Voyage n-1

by Stephen Baxter

  She dropped the paper back on the table. “It’s so damn circumspect. It’s hard to make out anything at all.”

  “Yeah.” He cradled his glass. “Well, the results are ambiguous. The life experiment is a gas chromatography mass spectrometer!”

  “We’d have done better. Viking would have carried—”

  “Yeah, I know. Anyway, the GCMS looked for organic molecules in the regolith.”

  “And?”

  “The GCMS found nothing, Natalie.”

  “Nothing? But that’s impossible…”

  Organic molecules didn’t necessarily imply the existence of life. “Organic” just meant “carbon-based.” But organic molecules were a necessary precursor to Earth-type life, and they had been expected on the Martian surface; organic materials had even been found in meteorites from outer space.

  Ben said, “The JPL guys figure there must be some process on Mars that actively destroys organics. Ultraviolet flux from the sun, maybe.”

  “So the surface is actually sterilized.” She felt a crushing disappointment. She had, she realized, been hoping, unreasonably, that some kind of life might turn up after all. Maybe a hardy lichen clinging to the lee side of a rock… “Mars is dead.”

  “Should you be jumping to conclusions like that, a true scientist like you?” He found another piece of paper. “Hey, listen to this. It’s from their meteorology team. Winds in the late afternoon were again out of a generally easterly direction. Once again the winds went to the southwesterly after midnight and oscillated about that direction through what appears to be two cycles. The maximum wind speed was twenty-four feet per second but gusts were detected reaching forty-five feet per second. The minimum temperature attained, just before dawn, was almost the same as on the previous day, minus ninety-six degrees centigrade. The maximum, measured at 2:16 P.M. local time, was minus forty-three degrees. This was two degrees colder than at the same time on the previous day. The mean pressure… Natalie, my God, this is a weather report from Mars.”

  She looked up at him. His blue eyes were on her, his face gentle; she felt as if he were looking right into her.

  For years, she thought, she had been heading toward Ben Priest, maybe toward that moment, like some dumb spacecraft on its blind trajectory to a target planet.

  She pushed toward him, leaning across the photographs of Mars. Their lips touched, gently, almost timidly. His skin felt cool, a little rough. She pressed again, and this time the kiss was deep.

  This has been coming for a hell of a long time. Ben Priest and Mars. It was a potent combination.

  Eventually they broke.

  He touched her cheek. “Now, where the hell did that come from?”

  “The Soviets have sent pictures from the surface of Mars,” she said. “It’s a hell of a day for all of us, for all of humanity. Maybe a new step in our evolutionary history. What else do you want to do to celebrate?” She reached into the pocket of her shirt and dug out her room key. “Come on.”

  Long after Ben had fallen asleep, York remained awake. It had turned into a hell of a night, the darkness laden with heat and humidity; the sheets lay loosely over her, faintly damp against her skin. She heard the ticking of the small clock beside the bed, the creak of the window shutters as they cooled. Mars 9 pictures and printouts were scattered over the floor at the end of the bed, with clothes piled loosely on top.

  She could feel the tousled warmth of Ben beside her. Ben had flown around the Moon, and there he was, in her bed.

  She remembered Ben’s question. Where the hell did that come from? Where, indeed. And where were they going?

  She wondered if she should ask him about Karen, and Peter.

  He hadn’t mentioned them; York didn’t even know where Karen was at this time. He had told her they were having difficulties with their boy: young, enthusiastic Petey had metamorphosed into Peter, a difficult seventeen-year-old, who had painted the walls of his room black — covering up the stars and astronaut pictures he’d pasted there — and spent more time listening to Alice Cooper than to his father.

  But Ben didn’t say much about that, even though she could see it caused him distress. Ben rarely talked about his family, in fact.

  And York was being a hypocritical asshole. A couple of hours ago, she couldn’t have given a damn about Karen.

  Would Ben ever leave Karen? They went back a long time, obviously. And theirs was a Navy marriage. When Karen married Ben, she took on a lot of separation, of anxiety. Perhaps Ben thought he owed her.

  Anyhow, if he did leave her — what then? Would York want him?

  What about Mike?

  It was all, she thought, just one hell of a mess. It was hard to understand how, for a person who had advanced so far on her rationality and logic, she could work out so little about a small affair of a handful of people, and their unexceptional relationships to each other.

  She stopped thinking about it.

  She picked the folder off the floor and, quietly dug farther through the contents of the Soviet file.

  She found XRF results. The X-ray fluorescence device had sent back to Earth a preliminary assay of the composition of Martian regolith. She scanned it quickly. Silicon dioxide, 45 percent; ferrous oxide, 18 percent… There was a lot of silicon, iron, magnesium, aluminum, calcium, and sodium. But the proportions weren’t like any terrestrial rock. There was a lot of iron there. And not much potassium. That was probably significant; it meant that Martian rock hadn’t suffered as much differentiation by internal heating as had the Earth. Maybe Mars didn’t have a large core of nickel and iron, as Earth did…

  She swore under her breath. She was speculating. Those data were so limited. That Soviet lander had set down in just one spot, on a planet with a land area the same as the Earth’s. And she could see the limitations of the sampling scoop just by looking at the photos of it. It was only going to be able to sample loose, friable material; what geologists called fines. It just wasn’t enough to give a complete picture.

  What we need is someone out there, climbing off the lander, with a spade and a hammer.

  Now that she’d gotten over her initial disappointment, she didn’t much care about the life results. It was geology that fascinated her; life was just a second-order consequence of geology, after all. A positive biology result would have been convenient, though. If only we had seen a silicon-based gorilla jumping up and down on the damn Russian camera, we’d be going to Mars tomorrow Even a fossilized trilobite would do.

  She remembered those scratchy Mariner 4 pictures. And later, those astonishing images of Phobos, and Olympus Mons, from Mariner 9. Humanity had learned more about Mars from the probes in the last decade or so than in the whole of previous human history. She was lucky to live at such a time, when so many ancient mysteries were being resolved.

  Lucky. Maybe.

  But it was as if Mars was somehow teasing her. Enticing her.

  She put down the reports. It was time she was honest with herself. This dribble of data isn’t enough I don’t want to spend the next thirty years as I have the last two or three, poring over grainy Mariner images, constructing hypotheses I can never confirm. I want to go to Mars, damn it. I want to get down on my hands and knees on that rocky ground, and dig a trench, and bury my gloved fingers in the surface. I want to see the pink sky, and the twin moons, and drive to the peak of Olympus Mons, and stand on the lip of the Valles Mariners.

  Mars, with its slow, teasing unveiling, was seducing her.

  She realized that Ben had seen that more clearly than she had. And certainly more clearly than Mike, who could barely see anything beyond his own concerns.

  But the dream, the ambition itself, wasn’t the problem. The problem was, she had an outside chance of getting there. As Ben kept telling her, York was the right age, with the right qualifications, to compete for a place in NASA.

  The problem was, she might actually try to do it.

  But joining NASA, trying to get to Mars, meant throwing away her who
le life. It meant she’d have to go back to school, and she’d have to go through endless, meaningless training with those assholes at NASA, and she might spend years in low Earth orbit working on crap outside her specialty.

  It probably meant, too — it occurred to her suddenly — that she wouldn’t have any kids.

  Did she really want to sacrifice all that, to go through so much shit, just for an outside chance of walking on the slopes of Tharsis?

  But her fingers itched to get into that dirt, to dig around, to get beyond the loose surface crust of Mars.

  The very next day, she was supposed to meet Mike. She’d booked them into a hotel in downtown L.A., so they could spend some time together.

  After last night she felt truly shitty about going ahead with the meeting, or date, or whatever the hell she was supposed to call it at that point in her relationship. But she decided to go anyhow; she didn’t see much choice.

  Before they parted, Ben dug a leaflet out of his jacket pocket. “Here,” he said. “For you.”

  Eighteen hours later, in their L.A. motel room, York rubbed the tension out of Mike’s shoulders, and at last he slept.

  After that it was York who seemed to be stuck awake.

  She was stiff and a little cold, and the sheets beneath her were crumpled, digging into her back as she lay there. The mellow feeling from the minibar brandies had worn off, leaving her feeling stale, her heart overstimulated.

  And besides, she had something she needed to talk over with Mike.

  She opened the drawer of the bedside table and pulled out Ben’s leaflet.

  In the soft glow of the splinters of light on the ceiling she couldn’t read any of it, but she could make out some of the images: the famous photograph of Joe Muldoon standing on the Moon with his hand across his chest, little schematic diagrams of spacecraft flying around the Solar System. At the back there was a tear-off application form; she ran her fingertip along the perforation.

  Issued by the National Academy of Sciences on behalf of NASA, the leaflet was tided “Opportunities for Scientists as Astronauts.” It set out a glowing future in space: expanded laboratories in Earth orbit, more stations around the Moon, even semipermanent scientific colonies on the surface to follow the preliminary toe-dips of Apollo. And then there were NASA’s goals beyond cislunar space: the first manned Mars mission, orbital surveys of Venus — and even, more ambitious still, manned flights to the asteroids and the Jovian system. All within the lifetimes of the scientists it was meant to enlist.

  It was an application form to be an astronaut.

  She’d been tempted to throw the leaflet into the trash. She was immensely disappointed by that garbage: typical NASA dreaming, predicated on an unwavering expansion of funding and an unrelenting political will. For that, she should sacrifice her career, throw away a decade of her life? After all, none of that astounding program was real…

  None of it. Except, maybe, Mars.

  Everyone knew about the problems: Mike’s NERVA program was years behind schedule, there were delays in the enhanced Saturn booster development, and the Mars lander base technology project was underfunded and lacking focus… And so forth. In the end, if it succeeded at all, NASA would probably reach Mars much as it had reached the Moon: not as part of any long-term integrated strategy of expansion into the Solar System, as set out in that glossy little pamphlet, but as a precarious one-of-a-kind stunt. NASA seemed organizationally equipped for no other mode of working.

  But, for all that, progress was being made, and funding seemed secured for the near future. Jimmy Carter’s attitude to space remained to be demonstrated, but Ben told her that Fred Michaels, the NASA Administrator, had thrown his weight behind Ted Kennedy as Vice President, and helped him secure the nomination against Walter Mondale — who was well known as a critic of the space program, all the way back to the 1960s. Carter/Kennedy were clear favorites to win the November election. And after that, things would look better for Michaels, with his links to the Democrats, and allies among the Kennedys both inside and outside the White House…

  NASA, it seemed, was still headed for Mars.

  She’d intended to talk to Mike about it tonight. Somehow, though, the subject hadn’t come up.

  She put the leaflet back in the drawer.

  Beside her, Mike shifted a little, but he didn’t wake up. He was turned toward her, and his hair lay in a dark halo about his head. He slept like a child, she thought: facedown, with his arms up around his head, and his face turned sideways. In sleep the tension had drained out of his face, and he looked years younger than his age of thirty-four.

  She’d hardly seen Mike in the last few months. His schedule was grueling. NERVA 2 was only seven months away from the Critical Design Review at the scheduled end of its Phase A development. After that Phase B, production and operations, should be starting up in earnest, with the first unmanned flight tests scheduled for 1978, and the Preliminary Flight Certificate — issued after the first manned flight — to be obtained by mid 1979.

  But Mike’s people still hadn’t been able to demonstrate a sustained burn of their huge new engine for more than a couple of seconds.

  Mike seemed to be taking it particularly hard. He’d clearly been working fifteen or eighteen hours a day for weeks. He’d become gaunt, his eyes sunk deep in shadows, his clothes and hair rumpled and ill maintained. She wasn’t sure if that reflected the way he was coping personally, or the fact that a lot of the problems seemed to be in the cooling systems for which he was responsible.

  Still sleepless, she turned on the TV.

  An old Star Trek rerun was flickering through its paces. The warp engines were in trouble again, and Mr. Scott was crawling through some kind of glass tube with a wrench.

  “If only it was as easy as that,” Mike mumbled.

  His head was lifted off the pillow, and, bleary, he was squinting at the TV.

  “I didn’t mean to wake you, Scotty.”

  He reached for a cigarette. “You want something else to drink?”

  “No. The brandy is keeping me awake, I think.” The comforting smell of stale smoke reached her; it reminded her of her mother. “It’s times like this I wish I smoked.”

  He grunted. “Don’t even think about it.”

  She debated telling him about the form in the bedside drawer.

  But he was checking the clock. “I think I’d have woken up anyhow. They should be running the latest burn about now. Something inside me, some dumb kind of tinier, wakes me up at moments like this, even when I’m twenty miles away from the facility.”

  “The burns. The tests. Always the fucking tests. Mike, unless you can figure out a way to relax, you’ll make yourself crazy.”

  He blew out smoke. “I think we’re all a little crazy already.”

  The trouble was, driving people like this had become part of NASA culture. We all worked eighteen hours a day for eight years to get a man on the Moon with Apollo, and if we have to do it all over again to get to Mars, well, by gosh, that’s what we’re going to do…. But mistakes had been made on Apollo, and those mistakes had claimed lives.

  She put her hand over his; she could feel how it was bunched up, almost into a fist. She stroked his knuckles. “Listen. I’ve been thinking. We don’t see enough of each other.”

  “Hell, I know that. But what can we do about it? We’ve always known what the deal would be.”

  She sought for words. “But I think our lives are kind of hollow, Mike; we’ve been neglecting ourselves too much. Too many other things to distract us.” She waved a hand at the motel room. “We need something more than patches of neutral territory like this. We need something solid. I think we should get a place to live—”

  He snorted out a billow of smoke. “Where? We’re lucky if we’re both in the same state for more than twenty-four hours.”

  She was irritated at his dismissiveness. “I know that. ‘Where’ doesn’t matter. Anywhere. Here, or Berkeley maybe. And it wouldn’t even matter if the
damn place was empty for three-quarters of the year. It would be ours, Mike; that’s the point. It would be a kind of base for us. At the moment, all we have is this. Holiday Inn. I don’t think it’s enough.” I’m twenty-eight years old, for God’s sake.

  He stubbed out his cigarette and watched her; on the TV screen, ignored, Captain Kirk was facing another crisis. “You’re a crazy woman, Natalie York.”

  “Maybe so. What do you say?”

  “Why now? I mean, it’s not going to make a damn piece of difference to the way we live our lives, the extent to which we see each other. You’re not going to give up your career.”

  “Of course not, and neither are you.” She pulled at his fingers. “But that’s not the point.”

  Then what is, Natalie? What primeval instinct has dragged this up, after all this time? And right at this moment, when you’re thinking of getting on a road that could take you off the Earth altogether…

  She surely hadn’t come to terms with what had happened last night, yet.

  Maybe this — tonight, with Mike — was all just some kind of way of dealing with Ben, she thought bleakly.

  But if that was true, where did it leave her and Mike?…

  Christ. What a mess.

  The phone rang, its sharp tone startling her.

  “Jesus.” He reached out and took the receiver. “Hello?… All right, I’ll be there.” He put the phone down.

  “Mike—”

  He was already halfway out of bed; he scrabbled over the floor, looking for his pants. “The burn was another failure. Sustained for less than half a second. Shit.” He touched her hair. “I’ve got to be there, Natalie. You go back to sleep.”

  “I haven’t been asleep.” She kicked away the sheets and stood up; the air in the room was distinctly cold. “I’ll come, too.”

  “You don’t have to.”

  “I’d prefer it. Anyway, we have a conversation to finish.”