Mars

by Ben Bova

  “You’ve fulfilled your father’s greatest expectations,” Jamie said, as gently as he knew how. “You don’t have to be afraid of him anymore.”

  “I am not afraid of my father!”

  “I mean, he’ll have to let go of you now.”

  She looked into his face for a long moment, troubled, uncertain. “I will have to let go of him, too, then.”

  “Yes.” Jamie nodded even though it hurt his head. Neither of them smiled.

  Ilona and Connors took their turn in the lab module together while Joanna went to the lavatory and prepared for bed. Jamie, too restless even to think about sleep, made his way up to the cockpit. The storm shrilled continuously outside, making the night blacker than any he had yet experienced on Mars. He peeked through the thermal shroud, saw that there was nothing to see, then let it snap back into place.

  He felt no fear of the billowing dust racing past. To Jamie it was more like soft cottony clouds enwrapping them; he had no sense of gritty sand particles that could scratch and grind metal. I could walk out there if I had to, even at the height of this storm, he told himself. It might even be fun.

  When will it end? he asked himself. Maybe I should call Toshima and ask for his forecast. Then he thought, Why bother? It’ll end when it ends, no matter what the meteorologist says. Fingering the comforting smooth stone of the bear fetish in his pocket, Jamie told himself it was foolish to try to press things. Especially when you have no power over them. Wait out the storm. Wait out all the storms.

  He felt tired, utterly tired, yet too keyed up to crawl into his bunk. Like a kid the night before Christmas. So damned tired he can barely keep his eyes open, yet too excited to go to sleep.

  Connors and Ilona are spending a long time in the lab. Is she up to her old tricks again? Well, if Pete can get it up when he feels as bad as he looks, then more credit to him. And Ilona—he almost laughed—she’s like the good old Post Office: neither rain nor storm nor dark of night will stop her.

  He rubbed a hand across his bristly chin. Maybe I ought to shave. If we get the antenna fixed and we’re on TV tomorrow I ought at least to try to look respectable. On the other hand, maybe I’ll look worse shaved than with a four-day growth. Maybe. Li won’t want the media to know we’re sick. Brumado must know about his daughter and the rest of us, but we sure as hell don’t want the media to pick up on it. They’ll go nuts. Martian fever. Everything we’ve accomplished will get buried the instant they suspect one of us has so much as the sniffles.

  He realized that there are people on Earth who would be afraid of any Martian life. The idea of life on other worlds destroyed their comforting self-esteem, attacked their religious beliefs, shattered their view of the universe. Or worse. The UFO nuts must be going crazy! They’ll be expecting a Martian invasion, at the very least. The thought startled Jamie. Saddened him beyond measure.

  Absently, his mind churning, Jamie leaned across the control panel and turned on the rover’s headlamps. Peeking through the thermal shroud again, he. saw a softly diffused grayish light that revealed nothing, just a dimensionless glow like a thick, billowing fog. The Martian wind sang its endless song, although he thought it sounded a tone deeper than before. Is that good news or bad? he wondered.

  They’re going to make us turn back tomorrow, he knew. Without getting near the cliff village. They’re going to say we’re too sick to go on and make us head back for the dome.

  Jamie knew that it was the right thing to do. Four lives depended on it. Yet as he peered out at the pearly gray clouds wafting past the rover’s canopy he wondered if there were some way he could get them to agree to pushing forward instead of retreating.

  I could walk it, he thought. I could walk there from here and get to see it, climb up the cliff and put my hands on it. I could do it.

  And then die. There’s no way to get back again; the suit can’t keep you alive for that long. But I could at least get there and see it for myself. It wouldn’t be a bad place to die. Maybe that’s the meaning of my dream.

  Tony Reed could not sleep either.

  He had retired to his cubicle, of course, as had the seven others living in the dome when the lights had automatically dimmed for the night. Vosnesensky insisted on keeping exactly to the mission schedule except for dire emergencies, and Mikhail Andreivitch was becoming more of a stickler than ever, grouchy and brooding, as the illness took hold of him.

  As soon as he heard the Russian’s deep snoring, like a farm tractor rumbling back and forth, Reed got up from his bunk and tiptoed in his bulky slipper socks back to his infirmary. The dome felt cold in the darkness. Reed dared not turn on the overhead lights as he padded past the silent workstations. He reached the infirmary and, sliding its door shut, groped around his desk to his chair and reached for his desktop computer as he sat down. He found its power switch by touch and turned it on. The little screen glowed orange like a cheery fire.

  They’re dying, Reed knew. They’re all dying and they’re looking to me to save them. And I don’t know what to do! He scrolled through the data from the latest medical checks. Nothing new. Nothing he could see that offered the slightest clue as to what might be infecting them.

  Tony shook his head as he stared at the screen. He himself felt fine: a bit tired, eyes burning from overwork, but otherwise fine. None of the symptoms the others had. How can that be? he asked himself. We all eat the same foods, breathe the same air. Yet they’re all sick, every one of them, in the rover and here in the dome. And I’m not.

  Leaning back in his spindly plastic chair, Reed half closed his eyes and steepled his long fingers on his chest. Think, man, he snarled to himself. Use the brain up there inside your skull and think.

  Proposition one: Both the team in the rover and the crew here in the dome have come down with it, whatever it is. Therefore it cannot be an infection from the life forms that the rover team has found.

  Yes, true. But can it be an infectious organism in the air? Even though theory says Martian parasites could not possibly attack visitors from another planet, might there be some sort of highly adaptable virus in the air? We know that there is life on Mars. What if there are organisms floating in the air?

  Reed shook his head, trying to dismiss the idea, We’ve sampled the air. Monique has tested it with every piece of equipment she has. Vosnesensky has checked the air purifiers. They’ve found nothing. And the air in here is Earth-normal, not Martian. Any Martian organisms would be killed by the high levels of oxygen.

  And yet—we don’t have an electron microscope. A virus could slip past Monique’s tests, especially since we don’t know exactly what to look for. Maybe they like oxygen. And we aren’t consistent; we’re very careful not to contaminate Martian soil or air samples with our bugs, aren’t we? If the bigwigs actually believed their theory, why would they worry that we might possibly infect Mars?

  It just doesn’t make any sense, Reed told himself. If it’s a native Martian organism infecting us, why haven’t I been infected? Why am I healthy while all the others are dying?

  For the first time he could remember, Tony Reed felt guilty. And inadequate.

  He also felt terribly afraid. But that was an emotion he had experienced all his life.

  Dr. Yang Meilin slept, but not well. She was troubled by a dream. A nightmare. She was an intern once again in her native city of Wuxi. The great famine had the entire province in its grip. The streets were so littered with the dead that people wore perfumed gauze masks to keep the stench of decaying flesh from their nostrils.

  Dr. Yang was at the hospital, in a ward jammed with squalling babies. Emaciated limbs and bloated bellies. Yet even though the babies were being fed with the supplies sent by the International Red Cross, they were still dying.

  She was making love with the handsome doctor from Beijing, but she could not give herself to him totally because she could hear the painful crying of the babies through the thin curtains they had pulled around the bed. The doctor returned to Beijing the next morning
without even bidding her farewell. And the babies continued to whimper and shriek. And die.

  They are not dying of malnutrition, Dr. Yang knew. And even as she said that to herself her dream changed, shifted, mutated: the babies were astronauts, the hospital ward was the dome on the red surface of Mars.

  She felt totally helpless. Why are they dying? It is my responsibility to save them, to help them, to keep them alive and return them to health. It is my responsibility to remember. Remember.

  She sat bolt upright in her bunk aboard the Mars 2 spacecraft, instantly awake.

  But she could not remember what the dream was trying to tell her.

  EARTH

  WASHINGTON: Staring out her hotel room window, Edith held the phone tightly against her ear.

  “You’re fired, Edie,” said Howard Francis’s angry, rasping voice.

  The first thought that went through her mind was, There goes the expense account.

  “But why me?” Edith asked. “I tried to get you …”

  Francis’s voice screeched, “You had the fuckin’ story an hour and a half before anybody else and you just sat on it! We could’ve been on the air before all the other networks, even before CNN, if you had done your job right!”

  “I tried to get y’all. I tried to get through to the news director, but some shitty little tramp wouldn’t let me.”

  “She was the assistant news director, for Chrissakes! You shoulda told her!”

  “She would have cut my throat.”

  “So what? The network would have been first on the air with the biggest story of all time!”

  Fuck the network, Edith thought. Aloud, she said, “I tried to tell her how important it was. She just wouldn’t believe me. I bet even if I told her what it was, she would have thought I was just some nut.”

  “Oh, my god, Edie, my own ass is in a sling around here. I’ll be lucky if they don’t fire me!”

  “That’d be too bad,” Edith said, her voice brittle with anger. I hope they fire all you assholes, she added silently as she hung up.

  Later that morning, when Alberto Brumado picked her up on his way to NASA headquarters, Edith told him her sad news.

  “Weil,” he said, glancing around the quietly opulent hotel lobby, “I suppose you could move in with me.”

  Edith felt her brows go up.

  Brumado smiled his boyish smile. “There is a guest suite on the top floor of the house. You can have complete privacy. I did not mean to suggest anything more.”

  Edith gave him a smile in return. “I appreciate it, Alberto. I sure need a place—until I can find a job.”

  “Perhaps I can help you there, too. I have many acquaintances among the media people.”

  Edith marveled at how smart Brumado really was, understanding that the media people he knew were acquaintances, not friends.

  SOL 38: MORNING

  Jamie awoke well before dawn. The wind had stopped! He lay flat on his bunk, listening. The storm must be over. There was no sound of the wind, no sounds in the darkened rover at all except Connors’s fitful snoring and the faint rustling of Joanna turning on her bunk just above him. And the ever-present background hum of electrical power and air fans.

  Slowly, silently, he slid out of the bunk and padded in his socks and coveralls to the cockpit. He pulled back the thermal shroud. Still black night outside. There was no discernible moonlight on Mars; its two satellites were too tiny to shed much light on the planet’s surface. Jamie switched on the rover’s headlamps. The air was clear. He could see the cliff wall out there standing gray and rugged like the ghost of some ancient grandfather.

  Quickly he turned the headlamps off, closed the shroud, and crept back to his bunk, satisfied that the storm had indeed ended. He crawled beneath the thin blanket and soon fell back to sleep.

  He dreamed of Joanna, the two of them walking across the desert wearing ordinary street clothes. He could not tell if the desert was on Earth or Mars. A city shone on the horizon, white and sparkling in the hot sun. But no matter how long they walked the city came no closer. They trudged along for hours, tired, thirsty, sweaty, but the gleaming towers remained nothing more than a hope in the distance. They became weaker and weaker. Joanna collapsed in his arms, suddenly naked. They both sank to the burning sand, dying, too weak to go any farther.

  Jamie had his fetish in his hand, but the little stone bear melted beneath the awful heat and flowed between his fingers.

  He was reaching for it, scrabbling in the sand to recover it, when he awoke and realized he was pawing at the sheet that had become tangled between his legs.

  Sheepishly Jamie got out of his bunk and headed for the lavatory before any of the others awoke. For the first time since they had left the dome, he shaved. The razor seemed to be slicing flesh, even though it drew no blood. No blood left in me, Jamie thought wearily. The lotion stung when he splashed it on, but the sharpness of the pain was almost welcome after days of the dull, sullen, glowering ache that had been dogging him.

  “Thanks,” Jamie muttered to his freshly shaved image in the lav’s metal mirror. “I needed that.” The face that looked back at him was gaunt, red eyed, with hollows beneath the high cheekbones. You’re turning into a paleface, Jamie said to it.

  Joanna seemed wearier, too, and Ilona barely managed to pull herself out of her bunk and make it to the lavatory. After a glum breakfast Jamie accompanied Connors outside despite the astronaut’s mild protests.

  “There won’t be a media conference until the antenna’s fixed,” Jamie pointed out. “So there’s no reason for me to stay inside.”

  He got the impression that the astronaut was too weak, too much in pain, to argue. Jamie himself felt ragged, and tired. The night’s sleep had done nothing to restore his strength. The achy feeling that had assailed him for two days now was worse; every muscle in his body felt strained.

  Morning mists hovered as they stepped out from the airlock. Tendrils of cold gray fog drifted by, slowly as departing spirits. Where does the moisture come from? Jamie asked himself again. It’s being replenished every day. It evaporates when the sun touches it, and then more mist forms the next morning. How? Why?

  Connors ignored the mist. “Looks like we’ve got some digging to do.”

  The rover was piled almost roof high with sand on its windward side, nearly buried in dust so fine and loose that it blew up in powdery clouds when the two hard-suited men stepped in it.

  “Good thing the hatch is on the sheltered side,” Jamie said.

  “I don’t think the sand’s heavy enough to keep the hatch closed,” Connors said, as they walked through the powdery drifts, tossing up plumes of dust with each booted step. “We could’ve pushed it open with no sweat, I betcha.”

  Maybe, Jamie said to himself.

  Connors clambered slowly, awkwardly up the ladder set into the command module’s side just behind the cockpit canopy and began to examine the microwave antenna.

  “Just what I thought,” Jamie heard in his earphones as he waited at the ladder’s base. “Goddamn dust wormed its way under the gasket seal … oh shit, I can’t believe I did that!”

  “What? Are you okay?”

  “Yeah. Just dumb, that’s all. I tried to blow the dust out of the gasket.”

  Connors was grumbling to himself. Then Jamie realized, “With your helmet on!”

  “Fogged up the faceplate real nice.”

  “Turn up the blower.”

  “Already have. It’s clearing up.”

  Connors came down and went to the outside equipment compartment on the lab module for tools: a fine wire brush and a shovel. In a few minutes he had the antenna mount clear of dust.

  Over the suit radios, they asked Joanna to check the TV link. They saw the antenna arm unfold; then the dish turned slowly until it locked onto their spacecraft orbiting over the equator. Joanna reported that she had contacted the dome without difficulty.

  “Vosnesensky says the news conference will start in another hour, if we can
be ready by then,” she reported.

  “No sweat,” said Connors.

  Jamie grunted to himself. In fact, he was perspiring heavily inside his suit and was certain that Connors was too.

  “You go in now,” the astronaut said to Jamie. “I’ll go around the other side and dig out one of the wheels, see if we can get away without digging out the others.”

  “I can help.”

  “Naw, it’s okay. This stuff is so fluffy you can blow it away with a whisk broom. If I need help I’ll ask you. Maybe we’ll have a digging party after the media conference, all four of us.”

  “You’re sure you’ll be okay out here?”

  “I’m no hero, Jamie. If I need help I’ll yell, don’t worry.”

  Reluctantly Jamie went back inside. It took much longer than usual to vacuum the dust off his suit. Leaving his helmet in the airlock, he tramped the length of the command module to the cockpit. Joanna was in the pilot’s seat, speaking into the display screen. Jamie recognized the face of Burt Klein, the American astronaut on Mars 2.

  Klein grinned at him. “You guys have your antenna back on track,” he said.

  Jamie mumbled an acknowledgment, then turned to the voice link with Connors. “Everything’s fine. We’ve got Mars 2 on the screen.”

  “Great,” said Connors, puffing. “I’ve got our right front wheel almost cleared.”

  Looking from Joanna’s tired face to Klein’s healthy unclouded image on the little display screen Jamie realized how sick the four of them must be. His skin’s almost pink, Jamie thought.

  Dr. Li came on the screen and began giving instructions about the news conference that would begin within the hour. He asked Jamie to bring Connors inside before the conference started. Jamie checked his wristwatch against the digital clock on the cockpit control panel, then asked Joanna to take over the comm link. Klein came back on and Joanna chatted with him almost as if they were old friends discussing the weather.

  Jamie saw that Joanna had put on a fresh set of coveralls, coral pink, and had applied makeup to her face. She’s trying to hide the pallor, he realized, trying to look good for the media. And for her father.