Mars

by Ben Bova

  Jamie kept rattling off instructions as the winch motor hummed thinly and Vosnesensky dropped lower.

  “I see it!” For the first time since he had met the Russian, Vosnesensky sounded excited. “Yes, interesting formations of rock inside …” His voice trailed off.

  “What do you think?” Jamie asked.

  No answer for many minutes. Then, “It can’t be a city. It looks like rock formations.”

  “Yeah.” Jamie paced nervously back and forth along the canyon rim. Down below the Russian was silent.

  Finally, “The tape is finished. I am coming up.”

  “Is it real?” Jamie asked as the winch labored, whining.

  “Real, yes. But not artificial. It could not be.”

  “Never mind what it could or couldn’t be. What is it?”

  “Unusual formations of rock. But natural, not man-made.”

  “Martian-made.”

  “Not that either.”

  Jamie knew he should agree. It couldn’t be artificial. It couldn’t be a village created by intelligent Martians. It couldn’t be the ancestors of his ancestors, the forerunner of Mesa Verde and the other cliff dwellings of the Anasazi. He knew it could not be.

  But by the time Vosnesensky was standing beside him once more and pulling free of the harness Jamie was babbling, “We’ve got to get the rover to that spot on the rim, right on top of it, so we can lower down and look in there for ourselves. We’re too far away to make certain from this distance and if there’s any chance, any slightest chance at all, that we’ve found the remains of intelligent life, holy Christ, Mikhail, it’s the biggest discovery in the history of the world!”

  Vosnesensky remained strangely silent, like a stolid schoolmaster who is accustomed to sudden enthusiasms from his young students. Jamie kept on chattering and the Russian remained silent as they took the winch apart, stowed it in the rover’s equipment module, and then clumped into the airlock.

  Once inside the living section they took their helmets off. Jamie could see that Vosnesensky looked solemn, almost pained. His heavy jaw was covered with several days’ stubble, making his face seem even grimmer than usual.

  He realized he had been virtually raving. “Well, we can drive over there tomorrow morning, first light. Right?”

  The Russian shook his head. “Not right. We have been ordered to return to the base.”

  “Ordered? By whom? When?”

  “This afternoon, while you were down in the climbing rig. The order came over the command frequency; I heard it in my suit. Dr. Li himself specifically ordered us to return to the base camp. There has been an accident.”

  MARS ORBIT: DEIMOS

  “It looks good enough to eat,” quipped Leonid Tolbukhin. “Like a big potato.”

  Isoruku Konoye said nothing. The Japanese geochemist felt strangely tense as he and the cosmonaut approached the lumpy irregular blob of the Martian moon Deimos. To the Russian it might look like something to eat; to him it seemed like a huge brooding mass of darkness, evil and dangerous.

  Mars has two moons, tiny chunks of rock named Phobos and Deimos, fear and dread, fitting companions for the god of war.

  At first glance the moons of Mars do look rather like battered potatoes. Neither of them is round. They are too small to have been subjected to the forces that turn a lump of stone and metal into a spherical shape. Both are deeply pitted from meteorite strikes. Phobos is streaked with inexplicable striations, grooves that look almost as if its rocky surface had been scored by the claws of a titanic beast.

  Deimos, the smaller of the two, is about the size of Manhattan Island: roughly ten by twelve by sixteen kilometers. It orbits just over twenty thousand kilometers above the surface of Mars. From the ground it looks like a very bright star that hangs in the sky for two and a half sols before dipping below the horizon.

  Phobos is twenty by twenty-three by twenty-eight kilometers and orbits much closer to its planet, less than six thousand kilometers above the surface. It crosses the Martian sky in only four and a half hours, hurtling from west to east like an artificial satellite (which it was once suspected to be) and rising again about six and a half hours later.

  It is believed that Deimos and Phobos were originally asteroids, perhaps members of the great belt of minor chunks of rock and metal that orbits between Mars and the giant planet Jupiter. Eons ago they drifted close enough to be captured by the red planet’s gravitational field and fall into satellite orbits around it.

  Thus, studying Phobos and Deimos can teach us much about the farther asteroids.

  Most of the meteorites that have hit the Earth were originally asteroids. The Martian moons resemble the type of meteorites called by astronomers “carbonaceous chondrites.” Such meteorites have been found to contain not only carbon compounds, but water, locked in chemical combinations called “hydrates” within the meteorite’s rocky materials.

  If the moons of Mars are rich in hydrates and carbon compounds, even though the water is not in liquid form, biologists will want to study the moons for signs of life or its precursors. Hydrates are immeasurably valuable to astronautical engineers, as well. They could supply life-giving water and oxygen. More important, water can be split into hydrogen and oxygen, which can be used for rocket propellants, which could cut in half the tonnages needed to be sent off Earth for any future missions to Mars.

  The tiny moons of Mars, then, could become oases for space travelers where they can refresh life-support supplies and refuel rocket engines.

  If they contain hydrates.

  Which is why the Japanese geochemist and the Russian cosmonaut had left the Mars 2 spacecraft to begin the hands on study of Deimos.

  Tolbukhin said into his helmet microphone, “Five minutes to impact. I am arming the penetrator.” This was a rocket-powered grappling hook, designed to imbed itself into Deimos’s pitted surface and anchor the two men safely. Without it to tether them, the explorers could go flying off the tiny moon with every step they took, Deimos’s gravity was so negligibly low.

  Still Konoye said nothing. He was no longer looking at the looming dark shape of Deimos. He stared instead at the enormous bulk of the red planet hanging overhead. He could not take his eyes off it.

  The two men had left the Mars 2 spacecraft an hour earlier, decked in hard-shell pressure suits and tubular metal frames of mobility units wrapped around their bodies. They looked like brightly colored fat robots stuck inside individual jungle gyms. The mobility units contained personal equipment, life-support systems, and the thrust motors and propellants that allowed them to fly from the orbiting spacecraft to the Martian moon named after the Greek word for dread.

  Slowly revolving a few kilometers away, the tethered Mars 1 and Mars 2 spacecraft looked like miniature models, white and silent, lifeless and desperately far off.

  To Konoye, Deimos was an ugly, irregular, dark-gray lump of crater-pitted stone blotting out the stars, covering half the sky. Enormous. Menacing. And Mars itself seemed terrifyingly huge, crushingly massive. In his perspective, the ponderous enormity of the red planet loomed above him, glowering overhead, pressing down, squeezing the breath from his lungs. The three immense volcanoes of the Tharsis Bulge and the even bigger caldera of Olympus Mons seemed to be staring down at him like the four monstrous wide round eyes of a demon, staring balefully.

  The Japanese geophysicist had trained for this moment for more than three years. He had gone through all the simulations on Earth and experienced long weeks of zero gravity aboard the space stations in Earth orbit. He had prepared himself thoroughly to lead the first-hand study of Mars’s two moons. Waiting for their turns behind him were a Russian geologist and an American geophysicist. But in this moment Japan was first.

  Yet Konoye had not reckoned on that enormous expanse of red looming above him like a powerful, palpable force. This was no simulation. Mars hung over him and he could feel it squeezing down on him while its many-eyed demon glared at him, angry and demanding. Something in his childhood
awakened and began screaming. Some long-forgotten nightmare tore at his mind. He had to get away. Get away!

  Blindly Konoye fired the thrusters of his excursion unit. In panic he fled from the overpowering presence of Mars.

  “Wait!” shouted Tolbukhin. “What are you doing?”

  Konoye was jetting away from Mars, away from Deimos, away from the spacecraft in which he had lived for more than nine months. His gloved hands clamped rigidly on the thruster controls, like a catatonic or a man already in rigor mortis.

  “Stop!” Tolbukhin yelled, so agitated he lapsed into Russian. “You fool, you’ll kill yourself!”

  But Konoye was fleeing, panic-stricken, unable to speak. The cosmonaut punched his own thrusters into life and jetted after him, even as his helmet earphones erupted in wild commands from the team in the Mars 2 spacecraft monitoring their excursion.

  Under the remorseless hand of blind nature Konoye had turned himself into a miniature asteroid. At full thrust the propellants in his tanks quickly ran out. In the frictionless vacuum of space he continued to fly away in the same direction, straight out into the endless void between worlds.

  Tolbukhin could not catch him. Within a few seconds his training asserted itself—abetted by the frenzied shouts of the monitoring team in his helmet earphones. He reversed course and headed back for the safety of the Mars 2 craft.

  It took no mere than two hours for the rescue team to reach Konoye in one of the emergency transfer vehicles they all referred to as “tugboats.” The Japanese scientist still had several hours of air in his suit tanks. His heater and other life-support equipment were still functioning.

  But he was quite dead. The autopsy promptly conducted by Dr. Yang aboard the Mars 2 craft found the cause of death to be a cerebral hemorrhage. Tolbukhin shook his head when he heard the verdict.

  “He died of fright,” muttered the Russian. “He died of deimos, dread.”

  SOL 9: EVENING

  “He died of natural causes, then,” Jamie said.

  Vosnesensky shrugged. “But would he have died if he had remained on Earth? Or if he had not gone on the EVA?”

  Jamie shrugged back at the Russian. “We’ll never know.”

  They were in the cramped confines of the airlock, slowly, laboriously pulling themselves out of their hard suits, tired from the day’s work, depressed by the news from orbit.

  “I still don’t see why Li had to order us to return to base,” Jamie grumbled. “Doesn’t he understand what we’ve found here?”

  “What have we found?” Vosnesensky smiled tolerantly. “An optical illusion?”

  “Well … maybe,” Jamie admitted.

  “When we get back to the base we can ask the team in orbit for computer enhancement of the videotapes. If there is any chance that the rock formations are man-made … er, Martian-made—we will certainly return here.”

  “It’s more than that, Mikhail. This canyon is an open book of the history of the planet. We should be here, studying what the rocks have to tell us. Joanna and the life-sciences people should be down there where the mists hang around all day. That’s the best chance for life to be found.”

  Vosnesensky had peeled down to his water-tubed skivvies. Jamie was still in his hard-shell pants, leaning against the airlock bulkhead to tug off a boot.

  The Russian looked at the red dust on Jamie’s boots and sniffed loudly. “It smells different from the moon.”

  “What?”

  “After a moon walk your shelter smells as if someone had shot off a revolver inside. The lunar dust that clings to your suit and boots has a burnt odor to it. This stuff—” he fingered the thin film of rusty powder on the sleeve of his empty hard suit “—this Martian dust smells different.”

  Jamie wrinkled his nose. “Now that you mention it—it smelled the same way back at the dome, didn’t it?”

  Nodding, Vosnesensky pulled on his hard suit’s arm; it swung upward with the slight hissing sound of its slick Teflon shoulder joints.

  “Smell.”

  Jamie sniffed at the metallic arm. Pungent. Harsh. Then he pulled one of his own gloves from the rack where he had tucked them. Somewhere deep in his memory the picture of an approaching thunderstorm formed itself, strange eerie afternoon light, the summer air heavy and still. Lightning flickering against approaching black clouds.

  “Yeah. Strange smell. Almost like … could it be ozone?”

  Vosnesensky rubbed at his eyes. “Yes, I think you are right. Ozone.”

  “The soil’s loaded with superoxides,” Jamie said.

  “And in the high temperature inside here they are breaking down, baking out of the dust.”

  Jamie’s own eyes were smarting now. The rover’s airlock was much smaller than the clean-up area in the dome. “Maybe we ought to get out of the airlock.”

  “Not until we clean the suits.”

  Jamie finished pulling off his boots and wriggled out of the hard suit’s pants. They vacuumed their suits thoroughly, yet the pungent odor remained in the airlock. Then he followed Vosnesensky through the hatch that led into the main compartment of the rover’s forward section.

  Blinking his eyes, Jamie said; “Wow, it feels like downtown Houston in there.”

  “The ozone will break down quickly enough,” said Vosnesensky. “It becomes molecular oxygen. Harmless.”

  Scanning the shelves of equipment neatly stacked on either side of him Jamie muttered, “We have a GC/MS in here, don’t we? They’re not both back in the equipment section.”

  Vosnesensky pointed to the lowest shelf. “That is the quadrupole device. The magnetic one is in the equipment module.”

  “This’ll do just fine,” Jamie knelt down to pull the instrument from the shelf. The gas chromatograph/mass spectrometer analyzed the chemical composition of materials, virtually atom by atom. It was neatly packaged in a gray plastic casing, surprisingly light. The manufacturer’s logo identified it as Japanese.

  “I want to monitor the levels of ozone in the airlock. See how it decomposes, what else the soil might be outgassing.”

  “Good,” said Vosnesensky.

  “I’ll set it up in the airlock and connect it to the secondary display screen in the cockpit. You set up dinner. I’m starvnig.”

  The Russian’s dark brows knitted slightly. “You are giving me orders? I am the commander.”

  Jamie was already starting to open the airlock hatch, the spectrometer in one arm resting on his hip. He glanced back over his shoulder at the cosmonaut.

  “I give the orders, Yankee. You set up the GC/MS while I prepare our meal.”

  “Right, boss,” said Jamie, laughing.

  Joanna watched the display screen as Vosnesensky and then Jamie Waterman made their evening reports. She was sitting on a spider-legged stool at the workbench in the biology lab, cocooned in the bulky equipment that surrounded her. She felt almost at home in the laboratory area; the microscopes and isolation boxes and racks of glassware made her feel more comfortable and protected here than in the bare narrow cubicle that served as her sleeping quarters.

  She had patched her lab computer into the base’s communications system so that she could see the excursion team’s report in some privacy. Jamie’s face looked serious yet happy. He was not really smiling, but there was an excitement in his eyes that she had never seen before as he described his day’s observations.

  “This is where we should have landed,” he was saying, looking out from the screen as if he knew his eyes would meet hers. “There’s moisture here and I’m willing to bet that the temperatures down at the bottom of the valley are significantly warmer than up here on the plain.”

  He went on, his eyes sparkling as he described the rock formations that looked to him so much like the adobe cliff dwellings of southwestern America.

  “He’s a handsome red devil, isn’t he?”

  Joanna whirled on the stool. Tony Reed was standing there, one arm casually leaning on the transparent plastic hood of an empty isolation box.
He wore a black turtleneck shirt beneath his tan coveralls. One corner of his lips was curved slightly in a strange sardonic smile. Joanna stared at him for a wordless moment. It was almost as if Reed’s face had been split in two: half his face was smiling, the other half not.

  “Jamie makes a strong case for studying the canyon,” she said. “The chances for finding living organisms, or even the fossils of extinct species …”

  Reed moved closer to her, pulled up the other stool, and straddled it. Gesturing toward the screen he said, “Our Indian friend seems to think he’s found the ruins of an ancient village. How preposterous.”

  Sudden anger flared within Joanna. “How do you know it is preposterous? How can we say anything about this world until we have explored all of it?”

  Reed’s smile widened. “I’m not a betting man, but I’d be willing to wager long odds that there are no ancient civilizations to be found on Mars.”

  “Yes, and a century and a half ago you would have bet that Schliemann would never find the ruins of Troy.”

  “My, aren’t we fiery!” Reed laughed.

  Joanna turned back to the computer, but Vosnesensky’s heavy-featured, morose face filled the screen now. She clicked it off.

  “You’re right, of course,” Reed admitted easily. “One mustn’t jump to conclusions—either way.”

  Joanna accepted it as an apology.

  “Jamie’s doing good work, isn’t he?” Reed asked rhetorically. “I’m glad we fought to get him onto the team.”

  “He is a great asset,” Joanna agreed.

  “Much better than Hoffman would have been, although I wonder how DiNardo would have fared here.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Leaning both his elbows on the lab bench behind him, Reed appeared as relaxed as if he were in a London pub. “Well, DiNardo has this enormous reputation, you know. If he had seen what Jamie’s seen out there at the Grand Canyon, I wonder if his prestige would have been big enough to get us to move the camp there.”