Tales of the Grand Tour

by Ben Bova

  The young meteorologist went on to give all the data he could present: maximum wind speeds would be above two hundred knots; the storm’s forward progress was a steady thirty-five knots; height of the clouds; dust burden; opacity. Many of the numbers were estimates or averages.

  “We must make certain all the planes are tied down really tight,” Stacy muttered as the meteorologist droned on.

  Jamie nodded. “And the generator, too.” He knew, in the calculating side of his brain, that even a two-hundred-knot wind on Mars did not have the momentum to knock down the tall cylinder that housed the fuel and water generator, especially when its tanks were full. The Martian atmosphere was so thin that there was little punch to its winds. Yet the other side of his mind pictured the generator toppling, blown over like a big tree in a hurricane.

  Dezhurova nodded. “We must get on it right away.”

  “Tómas and I will do the outside work,” Jamie said once the meteorologist finished his report. “You see that everything in here is buttoned up and everybody’s ready for a blow.”

  He slid his wheeled chair to the screen where the meteorologist’s frozen image stared out at them, face lined with concern, and punched the transmit key.

  “Dr. Kaderly, thanks for your report. It helps a lot. Please keep us updated and let us know immediately if there’s any change in the storm’s progress.”

  Then he turned back to Stacy, sitting beside him. “Send Kaderly’s report to Poss . . . I mean, to Wiley Craig and Dex. Then get the others started getting ready for the storm.”

  “Right, chief.”

  Jamie got up and headed for the airlock and the hard suits waiting by the lockers there. Somehow he didn’t mind it when Stacy called him chief. There was no mockery in her tone.

  As he began pulling on the rust-stained leggings of his hard suit, Jamie thought about Dex and Craig out there between Xanthe and Ares Vallis. They’re going to be caught in the storm for two sols, at least. Without a backup electrical system. The batteries ought to see them through okay, if they power down to a minimum. That means they’re going to have to stop and sit there until the storm blows past them.

  They’ll be okay. If they just keep their cool and wait it out, they’ll get through the storm all right.

  If the dust doesn’t damage their solar panels.

  “What do you think, Wiley?” asked Dex Trumball as soon as the meteorologist’s detailed report ended.

  Craig was driving the rover at a steady thirty klicks per hour. “How the hell fast is one knot? I always get confused.”

  Sitting in the right seat, staring out at the darkening horizon in front of them, Dex said, “It’s one nautical mile per hour.”

  “What’s that in real miles?”

  “Does it make that much difference?”

  Craig hunched his shoulders. “Naw, I guess not.”

  “It’s about one point fifteen statute miles.”

  “Fifteen percent longer’n a regular mile?”

  “That’s right.” Trumball was starting to feel exasperated. What difference did fifteen percent make? They were driving straight into a dust storm. A big one.

  “So it’ll take about two sols for the storm to pass over us.”

  “If we’re sitting still, yes.”

  Craig glanced over at Dex, then turned back to his driving. “You want to keep mushing ahead?”

  “Why not? As long as the solar cells are working, why not push ahead? Get the hell out of this mess as quick as we can.”

  “Hmm.” Craig seemed to think it over carefully. “Hell of it is, we got some nice smooth territory here. Pretty easy driving.”

  The land outside was not entirely free of rocks, but it was much more open and flat than the broken and boulder-strewn region of Xanthe they had been through. The ground was sloping downward gently, generally trending toward the lowlands of the Ares Vallis region.

  “We’re going to turn this route into a regular excursion for the tourists, Wiley,” Dex said, mainly to take his mind off the ominous cloud spreading across the horizon before them.

  “Build a road? Out here?”

  “Won’t need a road. We’ll put up a cable-car system, like they’re doing on the Moon. Just put up poles every hundred meters or so and string a line between ’em. The cars hang from the line and zip along, whoosh!” Dex made a swooping motion with one hand.

  Craig fell into the game. “The cable carries the electrical current to run the cars, huh?”

  “Right,” Dex said, trying not to look out at the horizon. “Cars can carry a couple dozen people. They’re sealed like spacecraft, carry their own air, heat, just like this rover.”

  “Only they skim over th’ ground,” Craig said.

  “They’ll be able to go a lot faster that way. A hundred klicks an hour, maybe.”

  Without taking his eyes from his driving, Craig said softly, “Wish we had one of ’em now.”

  Dex stared out the windshield. It was starting to get dark out there. The mammoth cloud of dust was coming toward them like a vast Mongol horde of conquerors. Soon it would engulf them entirely and they would be lost in the dark.

  He remembered an old adage about the weather: Red sky at night, sailor’s delight.

  Yeah, but that was back on Earth. Here on Mars the sky was always red. And there hadn’t been any sailors here for hundreds of millions of years, at least.

  As he stared at the approaching cloud he shivered involuntarily.

  Jamie was outside with Rodriguez, adding extra tie-down lines to the planes, when the call came through from Pete Connors, mission controller at Tarawa.

  Inside his hard suit, he could not see the former astronaut, only hear his caramel-rich baritone voice. Connors sounded concerned, worried.

  “Old man Trumball’s on the warpath, Jamie. I just heard about it from Dr. Li. He called Li and raised hell about you. He’s calling everybody on the ICU board. God knows who else he’s bitching to.”

  Jamie had asked that Connors’s call be put on the personal frequency, so that he could listen to the man in privacy.

  “I don’t need this,” he muttered as he tugged at the line that held the soarplane’s wingtip to one of the bolts they had sunk into the ground.

  Connors’s voice went on, unhearing, more than a hundred million kilometers away. “I’ve talked to several of the board members myself. None of them really wants to remove you, but they’re pretty scared of Trumball. He must be threatening to cut off funding for the next expedition.”

  Straightening in the hard suit was not an easy task. Jamie found himself puffing with exertion as he looked back toward the dome. Fuchida and Dezhurova were in the garden bubble, carefully checking its plastic skin for pinhole leaks or wrinkles where the wind might grab and tear the fabric apart.

  Once the dust starts blowing, will the particles have enough force in them to penetrate the bubble’s skin? he wondered. Not likely, but then the odds against the main dome being hit by meteoroids were a zillion to one and that had happened on the first expedition.

  Connors was still talking. “I had a long talk with Fr. DiNardo about it. He’s a damned good politician, that Jesuit, you know that? He says you should sit tight and ignore the whole thing. It’ll probably blow over as soon as the storm dissipates and Trumball realizes nothing’s happened to his son.”

  Jamie nodded inside his helmet as he walked over to the soarplane’s other wingtip and started tightening the lines already fastened there.

  “DiNardo said,” Connors continued, “that you shouldn’t even think about resigning unless Trumball keeps up the pressure even after the storm blows out and it becomes clear that a majority of the board’s going to go along with him.”

  Resigning? Jamie thought, alarmed. He thinks I should resign?

  Connors went on with his dolorous report, reminding Jamie several times more that he hated to bother him with this political maneuvering but he thought Jamie ought to know about it.

  Finally he said, �
��Well, that’s the whole story, up to now. I’ll wait for your answer. Be sure you mark it personal to me; that way nobody else’ll look at it. At least, nobody else should look at it. I don’t know how many people around here are reporting to Trumball on the sly.”

  Wonderful news, Jamie groaned silently.

  “Well, okay, that’s it, pal. I’ll wait for your answer. ’Bye for now.”

  Off on the eastern horizon, Jamie saw, the sky was darkening. Or is it just my imagination? he asked himself. I’ll check the instrumentation when I get back into the dome.

  How’s that old rhyme go? Jamie asked himself. Red sky at night, sailor’s delight. Red sky at morning, sailor take warning. What about when the sky turns black?

  The storm’s going to hit here, all right. No way around that. And now I’ve got another storm, a political squall, back on Earth.

  He glanced down at the suit radio’s keypad on his wrist, then said carefully, “Personal message to Pete Connors at Tarawa. Pete, I got your message. We’re battening down for the storm right now, so I don’t have time to reply. I want to think about this before I answer you, anyway. Thanks for the news, I guess. I’ll get back to you.”

  Damn, he thought as he stared out at the eastern horizon. It sure looks like it’s clouding up out there. Maybe the storm’s picked up speed. That’d be good; it’ll roll over Dex and Craig and get them out into the clear sooner.

  Starting back toward the dome’s airlock, Jamie said to himself, Why is Trumball so clanked up? Why is he out to remove me as mission director? Prejudice? Just plain malice? Or is he the type who’s not happy unless he’s forcing other people to jump through his hoops?

  Then Jamie heard his grandfather whisper, Put yourself in his shoes. Find what’s bothering him.

  Okay, Grandfather, he replied silently. What’s bothering the old man?

  His son is in danger, came the immediate reply. He’s worried about Dex’s safety. That’s natural. That’s good.

  But Trumball knew that exploring Mars carried its risks. Maybe he never considered that his own son would have to face those risks, just like the rest of us.

  He was all in favor of going after the Pathfinder hardware. But he didn’t think his son would be in any danger. Now he knows differently and he’s scared. He’s sitting in an office in Boston and his son is out in the middle of a dust storm a hundred million kilometers away and there’s nothing he can do about it.

  Except get angry and vent his fury on the most convenient target he can find: The mission director who allowed his son to go out into danger. Me. He’s pissed at me because he can’t do anything else about the situation. He’s scared and frustrated and trying to solve his problem the way he’s solved problems before: Fire the guy he’s mad at.

  Jamie took a deep breath and felt a calm warmth flow through him. He heard his grandfather’s gentle laughter. “Never lose your temper with a customer,” his grandfather had told him years ago, when Jamie had been a little boy angered by the pushy, demanding, loud-mouthed tourists who yelled at Al in his Santa Fe shop. “Let ’em whoop and holler, it don’t matter. Once they calm down they’re so ashamed of themselves that they’ll buy twice what they started out to buy, just to show they’re sorry.”

  Damn! Jamie said to himself as he trudged back to the airlock. It would be so satisfying to get sore at Trumball, to send him a blistering message telling him to mind his own damned business. So easy to taunt the old man from a hundred million kilometers’ distance.

  But I can’t get angry at him, Jamie realized. I understand what he’s going through. I understand him and you can’t hate a man you understand.

  As he stepped into the airlock and swung its outer hatch shut, he reminded himself, But just because you understand him doesn’t mean he can’t hurt you. You understand a rattlesnake, too, but you don’t let him bite you. Not if you can avoid it.

  “That’s all she wrote,” said Craig.

  He touched the brakes and brought the rover to a gentle stop.

  “It’s not even six o’clock yet, Wiley,” Dex protested. “We can get in another hour or more.”

  Craig got up from the driver’s seat. “I got an idea.”

  The sky was a dismal gray above them, getting darker by the minute. Dex could hear the wind now, a thin screeching sound like the wail of a distant banshee.

  “I’ll drive,” he offered.

  “Nope,” said Craig, heading back toward the bunks. “You gotta know when to hold ’em and know when to fold ’em. We sit still now and get ready for the storm.”

  “It’s not that bad yet,” Trumball insisted, turning in his seat to watch the older man. “We can push on a little more, at least.”

  Craig knelt down and pulled open the storage drawer beneath the bottom bunk. “The real danger from the storm’s gonna be the damage the sand does to our solar panels, right?”

  “Right,” Dex answered, wondering what his partner was up to.

  Craig pulled a set of sheets from the storage drawer. “So we cover the solar panels.”

  “Cover them? With bedsheets?”

  “And anything else we got,” Craig said. “Coveralls, plastic wrap, anything we got.”

  “But once they’re covered they’ll stop producing electricity for us. We’ll have to go onto the batteries.”

  Craig was emptying the drawer beneath the other bunk now. “Take a look at the instruments, buddy. It’s gettin’ mighty dark mighty quick. Those solar cells are already down to less’n thirty percent nominal, right?”

  Dex glanced at the panel instruments. The solar panels’ output hovered just above twenty-five percent of their maximum output.

  “Right,” he replied dismally.

  “So don’t just sit there,” Craig called, almost jovially. “Get up and find the duct tape, for cryin’ out loud.”

  Dex thought, This is just busywork. We won’t be able to keep the panels covered once the storm hits. Wind speeds are going to over two hundred knots, for chrissake. That’ll rip off anything we try to cover the panels with.

  But he pushed himself out of the chair, wormed his way past Craig, and started searching through the supplies locker, grateful for the chance to be doing something active instead of just sitting and watching the storm approach them.

  Wiley Craig ran the beam from his hand lamp across the rover from nose to tail.

  “Well . . . it ain’t a thing of beauty,” he said, “but it oughtta get the job done.”

  Standing beside him, Dex thought that the rover’s top looked like a Christmas present wrapped by clumsy children. Bedsheets, plastic wrapping, a tarpaulin, and several sets of spare coveralls—sliced apart to cover more area—were spread over the solar panels and taped down heavily.

  “Do you think they’ll stay put once the wind starts up?” he asked.

  Craig was silent for a moment, then said, “Oughtta. Wind must be purty near seventy knots already and they’re not flappin’.”

  Dex could hear the wind keening outside his helmet, softly but steadily, becoming insistent. He thought he also heard something grating across his suit’s outer skin, like fine grains of sand peppering him. He almost could feel the dust scratching against him.

  It was fully dark now. Dex felt tired, physically weary, yet his insides were jumpy, jittery. In the light from Wiley’s lamp he could see that the air was clear; no dust swirling. None that he could see. Yet there was that gritty rasping on the suit’s hard shell.

  “We could have driven another hour,” he said to Craig.

  “Maybe.”

  “Hell, Wiley, I’ve driven through snowstorms in New England.” Despite his words, Dex’s voice sounded quavery, even to himself.

  “This ain’t the Massachusetts Turnpike out here, buddy.”

  “So what do we do now? Just sit and bite our nails?”

  “Nope. We’re gonna collect all the data we can. Then we’re gonna have dinner. Then we’re gonna get a good night’s sleep.”

  Dex stared at
Craig’s space-suited figure. He doesn’t sound worried at all. The goddamned fuel cells are leaking and the solar panels are shut down and we’ll have to live off the batteries for god knows how long and he’s as calm and unruffled as a guy riding out a blizzard in a first-class ski lodge.

  “Okay, boss,” Dex asked, trying to sound nonchalant, “what do you want me to do now?”

  “You go inside and check the fuel cells, make sure all the comm systems are workin’, and call back to the base, let ’em know we’re buttoned up for the night.”

  Dex nodded. The commsats in orbit will pinpoint our location. If anything happens to us, he thought, at least they’ll know where to find the bodies.

  Craig whistled tunelessly as he trudged back to the airlock for a met/geo beacon to plant outside the rover. Dex went back inside and started to take off his hard suit. He knew that he should stay suited up and be prepared to go outside in case Craig got into trouble. But he was too tired, too drained, too plain frightened even to think about that.

  His eyes smarted briefly as he painstakingly vacuumed the dust off his suit. Ozone, from the superoxides in the soil, he knew. We could keep ourselves supplied with oxygen just by dumping some of the red dirt in here, he told himself.

  Once out of the suit, he went up to the cockpit and stared out at the darkening landscape, feeling his insides fluttering. I’m scared, Dex said to himself. Like a kid afraid of the dark. Scared. Wiley’s as calm as can be and I’m falling apart. Shit!

  With nothing better to do, he checked the communications file for incoming messages. The usual garbage from the base, plenty of satellite data about the approaching storm. And a message marked personal for him.

  Only one person in the solar system would be sending me a personal message, Dex thought. With a mixture of anger and relief he tapped the proper keys and saw his father’s glowering skull-like face appear on the rover’s control panel screen.

  Just what I need, he thought. Comic relief from dear old Dad.