Encounter With Tiber

by Buzz Aldrin

  As I watched the computer count down, the immense Valles Marineris stretched off to my left: a great deep scar in the Martian surface, kilometers deep and longer than the United States is wide. As it passed behind us, the retrorocket fired, right on time, and we began our plunge just above the broken territory called the Iani Chaos, in the eastern part of Margaritifer Terra.

  On the computer’s cue, I executed the 180 that turned us with our heat shield facing in our direction of motion; minutes later we felt the giant’s fist of reentry deceleration push us down into our couches. For a moment I could still see something of the pockmarked face of Arabia Terra through the white-hot plasma pouring past our window from the heat shield; then we were in true blackout, surrounded by flames, the incandescent air cutting off vision, radio, or any contact with the outside world. We sank deeper into our couches and tried not to think too much about how many things could go wrong.

  We lost speed and altitude steadily, and not long before we crossed the pole, the air streaming past us stopped being superheated; suddenly it was clear again, and I looked down at the polar ice cap for just a moment, before I put my focus back on monitoring the computer. There was a short, hard thud as the heat shield jettisoned, and then a hard push in the back as the landing rocket fired. We were now a mere thirty kilometers above the surface, though still moving quite fast, and the computer was going to use the small rocket to bring us down to a reasonable speed and then to steer us, hopping over the landscape on that small tongue of flame, to our prearranged landing site.

  I watched as the graphics showed us staying nicely in the center of all the curves; I never touched the controls. Crater Korolev is almost perfectly circular, and it’s fifty kilometers across. It has a great deal of swollen, torn-up ground around it, probably indicating that the soil was saturated with water at the time the meteor hit. The swelling rises to sharp-edged lip, and within there’s an immense frozen lake. We hovered above that surface, angled slightly to race along about a kilometer above the smooth ice, and in a matter of a few minutes we were approaching the base, a few kilometers from the dig site.

  In front of us lay a small cluster of five MarsHabs, each similar to ours: a large cylinder in a steel truss, with legs mounted to the truss. Each of them sat on four long, thin legs—illogically long and thin by the standards of Earth design, where three times greater gravity had to be coped with, but more than strong enough here. And around each of them there was a starburst pattern on the ice, for when the site had been definitely established, the stayover crew had partly refueled the landing rockets and flown their MarsHabs over here. For the time being, humanity’s first settlement on Mars was almost fully mobile.

  We descended slowly; through the camera below I could see the fluff of dry ice on the surface of the lake flung radially outward along the plane of ice in expanding concentric circles, without enough air to cause it to billow. Then at the edge of the circle, the dry ice burst and boiled into a white “smoke ring” surrounding our landing site. We came down lower and steam began to rise from the polished black ice that had lain there for millennia; lower still, and finally, with a bump, we touched down.

  Everyone got up and began talking at once, but Captain Gander held up his hand and said, “All right, everyone into pressure suits; we need to meet with the stayovers, and they’ve invited us to dinner. And before we do that—”

  “Er, Captain,” Nari said behind him, grinning broadly.

  “Yes?”

  “There’s something important we need to do right now.” He pulled out a tiny one-drink bottle of champagne, unscrewed the cap, and poured it over the bewildered Walter Gander’s head. “You’ve been to the Moon, of course, sir, and also to Phobos … so welcome to the Three Worlds Club.”

  There was a brief delay while the captain toweled off his hair; still he didn’t seem completely displeased. After that, we put on the suits that we had practiced with every week but never worn outside, verified that they were working as they were supposed to, and went, two at a time, through the airlock. Olga and I went together, climbing down from the lock on a long, thin ladder, jumping the last couple of meters in the low gravity.

  My boots hit with a thud, and then flew out from under me. Polished ice, and not enough gravity to generate much friction against it. At least the helmet had some padding to cushion my head. I struggled to my feet—it was like wearing omnidirectional roller skates—and saw Olga doing the same; we leaned against each other, got up, and saw several others struggling in the same way.

  The suit radio crackled. “As soon as you’re away from your ship the ice won’t be so slick.” We turned to see a man in a pressure suit dragging what looked for all the world like an old-fashioned sleigh toward us. “Here, all of you sit on this, and we’ll pull it over to the dining hall with the winch. Welcome to mass transit, Mars-style.”

  Ten people was a tight fit, especially with all of us wearing bulky pressure suits, but it certainly beat falling all over the place. I looked out across the dark ice. To the west, the Sun had disappeared below the scarred red rim of Crater Korolev. The sky was nearly black, except for a deep pink/purple glow around the horizon, and many stars were already out. Naturally, just traveling within the solar system, we hadn’t come far enough to change the positions of any of the fixed stars, at least not so that the naked eye could detect. The Big and Little Dippers blazed high above us, brighter than you ever see them on Earth.

  The rope tightened and the sleigh glided softly across the ice, the rumble barely perceptible to the external suit microphones in the thin air. Dark fell fast and hard, so that by the time we reached the hab that would serve as the dining hall, you could barely make out the crater rim.

  I got off the sleigh with the others, and looked at the wild proliferation of stars overhead, the looming crater walls, and the great sheet of ice that shone faintly in the starlight. I felt how light I was, a third of my Earth weight, and finally, truly, I believed I was on Mars.

  6

  I DON’T THINK I’VE ever seen five people so eager for fresh faces. There had been ten in the stayover crew that had arrived twenty-six months before, but five of those had departed for Earth more than eight months ago on the REcycler Collins. It was almost embarrassing; three of them just wanted to hear us talk, endlessly, about anything at all, and two of them couldn’t shut up.

  The food was standard MarsHab fare—it came out of a “farm,” the little vegetable and textured-protein growing machines that were, so far, one of two major items we had gotten out of studying the Tiberians. In some ways it was like a many-times-evolved version of the “salad machines,” “yogurt boxes,” and “sushi makers” that the different national space agencies had been fooling around with ever since the 1980s; in other ways it was radically different. I wasn’t biologist enough to understand much more than that you put sterilized human waste, carbon dioxide, and water in one side and took broccoli, carrots, tofu, and various other stuff out the other, and as a supplementary benefit it made about half the MarsHab’s oxygen and scrubbed about half the carbon dioxide buildup (the rest had to be done by chemical recycling). The big problem was that the “farms” produced only about fifteen different kinds of food; within a few weeks you would know everything that could possibly be on the menu. Not that the human race hadn’t lived for most of its existence on very monotonous diets for large parts of the year, but those of us from the advanced countries had grown up with very different ideas about what food should be.

  Their MarsHab’s food was seasoned a little differently from ours. Dr. Chalashajerian, the subsoil expert in their hab, had used his personal space for spices, and so they could do occasional curries; he had also come up with a lab procedure for extracting oil from soybeans out of the farm, and thus they had soy sauce and something that didn’t taste too bad as a spread for bread. Unfortunately, we didn’t have any real chefs in our crew, so there was no one for him to exchange ideas with. “Oh, well,” he said. “I shall just have to wait f
or Mars Five Alpha, and hope.”

  He was dark-skinned and muscular and spoke English with a light, pleasant Indian accent; he laughed a lot, and was one of the ones who wouldn’t shut up. I had to admit that after almost nine months in the ship, during which we had long since found out what everyone’s favorite topic of conversation was, it was refreshing to hear something new, even if it was only a monologue about recipes for salad dressing.

  There seemed to be a slight tension between Captain Gander and Yvana Borges, who had been the “mayor” of Korolev until our arrival. Arguably we didn’t really need any system of government at all, and certainly five people had needed it less than fifteen would, but still there had to be someone who was in charge of picking up the phone, replying to consortium requests, and representing the tiny colony on the radio. That job was to pass to Gander, now—he was figuring it would take up about two hours per day, at most—and Yvana was to return to her particular area of expertise, the scatter-imaging X-ray equipment that had located the Tiberian base and given us some idea of what was under the ice. She didn’t seem completely happy about it, and she kept thinking of two more things, or ten more things, to tell Gander about.

  We barely heard a word from any of the others. Pete Johnson was an American, a very dark-skinned black man with a beard well beyond regulation length, unusually tall for anyone who goes into space, who smiled a lot and watched all of us acutely. He was the biophysicist and physician for the original stayover group. So far, because there was no access to study the Tiberians, but plenty of research he could do on the crew, he had the record for scientific papers published as a result of being on Mars. After a while he fell into a very quiet conversation with Tsen, and the two of them appeared to be having a great time. As a pilot, my first thought was that they were thinking of new excuses for grounding me.

  Akira Yamada was a meteorologist; he sat quietly, watching everyone, but particularly Nari. I formed no impression of him that first night. Jim Flynn, a sandy-haired Texan, very slim and small, didn’t say much more; I was startled halfway through the evening to learn that he was a pilot and engineer, since he hadn’t said a word. “I would have thought the first stayovers would have been all science specialists,” I said.

  “Somebody’s gotta take care of them,” he said. “Pete kills germs, Doc C. grows food, and I make sure the machinery runs and drive various things so that we don’t have scientists falling into ravines because they were looking at the mountains instead of where they were going. And I’ve made a couple trips up to Phobos, mostly just hauling up loads of volatiles to replenish stocks for them. Now, up there—that is weird. Fourteen permanent residents. Almost a small city, really; there’s even a couple that’s gotten married while there.”

  “What’s weird about that?” Olga asked.

  “Oh, nothing, I guess, about getting married, if you want to do that sort of thing, but I mean all those people. They’re turning it into another South Pole City; in another ten oppositions I bet they’ve got movie theaters and a store up there, and probably a jail and a bar. It just isn’t the same rock that your captain landed on. Now, down here, you can still tell we’re at the edge of the frontier—though I suppose that will change, too.”

  “You like it at the edge?” Olga asked.

  “Oh, yes, ma’am, I do. I figure probably I’ll end up buried on Triton or Charon or someplace, at least if I get my wish. You know how nice and quiet it is, and how after a few weeks you really know everyone in your crew and then you can just go about your business? Well, that’s the kind of life I’d like.”

  Later, after we returned to our own MarsHab, Olga said, “Jim is much more extreme than I am. I only want to see new places and spend time there. I don’t think he ever wants to come back.”

  I shrugged. “Ever hear of Daniel Boone, Roald Amundsen, David Livingston, Jim Bridger? There hasn’t been much room for people like that in the last hundred years, nowhere to go where you could really be all by yourself, or at least not around anyone else like yourself. Now there’s going to be again. I don’t suppose there’s enough of them to make much of a difference, but I’m glad that they’ll have a place to go.”

  “It’s different,” Olga said. “Mostly they went on their own. People now have to pay a lot for a few to go. Still, I think everyone benefits from the few—and I’m glad there are people like Jim, who will volunteer.”

  Of course the stayovers had known when our team would be arriving, right down to the day, so they had made sure that everything was ready to get started. And we had no unpacking to do—the MarsHab was our home, just as it had been in space. So the next morning, after a breakfast just like every breakfast we’d had on the way, we suited up and met the others outside, got into the three open-topped treaded tractors that sat waiting for us, and started on our way to the site.

  I rode next to Jim, so I could learn to drive one of these things. They ran entirely on indigenous propellants: methanol made from water and carbon dioxide, and hydrogen peroxide made by electrosynthesis from water. The exhaust was pure water and carbon dioxide, so what we took from Mars went back to it without any real change except its location.

  The tractors were simple enough to drive—really just lightweight versions of the Sno-Cat that was the backbone of Antarctic travel on Earth. The real trick, as Jim showed me, was in getting them to behave on the slick ice, especially since much of the surface was still covered with frozen carbon dioxide from the night before. It was right on the edge of sublimating, and thus formed constant small bubbles under the treads, decreasing traction. “Just take it slow and remember nobody’s ever in a hurry on this planet,” he advised me. I got the hang of it pretty quickly—it was no worse than one of the manual-steering cars that had still been around when I was a teenager.

  The site itself turned out to be several very large “tents”: fabric-covered vault shapes under which things could be stored, with various labs and a few tiny sleeping modules inside them. “Nobody’s stayed the night here yet,” Pete observed. “Though I suppose now, with the dig starting, people will sometimes have reason to.”

  “Didn’t know we could just decide to,” Jim said. “I wouldn’t mind moving out here, except there’s nothing to eat.”

  “Tired of life in the busy urban center, eh?” Pete said, grinning. “I think we’re going to reserve it as a resort, actually. Somewhere to go on your vacations, when you get tired of the same old place.”

  As we drew closer, I saw the many stakes driven into the ice, and asked if that was the site. “Yep, that’s it,” Jim said. “Tiberian lander, graves, huts, and what we think is the Encyclopedia is all under that, four to six meters down.”

  The three little tractors stopped in front of the shelters, and all of us got out. By now, the Sun was well up, and though there were still dark shadows in the crater rim south of us, the ice in front of us was brilliant white with a hint of pink, reflecting the red of the sky. Everything had a strange, sharp-edged look to it, because the smaller apparent size of the Sun, and the much thinner air, meant the light was less diffused and scattered; shadows were darker and their edges sharper. The parts of the ice plain still covered with frozen carbon dioxide were sparkling white; where boots, tractor treads, or the wind had swept away the dry ice, the water ice showed through as blue-black smears. “Hey, we’re just in time,” Chalashajerian said. “Look north, everyone.”

  We did. At first I didn’t know what he was talking about, and then I saw—there was a faint puff of vapor forming a long line at the horizon. As I watched it rushed toward us at tremendous speed, a great onrushing wave that was somehow transparent, erasing the white dry ice and leaving black water ice behind it.

  “One of the more interesting sights of Martian spring, or at least spring on Korolev,” he explained as the line of frost bore down on us. “Watch your feet now—I don’t mean keep your balance, I mean look at your feet.”

  I did. Seconds later, I saw the white carbon dioxide at my feet flare into
a thin white cloud, boiling up at my face. When it passed, I saw black water ice in front of me—except where my shadow had been, where for a moment I saw its shape formed in white. I stepped back and away from it, and my white shadow exploded into a little cloud of vapor and was gone.

  “Sublimation of CO2 is very temperature-sensitive,” Pete explained. “And the walls of Korolev are fairly high, so the shadow stretches across the black ice until well into the morning. Then after it retreats, the surface starts to warm up; the places the shadow left first, sublimate first.”

  That was the highlight of the morning as far as I was concerned. In a way we were paying for the things my father’s generation had done at Tiber Base at the south pole of the Moon. They had gone through there so fast, with so many untrained hands, trying to find the Encyclopedia, that they had practically destroyed the site. For years archeologists had been trying to sort out what was done there by Tiberians and what was recent human activity.

  Nor had humanity’s mistakes on the Moon been confined to violating the archeological first principle that you never disturbed a site before extracting all the available information in your path. They had also violated another principle known to archeologists since before 1900. Ever since Schliemann had lifted the burial mask from a Mycenaen face—only to see it crumble before his eyes, before it could be photographed or sketched—it had been understood that there must be an expert on the site, as each step of the excavation, or of the unrolling of an ancient scroll, was completed, so that if anything should suddenly begin to deteriorate, there would be people on hand who knew what they were looking at and might remember something critical that would be lost forever on an untrained eye.