Mars (40 page)

Then at last he heard Jamie’s words. He stopped short, muttered, “Wait …”

Jamie realized that Brumado had an instant-replay feature
on his console, wherever on Earth he was. He watched Brumado’s face as the Brazilian listened to his words.

“Ah. Yes. That is the deal. You send me a statement supporting the Vice-President. I hold it until she makes a public announcement of her support for further Mars missions. Then I give her people your statement. When you return from Mars you announce your support of her candidacy. Everyone gets what they want. Everyone is happy.”

Not quite everyone, Jamie thought. Then he heard himself say, “There’s one thing more. I want the schedule rearranged so we can go back to Tithonium Chasma before we leave. Otherwise no deal.”

Alberto Brumado felt his jaw drop. He was accustomed to demands and counterdemands from the politicians, even from the academics who ruled universities. But to get one from this young pup of a scientist was something of a shock.

“Rearrange the mission schedule? But that would be impossible.”

He watched Waterman’s stolid broad-cheeked face as his words raced to Mars with the speed of light. It seemed to take forever.

Finally Waterman replied, “Either we go back to Tithonium Chasma and take a good look at that rock formation or there’s no deal. I know that she’ll demand that I be taken off the ground team and O’Hara brought down to replace me. Okay. If she does that I’ll yell my head off once we’ve returned to Earth. I’ll tell the media that I was removed from the ground team
because
I’m a Native American and she’s against full political rights for ethnic minorities.”

Brumado felt perspiration breaking out across his forehead. “You are putting me—the entire project administration—in a very difficult situation.”

Waterman’s reply, when it came, was, “That can’t be helped. This is important, much more important than who gets elected next year. We’ve got to go back to the canyon.”

“All right,” Brumado said reluctantly. “I’ll see what I can do.”

He waited long, long minutes before he saw Jamie Waterman’s answering smile.

The deal was done. Now to get the project administrators to agree to it and then implement it with the Vice-President’s aides. And make certain that she has no way to back out of it.

Brumado ended his transmission to Mars and rose from his chair, weary, drained, more than a little fearful. Like an athlete who had given his last ounce of strength and now waited for the judge’s verdict. There must be a second expedition sent to Mars. There
must
be. At least that. At the very least.

Glancing down at the blank gray screen of the communications console he realized that Waterman was both an asset and a liability. It’s a mistake to get him involved in the politics of this thing. He does not think politically; all he is interested in is the science. He is aflame to make a great discovery on Mars. So much so that he could ruin everything.

Thank god we could speak in private, Brumado said to himself. With the time lag between us it was difficult enough to get anything agreed to. It would have been impossible if others had been listening in.

More than a hundred fifty million kilometers away, Tony Reed stared thoughtfully at the dead screen of his own laptop. He had gone from the dome’s communications center to his infirmary, slid the accordion-fold door shut, and immediately tuned in on Jamie’s conversation with Brumado.

As the team’s physician and psychologist I have every right to know exactly what is going on, he had told himself. Secrecy be damned! They have no right to keep secrets from me.

Now he removed the plug from his ear and yanked out the hair-thin wire that connected it to his computer. So Jamie’s forcing them to send him back to Tithonium Chasma. Good! It can’t be soon enough.

Jamie had been unusually silent and moody at lunch, Tony Reed thought. Even for our stoic red man he’s being awfully quiet and withdrawn.

Reed was sitting at his infirmary desk, mulling over Jamie’s conversation with Brumado. The man has cheek, Tony thought, almost admiringly. Whatever inner demons are driving him, he has the gall to make demands on Brumado himself. And the Vice-President of the United States.

Smiling to himself, Reed thought, With any luck at all he’ll be banished to the orbiting spacecraft and leave Joanna to me.

Humming tunelessly, Reed tapped at his computer keyboard, calling up the afternoon’s schedule. Six of the seven scientists were supposed to be continuing the tedious business of mapping the depth and extent of the underground permafrost layer. Toshima, the seventh, would remain inside the dome working with his meteorology instruments. Reed had no responsibilities for outside work; one of the advantages of being team physician, he told himself.

Tony punched up his personal mission task schedule on the computer screen and saw that it was time for his weekly inventory of pharmaceutical supplies. With a barely suppressed moan of boredom he started by checking out the stocks of analgesics and vitamins. Next would come the uppers and downers. Have to be especially careful with them. Can’t have these people depending on drugs.

Pock!

The sound startled him. What on earth was that? Reed cocked his ears, but heard nothing, more than-the usual hums of machinery and the distant muffled voices of the others.
With a shrug, he turned his attention back to the task at hand.

Wearily he went through the computer’s file on the analgesics. Every aspirin tablet must be accounted for. No one was allowed to take even one on his own; only the team physician could dispense the pills, and he had to keep a strict record of who received what.

Everyone took vitamins, of course. Reed slid the box of vitamin bottles out of its rack in the container bin and toted it to his desk. Four big bottles of five hundred each. Just one of the pills provided all the daily vitamin supplement a person required; carrying two thousand of them to the surface was typical mission overkill.

With a light pen Reed began to check the bar codes printed on the lids of each jar, like a supermarket clerk checking out groceries. Damned silly busywork, he grumbled to himself. Yet if the computer did not show a bottle-by-bottle check of the inventory, Vosnesensky would be up in arms. All mission tasks must be accomplished, as far as the Russian was concerned, no matter how trivial or boring.

Then a new thought struck him. If Jamie has his way and returns to the Grand Canyon he’ll probably want to take Joanna with him. She’s the mission biologist, after all. Damn him! Reed snarled silently. There’s got to be a way to get this insolent red man separated from the Brazilian princess. Let’s hope they banish him to orbit.

Pock!
The same sound again, only fainter this time. What could it be? Reed asked himself as he unscrewed the first of the vitamin bottles. Might as well transfer them to the smaller bottles while I’ve got them out. Tony grumbled to himself about the efficiency experts who had planned the mission logistics; they had overlooked the fact that these giant-sized bottles did not fit in the galley shelves. He had to transfer the vitamin capsules by hand to smaller bottles that did. Utterly stupid nonsense.

Pock! Pock!

Reed jumped to his feet, knocking over the open bottle. Vitamin pills spilled across his desk, rolled onto the floor.

“Everyone into your suits!” Vosnesensky’s heavy voice roared through the dome. “At once! Into your hard suits!
Now!”

•   •   •

Cosmonaut Leonid Tolbukhin was on duty in the command center of
Mars 2
when the first pinging noise made him sit up rigidly in his chair. Cold sweat beaded across his upper lip.

My god, it must be me, he thought. I’m a Jonah, a jinx. First Konoye and now this.

But while his mind raced, his hands moved almost as fast. He flicked on the radar display and almost immediately, with the speed of a reflex action, he hit the alarm.

“Meteors! We’re running into a swarm of meteors!” he yelled into the ships’ intercom microphone, so excited that he said it in Russian.

Will Martin, the American geophysicist, happened to be at the comm console, in the middle of taping a long report back to Earth.

“What is it?” he shouted over the hooting of the alarm. “Speak English, dammit!”

“Meteors!” Tolbukhin shouted back. “Get into your hard suit at once!”

Vosnesensky was at the dome’s command center, locked in an earnest conversation with Mironov and Abell about the logistics of the upcoming traverse to Pavonis Mons, while ostensibly monitoring the scientists who were outside with Pete Connors. He had not heard the first soft warning sounds of meteoroids striking the dome’s exterior shell.

Both the dome and the orbiting spacecraft were double walled: the ships of metal, the dome of plastic. Although Mars’s atmosphere was almost vanishingly thin by terrestrial standards, it still offered enough resistance to incoming meteors to burn most of them to ashes long before they reached the ground.

The greatest danger, according to the mission planners, came from meteors plunging almost straight in from overhead: they would have the most energy and be most likely to survive the blazing heat of their atmospheric ride and reach the ground sizable enough to do damage. Meteors coming in from lower angles would have to traverse a longer path in the atmosphere, burning every centimeter of the way. Therefore the dome’s double walls were filled in along its top half with
spongy plastic material that could absorb the energy of an impact.

Tolbukhin’s warning blared in the dome’s radio speakers, as well as throughout the orbiting ships.

Vosnesensky stopped in midword and bellowed, “Everyone into your suits! At once! Into your hard suits!
Now!”

Only after he started running for the suit lockers by the airlock section did the Russian feel the fear that squeezed inside his chest like a cold fist.

Connors was the first to notice the tiny puff of dirt spouting out of the ground as if a rifle bullet had struck. The astronaut blinked, watching the dust settle slowly back to the ground, thinking, Good thing that didn’t hit any …

Anotherpuff sprouted ten meters away.

“Jesus Christ!” he yelled into his helmet microphone. “Meteors! Everybody back to the dome! Double quick!”

All six of the geology and biology scientists were spread across several hundred meters of the rock-strewn plain, trying to survey in detail the depth of the permafrost layer beneath the ground. The mapping work was slow, since they were doing it on foot. All excursions in the rovers were on hold until the mission controllers decided exactly where the rovers would be allowed to go.

Jamie was holding a digging pole whose toothed bit end drilled into the ground. He jerked to attention at Connors’s shouted warning. The pole’s bit stopped as soon as his gloved hands released the control stud, and the pole leaned lop-sidedly out of the hole in the ground.

Jamie took in the locations of the five other scientists with a swift glance. Connors was to his right, halfway between him and the dome’s airlock. Joanna was farther off, struggling with her corer.

“Now! Move it! Move it!” Connors was yelling so loud that it hurt Jamie’s ears. “Come on! Into the dome!”

Jamie angled off toward Joanna, watching the other hard-suited figures start into clumsy motion like a small herd of brightly colored hippos. A spurt of dust erupted near her, but she did not seem to notice. He ran as fast as he could toward her, feeling like a galumphing tortoise while he fiddled with
the radio controls on his wrist to turn down the volume of Connors’s urgent voice.

He reached Joanna as she finally started to move toward the dome. Slowing to her pace, Jamie knew he could not speak with her because Connors was flooding the suit-to-suit frequency with his hollering. Instead, he reached out to touch her shoulder. He could not see her face through the tinted visor of her helmet, could not see how frightened she was. Then Jamie realized he himself was scared, sweating cold, innards shaking.

The ground was erupting into puffs of dust, as if a squad of riflemen had them under fire. Something banged at the back of his helmet, just a tap, really, but it startled him as if he’d been shot. He looked up and saw that the dome was dimpling here and there as meteoroids struck its surface. Oh my god, if one of them breaks through …

One did. Jamie saw the transparent fabric on the lower level of the dome pucker for an instant, and then a small geyser of spray erupted into the dry thin air, like a whale spouting.

“The dome’s punctured!” somebody screamed.

The hole spread into a growing rip as moisture-laden air geysered out into the Martian atmosphere and the plastic fabric of the dome began to sag noticeably.

After that first moment of near panic Vosnesensky turned coldly calm. While the others rushed for their suits, he veered aside and trotted around the inner periphery of the dome, checking to see if the repair patches were in their proper places. He had checked the patches only a day earlier, part of his regular inspection routine. But now he checked them again, while a patter of
pock, pock
sounds rained gently over his head, almost drowned out by the fearful voices of Toshima and the fliers as they struggled to don their hard suits.

He never saw the dome punctured. The meteoroid that punched through both layers of the plastic was a nearly microscopic grain of dust. But Vosnesensky heard a different sound, like a sudden gusting intake of breath, the kind of sound a man makes when he’s been stabbed in the chest.

He felt the breeze as the dome’s air rushed toward the
puncture. Books fluttered open in the wind; loose papers flew across the dome like a covey of frightened birds. The hissing noise grew louder, a moan, a rushing torrent of air.

Vosnesensky whirled and saw dozens of the lightweight repair patches lifting off the floor to be sucked up against the wall of the dome. They flattened there, edges fluttering madly as the air rushed past them to escape the dome. The plastic walls began to sag between the dome’s stiff supporting ribs. The surface of the wall was ripping faster than the patches could cover it.