Obelisk

by Stephen Baxter

  ‘Could Mars be like Arizona?’

  ‘Something like it, but a higher altitude. Mariner confirmed the atmospheric pressure. You could walk around on the surface with nothing more than a face mask and sun cream …’

  The seventh picture showed craters.

  She stared. ‘This looks more like the moon.’

  ‘Mars is a small, geologically static world with a thin atmosphere, Verity. So, craters.’

  ‘We’re screwed.’

  ‘Why do you say that?’

  ‘Because nobody’s going to spend billions of dollars to send us to a cratered rockball.’

  ‘Just keep going.’

  She flicked on, and stopped at the thirteenth frame. ‘My God.’ Suddenly she sounded electrified.

  And well she might have been. The thirteenth picture showed more craters, but with what could only be forests sheltering inside them, bordering neat lakes. Life on Mars, unequivocal proof, coming after centuries of old men staring through telescopes at shifting grey-green patches …

  Verity whooped. ‘They’re just going to hose money at the programme now!’

  Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California. 21 January 1972.

  We got out of the car and I smuggled Alexei past JPL security, with me in my bright astronaut-corps jumpsuit and flashing my best grin at the star-struck guards and clerks. I murmured, ‘This is treason, probably. I could get shot for this.’

  Alexei Petrov grinned back at me. ‘Don’t worry about it. No American soldier yet born can shoot straight.’

  I hurried him nervously along the central mall, which stretched from the gate into the main working area of the laboratory. JPL was a cramped place, crowded between the San Gabriel Mountains and the upper-middle class suburb of La Canada. Alexei was distracted by the von Karman auditorium, for years the scene of triumphant news conferences. Today there was a crowd at the doors, for the rumour was that the Martian rainstorms had cleared enough for the Voyager mission controllers to attempt a landing. But I hurried him past.

  ‘We will not go in there? I heard Arthur C. Clarke and Walter Cronkite were coming today.’

  ‘What, you’re hunting autographs now? We’re going somewhere much more exciting.’

  I led him to the Image Processing Laboratory, rooms full of chattering technicians and junior scientists, and screens and computer printouts showing crude black and white images being put through various enhancement processes. Here, away from the sanitised stuff being presented to the celebrities, the raw data sent back by the Voyager orbiters at Mars were being received.

  In common with every other semi-public NASA facility, there were also TV feeds on the walls reporting on the agency’s growing celestial dominion, such as live in-colour Earth-orbit images from the astronauts in the Skylabs, and grainier pictures of the second EVA by the Apollo 18 crew on the moon – even an image from the Cape of preparations for the latest unmanned test launch of the mighty Nova booster, big brother of the Saturn Vs. But Alexei, dedicated planetary scientist that he was, had eyes only for the Mars data: images transmitted across the gulf one dot at a time like newsprint wire photos and painstakingly reconstructed. The very latest pictures, live from Mars!

  And, as I’d hoped and half-planned, Verity Whittaker came pushing out of the crowd. At twenty-nine she was more beautiful than ever, her hair cropped sensibly short, her body toned by years of astronaut training. She was still as remote from me as the moon, of course. But she smiled at an old colleague. ‘Hi, Puddephat. Should have known you’d show up. Who’s your friend?’

  ‘Lieutenant Verity Whittaker, meet Doctor Alexei Petrov, from the Soviet Academy of—’

  ‘Puddephat, are you insane? You smuggled in a Soviet?’

  Alexei, a little older than us at thirty-two, wasn’t the way you’d imagine a Soviet citizen. Coming from a relatively privileged stratum of Russian society – his father had been an Academician too – he was tall, slim, with slicked-back dark hair and movie-star looks. And, even as he and Verity faced each other down in those first seconds, I could see something sparking between them.

  ‘I take it you never met a Soviet citizen before.’ His rich Slavic accent was like warm butter.

  ‘Maybe not, but I met a few Chinese Commie flyers during my tour in ’Nam in ’68, and I don’t care what the official histories say.’

  I sighed; in the astronaut corps we’d had these arguments too many times. ‘Verity, science can only proceed through openness. I’ve known Alexei for years. He’s in the Soviet Mars cosmonaut cadre – he’s flown in space, which is more than I’ve managed so far. And when I heard he was in the country—’

  ‘I hunger for data,’ Alexei said, his gaze roaming. ‘My subject, astrobiology, is information-poor.’

  Verity moved to block his view. ‘In that case, go spend a billion roubles and retrieve your own data. Ah, but your landers failed, didn’t they?’

  Alexei said mildly, ‘Some commentators say a massive investment in space technology is itself destabilising.’

  ‘Maybe the way you Soviets do it.’

  ‘But what of your militarised Skylabs? And is it true that the Apollo 16 crew tested weapons on the moon during their “dark” EVA?’

  It’s probably just as well that before she could answer a stir of excitement distracted us, as the technicians and scientists gathered around the TV monitors.

  In this particular launch window, it had been unlucky for the twin Voyager-Mars spacecraft (and even more unlucky for their sturdy Soviet counterparts) to arrive in the middle of the worst Martian storm season the astronomers had ever seen. The JPL controllers didn’t want to risk dropping their landers down into that planetary maelstrom, and for weeks the orbiters’ cameras sent back nothing but images of rain clouds punctuated by lightning flashes.

  But now the storms had settled out, and it seemed the mission planners had agreed to go for a descent attempt. The lander attached to Voyager-Mars 2 had already separated, and was shown in grainy images from cameras mounted on the orbiter. It was a squat glider, a trial of the manned landers to be built in a few years’ time, and you could clearly see the Stars and Stripes and UNITED STATES boldly painted on its flanks. The scientists, Poindexter patriots all, whooped and cheered.

  But at that pivotal moment I found myself alone.

  When I looked around I saw Verity was shadowing Alexei as he went through an image archive. He was peering at striking images of liquid water running through the deep canyons, and the tough vegetation of Mars clumping in the crater basins. I saw how their slim bodies brushed close, and he turned his head, just subtly, as if distracted by the scent of her hair.

  And, reader, my heart ripped apart.

  Hesperia Base, Mars. 4 July 1976 (Mars dates given as at Houston meridian).

  I took a step forward, moving away from the MEM, into pale sunlight.

  This was me, Jonas Puddephat, aged thirty-three, walking on Mars – the first on Mars! Who’d have thought it? Not Verity and the rest of our six-strong crew, that’s for sure. We’d argued halfway to Mars about priority, and in the end it was pure diplomatic hypocrisy that had delivered me out the hatch first. President Nixon’s office had decided that this mission, as much militaristic land-grab as science expedition, should be led down the ladder by the only authentic civilian aboard. Verity had always been a strange mix of Cold Warrior and religious zealot, and she retreated into her onboard Bible study group and tried to find some consolation for the snub in the pages of the Good Book.

  But just then I didn’t care about any of that. Let me tell you, it was a moment that made up for all the years of training, and the horrors of the flight itself, from the shattering launch of the Nova booster climbing into the sky on its fourteen F-1 engines, to the months of the cruise in our souped-up Skylab hab module with the growling NERVA nuclear rockets at our back, and finally the hair-raising descent to
the ground in the Mars Excursion Module, an untried glider descending into a virtually unknown atmosphere. Not only that, we were rising out of the debris of too many accidents and disasters – too many lives lost, for our accelerated programme had put huge pressure on the resources and management structures of NASA, USAF and our main contractors.

  And then add on the fact that, such had been our eagerness to sprint here and beat the Soviets, we had no way of getting home again before a relief mission arrived some twenty-five months later.

  None of that mattered, for I’d lived through it all, and I was here. I whooped in my dweebish way and pumped the air.

  Verity’s voice murmured in his ear. ‘Checklist, asshole.’

  I sighed. ‘I know, Verity, I know.’

  So I got to work. I turned to face Nixon. The MEM was a biconic glider, its tile-clad belly and leading edges scorched, sitting on frail-looking skids. I made sure the camera mounted on my chest got a good view of the craft’s exterior, so Mission Control could check for damage.

  Then I set off again, across the Martian ground. Soon I had gone far enough that I could see no signs of raying from Nixon’s descent engines. The soil under my feet was unmarked, without footprints. Ahead of me I saw a dip in the ground, it might have been a crater, where what looked like a forest copse grew, crowding grey-green.

  By God, I thought, we’re here. We came for insane reasons, and probably by all the wrong methods, but we’re here.

  ‘Puddephat,’ Verity said gently. ‘Are you all right?’

  I tried to focus. ‘Fine, Verity.’ She didn’t need to tell me I was well behind schedule. I hadn’t even got the flag set up yet. But I walked forward, further from the MEM.

  And Verity murmured, ‘Look up.’

  Again I tilted back, and peered up at the zenith. I saw a single, brilliant star passing overhead. Not one of Mars’s moons – it had to be the Stalingrad. The Soviet vessel was an unlikely jam-up of Proton booster stages, a Salyut-derived space habitat, and some kind of lander, launched by three firings of their huge N-1 boosters – or four, if you count the one that blew up – but they had made it too, and here they were. Somewhere up there was Alexei Petrov, peering down at me through a telescope, with envy no doubt eating into his soul. I lifted an arm and waved.

  Again Verity pressed me. ‘We only beat them here by days, Puddephat. And if they manage to land before you get around to making the claim—’

  ‘All right, damn it.’

  It took me only a moment to set up the flagpole, and take the Stars and Stripes from its bag and fix it to the pole. ‘Can you see me, Nixon?’

  ‘Clear as crystal, Jonah.’

  I straightened up and saluted. ‘On this, the bicentenary day of my nation’s declaration of independence from foreign tyranny, I, Jonas James Puddephat, by the authority vested in me by the government of the United States of America, do hereby claim all these lands of Mars …’

  While I spoke, I heard Verity and the others discussing contingencies in case the Soviets landed close by. We had rifles and revolvers, engineered to work in Martian conditions and trialled on the moon, and the Nixon even packed a couple of artillery pieces. For years, even before we humans got there, Mars had been an arena projected from our Earthbound Cold War.

  When I was done, despite squawks from the MEM, I started unbuckling my mask. Somebody had to be first to try it. I ripped off my mask and took a deep lungful of that thin, cold, Martian air …

  United States Hellas Base, Mars. 9 November 1983.

  From the beginning we got visits from the Russians. Occasionally, some of us would go over there.

  We’d share tips on operational matters, and under the radar Alexei and I and the other scientists would pool data. It was never more than semi-official. But in the end it was our sheer humanity that united us; in the two bases combined there were just forty-some human souls stuck up here on Mars, and we needed company, no matter what was going on back on Earth.

  So, that November morning – that terrible morning, as it would turn out – I watched Alexei and the others come rolling over the horizon in the rovers we called Marsokhods, having driven from their own base, which we called Marsograd, tucked deep in the rift we called Voyager Valley, a quarter-way around the planet’s circumference. Few of us knew (or could pronounce) the names the Russians themselves gave to these things. But we admired the hardy ’khods, more robust than anything we had, although our vehicles ran on methane fuel from our wet-chemistry factory, which was better than anything they had.

  And on this particular visit, Verity was riding back with Alexei and the rest. Despite the fact that she was a veteran Cold Warrior she was one of the most frequent American visitors to the Soviet base, and if you saw her with Alexei you’d have known exactly why. My last hope that she would reject him as a godless Commie was dissipated when it turned out his family was Catholic.

  So there you are. I was forty years old, and still mooning over the woman. Even Mars was no cure for that.

  The arrival of a ’khod at the dismal, half-buried collection of shacks we called Hell City was usually a cause for a party. Well, most anything was. This time, though, the mood was sour and stiff, and it wasn’t hard to understand why. Up on that blue dot in the sky – thanks to Soviet atrocities in Afghanistan, thanks to the US deploying Pershing intermediate-range missiles throughout Europe thereby increasing our capability to launch a first strike, thanks to the increasing weaponisation of space, a process even we on Mars were a part of – the armed forces of our respective nations had come to a pitch of tension that hadn’t been matched since Cuba twenty years earlier. As soon as Verity got through the lock she hurried to her cabin to tune into her encrypted comms channel back to NORAD, to get the straight skinny on what was going on at home.

  Meanwhile I hosted Alexei and the rest in our galley area, the only place large enough to accommodate us all. On the wall-mounted TV set an ice hockey game was playing, another sublimated US-USSR confrontation, beamed directly from the Earth for the benefit of both sides of our ideological divide.

  Alexei glanced over his coffee at me. ‘You are preparing for home, yes?’

  The cycler habitat, a half-dozen ganged Skylabs looping endlessly between the orbits of Earth and Mars, was due in a few days, ready to collect us and take us home.

  I said, ‘I’ve been preparing a geology package to help train up my replacements. I ought to walk your people through it. I think we’ve established the basic parameters pretty well now. Aside from the lava fields around the Tharsis giants, you basically have a surface of impact ejecta mixed with debris from mudflows and floods. In many ways Mars is a mix of conditions on Earth and the moon, and I’ve recommended to Houston they should have crews trained up in the field on both those bodies before being sent over here.’

  He smiled. ‘That sounds a wise geological synthesis, for an astronomer.’

  He was needling me, affectionately enough. ‘Well, we all cross-trained, Alexei …’

  Verity came bustling in. Her face was pale and drawn, with Martian dust ingrained in her pores. She poured herself a cup of coffee from a perc on the bar, the liquid slopping in the low gravity. Her earpiece whispered continually. ‘The stupid fuckers,’ she muttered.

  Alexei asked, ‘Which particular stupid fuckers do you have in mind?’

  ‘My bosses, and yours.’ She sat with us and leaned closer so the ice hockey fans couldn’t hear. ‘I got a feed from NORAD. Allied forces across the world have been put on Defcon Two. It’s an exercise. But a big one, spanning all of western Europe. They call it Able Archer 83. It will be over in a couple of days. But it’s giving the Soviets nightmares. Seems nobody told them it’s just a drill. We’re trying out new comms systems and protocols, so they can’t follow what we’re doing. And the clincher is that the USAF has decided it’s a good opportunity to launch their OWP.’

  That was
a new acronym for me. ‘Say what?’

  ‘An orbital weapons platform,’ Alexei said grimly.

  ‘A Skylab with nukes,’ Verity said. ‘Hell, you Russians have your Salyuts—’

  ‘Peaceful scientific and reconnaissance platforms.’

  ‘Sure they are. And what about the Polyus programme? What’s that but a space battle station? Anyhow, no wonder the old men in the Kremlin are freaking out. We’re spending billions of dollars on this exercise and the build-up to it, but not one grain of thought is being given to how it looks to the other side – or how the Soviets might react.’ She stared at her coffee cup. Then, without looking up, she reached across the table and took Alexei’s hand.

  ‘Let’s talk about something else,’ I said sharply. ‘How’s your own work going, Alexei?’

  So we turned away from those dangerous topics to the strange life forms of Mars.

  The best biological results had been retrieved by the Soviets, in the diverse environments they had explored in the Voyager Valley – judging by the results they’d leaked to us, anyhow. And they seemed to have established the basic parameters of life on Mars. You had a substrate of microbial communities, some of them stretching for hundreds of miles in the shallow, moist soil, together with the very photogenic multicellular stars on the surface, mostly the forms we colloquially called ‘cacti’ and ‘trees’. The cacti had tough, leathery skin, which almost perfectly sealed in their water stores. The trees had trunks as hard as concrete, and leaves like needles to keep in the moisture. Both forms photosynthesised busily.

  But Alexei had always thought there was more to it.

  Now he leaned towards us, confidential. ‘As it happens, I do have new observations. We have believed there is no animal form here on Mars. Nothing but the microbes and the plants. We have no fossil traces—’

  ‘No spikes on the cacti.’ That had been my own first observation, on my second Marswalk, when I had explored that crater I saw after my first footfall, full of cacti and dwarf trees. There were no Martian teeth against which those cacti might have needed to evolve protection.