Voyage

by Stephen Baxter

  ‘Rager, Phil; you have a go for depress.’ Gershon would monitor this first EVA from the ascent stage cabin.

  Stone closed a switch on the wall; York heard sound leak out of the air, and the internal noise of her own breathing seemed to grow louder, more ragged, to compensate.

  ‘Roger,’ Stone said. ‘Everything is go here. We’re just waiting for the cabin to bleed enough pressure to open the hatch.’

  The gauge, York saw, showed the pressure already down to two-tenths of a pound.

  Gershon said, ‘I’m reading a real low static pressure on your lock. Do you think you can open the hatch yet?’

  Stone said, ‘I’ll try.’

  The exit from the airlock was a small hatch, close to the floor. The handle was a simple lever. Stone bent down, twisted the handle, tugged. York could see the thin metal of the hatch bow inward. The hatch stayed shut.

  ‘Damn it.’

  ‘Let me try.’ She crouched down, and picked at the corner of the hatch, where it protruded from the wall. Her gloves, of metal mesh and rubber, were clumsy; her hands felt huge and insensitive. But she managed to get a little flap of the hatch peeled back.

  Through the sliver she’d opened up between the hatch and its frame, she could see ochre light.

  ‘I think I broke the seal.’

  Stone pulled at the handle, and this time the hatch opened easily.

  York saw a little flurry of snow as the last of their air escaped into the Martian atmosphere.

  They both had to back away to let the hatch swing back.

  Now York could see the porch, the platform fixed to the top of Challenger’s squat landing leg, onto which Stone would back out in a moment. The porch was coated in brown grit, thrown up by the landing. And beyond the porch, she could see the surface of Mars: it looked like sand, and it was streaked with radial lines pointing away from Challenger, showing the effects of their descent engine’s final blast.

  It was just a scrap of landscape; on Earth it would look so commonplace she wouldn’t even perceive it. But it was Mangala Vallis: now, there was only a few feet of thin Martian air separating her from the surface she’d been studying all her adult life.

  ‘Natalie,’ Stone said.

  She turned; in contrast to the brown of Mars, in the mundane kitchen-light of the airlock, his suit seemed to glow white.

  ‘There’s something we forgot,’ Stone said. ‘From the checklist. We didn’t fix these.’ Stone had taken his red EV1 bands from a suit pocket. Stone, as the leader of the first EVA, was in charge of the operation; York was, officially, his backup, and Stone would wear the red bands around his arms and legs for identification by the TV cameras.

  But he was holding the bands out to her.

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  He was smiling again. ‘I think you do. Put on the bands.’

  She held out her hand, and he dropped the bands into her palm. Through her clumsy gloves she couldn’t feel the bands’ weight.

  ‘You’ve got to be kidding.’

  He said testily, ‘Look, I’m not asking you to land the goddamn MEM. You’ve done this in the contingency sims. All you have to do, on this first EVA, is to walk around and scratch a few rocks, and talk to the folks at home about it.’

  She didn’t feel any pleasure, or pride, in his startling offer. All she felt was irritation. That damn roller-coaster again. ‘This doesn’t make sense, Phil. You’re passing up the chance to become the first human to walk on Mars, for God’s sake. What kind of asshole does that?’

  ‘This kind,’ he said, annoyed. ‘This is important, Natalie. I discussed it with Joe Muldoon before the launch. We have to get this right – this first EVA most of all – for the sake of the future. The next few minutes are maybe the point of the whole damn mission. Even more than the science – though I don’t expect you to agree with that. Natalie, it’s going to be a long time before anyone comes this way again. But we’re changing history here; even if we fall back, now, people will be able to look up at Mars and say, yes, it’s possible, we can get there, live up there. We know, because somebody did it.

  ‘Look, I know I’m no Neil Armstrong. You’re more – articulate. And this is your place; your valley. Your planet, damn it. You know your way around here better than anyone alive. I think you’d do a better job of communicating this than me. And besides …’

  ‘What?’

  He smiled. ‘I have this feeling. I might be remembered longer for being the man who passed up the chance to be first.’

  ‘I hope she’s obeying orders,’ Gershon called.

  ‘About as much as she ever does.’

  They’ve plotted this. I’ve been set up.

  ‘And take this,’ Stone said.

  She held out her hand; Stone dropped into her palm a small disk, like a coin, less than an inch across. It was the diamond marker. ‘I think it’s more appropriate for you to place it. For Ben. And the others.’

  He reached out with two hands, and closed her fist over the marker. He was looking into her eyes.

  He knows, she realized suddenly. About Ben and me. He knows. They all knew, all the time.

  She dropped the marker into a sample pocket on her suit. Then, numbed, she pushed the red bands over her arms and legs, and dropped her gold visor down over her face.

  Stone held the hatch aside. York got down, clumsily, to her knees, and backed up ass-first to the hatch. She started to crawl backwards, out onto the porch.

  ‘Here we go. You’re lined up nicely, Natalie. Come toward me a little bit. Okay, down. Roll to the left. Put your left foot to the right – no, the other way. You’re doing fine.’

  She could feel where her sides scraped against the hatchway. Coolant tubes dug into her knees.

  Blood hammered in her ears.

  ‘Okay, Ralph, I’m on the porch.’ She reached out and grabbed the handrails, to either side of the porch.

  She looked up. The white paint of the outer hull was stained with landing dust, and tinged yellow by the quickening Martian morning. She had got so far out that could see the whole of the hatchway before her; it was a rectangle of brilliant fluorescent light, set within the skin of Challenger. Inside the rectangle Phil Stone had crouched down, peering out at her, nodding inside his helmet.

  She continued to move backwards, still crawling over the porch, feeling out with her right leg; eventually, her toe hit the top rung of the ladder.

  Holding onto the handrails, she straightened up.

  She was emerging into the shadow of Challenger; the rising sun was hidden by the bulk of the craft, and the sky above her was still black, though the stars were washing out. She turned, stiffly. To left and right she could see a flat, sharp, close horizon, delimiting a plain of dust and rocks. Everything was stained rust brown, like dried blood, the shadows long and sharp.

  The change of scale was startling. She’d spent months inside the confines of the Mission Module, where everything in the universe had been either a few feet away – enclosed by the tight, curving walls – or at infinity. Now, the sense of height and depth, of scales opening out around her, was profound, disorienting; nothing in her training had prepared her for this. For a moment she felt as if she would fall backwards, and she hooked her hands around the handrails of the porch.

  ‘Natalie?’

  ‘I’m okay, Phil. It’s just –’

  ‘I know,’ Stone said. ‘A big moment, right?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  Gershon asked, ‘Natalie, have you got out the MESA yet?’

  The MESA, the Modularized Equipment Storage Assembly, was a panel on the descent stage, to the left of the ladder. York reached out and opened a latch; the panel swung down like a drawbridge, bearing a TV camera.

  ‘Ralph, the MESA came down all right.’

  ‘I copy that, Natalie. I’m turning the TV on now.’

  The lens of the camera was dark, clean, watchful; she saw the camera swivel as Ralph worked its servo-motors, focusing on her. She felt absu
rdly self-conscious.

  Gershon said, ‘I’m waiting for the TV. Man, I’m getting a picture. There’s a great deal of contrast in it – it’s just splashes of color – and currently the damn thing’s upside down. But I can see a fair amount of detail and – I got it, it’s corrected itself. Natalie, I can see you at the top of the ladder.’

  York nodded to the camera. But they can’t see my face behind this visor. She waved.

  She made her way down the ladder, rung by rung. They were big steps, and in the stiff suit she found the best way to go was to let herself drop from step to step.

  The last rung was three feet from the ground, and she pushed herself away from the ladder and let herself fall. Her descent was distinctly slow-motion; it took nearly a second, she guessed, to cover that last yard. On Earth, it would have taken half that.

  Her blue boots came to rest on the white metal of the descent stage’s three-feet-wide footpad. It was still so dark, here in the shadow of Challenger, that it was actually quite difficult to see.

  She held onto the ladder with her fat-gloved hands, and tried to step back up to the ladder’s bottom rung. She had to make sure she could get back home. But the suit was too stiff, and she couldn’t lift her feet that high.

  ‘Fucking dumb design.’

  ‘Hot mike at this time, EV1,’ Gershon said blandly.

  She gave up trying to make the step. She bent down a little and jumped. Her knees were stiff, inside the suit, and all her mobility came from her toes and ankles. The Martian gravity pulled her back, but feebly, and she overshot the bottom rung. She fell against the ladder with a clatter, but she managed to get her feet hooked over the rung.

  Breathless, she dropped back to the footpad again.

  She looked past the pad to the Martian surface.

  ‘Okay. I’m at the foot of the ladder. The MEM’s footpads are depressed in the surface a couple of inches, maybe three; the sides of the depressions they’ve made are quite distinct, sharp and clear. There’s little water here, of course, and I guess the soil’s cohesion is electrostatic …’ Don’t analyze, York; tell them what it looks like. ‘The surface soil looks a little like beach sand. Wet sand. But as you get close to it it’s actually much finer-grained than sand, and it’s evident that it bonds well together. Here and there it’s very fine, powdery.’ She reached out her leg and kicked gently at the regolith, leaving furrows in the soil. ‘It’s easy for me to dig little trenches with my toe. The surface crunches when I kick it. I have the impression that the surface material is a duricrust. That is, dust particles cemented together by the upward seepage of water in the soil, with salts being precipitated out on evaporation.’

  There had been a little Martian dust on the footpad, she saw, and now, when she lifted up her boot, she could see that a little of that had already transferred itself to her. ‘The dust is clinging in fine layers to the sole and sides of my boot. So it’s both cohesive and adhesive. It looks as if it will take a slope of around seventy degrees …’

  Now Ralph Gershon said, ‘Natalie, I need you to get back facing the TV camera for a minute please.’

  ‘Say again, Ralph.’

  ‘Rager. I need you facing the field of view of the camera. Natalie, Phil, the President of the United States is in his office now and would like to say a few words to you.’

  Stone replied for her. ‘That would be an honor, Ralph.’

  She checked her cuff checklist. Reagan was right on cue. Trust an old actor.

  She turned toward the MESA.

  She imagined the TV pictures of herself now on their way to Earth: she would be a stiff, angular figure, posed on the footpad, her outline fuzzed by false colors against the crimson of Mars.

  She took a still Hasselblad camera from the MESA platform. After some fumbling, she fitted the camera to a mount above her chest panel.

  She turned around slowly, letting the camera snap a panoramic mosaic. Then she picked up a small TV camera, and fixed that in place on her chest, beside the Hasselblad.

  The quality of the radio link changed; a Houston capcom came on the line. ‘Go ahead, Mr President. Out.’

  Natalie and Phil, I’m talking to you by a radio link-up from the Oval Room at the White House.

  Reagan’s gravelly voice was lively, interested. He sure plays the part well. She found herself drawing a little more upright, as if coming to attention.

  Now, the NASA technical people tell me that it will take four minutes for my words to reach you, and four more before I get to hear your reply. So I figure we can’t have much of a conversation. I just want to say this, as you talk to us from the Valley of Mangala. Our progress in space – continuing to take giant steps for all mankind – is a tribute to American teamwork and excellence. And we can be proud to say: We are first; we are the best; and we are so because we’re free.

  America has always been greatest when we dared to be great. We have reached for greatness again. We can follow our dreams to the planets and to distant stars, living and working in space for peaceful, economic, and scientific gain …

  York – standing on the pad in the reality of the glowing landscape, and with the weight of her pack heavy on her back – endured the remote, distorted voice.

  … Now I’m going to shut up, Natalie and Phil, but I want you to indulge us with just a couple of minutes of your time. Please tell us how it feels to be, at last, on the surface of Mars.

  Reagan fell silent, and the radio link hissed.

  Stone said: ‘Thank you, Mr President. It’s an honor and a privilege for us to be here, representing not only the United States, but all of mankind. Natalie …’

  Natalie, tell them how it feels.

  The oldest question in the world, the most difficult to answer – and, maybe, the most important, she thought.

  The one question the Apollo astronauts could never answer.

  Now I must try.

  In the pink sky, the sun was continuing to strengthen, and the world was a bowl of shades of red and brown, of light scattering from the dust on the ground and suspended in the air. The light from the hatchway shone as brilliantly white as before, incongruous.

  ‘Okay, sir. The MEM is standing here on the flats north of Mangala Vallis. It’s a late fall morning – we’re only about eighty days away from the winter solstice, here in the northern hemisphere of Mars. The sky is uniformly ochre. The dust suffuses everything with a pale, salmon hue. The red planet isn’t really so red: the dominant color is a moderate yellow brown, reflected from the land. There’s no green, or blue, anywhere. If humans ever colonize Mars for good – no, make that when – we’ll have to invent a lot of new words for shades of brown.

  ‘I’m almost on the Martian equator. To give you some reference, the great Tharsis Bulge, with its three huge shield volcanoes, is a couple of thousand miles to the east of me; and Olympus Mons, the greatest volcano in the Solar System, is about the same distance to the north.

  ‘We’re close enough to Tharsis for this region to have been affected by the uplift of the Bulge. So, although the surface here looks as flat as a beach at low tide, I know that when I look away from the MEM I’m probably looking down a slope of a few tenths of a degree.’

  She took a long, slow look around at the panorama of Mangala Vallis.

  ‘The MEM is standing on a surface which is littered with rocks. The rocks, I would say, range in size from maybe half a yard up to two yards. The rocks show vesicles. That is, there are small bubbles in the surface of the rocks; it means the rocks are probably bits of frozen lava. The rocks are uniformly pitted and fluted, I would guess by wind erosion. I can seem smaller formations that look like pebbles, but I’m pretty sure they are duricrust aggregate. Just bits of the surface stuck together. The surface is not like sand; it’s evidently much finer grained. I’m sure that the dust is the result of the slow weathering of the rocks, with much oxidation having occurred; the rocks have the characteristic deep red-brown coloration of smectite clays …

  ‘I
can see how geological processes are continuing to shape this landscape. The surface has clearly been scoured by wind: the landscape is eroded, and the dust under my feet has surely been transported from around the planet. From a geological point of view, there is clearly a sequence of events represented here: impact, wind, volcanic activity, possibly flooding, probably ground ice.

  ‘The Moon is an old world; we think its story ended, essentially, a billion or more years ago. But it’s obvious to me, standing here, that Mars, like Earth, is still evolving. Still alive.’

  There was a long silence on the radio link.

  ‘Natalie,’ Stone said gendy. ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘Yes. Yes, I’m fine, Phil.’

  She thought of her words dispersing, radiating away to Earth and beyond; she wished she could call them back. It’s not enough. It could never be enough.

  But, I guess, it was the best I could do.

  It was time.

  She said, ‘I’ll step off the footpad now.’

  She held onto the ladder with her right hand and leaned out to the left. She raised her left boot over the lip of the footpad, pushed it out a little way, and – silendy, carefully – lowered it to the dust.

  Nobody spoke: Stone, Gershon, remote Earth. It was as if the whole of creation was focused on her, on this moment. She tested her weight, bouncing on her left boot in the gentle gravity. The Martian regolith was firm enough to hold her. As she had known it would be.

  She was standing with one foot on this clumsy artifact from Earth, the other on the virgin terrain of Mangala. She looked around, briefly, at the empty landscape, framed by the rounded rim of her faceplate, and she could see the play of soft ochre light over her nose and cheeks, the flesh of a human face, here on Mars.

  Holding onto the ladder, she placed her right foot on the ground. Then, cautiously, she let go of the ladder. She was standing freely on Mars.

  She took a step forward, then another.

  Her boots left clear, firm prints, which showed the ridging of the soles. She wished she could take her shoes off, press her bare toes into the sand of this Martian beach, feel the fine, powdery stuff for herself.