Read Return to Mars Online

Authors: Ben Bova

Tags: #Science Fiction, #Fantasy

Return to Mars (9 page)

OVERNIGHT: SOL 7/8
“THIS IS THE TRICKY PART,” JAMIE WARNED DEZHUROVA.
After a whole day of driving, she was edging the rover up the steadily rising ground, skirting boulders the size of automobiles, gearing clown as the grade steepened.
Off to their right the setting sun was almost touching the jagged horizon, its pale pinkish light slanting into the cockpit, throwing long shadows across the rocky ground. They were both in their tan coveralls. The last geology/meteorology beacon for the day had been planted almost two hours earlier. Now they were reaching the lip of the greatest canyon in the solar system.
“The edge comes up all of a sudden,” Jamie warned, in a near-whisper.
“I have flown the simulations,” Dezhurova said flatly, never taking her eyes off the ground trundling slowly by.
“Sorry,” Jamie muttered.
She flicked a quick glance at him. “Copilots are always backseat drivers,” she said, deadpan.
Jamie half rose in his seat. “I think …”
“Yes.”
“There it is!”
Dezhurova pressed the brake so gently that Jamie barely rocked forward. He sat there staring out at the immensity of the Grand Canyon. The breath gushed out of him.
There it was.
Stacy muttered, “Oora …” stretching out the word, her voice hollow with awe.
They were looking over the edge of the Grand Canyon, a gash in the world that spread the distance from New York to San Francisco, more than five kilometers deep, so wide that they could not see the other side.
The land just dropped away, abruptly, without warning. Far, far below, deeper than most ocean bottoms on Earth, was the Canyon floor, stretching out and beyond the horizon. Not a wisp of mist obscured their view; they could see it all in crisp detail, marred only by the incredible distances they gazed through.
“Come see this!” Dezhurova called back over her shoulder.
“We’re there?” Trudy Hall asked as she and Trumball pushed into the cockpit and crouched behind the seats to look out through the windshield.
“Marvelous,” Hall whispered.
Jamie glanced up at Trumball. For once in his life, Dex was speechless, staring, overwhelmed with wonder at the majesty of Tithonium Chasma.
Guide me to the right path, Grandfather, Jamie prayed silently. Lead me to the harmony that alone can bring peace to my heart. Let me find the truth of it all, and let me go in beauty.
Trumball found his voice at last. “I don’t see the landslide that you guys went down.”
“It’s off to the right a few klicks,” Jamie said, as certain as he was of his own name.
Kneeling behind Jamie’s seat, Trumball grunted. “Injun scout know-urn territory, huh?”
Jamie looked up sharply at him. “You bet your ass I do.”
Dezhurova tapped a finger on the control panel’s electronic map display. “Jamie is right. Here is where we are, and here …” her fingertip edged to a blinking green spot on the map, “… is where we want to be.”
“Can we get there before dark?” Hall asked.
“No,” said Dezhurova, shaking her head. “The sun is on the horizon already.”
“We’ll still have a half-hour or so before it gets dark,” Trumball pointed out.
Dezhurova half-turned in her seat to face him. ‘ ‘Do you want to go feeling your way along this cliff edge in the dark? I do not.”
“It won’t be that dark, not right away. And you’ve got the headlights, for god’s sake.”
Dezhurova’s broad chin was set stubbornly. “This is not the Bat-mobile, and I am no shroomer.”
Trumball frowned with puzzlement. Jamie grinned inwardly. He’d been around the astronauts enough to know that “shroomer” was short for “mushroomer,” someone with the intellectual capacity of a fungus.
“I still think—”
Jamie cut Trumball short. “In any argument that concerns safety, Dex, the astronaut has the final say. That’s the rule.”
“And we always play by the rules, don’t we?” Trumball grumbled.
Hall tried to defuse the situation. “If we’re only a half-hour or so away, why not wait until morning? It won’t make that much difference, will it?”
Trumball grinned at her, but it looked half-hearted. “Yeah, I suppose you’re right. What the hell.”
Trumball got up and headed back toward the midget galley in the module’s rear. Reluctantly, Jamie thought. “Might’s well start dinner,” he called over his shoulder.
Hall went back to join him in pulling packages of their prepared meals out of the freezer and sliding them into the microwave oven.
“I’m going to set up one of the beacons,” Jamie told Dezhurova, getting up from his seat.
“That means I will have to suit up, too,” she said, with a sigh.
“We can bend the rules a little. I’ll just be outside for a couple minutes.”
Her sapphire blue eyes flicked toward Trumball. “Bend the rules? How do you think he will feel about that?”
Before Jamie could answer, Dezhurova added, “Besides, I would like to get out of here for a little bit.”
So the two of them went back to the hard suits stored by the airlock and suited up while Trumball and Hall unfolded the table and started in on their meals.
“Wait for us before you begin dessert,” Dezhurova called cheerfully.
“Fine,” said Hall.
They checked each other’s suits, then Jamie took one of the beacons and entered the airlock. Once outside, by the time he had slid the rod lo its full length and dug its pointed end into the ground, Dezhurova came through the outer hatch to join him.
“That damned UV circuit is still balky,” she complained.
Struggling with the pole, Jamie said, “Maybe we should trace it all the way from the console. Find the fault.”
“Yes, I suppose we will have to,” Dezhurova said. Then she added, “They should have put a motorized auger on the poles.”
Bending over, grunting with the effort of worming the pole into the ground, Jamie answered, “Muscle power’s cheaper.”
He straightened up and turned his suit fans higher. He felt sweat trickling down his ribs.
“I think that’ll do it,” he said.
Dezhurova replied, “You haven’t turned the light on.”
“Wait a minute. I want to see if …”
“The sun is down. We must get back inside.”
“In a minute.” ‘
“What is it?”
Jamie turned his back to the faint pink glow where the sun had dropped behind the jagged horizon. The sky out to the east was black, empty.
“Let your eyes adjust to the darkness, Stacy,” he told Dezhurova.
“If you are trying to see Earth, it’s not—”
“No,” he whispered. “Wait.”
“For what?”
Jamie saw them. Shimmering bands of light, faint as ghosts, flickering across the sky in spectral pale pinks and whites.
“An aurora!” Dezhurova gasped.
“The sky dancers,” Jamie murmured, more to himself than her.
“There must be a solar flare … some kind of disturbance …”
“No,” Jamie heard himself say. “Mars’ magnetosphere is so weak that the solar wind hits the upper atmosphere all over the planet. We get the lights almost every night, right after sunset. They fade away pretty quickly, though.”
The Navaho side of his mind was saying, The sky dancers are here, Grandfather. I see them. I understand them. They bring your spirit to me, Grandfather. It’s good that you are here with me. It brings strength and beauty.

 

The Old Ones taught that the People once lived in a red world, long before coming to the desert where they now dwell. Coyote, ever the trickster, caused a huge flood that would have killed all the People if they had not been able to reach the blue world safely.
IN TRANSIT
NO MATTER HOW HARD HE TRIED, JAMIE FOUND THE LIVING QUARTERS ON the Mars-bound spacecraft small, cramped and stifling.
He knew his compartment was actually a bit larger than the quarters he had occupied in the first expedition’s craft. But that space vehicle had been equipped with a wardroom spacious enough to accommodate all twelve of the scientists and astronauts aboard. And there had been an observation center as well, a place where Jamie could get away from everyone else, at least for a little while.
The second expedition’s craft was laid out in a circular plan. Each of the eight compartments was a pie-shaped cubicle; each precisely the same size as all the others. A passageway ran along the outer perimeter, giving access to each cubicle. It also served as Trudy Hall’s running track. Every morning, for the entire five months of the flight to Mars, Jamie was awakened by her remorseless thumping, round and round, for at least a full hour.
In each compartment the door at the wide end of the pie wedge opened onto the passageway. The door at the narrow end opened onto one of the ship’s two lavatories; the three women shared one lav, the five men shared the other.
There were no observation ports. The ship’s designers had placed a Hat display screen on one wall of each living compartment, an electronic “window” that could show outside views or videos, at the whim of the occupant. It could also be used as a computer display.
Their cylindrical spacecraft swung at the end of a five-kilometer-long tether composed of microscopic-sized tubules of Buckyballs, man-made molecules of carbon atoms shaped like geodesic spheres. Tough, light and pliable, the Buckyball tethers had a greater tensile strength than the strongest metal alloys. On the other end of the tether was the nuclear rocket system and its radiation shield. The two modules swung around their common center to give a feeling of gravity to the explorers: a full terrestrial g when they left Earth orbit, slowly winding down to the one-third g of Mars as they crossed the gulf between the planets. Thus the explorers would be adapted to Martian gravity when they landed.
Despite the electronic window, Jamie felt like a penned animal, a convict in jail. The spacecraft was never quiet; pumps chugged, air fans buzzed, computers beeped. He could hear people talking from three or lour compartments away, livery day Trudy Mall’s endless jogging around the outer passageway sounded like a Chinese water torture, padding incessantly at her precise trotting pace.
Jamie spent as little time in his quarters as possible, preferring the galley on the level above. At least it was large enough to hold all eight of them at once, although it was something of a squeeze. They were always bumping shoulders up there, literally. “Good morning” was inevitably followed by, “Oops, sorry.”
The galley doubled as a conference room. There was no other room available. Their spacecraft had been designed to minimize cost, not maximize crew comforts.
Despite the crowding, or perhaps because of it, everyone was extremely polite. Most of the time. No one complained about body odors or stale jokes. No one played disks or videos without using an earplug, unless everyone agreed to listen or watch. If any of them paired off for sex, they kept quiet about it, both during the lovemaking and afterward. Most of the time.
But there were tensions. Possum Craig took some teasing about his nose, but to Jamie’s eye he was sensitive about his status as the team’s repairman. He’s a professional scientist, Jamie knew, but he’s spent his career working for petroleum companies rather than universities. The other scientists unconsciously looked down at him.
Vijay Shektar seemed constantly on guard against sexual advances. She had seemed like an attractive young woman when Jamie had first met her, but after the months of being confined in the spacecraft she began to look to him like one of the voluptuous dancing girls carved on the face of a Hindu temple. And the other men obviously felt the same way. But with her Aussie caustic wit she shriveled any man who tried to come on to her. It took several weeks before Tomas Rodriguez finally admitted defeat to himself.
Fuchida was more difficult for Jamie to fathom. He was exquisitely polite at all times and seemed totally at ease in the crowded living spaces. Yet his eyes seemed sad, melancholy, as if he longed for an Eden that was forever lost. Jamie wondered what preoccupied the Japanese biologist: was it something in his past that was bothering him, or something in the future he was worried about?
The other biologist, Trudy Hall, seemed to be quite self-contained: pleasant almost all the time, intelligent, but certainly not outgoing. She went her own way and spent most of her time working with Fuchida.
Anastasia Dezhurova was just the opposite: Stacy looked gloomy, scowling, forbidding, but once you began talking with her she opened up into a friendly, likeable, utterly competent woman. She was big-boned, thick in the middle, slow in movement, but her reflexes were lightning-fast. During a mandatory training session out in the badlands of Dakota, Jamie had seen her snatch a field mouse in her hare hand when it came sniffing into her tent. Then she tenderly carried the terrified rodent out to the brush and set it free.
Dezhurova was the senior of the team’s two astronauts, with more than a dozen flights into space for the Russians; she was second in command to Jamie. She worked with Rodriguez and, as the weeks went by, more and more with Craig on maintaining the equipment and running the astronomical experiments at the behest of astronomers back on Earth.
If being subordinate to her threatened Rodriguez’s machismo, he gave no outward sign of it. Tomas seemed to be an amiable, easygoing sort, although Jamie wondered how long he could remain cooped up with the three women without causing a problem.
It was Dex Trumball who gave Jamie the most irritation. Dex with his cocky, handsome smile and smooth manners. A young man born to money, who’d never had to struggle for anything in his life. His father had been a major force in funding this expedition, yet Dex would have been chosen to go anyway, he was that good a geophysicist. Degrees from Yale and a doctorate from Berkeley, no less, plus brilliant work on the lunar mascons.

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