Encounter With Tiber

by Buzz Aldrin

“But that meant one more thing to me: look for caves at the level of the discontinuity. And I’ve got a bunch of funny-looking echoes off the crater wall at just the right height—twenty kilometers from the landing site. So that’s where I want to look.”

  Fleurant nodded. “And I quite agree we should look there. You spin a good story, Nari, and I’d have to concede it’s even, perhaps, a true one. And a one-day excursion will do us good.”

  “I hope so,” Nari said with a slight smile.

  Three hours later, as sleep shift began, Gander announced, “Well, I did do as you requested and ask permission from Earth for a change of mission. And they read your report and okayed it, as I told you. Unfortunately,” Gander said, “and I feel like a jerk for pointing this out, we can only go about ten kilometers an hour in the treaded tractors. So ten kilometers to the dig site and twenty beyond that is three hours. We have about thirteen hours of daylight at the moment, so if we leave right at dawn, that’s seven hours on site. It’s also risking the entire base and all of its tractors on this one excursion. So the question is, now that you’ve got permission from Earth, why I shouldn’t just veto your plan?”

  Nari frowned. “You’re right, of course. And I did originally propose just four of us. I’d like to take Paul as well, and that’s one tractor load. Probably that’s all we should do, this time. If there’s a site there, we can start working it more seriously later. And as an additional thought, I think we’ll plan to return to the main site rather than all the way here—it gives us a whole extra hour at the dig.” He rose and stretched. “Well, this also means a dawn departure, so I highly recommend that you lucky people get some sleep—it’s what I’m going to do.”

  7

  THE DRIVE THE NEXT day was very long, and nobody was talking to either me or Olga; Paul, Yvana, and Nari all sat in the back, arguing and calculating about where to place the X-ray and ultrasound equipment. That left Olga and me with the front seats and a chance to enjoy the view—coupled with the pleasant realization that we wouldn’t be wrestling ice blocks all over the place today.

  We had managed to start just before dawn, so we got to watch the northern dawn in its most impressive form, since we were headed almost due west. The Sun came up behind us, and in the thin Martian air, there was very little that was gradual about it. The sky faded from black to blue to pink to red in mere minutes, as the stars rapidly winked out; the jagged black shape ahead of us, the crater rim, just as abruptly acquired form and definition in the morning sunlight.

  We ate breakfast as we drove, swallowing the usual forgettable starch and protein. The Sun was still low and shadows still very long as we passed the dig site; we were well into the third layer there, I noted, as we swung wide to avoid disturbing the excavation.

  An hour later we saw the rushing white line of sublimating carbon dioxide zoom southward toward us and pass in front of us. “That’s really spectacular, isn’t it?” I said to Olga. “The plumes must be five meters high.”

  “It’s certainly the kind of thing that tourists will eventually come to see,” she said.

  The land reared up into the sky, its sharp-edged lip seeming to curl toward us like an oncoming wave of surf; as we drew closer to it, it loomed higher and higher.

  At last we reached the point, half a kilometer from where the crater wall reared up out of the frozen lake, that Nari said was as close as we should get with the tractor for a preliminary survey. We paused and had some of the wretched freeze-dried excuse for coffee; then we got out and carefully carried our equipment in closer. I was still getting used to the gravity being three times one third of what I had grown up in. My tendency was always to try to carry too much weight and then fall over, because I could lift so much more, but it had the same momentum and my feet had only a third of their normal friction, so that it was a lot easier to get it moving than to stop it.

  At last they were all set up, and now Olga and I found out what we were really there for. Though there would be only a little more heavy lifting today, there was an amazing amount of sheer running around to do. The X-ray scattering technique worked by sending a tight beam of X-rays down into the ice at an angle and seeing where they bounced back to. The receiving antenna was a 200-meter-diameter blanket that was covered with tiny sensors. We would position the source, position the blanket, fire a pulse, move the blanket, fire another pulse, and so forth, till we found an angle at which we were getting maximum power returned; then we’d move the source and start over. Meanwhile the scientists were entering results into the computer and gesticulating furiously.

  Lunch was late and we were starving. There’s a lot of exercise in that much running around on a slick surface, not least because it takes a lot of muscular effort to keep your balance. But the scientists were so clearly impatient to get on with it that we glanced at each other, shrugged, wolfed our food, and volunteered to get back to work. No doubt they’d tell us what was so exciting once they knew.

  The Sun was creeping down toward the crater edge, and our shadows were beginning to reach pretty far to the east from us, when Nari got a call from Gander, reminding him to pack up and get moving. I had expected him to argue and had been preparing things that a very junior person like me could say to a very senior person like him, but for some reason he cooperated meekly enough. I’ll even give them credit enough to say that Yvana helped fold the blanket and all of them carried a lot of the equipment back to the tractor.

  “Boots are kind of senseless on this stuff,” I said as I fell down for the third time. “Might as well just get a decent pair of hockey skates, or maybe cross-country skis.”

  Nari half turned around, then abruptly lost his footing—that’s one of the best ways to make yourself fall in that environment. He landed on top of the crate of instruments, and I set my load down and helped him to his feet. “Are you hurt?”

  “Sprained a dignity someplace, otherwise no. Jason, that’s the kind of great idea that is seldom obvious enough. I think that it might be a genuine winner, and I’m going to send the suggestion in with your name on it.”

  “Suggestion?”

  “Skis or skates. As long as we’re working on a frozen lake, what could make more sense? Akira already tried to persuade them to send some grippers for our boot soles, and for some functions he’s right—but for getting around quickly, what you really need here is runners on your feet: skis or skates. It’s a great idea.”

  I shrugged. “If you say so. I was just complaining, actually.” We got the last load into the treaded tractor, and I turned it around and headed back for the dig. Five minutes later we got a call from Walter Gander, pointing out that if we hadn’t left yet, we were going to have a hard time getting to the main site by dark.

  On the way back, they were chattering just as eagerly in the backseat, and I found myself alone for all practical purposes with Olga. “Well,” I said, “that was quite a day. And at least it really was different.”

  “Oh, today would have been different anyway,” Olga said, “or didn’t you remember?”

  “Remember what?”

  She seemed a little impatient. “Why are we going to be looking up at the sky tonight?”

  “Ahh, because—oh, right. Aldrin is aerocapturing. In fact, that’s due in—less than an hour. Suppose it’ll be visible with the Sun still up?”

  “Well, if I’m figuring right, visible or not it will be right in front of us. And considerably above, of course. And the sun will be pretty far down in the sky, so it might well be visible.”

  “What might be visible?” Yvana asked from the backseat.

  “The Aldrin,” I said. “Its first aerobrake is in about an hour and we’re guessing we’ll be able to see part of it dead ahead.”

  “Of course it will be visible in daylight,” Yvana said. “You were. Why didn’t you just ask me?”

  She plunged back into her ongoing loud argument with the two men without waiting for a reply. I found myself thinking, not for the first time, that I knew why so many
of her crew had seemed so relieved when Captain Gander had taken over the station.

  We had covered another thirty minutes worth of territory, and the shadow reaching out in front of us was considerably longer, when I heard a voice I didn’t recognize—but which sounded strangely familiar—in my earphones. “Second Site Expedition, do you read me?”

  “Loud and clear,” I said. “Who’s that calling?”

  “It’s Scotty Johnston, Jason. Currently piloting Aldrin toward our first aerobrake. I’m about ten minutes from retrorockets.”

  “How did you know where I was?”

  “Happened to be talking with Captain Gander and mentioned that I was looking forward to seeing you; he patched me through. How the hell have you been? On the news you’re always excited to be here and totally committed to the mission.”

  “Yeah, well, they haven’t had a new tape to play of me for a while. It’s not a bad planet, Scotty. I’m afraid we don’t have margaritas, though.”

  Scotty was an old friend from Colorado Springs. We’d been doubles partners on the tennis team and spent a lot of time at the kind of bars which tended to be populated by sorority girls, where they served over-sweet drinks in funny colors. His family were what they used to call nafafs—“newly affluent Africans,” meaning that they were African-American, and when the great economic boom of 2012–2025 had hit, his family had caught the rising tide and gotten rich. In the twentieth century there had been a lot of “rich man’s booms”—times when business did well but employment didn’t change much—but so far in the twenty-first, we were having the other kind. The vast array of new technologies and big projects to be accomplished guaranteed not only that there was always work, but that you could always get training for a better job; business was screaming for intelligent, capable people and would do whatever it took to get them. When I had been at Colorado Springs, “nafaf” had been current slang; about five years ago it had disappeared because nobody thought there was anything unusual anymore. A lot of words were disappearing from current use in those years—words like ghetto, barrio, skid row, tobacco road—because the things they referred to were disappearing.

  “You know,” I said, “I don’t recall your being on the Five Alpha manifest.”

  “I was a last-minute replacement. Calvin Ho got the mumps.”

  “Well, if I’d known you were there, I’d have tried corresponding with you.”

  Scotty laughed. “You mean you’d have picked up your e-mail. Your mother, by the way, points out that not only have you not written, you haven’t picked up your last ten letters from her; she always sends them to you with automatic receipt, probably because she knows what kind of correspondent you are. I could have written to Captain Gander, I guess, and told him to get you on the stick, but I thought it might be more fun to surprise you. Anyway, I’m at six minutes to my retrorocket firing, so I’ll ring off for now. If they don’t have margaritas, though, this is going to be one disappointing trip to the beach.”

  “See you soon, Scotty.”

  We drove on, glancing to our right when we could to watch the Sun play on the distant south wall of the crater. “That’s going to be fun for you,” Olga said. “I’m sure he’ll be going back on Collins, so you can return home with your friend. And besides, you’ll have someone to hang around with.” It wasn’t a very subtle hint, but Olga wasn’t the most subtle person in the world. Most good engineers are so used to having to straighten people out before they do anything stupid that they lose whatever tact they might once have had.

  “Oh, he’s an okay guy,” I said, “but he won’t know the ropes here. When I really need to get something done I’d rather be around you. And he talks too much, anyway. He’s just a guy I knew from school.”

  “Oh. Well, still it will be nice for you to see a familiar face.”

  We sat in silence, glancing occasionally at the far northern horizon, till suddenly, in the now deep red sky, a bright blazing light streaked upward. “He’s in blackout for sure,” I said. “Wow, when a ship’s that big and going that fast, it sure makes a plume.”

  “Told you so,” Yvana said smugly.

  The great blazing fireball streaked from horizon to horizon in just a minute or so. A while afterwards, as we drew close to the main excavation site where we would bunk for the night, Scotty’s voice crackled in my ear again. “Hey, Second Site Mobile. Pay up on the bet—I managed an aerocapture. One more pass will take us down to a circular orbit. We’ll talk soon.”

  “Good to have you around, Scotty.”

  He was doing a job that was in some ways tougher than what I had done. Aldrin, as a cycler, was not intended ever to land, nor did it jettison its booster. Rather, it reeled in the booster, and instead of aerocapturing all the way down to the surface, it would use a series of aerobrakes and propulsion maneuvers until it would eventually be parked in a polar orbit around Mars, and we would ferry loads of fuel from our automated factory, down here, up to orbit to refuel the booster.

  That evening, as we shared the cold supper in Number Four, the large shelter at the dig site, Olga said, “I think Jason and I would both greatly appreciate knowing what you found today.”

  “Well, it takes a while to put an image together,” Yvana said, “and we would have to take many more pictures to refine the detail and give the computer enhancement enough to work with, but it would appear—well. For my money, Dr. Nigawa is vindicated.”

  Instinctively we glanced at Paul Fleurant to see what he thought; he was nodding. “It’s a big cave,” he said, “and from the backscatter we were able to get, it looks very much like they had a sizable facility under construction there. Looks also like two dozen Tiberian bodies in a small graveyard, and maybe a spare farm unit from some ship or other, though from the bulk of it it’s probably one of those earlier-technology things that so fascinates Nari. As I said, the picture is hazy, but not so hazy that we could call it a hallucination. So what’s your next step, Nari? You said you had one more thing to look at if this panned out.”

  Nari grinned and sipped the last of the coffee, making a face the moment he tasted it. “You know, the best reason for terraforming this ball of red dirt is that when we were done, we could grow coffee and tea here. And some rice. Just now I’d kill for rice.”

  “Nari—”

  “All right, I’ll tell you. I think we need to look at the south pole. Think about what every proposed terraforming project has ended up saying: it’s where all the carbon dioxide is, and if you just darken the ice there, especially right before southern spring, you can get pressure up to thirty millibars or so, so that water will melt and run, and all that. Nine thousand years ago conditions weren’t all that different from the present, except that the system was much more slanted against them than it would be against us. So I’d say there ought to be evidence of however they did it there.”

  “You have a candidate?”

  “Well, the south pole terrain is pretty scarred up, but if you look at Craters Hutton, Rayleigh, Burroughs, and Liais—a group of four right around longitudes 240 to 260—you’ll see they all are pretty good dust catchers, and they all have these interesting small craters inside them. Back in the 1990s, when guys like Zubrin were putting together the idea for how you’d do Mars missions better if you used more local materials, a guy named Mole had an idea that you could blow fine dust up into big clouds using nuclear bombs. If you do that close enough to the pole, just before southern spring, then at least in theory the dust ought to rain down and darken the ice, which in turn would mean faster evaporation and getting more of the residual cap back into the atmosphere. And at that point, well, the feedback cycle of warming that releases carbon dioxide, which causes more warming, starts, and you’ve got a warm, wet Mars. It’s a good thing nobody tried it back in the nineties when Mole proposed it, or just possibly all the Tiberian stuff would now be in the bottom muck of Lake Korolev. But it’s a cheap, easy-to-improvise way of terraforming, and I think our Tiberian friends really needed exactly
that. So what I want to do is look at those craters up close—the little ones that might be right where the dust was, nine thousand years ago—and see whether there’s any residual radioactivity.”

  “Well, I’m up for the trip anytime,” Paul said, smiling. “I’d be very happy to see this work out the way you think it does, Nari. And even happier if what we find in the Encyclopedia should confirm it.”

  Olga rose and stretched. “Well, I thank all of you, and I’m glad to know what you found and very happy for you, Nari, but I’m about to drop. I’m afraid running around on the ice all day makes me sleepy.”

  “I made sure we were all set up with places to sleep right when we got here, while dinner was cooking, and that they were ready,” Paul said. “There are five temporary bunks ready to go here. Nari and I are going through the tunnel here to Shelter One, Yvana gets Shelter Two to herself since it only has one bunk, and you and Jason are in Shelter Three.”

  I trailed after her to Shelter Three, feeling a little confused; normally, with three guys, two women, and three shelters, wouldn’t you—?

  When we got into the shelter and closed the door, I saw that not only were there just two bunks, but they seemed to have been shoved together. I glanced sideways at Olga; she was blushing but smiling. “Paul is a perfect example of why we Russians have always been on good terms with the French,” she said. “We can move them apart if you’d, ah, rather not, but since this is likely to be our big chance for privacy—”

  “We’re not moving them,” I said, and took her in my arms. “I’m just glad one of us was smart enough to see an opportunity. I think I owe Paul a lot of favors.”

  The next morning I was in much too good a mood to notice, really, but I had a distinct impression that Yvana was mad at us about something, and that Paul and Nari were as pleased as could be. The rest of the crew arrived at the usual time, and we all worked only a half day because the Five Alpha landers were due that day. Somewhere toward the end of the shift, Gander dropped back next to me and said, “Uh, Jason.”