by Ben Bova
“Will you look at that!” Trumball’s voice sounded excited, almost frightened, from behind Jamie’s chair. “Like crash-diving a submarine.”
“Rather an unfortunate term, crash-dive,” said Trudy Hall. Jamie glanced over his shoulder at the two of them. Trumball looked excited, like a kid about to bungee jump off a high bridge. Hall seemed cool, although she kept licking her lips.
After a few tense, silent moments, Dezhurova eased up from her cramped posture and grinned. “Piece of cake.”
All three of the others relaxed. Jamie hadn’t realized he’d been holding his breath until he let it out in a big, relieved gust.
“The only bad spot we found was that dust-filled crater,” he said, as if Dezhurova hadn’t gone through this a thousand times already. “Although there might be other bad patches we just happened to miss,” he added.
“That’s the stuff,” said Trumball, “look on the bright side.”
“Oh hush, Dex,” Hall said crossly.
Trudy pulled down the jumpseat behind Jamie and settled in to watch their slow descent toward the valley floor, several kilometers ahead. Trumball went back toward the rear of the module.
“Don’t you want to see this?” Hall called back to him.
“Not just see it,” he yelled back. “I want to make certain it’s getting onto the VR database. People back home will flip their toggles over this!”
“It’s all being recorded,” Dezhurova said.
“Just checking,” Trumball called back. “Yep. Every little pixel is coming through in living color. All we need is Tars Tarkas standing out there to greet us.”
“Tars Tarkas?” Jamie asked.
“A sixteen-foot-tall, green, four-armed Martian,” Hall explained, with seeming distaste. “From some lurid skiffy novel Dex must have read in his misspent youth.”
“Sounds like you read it too, kiddo,” Trumball said, as he made his way back up to the cockpit.
Hall replied, “You’re not the only one to have had a misspent youth, Dex.”
Trumball took the other jumpseat and they all fell silent for a while. Jamie offered to spell Dezhurova at the wheel, but she shook her head.
“I don’t want to stop. Besides, this isn’t as bad as I thought it would be.”
Jamie nodded, then realized that he’d been at the wheel when the rover ploughed into the sand trap, six years earlier. Of course, they had all been miserably sick with scurvy, but still he was the driver and he had gotten them all stuck.
“Look!” Trumball shouted. “I see it!”
“The old rover,” Jamie said.
It looked like a giant metal caterpillar trying to burrow into the ground, its forward module half buried in the sand. Wind-blown dust had piled up on its left side; the right side was bright bare aluminum, perhaps even scoured clean.
“It’s still there,” said Hall.
Trumball laughed. “What, you think somebody would repo it?”
“Hardly.”
“Maybe we should,” he said.
“Should what?”
“Repo the old rover.”
Jamie glanced back at him.
“What do you think, big chief?” Trumball asked. “If we can drag it out of that sand trap, we’d have an extra rover to play with.”
“We don’t need an extra rover,” Jamie said.
Dezhurova had slowed down as she maneuvered carefully around the area, staying well clear of the treacherous sand-filled crater. They could all see the faint outline of the crater and the little ridges of sand in it, like ripples on a pond. Jamie had been too ill and exhausted to notice them when he had piloted the rover into the sand trap.
“Sure we could use an extra rover,” Trumball said, enthusiasm warming his tone.
“We’ve only got eight people here, Dex,” Jamie said. “Only three qualified drivers. We—”
“If you can drive a rover,” Trumball interrupted, “I sure can. We’ve all practiced in the simulators.”
Trudy Hall asked, ‘ ‘All the excursions have been planned out, Dex. What do we need another rover for?”
Trumball’s grin was dazzling. “To go out and get the Pathfinder.”
“Pathfinder?” Jamie and Dezhurova blurted in unison.
“Sure! It’s sitting at the Sagan site, over at Ares Vallis. With that little Sojourner buggy, too!”
“That is more than a thousand kilometers away, Dex,” said Dezhurova.
“More like four thousand,” Trumball admitted, “from our base camp.”
They were slowly passing the old rover, crawling over the firmer ground where Jamie had walked, staggered, crawled to carry a safety line to the Russians who had come to rescue them.
“Let’s at least stop and see if the old clunker is still usable,” Trumball urged.
With a glance at Dezhurova, who slowed the rover even more, Jamie asked, “Why? How will salvaging the rover get you to Ares Vallis?”
Grinning even wider, Trumball said, “Now here’s my plan. If the old rover is usable, we drive it back to the base. Or tow it, most likely.”
“Tow it?” Trudy Hall muttered.
Ignoring her, Trumball went on, ‘ “Then Wiley and I repair whatever needs repairing and get her in good working order.”
Stacy Dezhurova asked laconically, “Would you buy a used car from this man?”
“Then I drive her out to the Sagan site and pick up the Pathfinder and Sojourner.”
“But why?” Hall demanded.
Trumball turned a pitying gaze on her. “Do you have any idea how much a museum would pay for that hardware? The Air and Space Museum in Washington, for example?”
“Not much,” Dezhurova said. “That is a government operation, remember.”
“Okay, what about Disney? Or one of the Las Vegas casinos? Or some of the big amusement complexes in Japan or Europe?”
“How much would you expect?” Hall asked.
Instead of answering directly, Trumball replied, “Lemme tell you, it’ll be plenty. How much did that Picasso painting go for last year? Fifty mil? And that was just a piece of canvas with some colors smeared on it. We’re talking about hardware that’s been to freaking Mars, for chrissake!”
“Do you really think—”
“You start a feeding frenzy,” Trumball explained eagerly. “Get all the big players heated up about it. The Disney execs. The Trumps and Yamagatas and whatnot. They’ll bid it up to a billion in no time.”
“But the thing doesn’t belong to you,” Hall objected. “It belongs to NASA, doesn’t it? Or the U.S. government.”
Trumball wagged his head back and forth. “Nah! I looked that up. There’s the law of salvage—”
“That’s for sunken ships,” Hall said.
“Or treasure,” added Dezhurova.
“It’s for hardware that’s been lost or abandoned,” Trumball retorted firmly. “Works the same in space as it does on Earth. That guy— what’s his name? Gunn, wasn’t it? He recovered the original Vanguard satellite, I think. Something like that. It’s salvage.”
“Then if you can grab it, it’s yours?” Hall asked.
“Yep,” Trumball replied smugly.
Jamie saw that they had passed the half-buried rover. The floor of the Canyon was only a couple of klicks away now, still shrouded in thinning tendrils of mist. The idea of taking the old Pathfinder hardware away from its landing spot bothered Jamie, deep down below the rational level of his mind. It smacked of sacrilege, of desecrating a holy place.
But he said nothing, knowing that if he spoke it would be with anger.
Stacy Dezhurova did not stay silent, though. “Dex, even assuming you are right, none of these rovers has the range to go out four thousand klicks and back again.”
“I know that,” Trumball said condescendingly. “I’m not completely brain-dead. We fly the backup fuel generator to Ares Vallis so it’ll be there to fill up the rover when it gets there.”
“Fly the … that’s crazy!”
&n
bsp; “We’ll have to put the backup water recycler back on the fuel generator, too,” Dex added.
“Even crazier.”
“The fuel generator’s just sitting two klicks from the base, standing by for an emergency, isn’t it? And we don’t need the spare water recycler now that the garden’s working. So why not put ‘em to use?”
“How can you fly it?” Stacy demanded.
“The descent engines have enough thrust to lob it on a ballistic trajectory. I’ve checked out the numbers seventeen ways from Friday. It’ll work.”
“Fly our backup fuel generator to Ares Vallis,” Dezhurova muttered. “Insane.”
“I can show you the computer evaluation,” Trumball said, unperturbed.
“Those descent engines were not built for repeated use,” Dezhurova pointed out. “They don’t have enough thrust—”
Trumball wagged a finger in the air. “I checked it all out with the manufacturer months ago, Stacy baby. You can get a half-dozen burns out of those engines, no sweat. And if they can soft-land the bird, they can lift it again. We’re not talking orbit now, just a little hop across the desert.”
“If it doesn’t work—”
“Worst case, we lose the backup fuel generator. Best case, we pick up a billion dollars worth of hardware for auction back at Sotheby’s.”
Jamie sat there and let Stacy and Dex argue it out. I don’t want to be in the middle of this, he told himself. Yet he knew that, ultimately, inescapably, he would be the one to make the real decision.
Trudy Hall made a sardonic face. “Why not pick up one of the original Viking landers while you’re at it?”
“Too big,” Trumball answered, matter-of-factly. “Pathfinder’s small enough for us to carry back with us. The Vikings are big clunkers.”
“There are a half-dozen other landers scattered around the planet,” Dezhurova said.
Trumball made a wry face. “Yeah, but most of ‘em are too big or too far away to reach. Besides, if we take too much of the old hardware back, their value starts to go down. Got to play this game smart, kiddo.”
He’s been thinking about this for a long time, Jamie realized. Doing computer evaluations. Dex doesn’t do anything without planning it all out first.
They were leaving the old rover behind. The mist was clearing from the Canyon floor.
Trumball tapped Jamie on the shoulder. “Well, big chief, what do you have to say about it?”
Jamie grimaced at Trumball’s ethnic wisecrack, but he said only, “I think your idea will have to wait until the next expedition, Dex.”
“That’s about what I thought you’d say,” Trumball replied.
Jamie had expected him to be sullen, piqued at being rebuffed.
Instead, Trumball looked like a young man who held a trump card up his sleeve.
“Suppose we make a trade,” he suggested, his smile turning crafty. “I go for the Pathfinder and you can go look for your cliff dwellings.”
DOSSIER: G. DEXTER TRUMBALL
NO MATTER HOW WELL HE DID, NO MATTER WHAT HE ACCOMPLISHED.
Dex Trumball could never satisfy his coldly indifferent father.
Darryl C. Trumball was a self-made man, he firmly proclaimed to anyone and everyone. One of Dex’s earliest memories was his father cornering a U.S. senator at a house party and tapping him on the shoulder with each and every word as he declared with quiet insistence, “I started with nothing but my bare hands and my brain, and I built a fortune for myself.”
In truth, the old man had started with a meager inheritance: a decrepit auto body shop that was on the verge of bankruptcy when Dex’s grandfather died of a massive stroke in the middle of his fourth beer at the neighborhood bar.
Dex had been just a baby then, an only child. His mother was pretty, frail, and ineffectual; totally unable to stand up to her implacably driven husband. Dex’s father, blade-slim, fast and agile, had attended Holy Cross on a track scholarship. He never graduated; he had to take over the family business instead. His dream of going to the Boston College Law School, as he had been promised, was shattered, leaving him bitter and resentful.
And filled with an icy, relentless energy.
Darryl C. Trumball quickly learned that business depends on politics. Although the body shop was practically worthless, the land on which it stood could become extremely valuable if it could be converted to upscale condominiums for the white-collar types who worked in Boston’s financial district. He pushed feverishly to get the old neighborhood rezoned, then sold the shop and his mother’s house for a sizable sum.
By the time Dex was ready for college, his father was very wealthy, and known in the financial community for his cold-blooded ruthlessness. Money was important to him, and he spent every waking hour striving to increase his net worth. When Dex expressed an interest in science, the elder Trumball snorted disdainfully:
“You’ll never he able to support yourself that way! Why, when I was your age I was taking care of your grandmother, your two aunts, your mother and you.”
Dex listened obediently and registered anyway for physics at Yale. His high-school grades (and his father’s money) were good enough to be acceptable to Harvard and half a dozen other Ivy League schools, but Dex decided on Yale. New Haven was close enough to Boston for him to get home easily, yet far away enough for him to be free of his lather’s chilling presence.
Dex had always found school to be ridiculously easy. Where others pored over textbooks and sweated out exams, Dex breezed through with a near-photographic memory and a clever ability to tell his teachers exactly what they wanted to hear. His relationships with his peers were much the same: they did what he wanted, almost always. Dex got the lit brilliant ideas and his friends got into trouble carrying them out. Yet they never complained; they admired his dash and felt grateful when he noticed them at all.
Sex was equally easy for him, even on campuses electrified by charges of harassment. Dex had his pick of the women: the more intelligent they were, the more they seemed to bask in the temporary sunshine of his affection. And they never complained afterward.
Physics was not for Dex, but he found himself drawn to geophysics: the study of the Earth, its interior and its atmosphere. His grades were well-nigh perfect. He was a campus leader in everything from the school television station to the tennis team. Yet his father was never pleased.
“An educated bum, that’s what you are,” his father taunted. “I’ll have to support you all my life and keep on supporting you even after I’m gone.”
Which suited Dex just fine. But deep within, he longed to hear one approving word from his father. He ached to have the callous old man smile at him.
His life changed forever at a planetarium show. Dex liked to take his dates to the planetarium. It was cheap, it impressed young women with his seriousness and intelligence, and it was the darkest place in town. Very romantic, really, sitting in the back row with the splendors of the heavens spangled above.
One particular show was about the planet Mars. After several failures, an automated spacecraft had successfully returned actual samples of Martian rocks and soil to a laboratory in orbit around the Earth. Now there was talk of sending human explorers there. Suddenly Dex stopped fondling the young woman who had accompanied him and sat up straight in his chair.
“There’s more than one planet to study!” he said aloud, eliciting a chorus of shushing hisses from around him, and the utter humiliation of his date.
Dex spent that summer at the University of Nevada, taking a special course in geology. The next summer he went to a seminar on planetary geology in Berkeley.
By the time the first expedition had returned from Mars, triumphantly bearing samples of living Martian organisms, Dex had degrees from Yale and Berkeley. He went to the struggling Moonbase settlement for six months to do field work on the massive meteorites that lay buried deep beneath Mare Nubium and Mare Imbrium.
Much to his father’s dismay.
“I give the government fortune
s of tax money for this space stuff,” the old man complained bitterly. “What damned good is it?”
Dex’s father was a real-estate tycoon now, with long fingers in several New England-based banks and business interests in Europe, Asia and Latin America. He kept in touch with his far-flung associates through satellite-relayed electronic links and even leased space in an orbital factory that manufactured ultrapure pharmaceuticals.
Dex smiled brightly for his father. “Don’t be a flathead, Dad. I want to be on the next expedition to Mars.”
His father stared at him coldly. “When are you going to start bringing some money in to this family, instead of spending it like it’s water?”
Challenged, wanting to please his father and win his approval for once, Dex blurted, “We could make money from Mars.”
His father fixed Dex with an icy, disbelieving expression in his flinty eyes.
“We could, really,” Dex said, groping for something that would convince the old man. “Besides, it’d make your name in history, Dad. The man who led the way back to Mars. It’d be your monument.”
Darryl C. Trumball seemed unmoved by thoughts of a monument. Yet he asked, ”You think we could make money out of an expedition to Mars?”
Dex nodded vigorously. “That’s right.”
“How?”
That was when Dex began planning an expedition to Mars that would be funded by private donors. To be sure, a good deal of taxpayers’ money went into the pot. But once Dex enlisted the interest and drive of his profit-oriented father, funding for the Second Martian Expedition came mainly from private sources.
Dex was determined to make the expedition profitable. He wanted his father’s praise, just once. Then he could tell the old man to go bust a blood vessel and drop dead.
MORNING: SOL 8
“THE CLIFF DWELLING,” JAMIE ECHOED.
With a knowing grin, Trumball said easily, “Sure. You want to go chase down the cliff dwelling you think you saw and I want to get the Pathfinder hardware. You scratch my itch and I’ll scratch yours.”