Return to Mars

by Ben Bova

  “There you are,” Trumball said. Striding along the aisle between rows of plants, he said to Jamie, “I just heard you’re going to go with us on the first traverse. Is that true?”

  As mission director, Jamie’s place should have been at the base camp. But the expedition’s first overland traverse was heading for Tithonium Chasma, where the lichen had been found, and Jamie had no intention of remaining in the dome while the others were in the field.

  “You really want to come out with us?” Trumball asked, looking somewhere between amused and annoyed.

  Through the open hatch Jamie could hear a country and western tune that someone was playing, plaintive guitars and nasal yearning.

  Jamie nodded solemnly. “You bet I do.”

  Trumball swept an arm through the air, grinning. “And give up all this luxury?”

  “I’m part Navaho,” Jamie countered, making himself grin back at Dex. “I’m rugged.”

  Their base was at last in order. All systems were functioning adequately, even the toilets. Possum Craig was outside with the drilling rig, digging deeper every day, seeking samples of bacteria from the “Plutonian biosphere” that Earthbound biologists had conjectured.

  The backup water generator now stood less than fifty meters from the dome; the plumbing lines from both the primary and backup machines were buried underground and heavily insulated. Now that Fuchida and Trudy Hall had transferred the hydroponic garden from the ship to its own transparent dome they could eat a completely “home grown” vegetarian diet again, as they had during the long flight from Earth.

  There were two fuel generators, as well. The first one, sent ahead of the explorers, still sat slightly more than two kilometers away. After discussing the situation with the two astronauts and Craig, Jamie had decided to let that one continue to serve as their backup and use the one that had landed with them as their primary fuel source.

  Standing in front of Jamie, close enough almost to touch noses, Trumball planted his fists and his hips and cocked his head slightly to one side. “So it’s going to be you, me and Trudy: two geoscientists and one biologist.”

  “And Stacy.”

  “Our driver.”

  Safety regulations required that every field mission had to include one of the team’s astronauts until each of the scientists qualified as an experienced driver.

  Jamie said, “I’ll double as her backup; I’ve had experience driving on Mars.”

  “Learned how to do it back on the reservation, I’ll bet.”

  With a curt nod, Jamie answered, “It’s a lot like Mars back there, yes. Where’d you learn to drive?”

  “Boston,” said Trumball. “If you can drive in Boston you can drive anywhere.”

  Mars was bracketed by three communications satellites now, hovering above the equator in synchronous orbit, so they stayed fixed over one spot on the ground.

  One of Mars’ two tiny moons, Deimos—no bigger than Manhattan island—orbited almost at the synchronous altitude. Its slight gravitational pull would eventually warp the commsats out of their precise orbits, but calculations had shown that the satellites should remain stable for at least the length of the explorers’ stay on the ground.

  So Jamie was not concerned that he, as mission director, would be away from the base for a week. He could remain in touch with the camp, and with Earth, through the hovering commsats.

  As he suited up for the ten-meter walk to the waiting rover, he saw Vijay Shektar step through the airlock’s inner hatch and lift off her helmet. She shook her hair free, noticed Jamie, and smiled at him.

  “I’ve double-checked all the supplies,” she said. “Everything’s in place.”

  “Then we’re go for the excursion,” said Jamie.

  “Yes.”

  She sat beside him on the bench that ran the length of the hard-suit lockers and with a sigh began to pull off her gloves.

  “Blasted suit is chafing my right elbow raw,” she complained.

  “Put a sponge pad on the spot,” Jamie suggested. No matter how well the suits fit, there was always some discomfort. His own suit felt inordinately stiff. It would be impossible to run in it.

  Jamie had already gotten into the leggings and boots, the hardest part of suiting up. Now he stood and stepped over to the waiting torso.

  “It’s like getting into a knight’s armor, isn’t it?” Shektar said.

  “Going out to joust with the dragons,” said Jamie.

  “Dragons? That would be news!”

  “Real dragons,” he said. “Ignorance, the unknown.”

  “Ah. Yes, real dragons, all right.”

  “And fear.”

  “Fear? D’you feel fear?”

  “Not fear of going outside.” Jamie explained hastily. “Not fear of Mars. This world might he dangerous, hut it’s not malign.”

  She sat there encased in the hard suit like a woman being devoured by a metallic monster, and smiled curiously at Jamie.

  “Then what are you afraid of?”

  “I’m not afraid—but others are. Afraid of finding things that upset them.”

  “Such as life?”

  “Such as intelligent life,” said Jamie.

  Understanding lit her face. “That’s why you insisted on going out on this traverse. Your cliff dwelling.”

  Jamie nodded solemnly.

  “Do you really think you can find it?”

  “I could walk to it, if I had to.”

  “And you really believe it’s an artifact, built by intelligent Martians?”

  Dex Trumball came through the airlock hatch and slid up his visor. “We’re all set to go, soon as the mission director climbs aboard.”

  “Two minutes,” Jamie said. Then, looking back at Vijay’s questioning eyes, he added, “We’ll find out pretty soon, won’t we?”

  FIRST TRAVERSE: SOL 6

  THE EXPEDITION INCLUDED TWO LARGE SEGMENTED ROVER VEHICLES FOR overland traverses. The rovers were exactly the same as those used in the first expedition: each was a trio of cylindrical aluminum modules, mounted on springy, loose-jointed wheels that could crawl over fair-sized rocks without upsetting the vehicle. They represented a considerable financial saving for the expedition: the cost of developing and testing them had already been absorbed by the first expedition. The second expedition merely had to order two more of them to be built.

  One of the cylindrical modules was the fuel tank, big enough to keep the vehicle out in the field for two weeks or more. The middle segment usually held equipment and supplies, although it could be modified to serve as a small mobile laboratory if necessary. The front segment, largest of the three, was about the size of a city bus. It was pressurized like a spacecraft so people could live in it in their shirtsleeves. There was an airlock at its rear, where it linked with the second module. Its front end was u bulbous transparent canopy, which made the entire assembly look something like a giant metallic caterpillar.

  Bach rover was designed to carry four in reasonable comfort, although the entire complement of eight explorers could be squeezed into one in an emergency.

  Even bundled inside the cumbersome hard suit and sitting uncomfortably in the right-hand seat of the rover’s cockpit, Jamie felt free.

  He watched the Martian landscape rolling past in a sort of double vision: his trained geologist’s eye cataloguing the landforms, the boulders and craters and wind-sculpted sand dunes; his deeper Navaho mind recognizing territory that might have once been home to the People.

  How like the desert homeland of the People, he thought. Rusty sand and red rocks, steep-walled mesas off by the horizon. He almost expected to see footprints out there, the trail of his ancestors.

  Nonsense! his Anglo mind scoffed. There’s not a blade of grass within a hundred million kilometers of here. The temperature out there is below zero and tonight it’ll drop to a hundred-and-more below. You can’t breathe the air.

  Still, Jamie felt as if he had returned home.

  And farther along out there
, built into a cleft in the mighty cliff wall of the Grand Canyon, there waited the ruins of an ancient city. Jamie felt certain of that. No matter what the others said, no matter what the rational side of his own mind insisted, he knew in his heart that what he had seen on the first expedition had been built by intelligent creatures.

  “Thirty klicks,” said Stacy Dezhurova. Sitting in the driver’s seat beside Jamie, she too was encased in a bulky hard suit, although she had not put on her helmet. With her dirty-blond pageboy she looked like a chunky Dutch woman being swallowed alive by a robot.

  Jamie nodded and pushed himself awkwardly out of the seat. He had to bend slightly to get out of the bulbous glassed cockpit without scraping his helmet on the overhead.

  He clomped past Trudy Hall, sitting in her tan coveralls in the midsection of the rover’s module. She smiled up at him.

  The rover slowed to a smooth stop. Jamie hardly felt it; Dezhurova was an excellent pilot.

  Trumball was standing by the airlock hatch with one of the beacon rods already in his hand. Jamie took it from him silently. Later on, Dex would suit up and do the outside work, but Jamie wanted to be the first to go outside.

  “Checklist,” Trumball said as he handed the beacon to Jamie.

  Jamie nodded and slid down the visor of his helmet. Trumball riffled through the safety checklist quickly but thoroughly, making certain Jamie’s suit was correctly sealed and all its equipment functioning properly.

  “Okay, pal,” he said, tapping Jamie on the buck of his helmet. His voice was muffled by the helmet’s insulation.

  “I’m going into the airlock.” Jamie spoke into the microphone built into the helmet between the bottom of the visor and the neck ring.

  “Copy,” he heard Dezhurova’s voice acknowledge. “Wait one. I have an amber on the UV.”

  The airlock ceiling held a battery of ultraviolet lamps which turned on automatically as the airlock was pumped down to vacuum. The UV light was supposed to sterilize the outside of the hard suits, killing any microbes clinging to their surfaces, so the explorers could not contaminate the world outside with microscopic life from Earth. The UV was also supposed to kill any possible back-contamination on the suits when the explorers came back into the rover.

  “Backup is in the green,” Dezhurova’s voice said crisply in Jamie’s earphones. “I’ll check out the primary circuit while you are outside.”

  “Okay. Entering the airlock now.”

  The airlock was no bigger than a telephone booth, barely large enough to fit a suited man. Clutching the stubby rod of the geology/meteorology beacon in one gloved hand, Jamie pressed the control stud beside the outer hatch with his other. He heard the pump chug to life as the telltale light on the panel went from green to amber.

  The sound of the pump and the slight hissing of air dwindled to nothing, although Jamie could still feel the pump’s vibration through the thick soles of his boots. In a minute even that ceased, and the panel light went to red. The airlock was now in vacuum.

  The ultraviolet light was invisible to his eyes, of course, although he thought it made the red stripes on his sleeves fluoresce slightly.

  Jamie leaned on the control stud and the outer hatch slid open. He stepped carefully down the metal rung and out onto the red sand of Mars.

  He knew it was nonsense, but Jamie felt free and happy outside by himself. The barren red sands of Mars stretched all around him, out to a rugged, undulating horizon that seemed almost too close for comfort. The edge of the world. The beginning of infinity. The sky was a yellowish tan along that horizon, shading slowly toward blue as he looked up toward the small, strangely weak sun.

  “Good-sized crater off to the left,” he spoke into the helmet mike. “Looks recent, fresh rock along its rim.”

  They were following the route he had taken during the improvised jaunt to the Grand Canyon six years earlier. The excursion that had nearly killed them all. The excursion that had discovered living Martian lichen at the bottom of Tithonium Chasma.

  Jamie had half-expected to see traces of the wheel tracks from that trip, but the wind-driven sand had covered them over completely. They had not bothered to plant beacons along the way, six years ago; they

  had been in too much of a hurry for that. Now Jamie corrected that oversight.

  He pulled on the rod, extending it out to its full two meters, then planted it firmly in the red, dusty soil. Not soil, he reminded himself. Regolith. Soil is honeycombed with living things: worms, bugs, bacteria This rusty iron sand of Mars was devoid of any trace of life. The stuff was loaded with superoxides, like powdered bleach. When the earliest automated landing vehicles first sampled the surface and could not find even traces of organic molecules in it, hopes for discovering life on Mars plummeted.

  Jamie smiled to himself inside his helmet as he worked the pointed end of the beacon deeper into the ground. Mars surprised them all, he thought. We found life. What new surprises will we find this time?

  Below the superoxide level there might be colonies of bacteria that never saw sunlight, bacteria that digested rock with water from the permafrost. Geologists had been stunned to find such bacteria deep underground on Earth. Possum Craig was drilling for similar Martian organisms.

  Jamie was sweating by the time he got the pole set firmly enough into the ground to satisfy himself. Reaching up, he unfolded the solar panels, then clicked on the beacon’s radio transmitter.

  Sing your song, Jamie said silently to the beacon. A totem for the scientists, he realized. The instrumentation built into the slim pole would continuously measure ground tremors, heat flow from the planet’s interior, air temperature, wind velocity and humidity. Of the hundred-some beacons they had planted during the first expedition, more than thirty were still functioning after six years. Jamie wanted to find those that had failed and see what had happened to them.

  But not now, he told himself. Not today. He went back to the rover and stepped up to the open airlock hatch.

  He turned around and gazed out at the rock-strewn landscape once more before closing the hatch. That fresh-looking crater beckoned to him, but he knew they had no time for it. Not yet.

  Jamie gazed out at Mars. Barren, almost airless, colder than Siberia or Greenland or even the South Pole. Yet it still looked like home to him.

  DIARY ENTRY

  None of the others seem to understand what danger we are in. This is an alien world, and all we have to protect us is a thin shell of plastic or metal. If that shell is ruptured, even a tiny pinprick, we will all die in agony. I was a fool to come here, but the rest of them are even bigger fools. They are a fingernail’s width away from death, and they act as if they don’t know it. Or don’t care. The fools!

  OVERNIGHT: SOL 6/7

  “ACTUALLY,” SAID TRUDY HALL, “MOST SCIENTIFIC WORK is crushingly boring.”

  The four of them were sitting on the lower bunks in the module’s midsection, with the narrow foldout table between them and the remains of their dinners on the plastic trays before them. The two women sat on one side of the table, Trumball and Jamie on the other.

  “Most of any kind of work is a bore,” said Trumball, reaching for his glass of water. “I worked in my old man’s office when I was a kid. Talk about boring!”

  “That’s what they say about flying for the air force,” Stacy Dezhurova added, straight-faced. “Long hours of boredom punctuated by moments of sheer terror.”

  They all laughed.

  “I know we could move a lot faster if we didn’t have to plant the beacons,” Jamie said, “but they’re important to—”

  “Oh, don’t be so serious!” Hall said, looking surprised. “I wasn’t complaining. I was merely making a philosophical point.”

  “The English are very deep,” Trumball said, grinning across the (able at her. “Really into philosophy and all that.”

  “Rather,” agreed Hall.

  Jamie made a smile for them.

  “We have made good progress,” Dezhurova said.
“We will get to within striking distance of the Canyon’s edge by sundown tomorrow.”

  “We could make it to the edge itself if we spaced out the beacons u little more,” Trumball suggested. “Say, fifty klicks instead of thirty.”

  Jamie felt his brows knit slightly. “Thirty klicks means we stop once every hour, more or less.”

  Trumball turned on the cot to face Jamie, his grin knowing, certain. “Yeah, but if we spread ‘em out to every hour and a half we could save six-seven stops tomorrow. I checked it out on the computer. We’ll make a helluva lot better time.”

  Hall’s expression turned thoughtful. “How would that affect the data stream?”

  Trumball shrugged. “Not much. We picked thirty klicks pretty much arbitrarily, right? Stop once an hour, and the rover’s top speed isn’t much more than thirty kilometers per hour, right?”

  “So if we space the beacons out every fifty klicks—will you still get the data you want?” Hall asked.

  Jamie studied her face across the narrow table from him. Her gray-blue eyes were focused on Trumball. Her chin was slightly pointed; her facial bones sculpted almost like a fashion model’s. She had been a runner back on Earth; even on the long flight to Mars she had jogged around the spacecraft’s outer passageway for hours on end during her free time.

  Trumball waved a hand in the air. “Sure. Thirty klicks, fifty klicks, what’s the difference?” He was facing Hall, but he glanced sideways toward Jamie.

  Taking in a breath to give himself a moment to consider, Jamie said, “Maybe you’re right, Dex. Spacing out the beacons a bit more won’t hurt all that much.”

  Trumball’s eyes widened momentarily. Quickly, he added, “And we could make better time getting to the Canyon.”

  Jamie nodded. “Why not? Good suggestion.”

  Trumball’s grin seemed more triumphant than grateful.

  While the others took turns using the lavatory and getting into then-sleep coveralls, Jamie went forward to the cockpit and called the base dome.