Mars Life (27 page)

“Stop the Mars program,” Fry murmured. “Yeah, I’ve heard them bitching about how much it costs.”

McChesney said, “It’s more than the money. They don’t like the scientists talking about finding intelligent life on Mars.”

“It’s extinct, isn’t it?”

“Even so. They want to get everybody off Mars and forget the whole thing.”

Fry shook his head. “Damn yahoos.”

“Maybe so, but if you come out strong against Mars maybe you can finesse the science class issue.”

“Against Mars?”

Breaking into a wide smile, McChesney explained, “The beauty of it is that it doesn’t mean a thing. The government’s already cut all the Mars funding to zero. So you can make a big splash about bringing those people back from Mars without making any difference at all to what’s really happening.”

Fry was silent for several moments, thinking. At last he asked, “I just make some noise against Mars and sidestep the school issue.”

“Could work,” McChesney said hopefully.

Another few moments of silence. Then, “Okay, let’s do it.”

McChesney slapped his hands together. “Good. I’ll get Tilton and her people working on a statement for you to make. And I’ll schedule a meeting with the head of the New Morality’s California organization.”‘

Fry gritted his teeth, but said, “Okay. Do that.”

Jamie’s pocket phone was buzzing. He snapped awake and looked around, confused for a moment. Then he realized, I’m in the dome up on the plain. He sat up on his bunk and reached for the phone, buzzing away on the metal nightstand beside the bunk.

Vijay’s smiling face filled the tiny screen, brilliant teeth against shining dark skin, big luminous eyes. “G’day, mate,” she said brightly. “This is your six a.m. wake-up call.”

“Good morning,” Jamie said, yawning.

“How’d you sleep?” they asked simultaneously. Then laughed. As they chatted, Jamie heard coughing and snuffling from one of the other compartments, then water running.

“Time to get to work,” he told Vijay.

“Me, too. One of the geologists came down with a bit of the jitters after you left. He started thinking about the meteor hitting the dome here. I had to sedate him.”

“How’s Billy Graycloud doing?” Jamie asked, and wondered why.

“Graycloud? Solid as a rock, that one. Like you, a stoic Navaho.”

“No problems with the rest of the staff?”

“Nothing big enough to involve the resident psychologist,” Vijay replied lightly.

“Okay,” he said, pulling his legs out from under the twisted blanket and sheet. “Guess I ought to get to work.”

“Go in beauty, Jamie.”

He blinked with surprise, then smiled. “We’ll make a Navaho out of you yet, Vijay.”

It took three hours in the camper, trundling along full-out at thirty kilometers an hour, to reach the new crater. Jamie drove all the way, while DiNardo sat in the right-hand seat beside him and Hasdrubal hunched over them both.

“There it is!” DiNardo shouted, excited.

“Christ, it’s 
steaming!” 
Hasdrubal blurted.

DiNardo shot an unhappy scowl at the American’s blasphemy as Jamie braked the camper to a halt. All they could see of the impact crater was a raised rim of reddish gray stones. And a delicate wisp of steam rising from it and dissipating in the thin, clear air.

DiNardo felt his pulse thundering in his ears so loudly that he barely heard Jamie mutter, “I’ll call back to base, let them know we’re here.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Hasdrubal said impatiently. “Let’s get out there and start setting up the instrumentation.”

The biologist hurried back toward the camper’s airlock, where their nanosuits were stored. Jamie made a swift, perfunctory call to the excursion controller, then pushed out of the driver’s seat and also went to the rear of the camper.

DiNardo wondered if his legs would hold him erect. He had taken two of his heart pills once they’d bedded down in the dome, after the exertions of the climb up the cliff face and their hike through the bitter black night to the dome. Then he’d set his wristwatch alarm for two hours before sunrise so he could say his breviary before either of the other two woke up. Now he felt dull, dense and slow. I’ve got to be at my best, he said to himself. Lord, lend me strength.

Jamie felt excited, almost trembling with anticipation as he waited for Hasdrubal to close the seals on his nanosuit and inflate its hood into a helmet. Once the lanky biologist worked his long arms through the shoulder straps of his backpack, Jamie checked his suit and backpack connections, then started pulling on his own suit.

Monsignor DiNardo came slowly up the narrow aisle between the folded-up bunks and reached for the third suit. He looked pale to Jamie, his expression . . . what? Jamie asked himself: apprehensive, expectant, scared?

“Are you alright, Fulvio?” he asked.

DiNardo made a tight smile. “Yes. I am fine. Excited, of course.”

Jamie made a mental note to ask Vijay about DiNardo’s medical readouts. But Hasdrubal was already ducking through the airlock’s inner hatch, eager as a child at Christmas to get outside and see the new crater.

Jamie ushered DiNardo into the airlock once Hasdrubal was outside. Then, finally, he went through himself.

The two men were standing on the circular rim, goggling down into the crater. Jamie stepped up to them, noting that some of the rim rocks were blocky, squarish. Then he looked down into the crater itself. It was a lot smaller than the Meteor Crater in Arizona, barely a couple of football fields across and only about twenty, twenty-five meters deep. Almost perfectly round. The rock must have come straight down at nearly ninety degrees, he thought. Steam was coming up from one slope, near the bottom, a weak little breath rising upward that disappeared almost immediately on the gentle breeze wafting by.

“Heat,” Jamie murmured, although the Navaho in him thought the delicate cloud might be the spirits of dead Martians rising to join Father Sun at last.

“From the impact,” said DiNardo.

Hasdrubal nodded inside his bubble of a helmet. “That rock dumped a helluva lot of kinetic energy into the ground.”

“It penetrated to the permafrost layer,” Jamie said.

“And it has remained hot enough to melt the permafrost even after the overnight cold,” DiNardo agreed.

“Let’s get the instruments planted,” Jamie said. “And we’ll need to bring back samples for the biologists.”

“Damn straight,” said Hasdrubal, fervently.

DiNardo turned sharply toward Jamie. “Do you think there might be organisms down there?”

“Or their remains,” Jamie replied. “Either way, the bio people would crucify us if we didn’t bring back samples for them to look at.”

“Damn straight,” Hasdrubal repeated.

“Yes,” DiNardo agreed, his stubble-jawed head bobbing up and down. “Yes, of course.”

“Wait a minute,” Hasdrubal said. “Before we do anything we oughtta give this hole in the ground a name.”

“A name, yes,” said DiNardo.                               

“Or three names,” Hasdrubal said, pointing to himself and the two others in turn.

“It should be your decision, Jamie,” said DiNardo. “You are the senior among us.”

Jamie knew instantly what he had to do. “Chang,” he pronounced. “I name this crater for Dr. Chang Laodong.”

DiNardo nodded. Hasdrubal muttered, “Rank has its privileges, don’t it.”

So much of science is physical labor, Jamie said to himself as he lifted a spadeful of dirt from the bottom of the crater and let it slide into one of the biology sample cases. Hasdrubal was a few meters away, worming sensor poles into the ground, unfolding their solar panels, actually singing to himself in a deep baritone as he worked. DiNardo appeared up at the crater’s edge; the priest was trudging back and forth, carrying armfuls of sensor poles and sample cases from the camper to the crater rim.

He looks tired, Jamie thought as he looked up at DiNardo. For an older guy, he’s doing his share of the dogwork. He hasn’t said much, but he’s actually smiling.

The sun was almost at the horizon when Jamie closed the last of the six sensor boxes.

“If you find any microbes in this dirt,” he said to Hasdrubal, “you’re going to have to figure out if they’re native to Mars or were carried in on the meteor.”

“That’s a good problem,” Hasdrubal said, grunting as he pushed one of the sensor poles into the churned-up slope of the crater. “That’s the kind of problem a man could rest his career on.”

“I’ll give you a hand,” said Jamie, reaching for one of the poles lying at the geologist’s feet. He stepped carefully, as if trying to avoid treading on the spirits of the dead. “We don’t have much time It’ll before it gets dark.”

Hasdrubal straightened up and said, “She’s not steaming anymore.”

Peering at the thermometer on his wrist pad, Jamie said, “Temperature’s almost forty below. It hasn’t been above freezing all day.”

“Well, I’m sweatin’,” Hasdrubal said.

“Me, too. I guess the suits give us enough thermal protection, after all.”

“Guess so.” Hasdrubal picked up one of the poles and began worming its pointed end into the ground, working it back and forth, back and forth. “We’ll smell pretty gunky when we take these suits off tonight.”

Jamie started pushing another pole into the ground. “Guess so. The badge of honor for working so hard.”

“The priest must be takin’ a break,” Hasdrubal said, looking up. “Haven’t seen him for damn near a half hour.”

At that instant Vijay’s voice came through Jamie’s earphone, taut and anxious. “Jamie, Father DiNardo’s heart readouts have spiked and then dropped into the red! I think he’s flatlining!”

Despite reciting the rosary over and over again as he trudged wearily back and forth from the camper to the lip of the crater, Monsignor DiNardo found no peace, no solace, none of the tranquility that the repeated prayers usually brought him.

It was a foolish mistake to put on the nanosuit without putting the vial of pills into one of the suit’s capacious thigh pouches, he realized. Now the pills rested in the hip pocket of his coveralls, mere centimeters from his grasp, but he could not reach them. Not without opening the suit, which was impossible out here in the open.

Excitement about the crater had smothered his usual good sense. Like a schoolboy, he admonished himself. You rushed out here to see the crater without thinking, without planning ahead. You allowed your enthusiasm to overpower your intelligence. A mistake. A serious mistake. The crater isn’t going to disappear! You should have been more careful, more thoughtful, before pulling on the nanosuit and rushing out to see it.

He had volunteered to be the donkey, carrying instrument poles and sample cases from the camper to the crater’s rim. Easy work, he thought. Waterman and Hasdrubal gave him the easiest task. I can recite the rosary as I walk back and forth. I can keep my loads light and walk slowly, deliberately, across the sands of Mars.

Still, his pulse thudded in his ears. He blinked beads of perspiration from his eyes, felt sweat trickling down his ribs. Yet he felt cold, clammy and cold.

The rosary, he told himself as he pulled another armload of sensor rods from the camper’s exterior cargo bay. Do it in Latin. 
Pater noster. . .

I could go back inside the camper, take off the suit, and get to the pills. I don’t really need them, I’m fine at the moment. But it would be a relief to have them within my grasp.

And then what? he asked himself. Once you come outside again, how can you swallow a pill with this ridiculous plastic bubble over your head? Open it for a second and you’ll die of decompression.

He lay the sensor poles on the ground at the crater’s rim. It had stopped smoking, he saw. Peering down into the pit he saw Waterman and Hasdrubal laboring to set a network of sensor rods in the churned-up ground. A half-dozen insulated specimen cases lay off to one side.

“Father DiNardo?” The woman’s voice in his earphone startled him.

“I am here,” he replied, looking up into the cloudless butterscotch sky. Not entirely cloudless, he realized. Three little wisps floated high, high above. Like the Holy Trinity watching over him.

“Your readouts show a good deal of exertion.” It was Mrs. Waterman’s voice, he recognized. Of course. She is a physician. “Perhaps you should stop what you’re doing and take a brief rest.”

“Yes,” he said gratefully. “Thank you.”

I’ll go back inside the camper and take a pill, DiNardo told himself. Then I’ll be fine.

But halfway back to the camper he felt a sudden white-hot stab of pain at the base of his skull. He tried to call out, to scream, but his voice froze in his throat. I can’t move! He willed his booted feet to take him to the camper but instead his knees buckled and he sank to the ground. The pain overwhelmed him.

He lay on the red sand on one side, his backpack preventing him from rolling onto his back. He couldn’t move. His arms, his hands, paralyzed. He tried to wiggle his toes inside the boots. Nothing. He lay there and stared at the distant horizon, reddish bare hills and endless barren wasteland.

Mother of God, he thought, I’m going to die on Mars.

Jamie scrambled up the slope of the crater, knocking over a couple of sensor poles as loose stones rolled under his boots.

“Father DiNardo!” he shouted. “Fulvio! Are you all right?”

No response.

He reached the lip of the crater and saw the priest’s body crumpled on the ground, halfway to the camper.

“He’s collapsed!” Jamie called to Hasdrubal.

Vijay’s voice came through his earphone, taut but calm. “It might be a stroke. Get him into the camper right away.”