Return to Mars (11 page)

Where are the people who made this wonderful place? Jamie wondered as he walked barefoot through the central plaza. The fluted columns of magnificent temples stood on either side of him. Before him rose a palace, its steps reaching to the sky.

Where have they all gone? He wondered.

Suddenly the peaceful silence was shattered by the roar of thousands of people who poured into the plaza from all sides, streaming in unending hordes, men and women and children in shorts and tee shirts and baseball caps pointing cameras and munching burgers and fries and slopping sodas from plastic mugs.

He knew some of the people. He saw a beautiful dark-skinned woman in an emerald green thong bikini stretched out on one of the high temple ledges, sunning herself, alone and aloof from the crowds that jostled him.

The noise of hammering and power saws rattled the air; construction cranes rose into the sky as more and always more people crowded into the ancient, doomed city.

A lean, hard-eyed man with a shaved skull was directing everyone, sending people scurrying each time he pointed his outstretched hands.

“You people go up to the temple there, take a good look at the artwork on the walls before we tear it down and bring it back home. The rest of you can eat at the new fast-food franchise we’re building.”

The man looked toward Jamie and seemed to recognize him. “You can’t stay here!” he shouted angrily. “What’re you doing off your reservation?”

Jamie recognized the man. It was Darryl C. Trumball. And standing just behind him was his son, Dex, grinning smugly.

Jamie’s eyes popped open. He was sweating and his bedsheet was tangled around his legs. Inches above him was the rover’s upper bunk, sagging slightly under Dex Trumball’s weight. Across the way the two women slept.

He blinked and rubbed his eyes. He had been dreaming, but he could not remember all of his dream. Something about hordes of people swarming across the barren face of Mars in loud sports shirts and bathing suits, leaving tons of emptied beer cans and wadded fast-food wrappers across the rust-red landscape. A disturbing dream, its essence retreating into nothingness as Jamie tried to remember its details.

Trumball had been in the dream. And Vijay Shektar, wearing a skimpy bikini rather than expedition-issue coveralls.

Jamie shook his head, trying to clear away the remnants of his dream, then slid quietly out of his bottom bunk without disturbing Dex. He stole a glance at the younger man; Trumball’s face was peaceful, relaxed. No bad dreams for him.

Across the narrow aisle, Stacy Dezhurova was turned to the bulkhead, curled slightly with her knees drawn up. Trudy Hall, on the top bunk, lay on her back with a tiny knot of a frown creasing her brows.

Jamie felt almost guilty, looking at them in their sleep. Soul-stealer, he thought. Let them have their dreams to themselves.

He took his wrinkled coveralls and padded to the lavatory. By the time he came out, all three of the others were up, sitting on the edges of their bunks, yawning and rubbing the sleep out of their eyes.

Jamie went up forward to the cockpit and slid the thermal screen back from the windshield.

And gasped.

The mist. He had forgotten about the mists that sometimes rose from the valley floor. Now, with the sun barely over the eastern horizon, the valley was filled with pearl-gray vapor, undulating slowly in the morning breeze, like the soft lapping waves of a gentle sea, like the easy rhythmic breathing of a world.

“Come and see this!” he called back to the others.

Trumball was in the lav, but the two women padded barefoot to the cockpit.

“Oooh,” breathed Trudy Hall. “It’s beautiful*.”

Stacy Dezhurova nodded and ran a hand through her lank blonde hair. “Beautiful, all right. But how will we drive through it?”

The rising sun burned the mist away, as Jamie recalled it did when he had first seen the Canyon. By the time they had breakfasted and started the rover’s engines, Dezhurova was no longer worried about driving into fog.

“Sun is burning it off faster than we’re traveling,” she said, driving along the Canyon’s rim.

“There it is,” said Jamie, pointing. His outstretched finger nearly bumped the rover’s bulbous windshield.

“I see it,” Dezhurova said.

The landslide was still there. Jamie knew it would be. Several thousand million tons of slumped dirt do not disappear over six years, but still he felt an inner thrill of relief and excitement that it was still there, like a ramp prepared by the gods for them to ride down to the floor of the Canyon.

A shadow flickered overhead and they both looked up. One of the soarplanes, remotely piloted by Rodriguez back at the base camp, its cameras and radar serving to scout the territory ahead.

Jamie punched up the soarplane’s camera view on the rover’s control panel display screen. The ramp is just the way we left it, he saw. He squinted hard, trying to make out the tracks their vehicles had left the first time. But the tireless winds of Mars had erased them, filled them in with fine iron-rich dust.

“Give me the radar view,” Dezhurova ordered. Jamie knew the radar data could tell them about the ground’s consistency. They had lost one of the rovers on the first expedition, stuck in an ancient crater filled in with treacherous fine dust that swallowed up half the vehicle like quicksand.

It’s still there, he knew, stuck half in the dust pool. If we could pull it out we’d have an extra vehicle to work with.

Jamie shook his head at the idea. We’re here to study the lichen down at the Canyon floor, not to salvage old equipment.

“Steady now,” Jamie muttered as Dezhurova nosed the rover over the lip of the canyon rim. Her gaze was riveted straight ahead, down the steeply angled slope, although her eyes flicked every few seconds to the radar display, like a novice pianist glancing back and forth from her music sheet to the keyboard.

“Easy does it,” Dezhurova whispered, half to herself.

Jamie felt the bump as each set of wheels crossed the rimrock. Staring out the windshield, he almost felt as if he were in a diving airplane. Dezhurova was bent over the steering wheel, both hands locked tightly on it. Her knuckles weren’t white, Jamie noticed, but her grip on the wheel was far from relaxed.

“Will you look at that!” Trumball’s voice sounded excited, almost frightened, from behind Jamie’s chair. “Like crash-diving a submarine.”

“Rather an unfortunate term, crash-dive,” said Trudy Hall. Jamie glanced over his shoulder at the two of them. Trumball looked excited, like a kid about to bungee jump off a high bridge. Hall seemed cool, although she kept licking her lips.

After a few tense, silent moments, Dezhurova eased up from her cramped posture and grinned. “Piece of cake.”

All three of the others relaxed. Jamie hadn’t realized he’d been holding his breath until he let it out in a big, relieved gust.

“The only bad spot we found was that dust-filled crater,” he said, as if Dezhurova hadn’t gone through this a thousand times already. “Although there might be other bad patches we just happened to miss,” he added.

“That’s the stuff,” said Trumball, “look on the bright side.”

“Oh hush, Dex,” Hall said crossly.

Trudy pulled down the jumpseat behind Jamie and settled in to watch their slow descent toward the valley floor, several kilometers ahead. Trumball went back toward the rear of the module.

“Don’t you want to see this?” Hall called back to him.

“Not just see it,” he yelled back. “I want to make certain it’s getting onto the VR database. People back home will flip their toggles over this!”

“It’s all being recorded,” Dezhurova said.

“Just checking,” Trumball called back. “Yep. Every little pixel is coming through in living color. All we need is Tars Tarkas standing out there to greet us.”

“Tars Tarkas?” Jamie asked.

“A sixteen-foot-tall, green, four-armed Martian,” Hall explained, with seeming distaste. “From some lurid skiffy novel Dex must have read in his misspent youth.”

“Sounds like you read it too, kiddo,” Trumball said, as he made his way back up to the cockpit.

Hall replied, “You’re not the only one to have had a misspent youth, Dex.”

Trumball took the other jumpseat and they all fell silent for a while. Jamie offered to spell Dezhurova at the wheel, but she shook her head.

“I don’t want to stop. Besides, this isn’t as bad as I thought it would be.”

Jamie nodded, then realized that he’d been at the wheel when the rover ploughed into the sand trap, six years earlier. Of course, they had all been miserably sick with scurvy, but still he was the driver and he had gotten them all stuck.

“Look!” Trumball shouted. “I see it!”

“The old rover,” Jamie said.

It looked like a giant metal caterpillar trying to burrow into the ground, its forward module half buried in the sand. Wind-blown dust had piled up on its left side; the right side was bright bare aluminum, perhaps even scoured clean.

“It’s still there,” said Hall.

Trumball laughed. “What, you think somebody would repo it?”

“Hardly.”

“Maybe we should,” he said.

“Should what?”

“Repo the old rover.”

Jamie glanced back at him.

“What do you think, big chief?” Trumball asked. “If we can drag it out of that sand trap, we’d have an extra rover to play with.”

“We don’t need an extra rover,” Jamie said.

Dezhurova had slowed down as she maneuvered carefully around the area, staying well clear of the treacherous sand-filled crater. They could all see the faint outline of the crater and the little ridges of sand in it, like ripples on a pond. Jamie had been too ill and exhausted to notice them when he had piloted the rover into the sand trap.

“Sure we could use an extra rover,” Trumball said, enthusiasm warming his tone.

“We’ve only got eight people here, Dex,” Jamie said. “Only three qualified drivers. We—”

“If you can drive a rover,” Trumball interrupted, “I sure can. We’ve all practiced in the simulators.”

Trudy Hall asked, ‘ ‘All the excursions have been planned out, Dex. What do we need another rover for?”

Trumball’s grin was dazzling. “To go out and get the Pathfinder.”

“Pathfinder?” Jamie and Dezhurova blurted in unison.

“Sure! It’s sitting at the Sagan site, over at Ares Vallis. With that little Sojourner buggy, too!”

“That is more than a thousand kilometers away, Dex,” said Dezhurova.

“More like four thousand,” Trumball admitted, “from our base camp.”

They were slowly passing the old rover, crawling over the firmer ground where Jamie had walked, staggered, crawled to carry a safety line to the Russians who had come to rescue them.

“Let’s at least stop and see if the old clunker is still usable,” Trumball urged.

With a glance at Dezhurova, who slowed the rover even more, Jamie asked, “Why? How will salvaging the rover get you to Ares Vallis?”

Grinning even wider, Trumball said, “Now here’s my plan. If the old rover is usable, we drive it back to the base. Or tow it, most likely.”

“Tow it?” Trudy Hall muttered.

Ignoring her, Trumball went on, ‘ “Then Wiley and I repair whatever needs repairing and get her in good working order.”

Stacy Dezhurova asked laconically, “Would you buy a used car from this man?”

“Then I drive her out to the Sagan site and pick up the Pathfinder and Sojourner.”

“But why?” Hall demanded.

Trumball turned a pitying gaze on her. “Do you have any idea how much a museum would pay for that hardware? The Air and Space Museum in Washington, for example?”

“Not much,” Dezhurova said. “That is a government operation, remember.”

“Okay, what about Disney? Or one of the Las Vegas casinos? Or some of the big amusement complexes in Japan or Europe?”

“How much would you expect?” Hall asked.

Instead of answering directly, Trumball replied, “Lemme tell you, it’ll be plenty. How much did that Picasso painting go for last year? Fifty mil? And that was just a piece of canvas with some colors smeared on it. We’re talking about hardware that’s been to freaking Mars, for chrissake!”

“Do you really think—”

“You start a feeding frenzy,” Trumball explained eagerly. “Get all the big players heated up about it. The Disney execs. The Trumps and Yamagatas and whatnot. They’ll bid it up to a billion in no time.”

“But the thing doesn’t belong to you,” Hall objected. “It belongs to NASA, doesn’t it? Or the U.S. government.”

Trumball wagged his head back and forth. “Nah! I looked that up. There’s the law of salvage—”

“That’s for sunken ships,” Hall said.

“Or treasure,” added Dezhurova.

“It’s for hardware that’s been lost or abandoned,” Trumball retorted firmly. “Works the same in space as it does on Earth. That guy— what’s his name? Gunn, wasn’t it? He recovered the original Vanguard satellite, I think. Something like that. It’s salvage.”

“Then if you can grab it, it’s yours?” Hall asked.

“Yep,” Trumball replied smugly.

Jamie saw that they had passed the half-buried rover. The floor of the Canyon was only a couple of klicks away now, still shrouded in thinning tendrils of mist. The idea of taking the old Pathfinder hardware away from its landing spot bothered Jamie, deep down below the rational level of his mind. It smacked of sacrilege, of desecrating a holy place.

But he said nothing, knowing that if he spoke it would be with anger.

Stacy Dezhurova did not stay silent, though. “Dex, even assuming you are right, none of these rovers has the range to go out four thousand klicks and back again.”

“I know that,” Trumball said condescendingly. “I’m not completely brain-dead. We fly the backup fuel generator to Ares Vallis so it’ll be there to fill up the rover when it gets there.”