Mars

by Ben Bova

  “This morning doesn’t count,” Jamie said.

  “All right … but just … this once.”

  Connors and finally Vosnesensky rode the cable across the sand-filled crater. By the time the sun was at high noon, they were all out of their suits and Vosnesensky was at the controls in the cockpit, grinning hugely.

  “Now we return to the dome,” he said. “And from there to orbit in a few days.”

  “And from orbit, back to Earth,” Connors said, perched on one of the benches.

  Ivshenko was up in the cockpit with Vosnesensky. Jamie was sitting on the bench between Joanna and the astronaut. Reed was standing beside the galley, his back to the airlock hatch. They had pulled down the lower bunk on the opposite side so that Ilona could lie on it. She seemed to be asleep as the rover lurched into motion.

  “You saved our necks, man,” said Connors.

  “Not me,” Jamie said. “Tony …”

  But Joanna interrupted him by laying a hand on his thigh. “You saved us. And not only us. You saved our Martian specimens.”

  Jamie looked down at her urchin’s face, drawn and pale. Is that why she kissed me? Because I saved her damned lichen?

  EARTH

  Alberto Brumado smiled tiredly into the dazzling lights. He thought he knew how exhausted the explorers on Mars must feel; he felt the same way. He had lost track of how many hours he had been sitting before the lights and cameras and reporters, answering their questions, feeding them the news of the stranded team as it became available to him.

  The little lobby of the hotel had quickly proved too small for Brumado’s impromptu news conference, so they had moved—reporters, camera crews, lights, and all—to the largest conference room in the hotel and quickly jammed it to the walls and out into the corridor beyond its wide double doors.

  The Mars Project officials at the Johnson Space Center had been furious, at first, that Brumado was talking off the cuff to the media. But after the first few hours, and hurried phone discussions with Washington and Kaliningrad, the project bigwigs had offered Brumado their own spacious conference hall at the Johnson Center.

  None of the media people wanted to shut down and move to Johnson, not while they had Brumado live, giving a bravura marathon performance. So, swallowing their resentment, the Johnson people began passing information to Brumado as it came in from Mars.

  Brumado was sitting on a folding chair behind a little table, up on the makeshift dais that had been quickly erected at the far end of the room. Perspiring, hair tousled, suit rumpled, tie long gone from his collar, he took another sheet of paper from Edith’s hand, scanned it quickly, then smiled up at the cameras.

  “They are safe,” he said, the three most wonderful words he had ever spoken. “Dr. Waterman carried the cable line to the second rover and cosmonaut Vosnesensky has brought the others to their vehicle. They have started on their way back to the dome.”

  He could not see the pack of reporters beyond the glare of the TV lights, but he heard them sigh audibly, then break into spontaneous applause. Brumado felt surprised at that; then he wondered if they were applauding the good news or his own performance. The good news, of course. Joanna is safe. She will live. He stood up on weak, trembling legs and raised both his hands.

  “If you will excuse me, I would like to take a break now. The public-information people at Johnson can take over, if you would be kind enough to go there.”

  They applauded again, startling him anew. This time he realized it was for him. Alberto Brumado smiled boyishly and realized he needed to go to the toilet very badly.

  Edith, standing off to one side of the dais, knew that Brumado would immediately want to speak to his daughter. She intended to be there when he did. It would be her chance to see Jamie.

  He’s safe, Edith said to herself. And a hero. She felt proud of him. And of Alberto, who had turned this near disaster into a global media triumph.

  It was only then, after more than twelve nonstop hours, that Edith began to think about how this event could be used to further her own career.

  SOL 45: MORNING

  Everyone feels so damned happy to be leaving, Jamie thought. Why don’t I?

  They had packed their specimens and computer disks aboard the ascent modules of the L/AVs. All the lab equipment and what remained of their supplies had been carefully covered and sealed, to be left inside the dome with the furniture and life-support equipment, ready to be used by the next explorers—if there was to be a second Mars expedition.

  Jamie felt as if he were leaving a home he had lived in all his life. He remembered the hollow, almost frightened feeling in the pit of his stomach the day he and his parents had left Santa Fe for their new home in Berkeley. He had been five years old then. Funny the things you remember, he thought.

  The dome echoed now with emptiness. He felt sad, despondent about it.

  “Message coming in for you,” Ollie Zieman told him, startling Jamie out of his reverie. The astronaut was manning the communications console until the last L/AV was ready to lift off.

  Jamie followed him to the comm center and sat in front of the main console. He was surprised to see Edith’s face on the screen.

  She looked very tired, as if she had not slept for days. But happy.

  “Jamie, I’ve been trying to get through to you for five days now. The project people have finally let me send a personal message to y’all. We—Alberto and me—we’ve been on the air almost nonstop, trying to do what you guys call damage control for the project. Alberto gave them a blow-by-blow account of your rescue, and I saw to it that his version of what happened to y’all got out on the air before anybody else had a chance to say diddly-squat.”

  Jamie grinned at her image. No matter what she was doing with her private life, Edith had become part of the Mars team.

  “Now, they only gave me a minute of their precious transmission time, so all I got time to say is—I’ll be waiting for you in Washington when you get back. I’ll be the full-time regular space correspondent for Cable News, and I expect to get a private and exclusive interview with you. Don’t matter who else you been talking to, if you get what I mean. I want to interview you. Understand me?”

  She looked out from the screen expectantly. Jamie glanced over his shoulder at Zieman, who busily pretended not to have been eavesdropping.

  “Okay,” Jamie said, knowing it would take more than twelve minutes for his words to reach Edith. “A complete and exclusive interview. Like the one we did in Galveston when I found out that I’d been selected for the landing team. Maybe you can arrange to meet us at the space station. Zero gravity can be a lot of fun.”

  He sensed another person standing behind him. Turning in the chair, he saw it was Joanna, looking at him with a strange, quizzical smile playing on her lips. She held up the fingers of both hands to him. Nine fingers. We’ll be in transit for nine months, Jamie translated her silent message.

  Joanna walked away, still smiling. And Jamie realized that she was telling him that the trip back home was going to be very different from the voyage outward.

  “It is time to suit up,” Vosnesensky said.

  For the last time, Jamie said to himself. One final hour or so in the hard suits and then we’ll be aboard the spacecraft and ready to start for home. Everyone headed for the airlock and the racks of hard suits waiting for them.

  Zieman and Dr. Yang went with Tony Reed, the diminutive Chinese physician walking in front of the Englishman, the husky astronaut behind him. Like a prisoner under house arrest, Jamie thought. They’re already blaming him for the scurvy outbreak. They’ll want a scapegoat back on Earth and they’ve decided it’s going to be Tony.

  Reed looked pale and withdrawn, but when he saw Jamie coming up beside him his old crooked little smile returned. “My god, James, you look positively morose. Don’t you want to go home?”

  “Sure I do.” But Jamie knew it was only partially true.

  “You want to continue exploring Mars, don’t you?�
� Reed said.

  “Don’t you?”

  “No thanks,” Reed said fervently. “I’ve had enough of this dust bowl. I’m looking forward to England and rain and flower gardens.”

  Jamie thought of the desert where his Navaho ancestors lived. How much like Mars it is; yet how different.

  “If you’re feeling so melancholy,” Reed jibed, “then perhaps you ought to stay here.”

  “I wish I could,” Jamie admitted.

  Reed hiked an eyebrow.

  “How are you doing, Tony?” Jamie asked.

  “I’m fine. Don’t worry about me.”

  Jamie said, “I’m going to have a long talk with Dr. Li, once we get back into orbit. And with the mission controllers.”

  “On my behalf?”

  “Right.”

  “Don’t bother.”

  “I damned well will bother,” Jamie said, with quiet intensity. “I’ll take it all the way up to the project directors, if I have to.”

  “Don’t be silly,” said Reed. “And don’t give me that ‘you saved my life’ business again.”

  “But they’re going to make you the scapegoat for everything that went wrong with the mission!”

  Reed’s smile turned bitter. “What of it? The mission needs a sacrificial lamb, doesn’t it? One man killed in orbit. The entire ground team nearly killed by a stupid mistake. You can be the mission’s hero, James. I’ll be the goat.”

  “That’s not right. It’s not fair.”

  Reed’s smile turned sour. “Perhaps you’d better stay, then, my heroic friend. That’s the only way you’re going to get to explore more of this miserable ball of rust. Once we get back home and they start dissecting all the mistakes we’ve made, there will never be another expedition to Mars. Never.”

  Jamie saw that the others had gathered around them, faces questioning. Even Vosnesensky looked doubtful, scowling worriedly. They had reached the row of lockers where their dust-spattered hard suits waited like the battered armor of knights who had sought the Holy Grail.

  Jamie turned around to face Reed. Calmly, quietly, he said, “There will be no scapegoats among us. Not among us. We’re a team. Even when we get back to Earth we’re still a team. Without heroes and without goats.”

  “I wish that could be true, Jamie,” said Reed, with real yearning in his voice.

  “It will be.”

  “It can’t be. The project directors will never trust me again. I’ll get a polite handshake and be mustered out into private practice. And think of what’s waiting for Mikhail. Our noble team leader fractured every rule in the regulations and thumbed his nose at Li and the mission controllers. Mikhail’s career is finished.”

  Vosnesensky grunted. “So I will retire. I have achieved my dream. I was the first man on Mars. I will not return. I don’t think anyone will come back to Mars. Tony is right. There will be no more expeditions.”

  “For how long?” Jamie demanded. “For my whole lifetime? For a hundred years? A thousand? I don’t think so. But even if it happens that way, what of it? We’ll come back to Mars one day, just as surely as the sun rises.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes! Because we have to. The human race has to. We’re explorers, Tony. All of us. Even you; it’s what brought you here. It’s built into our blood, into our brains. That’s what science is all about. Human beings have to learn, have to search and seek and explore. We need to, just like a flower needs water and sunlight. It’s what made our ancestors move out of Africa and spread all across the Earth. Now we’re spreading all across the solar system and someday we’ll start to move out to the stars. You can’t stop that, Tony. Nobody can. It’s what makes us human.”

  Reed backed off a step, then lifted his chin a notch higher. “Very pretty speech, Jamie. But most of the human race doesn’t give a damn about Mars or anything else except their own squalid little greeds. They’re going to close down the Mars Project, Jamie. They’re going to kill it.”

  “They’ll try, I know. They’ll do their best to shut us down. And I’ll do mine. Because I’m not going to rest until they send another expedition back here. If I have to do it with my bare hands, I’ll bring us back to Mars.”

  Jamie stuck his hand into his coverall pocket and pulled out his bear fetish. He reached up and put it on the rack beside his gray helmet.

  “And to prove it, I’m going to leave this little fellow here to greet me when I return.”

  They all stared at the fetish. Jamie had not allowed any of them to see it before.

  “My grandfather would say it has powerful magic,” Jamie told them. “But the real magic is in us. We make things happen. We’re coming back to Mars—all of us who want to.”

  Reed huffed. “A gesture.”

  “A symbol,” Jamie corrected.

  “Speaking of gestures,” Ilona said, stepping through the group to stand between Jamie and Vosnesensky, “I had intended to do this in private, once we were aboard the spacecraft.”

  She took from her breast pocket the dog-eared photograph that had been taped up over her bunk. Staring solemnly at Vosnesensky, Ilona methodically tore the photo into small pieces.

  “Mikhail, I have wronged you and all the Russians on this mission. I apologize. You saved our lives, and it was wrong of me to hold a fifty-year grudge against you personally.”

  Vosnesensky, totally surprised, shifted from one foot to another. “Well … I suppose …,” he stammered.

  Ilona threw her arms around his neck and kissed him so soundly that Vosnesensky’s face turned as red as his hard suit. Everyone laughed. Even Reed.

  Jamie looked at the other members of the Mars team. One by one, from Abell’s grinning frog face to Ivshenko, leaning heavily on a pair of stainless steel crutches. Mikhail was right, he thought. Mars has tested us. Each and every one of us. None of us is the same person we were when we arrived here.

  His gaze ended with Joanna, standing slightly aside from all the others, strong and proud. Her eyes gleamed back at him.

  It’s going to be an interesting trip home, Jamie thought. Very interesting.

  SOL 45: NOON

  One after the other, the three ascent modules lifted from the surface of Mars on tongues of shimmering flame. Their rocket engines blew miniature sandstorms across the landscape as they shrieked like departing demons, leaving the lower half of each L/AV sitting empty, incomplete, on the red dusty ground.

  Quiet returned to Mars. The wind sighed as though sad to be alone again. The planet turned as it had since its beginning. Here and there in special niches on the bitterly cold little world, life abided, soaking up the sunlight and whatever pitiful moisture it could find.

  Night fell and the pale distant sun rose again. More nights and days passed in their turn and nothing changed on the red surface of Mars. At last on one bright morning a new double star burned briefly in the pink sky and then was gone. The two linked spacecraft that had orbited the planet, a strange twinned artificial moon from another world, began the long journey back toward Earth.

  Mars was alone again. Nothing of the inquisitive visitors from Earth remained. Except their scattered equipment, dead and still now, and their domed base, waiting for the next explorers. Inside the dome, sitting crouched on an empty rack, waited a miniature stone likeness of a bear that carried a tiny flint arrowhead and an eagle’s feather, tied by a leather thong that had been lovingly knotted.

  The wind of Mars stroked the dome gently, waiting also.

  High up on the flat top of a mesa where the Old Ones had built themselves a city a thousand years ago, Edith Elgin and Al Waterman walked beneath the bright blue sky. They both wore strong, comfortable boots, sheepskin jackets, and broad-brimmed hats.

  “They’re on their way back,” Edith told Jamie’s grandfather. “They’ll be here by the springtime.”

  Al nodded and squinted up at the brilliant sky. “I hope I’m still around by then.”

  Edith looked at him sharply. “Why? Are you sick?”


  “Not yet,” he said. “But there’s this feeling in my bones, you know.”

  “Jamie told me you had a mystical streak in you.”

  Al laughed. “Yeah, I guess I do.”

  They walked along in silence for a while. The wind gusted hard, lifting the collars of their coats against their necks. All that remained of the ancient city was a scattering of adobe bricks almost hidden by the wild waving grass.

  “You know,” Al said, “he’s gonna want to go back there soon’s he can.”

  Edith nodded. “Maybe. It’s going to be a tough fight to get everyone to agree to another mission.”

  “Naw, not as tough as you think. Jamie’s found his path; he’s turned into a hero. Nobody will be able to stop him from goin’ back to Mars. Not even the President of the United States, whoever it might be next year.”

  “You think he’s that strong?”

  “Sure.” Al peered at her, his eyes questioning. “He’ll make a lousy husband, you know, away for years at a time.”

  Edith said nothing.

  “Maybe he’ll marry one of the women scientists,” Al said.

  “Or maybe,” Edith smiled her brightest smile, “maybe a really smart newswoman could get herself a spot on the next expedition and go out to Mars with him.”

  Al grinned back at her. “Now that would be something, wouldn’t it?”

  “Yes,” said Edith. “That would be just about perfect.”

  Mars waited.

  The giant volcanoes thrust their massive cones high into the thin atmosphere. The long rift valley sheltered its stubbornly rugged patches of lichen. The strange rock that bore the likeness of a human face abided patiently, as it had for untold millennia. The ocean of water frozen beneath the ground waited for a warmer time when it could release its vital moisture and renew the red world once more.

  The dead cities carved into ancient cliff sides held their secrets, waiting, waiting for the children of the blue world to return and discover them.