Goodbye, John. Goodbye.
19
METEORS
Ryan Martin had inspected the dome and was hesitating outside when a sudden flash of light attracted his attention. Wow, that was an impressive one, he thought. Looks like it almost hit us. And then there was another, and then a third.
It's a meteor shower, he thought. No, more than just a shower—this was rally a meteor storm. Streaks of light, yellow, blue. One streaked by and seemed barely over his head, as if it were close enough to touch. Jesus, he thought. Could that one really have been as close as it looked?
Are we in danger? Are we going to get hit?
For a moment Ryan was frightened, and then his rational mind whispered, you know better than that. On Earth, meteors burn up in the tenuous fringes of the atmosphere, a hundred kilometers up. A very few of the largest ones may penetrate as low as forty kilometers before being slowed and shattered by the atmosphere. The atmosphere of Mars was thin, but it was not that thin—the meteor shower might look close, but it was still no more than grains of dust burning up tens of kilometers above their heads, a light show of no practical danger to anyone on the surface.
Meteor showers on Mars have different dates, he thought, different radiants from those on Earth. Who knows the dates of Mars meteor showers? This one probably happens every Mars year at this time, and since Mars is closer to the asteroid belt than Earth, the show is correspondingly more impressive.
He watched it for a few more minutes—on Earth he'd always loved meteor showers; he marked them on his calendar so he wouldn't forget to watch—and then went into the habitat.
20
ON THE RIDGE
In the morning the first task was to unpack the dirt-rover from its carrying harness on the rockhopper.
Trevor, as usual, was the first one awake. He stepped outside the dome. He stopped, astounded. The yellow-red of Mars had vanished. The adobe-yellow sky had vanished, and had been replaced with a dome of opalescent white. Not one, but three suns were rising into the sky, and around the central sun was an enormous half-circle of light, a red-rimmed halo that just met the twin suns to either side. Even as he watched, the two second suns stretched out into arcs, and a third luminous arc formed above the sun.
At last Trevor found his voice. "What is it," he said. "What is it?"
Ryan stood beside him. Trevor hadn't noticed him leave the dome. He was silent for a moment, taking in the sight, and then said, "Parhalia."
"What?"
"Ice crystal halos." He looked at Trevor. "It's microscopic crystals of ice, suspended at high altitudes in the atmosphere. They reflect light. I've heard about it."
There were three complete circles in the sky now, and partial arcs of three more. It was geometrically perfect, as if a computer artist had drawn glowing circles across the heavens.
"This must be an ice haze filling up the canyon, because the canyon bottom is so low," Ryan said. "Miles below sea level, if you can say Mars has a sea level."
"Yikes!" Tana said. She had just emerged from the habitat dome. "That's incredible."
The canyon bottom had seemed flat the previous day, but today they realized that, in fact, they had been traveling parallel to a set of ridges. The light, diffusing through the layer of ice crystals, blurred the shadows, gave the rocky plains a softer, more Earthlike look.
The ridge nearest them was a bare hundred meters away. While the others were setting up the rockhopper and deflating and packing away the dome, Trevor climbed up to the top of it and looked out across the landscape. From below it had looked like a sand dune, but the surface under his boots was hard and unyielding, rough, more like concrete than sand. From the top, for as far as he could see in either direction, there were dunes, like an endless sea of frozen waves. The walls of the canyon itself were invisible.
His sense of direction was still acting screwy. He had no idea which way was north, which was south. No matter which way he looked, he could not see the canyon walls. Even from the ridge, the canyon walls were over the horizon.
Trevor was still trying to sort out his feelings about Commander Radkowski's death. Radkowski had never cut him the least bit of slack. It was hard for him to grieve too much at Radkowski's death, but he wondered how bad it had hurt their chances of returning. Ryan had already taken over as mission commander, he guessed—he had been pretty decisive in getting them moved out and away from the canyon wall, when the other two astronauts had been pretty much shocked and useless.
And, with Radkowski gone, his chances of joining the ride home had noticeably improved.
The luminous arcs of light in the sky had slowly faded and vanished, burned away by the heat of the rising sun, and now it was just another clear Martian morning. The sky was a dirty yellow, with only a thin tracery of clouds in the east, a pale shade of translucent blue, like gauze. When the sun comes up on lonely peaks, he's vanished with the wind, Trevor hummed. His throat was a little sore, and he didn't feel like singing, but he could still hum. With the sighing of the lonely desert wind.
21
THE VIEW FROM THE SPACE STATION
The cupola was the viewing area of the space station, a tiny observation atrium with windows on all sides. When Tana had no other duties, she often drifted there to just look down. It was a place to meditate.
Tana looked out at the everchanging panorama of the Earth. She was beginning to feel comfortable on the space station now. She was fitting in, running the little medical clinic, participating in experiments. Just as planned, she was getting familiar with space. She wondered if the Mars mission would be like this.
Tana felt somebody float up behind her. She shifted to make room— the cupola was barely large enough for two—but didn't turn. "It's so beautiful," she said. "Always changing. Always different."
Out the cupola, the ocean streamed past below. It was a delicate shade of aqua, a color so bright that it looked artificial. The blue was brushed with the crescent shapes of islands outlined in pale yellow sand and deep green vegetation. It looked so fragile, as if it could be made out of blown crystal, eggshell-thin, that might shatter with a touch.
"Yes," the voice came from behind her. "A fractal beauty."
It was Ryan Martin's voice, but she would have known who it was even if she hadn't recognized the voice. Only the Canadian astronaut would see the beauty in terms of the fractal spatter-pattern of large and small islands, the tiniest islets so small as to be no more than specks of yellow in the yellow-green sea.
She didn't recognize any of it. Tana had won an eighth-grade ribbon for her knowledge of geography, but here, where there were no national borders marked, where "north" was not up but could be any direction depending on the space station attitude, she was always lost.
"Where are we?" she asked.
"South Pacific somewhere," Ryan answered. "Want to know exactly? I could find a laptop with STK." He turned to swim down into the station.
"No, no. Pacific—that's fine."
The scenery scrolled past, the aqua of the shallow waters deepening to a rich dark blue, with a wash of thin clouds. She smiled inwardly, knowing that Ryan would probably also be thinking of the cloud patterns as a fractal shape, the graceful pattern of swirls repeated in the smaller bird-feather clouds.
The Mars crew selections wasn't yet official, but she knew that Ryan would be the third member of the Mars team. He had just arrived at the space station for a training mission. She was glad he was on the team.
She had seen him around NASA Johnson, but until they started to train together, she hadn't recognized him as the young astronaut who had given the talk that had given her the incentive to apply to NASA to be a flight surgeon. Why, without a doubt he was the reason she was here, and he didn't even know it. She had a sudden wild urge to turn around, tell him thank you, and kiss him. She wondered what he would do.
She did nothing, of course. It wouldn't be appropriate.
22
SUSPICIONS
The rope shoul
dn't have broken, Tana explained to Estrela, when they stopped for a moment to rest and swap drivers. It was rated for more than a hundred tons of breaking strength; it could have held a truckload of elephants. "I'm thinking that it might not have been an accident."
"What are you saying?" Estrela asked. "Of course it was an accident. What else?"
"Don't play dumb, you're not blond," Tana said. "You've figured out that only two of us can be on that rocket back, maybe three, no more. Everybody on the whole team knows it. If there are fewer of us, that's more chances to get home."
"Murder," Estrela said. She didn't look at Tana.
"You have another idea?"
Estrela nodded slowly. "So you're saying, we should watch our backs."
"You got it." Tana shook her head. "Trust nobody."
Estrela asked, "Not even me?"
Tana looked at her for a long time, and then shook her head again. "Not even you," she said.
23
CLIFF
Twice they came across dry riverbeds, with dust-covered bottoms of smooth gray stone that looked like slate. "A good place to look for fossils," Estrela whispered, but only Trevor wanted to stop.
And, slowly, the cliffs of the opposite wall grew in the distance, at first no more than a thin ruddy line faintly visible against the horizon, and then a massive presence that came closer and closer, until the stark rocks seemed to be looming over their heads.
Ryan stopped the rockhopper to inspect the embankment with the binoculars. Like the cliff on the south edge of the canyon, eons of undercutting had given the embankment an extensive talus slope of fragmented boulders at the base. He examined it minutely, trying to determine where the slope was least steep, where it came closest to the top of the vertical face. It was a forbidding prospect; the jumbled slope of loose, angular rock would be a dangerous climb, and it rose for miles before it met the face of the cliff.
"Hey, come on," Trevor said at last. "Can't I look too?"
"This isn't a game," Ryan snapped, and then instantly regretted it. "Wait, I'm sorry." He wasn't getting anywhere, might as well let the kid try. He handed him the binoculars "Here. See if you can find a good way up."
Trevor put the binoculars to his faceplate, adjusted the electronic focus, and scanned upward. After a few seconds he stopped. "There," he said.
"What?"
"Right there." Trevor lowered the binoculars and pointed. "See?"
Ryan took the binoculars back and looked at where Trevor was pointing. "Where?" He didn't see anything.
"Wait, let me guide you. See the big boulder that looks like a thumb?"
Ryan didn't see anything that looked like a thumb. He scanned left and right, and then suddenly saw a peach-colored boulder that sat alone, sticking straight up out of the ground. It did look like a thumb, now that Trevor had pointed it out. "Got it."
"Okay, go up from there. Up and a little left of that there are two boulders together, almost round? They look like a pair of tits. Okay, now right behind that and a little left you can see a groove. Looks like a stream bed. That's a natural path up the slope."
"Yeah, got it," Ryan said. "But I don't see a path."
"Give me the binoculars for a moment," Trevor said, and Ryan handed them to him before he even had a chance to think, Why the hell am I giving these to him?
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?"
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