Return to Mars

by Ben Bova

  Jamie said, “Stacy, you’ll have to make the call as far as safety is concerned. I need to know exactly how much of our fuel the tow job would eat up.”

  “I can give you an estimate, but I don’t know exactly how much fuel we’ll consume towing the beast.”

  “Your best estimate, then,” Jamie said.

  “We’ll want the rover at the base sooner or later,” Trumball went on. “Might’s well bring it along with us.”

  “If we can,” said Jamie.

  “Right. But I’m willing to bet that we can do it with no strain.”

  “We’ll see.”

  “Yes, Daddy,” Dex kidded.

  After dinner they put away the table and folded down the upper bunks. Trumball took his turn in the lav while the two women went up to the cockpit together. Jamie squatted on his bunk, opened his laptop and checked in with the base. Rodriguez was at the comm desk.

  “Did you get the imagery I sent last night?” he asked, his beefy face frowning with concern.

  “Yes, I just haven’t had a chance to go over it.”

  “Doesn’t show much. The soar plane’s not such a good platform for the kind of data you want.”

  Sitting cross-legged on his bunk, Jamie shrugged. “It’s all we’ve got, for now.”

  “Yeah, right.”

  He went through the day’s report with Rodriguez. Possum Craig had the drill rig running again. Fuchida was plotting out his excursion to Olympus Mons. Rodriguez himself was beginning to assemble the manned rocketplane that would carry him and the biologist to the top of the tallest mountain in the solar system.

  Jamie listened, watched inventory lists flicker down his screen, waited patiently until he heard himself ask, “What’s Shektar been doing?”

  “Vijay? She’s tending Fuchida’s garden and looking after the bugs that Possum’s drill is bringing up. Want to talk with her?”

  “Sure. Yes.”

  Trumball came back from the lavatory and ducked low enough to grin at Jamie. “Don’t stay up too late now, chief. Big day tomorrow.”

  “Right,” Jamie said. He reached for the earplug attachment to his laptop and pressed it into his ear, then pulled its microphone arm down until the pin mike was almost touching his lips.

  As Trumball swung up on the top bunk, Rodriguez’s face on the screen was replaced by Vijay Shektar’s. She seemed to glisten, as if her skin had been oiled. Jamie thought again how much fun it would be to massage her with pungent balms.

  She smiled and talked easily enough, answered Jamie’s questions about the iron-eating bacteria that Craig’s drill rig was now pulling up from several kilometers below the surface.

  “They’re magnetically active,” she reported. “They align themselves with magnetic fields.”

  “Must be from the iron they ingest,” Jamie guessed.

  “Yes, but what advantage does that give them? Mars’ magnetic field is so weak that I can’t see how it helps them to survive.”

  “Maybe it doesn’t,” Jamie said. “Maybe it’s just incidental.”

  She looked doubtful.

  “Or maybe Mars had a much stronger field once,” he suggested, “and the field has dissipated over time.”

  “That could be,” Vijay said thoughtfully. Then she brightened. “They’re reproducing quite nicely in culture. They fission every hour, on average.”

  “In ambient conditions?”

  “Mitsuo’s rigged a special high-pressure box for them,” she answered. “They’ve got to be kept in total darkness. Light kills them.”

  “What about heat?”

  Her eyes flashed. “Oh, they’re thermophiles, all right. At eighty degrees they switch from fissioning to conjugation. You ought to see them, Jamie. The busy little buggers mate like rabbits!”

  “Just what we need,” Jamie murmured. “Sex-crazed bacteria.”

  “They’re just like most men,” Vijay said, smiling brightly. “They only do it in the dark—and under great pressure.”

  “Australian men, you mean,” he said.

  “Some Yanks, too.”

  He had no reply for that one.

  Still smiling, Vijay asked, “And how are you getting along?”

  Jamie felt grateful for the change in subject. He returned to the safety of the work they were doing. As he told her about pulling the old rover out of the sand, he reminded himself that this very desirable woman could destroy this expedition if she had a mind to.

  He remembered Ilona Malater, who decided that she would be the resident sex therapist for the first expedition. She caused tensions that became almost unbearable, particularly among the Russians.

  Vijay was different. Younger, for one thing. And she seemed to be laughing at some private, inner joke. She admitted to having a wicked sense of humor, but Jamie felt that she was professional enough to keep it—and her other passions—under control.

  She’d better, he said to himself.

  Then a voice in his mind asked, What if she doesn’t? What are you going to do about it?

  IMAGERY

  TOMAS RODRIGUEZ DRUMMED HIS FINGERS ABSENTLY AGAINST THE DESKTOP in rhythm to the trumpets and strings of the mariachi CD he was listening to while he squinted hard at the computer’s display screen. He was trying to force some sense out of what the soarplane’s cameras showed.

  It was well past midnight. He was sitting alone in the dome’s geology lab, surrounded by shelves laden with red, pitted rocks and plastic containers of rusty red soil. The dome was dark and quiet; he kept the music low, just enough to keep him company while everyone else slept.

  Rodriguez desperately wanted to see what Jamie Waterman thought he had seen: an artificial structure built into a niche two-thirds of the way up the steep rugged cliff of Tithonium Chasma’s northern face. He tried his best to see it.

  The image on the screen showed the niche, a dark cleft in the massive cliff face with a bulging rock overhang above it. The overhang kept the niche in shadow, despite the fact that the sun was shining on the cliff wall.

  The plane’s not a good platform for this, Rodriguez thought as he watched the niche get bigger and bigger, then slide out of view as the soarplane banked away and climbed out of the Canyon.

  With a patient sigh he went back to the beginning of the sequence, slowed it down, and watched even more intently. The plane was flying almost straight into the cliff, its forward cameras aimed at the niche.

  Rodriguez’s lingers clicked across the computer keyboard, calling up the best level of brightness the machine could produce. The cliff face washed out almost entirely, but the interior of the niche remained maddeningly unresolved.

  He froze the image with a bang of a thick forefinger on a key. Yes, there was something in there, a formation of rock that was lighter than the rest. And it looked like it ran roughly parallel to the lip of the niche. Pretty straight.

  A wall? Rodriguez puffed out a pent-up breath. Quien sabe?

  “Is that Jamie’s village?”

  Her voice startled him. Rodriguez spun around in his little wheeled chair and saw Vijay Shektar standing at the doorway to the lab cubicle, each hand holding a plastic mug. She was wearing coveralls, as everyone did. But the Velcro seal down the front was open a few inches, enough for him to notice. Jesus, but she’s a sexy one, Tomas thought.

  “I couldn’t sleep,” she explained. “Thought some hot tea would help.”

  Tomas noticed that both mugs were steaming slightly. And he realized that, when she spoke quietly like this, Vijay’s voice was a throaty, sultry purr.

  “I heard the music. Mexican, isn’t it?” she said, stepping into the lab. “Thought you might like a cuppa.”

  He took the cup and started to say thanks, but found that his voice stuck in his throat. Like a goddam kid, he thought. He took a breath, then said carefully, “Mexican, right. Mariachi. Their equivalent of country and western.”

  “Really?”

  He nodded. “Yeah. Same old stuff: I loved you but you left me. My heart
’s broken because you were unfaithful.”

  “And you took my pickup truck,” she added.

  “And my dog.”

  Vijay laughed. Then she said, “Somebody told me once that it’s music for losers.”

  Rodriguez shrugged. “I like it.”

  “Is that Jamie’s village?” she asked again. She remained standing, her eyes focused on the display screen, looking past him.

  The mug of tea was hot in his hand. He sighed. “It’s no village.”

  “Are you certain?”

  “Pretty much.”

  The tea felt too hot to drink, he thought, but she put it to her lips and drank with no qualms. He took a cautious sip. It was scalding. Suppressing a yowl of pain, Tomas put the cup down on the desk beside him.

  “Pull up a chair,” he said, wondering if his tongue would blister, “and I’ll show you what we’ve got.”

  As she sat in the lab’s other little wheeled chair, Vijay commented, “You’re up awfully late.”

  “So are you.”

  She shrugged, and the movement excited him. “I’m not much of a sleeper. Never have been.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “What about you, though? Shouldn’t you be getting your rest? You ought to be taking tip-top care of yourself. We need you to be bright and shiny in the morning.”

  According to the expedition’s regulations, Rodriguez was in charge at the dome while Jamie and Stacy Dezhurova were both away. He was the second-ranking astronaut, and that put him in command when the first astronaut and the mission director were absent. Not that the scientists paid any attention to such protocol. The only time they would obey his commands, Rodriguez was certain, would be if some emergency came up. Maybe not even then.

  “I’m okay,” he said, thinking that he’d be more than willing to march off to bed this instant if she would come with him.

  She turned her attention to the screen again. “So you don’t think it’s a village or anything artificial?”

  She was wearing perfume, he was certain of it. Faint, but a scent of something feminine. It took an effort to keep from reaching out and taking her in his arms. Turning reluctantly back to the screen, Tomas found the strength to say, “See for yourself.”

  They spent the next half-hour studying the imagery from the soarplane: visual, infrared, radar, false color, even the brief burst of data from the gas chromatograph that gave them nothing but the composition of the air in the Canyon.

  She sat next to him, so close they were almost touching shoulders. Tomas felt a thin sheen of perspiration beading his upper lip.

  Vijay sighed stirringly. “There’s certainly no signs saying, ‘Welcome Earthlings,’ are there?”

  Is she doing that deliberately? Tomas wondered. Does she know how it affects a man?

  “If it was anybody but Jamie, I’d say we’re wasting our time,” he told her.

  “But Jamie’s different?”

  “He’s the expedition’s director,” Rodriguez said. “And he’s been here before.”

  “Does that make him right?”

  He thought about that for a moment. “No. But it means we go out of our way to follow up his hunch.”

  Vijay looked directly into his eyes. “How far out of your way would you go for Jamie?”

  “For Jamie? What do you mean?”

  “Suppose Jamie asked you to go with him to this area, to poke about in that niche and see what’s really there. Would you go?”

  “Yeah. Sure.”

  “Because he’s the expedition director?”

  Rodriguez hesitated. “I guess so. Also … I guess I’d want to go with him even if he wasn’t the boss.”

  “Why?”

  He could feel his brows knitting. This is a psych test, he realized. That’s all she’s after. She’s just doing this to fill out her goddamned psych report on me.

  “I like Jamie,” he said. “I trust him. I guess if he asked me to go with him to the Canyon I’d be kinda flattered.”

  Vijay nodded. “He is likable, isn’t he?”

  “Yeah.”

  “But he’s wrong about the village.” She said it softly, with real sadness in her voice.

  “You like him, too, don’t you?”

  Staring at the display screen image of the shadowed niche high up on the cliff wall, Vijay Shektar answered very softly, “Yes, I like him too.”

  Abruptly, Rodriguez turned to the computer and began to shut it down. The image of the rock niche winked off. The screen went dark.

  “You’re right,” he said, almost angrily. “It’s late. I better get some sleep.”

  Dr. Shektar got up from her chair. “Yes, I suppose I should, too.”

  Rodriguez stood up and noticed for the first time how small she really was. Tiny. Like a little doll. With curves. I could pick her up off her feet with one hand.

  She looked up at him and said, “I’m sorry I disturbed you, Tom. Have a good sleep.”

  She turned and headed for the doorway, leaving Rodriguez standing alone in the geology lab.

  She likes Jamie, he told himself. She likes him, not me. I’m just one of her patients, one of her goddamn study subjects. Sorry she disturbed me. Like hell she is. She knows goddamn well the effect she has on me. She’s getting her kicks watching me sweat.

  He fell asleep fantasizing about her.

  NOON: SOL 18

  AS THE DOME OF THEIR BASE CAMP APPEARED ABOVE THE RUST-RED HORIZON at last, Jamie heard in his mind the strains of Peter and the Wolf: the climactic march, with Peter leading the captured wolf back to his grandfather’s house.

  They were dragging the old rover behind them, a triumphant return to their base camp with an extra piece of equipment to add to their inventory.

  If Possum Craig and the two astronauts could get it to work.

  Jamie was driving the rover, with Trumball in the right-hand seat. Stacy Dezhurova was taking a well-earned break after driving nearly every kilometer of the way back from the Canyon. Trudy Hall was already back by the airlock, struggling into her hard suit, ready to carry her samples of the lichen into the dome’s laboratory.

  We ought to be able to construct an access tunnel, Jamie thought, so we can go from the rover’s hatch to the dome’s interior without needing to bundle into the damned hard suits.

  “Y’know what we need?” Trumball asked, one foot planted jauntily on the control panel. Without waiting for Jamie to reply, he went on, “A flexible tunnel. You know, like the access ramps at airports. That way…”

  The strains of the triumphal march disappeared. Jamie remembered that in science it doesn’t matter who gets the original idea; what matters is who publishes the idea first.

  With a slow smile, Jamie said, “That’s a good idea, Dex. An access tunnel makes a lot of sense.”

  Trumball’s eyes flashed with pleased surprise, but he quickly suppressed it.

  Jamie spent the afternoon going over the old rover with Possum Craig. It was cramped inside, with both of them in their hard suits. Through his helmet earphones Jamie could hear Craig sighing and moaning like a neighborhood repairman trying to figure out just how high an estimate he could get away with and still be awarded the job.

  “Fuel cells completely gone,” Craig muttered. Some time later, “Batteries ain’t worth shit now.”

  When they went out again and clambered up the ladder built into the front module’s Hank to inspect the solar panels, Craig’s voice went from somber to dismal. “Y’all ain’t gonna get diddley-squat from these guys.”

  By the time they had come back inside the dome and gotten out of their suits, Jamie was ready to write off the rover completely.

  But Craig rubbed a hand across his stubbly chin and said, “Well, boss honcho, if the drill rig keeps on behavin’ itself and the creek don’t rise, I can get her runnin’ in about a week, I imagine.”

  Surprised, Jamie blurted, “A week?”

  “Give or take a coupla days.”

  “Really?” Jamie sat on the
bench that ran the length of the hard-suit lockers.

  Craig nodded sagely and planted one foot on the bench beside Jamie. “Her structural integrity’s okay. We got replacement batteries and solar panel spares in th’ supplies.”

  “Enough …?”

  “Gotta check out the inventory on the computer and then find the sumbitches in the cargo bay. But we oughtta be okay.”

  “Great!”

  “Her fuel cells are a pain in th’ butt,” Craig complained. “Old style, run on hydrogen and oxy. We’ll have to electrolyze some of the water from the backup recycler, I expect.”

  The fuel cells in the newer rovers used methane and oxygen, Jamie knew.

  “Funny thing,” Craig went on. “I was more worried about damage to th’ windshield … you know, pitting or even crazing from the sandstorms. But you had her front end buried nice and cozy in the sand, so the windshield’s okay.”

  Jamie got to his feet, a little shakily. “I never thought—”

  “Electrical stuff we got backups for,” Craig went on. “But if that windshield had gone, that’d be all she wrote.”

  When he checked the comm center, Jamie saw Rodriguez sitting at the communications console with a glum look on his swarthy face. And he noticed that the young astronaut seemed to be trying to grow a mustache; his upper lip sported a sprinkling of short, dark hairs.

  “Que tal, Tomas?”

  Rodriguez looked up at him with an almost guilty expression. “Troubles, man.”

  “What’s the matter?” Jamie asked, pulling up the other wheeled chair to sit next to him.

  “I lost contact with number two.”

  “The soarplane?” Jamie felt a twinge of apprehension in his guts.

  Rodriguez nodded unhappily. “Been trying to reestablish contact. No go.”

  “Where was the plane?”

  “Recce flight over Olympus Mons.”

  The unmanned soarplane was mapping out the huge volcano for Fuchida’s upcoming mission to its peak.

  “What happened?”

  The astronaut shook his head. ‘ ‘I been going over the flight record. Hit some turbulence while she was climbing through twenty thousand meters, but then it cleared up.”