Mars Crossing

by Geoffrey A. Landis

  Trevor put the binoculars to his faceplate. “Okay, from the two breasts, look upward and left. There’s one shaped like a skull, kind of, and one shaped like, um, maybe sort of like an elephant’s ass. The path goes between those.” He handed the binoculars back to Ryan. “Take a look.”

  A skull. He found that one, and then the elephant’s buttocks. Shit, it was rough, but if you looked at it right, it almost did look like a path.

  “See how it goes up toward that notch?” Trevor said. “Okay, now follow it up, keep going. Where it meets the cliff, see that? It’s dried up, but looks like it used to be a waterfall. Just to the right there’s a big splinter of rock, looks like a knife blade, leaning up against the cliff. You could climb right up that. And then at the top, see the groove in the cliff? That’s a natural chimney. Climb up that just as easily as walking down the street, I bet. Easier.”

  Ryan could see it now. He wasn’t sure about the waterfall part, but the rest looked right. He felt foolish. He had been scanning the cliff face for ten minutes, looking for a possible way to get up it, and then in twenty seconds Trevor pointed out a route he hadn’t even noticed. “Hey, kid, that’s good. How could you find that so fast?”

  Trevor shrugged and looked away, but Ryan could tell he was pleased with the praise. “Heck, I live in Arizona. I’ve been looking at rocks since, I don’t know, my big brother used to take me when I was just a kid. Since forever.”

  Ryan looked around, and saw that the two women were watching him. They’d seen the whole exchange. He cleared his throat, which had been awfully dry and scratchy lately. “Okay. Let’s get back on the road. We’ll get to the base of the slope and camp. I think that Trevor has just found us a path.”

  24

  INSPECTION DETAIL

  Again at sunrise the sky was a luminous white, with a halo surrounding the true sun. Ryan was annoyed to see that Trevor had once again gotten up far earlier than the rest of them—didn’t that kid need sleep? By the time the rest of them awoke, he had already donned his suit and was doing the suit check to go out on a morning walk. Radkowski would never have let him get away with it; he’d been quite strict about nobody going out without a buddy. Ryan thought about telling him to forget it, to stick around and help with the deflation of the hobbit hab, but he didn’t really feel like being the bad guy first thing in the morning, and really there was little Trevor could do to help until the others had breakfasted. So he let Trevor go out, with the admonition that he was not to get out of view of the hab.

  They finished breakfast and deflated and packed away the habitat before Trevor wandered back. Ryan doubted if he had stayed in sight.

  “Find anything?” Tana asked, when he came back to the rockhopper.

  Trevor shook his head.

  “What were you looking for out there, anyway?”

  “Anything. Maybe fossils, I don’t know.” He shrugged. “Or old NASA Mars probes.”

  “Didn’t find anything at all?”

  “Rocks.” Trevor shrugged again. “Lots of rocks.”

  “Well, keep looking,” Tana said cheerfully. “Maybe you’ll get lucky.”

  In the early morning sunlight Ryan drove the rockhopper as far up the slope as he dared. He gained almost a kilometer and a half of altitude above the canyon floor. When the wheels of the rockhopper started to slide on loose rock, he stopped, backed down to a less slippery spot, and chocked the wheels of the rockhopper with rocks.

  He detailed Tana and Trevor to climb the slope on foot.

  He still intended to drive the rockhopper up to the base of the cliff under its own power, but the slope was getting dangerous, and a slide would mean the end of the expedition. He wanted a superfiber rope—better, two superfiber ropes—as a safety line.

  Ryan wondered if he should do a centimeter by centimeter inspection of each line. He had examined the severed ends of the fibers that had broken to kill commander Radkowski. They had broken cleanly, both the main rope and the safety line the same way, with no sign of wear, friction, or damage. The breaks were so clean that they might have been done with a razor blade. The superfiber wouldn’t break like that from simple overload; a clean break like that had to have happened by some preexisting nick or flaw in the rope.

  Or a deliberate action. But he wasn’t going to think about that. They had to be able to trust each other, they just had to, or else they would all die.

  No, it must have been a nick in the fiber. He had discarded the spool that had held the superfiber that had failed, just in case there was a problem with the batch.

  An inspection would be a good cautionary step, he decided. Tedious, but safe. As they paid the line out from the reel on the rockhopper, he watched it as it came off the spool, alert for any infinitesimal flaws.

  “You’re just going to sit there and watch it unreel?” Trevor asked, incredulous. “Every inch of it?”

  “Every centimeter.”

  “Wow,” Trevor said. “I don’t know if that’s dedication or stupidity.”

  Ryan shrugged. “A flaw killed one of us. I’d just as soon it didn’t kill another.”

  It wasn’t easy.

  25

  ELECTIVE SURGERY

  Overall, I’d say you’re in fine shape,” Doctor Geroch said to Tana. “I can tell you, I wish I had a heart like yours.” She laughed.

  Julie Geroch, the NASA flight surgeon assigned to oversee the mission, wasn’t in bad shape herself, but she was a little overweight. If Tana had been her physician, she would have suggested exercising more. But there was no point in saying that. The point of the exam was for Tana to get certified as medically fit for the mission, not for her to give advice to others on their personal habits. “Thanks,” she said. She slipped off the hospital gown and reached behind the door to fetch her shirt.

  “I’ll be scheduling you for surgery a week from Thursday,” Geroch said. “Is that date okay for you?”

  With her brassiere halfway fastened, Tana suddenly froze. “Surgery?”

  Dr. Geroch looked at her in surprise. “Sure.” She flipped through the stack of papers on her clipboard, and pulled out a color printout, an MRI image of Tana’s abdomen. “Your appendectomy.”

  “Let me see that.” Tana’s bra dropped on the floor as she grabbed the clipboard away from the doctor. She stared at the image. “Looks fine to me. No swelling—” She checked the legend for the metabolic and physio-chemical data. “Fluids normal, white cell count, nothing special either way, looks good to me. What’s the problem here?”

  “Oh, no problem,” Geroch said. “You’ve got an excellent appendix; I’d be sorry to see it go, too. But there’s no medical evacuation from Mars, and the crew will be leaving their appendices on Earth. Wisdom teeth too, although I see you’ve already had yours out. Didn’t they tell you that?”

  It was probably somewhere in the stacks of briefing documents. Tana hadn’t read them all.

  “Well, forget it,” Tana said. “The chances of appendicitis are trivial, and if it comes to it, I can remove an appendix. I’ve done dozens of emergency appendectomies; you know full well that I was a surgeon on call for the ER. I don’t know who called for this procedure, but I don’t approve of unnecessary surgery. You can never be one hundred percent sure that there won’t be a complication.”

  “Sure,” Geroch said agreeably. “And we’d rather have a complication here on Earth than halfway to Mars.”

  “I can do an appendectomy,” Tana retorted. “And I can deal with complications, thank you.”

  “That’s fine, Doctor Jackson,” Geroch replied. “And tell me, can you remove your own appendix?”

  “Sure. If I had to.”

  “No problem, then. We won’t schedule an appendectomy, then.”

  Tana smiled, relieved. She had no qualms doing surgery on other people—once you’ve done it a few times, pulling an appendix was no more challenging, say, than replacing the fuel-cell charge-discharge regulator on her Pontiac—but she didn’t like the thought of other
people’s hands inside her own personal body.

  “—as long as you can prove that you can remove your own appendix,” Geroch continued smoothly. “Here’s the deal. The way you prove that is for you to do it. So, when do you want to schedule the operating room?”

  “Let me get this straight,” Tana said. “If I show you I can remove my appendix, by removing my appendix, then I don’t have to have my appendix removed?”

  Dr. Geroch nodded, smiling. “That is correct.”

  “Either way, the appendix is gone,” Tana said.

  “That’s right.”

  Tana sighed. “Okay, okay. Let’s schedule the damn surgery then.”

  “Now, you’re talking sense. So. A week from Thursday works for you?”

  26

  UP THE CREEK

  Tana and Trevor took the path up, trailing the superfiber from the spool on the rockhopper. Ryan insisted that they rope themselves together, worried that the loose and fragmented rock would give way under one of them, and they would slide down the face along with a few hundred tons of boulders. They carried with them an extra spool of superfiber and a rock drill.

  The cliff was farther away than it looked. It took them four hours of hard climbing to reach the face, and at the end of it, even with several breaks for rest, Tana’s body was slick with sweat inside the chest-carapace of her suit. Despite the freezing temperature of the Martian air surrounding her, her suit was straining the limits of its thermal control unit to take away her body heat. Trevor unclipped the rope, and they took a well-deserved rest.

  “It was a river,” Trevor said. “Look at it! Look!”

  The spot where they were sitting was a level, sandy area, nearly circular, surrounded by low banks on all sides except the side they had climbed up. A dry pool at the bottom of an ancient, long dead waterfall. Now that Trevor had pointed it out, it was too clear to miss. Tana had suspected that they were climbing an ancient creek bed the whole climb, from seeing the way the stones were rounded, the way the stream had undercut the banks, and the way the path wound around, seeking the lowest level. But the dry pool was clear evidence.

  “There was water here,” Tana agreed. “No doubt.”

  Trevor was inspecting the banks. “I wonder if there are fossils?” he said.

  After a brief rest, Tana moved to the cliff face and began the process of drilling bolts into the rock to attach anchors for the superfiber. When she had the bolts drilled and the anchors set, she radioed back down to Ryan. “Got the superfiber anchored. Go ahead and reel it in.”

  “Copy anchored,” Ryan’s voice came. “I’m ready to reel.”

  “Take it slow,” she advised. “Copy that,” Ryan said. “Slow it is.”

  Tana noticed that Trevor had disappeared. Exploring, she guessed. The kid couldn’t stay put. Typical.

  27

  AT THE BASE OF THE CLIFF

  This cliff would be easy, Trevor thought, looking up the rock face to the chimney above. A long climb, but not a difficult one. He considered climbing to the top just to show how easy it would be, but decided at last that Ryan would tell him he was violating safety and keep him from exploring any more.

  He checked back to verify that he was still in sight of Tana. She was still drilling anchors into the rock. Her bright purple suit, even with a spattered layering of Mars dust over it, was easy to spot. He could still go a little ways without Ryan shouting about safety regulations.

  Should he start calling him Commander Martin now? Ryan hadn’t said anything. He seemed less interested in formality than Commander Radkowski had been.

  He could see, looking up the cliff face, an overhang. He would be willing to bet that it was another cave, a horizontal slot in the rock that was a mirror image of the one on the south rim. The commander’s death had cut off his opportunity to explore that one, but if he climbed up the splinter of rock angled against the cliff face, he could get a chance to look at this one. Would that be against safety regulations? Probably would, he concluded with some reluctance.

  Anyway, according to Tana and Ryan, who had explored it, it was boring anyway. Nothing but salt. Not even any stalactites.

  Instead, he followed the base of the cliff around to the right. It wasn’t as if he could get lost here; his sense of direction was still screwy on Mars, but if he just kept his right hand on the wall, he had to come back to the waterfall.

  It was a dizzying view down, like the ski slope from hell. It must be miles down; tens of miles, maybe. He couldn’t see where the rockhopper was parked on the slope below, it was so far. He tuned in to the radio for a moment to see what Tana and Ryan were doing, but they were just discussing the superfiber cable, so he turned the radio off again.

  The cliff face was extremely interesting. It wasn’t all uniform sandstone, like he’d first thought, but a whole variety of different layers, even different colors, some of it a smooth, grayish blue stone, other layers made of a mixture of rocks all cemented together. Conglomerate; he remembered that from his geology classes. They had that in Arizona, too. Below the conglomerate was a smooth layer of gray rock that looked like slate. Or shale; he always got those two confused. It jutted out and made a little shelf a few inches thick, strong enough that he could stand on it. He thought about jumping up and down to see how strong it was, but decided that it would be a bad idea.

  It must have been a flood or something, he thought. No, more likely a lake bottom, or even the bottom of an ocean. All the mud on the bottom settled in a layer, more rocks and stuff got layered on top, and it squished down on it until the mud got squeezed into rock. All this was once muddy ocean floor. And then the ocean or lake or flood or whatever dried up.

  Slate—or shale, whatever—was where you find fossils, he recalled. He followed the ledge along, looking carefully, but it was completely flat and uniformed. Boring.

  Sometime you had to break the shale open, and the fossil is inside. He wished he had one of those hammers that geologists use. Estrela would have one, he knew, but she was down at the rockhopper. He looked around. Above the shale layer, he found a piece of the conglomerate about the size of a brick that looked ready to come loose. Trevor pried at it with his fingers, worked it back and forth until all of a sudden it popped loose.

  He used the rock as a hammer. The shale broke easily, peeling off in flakes like the pages of a book. He looked at each one carefully, hoping for a fossil, but there was still nothing.

  When his arm got tired, he put his hammer rock down on the ledge for a rest. He was so tired that his eyes had been looking at it for minutes before his brain noticed that there was something there to look at.

  The piece of conglomerate he had been holding had a smooth, concave surface. It had been molded around something. It was hard to tell just what, but it couldn’t be natural. He raced back to the place he had found the rock. The trail of broken shale showed just exactly where he’d been. Yes, there it was, embedded in the rock, the piece that was left behind when he pried out the rock he used as a hammer, like a bas-relief protruding from the wall.

  But what was it?

  It was maybe six inches long, the diameter of his thumb, a perfect cylinder, but curved slightly, like a piece of macaroni. Looking closer at it, he could see slight pumpkin-ridges on the surface.

  He tugged on the rock, but couldn’t pull it free. It didn’t matter. A fossil, he had found a fossil. There were fossils on Mars. There had been life on Mars.

  And he, Brandon Weber, had found it.

  PART FIVE

  BRANDON WEBER

  But the ethereal and timeless power of the land, that union of what is beautiful with what is terrifying, is insistent…The beauty here is a beauty you feel in your flesh. You feel it physically, and that is why it is sometimes terrifying to approach. Other beauty takes only the heart, or the mind.

  —Barry Holstun Lopez,

  Arctic Dreams (1986)

  The horizon was a sea of mirage. Gigantic sand columns whirled over the plain, and on both sid
es of our road were huge piles of bare rocks standing detached upon the surface of sand and clay. Here they appeared in oval clumps, heaped up with a semblance of symmetry; there a single boulder stood, with its narrow foundation based upon a pedestal of low, dome-shaped rock.

  —Richard Francis Burton,

  A Pilgrimage to Mecca and Medina (1855)

  1

  FOSSIL HUNTERS

  They all clustered around the base of the cliff, looking at the layer of shale with his fossil embedded in it, examining his find. He felt inordinately proud. He had found it! Everybody else had stopped looking, but he had kept on. He, Brandon, had found fossils of life on Mars.

  “It’s a great find, Trevor,” Ryan said, and he almost couldn’t help from dancing at the praise. “You’ve got sharp eyes.”

  He ran fingers over it once again, feeling its surface, hoping that from tactile sense alone some message from the distant past would be transmitted through his fingertips. But the gloves were too thick, or perhaps no message was there to be sent.

  It looked like nothing more than a six-inch length of some ordinary, dark brown garden hose that had somehow gotten glued into the rock. But that was impossible, of course. There were no garden hoses on Mars.

  “Estrela,” Ryan said. “You’re the rock expert here. What do you think?”

  “Me?” Estrela seemed startled to be asked. She seemed worn out, he suddenly thought. He was surprised how haggard Estrela looked. The pain of her arm must be wearing on her, he thought. Perhaps Tana needed to prescribe a stronger painkiller. “Clearly a fossil,” Estrela said. “I think.”

  “What do you mean, you think?” Ryan pressed. “What is it?”

  “Let me think.” Estrela’s voice was distant, a little weary. “This whole stratum was under the ocean,” she said. “We’re below the salt layer here, right? These are sedimentary layerings from the ocean floor. This one”—she touched the smooth blue rock layer—“is siltstone. Dried and compressed mud. This one here”—she touched another layer—“is a sandstone. This must have been a very shallow layer here. The layer with the fossil is a conglomerate; lots of different sediments pressed together. It’s right above the shale layer; more layered mud. Santa Luzia, shales often have a high carbon content. We’ve got to get the mass-spec here, look for organics.”