Mars

by Ben Bova

  Other thrusters would later de-spin the spacecraft enough to reduce the internal gravity to the Martian level. By the time they arrived at Mars the explorers would be fully accustomed to the low Martian gravity. On the nine-month flight back home the spacecraft would spin up to a normal terrestrial g once again.

  The interior of the habitat module was like the interior of every spacecraft Jamie had ever been in: a central corridor flanked either by the closed doors of privacy compartments or the open benches and equipment racks of workstations.

  Up forward was the command section where a Russian cosmonaut and American astronaut copiloted the spacecraft. Just behind it was a sort of passenger compartment with seats for all the personnel, which could also serve as an informal lounge or conference room.

  There was no need for acceleration couches. The rockets that would propel them to Mars produced very low levels of thrust; they would hardly feel as much acceleration as during a jet airliner’s takeoff. Lifting off from the ground and going into Earth orbit required a big jolt of thrust, several minutes of three g’s or more. That had all been done by space shuttles and unmanned rocket boosters carrying cargo. Once in orbit, though, the rest of the solar system could be reached gently.

  One part of the habitat module was different. A section toward the rear was devoted to an oblong window made of thick quartz. Once they got to Mars, this observation port would be studded with cameras and other sensors. For now, though, it made a fine picture window.

  The hour they were scheduled to depart, Jamie found himself at the observation port, hovering easily in zero g, his slippered feet dangling a few centimeters above the foot restraints set into the metal floor. He saw the Earth sliding past, an enormously massive curve of deep luminous blue, then the duller green-brown of land and the hard gray wrinkles of a mountain chain, dusted with clutching skeletal fingers of white snow. Another ocean slid into view, the immense swirl of a tropical storm’s seething clouds forming a gigantic gray-white comma over the water.

  “Those are the Andes Mountains.”

  Joanna had come up beside him, floating noiselessly. He had not noticed, he had been staring at the world so intently.

  “Come to say good-bye to Mother Earth?” Jamie asked her.

  “Not good-bye,” she whispered. “We will return.”

  “Adios, then.”

  She nodded absently as she slipped her feet into the floor loops, her eyes on the world they were about to leave.

  “I still can hardly believe I’m here,” Jamie said. “It’s kind of like a dream.”

  Joanna glanced up at him. “We have a long and difficult journey ahead of us. Hardly a dream.”

  “It is for me.”

  She almost smiled. “You are a romantic.”

  “Aren’t you?”

  “No,” Joanna said. “Women must be practical. Men can be the romantics. Women must think about the consequences.”

  “Departure in three minutes,” came a Russian-accented voice over the speaker in the ceiling above them. “Please take your assigned seats in the forward lounge.”

  Jamie took Joanna by the shoulders and kissed her on the lips, lightly, swiftly.

  “For luck,” he said.

  Joanna pushed free and floated away from him, her face frozen, unsmiling, her eyes wide and fearful. Without a word she turned and grabbed the edge of the hatch for purchase, then launched herself up the passageway toward the forward lounge.

  Jamie waited a few moments, then went after her, moving more slowly. Then he saw Tony Reed hovering in the doorway to his cubicle, a sardonic smile on his lean face.

  “I don’t think the direct approach will work with little Joanna,” Reed said.

  Jamie said nothing. He pushed past Reed, heading forward.

  The Englishman followed him. “I may have told you too much about our little cabal to get rid of Hoffman. Remember, my impetuous friend, that she may have wanted to have you picked for the expedition, but she certainly did not want Hoffman to come with us.”

  Jamie looked over his shoulder and said, “White man speaks with forked tongue.”

  Reed laughed all the way to the forward lounge.

  There were no windows in the compartment. If necessary, this entire forward section of the spacecraft could be detached and flown by the pilots up in the cockpit into a reentry trajectory and an ocean spashdown. The procedure was for emergency use only; the mission plan called for the spacecraft to return to Earth orbit, where the personnel would transfer to shuttles for the final ride to Earth’s surface. But a water landing was possible, if the need arose.

  Jamie had barely floundered through the swimming course required by the mission planners. He wondered how the seven other scientists strapping themselves into their cushioned chairs would handle such an emergency. Or the four astronauts and cosmonauts in the cockpit, for that matter. It would be fine irony to go all the way to Mars and back and then drown.

  “Departure in thirty seconds,” came Vosnesensky’s voice from the cockpit. “I am putting an external camera view on the display screen.”

  The compartment had a small screen built into its forward bulkhead. It flickered briefly, then showed the curving bulk of the blue-and-white Earth sliding past. Jamie took the last remaining seat and clicked the safety belt across his lap to prevent himself from floating out of the chair. Reed had taken the chair beside Joanna.

  “Five seconds … four, three, two, one—ignition.”

  The Russian’s voice was flat calm. Jamie felt a surge of pressure pushing him against the chair’s back. Nothing startling; he had driven sports cars with more acceleration. The picture of Earth on the display screen did not change discernibly.

  But Vosnesensky’s voice said, “We are off, on schedule. Mars 2 thruster ignition was precisely on time, also.”

  A clearly American voice broke in, “We’re off for Mars!”

  Not one of the scientists cheered. Jamie wanted to, but felt too embarrassed. An image of Edith formed in his mind, the strangely sad smile on her pretty face as they said goodbye for the final time. No, not the final time, Jamie told himself. I’ll be back. I’ll see her when I get back.

  He did not notice Tony Reed staring at him, thinking, I got rid of that prig Hoffman and neither our Navaho geologist nor pretty Joanna has even so much as thanked me for it. Perhaps I made a mistake. She’s interested in this Red Indian. As long as he’s among us Joanna won’t even look at me.

  SOL 3: NIGHT

  They did not eat together that night. Joanna and the other two women huddled by the biology bench, ignoring food as they tested the green-streaked rock. Tony Reed and a couple of the other men drifted by, but the women shooed them away.

  Jamie picked at his meal, worrying more about the idiotic news media back home than the Martian rock. It’s copper, he told himself. Got to be.

  But suppose it isn’t? A part of his mind wanted the rock to be life bearing. In fact, as he sat alone at the wardroom table methodically working his way through the bland microwaved meal, Jamie realized that if they had indeed found life it would surely divert the media’s attention from this Native American business.

  He got up and took his half-finished tray to the recycler, scraped the food into the slot in its top, and then stacked the tray and his utensils in the dishwasher’s rack. Someone had put a swing-era tape on the sound system: a clarinet sweet as licorice worked through an old ballad.

  Laughter rose from the far side of the dome; men joking together. He recognized Patel’s high-pitched squeal. His fellow geologist had found something amusing. Whom was he sharing it with? Reed? Naguib? Toshima? From the sound of it they were all in one of the lab areas together.

  Vosnesensky and the three other pilots were sitting around one of the communications consoles. Its screen showed a topographical map. Planning the first cross-country traverse, Jamie thought as he walked past them.

  “Waterman, come and look at this,” called Vosnesensky. “Latest photos of the badl
ands.”

  Jamie joined them and saw that the image on the screen was a map of contour lines superimposed on a photograph of the Noctis Labyrinthus region, slightly less than three hundred kilometers to the south. He pulled a chair from the monitoring station next to the comm console and joined the little group.

  Noctis Labyrinthus. The badlands. A real labyrinth of interconnected canyons and chains of craters, fault lines that ran for hundreds of kilometers like giant cracks crisscrossing the ground, slumped canyon walls with landslides that may have been caused by flowing water.

  The labyrinth was at the western end of the titanic Valles Marineris, the Grand Canyon of Mars that extended more than four thousand kilometers, at places so wide that an observer standing on the lip of the seven-kilometer-deep canyon could not see the other side of it. Named after the Mariner 9 spacecraft that discovered the giant rift, Valles Marineris was longer than North America was wide, and deeper than the Atlantic Ocean. Its western end butted into the enormous upswelling of the Tharsis Bulge, where ten-kilometer-high volcanoes sat atop a mammoth blister of rock the size of Europe.

  Where the deeply carved Valles Marineris meets the dense rock of the Tharsis Bulge the badlands of the Noctis Labyrinthus spreads its fractured pattern of canyons. From orbit above Mars it almost looks as if the great rip in the ground was stopped and shattered by the uplifted bulge the way a battering ram might splinter against an iron door.

  “We are deciding on the route for the first traverse,” Vosnesensky said as Jamie sat down in front of the display screen.

  Jamie looked at the four fliers. Vosnesensky seemed brooding and melancholy, as usual. Mironov was smiling the way a man does when he is bored or embarrassed. Connors was studying the map display intently, as if trying to memorize it. Paul Abell had a puzzled, quizzical expression on his pop-eyed face.

  Tapping a fingernail against the screen, Jamie said, “I’d like to arrive here, at this point.”

  Abell said, “That’s not exactly where Father DiNardo indicated in his mission plan, is it?”

  “Not quite. I’ve been thinking about this traverse all during our flight here. This spot here is a branching point. I can look at three canyons from there.” Leaning forward enough to reach the keyboard, Jamie punched up an enlargement of the region. “You see? There’s slumping here; a landslide. And clear fracture lines …”

  “Yes, yes,” said Vosnesensky impatiently. “That is permissible. We can get you to that point.”

  “Good.”

  “I have decided to drive the rover myself,” Vosnesensky said.

  Jamie glanced at Connors. The American did not seem surprised. Jamie realized that he had been keeping his eyes focused on the display screen because he was angry. The astronaut’s lips were pressed together in a grim tight line.

  “I thought the mission plan called for Pete to drive the rover.”

  “I have changed the plan,” Vosnesensky said flatly.

  “Why?”

  “This is no reflection on Pete. He will still command one of the other traverses and fly the soarplane.”

  “But why change the mission plan?” Jamie insisted.

  Mironov’s smile had gradually dwindled. He said, “This has nothing to do with politics, I assure you.”

  Which immediately made Jamie think that it was entirely due to national pride and competition. Or at least some form of rivalry between the Russians and the Americans.

  Connors finally spoke up. “It’s cool, Jamie. We talked it over. Mike just wants to take the first traverse himself.” Forcing a humorless grin, the astronaut added, “It’s part of Mike’s god complex. He’s afraid something’ll go wrong if he’s not there running the show himself.”

  Mikhail Vosnesensky made himself smile back at Connors. “I have no intention of flying the soarplane. You may have that honor entirely to yourself.”

  Connors nodded and turned back toward the display screen.

  Jamie asked, “Do we start the traverse as scheduled?”

  “In two days, yes.”

  “The only change,” Mironov said, “is to substitute Mikhail Andreivitch as your chauffeur.”

  “Does Dr. Li know about this?” Jamie asked.

  “He will be informed. I do not expect him to object,” Vosnesensky said.

  With a shrug, Jamie said, “Well, I guess it’s okay then.”

  Mironov got to his feet and Vosnesensky lumbered up from his chair a fraction of a second after him. For a wild moment Jamie got the impression that Mironov was in charge, not Vosnesensky. Vaguely he recalled that the Russians used to have political officers among their men who worked at subsidiary jobs but were actually the real bosses.

  As the two Russians walked away, Connors said earnestly, “Listen, Jamie, the last thing I want is for a Russian-American rivalry to break out here.”

  “But why’d he do it?” Jamie asked.

  Leaning his forearms on his knees, Connors answered, “I think he really has a god complex. He thinks that if he’s in charge nothing will go wrong. It’s the first overland traverse and he’s nervous about it.”

  Abell looked skeptical but said nothing.

  “You don’t mind being bumped?” Jamie asked.

  Connors leaned back again, away from him. “Sure I mind! Shit, who wouldn’t mind? But like the man said, there’ll be other traverses. Let him take the first one; it’s okay. I’ll do the soarplane flying; he can’t talk me out of that.”

  Abell grunted. “So our friend Mike gets to play god, but he lets you be the angel.”

  Connors tapped Abell on the shoulder and got up from his chair. Abell left with him. Jamie sat alone in front of the display screen, caring less about who drove the damned rover than he did about what they would find when they reached the intersection of those three canyons.

  Finally he flicked the display off and got to his feet. Scanning the dome’s interior, he saw that the women were still at the biology bench, but they were talking among themselves now, no longer bent over the equipment. The music had ended; the dome was quiet. Joanna looked tired.

  Jamie approached them slowly, but they did not seem to notice him. They sat in the spindly Martian-gravity chairs earnestly talking among themselves.

  “How’s it going?”

  Turning in her chair, Ilona gave him a bitter scowl. “It’s inorganic.”

  Ilona turned thoughtful. “If life processes began at such impact sites they would have spread across the entire surface of the planet, wouldn’t they? After all, life is a dynamic process. It doesn’t stay in one place. It expands. It grows.”

  “Only if it can find the nutrients and energy it requires,” said Monique. “Otherwise …”

  “Otherwise it dies out,” Joanna said in a low, drained voice. “Or it never even begins.”

  Jamie and the others fell silent.

  “Even if meteorites bearing amino acids and other long-chain carbon molecules have been raining out of the sky for eons,” Joanna went on, her voice so low he could barely hear her, “what do they encounter when they reach the surface? High levels of ultraviolet and even harder radiation, sub-freezing temperatures every night, the soil loaded with superoxides, no liquid water …”

  Jamie stopped her with an upraised hand. “Wait a minute. Even a small meteorite, like the one we found in Antarctica, would hit the ground with enough energy to liquefy the permafrost if the ice is only a meter or so beneath the surface.”

  “Yes,” said Ilona. “But how long would the water remain liquid?”

  “You saw what happened out there today,” Monique said. “In this thin atmosphere the water boils away instantly.”

  Jamie nodded reluctant agreement.

  “There is no life on Mars,” Joanna said. “None at all.”

  “You’re tired,” said Monique. “We all are. A good night’s sleep is what we need. Things will look better in the morning’s light.”

  “Yes, Mama,” said Ilona, grinning.

  “But first let us
put a little water on our seedlings, eh?” Monique said. “Then we can sleep.”

  Joanna tried to smile at her, but did not quite make it. Jamie realized that she had wanted to be able to tell her father that they had discovered life. No one else mattered to Joanna, only her father. She wanted to give him that triumph. Now she felt that she had failed.

  He wanted to put his arm around her shoulders and tell her that it was all right, that if she hadn’t made the great discovery there were still important and wonderful things to be done on Mars. Even if the planet were totally dead that information in itself could teach science vital knowledge about the needs and drives of life. He realized that he wanted to hold her, comfort her, lend her some of his own strength.

  But Joanna had no room in her life for him. Her father owned her soul. Everything she did, she did for her father.

  Jamie felt a smoldering jealousy for a rival who was a hundred million kilometers away, a rival he could not possibly fight.

  WASHINGTON: THE WHITE HOUSE

  In bygone years the Map Room had been used by Franklin D. Roosevelt as a situation room where he could follow the course of World War II. Located on the ground floor of the mansion’s central section, it was easy to get to from the Oval Office, even in a wheelchair.

  Now the President used the room for his weekly private lunches with the Vice-President, a tradition neither of them cherished.

  The first Hispanic to serve as President and the first woman to be Vice-President, the duo had inherited from the previous administration a Mars program that they would have canceled, except that it had gone too far to stop. Instead, they worked to win for themselves the credit for the first human landings on Mars while cutting expenditures for the program back to the bone. As political cynicism goes, theirs was almost trivial.

  They made an odd-looking couple. The President was rotund and bald, with a dark moustache and large soft brown eyes. His skin was not so dark as to frighten non-Hispanic voters. On television he looked like a friendly smiling uncle or perhaps the easygoing guy who ran the hardware store. The Vice-President was wiry, ash blonde, and strident. When she raised her voice it took on the urgency of a dentist’s drill.