Mars

by Ben Bova

  She was incensed.

  “Do you realize how this looks to the media?” she asked, waving a gold salad fork in the air.

  The President glanced past her irate face to the portrait of Franklin Pierce hanging against the cream-colored far wall. The least-remembered of all the men who had lived in the White House. The President cherished Pierce’s portrait: it served as a reminder and a spur. At least I can do better than he did.

  “You’re not even listening to me!”

  The President returned his attention to his veep. She had never entirely outgrown her origins as a public schoolteacher in New Jersey. She was quick to anger, slow to forgive.

  “I understand the situation,” he said softly. “All sorts of people have been hounding me about this Native American business, too.”

  “Well, what are we going to do about it? If we let the media have that videotape interview he’ll look like a god-dammed saint. If we refuse to release it to the media we’ll look like bastards.”

  The President winced at her choice of words. He was essentially a gentle man. He felt relaxed among the luxurious burgundy draperies and lustrous Chippendale furnishings of the Map Room. Even the huge Persian carpet soothed him with its glowing colors and intricate geometric designs.

  “I saw the video,” he answered. “The young man simply said he wasn’t involved in politics. I don’t see how that can hurt us.”

  “He’s become a hero to the Indians,” the Vice-President snapped. “And if we release that tape he’ll become a hero to every minority group in the nation.”

  “But those are our own people …”

  “Yes! Right! Our people. But if we let the media turn him into a hero, how long do you think it’ll take Masterson and those other bastards to turn him into a front man for their own organization?”

  The President shook his head. “I don’t think so.”

  “Sure! You’re retiring after next year. I’ve got to face all the primaries. It’s tough enough being a woman without having to deal with a Native American who’s been to Mars!”

  “But he’s not interested in politics,” said the President.

  “Then why did he start that Indian crap?” The Vice-President was fuming, her lunch lying before her untouched. “He’ll be getting back from Mars just in time for the first primaries. I don’t want him being used against me!”

  The President, who understood something of politics, thought swiftly. “Suppose he becomes one of your supporters?”

  She shook her head doggedly. “Masterson’s in tight with the high-tech crowd. He’ll grab this redskin before we can; you know that. Remember, I was the one who got the Space Council to vote against funding for further Mars missions until we get the results back from this one! Masterson will crucify me for that! And this Indian will help him. He’s already helping him!”

  Pushing his chair back slightly, the President gazed around the room for support. None of the portraits offered a bit of help, not even the one of FDR in his Navy cape.

  “Well, what can we do about it?” he asked.

  “Muzzle him,” the Vice-President replied immediately. “Get him off the team on the ground there on Mars and put him up in one of the orbiting ships. That way he’ll be ignored by the media. They’re only interested in what’s going on on the ground.”

  “But won’t people think that we’re hurting this scientist for political reasons?”

  “We can find a reason to get him off the ground team. Not right away, of course. In a week or two. That will be plenty of time. The media might squawk, but I’d rather have them squawking now than a year from now when he gets back here.”

  “Do you think we can get away with that?”

  “A year from now he’ll be forgotten. Nobody’s got an attention span that long.”

  The President smiled gently. “You do.”

  His Vice-President grimaced back at him. “In our business you need a long memory. And claws.”

  “And the video?”

  “Tell the media he refused to be interviewed. Make him look like a stuck-up scientific type instead of a noble Indian trying to call attention to his people’s plight.”

  The President nodded slowly. It might work. And this power-hungry woman sitting across from him might just make herself the first female President of the United States. She had the fire in her gut for it. And the claws.

  IN TRANSIT: BETWEEN WORLDS

  1

  During the long years of training, Jamie had traveled so much that he often awoke in the morning with the feeling that he had never really left Houston; some mysterious organization had merely changed the city outside his hotel window. The cities out there were gigantic stage sets and all the people in them were hired actors. Or perhaps very clever robots.

  After several weeks aboard the Mars 1 spacecraft coasting toward its distant destination, Jamie began to think that all spacecraft were stage sets, too.

  They all looked alike from the inside. The space stations in Earth orbit, the shuttles that carried the Mars explorers to them, the Mars-bound craft themselves—their interiors were all almost identical. Cramped compartments, narrow passageways, the constant hum of electrical equipment, the glare-free, shadowless, flat lighting, the same smell of cold metal and canned stale air. The packed-in feeling that someone was waiting in line behind you, even in the toilet.

  Now that the two spacecraft had been spun up, though, there was at least a feeling of gravity. One could walk down the central corridor, sit in a chair, sleep with the solidity of a mattress and blanket that did not float away when you turned over.

  There was only one place on the Mars 1 craft that was not claustrophobic: the observation port that looked out on the universe. Jamie found himself going there more and more often as the long wearisome weeks passed by. It would take more than nine months before they reached the red planet and established a safe orbit around it. Nine months of inactivity, living cheek by jowl like a dozen sardines inside an aluminum can. No, not a can, Jamie said to himself. A pressure cooker.

  There was work for them to do, of sorts. And a strict schedule of physical exercises in the closet-sized gymnasium. But it was all perfunctory. Jamie put in his required hours on the exercise machines; they kept his muscles in shape, but his mind wandered—he was bored, moody, dull.

  Every two or three days he received a call from DiNardo, recovered now from his surgery. The Jesuit reviewed the work going on in several terrestrial laboratories, further analysis of the rocks and soil samples returned from Mars by the unmanned robot exploratory vehicles. The various analyses differed only in the minutest details: the soil samples were sterile, although a few of the rocks contained traces of organic material, carbon-rich chemicals that might be the precursors of living organisms.

  The chemicals of life might exist in those rocks, but that’s about as exciting as looking at the bottles of aspirin tablets in a drugstore display case. They haven’t found anything alive in the samples, not even an amoeba.

  Nearly four months into the flight, Jamie suddenly asked, “How is Professor Hoffman? Is he involved in these analyses?”

  It took several minutes for messages to travel the distance between the spacecraft and Earth. As he watched the little display screen of the communications console Jamie saw DiNardo’s swarthy face register surprise, then something else. Guilt? The priest ran a hand over his shaved scalp before answering.

  “Professor Hoffman has apparently suffered a nervous breakdown. He is in a rest home in Vienna for the present.”

  Jamie felt the same surprise flaring into guilt that seared his guts.

  “I have visited him myself,” DiNardo went on. “His doctors assure me that he will be fine in a few weeks or so.”

  I wonder how I’d have reacted to being yanked off the mission at the last minute, Jamie asked himself. He changed the subject back to geology and concluded his conversation with the priest as swiftly as he could.

  He left the communications console u
p on the flight deck and rushed down the length of the habitat module toward the observation port. By common custom the section housing the port was considered private. Whenever someone entered it and closed the hatch that separated it from the rest of the module, no one else in the crew would enter. It was the one place aboard the Mars spacecraft where a person could be alone.

  Jamie needed to be alone, to be away from all the others. Yet as he hurried down the narrow passageway he felt a sullen tide of anger rising within him. Not guilt. Not pity. Anger. They always have to take something away from you, he heard a voice in his mind complain. They can never let you have the whole cake; they always lick the icing off first. Or piss on it. So I’m on my way to Mars and Hoffman’s in a funny farm. Great.

  Then he remembered his grandfather years ago, when Jamie had been an eager young high schooler bursting to show off how much he had learned in his science classes. He had tried to explain to Al the laws of thermodynamics, throwing in terms such as “entropy” and “heat flow” and “thermal equilibrium.”

  “Aw, I know all about that stuff,” Al had said.

  “You do?” Jamie had been extremely skeptical of his grandfather’s claim.

  “Sure. Comes up every day in the store. Or when I play poker. What it boils down to is, you can’t win, you can’t even break even, and you can’t get out of the game.”

  Jamie had gaped at his grandfather. Al had explained the concepts of thermodynamics as succinctly as he would ever hear.

  “Main thing,” Al said, grinning at his surprised grandson, “is to stay in balance with life. That way no matter what happens it won’t throw you. Stay in balance. Never lean so far in one direction that a puff of wind can knock you over.”

  What it boils down to is that you have to pay for everything you get, and the price is always more than the value of the thing you’re after. And you can’t get out of the game. Even millions of miles from Earth, you can’t get out of the game.

  The hatch to the observation area was open. No one was there. Good.

  The astronomers hated the spin that produced a feeling of gravity within the Mars-bound ships. It meant that their telescopes, even though placed outside the ships along the tethers connecting them, had to be mounted on complex motorized bearings that moved exactly opposite to the spin so that they could remain focused on the same distant speck of light for weeks or months at a time.

  The spin had bothered Jamie, too, at first. The stars rotated past the oblong window in a slow steady procession instead of remaining fixed against the dark backdrop the way they did on Earth. But they don’t really stay still on Earth, Jamie told himself. They rotate around the sky too slow for you to notice. Out here we’ve just speeded things up. We’ve made our own little world and it spins around every two and a half minutes instead of every twenty-four hours.

  It felt cold in the observation section. He knew it was only his imagination, but the cold of that deep empty darkness out there seemed to seep through the window and chill him to the bone.

  Someone was already there. As Jamie stepped through the open hatch he saw the tall, lithe form of Ilona Malater standing by the long window. She was staring out at the stars, her face solemn, immobile. In the faint light her honey-colored hair looked gray, her tan coveralls nearly colorless.

  As Jamie approached the window he almost felt glad that someone else was there. His desire to be alone faded beneath his need for human warmth. He realized that Ilona was tall and slim enough to be a high-fashion model. Her aristocratic face had that magazine-cover haughtiness to it, as well.

  “Hello,” he said.

  She whirled, startled, then relaxed and smiled. “Jamie. What are you doing up here?”

  “Same as you, I guess.”

  “I thought this was my private hideaway.” Ilona’s voice was a rich, throaty contralto.

  With a rueful grin Jamie said, “Me too.” He hesitated, then offered, “I can go back …”

  “No, that’s all right.” She smiled back at Jamie. “Perhaps I need someone to talk to more than I need solitude.”

  The only light in the area came from the faintly glowing guide strips on the floor. And the starlight. Barely enough to see her face, to catch the expression in her eyes. The electrical hum that pervaded the spacecraft seemed fainter here, muted.

  “You heard about Hoffman?” Jamie asked.

  “What has he done now?”

  “He’s had a nervous breakdown.”

  Ilona arched an eyebrow. “Serves him right, the pig.”

  “That’s a hell of an attitude!”

  “He was a womanizer. I imagine he’s the terror of the female undergraduates wherever he teaches.”

  Jamie blinked at her. He had never thought of Hoffman as anything but a geologist who stood between himself and Mars.

  “He tried to seduce every woman he met during training.”

  “He hit on you?”

  Ilona laughed. “He tried to. I hit him back. I told him that if he could not satisfy his wife why did he think he could satisfy me? He never spoke another word to me.”

  Jamie thought it less than funny. There was a fierceness in this woman that he had never suspected, an anger seething within her.

  Then it occurred to him. “He must have hit on Joanna too.”

  “Yes. Certainly.”

  That’s why Joanna wanted him off the mission, Jamie said to himself. Not to get me aboard. Just to get rid of a man who bothered her.

  He felt suddenly awkward. There was no place to sit except the chill metal floor, no one to turn to for support. He looked out the nonreflective window and saw nothing but the starry emptiness; the Mars 2 craft was out of sight, literally over their heads.

  “Is Hoffman’s breakdown what brought you up here?” Ilona asked.

  Jamie nodded. “And you?”

  “I had to get away,” she said, her voice lowering. “I am becoming depressed.”

  “Why? What’s wrong?”

  “Mars is wrong. I am wrong. It was wrong to include a biochemist on this expedition. There is no life on Mars for me to study.”

  “We don’t know that for certain,” Jamie said. “Not yet.”

  “Don’t we?” Ilona spoke the words with a weary sigh. Then she turned and stretched her arm toward a glowing ruddy point of light swinging past in the starry blackness.

  “Look at the planet, Jamie. Think of all the rocks and soil samples and photographs we have studied. We get new photos and data every day from the orbiters they’ve put around the planet. Not a trace of life. Nothing. Mars is absolutely barren. Lifeless.”

  He turned from the red glow of Mars to focus on her sorrowing face once more. “But we’ve only had a few dozen samples. You’re talking about a whole world. There must be …”

  She laid a long manicured finger on Jamie’s lips, silencing him. “You have heard of Gaia?” Ilona asked.

  Jamie said, “The idea that the Earth is a living entity?”

  Ilona gave him a scant smile. “That’s close. Not bad for a geologist.”

  He found himself grinning back at her. “All right, what about Gaia? And what’s it got to do with Mars?”

  “The Gaia hypothesis states that all life on Earth works together as a self-regulating feedback system that maintains itself. No single species of life—not even the human race—lives in isolation. All species are part of the whole, part of the totally integrated living Gaia.”

  “I don’t see what that’s got to do with Mars,” Jamie said.

  “Life has spread itself all across the Earth,” Ilona replied. “Down in the deepest ocean trenches there is life. The air teems with microorganisms, even up in the stratosphere there are yeast molds floating about. Even in the most barren Antarctic deserts there are rocks that hold colonies of lichens just below their surfaces.”

  “And Mars looks barren.”

  “Mars is barren. The probes have found nothing in the air. There is no liquid water. The soil is so loaded with super-oxi
des it’s like an intense bleach; no living organism could survive in it.”

  “Some of the rocks bear organic chemicals,” Jamie reminded her.

  “But if life existed on Mars it would not be confined to one place!” Ilona’s husky voice was almost pleading now. “If there were a Martian equivalent of Gaia we would see life everywhere we looked, just as we do on Earth.”

  Stubbornly Jamie shook his head. “But Earth is warmer, Earth has liquid water everywhere you look, it’s easy for life to grow and spread on Earth. Mars isn’t that rich. Life would have a tougher time there.”

  Ilona shook her head too. “No, I don’t believe that’s the reason why Mars looks so bleak. The planet is truly barren. There is no life there and there probably never was. I have wasted the past three years of my life. Sending anyone involved in biology was a mistake.”

  She stood there framed by the oblong window, the slowly circling stars behind her. Ilona no longer looked haughty or regal. She looked depressed, disheartened.

  Jamie shrugged and muttered, “I don’t think you can give up before you’ve even started. No matter what you believe you can’t really say anything definite until you’ve gotten there and looked for yourself. Mars probably has a few surprises in store for you. For all of us.”

  “Perhaps.” Ilona sighed again. Then she wrapped her arms around herself and shivered. “It’s always so cold in here! I should have worn my thermal underwear.”

  “I’m sorry I don’t have a sweater or jacket …”

  “It’s my own fault,” she said. “I acted on impulse, coming here in just these coveralls.”

  Jamie grinned at her. “That’s against the rules. How many times has Vosnesensky drilled it into us: think ten times before you do anything.”

  “Vosnesensky.” She growled the name, like a lioness snarling.

  “What’s wrong with Mikhail?” Jamie asked. “He doesn’t seem like such a bad guy to me.”

  “He is a Russian.”