“I’ll do it,” she said. “You wait down here and release the Rover’s brakes when I give you the signal. You can then climb up after me. The wall doesn’t look like it should be too hard. No overhangs.”
“Yeah, sure. Not hard at all,” he mumbled. Sarah had to be crazy. And he was, too, since he had just agreed to her idea. In the face of her enthusiasm, he didn’t have it in him to argue with her.
“If we start now, we should be at the top in forty-five minutes,” she said optimistically.
“Let’s get cracking,” Lance said.
Sarah started rummaging for the winch in the toolbox. She clipped it onto her back and then attached herself to the safety line. And just like that, Sarah started up the slope.
Lance watched closely as she struggled up the wall. It would be good for him to memorize the route she took. She moved assuredly, like an experienced climber. And here he had thought she was a typical scientist who never left the laboratory.
“You’re doing great,” he said.
“Eh,” she exhaled loudly, “I’m a little out of shape. Fifteen years ago, I pursued speed climbing as a hobby.”
“Take your time. This isn’t a competition.”
“I know that.”
And with that, she reached the top. The most critical phase started now. Sarah had to find a way to secure the winch so that the weight of the Rover wouldn’t be able to pull it loose. Lance couldn’t help her. He couldn’t even see what she was doing, but she was taking her time, which was a good thing. If she made even the smallest misjudgment here, the Rover would plunge to the bottom of the canyon.
“That’s it,” she said. “Heads up, here comes the rope.
Lance caught the rope and tied it to the front of the Rover. “The rope’s secure.”
Now or never, Sarah thought. “Starting the winch.”
Lance released the Rover’s brakes, and Sarah began to turn the winch. Thanks to the winch’s gear ratio, she was strong enough to slowly raise the vehicle. The front axle dangled in the air, and the rest of the vehicle crept closer to the wall. The Rover swung side to side a little, but that stopped when the front two wheels met the wall.
“It’s working,” he shouted.
Centimeter by centimeter, the rope was pulled upward. The Rover’s joints creaked as the vehicle assumed a sway-backed shape. The Rover hadn’t been constructed to be bent like that, but as long as unusual noises were the only things breaking the silence, Lance was satisfied.
The Rover’s eight tires were now pressed against the wall. It was a strange scene, one in which it looked as if someone had switched off the gravitational pull. Lance’s tasks below were over, so he also started to climb. For a two-legged creature, the steep wall didn’t really present a problem. There were enough footholds, and the stone hadn’t eroded much and was stable. He finally propped his arms on the upper edge and pulled the rest of his body over the top. Did it!
Sarah was still cranking the winch. She had placed it far enough back that when the Rover crested the wall, it would roll to a stop in front of her.
“Need any help?” he asked.
“Not right now. Could you check on the Rover, though?”
Lance stood on the edge of the cliff. A thick, plump caterpillar twinkled its headlights at him. “Looks great,” he said, giving Sarah a thumbs up.
The next moment, she began to sway unsteadily. He was about to run to her, but she caught herself in time.
“Ooof. I lost my balance because the Rover suddenly grew lighter. Did you see anything fall off?”
“I’m sorry. I was looking at you.”
“That’s alright,” she said.
Ten minutes later, the Rover was standing beside them. They had saved at least three hours—and another night spent camping in the wall—by following Sarah’s advice.
Together they checked their cargo. Nothing obvious was missing, but then Lance recalled, “We had packed those rocks on the Rover for better traction. They must’ve come loose,” he said in relief.
“Of course,” Sarah answered. “Why didn’t I think of that before?”
Sol 59, NASA base
“Have you heard anything from Sarah and Lance?”
Sharon gave a start as Mike poked his head into the command center. It was only 5 AM. “No, nothing new,” she replied. “But I told you I would wake you up immediately if they called in.”
Mike dropped into the seat beside hers. He reeked of sweat.
“Maybe you should take a long shower. Why are you up already?” Sharon asked.
“I couldn’t sleep anymore. How could anyone sleep with all this bad news? I bet the MfE backstabbers have done something to Sarah and Lance. We’d have heard from them otherwise!”
“We can’t know that. Their settlement is located in the other direction, and they don’t even know that Sarah and Lance are out and about.”
“Maybe they’ve been listening in on our radio communications. I’d believe anything of them. We need to encrypt our communications from now on.”
“Mike, anything could’ve happened. Maybe a sun flare hit Mars and scrambled the ionosphere. Or their radio had a short circuit. There are plenty of innocent reasons why we might not be hearing from them. The two of them can look out for themselves.”
“There are also enough reasons that make my blood run cold. I’m the one who suggested they take the route through the Hebes Chasma. That was a huge mistake.”
“They got down into the canyon just fine. The contact broke off after that point.”
“See! Something must’ve happened when they tried to drive out of the Chasma. If the MfE scum hadn’t robbed us blind, we could’ve checked on them. But now we can’t help them at all.”
“We could ask the MfE people for help if it’s necessary.”
“Ask them? Just what we need. So they can betray us one more time? Lance and Sarah are better off without them.”
“I’ll bet they’re feeling bad about what they did, Mike. At least a few of them probably are. They have two Rovers and plenty of people.”
“Only over my dead body,” Mike snapped back.
“You know what, I’m going to go lay down for a little while. The night shift was tense, and your griping isn’t helping. What’s happened to your optimism?”
“How could anyone remain an optimist under these circumstances?”
“Goodnight, Mike.”
“Goodnight, Sharon.”
Although she was dead tired, it took Sharon a long time to fall asleep. At this rate, Mike was going to drive her totally crazy. The boy was so hardheaded! And he now expected only the worst from the MfE group. But it was impossible for 15 people to all mutate into assholes overnight. What’s that old saying? Ah, yes, ‘A fish rots from the head down,’ she recalled. The theft might not have been Ewa’s idea, but she was the one who had approved and then implemented it. Sharon had a hard time believing that the entire crew had been in agreement. They needed to make contact with the ones who hadn’t agreed with Ewa. But how? The reality was that it didn’t help anything to condemn the entire crew, as Mike was willing to do.
The first thing she had to do was tend to Mike. Sometimes she felt like he was a big baby, and she was his mother. At those times, she felt a little jealous of Lance and Sarah, who had found common ground as peers. Were they also sleeping together? They would be spending a lot of time together as a foursome. It made sense if they could fulfill each other’s needs like that. However, Mike—who felt more like a son—wasn’t the right one for her.
How could she distract him, moving forward? Mike needed an outlet for his energy. Now that they weren’t working with the MfE people any longer, they had to rely on each other for survival. One valuable resource was missing for their long-term plans—easily obtainable water. MfE was deliberately building their settlement at a location that possessed this resource. They couldn’t transplant their base so easily. That meant that they would have to find another way to access the vital water.<
br />
When Sharon woke up, the clock indicated that it was noon. She slipped into the shower and put on fresh clothing before joining Mike in the command center. She noticed instantly that he still hadn’t showered. He was wearing earphones and seemed to be searching through all the frequencies for signals.
She snuck up behind on his left side and tapped him on his right shoulder.
Mike flinched and spun around toward the wrong way. “You got me!” he said with a laugh. He always fell for that.
Sharon gazed at him sternly, then said, “If you don’t get into the shower this instant, I will stick you in your spacesuit.”
Mike sighed. “Okay,” he said as he stood up to shuffle into the bathroom.
He was back 15 minutes later. It was like night and day. He was wearing clean clothes and smelled like a freshly-bathed baby.
“That’s better,” she said. Children liked to be praised. “Before I fell asleep I had a major idea that I’d like to discuss with you.”
“Lance and Sarah didn’t radio in while I was gone?”
“No, Mike. What I wanted to say was, now that MfE has left us high and dry, we have a big problem to solve.”
“I know. We need water. I’ve been thinking about that.”
“Oh?” Sharon was surprised. Mike was obviously still in a condition to think about other things besides their betrayal.
“Yes, and I have an idea of where we can find some.”
“Sounds good.”
“The MfE scum took our Rover with the GPR, so we can forget about that. But we could construct our own radar. We have everything we’d need to do that right here.” Mike pointed at the radio. “I have to admit I already got started while you were sleeping,” he added.
“A radio?”
“Yes, we don’t need more than that. Depending on the frequency, we can use it to explore up to a thousand meters below the surface level. When the radio waves encounter the separation levels, they will bounce off of them at varying intensities.”
“That seems like a brilliant solution.”
“The main problem is that we will have to somehow calibrate the radar. The GPR on the Rover is already calibrated. In other words, the device knows which material the signal is encountering based on its reflection factor. We don’t have that information.
“What will we need to do that?
“Ideally, we could deposit water and ice samples at various depths, but to do that we need the drill the MfE scum stole from us.”
“What’s the second-best option?”
“We might just get lucky.”
“That’s exactly what I was thinking,” Sharon said. “But what does that look like in a concrete sense?”
“At some depth between five hundred and a thousand meters, there must be a water table. The water there is warm, due to its depth, and it will contain numerous admixtures, which will make it very conductive. If our radio waves hit it, we should hear a clear echo.”
“Geothermics. That would be marvelous, since we could also obtain energy from it. But what could possibly go wrong with this approach?”
“If there’s something else down there that functions as an equally strong electrical conduit, then we’ll end up drilling a five-hundred or thousand-meter deep hole for nothing.”
“What else could be down there?”
“No idea. Maybe an iron deposit?”
“Metallic iron? Not very likely.”
“You asked, Sharon.”
“It doesn’t matter. We have to take that risk. When do we start?”
“Give me an hour. I’ll convert the radio into a portable GPR. Sarah and Lance seem to be incommunicado for the time being anyway.”
“Hopefully you didn’t ruin your suit,” Sharon said skeptically, eying Mike’s homemade connector between the converted radio and his spacesuit.
“You don’t think I can show up at the Captain’s dinner in this, after all?” he shot back.
“Smartass.”
They were waiting for the airlock to open the external hatch.
“But seriously,” Mike explained, “I had to find a way to connect the radio to my helmet’s earphones. Now I can hear if we hit a conduit layer below the surface.”
“You’ll hear it?”
“The receiver will filter out the reflected part of the signal, amplify it, and make its rhythm audible to the human ear.”
“Ah. So if nothing’s being reflected, you won’t hear anything, but if there’s water right underneath us, it will beep loudly.”
“Something like that. Though I don’t really expect us to find groundwater anywhere nearby.”
The light in the airlock switched from red to green. Sometimes Sharon suspected the base’s computer listened in on their conversations and waited to start the next activity until they were done talking. Very courteous, she thought. But that was nonsense, of course. This expedition had deliberately not been equipped with an AI system. NASA had discussed this for a long time, but in the end, they decided against it—it was either deemed too expensive, or too risky. Nobody had ever told them the exact reason for the decision.
“After you,” Sharon said.
“Ladies first,” Mike countered.
“You weren’t paying attention during training, were you? Upon exiting a vehicle, the gentleman goes first, holds the door, and opens the umbrella for the lady.”
“Is it supposed to rain today?”
“The entire week.”
“I hate this constant rain.”
In moments like this, Sharon actually liked her colleague. You could kid around with him very easily.
“Go on now. Get out,” she said, hands on hips.
Mike climbed up the ladder.
The sky above them was remarkably clear today. It still wasn’t blue—nor would it ever be that color in the future—but the grayish-brown looked fresher than usual, tinged as it was with a generous dash of pink. One might even wonder if rain had just passed through.
“Watch out for the puddles,” Sharon advised.
“I was just about to jump in one. They always splash so nicely.”
“There’ll be hell to pay if you get your newly-washed suit dirty.”
“Sure.”
Sharon walked around the base. Since the Endeavour had been stolen and the Rover was gone, the human presence on Mars was barely noticeable. The structure was a rectangular hole in the ground. The roof was covered with slag to shield its occupants from cosmic radiation. Observers would undoubtedly realize that the hill was a relatively recent addition to the Mars surface, but it probably wouldn’t occur to them that this was where NASA had built its first and only base.
The sole structure that looked manmade was the greenhouse, thanks to its vaulted plexiglass dome. Lance had constructed his turbine behind it. It was turning very slowly. She suddenly remembered that Lance had asked her to knock the dust off it from time to time. She walked over to it and did just that. From the turbine, a thick cable ran westward to where their KRUSTY, their small nuclear reactor, sat at a safe distance.
This was now their new home. Sharon was still having a hard time accepting that. Small but mine—didn’t people say that? She would never again see a green meadow or smell the resiny air of a forest. Worse still, she would eventually forget what that was even like. Memories couldn’t last forever. It was actually a practical mechanism, she thought. It would help make life easier for her on this dusty, red rock, but there was still something achingly sad about this.
Maybe they should meet to share memories for an hour or so a week. Sharon imagined all four of them sitting at the table, talking about their loveliest memories. While their own memories faded, they would be inspired by their visions of the others’ stories. In 30 years, their recollections might become a collective trove as they lost the ability to distinguish who had contributed which memory. Isn’t that how humanity’s great myths had been created, by people gathered around a fire? It was a strange feeling, but if they found a way
to survive on Mars, their memories might form the foundational mythology for a future Mars Nation.
“Should we get started?”
Sharon glanced around. Mike’s voice sounded clear in her headphones. He was moving away from her in the opposite direction. He already seemed far away, but she knew that the perspective was deceptive. She unconsciously still defaulted to Earth’s scale with its much greater distance to the horizon. “I’m coming,” she said.
“I’ve already started.”
Sharon sprinted to catch up with him. Her heart was racing. Mike pointed at his helmet, about where his ear was located. It looked as if he was listening to the planet’s heartbeat. Mike walked along slowly, and Sharon followed. But then he stopped.
“Do you want to listen in?” he asked.
“Yeah.”
“I’ll crank the volume up as high as I can and switch on my helmet mic.”
“Alright.”
There was the sound. Sharon heard a high ping that repeated every ten seconds. She recognized it from an old film she had seen that had been set on board a World War II sub.
“But that’s not the echo, is it?”
“No. It’s nothing more than a fake, or really more like a symbol. I’m not sending sound waves into the ground like the U-boats did when they used sonar to search for obstacles. These are radio waves that the receiver is transforming into audible sounds.”
“And the echo?”
“To a certain extent, the material is absorbing the radio waves, but some of them are also being scattered or reflected. They are being picked up by the receiver, though with a certain amount of delay and distortion which is dependent upon the materials they’re crossing through and being reflected by.”
“So you’re hearing a lot of echoes?”
“The receiver is filtering out all the weak returns. I’m not hearing any of them. But if the waves hit a conductive layer, a larger percentage of them will be reflected. That’s also the reason why mirrors function as they do. They reflect the largest percentage of light waves. Interesting bit of trivia—the water on Mars is supposed to have a high saline content.”
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