Tales of the Grand Tour

by Ben Bova

  “Don’t be a dweeb, Wiley. This vehicle’s been through a dust storm before, y’know.”

  “Yeah, and I’ve jumped off a burning oil platform into th’ Gulf of Mexico, too. Doesn’t mean I wanna do it again.”

  Trumball’s answer was to lean harder on the accelerator. Craig watched the speedometer edge up past thirty-one kilometers per hour. With a grim smile, he remembered an old prizefighter’s maxim: You can run but you can’t hide.

  “By golly, there she is!”

  Wiley Craig pointed with his right hand while keeping his left on the steering wheel.

  Dex Trumball squinted into the bright morning sun. Off on the rough, crimson horizon he saw a tall metal shape, gleaming and alien-looking in the Martian landscape.

  The rover was plunging at top speed across a field of rocks, its spindly, springy wheels jouncing and rattling them so hard they had both strapped themselves into the cockpit seats.

  “We’ve drifted too far north, Wiley,” said Trumball. “It’s going to cost us a half a day to get to her.”

  Craig’s bristly, bearded face was split by a big, gap-toothed grin. “Don’t care how far away she is; she shore looks purty, don’t she?”

  Dex nodded and admitted, “Yeah, she sure does.”

  The dust storm in the southern hemisphere had petered out at last, according to the previous night’s weather report. Craig had expressed great relief. Trumball, equally grateful that the storm would not hit them, played it much cooler.

  “Even if it had crossed the equator, we could’ve ridden it out.”

  “I don’t know, Dex,” Craig had said soberly. “Some of those storms last for weeks.”

  “Not this time of year.”

  “Uh-huh. And it never rains in California.”

  Trumball got up and headed back toward the equipment racks near the airlock while Craig steered the rover through the rock field and onto smoother, slightly higher ground. The generator took shape before his eyes, a tall polished aluminum cylinder catching the glint of the morning sun, resting on three slim-looking metal legs, the nozzles of three rocket engines hanging beneath the vehicle’s end skirt.

  “Come on,” Dex called from the rear of the rover module, “goose her up a little more. Let’s make as much time as we can.”

  “Let’s not throw a wheel, either,” Craig countered. “Another half hour ain’t gonna kill us.”

  Trumball grumbled to himself as he checked out the video monitoring equipment. The outside cameras were recording everything; not only would the views be a bonanza for geologists studying Mars, they would be great background material for the virtual reality tours that Dex would beam Earthward.

  By the time Craig pulled the rover to a stop next to the generator Dex was suited up and already stepping into the airlock.

  “You just wait a minute there, buddy,” Craig called to him. “You’re not goin’ outside without being checked out.”

  “Aw, come on, Wiley. I went through the checklist myself. Don’t chickenshit me.”

  But Craig would not be put off. He checked Trumball’s suit quickly but thoroughly, then pronounced him ready to go outside.

  “I’ll holler when I’m suited up and you come back in and check me over.”

  “Yeah, yeah.”

  The generator was chugging away, sucking up water from the line it had drilled down to the permafrost level under Craig’s remote guidance, pulling in the thin Martian air and separating its components automatically.

  By the time Craig came through the airlock hatch and stepped onto the rusty ground, Trumball had ascertained that the methane and water tanks were both filled almost to capacity.

  “Okay, great,” Wiley said. “Now we gotta fill our tanks.”

  It took more than an hour. While Craig handled the hoses and watched the gauges, Dex beamed a VR session back to Tarawa: The intrepid explorers hacking their way through the Martian wilderness have made their rendezvous with the refueling generator. On to Pathfinder!

  Once they climbed back inside the rover, Dex scrambled quickly out of his suit and made his way to the cockpit. A brief scan of the control panel showed everything in the green, except for the glowering red light of the fuel cells. We’ll get that into the green, too, he told himself. Soon as Wiley electrolyzes enough of our water to feed ’em.

  By sundown they were well on their way toward Ares Vallis, the generator below their horizon and out of sight. Dex was still driving, Craig in back tinkering with the fuel cells.

  “How’re they holding?” Trumball called over his shoulder.

  Craig’s weary sigh was audible even from the rear of the module. “Leakproof welds my hairy butt,” he groused.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “These damn dewars are supposed to hold liquid hydrogen,” Craig said, kicking a booted toe on the stainless steel cylinder on the rover floor.

  “Yeah?”

  “Well, the damned welds on ’em leak like a sieve that’s been shotgunned.”

  “They’re still leaking?”

  “Does the pope eat spaghetti?”

  “How bad?”

  Craig clumped up toward the cockpit and slid into the right-hand seat. “I gotta do some calculations. It ain’t good, though, I can tell you that without a computer.”

  Trumball saw that Craig was more disgruntled than worried. We can get along without the fuel cells, he thought. Hell, we’ve been getting along without ’em for days now. Still, it’d be good to get that damned red light off the board.

  “The newest fuel cells back on Earth use nanotube filaments to store the hydrogen,” Craig was muttering. “Nanotubes work, pardner. They soak up molecular hydrogen like a sponge and hold onto it like a vise. But all we got is these leaky damned dewars.”

  The sun was nearing the horizon, Dex saw. A thin patch of cloud high above was already reflecting brilliant red highlights.

  “We’re going to have a beautiful sunset, Wiley.”

  Craig looked up from the panel’s computer display. “Yep. A purty one. Reminds me of Houston. We used to get some bee-yootiful sunsets there, thanks to all the industrial waste the refineries poured into the air.”

  Trumball laughed. “No factories out here.”

  “No, but . . .” Craig’s voice petered off into thoughtful silence.

  “What’s the matter, Wiley?”

  “Those clouds.”

  At that instant the communications chime sounded. Trumball tapped the ON button and Stacy Dezhurova’s face appeared on the panel screen.

  “Latest weather report,” she said, looking worried. “New dust storm has started, this time in the northern hemisphere.”

  “Where?” Trumball asked.

  “Exactly where you’re heading,” came her reply.

  Jamie stared at the weather map on the screen. He had superimposed the position of Trumball and Craig’s rover, and the route they had to follow to reach the Pathfinder.

  The storm’s going to roll right over them, he saw.

  “What do you want to do?” Stacy Dezhurova asked from her chair at the comm console.

  Jamie looked up at her. She looked concerned.

  “They’re more than halfway to the Pathfinder site,” he said, thinking aloud. “If I tell them to turn around and head back to the generator the storm will overtake them anyway.”

  “So you think they should just keep on going?”

  “The storm’s heading east to west; they’re going west to east. They could drive through it.”

  “Assuming they can drive when the storm hits them.”

  “If not, they’ll have to sit still until it passes them.”

  Dezhurova nodded, her normally somber face positively morose.

  “If only we could predict how big the storm’s going to get,” Jamie muttered. “We’ve been studying Martian weather for more than twenty years now and we still can’t make a decent forecast.”

  Stacy made a weak grin. “They have been studying terrestrial weather
for almost two centuries and the meteorologists still can’t make a decent forecast on Earth, Jamie.”

  “It might not be as bad as it looks,” he said, remembering the storm he had endured. “If they button up tight they’ll be all right.”

  “But what if the storm grows? The big ones take weeks to clear up . . . months.”

  With a grimace, Jamie said, “This one doesn’t look that bad. So far.”

  Dezhurova countered, “The one in the southern hemisphere hung in for a solid week.”

  “I know,” he admitted, staring again at the weather map, as if he could force it to reveal its secrets if he scowled at it hard enough.

  Dezhurova fell silent, letting Jamie work out his thoughts for himself. At last he got to his feet and said, “We’ll thrash it out over dinner. Let everybody chip in their ideas.”

  With Fuchida and Rodriguez back from Olympus Mons, there were six of them at dinner. Even so, their ideas were almost nonexistent. They talked the situation through over dinner, mulling through one possibility after another. It all boiled down to a choice between letting Craig and Trumball continue into the storm or ordering them to turn back to the generator and allowing the storm to catch up with them.

  “They’re way too far out to get back here before the storm overtakes them,” said Rodriguez. “They’re gonna get caught in it, one way or the other.”

  “Dex won’t want to turn around,” Vijay said, with firm certainty. “He’ll want to push ahead, no matter what.”

  “If only we knew how big the storm will grow,” Trudy Hall said. “We’re trying to make a decision rather in the blind, don’t you think?”

  “The storm will grow,” Fuchida predicted. “It might even reach us here.”

  “Here?” Trudy looked suddenly alarmed.

  “It’s a strong possibility,” said Fuchida. He was sitting with his bad leg propped on an empty chair. Vijay had X-rayed his ankle, injured on Mt. Olympus, and found no fracture. She had wrapped it tightly with an elastic bandage.

  “Are you a meteorologist, too?” Stacy asked the Japanese biologist, straight-faced.

  “Yes, I am,” Fuchida replied with dignity. Then he added, “When I call up the meteorology program on my laptop.”

  Rodriguez pointed out, “The biggest problem is the solar cells. If the dust covers them, the rover loses its primary power source.”

  “So they go to the batteries,” Hall said.

  “For how long? Their fuel cells aren’t working right, remember? Their backup power system isn’t reliable.”

  Trudy looked surprised. “I had forgotten that.”

  “They can’t sit in the dark for more than forty-eight hours—fifty, tops,” Rodriguez said.

  “They can stretch it if they power down,” said Jamie.

  “How far? They got to keep the heaters going, and that’s what takes up most of the juice.”

  Stacy Dezhurova said, “If they go back to the generator that can refill the fuel cells as much as they need to.”

  “That’s right,” Jamie said, pushing himself up from the table. “But my instinct is to let them continue ahead; it’s the shortest path out of the storm.”

  “Unless the storm grows much larger and stronger,” Hall said.

  “If it grows that much they’re in trouble no matter what they do.”

  “And the dust might damage the solar cells,” Rodriguez added gloomily. “Degrade them to the point where they can’t provide enough power to run the rover.”

  “That’s a cheerful thought,” Hall said.

  The others nodded glum agreement.

  Jamie went to the comm center again and sat at the main console. All the others crowded in behind him. As he called to the rover, Jamie felt the heat and tension in the little cubicle. Too many bodies pressed together. Too many fears building up.

  Mars is a gentle world, he reminded himself as he waited for the rover to reply. It doesn’t want to harm us.

  No, the other side of his mind replied. Not unless you do something stupid, like get caught in a dust storm three thousand klicks from home.

  Craig’s scruffy face filled the screen. From what Jamie could see, he was still driving the rover through the lengthening shadows of nightfall.

  Jamie went through the situation and the two possible courses of action with Craig. Then he asked, “Possum, what do you think? Which way do you want to go?”

  Before Craig could answer, Dex Trumball pivoted the camera to himself and said, “We’re pushing on! No sense turning tail.”

  Patiently, Jamie said, “Dex, I asked Possum, not you. He’s in charge.”

  “Wiley and I agree,” Trumball insisted. “We want to keep on going and get the hell out of this storm. Turning back would be a waste of time.”

  “It might be the safer course to take,” Jamie said. “You could make it back to the generator before the storm overtook you, and ride it out there, where you’re assured of fuel, water, and oxygen.”

  “We’re going forward,” Trumball snapped.

  “Possum, what do you have to say about it?” Jamie asked.

  The camera view swivelled back to Craig’s jowly face. “First off, I’d rather be called Wiley than Possum. Second, I agree with Dex: Let’s push ahead and get through this blow.”

  Jamie sat digesting that for a few silent moments. He could feel the others stirring nervously behind him.

  “You’re sure?” he said, stalling for time to think.

  “Yep,” Craig replied.

  It would be safer for them to camp by the generator, Jamie told himself. But if the storm lasts for a week or more they’ll run out of food and have to start back. Without getting the Pathfinder hardware. Their whole trek would be for nothing. That’s what’s eating at Dex. To go all the way out there and return empty-handed. That’s what’s fueling his fire.

  On the other hand, he thought, what if they get killed out there? Is the hardware so important that I should let them risk their lives over it?

  Trumball swung the camera back to his own face. His ragged dark beard made him look truculent, belligerent, as if he were daring Jamie to contradict him.

  “Well?” he demanded. “What are your orders, chief?” The sarcastic stress he laid on the word orders was obvious.

  “Keep on going,” Jamie heard himself say. “And good luck.”

  Trumball looked surprised.

  Vijay followed Jamie into his cubicle when they all filed out of the comm center. What the hell, Jamie thought. If the others didn’t realize we’ve been sleeping together, they know it now.

  Later, cupped against one another in the narrow bunk, she whispered to him, “You did the right thing, Jamie.”

  “Did I?”

  “Dex wouldn’t have obeyed an order to turn around. He would have defied you openly.”

  Jamie sighed in the darkness. “Yes, I suppose he would have.”

  “It was smart to avoid an open conflict.”

  “Maybe.”

  “You don’t think so?”

  “It’s not important,” he said.

  “But it is!” She propped herself on one elbow and looked down at him. “Your authority shouldn’t be challenged.”

  “That doesn’t worry me, Vijay.”

  “It doesn’t? Then what does?”

  He gazed up at her lovely face, outlined in the faint glow from the digital clock. So beautiful, so serious, so concerned about him.

  “What bothers me is that I want Dex to be away from here. Away from you. Away from us.”

  “Wind’s pickin’ up,” Wiley Craig said.

  Trumball was driving the rover with single-minded concentration through a field of rocks big enough to stop army tanks, steering between the minivan-sized boulders while his geologist’s mind begged to go outside and see what they were made of. No time for that, Dex told himself, glancing up at the darkening sky. We’ll do the science on the way back.

  Craig was peering at the readouts on the display screen. The wind was
up to eighty-five knots: Hurricane speed on Earth yet only a zephyr in the rarified atmosphere of Mars. But the wind speed was increasing, and off on the horizon before them an ominous dark cloud hung low over the land.

  “How’re the fuel cells doing?” Trumball asked, without taking his eyes from his steering.

  Craig tapped a few keys on the control panel. “Down to sixty-three percent.”

  “Might as well use them as soon as the solar cells crap out,” Trumball said, through gritted teeth. “Save the batteries.”

  “Use ’em or lose ’em,” Craig agreed. “Get some work outta them before they fade to zero.”

  It took a conscious effort for Dex to unlock his jaws. He had clamped his teeth together so hard it was giving him a headache. If it wasn’t so scary it’d be funny, he told himself. I’m steering this buggy like a kid in a video game, trying to get through this frigging rock field and out into the open before the storm hits us.

  “Any new data on the storm?” he asked.

  Craig tapped more keys, stared at the display screen a moment, then sighed mightily. “She’s gettin’ bigger.”

  “Great.”

  We should have gone back to the generator, Dex admitted silently. Jamie should’ve ordered us to go back. Wiley should’ve insisted on it. This isn’t a game; that storm could kill us, for chrissakes.

  “Want me to drive?” Craig asked gently.

  Trumball glanced at the older man. “Wiley, if I wasn’t driving I’d be biting my fingernails up to the elbows.”

  Craig laughed. “Hell, this isn’t all that bad, Dex. Lemme tell you about the time a hurricane hit us while we were tryin’ to cap a big leak on an oil platform in the Gulf of Mexico. Right near Biloxi it was . . .”

  Trumball listened with only half his attention, but he was grateful that Craig was trying to ease his tension. It wasn’t working, of course, but he was grateful that Wiley was at least trying.

  “It’s definitely going to reach your base camp,” said the meteorologist. “At its present rate of growth and forward speed, the storm will overrun your area in two days—er, that’s two Martian days, sols.”

  Jamie and Stacy Dezhurova watched the report in the comm center. The meteorologist appeared to be in Florida, perhaps Miami. Jamie could see palm trees and high-rise condos through the man’s office window, behind his youthful but intently serious face.