Mars Prime

by William C. Dietz

  Corvan was philosophical. It would be hard to beat the shots he'd taken from orbit anyway. Besides, the construction crew had been dirtside for quite a while now and had sent back enough video of white polar caps, endless wastelands, and dry riverbeds to last everyone a long, long time.

  No, that stuff was old hat. His job was to tell the stories that went with the landscape. A city rising from the desert. Geologists probing below the surface. Biologists tinkering with custom-designed microbes. The possibilities were endless.

  The shuttle shuddered slightly as it hit the planet's atmosphere. The air might be thin, but it was still there and could present problems. As when the sun heated both the surface and the dust particles floating in the air enough to start a convective cell. Winds reaching speeds of up to 250 miles per hour had been known to result. Scary, but not necessarily fatal, since the air was so thin that the storm would feel like little more than a twenty-five mile an hour breeze to someone standing on the surface. Strong but survivable, assuming that your vehicle was in working order, and you could see well enough to find your way home.

  Something felt different, and it took Corvan a moment to figure out what it was. Gravity! It was back! He loosened his harness just to make sure. Yes, there was no doubt about it, something held him in place. He gestured to Kim by pulling the straps out and away from his body. She nodded and made a circle with thumb and forefinger. The reop took the slack out of his harness. It would feel good to walk again even if the gravity was about one third that of Earth's.

  The shuttle banked slightly and gave Corvan a view of Olympus Mons, a gigantic volcano that reached fifteen miles into the sky and would have dwarfed Mount Everest had the two sat side by side.

  The co-pilot provided them with the kind of narration that shuttle jockey's love, full of facts and figures, and more than a little patronizing. Her voice boomed inside Corvan's helmet and he hurried to turn the volume down.

  "Take a look, folks, just off the port side, something to write home about. Olympus Mons. It has a forty-five-mile-wide caldera and a three hundred and thirty-five-mile base. Mars doesn't have tectonic plates, or so the rock doctors tell me, and that means that a volcano could sit over the same plume of lava and grow almost forever."

  Some of the colonists craned their heads trying to see while others ignored the whole thing. Corvan was one of the former, taking everything in, excited by the wild untamed beauty of it all. Olympus Mons was quickly gone, giving way to the vast emptiness that lay between it and Chryse Planitia, the area where Viking Lander I had touched down back in 1976. He saw impact craters, networks of deeply cut canyons, and vast rock-strewn plains.

  Here was a virgin planet. Well, almost virgin, since man was already scratching away at its surface. But what would become of it? Would Mars become another Earth? Used, abused, and then abandoned? Or had mankind learned a thing or two? Only time would tell.

  They were lower now, so low that Corvan could make out individual craters and the larger rocks. He felt the shuttle vibrate as the pilot fired her braking jets. They were thrown forward against the harnesses. The scenery slowed to a crawl. Flying was a matter of brute force due to the almost nonexistent atmosphere. That's why the shuttle had no wings, why the colonists had to get along without aircraft, and why ground transportation was the norm.

  Like the takeoff the landing was almost anticlimactic. Corvan barely had time to glimpse a half-finished dome, rows of cylindrical storage tanks, and a com mast before the shuttle rotated on its own axis and descended toward the ground below. The reporter grabbed both of his arm rests, felt his stomach do a flip flop, then steady as the landing jets fired.

  Clouds of fine red dust billowed up and around the shuttle. The desert disappeared. It gave Corvan a taste of what a sand storm would be like. Billions of tiny particles whirling through the air, unable to see or do anything about it, forced to stop or run the risk of driving off the edge of a cliff. Not a pleasant thought.

  The landing skids hit hard, threw the colonists against their restraints, and caused the pilot to apologize.

  "Sorry about that. . . and welcome to Mars."

  Corvan hit his seat release and jumped to his feet. He was immediately sorry. His feet broke contact with the deck and his helmet hit the overhead. That's when the co-pilot's voice filled his ears. "Watch yourselves now ... the gravity is one-third Earth normal ... and it's easy to overreact."

  Corvan knew his wife was laughing at him and couldn't help but smile. What a headline: "Ace reop arrives on Mars ... then knocks himself unconscious while leaving ship."

  The process of leaving the ship was less structured than getting aboard had been. Though among the last to board, the Corvans were among the first to disembark, and saw none of the heavy-handed efficiency so typical of the Outward Bound. There was a single space-suited figure by the hatch, reading their names off their suits and entering them into a hand-held por-tacomp. And, outside of an additional person that served to aim the colonists toward a distant dome, there was no one else around.

  The directions were clear enough, though. "Stay on the path. Stay off the radio. Monitor frequency nine. Stay on the . . ."

  All of the suits had the capacity to monitor three frequencies at once. Corvan stayed on nine in accordance with instructions and scanned the other channels for conversation. There was a lot of it on channel five. Construction stuff mostly, intercut with prerecorded infomercials on everything from safety to personal hygiene. He let it rumble in the background.

  Corvan activated the robo cam but left it on his shoulder. The words were not planned, not consciously anyway, but flowed as if they had been. It felt that way sometimes, when the story laid itself out in chronological order and his mind was in the groove. The reop checked to make sure his mike was on and laid sound with the pictures.

  "This is a brand new experience, and a slightly dangerous one, so the first thing that comes to mind is survival. That means trying to remember the things they taught you about your suit, conditions on the surface, and the various emergencies that might arise. You know the stuff, or think you do, but you wonder about your ability to handle it so there's an empty spot in the pit of your stomach.

  "And there are other concerns as well. Remember what it felt like on your first day at a new school? Or when you arrived at summer camp? Or were inducted into the youth corps? You wanted to fit in, to be accepted, to earn some respect. Well, that's what we're going through now.

  "The man or woman next to the hatch has been dirtside for more than a year now. Look at his or her suit. It looks worn instead of new. You can see patches here and there along with some sort of artwork on the chest plate. A desertscape with two moons hanging over it. It looks nice. Do all the colonists decorate their suits? Is that how they provide themselves with some sort of individual identity? Just one of the many things we'll learn during the next couple of days."

  Corvan reached the bottom of the stairs, made his way out away from the ship, and turned back. He kept his movements slow and deliberate. He didn't intend to make the same mistake twice. The shuttle loomed large in the foreground. More ships were visible in the background. Dust billowed as one of them lifted off, skittered across the ground, and headed toward a prefab hangar. A low ridge could be seen beyond that. A column of dust marked the spot where a ground vehicle moved along the top of it. Corvan cut to a medium shot as the last of the passengers disembarked. He wondered if one of them was a murderer, then pushed the thought aside.

  First one colonist, then another, began to run. They ran in circles, jumped up and down* and slapped each other on the back. Many lost their balance, fell, and broke into uproarious laughter. They were reprimanded for a break in radio discipline, threatened with all sorts of horrible punishments, and were forced to pantomime their joy instead.

  Corvan launched the robo cam, saw its jets fire, and sent it weaving between them. "And that's what you feel like doing after being cooped up on a ship for nine months. Running and jumping and us
ing your muscles. Muscles that seem stronger than they were on Earth since the gravity is two-thirds lighter."

  The reop caused the camera to hover, noticed a suit that was smaller than the rest, and zoomed in. It was only when he saw the name stenciled on the suit that he realized who it was. Dr. Bethany McKeen! Corvan waved but the diminutive scientist was busy doing jumping jacks and didn't notice.

  Corvan sent the robo cam up to a higher altitude and zoomed wide. The dome would be huge when it was finished, four times the size of the King Dome in his native Seattle, and sufficient to house more than ten thousand people. But only half the structure was in place and it would be the better part of a year before the rest was finished. It would take all of the metal from the Outward Bound's hull plus tons of fittings, machinery, wiring, furniture and countless other things that hadn't arrived yet in order to finish the dome and make it truly livable. Corvan focused his thoughts and searched for the words to express them.

  "And over there, in the distance, a city is rising from the desert. Not a city yet, mind you, but the makings of one—the birth of Mars Prime. A construction project that already ranks with the pyramids, the tunnel under the English Channel, and Luna Base III in terms of complexity, difficulty, and old-fashioned hard work."

  The robo cam came in for a landing and they hurried to catch up with the others. An informal pathway led away from the landing pad and toward the collection of cranes, gantries, cylinders, and globes that marked the place where the dome was taking shape. Orderly rows of reddish rock marked both its edges, a yellow hand-line stretched along the left-hand side and was supported by steel stanchions. A safety line in case of sand storms? Corvan wasn't sure and made a note to ask.

  Corvan felt Kim's helmet touch his. Her voice was muffled but understandable all the same. "Look."

  Corvan looked as only he could and recorded what he saw. An I-beam had been sunk into the ground and hand-lettered signs had been attached. They pointed in every direction, including straight up, and said things like: "New York, 189 million miles, (give or take), Tharsis Rise, 2,500 miles, Lover's Leap, 10 miles" and so forth. Many of the entries were in languages he didn't know. At least some of the construction crew still had a sense of humor. That meant morale was good. Or so it seemed until they neared the half-finished dome and saw sights of another kind.

  Kim noticed the chain gang first and bumped Corvan's helmet to tell him about it. "Look ... I wonder what they did."

  Or didn't do, Corvan thought to himself as he zoomed in. Their suits had been painted blue in stark contrast to the reddish-orange background. The prisoners had been bound ankle to ankle like the chain gangs of old and were equipped with sledge hammers. They rose in a wave, glinted in the sun, then fell toward the rocks below. Reddish-orange fragments flew up, tumbled end over end, and drifted toward the ground. Fountains of dust sprang up wherever they hit. The work was not as difficult as it would have been on Earth but was far from pleasant. The voice in his helmet was hard.

  "Keep it moving newbies ... or grab a hammer and join in."

  The problem with helmet radios is that voices lose their directionality. It took a moment to locate the guard. He stood off to one side and looked average enough, except for the skull and crossbones painted on his chest and the bulky weapon cradled in his arms. Corvan tried to see the guard's face but couldn't penetrate beyond the reflective visor.

  Someone tugged at his arm. Corvan turned to find Kim gesturing toward the dome. She was worried, afraid that he'd refuse the guard's order and get them in trouble. The reop forced himself to go along. Kim was right. The story would keep.

  The colonists gave the chain gang a wide berth as they trudged toward the dome. They were up close now, walking in its shadow and winding their way through a maze of machinery and construction materials. They stared as construction workers walked by carrying loads that would have been impossible on Earth.

  There were machines too, lots of them, and they came in all shapes and sizes. There was no sound to warn Corvan of their approach, so the reop found himself trying to look in every direction at once, fearful of an accident. Some had human operators, some were remote controlled, and some had minds of their own. The latter took on a variety of shapes and sizes, looking like tractors, loaders, and yes, human beings.

  The reop watched as a bipedal robot followed a human to a pile of conduit, waited while the worker selected six eight-foot sections of pipe, then copied the sentient's motions with eerie accuracy.

  A space suit appeared out of nowhere. It was shorter than Corvan's and painted to resemble a man in evening clothes. The voice that came over their headsets was unexpectedly high-pitched and somewhat squeaky.

  "All right . . . line up and wait for your name to be called. A few of you rate private quarters but most don't. Let's start with the lucky ones first so that the rest of you will know who to hate. Adair, Arjona, Tom and Marta, Bartu, Beierle, Bouta, Cera, Civarra, Corvan, Kim and Rex, Deeson ..."

  It didn't take long to name the rest of the people fortunate enough to rate private quarters and herd them into a separate group. Once the naming was over another person arrived and identified himself as Father Simmons. His suit was completely unadorned except for a rather plainly executed crucifix located at the exact center of his chest plate. His voice was friendly and somewhat apologetic.

  "Welcome to Mars Prime, everyone. I'm sorry about the razzing, but entertainment is hard to come by around here, and that leads to some good-natured teasing."

  Corvan had some doubts about the padre's analysis but let it go.

  "So," Simmons said cheerfully, "I've been assigned to give you the royal tour and make sure that you reach your quarters safely."

  There were murmurs of appreciation but Simmons waved them away. "It's the least I can do, and besides, time is something I have plenty of."

  The last sounded somewhat wistful and caused Corvan to wonder if church attendance had fallen off.

  They entered the dome through a lock that would eventually be one of many connecting various sections of the interior together. The theory was that if one compartment lost pressure the others wouldn't and most of the colony would survive.

  The lock was huge, large enough to drive heavy equipment in and out of, and the newbies shared it with a heavy-duty fork lift. The driver, invisible behind her reflective visor, ignored them.

  Red lights flashed on and off as massive interlocking doors slid shut and a prerecorded voice sounded in their helmets. "Please stand by. Please stand by. Do not vent your suit until the green lights come on. Do not vent your suit until the green lights come on."

  Three or four minutes passed, the green lights came on, and another set of doors slid open. The forklift went on its way and the voice returned.

  "Please leave the lock. Please leave the lock. You may vent your suits. You may vent your suits."

  The group did as they were told, leaving the lock, and breaking their neck ring seals. Corvan heard the hiss of escaping air as he removed his helmet. The reop swallowed and his ears popped. He took a deep breath. The air was thick with various kinds of fumes, ranging from the sharp scent of solvents to the heavier odor of adhesives. Corvan wrinkled his nose and tried to breath through his mouth.

  Dr. B took her helmet off, spotted Corvan, and waved from the other side of the group. Corvan waved back.

  "There," Father Simmons said, removing his helmet, "that's better."

  Corvan saw that the padre was a relatively young man, thirty at most, with an innocent unlined face. He motioned for his flock to follow him deeper into the dome.

  "Keep your eyes peeled for oncoming traffic. They move pretty fast sometimes."

  Simmons side-stepped a graffiti-covered maintenance bot, waited for some construction workers to pass, and then led the way down a spacious corridor. Anyway, it would have been spacious if building materials hadn't been stacked along both walls. Corvan saw exposed beams, half-finished wiring, conduit that led nowhere, gaping junction boxes,
and unjoined ductwork. Add to that the sound of power tools, a lot of old-fashioned hammering, at least six kinds of music, the constant drone of the PA system, and Mars Prime seemed more like a do-it-yourself lunatic asylum than a high tech city in the making.

  "The main corridors are laid out like spokes on a wheel," Simmons said, yelling to make himself heard over the background sound. "This is corridor eight, but is better known as Broadway, and will eventually be lined with restaurants, theaters, and nightclubs. A low priority where management is concerned but of considerable interest to labor."

  Corvan listened intently. There it was again. A not so veiled reference to the lack of entertainment and other amenities. Just one of the many leads he'd follow up on. Assuming the suits would allow him to do anything approaching honest journalism.

  Simmons stopped by a massive pair of doors and motioned for the others to enter. Corvan followed Kim into a large open space and looked around. There was a flat space toward the center of the room, a wall that divided it in half, and floors that slanted up towards the ceiling.

  The priest waited until everyone had entered and moved to the center of the group. "This is our sports arena," Simmons said proudly, "or will be when the other half of the dome is finished."

  "An event that can't come a moment too soon," a female voice boomed.

  Corvan turned just in time to see some people emerge from a side corridor. He knew most of them. The group included Fornos, Jopp, Hobarth, and J.D. Paxton. It made sense. If he'd been allowed to land early, then they would have arrived even earlier and were participating in some sort of VIP tour.

  The woman who had replied to Father Simmons' comment and seemed in charge of the tour stood out in stark contrast to Jopp. She was older, fifty pounds heavier, and seemed a good deal more personable. Corvan didn't know her, but had seen her on television and read about her in countless magazine articles. This was Margaret Peco-Evans, the force behind Luna Base III, and the architect who had designed Mars Prime. She smiled at Simmons.