Return to Mars

by Ben Bova

  With the barest dip of his head, the biologist answered, “Rodriguez and Craig are repairing the drill rig. Vijay is—”

  “Repairing the drill?” Jamie interrupted. “What happened?”

  Fuchida blinked twice, rapidly. “The hydraulic line to the auger head froze overnight. Possum believes the electrical heating system failed.”

  “How serious is it?”

  With a slight shrug of his slim shoulders, Fuchida said, “I don’t know. Possum didn’t seem very upset about it.”

  Jamie settled back in his seat. “Ask him to call me when he gets a chance, please.”

  “Yes, I will. It probably won’t be until nightfall, though.”

  “That’s okay. I think we’ll be outside checking out the old rover until then, anyway.”

  Fuchida nodded, then said, “We’ve received half a dozen more messages from Boston inquiring about the VR system.”

  “Whatever’s wrong with it,” Dex said from behind Jamie, “it’s more than I can handle. It’ll have to wait until we get back to the dome.”

  “Perhaps Possum could work with you on it from here,” Fuchida suggested.

  “The scientific tasks have priority,” Jamie said. “We don’t have much time to work on the entertainment system.”

  Fuchida’s brows rose. “Mr. Trumball in Boston is very insistent.”

  “I’ll send him a message tonight,” Dex said. “I’ll calm him down.”

  Jamie turned to look at Dex. “Thanks,” he said.

  Dex shrugged.

  Turning back to the display screen, Jamie waited for Fuchida to say something more, but when the biologist stayed silent, he realized he had to ask, “What about Shektar? What’s she doing?” He also realized he felt somewhere between nettled and embarrassed about asking.

  Fuchida replied as if it were a routine question, “She’s been running the comm link with Tarawa most of the day. I believe she’s been reviewing our medical records.”

  “Any problems?”

  “Not that I’m aware of. We all seem to be healthy enough, even though several of us have lost a kilo or two.”

  Trumball piped up, “With this vegetarian diet from the garden, what can you expect?”

  Fuchida smiled. “What’s the matter, you don’t like soy derivatives? The garden crops produce a completely balanced diet. “

  “Yeah, sure,” said Dex. “Microwaved soyburgers and eggplant.”

  The biologist’s smile widened. “No steaks on Mars, my friend.”

  Trumball leaned closer between Jamie’s seat and Dezhurova’s. “No sushi, either, pal.”

  “Ah, but we could cultivate fish,” Fuchida retorted. “I am writing a prospectus on adding fish tanks to the garden.”

  “Just what we need,” Trumball said breezily, “fish crap in our water supply.”

  Jamie glanced at him, over his shoulder, then turned back to the screen. “All right, we’ll he at the old rover until nightfall, at least. Might spend the night there.”

  “Understood,” Fuchida said, all business again. “1 will have Possum call you when he comes in.”

  “I’d like to see the imagery from the soarplane as soon as Tomas can send it,” Jamie said.

  Fuchida’s eyes widened for the barest flash of a moment. “He sent it last night. It should be in your incoming data.”

  Surprised, Jamie said, “I’ll check it out … wait a minute.”

  He switched from the biologist’s image to a list of his incoming messages. Sure enough, there was one from Rodriguez marked “imagery”: several dozen gigabytes.

  Putting Fuchida back on the screen, Jamie said, “Yep, it’s here, all right. I’ll review it tonight. Thank Tomas for me, please.”

  “I will,” said Fuchida.

  After Jamie ended the transmission, Trumball said softly, “Missed your mail, huh? Maybe you oughtta tell Rodriguez to send up smoke signals.”

  Jamie did not turn around to look at Dex. He knew the smug grin that would be on his face. And he didn’t want Dex to see the annoyance on his own.

  That was dumb, he raged to himself. Stupid. You should have checked your incoming messages last night. That’s the second time you’ve made that mistake. Jamie knew that what nettled him most was not that he had neglected to check his mail, but that he had let Trumball and everyone else see his oversight.

  “How close do you want to get?” Dezhurova asked.

  Jamie looked up and saw through the windshield that they were less than a hundred meters from the old, abandoned rover.

  “Close enough to attach a tow line,” he said, then added, “But be careful of the footing.”

  “Don’t worry,” she replied. “I don’t want to get us stuck in the dust.”

  “You can see the edge of the old crater,” Trumball said, pointing his extended arm between Dezhurova and Jamie. “Shouldn’t be a problem.”

  True enough, Jamie saw. The phantom outline of the old crater was easy enough to see, if you knew what you were looking for. The oval of the crater was rimmed with dark rock, raised a few centimeters above the rest of the sloping ground. Within the crater, the dust formed tiny dunes, like wavelets lapping across a pond.

  I should have seen them when I was driving the rover, Jamie said to himself. I should have spotted it and driven around it. Even sick and exhausted, a geologist shouldn’t have missed something so goddamned obvious.

  He glanced over his shoulder at Trumball. The look on the younger man’s face seemed almost gloating, he thought.

  As Stacy Dezhurova carefully edged the rover up to the rear end of the old vehicle, she reached down with her right hand and activated the laser rangefinder.

  “Read it out for me, will you, Jamie?”

  “Thirty meters,” he said, watching the green glowing digital numbers. “Twenty-eight … twenty-five…”

  “Ten meters okay?”

  “Fine,” Trumball answered.

  “Jamie?”

  “Fine,” he echoed.

  She slowed the rover still more as Jamie called out, “Nineteen meters … seventeen…”

  At precisely ten meters Dezhurova stopped the rover. The old vehicle’s rounded rear was dead ahead, scoured to glistening metal by six years of wind-driven iron-rich dust particles.

  “Piece of cake,” Dezhurova said, shutting down the drive motors. Then she added, “So far.”

  Jamie, Trumball and Dezhurova suited up and, one by one, went through the airlock and outside. They left Trudy Hall in the rover. She could call the base for help if an emergency arose. As if help could come in time to do any good, Jamie thought. Still, the safety regulations required that at least one person remain inside the rover at all times. If worst came to worst, Trudy would have to drive back to the base by herself.

  They walked around the back end of the rover.

  “Sand has piled up high on this side,” Dezhurova said, her voice sounding calm, almost clinical, in Jamie’s earphones.

  “It’s pretty soft stuff,” Jamie said. “Like fluff. Connors and I were able to shovel it away after we got caught in a sandstorm down on the Canyon floor.”

  Trumball dug a gloved hand into the sand bank. “Fluff is right. Look!” He tossed his handful of sand into the air; it drifted like powder, falling slowly in the light Martian gravity.

  “We could ski on this,” Trumball said. “Hey, that’d be something for the tourists! Ski Mars!”

  He laughed while Jamie gritted his teeth. Is he serious, Jamie wondered, or is he just trying to get a rise out of me?

  “The solar panels are caked with the dust,” Dezhurova pointed out.

  Looking up toward the top of the rover’s segments, Jamie saw that she was right. “Wind blew the sand onto the panels, but didn’t blow it off again.”

  Trumball said. “This stuff is pretty damned gritty, too. Probably gouged up the panels.”

  “Come this way,” Dezhurova said. “The hatch is on the lee side.”

  Jamie followed her, watching
the prints her boots made on the ground. It was firm here, but a few meters away was the lip of the crater.

  Dezhurova pressed the hatch’s control stud. “No joy.”

  “With the solar panels out, the batteries must’ve died years ago,” Trumball, said.

  “We must go to manual,” Dezhurova muttered, pulling a slim cordless power screwdriver from the tool set nestled in her suit’s thigh patch.

  Jamie watched her unfasten the panel that covered the manual control. The screws resisted, frozen by time and gritty dust. Dezhurova began swearing softly in Russian as the power screwdriver whined away. Jamie heard her mumbling in his earphones and worried that a slip of the screwdriver could tear her gloves. A rip in the space suit’s gloves would be far worse than a skinned knuckle.

  The power driver finally got the first screw moving, and Dezhurova’s muttered curses stopped. The other screws went much more easily.

  “Always the way,” she said, without looking up from her work. “The first one you pick is always the bitch.”

  The wheel that opened the hatch manually was even tougher. Dezhurova could not budge it. Trumball eagerly grabbed at it, and together the two of them grunted and heaved until the airlock hatch cracked open. Then the turning became easier and the door slid all the way open.

  “Okay, Jamie,” Dezhurova said, panting. “After you.”

  “You stay outside, Stacy,” he reminded her, “until we check out the interior.”

  “Right, chief,” she said.

  Wondering if she were using Trumball’s nickname for him unconsciously or deliberately, Jamie wedged one boot on the middle rung of the short ladder and gripped the edges of the open hatch with both hands. Then he pulled himself up inside the airlock, noting in the back of his mind that being accustomed to Mars’ one-third gravity had its drawbacks: in the suit and backpack it took a real effort to lift himself.

  The manual override for the inner hatch was just beneath the electrical control panel. It too was hard to turn at first, but Jamie got the wheel turning by himself and the inner hatch cranked slowly open.

  “Okay, I’m going in,” he said.

  “Me too,” said Trumball. Hearing him grunt as he pulled himself into the airlock, Jamie grinned inwardly that Dex had to exert himself to climb up, too.

  The interior was a mess. The four of them had been sick with scurvy when the Russians had come to rescue them. They had left the rover without a thought to tidying up. The sheets on the bunks were roiled and wrinkled, just as they had left them. Jamie thought they still looked sweaty, though he knew that any moisture would have evaporated years ago.

  He heard Trumball, behind him. “So this is where it happened.” The younger man’s voice was softer than usual.

  Turning to look at him, Jamie saw that Dex was peering through the hatch that connected to the rover’s middle segment, which had been converted into a mobile biology lab.

  “This is where Brumado and Malater discovered the lichen,” Trumball said, almost as if he were gazing upon a holy shrine.

  “That’s right,” Jamie said. The memory that came to his mind was of Joanna, frightened and lovely Joanna, with her big dark eyes and her lonely, vulnerable waifs face. The child-woman he had fallen in love with. The daughter of Alberto Brumado whom he had married. The woman who became an adult at last and walked away from him.

  She never loved me, Jamie realized for the millionth time. Maybe »he thought she did, at first, but she never loved me. Was I really in love with her? Shaking his head inside the helmet, he thought, whatever it was, you certainly made a mess of the whole thing.

  “Boy, what some museum would pay to have this chunk of hardware in their hands,” Trumball said, the awe in his voice giving way to excitement.

  Jamie started to snap out a reply, but caught himself in time. This hardware’s much too heavy for us to carry back to Earth, he told himself. The ascent section of the L/AV couldn’t possibly lift it.

  As if reading Jamie’s thoughts, Trumball went on, “We’ll make this into an exhibit for the visitors. Maybe park it back down on the Canyon floor, where the discovery was originally made, and bus the tourists out there.”

  Jamie got a vision of the Navaho women who spread their blankets on the sidewalks along Santa Fe’s central plaza to sell trinkets to the tourists.

  “Are you all right?” Stacy Dezhurova’s voice demanded in their earphones.

  “We’re inside,” Jamie reported. “No problems.”

  “I’m coming in,” she said. “We must check out the electrical systems.”

  “Right.”

  Nearly an hour later, Dezhurova announced what they had already known. “Dead as a dinosaur,” she said, sitting in the pilot’s chair.

  Standing behind her, gazing at the blank screens and lifeless gauges of the control panel, Jamie nodded inside his helmet. What did you expect? he asked himself. She’s been sitting out here for six years, a hundred below zero every night, dust covering the solar panels. The batteries must’ve died within a few days, a week, at best. The fuel cells are gone, hydrogen leaked away.

  “We’ll have to tow it,” Trumball said.

  “If we can,” said Jamie.

  “Why not?”

  Jamie wanted to shrug, but the hard suit defeated it. “We’ll have to try it and see.”

  “Okay,” said Dezhurova. “Let’s get to it before the sun goes down.”

  SUNDOWN: SOL 15

  JAMIE STILL FELT A SLIGHT SHUDDER OF UNEASE WHEN HE LOOKED AT THE sun; it was eerily small, shrunken, a visible reminder of how far they were from home.

  Now the distant sun was almost touching the uneven horizon, an unblinking warning red eye set in a glowing coppery sky. Jamie had to turn his entire body inside his cumbersome hard suit to see the other way. The sky was dark there, with a few stars already glistening brightly. Earth was an evening star now, he knew, but he had no time to search it out or to wait for the aurora.

  As the shadows of twilight reached across the cliffs toward them, they hitched a Buckyball cable from the winch drum sticking out from the nose of their rover to an attachment hook on the tail of the old vehicle, then went inside their vehicle, one by one. It took another half-hour to vacuum off the dust, although none of them got out of their suits.

  Dezhurova slid her visor up and clomped to the cockpit. Trudy Hall was sitting in the right-hand seat, looking small, almost elfin, in only her coveralls.

  Stacy checked out the control panel and began to power up the wheel motors. Jamie and Dex stood behind the two women. Both men had slid up their visors and taken off their gloves.

  “You’re sure its wheels are in neutral?” Trumball asked.

  Jamie nodded inside his helmet. “All drive wheels go to neutral once the power’s off, unless they’re actively set in gear.”

  “Or locked in parking mode,” Dex added.

  “They’re not locked,” Jamie insisted. “I was there; we didn’t lock the wheels when we fell into the dust. Just the opposite, we tried to back out of the crater.”

  “Then they might he set in reverse.”

  “They’re in neutral,” Jamie insisted.

  Trumball’s glance slid from Jamie to Dezhurova, sitting in the pilot’s seat with her back to them. “I sure wish we could’ve checked the wheel settings,” he muttered.

  “Not possible,” Stacy said, from her chair. “Not unless we run a power line to the old rover and boot up her electrical systems.”

  “Maybe we ought to do that,” Trumball said.

  “Let’s see if we can tow her without getting into that kind of work,” Jamie said.

  “Spooling up,” Dezhurova muttered, engaging the drive motors. Jamie could not see her head, only the top of her gleaming white helmet.

  “Take it easy, now,” said Trumball.

  “Be quiet, Dex,” she snapped. “I know what I’m doing.”

  Dex went silent. Jamie, beside him, stared straight ahead at the curved rear end of the old rover looming
ten meters in front of the windshield.

  The motors whined as Dezhurova began to slowly back the rover. The tether cable stretched taut.

  “Come, come, my sweet one,” Dezhurova coaxed gently, in a whisper Jamie could barely hear. Then she lapsed into Russian, cooing softly, tenderly.

  Standing behind Trudy’s seat, Jamie marveled at the cool, gentle, almost motherly softness of Stacy’s whispered urgings. Is this the same woman who was swearing like a biker at a screwdriver just a couple of hours ago?

  The rover rocked slightly, and Jamie grabbed the back of Hall’s chair for support. The drive motors whined louder. Jamie thought he smelled something burning.

  “Come, baby,” Dezhurova cooed.

  Trumball muttered, “It’s not going …”

  The rover lurched again, and Jamie reached out with his free hand to hold onto Trumball. Dex grappled for Jamie’s arm clumsily, rocking backwards in his hard suit and nearly tumbling over.

  “Here she comes!” Dezhurova shouted.

  The rounded end of the old rover trundled toward them in slow motion, bigger, bigger.

  “Hang on!”

  The tail of the old vehicle thumped against the projecting winch drum on the nose of their rover hard enough to rock Jamie against the cockpit’s rear bulkhead. Both vehicles stopped.

  For a long moment none of them said anything. Then Trudy Hall giggled and declared, “Whiplash! Where’s the nearest lawyer?”

  They all laughed, shakily.

  “I guess the old bird’s wheels are in neutral,” Trumball admitted.

  “I guess they are,” said Dezhurova.

  Jamie noticed that she locked their rover’s wheels in park before she pushed herself up from the pilot’s chair.

  “I have to pee,” she announced cheerfully.

  Over dinner they planned how they would tow the old rover up to the Canyon rim. As usual, the two women sat on one of the lower bunks while Jamie and Trumball sat side-by-side on the other.

  “Why not bring it all the way back to the base?” Trumball urged.

  “Cuts into our fuel reserves,” Dezhurova said, looking across the foldout table to Jamie.

  “Not by that much,” Trumball countered.