Mars

by Ben Bova

  The mission rule book doesn’t cover this, Jamie had told himself as he slowly, carefully climbed the ladder. He had gone up as if mountain climbing, three points attached at all times. Move one gloved hand to the next rung. Grip it, then move the other hand. Grip, then one booted foot. Make sure it’s firmly seated on the rung, then pull up the other one. The dust frightened him. He pictured himself drowning in it like a man caught in quicksand.

  Now at last he stood up on the roof. If you have any power to help at all, he said silently to the fetish, now’s the time to get it working.

  “What’s it look like?” Connors’s voice came through his helmet earphones.

  “Not good,” Jamie replied, surveying the scene. “She’s buried up over the fenders, all except the last half of the rear module. Not enough traction to pull us out.”

  Connors said nothing, although Jamie could hear his ragged breathing.

  “How’re you doing?” he asked.

  “I’m fine. Just can’t get up on my fuckin’ feet, that’s all.”

  Jamie’s head was swimming with dizziness. His body ached all over and he felt so tired that it was tempting just to stretch out right there and go to sleep. The canyon was so wide that he could actually see the sunset; the cliffs on the other side were too far away to be visible, tall as they were. He watched the sun for a moment, saw it touch the rocky horizon, felt the shadows of deathly freezing night reaching toward him. Inside his suit he shuddered, almost like a dog trying to shake off water.

  He looked down at the tiny stone bear in the fading light. The leather thong holding the miniature arrowhead and the feather had been lovingly tied by his grandfather. An eagle’s feather, Jamie thought. Symbol of strength. I could sure use some now.

  Into his helmet microphone he said, “I might as well come down. There’s nothing I can do up here and the sun’s going down.”

  Tucking the miniature stone bear back into the pouch on the right leg of his hard suit, Jamie started slowly down the ladder. By the time he had painfully made his way back into the airlock it was dark outside. Connors was sitting in the heaped sand, his white hard suit coated with the red dust.

  Jamie tried to sound cheerful. “You look like a snowman playing in a pile of rust.”

  “I feel like a goddammed snowman—in July,” Connors grumbled.

  Slowly, like two arthritic old men, they shoveled most of the sand outside and then closed the outer hatch.

  “Gotta clean off the suits,” Connors muttered.

  “We’ve got to get you on your feet first,” Jamie said.

  It seemed like hours of tugging and pushing, but finally Connors was standing again and they went through the motions of vacuuming the dust off their suits. The suits were still stained rust-red, though, as they struggled out of them. The airlock smelled of ozone so heavily that Jamie’s eyes burned and watered.

  Finally they staggered through the inner hatch and half collapsed on the midship benches. Both women were up in the cockpit, Joanna with a headset clamped over her thick dark hair.

  “Vosnesensky wants to talk to you,” Joanna called back to them, her voice hoarse, labored.

  Ilona muttered, “The Russian pig won’t trust a woman with his important messages.”

  Jamie felt his temper snap. “Jesus Christ, Ilona, knock off the anti-Russian crap! We’re in a bad enough fix without your bullshit!”

  She smiled languidly at him. “What difference does it make? We are all going to die here no matter what I say, aren’t we?”

  Joanna clutched at her arm. “No! We are not going to die! Jamie won’t let us die.”

  He looked into their faces as he painfully made his way toward them in the cockpit. The illness had changed them. Ilona was no longer the haughty, imperious beauty who flouted all the rules. Her cheeks were sunken, her eyes ringed with dark circles. She had a look of near panic in her face; the smell of death was on her. Joanna’s eyes were burning, blazing. She still looked like a bedraggled little waif, but now there was something in her eyes that Jamie had never seen before: a strength, an endurance he had not realized was in her. Perhaps Joanna had not known it herself. She focused those eyes on Jamie, urgent, demanding.

  “No, I won’t let us die,” Jamie said in a half whisper. He added silently, Not without a fight, at least.

  A growing feeling of helplessness was beginning to overwhelm Dr. Li.

  “Kaliningrad insists that a rescue flight is out of the question,” he said.

  The expedition commander wanted to stand and pace, wanted to work off the nervous energy sizzling inside him. But in the low-ceilinged confines of the command module he had to content himself with sitting in one of the narrow padded chairs with his knees poking up ridiculously, clenching and unclenching his fists as he spoke.

  “But they’re stuck down there!” Burt Klein said.

  Li shook his head. “Kaliningrad says the last lander is to be used only in the direst emergency.”

  “The fact that four of our people are in danger of dying is not a dire emergency?” asked Leonid Tolbukhin sourly.

  The cosmonaut and astronaut had quickly volunteered to pilot the expedition’s last remaining landing vehicle to the canyon to rescue the four stranded in the rover.

  “We could sit her down within fifty yards of the rover,” Klein said confidently, “and then bring them straight back here. Nothing to it.”

  “A piece of cake,” Tolbukhin confirmed, the British idiom sounding strange and deliberate in his deep Russian voice.

  “Kaliningrad says no. You two are the only pilots left here in orbit.”

  “Bring Ivshenko and Zieman back here,” Tolbukhin suggested. “Then Burt and I can go to the canyon.”

  “Sure!” Klein said. “You’ll still have two L/AVs and four pilots at the dome. That’ll be plenty to bring the others back when the time comes.”

  Li’s face was a picture of misery. “Ivshenko and Zieman cannot return here without Yang. We cannot leave both our doctors at the dome. What good would it do to bring the traverse team up here if there is no physician here to treat them?”

  Tolbukhin nodded reluctantly.

  “There is something more,” Li told them. “The medical staff at Kaliningrad has brought up the question of quarantine.”

  “Quarantine?”

  Li felt miserable as he said, “Since we do not know what is infecting the ground team, they fear that whatever it is might infect us here in orbit if we return the ground team here.”

  “Holy shit,” Klein muttered. “They want us to leave them down there?”

  Tolbukhin grasped the larger implication. “That means they will not allow us to return to Earth if we have not found the source of the disease.”

  “Yes,” admitted Li. “We ourselves might be quarantined in Earth orbit.”

  “If we live long enough to get back that far,” the Russian said.

  “The alternative is to leave the ground team and return to Earth without them.”

  “That’d kill them!” Klein snapped.

  “Yes. But to rescue them and bring them back up to orbit with us might kill us all.”

  For long moments neither the astronaut nor the cosmonaut spoke a word.

  Finally Klein said, “Well, you’ve got to do something.”

  Li knew he was right. The weight of responsibility was squarely on his shoulders. Let the four in the rover die, or risk the lives of everyone—including those in orbit—by allowing the last of their pilots to ride to the rescue on the last of the landing/ascent vehicles. Abandon the ground team altogether or risk catching their disease and killing everyone.

  Li felt the weight of two dozen lives on him. The weight of two worlds.

  When the last of the physicals was finished Tony Reed asked Yang Meilin, “What do you expect to find?”

  She shot him a sharp glance from the chair on which she sat. “The cause of this epidemic.”

  Reed had barely budged from the corner of the infirmary where he ha
d watched her examine all the people in the dome. Now he made a puzzled shrug.

  “Vosnesensky thinks it might be Martian dust that we’re inhaling,” he said.

  Yang’s almond eyes watched him unblinkingly from beneath her straight bangs. “Do you believe that?”

  “No, I don’t. We’ve tested the air here in the dome. It’s cleaner than the air in London, by far.”

  She got up from the chair, a tiny Chinese woman with a nondescript figure and an utterly forgettable round, flat-featured face—except for those eyes. Reed thought they looked at him accusingly. Why not? Why shouldn’t she blame me for this calamity? It is my fault, my responsibility. I was put here to protect the health of these men and women. Some protector!

  “Well,” he asked, “what do you think?”

  She shook her head slightly. “I cannot tell. All the data from the tests we have just done are being analyzed by the medical computer aboard Mars 2. Until we get its results I cannot go further.”

  Reed gave an exasperated sigh. “It won’t do any good, you know. The first thing I did when they started coming down with this malady was to run all the medical records through the computer diagnostic program. It just burped out nonsense.”

  “Perhaps now, with more data …”

  “I doubt it. The computer can only tell you what it already knows, and we’re facing something new and unprecedented here.”

  “Perhaps not. It may be something ordinary but unexpected. That is the great strength of the computer: it is not clouded by human expectations or emotions. It analyzes all the symptoms and reports which medical conditions fit the data.”

  “Yes,” Reed sniffed, feeling real anger surging up inside him. “I’ll tell you what the damned computer will give us. It will suggest that the malady might be a variation of influenza—which it isn’t, because we’ve found no influenza viruses in the blood workups; or malaria—which is ridiculous because the nearest mosquito is two hundred million kilometers from here; or radiation poisoning—which it can’t be, because the dosimeters show that every member of the team is well within tolerable limits; or a vitamin deficiency—which is ludicrous because I see to it that everyone takes their bloody vitamin supplements,”

  Yang said, “Perhaps a slow virus? Perhaps an infection such as Legionnaires’ disease?”

  “I thought of that,” Reed snapped! “The symptoms don’t match.”

  The Chinese doctor murmured something too low for Reed to hear. Ignoring her, he went on:

  “The marvelous computer analysis will also suggest the possibility of salmonellosis, tuberculosis, or typhoid fever—in decreasing probabilities, of course.”

  He stopped, out of breath, seething with a rage that he had not realized was in him.

  “Why are you angry with me?” Yang asked, her mask of impassivity gone. She looked shocked, hurt.

  Tony stared at her, his insides jumping, his hands clenching into fists. He took a deep breath, then stepped back to his desk.

  “I’m sorry. I apologize. It’s not you. I suppose I’m angry at myself, really. This thing—I can’t for the life of me figure out what it is!” He banged a fist on the flimsy desktop.

  “That is why we need the help of the computer program.”

  Reed cast her a cynical smile.

  “Not to tell us what the disease may be,” Yang explained, “but to rule out definitely what it is not.”

  “I don’t believe it can even do that.”

  Yang tried to smile. “Was it not one of your English writers who said that once you have ruled out the impossible, then whatever is left—however improbable it may seem—must be the truth?”

  Reed blinked at her. “Arthur Clarke?”

  As politely as she could, Yang replied, “I believe it was Conan Doyle.”

  EARTH

  KALININGRAD: In a windowless conference room in the mission control complex, twenty men and women from six nations thrashed out the problem that assailed them from nearly two hundred million kilometers away.

  The oblong conference table was littered with scribbled sheets of paper, crusts from sandwiches, charts and view-graphs, Styrofoam beverage cups, ashtrays heaped high with smoldering butts. Some of the people around the table slouched miserably, heads in their hands, jackets long pulled off and shirtsleeves rolled high. A few paced pointlessly along the length of the stuffy, smoky room.

  They had long ago shouted themselves hoarse without arriving at a conclusion.

  At the head of the table sat the chief of mission control, a lean red-headed Russian with a saturnine pointed beard and red eyebrows like inverted vees. He tapped a long fingernail on the imitation wood of the tabletop. In the exhausted silence of the room every head swiveled toward him.

  “We cannot merely sit here without making a decision. Human lives are at stake. The success of the entire mission is at stake!”

  One of the women, a Swede, coughed slightly, cleared her throat, then said: “Our alternatives are clear—allow the traverse team to die or take the risk of killing more members of the expedition in an attempt to save them.”

  “We can’t just let them die!” said another woman.

  “But a rescue attempt might fail and there will be more deaths,” countered a Japanese male.

  “Half the reporters in the world are pounding on our doors,” someone commented sourly. “We’ve got to do something, and do it now!”

  “We should never have permitted an excursion into the canyon,” a Frenchman complained. “Not on the very first mission. It was not in our original plan. We bowed to blatant American political pressure. That is what has put us in this chamber pot.”

  “But Brumado’s daughter is one of the people who are stranded. We can’t let her die! Who’s going to. face him and say that we decided to let his daughter die?”

  “I am convinced,” said a chubby, balding Russian, “that the only thing we can do is to bring up the people in the dome right now, get them up to safety in the orbiting ships, and then send the last lander down to the canyon to take up the four in the rover.”

  “And abort the expedition two weeks earlier than the schedule calls for?”

  “Schedule?” an American shouted. “Schedule? What the hell difference does the damned schedule make? We’re talking human lives here!”

  The chief controller pressed both his hands together, almost as if praying. “I am afraid that your suggestion is the only reasonable course of action that we have open to us. Even though it is not entirely free of risk.”

  “It means that the people in the rover will have to wait at least another two days before the lander can be sent to them.”

  “I doubt that we can close down the operations at the dome and bring all those people up with their equipment and specimens in just two days. The schedule calls for a full week to shut down the dome.”

  “This is an emergency! Leave the equipment and specimens. Bring up the people and get on with the rescue, for god’s sake!”

  “Leave everything?”

  “Retrieve it on the next mission.”

  “There won’t be another mission. Not if we have to abandon this one, run away from Mars like thieves in the night.”

  “That’s the most stupid metaphor I’ve heard yet!”

  “Just because you’re a woman doesn’t give you the right to …”

  “Silence!” roared the chief controller. “I will not have us squabbling like children in a schoolyard. We will abort the mission. We will bring up the people in the dome as quickly as possible and then send the last of the landers to pick up the traverse team in the canyon. Anyone who wants to go on record as being against that decision should raise his or her hand. Now.”

  Not a single hand went up.

  “And it is also agreed,” the chief controller added, “that none of the expedition members will be allowed back to Earth unless and until this medical problem is solved. They will remain quarantined in Earth orbit.”

  “If they get that far,” someo
ne said in a stage whisper.

  WASHINGTON: Edith could tell from Alberto’s face that something had gone very wrong.

  “What is it?” she asked.

  They were in the kitchen of the Georgetown house, just finishing breakfast before heading to Capitol Hill. Brumado had a date to testify before a congressional subcommittee holding hearings on the next fiscal year’s budget for space. The kitchen overlooked a lovely garden bounded by a redbrick wall. Most of the flowers were gone this late in the season, except for the hardy little impatiens lining the curved brick walkway with pink-and-white blooms that nodded in the soft morning breeze.

  “What is it?” Edith asked again.

  Brumado was at the telephone by the sink. His face was ashen. “My daughter … the traverse team … they are stranded in the canyon. Their rover vehicle has bogged down.”

  Edith got up from the glass-topped table, her breakfast instantly forgotten. “They have the backup rover, don’t they? They can pick them up …”

  But Brumado was shaking his head. “They’re sick. All of them on the ground team. Something has made them all very sick and weak.”

  “Jamie too?”

  “Yes. Him too.”

  Edith felt her own breath catch in her throat. She swallowed hard, then asked, “What’re they going to do?”

  “NASA has offered to fly me to Houston, the mission control complex there.”

  “But what about Jamie and your daughter?”

  “I must testify to the subcommittee,” Brumado was muttering absently, like a man in shock. “They asked me not to reveal any of this. Not yet.”

  “But Jamie?”

  Abruptly he seemed to realize she was standing in front of him. “Edith, I must have your word that you will not break this news to your network.”

  “Hey, I don’t have a network anymore. I’m unemployed, remember? But what about Jamie? Is he …”

  “I don’t know!” Brumado snapped. Edith realized that he was fighting to maintain his self-control. She saw tears glimmering in the corners of his eyes.

  “Maybe you ought to cancel the subcommittee appearance,” she suggested.