Labyrinth of Night (4 page)

Return to the Red Planet (1990)

Eric Burgess

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The first clues that extraterrestrial intelligence had entered the solar system in the ancient past were largely ignored by the scientific community. When NASA’s
Viking I
space probe rendezvoused with Mars on July 20, 1976, the spacecraft’s orbiter circled the planet, conducting the most extensive photographic mapping of Mars
(see
Chapter Two). During Orbit 35, the
Viking’s
camera caught the first image of the Face, in the Cydonia region of Mars’ northern hemisphere, on the edge of Acidalia Planitia.
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(Animation of
Viking I
approaching and orbiting Mars fades to the first vague photograph of the Face; footage of NASA’s
Viking
team gathering around monitors at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.)

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Although the Face was immediately noticed by the
Viking
Imaging Team, it was dismissed as being a natural formation caused by wind erosion. However, a few scientists and earthbound space explorers followed up on the enigmatic Frame 35A72. Calling themselves the Independent Mars Investigation Team, the dozen members asked an unpopular question: was the Face evidence that a spacefaring interstellar civilization had once inhabited Mars?
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(An orbital panorama of the Cydonia region; graphic lines are overlaid on the photograph to show the relationships between key objects; frame zooms in to focus on separate details in the montage.)

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The informal group examined
Viking
photos of Cydonia over the next decade, now enhanced by a computer-generated processing system called SPIT, or Starburst Pixel Interleaving Technique
(see
Appendix 2). They made a number of intriguing discoveries. Lying 11.2 kilometers west of the Face there was apparently a city, composed of four major pyramids arranged equilaterally in a cluster measuring 4 by 8 kilometers around a central city square. A few kilometers south of the Face, another large structure was located, labeled by the group as the ‘D & M Pyramid’ after Vincent DiPietro and Gregory Molenaar, the Pyramid’s discoverers. Like the City, it was apparently aligned towards the Face. Since the D & M Pyramid seemed to have an unevenly defined fifth side on its north-east flank, apparently a large crevasse had been opened in one side of the Pyramid, possibly caused by meteorite impact. Alignments between the City, the D & M Pyramid and the Face appeared to comprise two adjacent right-angles—a triangle—further evidence that the formations were artificial in origin. In addition, the group calculated that sunrise on Mars occurred during the solstices from directly to the east of the Face, so that the sun could be seen rising above the Face from the City Square,
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(A series of photos and filmclips: a meeting during the first ‘Case For Mars’ conference in Boulder, Colorado; the cover of a report, titled
Unusual Martian Surface Features;
a hilltop radio-telescope dish; the headline of a supermarket tabloid,
Weekly World News:
‘THE FACE ON MARS—A NEW SHOCKER!’
)

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The Independent Mars Investigation Team made their findings public during the 1980s, only to be met by skepticism, and even hostility, from the majority of the space science community. Although the question of whether extraterrestrial intelligences existed was being debated and explored, most SETI research concentrated on detecting radio signals from distant stars, such as Project META in Harvard, Massachusetts
(see
Chapter Fifteen). The idea that evidence of E. T.s existed within our own Solar System was considered ludicrous by most experts. To its dismay, the group saw media exposure of the Face relegated largely to sensational tabloid headlines, lumped in with Bigfoot sightings and reports that Elvis Presley had returned in a UFO.
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(Film clip of a CIS Proton rocket lifting off from a pad; animation of unmanned Russian and American probes coasting into orbit around Mars; footage of the first-generation Mars ship of first American-Russian manned expedition being assembled in
l
ow orbit above Earth near Freedom Station; footage of the landers being released from the
H. G. Wells
above Mars; film clips of Arsia Station in the Tharsis region being assembled.
)

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While advocates of the Face theory pushed for a return to Mars to investigate the mystery in Cydonia, renewed Mars exploration was eventually begun in the last years of the 20th century by the United States and the Commonwealth of Independent States. Unmanned probes, including NASA’s Sample Return Mission, led to the International Mars Project which landed man on the red planet on August 12, 2020
(see
Chapter Two). Arsia Station, the first permanently manned base, was established by the first expedition just south of the equator, approximately 4,700 miles from Cydonia. But the reasons for the first missions had more to do with international politics than scientific inquiry, and the Cydonia enigma remained a low-priority assignment. Even with men on Mars, it was another eight years before the controversy was finally laid to rest by the first human visit to Cydonia.
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O
NE AND A HALF
AU’s from the Sun, Mars glides through space, a rust-colored desert world caught between the placid blue-green beauty of Earth and the immense, multicolored maelstrom of Jupiter. On Earth, it’s early summer in the northern hemisphere, but for Mars summer has ended in the northern latitudes; frozen carbon-dioxide and water have caused the small white icecap at the planet’s north pole to expand again while, south of the equator, it is high spring and the ice pack at the south pole has all but vanished.

As the sun rises over the central meridian, water vapor causes thin, filmy clouds to spawn in the vast canyons of the Valles Marineris, which are quickly evaporated by the new day. For a brief time the winds rise, kicking red sands into the sparse atmosphere before they reluctantly retire again, if only for a while. Mars is a slumbering world, gradually stirring from its rest; as autumn settles on the northern hemisphere and the days get colder, there will be fewer naps for the red planet. Soon the sandstorms will begin and vast curtains of scarlet, wind-borne sand will cloak much of the world, shrouding even the high caldera of Olympus Mons, the great shield volcano north-east at the Valles Marineris.

The Martian day lasts slightly longer than Earth’s: twenty-four hours, thirty-nine minutes and thirty-five seconds. This is one of the few real similarities between the two worlds. Its atmosphere is composed principally of carbon-dioxide and has a density of seven millibars in the Amazonis Planitia, as compared to Earth’s atmospheric density of one thousand millibars at sea level. Mars has no ‘sea level’; its seas and oceans evaporated millions of years ago, and the lack of atmospheric pressure means that free-standing water simply could not exist. High summer at the Martian equator is when the ground temperature has risen to a sweltering 62 degrees Fahrenheit; during winter, the temperature can plunge to 172° below zero at the north pole.

A long time ago, an all-but-forgotten American vice-president named Daniel Quayle made the following observation about Mars during a TV interview: ‘Mars is in essentially the same orbit. Mars is somewhat the same distance from the Sun, which is very important. We have seen pictures where there are canals, we believe, and water. If there is water, that means there is oxygen. If oxygen, that means we can breathe.’

Dan Quayle was stupid. Mars is not Earth’s twin brother with a bad skin problem. This is a cold world. This is a harsh world.

But by no means is it a lifeless world.

Forty million miles from Earth, the NASDA/Uchu-Hiko cycleship SS
Shinseiki
coasted on the last leg of its outbound flight to Mars, gracefully spinning on its central axis like a three-vaned weathercock.

Nine months earlier, three interplanetary vessels had fired their nuclear-thermal engines and launched themselves from Earth orbit, following identical trajectories toward the red planet. Once having escaped Earth’s gravity well, beyond the orbit of the Moon, the vessels had rendezvoused in deep space. The three ships linked together at the multiple-target docking adapter at each forward bow, so that each vessel lay 120 degrees apart from the other, forming a pinwheel 240 feet in diameter. Long heat radiators accordioned outward from the ends of each of the three arms, and reaction-control jets fired to spin the pinwheel clockwise to produce one-third Earth gravity within the two cylindrical habitation modules that lay behind the solar-thermal dishes on each arm.

In this way, once again, the
Shinseiki
was created, just as it had been twice already. Elsewhere in the vast distance separating Earth and Mars, its two sister cycleships were on other stages of the Mars Run; the USS
Percival Lowell,
the American ship operated by Skycorp, was on the long, lonely return flight from the red planet, and the SS
Sergei Korolev,
the CIS ship jointly operated by Glavkosmos and Arianespace, was being refitted for launch from the Mir space station in Earth orbit. Every five to ten months, depending on orbital conjunctions between the two planets, a different cycleship returns to Mars, with the three of them forming a long, cycling bridge between the worlds. This time, it was the
Shinseiki’s
turn to visit the planet of the war god.

On this visit, though, the
Shinseiki
carried more than relief crews, consumables, replacement parts and mail. In hibernation deck-B of Module Two, five men were being administered drugs to wake them from their long sleep. Above them, on the other side of Arm Two’s long truss and sheathed in layers of protective gold film, were the two aeroshells which August Nash had photographed in the payload bay of the
Constellation
many months earlier.

And on the opposite end of Arm Two, in a storage compartment in Module One, was a guitar.

Ten months after he had first spoken with Richard Jessup, Ben Cassidy found himself watching a cup of coffee spill in a way that he had never seen coffee spill before in his life. He had just settled into a chair in the cycleship’s wardroom—a chair which pulled out along a slender, jointed rail from underneath the hexagonal table and unfolded like a box-top—and the Japanese commander, Minora Omori, had placed the paper cup of coffee on the table near his elbow. Dick Jessup, who had taken a seat across the table from him, had held out a briefing folder to him; when Cassidy had reached to take the folder, his elbow knocked over the cup.

The coffee spilled in slow motion, as if caught by time-lapse photography. It tipped over at a weird angle and the coffee sloshed out at a slightly curving trajectory; like a blob of brown mercury the liquid seemed to follow a path of its own making, slopping to the left. Cassidy found himself staring at it as Jessup made a grab for a paper towel from the galley counter behind him. Jessup sopped up the mess before it reached Cassidy’s lap, then looked up and noticed the dazed look on the musician’s face.

‘Coriolis effect,’ he said. ‘It’s caused by the ship’s rotation. Don’t worry, you won’t be here long enough to have to get used to it.’

‘Oh,’ Cassidy murmured. ‘That’s great.’

‘How are you doing? Got your bearings yet?’

‘Yeah. Sure. Doing fine.’ Of course he was doing fine. He had just come to the realization that he was in a Japanese spaceship in orbit around Mars, about 40 million miles from everything he had ever known or loved, where even a cup of coffee doesn’t spill right. And how are you doing today, Dick?

Cassidy watched Jessup as he got up and walked to the galley to throw the towel into the recycling chute. The first impression Cassidy had had of Jessup, when they had met in Waterville almost a year ago, was that the man was a suit and little more: tall, dark-haired, whipcord-thin, conservative in every sense, having little or no sense of humor and patronizing to an offensive degree. Another bureaucrat, indistinguishable from the average IRS accountant or post office clerk. Yet, while there was obviously more to Richard Jessup than met the eye, he was still an enigma to Cassidy. Of course, Cassidy had been asleep during most of their relationship, so maybe it was a little early to pass judgment…but he didn’t like Jessup during their first encounter, and he still had no reason to trust the man.

Behind him, he could hear the amused snickers of the Marines, two tough guys from the First Space Infantry who had been revived from the zombie tanks in the hibernation bay shortly before he had. Biostasis had been part of their training; anyone who had never before been in drug-induced suspended animation for nine months was obviously a woosie. So it was okay for them to laugh, these professional badasses leaning against the bulkhead in the subdued half-light of the wardroom.

‘Got them zombie shakes,’ he heard one of them whisper.

‘Too much rock ‘n roll, man,’ his buddy replied.

Screw you both, Cassidy thought. To hide his embarrassment, he glanced up at the wrap-around bank of screens suspended above the table. One of the screens showed a computer-enhanced image of Mars as captured by a camera at the
Shinseiki’s
hub. As he watched, one of the cycleship’s three spindly arms glided past the bloodshot-eye of Mars, surrounded by blackness and tiny blue readouts.

He blinked at it. Yeah, it was Mars all right. Now, what in the name of God was he doing here?

Captain Omori, the
Shinseiki’s
commanding officer, carefully placed another cup of coffee on the table in front of Cassidy and unfolded his own chair at the table. Jessup sat down at the table again, cleared his throat, and flipped a page on his clipboard. ‘Thank you all for being here,’ he said. ‘Like you, I’m still recovering from the tanks…’