Mars Crossing

by Geoffrey Landis

  13

  NORTH

  Tana's seat had come to rest upside down, completely detached from the fuselage, but remarkably intact otherwise. She unbuckled her harness and pushed the seat away. Debris from the airplane was scattered for a hundred meters down the ice. Estrela had been thrown clear and landed spreadeagled in a drift of snow a few feet away. Ryan, and the front half of the fuselage, protruded from a snowbank.

  She could see Estrela moving, and then standing up. Her body was smoking. She brushed the smoke away, and with relief, Tana realized that it was just dry ice vaporizing away from the heat of her body.

  In another moment, Ryan unfastened his harness and took a few steps onto the ice.

  They were alive.

  Ryan looked across at her. He seemed unhurt. The snow had apparently cushioned the landing.

  She toggled her radio on to the common band. "Ryan, Estrela, are you okay? Any injuries to report?"

  "Think I'm okay," Ryan said. "Nothing broken, anyway."

  "Foda-se!" Estrela said. "Yes, I'm okay. I think."

  Tana wasn't sure what she could have done if they had reported injuries anyway. The nearest emergency room was over a hundred million miles away. She looked across the ice. Liquid oxygen tanks, supplies, shards of aluminum-lithium alloy, the burned-out rocket engine, shreds of wing fabric; pieces of the Butterfly were spread on both sides of the skid mark the plane had made sliding along the snow. There was no way it was ever going to fly again. Jesus, that had been the most frightening moment of her life. She was amazed that Ryan had managed to hold it together for so long. "And what now?" she asked.

  The question hung in the air for a moment, and then Ryan answered. "What choices do we have?"

  A tremor shook the ice, and a moment later a sharp report. "What in the world—"

  Tana pointed wordlessly.

  A few hundred meters to the east, a geyser had sprung up from the snow, a brilliant white plume shooting a hundred meters into the air. Fragments of ice pattered down on the snow all around them. The ground below the geyser split open, and the glittering plume spread out, at first slowly, and then with increasing speed along the crack in both directions until it was a wall of glistening spray that raced toward the horizon in both directions.

  Ryan reached down and touched the ground tentatively. The polar cap surface was dust mixed with ice, a rough, crusty surface. He tapped it gingerly. It seemed solid. "Ice," he said. He rapped on it solidly and looked up at them. "The crust is ordinary water ice. But below the crust, it must be carbon dioxide—dry ice. It's slowly sublimating away in the heat. When it gets trapped—wham. It all blows out at once."

  Already the sudden geyser was beginning to die away. In a few minutes, all that was left of it was a patch of broken snow.

  "For certain we can't stay here," Ryan said. "We head north."

  "On foot?" Tana asked. Nobody said anything; the answer was obvious. "How far?"

  "About two hundred and fifty kilometers," Ryan said.

  "You've got to be kidding."

  It took Tana ten minutes of searching to find the inertial navigation system. The laser gyros had no moving parts; it was a design that had been built to locate airplane crash sites on Earth. She checked it. "Still working. We ought to write the manufacturer." It had been designed to be tough.

  Ryan was ripping parts of skin off the Butterfly and examining their flexibility, but they didn't seem to meet his needs. He moved over to salvage struts out of the wreckage of the seats, apparently a bit more to his liking. He looked up. "Do you know how to ski?"

  "Now you really have to be kidding," Tana said.

  He held up one of the struts. It was a piece of aluminum-lithium alloy, strong and light. He had been able to flatten it down, and bent a crude curve at one end. He examined it critically, and then started to work on another. "Do you have another idea?"

  Tana shook her head.

  "North," Ryan said.

  14

  TO THE FARTHEST NORTH

  The sun was circled by a luminous double halo, with mock suns on either side. It never set, but only circled constantly around them, dipping down almost to the horizon in front of them and then rising up at their backs.

  The ground was a jumbled chaos of pressure ridges and fragmented ice-blocks half buried in snow. In regions the ground was solid ice, crisscrossed with cracks that hissed out jets of snow-laden vapor, and in other regions gleaming new snow lay flat and smooth and inviting. Ryan cheerfully steered into the middle of one of these, and as his makeshift skis touched the snow, it hissed and foamed around him. All friction vanished, and he skidded helplessly away on a cushion of foaming carbon dioxide vapor.

  It took him an hour to painstakingly make his way out of the trap, warming each step down until he reached solid footing. After that, they learned to avoid the areas of new snow.

  After six hours of skiing, Ryan called for a halt. They pulled off their skis and inflated the emergency habitat.

  The emergency habitat was a cylinder, two meters long and a meter and a half in diameter, with translucent walls made of polyimide impregnated with netting of ripstop superfiber. An even, pinkish-orange light filtered through the habitat walls, making the inside look like the interior of a furnace. But the inside was cold. The only heat came from the radiators of the isotope power units on the Mars suits. It was so tightly crowded inside that it was hard for them to take their suits off; it had been designed to keep one person alive while waiting for rescue. But nobody was coming to rescue them. They silently stripped down to just the suit liners and piled together in the middle for warmth.

  It was nearly impossible to sleep, and they huddled together, too tired to move, too tired to complain. With the continuous sunlight, there was no sense of time. After six hours, without any discussion, they put their suits on.

  When they got outside, they saw that the waste heat from the sausage habitat had sublimed the ice away from under it, and the sausage had settled into a hollow half a meter deep.

  They continued north.

  For the first three days, snow geysers burst forth unexpectedly all around them, and they constantly worried that at any moment one might open beneath them. As they worked farther north, the snow geysers got smaller and less frequent, until they stopped being a threat.

  In some places, the ice was just a thin crust suspended above a layer of gas below. The first footstep to touch it would trigger a collapse, and with a rattling crunch, an area as large as a soccer field would suddenly fragment and fall a distance of two or three centimeters.

  They would walk on the rough ice, and ski across the snow, until Ryan called a break. He inflated the sausage, and they crawled into the cold, stinking interior. It was a relief to take the suits off, even briefly. After a month of nearly continuous wear, every wrinkle and irregularity of the suits was rubbing their skin raw.

  But in the constant light, none of them could really sleep. They took to resting only for three-hour naps, huddling in a semiconscious stupor that was neither sleep nor wakefulness, until Ryan told them it was time for them to put on their suits and push onward.

  They came to cliffs of ice and laboriously hacked steps into the ice to climb. The route was upward, ever upward. Twice they came to immense crevasses, hundreds of meters wide, crossing their path. The depths were misty with a white fog, fading into darkness as far down as they could look. It was impossible to cross them, and so they detoured around, cursing at the delay.

  They continued north.

  15

  ACROSS THE ICE

  Estrela Conselheiro had experienced snow, but never so much of it. In the years she had lived in Cleveland, the winters had been mild, and snow was a rare thing, something that came once or twice a winter, melting in a day or so. Some of the older people in the city told stories of how in the last century it had been different, how the winters had been cold, and snow a meter deep, but no one really remembered.

  Now she was surrounded by it.
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  In places the wind had sculpted the snow up in ridges like frozen waves. Other places the ice was swept clear of snow and glowed almost blue in the pale sunlight.

  In all directions, as far as it was possible to see, there was only ice. Estrela had to confront the secret that she had never shared with any of the crew: The immensity of Mars terrified her.

  They moved in silence. Estrela felt as if she were alone on the face of an uncaring planet. She seemed to be walking in a narrow cavern, a knife-thin slot between the blue-white ice below and the dirty yellow sky above. She felt that she was small, an insignificant speck crawling across the wrinkled ice.

  But, to her surprise, she realized on the second day that it no longer terrified her. The ice was just ice, the sky just sky. Neither ice nor sky cared who she was or what she had done. She didn't have to explain herself to them, didn't have to pretend to be anybody. She could forget the others, forget even João, in the presence of uncaring immensity. It was as if she weren't even there at all.

  Estrela walked as if hypnotized, half-numbed from cold, numbed from lack of sleep, ignoring the others, alone inside her suit.

  Alone between the ice and the sky, Estrela Conselheiro felt free to be nobody at all.

  16

  THE BURIED SPACESHIP

  It took them eight days to reach the pole.

  They came over the ice ridge, and Jesus do Sul was visible. Or the top half of the spacecraft was visible.

  Jesus do Sul had sunk into the ice.

  Estrela stopped abruptly, as if suddenly waking from a long trance. "Jesus do Sul," she said softly, as if it were some puzzling words she were trying to understand, and then, more firmly, "Jesus do Sul." Then suddenly she screamed and ran toward the ship. "João! João!"

  Around the spacecraft, the snow was clean and undisturbed. Not even a ripple marked the locations where the two Brazilian explorers had fallen.

  Ryan started to go to her, and Tana held him back. She switched over to the private channel. "Leave her be," she said. "I think she needs to be alone for a while. Let's go check out the spacecraft."

  They were desperately in need of the supplies. They had eaten the last of their ration bricks two days ago and were living on nothing but one liter of recycled water per day. It wasn't enough, and they were all suffering from the effects of dehydration.

  There was a habitat module at the base of the Jesus do Sul. Ryan knew where it had to be—he had watched the tapes of the Brazilian exploration hundreds of times and had memorized all the details of the base—but nothing was visible. It was buried beneath the snow.

  Estrela was looking around frantically. "João!"

  Tana ignored her own advice and went toward Estrela. "Estrela?" she said. "Are you all right?"

  Ryan turned to the rocket. They had to get into the habitat, and they didn't have any extra time.

  The Brazilians had taken a much more streamlined approach to the design, and the part of the rocket that protruded from the snow looked like the spire of an onion-domed cathedral, with two smaller domes, the tops of the two first-stage boosters, to either side.

  The dome at the top of the spire of Jesus do Sul contained the Earth Return Module, the uppermost stage of the Brazilian rocket. Ryan climbed the ladder to reach it. The hatch was over his head at an awkward angle. He pulled at the latch.

  It didn't move.

  It's locked, Ryan thought, and then immediately, no, that's ridiculous. Nobody would put a lock on a spaceship hatch. It's just stuck. He put his full strength against the latch and pulled. Nothing.

  He paused to think. Cold. Cold, and dry, sitting in the cold and dry for eight years. The hatch had sealed solid against the rim. He went down the ladder back to the snow where he had left his skis, picked up one of the makeshift metal skis, and returned to the hatch. Using the end of the ski as a hammer, he methodically pounded, working around the edge of the sealed hatch. The metal of the ski twisted; he ignored it and kept working, moving clockwise around the seal once, twice.

  He used the ski as a lever to pry against the hatch handle and tried it again. No success. He put both hands on the lever and pulled with his full strength against it, and felt something, a slight, almost infinitesimal give. He jerked it again, and then began to rhythmically pull with a succession of quick jerks. With an abrupt sucking, the bottom of the hatch pulled open, and then the top. He nearly fell backward as it opened.

  The interior had two couches and a control panel. It was completely dark.

  If even the emergency batteries were dead, they were in trouble. But no, when he switched over to emergency power, a feeble cockpit light came on, enough for him to see the controls.

  Good enough. He looked around. The advice from the ground had mentioned that there was an EVA maneuvering gun, a small rocket engine mounted on a pistol-grip that could be used if ever there had been a reason to go outside the spacecraft. The ground crew had listed it as a possible item to discard to decrease the launch mass, but Ryan had a different use for it now.

  Buried below the snow there was a habitat module, stocked with food and water and an electrical generator, all the necessities for the three hundred and fifty days the Brazilians had planned to stay on the surface.

  Ryan intended to melt his way down to it.

  17

  AT THE POLE

  "He's buried, Estrela," Tana said. She tried to be as gentle as she could. "He's at peace."

  Estrela's only reply was an inarticulate moan. She had been on her knees on the ice, at the spot where João had lain, for an hour.

  The ice was empty. Over the eight years since João had fallen, his body had slowly sunk into the ice, and new snow had fallen on top, until now only the barest shadow under the ice marked where he had died.

  Estrela had been crying continuously. Tana had never before seen her cry; she'd always seen Estrela as being cold and unemotional, sensuous, yes, in her negligent way, but not affected by anything. Tana tried to remember what it felt like to love a man like that. Had she ever loved Derrick so much? She couldn't remember.

  Ryan had melted a tunnel down through the ice to the habitat. Or sublimed a tunnel, rather; at this pressure ice vaporized rather than melted. He was beginning to get the solar arrays cleared and the habitat systems powered up. Good old Ryan, she thought; if there's any possible technical solution to a problem, Ryan will find it.

  The heat of Estrela's suit had vaporized down six inches of ice around her. The heaters on the suit were good, but at sixty degrees below zero, being pressed right against the snow was pushing them beyond their limits. Why, she must be freezing, Tana thought.

  She reached out for Estrela's arm and pulled her up. "Come on. Aren't you cold? We have to get you inside."

  Estrela twisted her arm free and shoved Tana away. Wordlessly, she turned back to the little hollow she had melted into the ice and went back down to her knees.

  Ryan came up. "I've got the habitat powered up." He looked down at Estrela. "Has she been here this whole time? Is she okay?"

  Tana shook her head. "I think she's going hypothermic."

  Between the two of them, they managed to pull her to her feet. She struggled fiercely for a moment, and then allowed them to guide her without resisting.

  After eight days sleeping inside the sausage, the tiny fiberglass habitat of Jesus do Sul seemed like a cathedral. Inside, Tana pulled Estrela out of her suit, and then released her own. "Yikes!" she said. "Sweet Christ, it's cold in here."

  "Sorry," Ryan said. "The power system is underperforming. It should warm up in a bit. Coveralls in the storage locker over here."

  Tana, starting to shiver, went to the locker. Ryan had already pulled on a coverall. The air in the little dome was frigid. Their breaths came out in white puffs, and the walls around them grew a coating of frost from the exhaled vapor in their breath.

  Estrela, stripped down to only her suit lining, had not moved. She was completely still, not even shivering. The tears on her face had froze
n into tiny glistening icicles down her cheeks and chin. Tana reached out and touched her on the side of the neck. Her skin was icy to the touch. Tana swore briefly under her breath.

  "She's hypothermic, all right," she said. "She's not shivering; that's a bad sign. A real bad sign."

  She looked around. "We've got to warm her up. Can you heat up some water?"

  "Water supply is still frozen." Ryan shook his head. "It'll be an hour before we get enough power to heat up anything."

  "That's too long," said Tana. "Wrapping her in a blanket won't do, she's so cold that there's no heat to conserve. Her skin is too cold."

  Tana stripped Estrela down to bare skin. Estrela made no objection; she didn't seem to even notice them. Then Tana peeled away her own clothes; first the coveralls and then her suit liner. The air of the habitat was frigid winter against her bare skin. She wrapped her arms around Estrela, hugging her as close to her as she could, trying to maximize skin contact. It was like hugging ice cubes.

  "Can you find a blanket?" Tana asked.

  Ryan went to their suits and detached the thermophotovoltaic isotope power supplies. He arranged these around Tana and Estrela. The waste heat from the radiators felt good. It helped. Not enough.

  "You, too," Tana said.

  Ryan fetched a blanket, and then stripped. He hesitated for a moment at his underwear, and then turned his back and stripped them off. He quickly stepped behind Estrela and pulled her close, and then wrapped the blanket around the three of them.

  But Tana had seen.

  Christ almighty, how could he have a hard-on in a place like this? Tana thought. This is not an erotic situation. Just as quickly, she thought, I shouldn't judge, it's not as if he could help it. And at the same time, she thought, he got that from looking at Estrela, not me. I wish my body had an effect like that.