by Ben Bova
McPherson fidgeted impatiently.
Standing beside him in the narrow compartment, Catherine murmured, “Patience, mon amour.”
She had been trying to teach Hi some conversational French, but he was not a fast learner. He had decided, though, that taking time to learn his wife’s language was a good way to keep his mind diverted from the struggle for survival they were facing.
“Oui,” he replied.
Catherine laughed, a delightful sound in his ears. “Conversation in French. Merveilleux.”
He grinned back at her.
Then the blue light winked off and they heard the clatter of the pump sucking the air out of the chamber. The green light turned amber. The sound of the pump grew fainter and higher-pitched. Then it quit altogether and the panel’s red light showed that the airlock was now in vacuum.
Clicking off his suit radio, Hi leaned close enough to Catherine so that their helmets touched. “I was thinking,” he whispered, his voice carried to her ears by conduction, “that we could turn the auxiliary airlock into a honeymoon suite.”
She looked surprised, but then she smiled and nodded. “Tonight.”
“Ce soir,” he agreed.
Then he pressed a gloved finger on the control button and the hatch swung open. They stepped out onto the surface of Mars.
November 8, 2035
Mars Landing Plus 3 Days
12:24 Universal Time
Elysium Planitia
I’ve seen this before, somewhere, McPherson thought as he and Catherine stood outside the airlock. The hint of familiarity tugged at his memory.
The plain that humans had named Elysium stretched out to the horizon and beyond. Although McPherson knew it was well below freezing outside his suit, the area looked warm, almost inviting, with the Sun shining bountifully out of the cloudless sky.
All around them was rusty desert in shades of orange and red. The ground undulated, dipping here and there in little gullies, rising in sinuous mounds. Rocks and pebbles were sprinkled everywhere, some of them as big as a compact automobile. Very few craters, although he noticed some pockmarks, as if fingertips had been poked into the sand. Off by the horizon was a row of reddish bare hills, their flanks creased with furrows.
Pointing to the hills, Catherine said, “Water flowed there once, long ago.”
“Water, or some other kind of liquid,” he replied.
“Water.” She had made up her mind.
Absolutely barren, McPherson saw. Not a tree or a bush or even a blade of grass.
“Well, there’s no water here now.”
“Below the ground,” said Catherine. “Permafrost. The satellite sensors showed it.”
Nodding inside his helmet, McPherson thought that the earlier satellite readings indicated the presence of permafrost below the surface. They didn’t prove it. And they didn’t show how deep underground the ice might be.
“I’ve been here before,” he murmured.
“Quoi?” What?
Searching his memory, McPherson realized, “Arizona. Up in the Navaho territory. It looks like this.”
“Truly?”
Chuckling, he explained, “Oh, the badlands out there look like a Garden of Eden compared to this. But the feeling is the same. Not desolation, but . . . well, a stark kind of beauty.”
“I prefer Tahiti,” said Catherine. “Even with the tourists.”
McPherson laughed. “No tourists here.”
“Not yet.”
She started toward the Hercules, standing against the butterscotch sky, but McPherson touched her arm and pointed off toward their right.
“Let’s go this way,” he said. “We’ve seen the area between here and the lander. Let’s go someplace different.”
Catherine couldn’t shrug inside her surface suit, but he heard it in her voice. “If you wish.”
A little over an hour later, Catherine and Hi were making good progress eastward. They had no roving vehicle, so their exploration was limited to how far their feet could take them. Both carried sample collection bags slung over their shoulders, high-resolution cameras tucked into their leg pouches and spindly looking ExtendArms clipped to their right wrists. Their prime objective was to locate and mark any sites that looked promising for finding water ice.
Catherine suddenly gasped. “Look! A stream bed!”
It certainly looked like the bed of a stream that had dried up long ago, McPherson thought. Like an arroyo in the Arizona desert, waiting for the next cloudburst to fill it with rushing water. There hasn’t been a cloudburst here for a billion years or more, he knew. But here it is, like it’s been waiting for us to discover it.
Catherine began picking up rocks with her ExtendArm implement. Electronically slaved to the movements of her right hand, it allowed her to pick up rocks without bending over or kneeling on the Martian sand, potentially damaging her suit.
She held up one of the smooth, rounded pebbles in her gloved left hand. “Eroded by water flow,” she pronounced, holding it up for McPherson to examine.
“We’ll have to check their chemical composition,” he said, “see if there’s phosphates or other indicators of water.”
“Indeed,” Catherine said, stuffing the samples into the collection bag she carried slung over her shoulder. “Indeed.”
Looking beyond her, McPherson saw a curved ridge of rock that rose a few centimeters above the sand. Ancient crater rim? he asked himself. Leaving Catherine in the arroyo, he went to the rim and started chipping out samples of its rock.
“Two hours,” Connover’s voice sounded in their helmets.
“Already?” cried Catherine.
“Stow what you’ve picked up in the ascent stage,” Ted commanded, “then come back in.”
“Too soon!” Catherine pleaded. “Another hour, please. Thirty minutes, at least.”
McPherson couldn’t see her face, her back was to him. But he heard the plaintive supplication in her voice, like a child begging her father to be allowed to stay up just a few minutes more.
Connover replied, “Thirty minutes, Catherine, and that’s it. No arguments.”
“No arguments,” she said gratefully. “Merci.”
They rode the elevator up to the Hercules airlock and, after spending nearly an hour carefully labeling each sample case with the precise location and date of its collection, they sealed their finds in the spacecraft’s lockers. Both Catherine and Hi kept about half the samples they had picked up. They intended to study them in the habitat’s miniature geology lab.
As they trudged back to the habitat, McPherson looked back at the plain of Elysium. Their footprints looked new and bright in the reddish sand. But not strange, not intrusive. It’s like we belong here, he thought. It’s like Mars has been waiting for us to show up.
He smiled at the thought.
November 10, 2035
Mars Landing Plus 5 Days
18:40 Universal Time
Dirksen Senate Office Building
Senator William Donaldson sat sourly behind his imposing desk, absently swirling a heavy crystal glass of single-malt scotch in one hand as he scowled at the big flat panel TV screen set into the wall above his office’s fireplace.
The fireplace was strictly for show, it had never been lit, as far as Donaldson knew. And what was playing on the TV screen was strictly for show, too, he knew. A big, stupid public relations show promoting those idiots on Mars.
Two of them were out in the open, wearing their white suits and helmets. But the suits weren’t lily-white anymore. Five days out on the sands of Mars and the suits were turning pink, especially their boots and leggings, and their gloves.
“The atmosphere here on Mars is so thin,” the male astronaut was saying from inside his helmet, “that water boils away immediately, even though the temperature is well below freezing.”
“Having that damned news reporter with them makes it all look completely ridiculous,” Donaldson grumbled to the trio of aides who were watching the broadcas
t with him.
They nodded in unison.
On the TV screen, Steven Treadway appeared to be standing between the two spacesuited astronauts. Unlike them, he was wearing his usual white shirt and slacks. Virtual reality, Donaldson snorted to himself. Just plain stupid.
The male astronaut—identified on the bottom of the screen as geologist Hiram McPherson—was holding a small bottle of water in his gloved hand.
Treadway was saying, “Do you mean that if you uncapped that bottle you’re holding, the water would boil away? Just like that?”
“That’s right, Steve. Look.”
The TV camera moved in closer as McPherson unscrewed the bottle’s cap. As soon as he removed it the water in the bottle began to froth furiously. In seconds it was all gone.
“Wow!” said Treadway. An intellectual giant, Donaldson thought. And wasn’t there a delay? This had to be scripted.
“And the temperature right now is . . . ?”
McPherson raised his left hand and peered at the instrument cuff on his wrist. “It’s twenty-three degrees below zero, Steve. An average summer afternoon on Mars.”
“But the air pressure is so low that the water boils, even at such a low temperature.”
“That’s right, Steve.”
“Turn it off,” Donaldson snapped. “I’ve seen enough.”
The pert young woman who headed the senator’s public relations staff picked up the remote from a corner of the senator’s desk and clicked the TV screen to darkness.
“Publicity stunt,” Donaldson grumbled.
“Yeah,” said his chief of staff, a pudgy, short, balding New Englander with a pouchy-eyed face that masked a keen analytical mind. He had successfully guided Donaldson through many political campaigns. “But that trick of writing your name in the sand with a magnet, that’s pretty neat.”
“Tomfoolery,” Donaldson groused.
“The sand’s loaded with iron,” said his third aide, his techie guru.
“A striking image,” said the PR woman.
Donaldson looked at them the way Julius Caesar must have looked at Brutus, at that last instant.
“Whose side are you people on?” he demanded.
“Yours, of course,” said his chief of staff. His normally cheerful round face was quite serious. As he sat up straighter in his chair his unbuttoned suit jacket flapped open around his corpulent middle.
“But this stuff coming from Mars is a real problem,” said the PR person. “Audience response has been tremendous, even with the religious groups that want the mission cancelled.”
“A lot of kids, though,” the chief of staff said. “They don’t vote.”
The PR person was a light-skinned Hispanic woman. “Great publicity for the Mars people. The numbers show overwhelming support for sending the next mission out there to save their lives.”
Donaldson remembered the three laws of politics enunciated by the man for whom this Senate Office Building had been named, Ohio Senator Everett Dirksen: Get elected. Get reelected. Don’t get mad, get even.
“All right,” he said, putting his drink down on the green Vermont marble coaster atop his desk. “What do we do about this?”
His chief of staff said, “Harper’s going to ask you to reinstate funding for the follow-on mission.”
“I know that. What do we do about it?”
“You can’t oppose it,” the PR director said. “You’d look like an insensitive know-nothing.”
“Or a murderer,” said the tech guru.
Donaldson glared at him.
His chief of staff hauled himself out of the chair and headed for the bar, hidden behind a row of false book spines.
“You’ve got to give the appearance of going along with the follow-on mission,” he told the senator, over his shoulder.
“Give the appearance of caving in to Harper? Never!”
Bending over to pick a bottle of ginger ale from the bar’s refrigerator, the chief of staff said, “You want the party’s nomination next year? You go along with the follow-on. QED.”
“Never,” Donaldson repeated, but more softly.
With an amiable smile on his moon face, the staff chief said, “It’s politics, William. You’ve got to give something to get something.”
Donaldson frowned as his longtime friend and advisor settled himself back in his chair.
“After all,” the man went on, “you at least have to give the impression that you’re willing to bend in order to try to save those four nitwits on Mars.”
“Give the impression,” Donaldson muttered.
“You ask your subcommittee to study the possibility of replacing the funding for the follow-on. You tell the NASA people to appear before the subcommittee and lay out their plans for the mission, together with their best estimate for its chance of success.”
Donaldson nodded slowly.
“These things take time, of course. Drag it out until the party’s convention next July. Then, once you’ve got the nomination in your pocket, you just let the follow-on die a natural death. Who knows, by then those people on Mars might be dead anyway and most people will have forgotten all about the chemicals that the Chinese claim to have found.”
Donaldson glanced at his PR director, who gave the idea a tentative smile. “It could work,” she said.
The tech guru looked less happy.
“As president,” the chief of staff said, “you can see to it that we build a monument to the four dead heroes.”
Donaldson added, “As president, I’ll make sure we don’t waste any more money on sending people to Mars.”
November 15, 2035
Mars Landing Plus 10 Days
07:14 Universal Time
The Arrow
Sitting in the command center, Benson held one of the Mars rocks in his hands. It had been sitting in an airtight plastic pouch in one of the ascent stage’s lockers, together with a scribbled note signed by Catherine and Hi:
Bee—Thanks for everything.
Here’s a remembrance for you. Bon voyage.
After thanking them, Benson got detailed instructions from Amanda Lynn on how to handle the rock. To prevent any possible contamination of the Arrow, she explained, the rock had to be heated to more than two hundred seventy-five degrees Fahrenheit for more than thirty minutes, long enough to kill any known bacteria, viruses or prions. Only then would it be safe to handle in the ship’s open air. As the mission’s resident biologist, Amanda took an almost proprietary interest in the rock’s “care and feeding.”
Now Benson held the rock in his bare hands. It fit into his palm easily, a smooth oblong rust-red stone with flecks of pale gray spotting it. He couldn’t help marveling at it.
He held it up to the light for the umpteenth time, trying in vain to see something different about it, something exotic or alien.
It just looks like a rock, he concluded. It would take trained geologists with their specialized instruments to see if there was anything extraordinary about it.
Swiveling his command chair slightly, he called, “Taki, would you come over here, please?”
The ship’s doctor was, by default, their chief biologist now that Amanda was down on the surface. She looked up from the console where she’d been checking the Arrow’s life-support system and pushed over to Benson.
“What’s up, Bee?” she asked as she grasped the back of his chair to stop herself.
“Have you found any signs of life in the samples you’ve cultured so far?”
She grinned at him. “If I had you would have known it by now. My whoop would probably be heard all the way back to Earth.”
Benson nodded. “Yes, I imagine so.”
More seriously, Nomura said, “No, so far all the cultures are negative. If there’s anything alive in these samples it’s not responding to any of the tests I know how to do. If there were any Earthlike bacteria, even just a few, the tests would have shown it in a matter of minutes. No viruses, either, as far as I can tell. I’m running a te
st for prions back in the bio lab right now, but I don’t expect any positive results.”
“Well, keep me posted, will you? I can hardly bring myself to put this one down. I keep expecting to see some little green creature wriggling out of it.”
With a laugh, Nomura replied, “If you see one, you let me know.”
“Right,” said Benson. Then, his tone darkening, “I hate to change the subject, but how’s Mikhail doing?”
“Today is a better day. He ate a full breakfast and he’s talking about resuming some of his shipboard duties. He wants to help with our departure for Earth. I think you should let him.”
“Good idea. I can task him with some of the checklists. He’s cross-trained for that, and it shouldn’t strain him too much. Besides, it won’t mess things up too much if he gets distracted.”
“Just make sure it’s meaningful, Bee,” said Nomura. “He’s no dummy. If it’s just a makework task he’ll know you’re humoring him and he’ll feel hurt.”
“Encourage him, not discourage him,” Benson said.
“That’s the ticket.” Nomura floated away from the chair and started for the hatch. “I’ll help him get dressed for duty. I’ll have him back here in about half an hour.”
“Right.” Benson watched Taki glide through the hatch, then turned and rested the rock atop the control panel, where he could see it as he worked. They were planning to break out of Mars orbit in two days and there was a lot to take care of before then.
Twenty-some minutes later, he head Prokhorov’s raspy voice. “Reporting for duty, Commander.”
Turning, Benson smiled to see the Russian standing as stiffly as he could in zero gravity, his right hand raised to his brow, a crooked smile on his lips. Prokhorov looked almost painfully thin: his coveralls hung on his gaunt frame like an oversized sheet. His face was pale and his cheekbones more prominent than they had been a few weeks earlier.