnesensky looked up from the notes he had been reading and said, “That completes my report.”

  Li said to the image on the screen, “Everyone is in good health?”

  With a grunt and a nod the Russian answered, “Yes, it seems so. I can have Dr. Reed give you the data from his weekly examinations.”

  “That information is transmitted to our computer, is it not?”

  “Yes. Automatically.”

  “Then I can access it if necessary without troubling Dr. Reed.” Li hesitated a heartbeat. “Tell me, how is everyone emotionally? How do you assess the psychological aspects of your group members?”

  Vosnesensky’s beefy face showed surprise, then pulled into a thoughtful frown. “They all seem normal enough to me,” he said after several moments. “There was considerable excitement just before the excursion team left, but everything has settled back to normal routine now.”

  That was precisely what Li wanted to hear. “Good,” he said. “I am glad that they are happy in their work.”

  Mikhail Vosnesensky nodded glumly at Dr. Li’s image on the comm screen. The expedition commander made a few more polit
e remarks, then bade the cosmonaut a good night.

  Vosnesensky continued to stare at the display screen for long moments after it had gone dead gray. He had not lied to the expedition commander, not exactly. He had merely put the best face on the answer he gave to Li’s question about morale. True enough, everyone seemed to be happy in their work. Yet that was not the entire truth.

  There was something subtly wrong, Vosnesensky thought. He felt a tension in the air that had not been there a few weeks earlier. Nothing he could put his finger on, no obvious clashes or animosities. Nothing so blatant as Ilona Malater’s malicious baiting or Patel’s unhappy bleating about the schedule rearrangements.

  But something was going on. Something.

  Most of the group have lost weight. It’s been especially noticeable over the past week or so. Reed says that’s to be expected, though. And all that physiological data goes straight back to the medical experts on Earth. If it alarmed them they would have let us know by now, wouldn’t they?

  Or would they be afraid of frightening us, ruining our efficiency? After all, we only have a little over three more weeks to go.

  Perhaps I should discuss it with Reed, he said to himself as he got up from the communications console. He’s our doctor. And psychologist. Perhaps he can throw some light on the problem.

  With a shrug of his heavy shoulders Vosnesensky decided to try to get a good night’s sleep, instead. I can talk to Reed tomorrow if I still feel worried. Tomorrow will be soon enough.

  SOL 35: EVENING

  “Who would have thought,” complained Ilona, “that one could get so tired merely sitting down all day?”

  Long, darkly red shadows were stretching across the sandy barren landscape. Jamie saw that the sun would be setting in an hour or so.

  “Doing nothing can be more exhausting than hard physical labor,” Joanna agreed.

  All day long the two women had been either sitting on the folded benches or standing behind the men in their cockpit seats as the rover trundled across the boulder-strewn wilderness toward Tithonium Chasma. Jamie had taken turns at driving with Pete Connors. His head ached from the unrelieved tension; even when he was in the right-hand seat he hunched forward in strained concentration, watching anxiously for rocks too big to clamber over or craters too steep to traverse.

  The land they were traveling across was rough, uneven rust-red formations of low, flat-topped hills, with a rugged wall of mountains in the distance lining the horizon. Just like the Chinle Formation in Arizona, Jamie said to himself, shaking his head in wonder at the similarities between the two worlds. They had found dinosaur bones in those red rocks back home, he remembered.

  “Anything wrong?” Connors asked.

  Almost startled, Jamie pulled himself out of his reverie. The astronaut was grinning at him good-naturedly.

  “You were frowning as if your shoes are too tight,” Connors said.

  “Just thinking about geology,” said Jamie.

  “Does it hurt?”

  Jamie laughed and shook his head.

  A few minutes later, Jamie asked, “Pete, what does the ‘T’ stand for? Why don’t you use your first name?”

  Connors’s long face sank into a frown. “Tyrone,” he muttered.

  “Tyrone?”

  “Don’t tell anybody.”

  “Why not? It’s a fine old Irish name.”

  Connors’s grin returned, but somehow it looked almost sad. “The white kids in Nebraska didn’t think so. Got me into a helluva lot of fights. Didn’t look right for the minister’s son to have skinned knuckles all the time. ‘Pete’ is a lot easier to live with.”

  I wonder how many extra battles he had to fight in the Air Force, Jamie thought. And the space agency.

  They kept on driving as the distant, pale sun sank toward the red horizon. Connors was muttering into the microphone of the comm set clipped over his short-cropped hair. Jamie did not have his earphones on, but he knew that the astronaut was checking their position on the satellite-generated photo map and calling in to Vosnesensky at home base.

  According to the display screen in the middle of the cockpit control panel they were less than five kilometers from the canyon. Jamie checked his wristwatch; about fifteen minutes of daylight remained.

  Connors slewed the segmented rover almost ninety degrees off its course and eased it to a stop. The electric generator that powered the wheel motors hummed to a lower pitch.

  “Okay, that’s it for today,” he said.

  Before Jamie could ask why he had turned off course Connors called over his shoulder to the women, “Come on up and watch the sunset!”

  They crowded into the cockpit and watched in silence as the strangely small sun sunk below a line of bluffs. The sky turned from pink to burning red, then went utterly black. Jamie strained his eyes for a glimpse of the aurora, but either it was too delicate to be seen through the tinted canopy or there was none. Maybe it’s only there when the sun’s active, he guessed.

  None of them moved. No one said a word. Jamie felt the cold of the Martian night seeping through the plastic bubble of the cockpit. Slowly, as their eyes adjusted, a few of the brightest stars gleamed through the bulbous tinted plastic.

  “That must be the Earth,” Ilona said in her breathy sultry voice.

  “Nope. It’s Sirius,” Connors corrected. “According to the ephemeris Earth is already below the horizon.”

  “We cannot see it at all?” Joanna asked.

  “Not until she becomes a morning star. And we’ll be on our way home by then.”

  Jamie stared out at the dark night sky. He could see only a sparse sprinkling of Stars. The sky looked lonely, abandoned.

  Connors reached up and pulled the thermal shroud over the plastic canopy. Then, “Could you let me squeeze past, please?” he said to the women. “I’ve got to get some aspirin.”

  “Headache?” Ilona asked.

  “Yeah. Too many hours driving. It’s a lot easier flying a plane.”

  “Me too,” said Ilona. “I’ll join you at the aspirin bottle.”

  Jamie wondered if Ilona was going to make a play for the astronaut. Not here, he thought. It’s too crowded, there’s too much at stake. Then he realized that his own temples were throbbing. It had been a tense day, driving constantly.

  By the time they finished dinner, though, they all seemed to feel better. Connors regaled them with stories about his days as the “tail-end Charlie” with the U.S. Air Force’s acrobatic flying team, the Thunderbirds.

  “… so we pull out of the loop, wingtip to wingtip, and my goddam canopy pops off, pow! just like that. We’re pulling four g’s and battin’ along close to Mach 1 and all of a sudden I’m in the middle of a regular hurricane right there in my cockpit!”

  His black face was alive with expression, his hands twisting to show the positions of the airplanes. Both women were listening raptly, their wide eyes riveted on Connors. Jamie listened with half an ear and let his mind wander to the task they would face in the morning: finding a safe slope down the landslide to the floor of the canyon. Would the ground be firm enough to hold them? Would it be too rocky for the rover’s wheels?

  Li’s people up in orbit had fired the last four of their geological probes into the canyon. Completely automated, the probes shed their atmospheric heat shields as they neared the ground and then drifted to soft touchdowns on billowing white parachutes. Only one of them had actually sunk its instrument-bearing anchor into the rubble of the landslide itself. The other three had missed it by ranges of a few dozen meters to a full kilometer.

  That one probe’s instruments reported that the landslide was firm enough for the rover to traverse. But it was only one spot on the slide. What if there were pockets of loose powdery soil? What if they got stuck halfway down? To come this close and then have to turn back would be sickening. …

  He realized that Connors had finished his story and gone back to the cockpit for his final check-in with the dome before retiring for the night. Il
ona had gone up there with him, sitting in the chair Jamie had occupied most of the day.

  Joanna was sliding the table into its slot below the lower bunk, opposite Jamie.

  “Are you all right?” she asked.

  “Hmm? Yes, sure. I’m okay.”

  “You seemed to drift away from us.”

  “I was thinking.”

  She smiled slightly. “Not a bad thing for a scientist to do—on occasion.”

  “How do you feel?” he asked.

  “Oh … tired. Worried, I suppose.”

  “Worried? About what?”

  Sitting on the edge of the folded bunk beside Jamie, she said in her whispery voice, “Suppose we go all this way, suppose we get to the bottom of the canyon—and there is nothing there? No life.”

  Jamie shrugged. “That’s why we’re going all this way: to find out if there’s life down there or not.”

  “But suppose we find none?” There was something in her eyes that Jamie could not fathom, something more than anxiety, deeper than a scientist’s concern over the outcome of an investigation.

  “If there isn’t any life to be found down there,” Jamie answered slowly, “that in itself is an important discovery. We’ll just have to search elsewhere.”

  Joanna shook her head. “If there is no life beneath the mists, what can we expect from the rest of this frozen desert? We will have failed, Jamie. There will never be another expedition to Mars.”

  “Hey, don’t get so down,” he said, reaching out to grasp her shoulder gently. “It won’t be your fault if Mars is lifeless.”

  “But we will have come all this way for nothing.”

  “No. Not for nothing. We’re here to learn whatever it is that Mars has to teach us. That’s what science is all about, Joanna. It’s not a game, where you keep score. It’s about building up knowledge. The negative results are just as important as the positives. More so, maybe.”

  The expression on her face was close to misery.

  “We’re here to seek the truth,” Jamie said in an urgent whisper, “and not to be afraid of what we find, whatever it is.”