Return to Mars (19 page)

Trudy Hall said in a hushed voice, “And that’s exactly what we’re finding.”

“The lichen are struggling to stay alive,” Jamie said, “but they’re running out of the resources they need.”

“Using up the hydrates in the rocks.”

“Dying off, slowly.”

“But dying.”

“Or going into a spore state,” Trumball reminded them. “Suspended animation, waiting for better conditions to arise, so they can swing back into life again.”

“How long can they stay that way?” Craig asked.

Fuchida said, “Spores from the age of dinosaurs have been revived on Earth.”

“Millions of years, then.”

“Tens of millions.”

“Spores survived on the Moon’s surface,” Dezhurova pointed out. “Despite vacuum and hard radiation.”

“Lunar spores?” Trumball asked.

“Spores we brought with us, without knowing it,” the cosmonaut answered. “They were waiting on the old Apollo hardware when we, got back there, more than forty years later.”

“Didn’t they decontaminate the Apollo hardware before they took off for the Moon?”

“Yes, certainly, but that didn’t kill all the bugs. They’re very tough.”

Craig snorted disdainfully. “Makes you wonder what we’re carryin’ around with us, don’t it?”

“The important point is,” Jamie said, “that the lichen seem to be indicating that life was once much more abundant on Mars, and now it’s dying out.”

They all nodded in agreement, all around the table. Jamie thought, Mars is dying. Once life was thriving here. Once there were intelligent Martians who built cities for themselves up in the cliffs. I know it! I’ve got to get out there and prove it.

Dex Trumball watched the expression on Jamie’s face and knew exactly what was going through the Navaho’s mind. He’s building a theoretical house of cards to prove to himself that the mirage he saw in that niche in the Canyon was a structure built by intelligent Martians.

Keeping his opinion about that to himself, Dex sat out the rest of the dinner-table discussion as it rambled on, people repeating themselves, thinking out loud, taking wild stabs of guesses just for the joy of hearing themselves talk.

He stayed for it all, not wanting to be the first to walk away from the gabfest. At last, though, Jamie tapped his wristwatch and suggested they clean the table and go to sleep.

Dex smiled inwardly. He always says “go to sleep.” Never “go to bed.” Wonder how long it’s been since he’s gotten himself laid? Hell, it’s been too damned long for me, and he tries to carry himself like some kind of Navaho holy man. A saint, that’s our noble leader: Saint Jamie of Mars.

Still laughing to himself, Dex went to his quarters and booted up his laptop. Dad should have answered my last message by now.

Sure enough, there was a communication from his father. And one from Mom, too. A lot longer than Dad’s.

Dex ignored his mother’s message and called up his father’s gaunt, austere image on the laptop’s screen.

He looks like an ice sculpture, Dex thought: cold and hard, inhuman. Dad was in his office, obviously. Dex could see the Boston skyline through the window behind his desk.

“Dex, I think this idea of recovering the old Pathfinder hardware is all right. I’ve already contacted a few select individuals and started their glands salivating. We could clear a very tidy little bundle on this deal.”

Say, Good work, Dex, he thought. Or, I’m proud of you, son.

But the elder Trumball went on, “Now, I know this scheme of yours is not without its risks. I’ve checked with the people who know about these things, and they tell me it’s technically feasible, but on the risky side. If anything goes wrong, there’ll be very little chance of getting help.”

That’s right, Dad, he answered silently. You’re always saying I’ve never risked my butt at anything, I’ve always had it easy. So now I’m going to show you how wrong you are about me.

”For that reason, I want to make certain that the people picked for this mission are the least needed for the success and safety of the expedition. Get Dr. Waterman to send that Mexican astronaut, Rodriguez. And the Texan, what’s his name. Craig, isn’t it? They’ll get along well together and they won’t be that big u loss if anything happens to them.”

Dex stared at the little screen, wide-eyed. “You don’t know shit, Dad,” he muttered. “You just don’t know anything about anything.”

But his father was saying, “Under no circumstances are you to go on this mission. Do you hear me, Dex? I absolutely forbid it. You stay where it’s safe. Let the others do the work; you take the glory.”

“THREE WEEKS ON MARS,” SAID VIJAY SHEKTAR. “WE SHOULD HAVE A celebration tonight.”

Jamie was sitting on a spindly-legged stool in Shektar’s infirmary, the top of his coveralls pulled down, a blood pressure cuff wrapped around his left forearm and half a dozen medical sensor patches adhering to the skin of his chest and back.

“The first expedition stayed forty-five sols,” he said. “Let’s wait until we’ve broken their record.”

“You’re not much fun, Jamie.” Vijay made a face somewhere between a pout and a grin.

“Or better yet, wait until we’ve got something more to celebrate than a date on a calendar.”

Vijay glanced at the monitor screens that were reading Jamie’s pressure, pulse, temperature and skin pH. When she looked back at Jamie, her eyes were dancing.

“Well,” she said, “Christmas is coming—on Earth.”

“Fine. We can celebrate Christmas.”

“No tree.”

“We’ll make one out of aluminum. Or plastic.”

She began peeling off the sensor disks. “You’re boringly healthy, mate. Skin pallor’s not so good, though. You ought to spend more time under the sun lamps.”

“I could go into the airlock without a suit,” he suggested, grinning as he pulled up his coveralls and wormed an arm into a sleeve.

“The UV’s a bit intense for suntan in there,” she said.

“Never thought a guy with my complexion would need a sunlamp,” Jamie said.

“What about me?”

“You’ve got a permanent tan.”

“Yes, I found that out the first time I went to a chemist’s shop and tried to buy flesh-colored Band-aids.”

Jamie looked at her closely. There was no trace of rancor in her expression. Just the opposite.

“You’re all smiles this morning,” Jamie said, sealing up the Velcro front of the coveralls.

“And you’re all business, as usual.”

“That’s my job.”

“You could use some relaxation,” she said. “All work and no play, you know.”

Jamie thought it over swiftly. “Want to take a walk?”

“Outside?”

“Where else?”

“Trudy jogs through the dome every day. She’s got a regular route all pegged out.”

“No,” Jamie said. “I mean outside.”

“Do you think we should?”

“I’ve got some free time late this afternoon, just before dinner. Want to take a stroll with me?”

“I’d love to.”

“I’ll bet you haven’t been outside since the day we landed,” Jamie said lightly.

“Oh no, that’s not so. Dex and I went out a couple of times. Not since he’s gotten so busy planning this Ares Vallis excursion, of course.”

“Of course,” Jamie replied, feeling deflated.

Vijay giggled. “Dex was trying to convince me that we could both fit into one hard suit.”

“Was he?” Jamie growled.

She was grinning broadly at him. “What do you think, Jamie? You’re a bit heftier than Dex. D’you think we two might snuggle into one suit?”

Jamie was at a loss for words until he remembered an old line that one of his university classmates had told him about. “Vijay, don’t let your mouth write a check that your body can’t cash.”

For once, she was speechless.

Grinning now, Jamie said, “Sixteen hundred hours. I’ll meet you at the lockers. Okay?”

She made a military salute. “Aye-aye, sir.”

Dex Trumball was still seething over his father’s command. The planning for this excursion out to Ares Vallis was eating up more and more time, especially now that they were testing the guidance system for the fuel generator’s rocket booster. Jamie had okayed a serious change in Dex’s personal schedule, and Craig’s, as well. It allowed them to spend most of their time preparing for the excursion, at the cost of postponing much of their regular work, including the stratigraphy workups that were so important to understanding the time scales of Martian geological forces.

Jamie himself took up some of that slack, since he was a geologist. He could try to make sense out of the different layers of rock and determine when each had been laid down. But Dex knew that he should be doing that himself; his own work was slipping—and Jamie was allowing it.

Sure, he thought. If anybody complains about the geology work slipping he can tell them it’s my fault.

Dex had told no one about his father’s determination that he should not go on the excursion. He had even erased his father’s hateful message and hacked into the expedition’s main computer to make certain there was no copy of it in its files.

He doesn’t want me to go, Dex grumbled to himself as he stared at the readout display from the guidance computer. Possum Craig was outside, fitting a set of sensors to the rocket vehicle, so that they could make some scientific use of its upcoming flight to the Xanthe Terrra region, east of Lunae Planum. Stacy Dezhurova was going to run the flight remotely from the base dome. Dex was working with her to get all the flight parameters squared away.

He doesn’t want me to go because he thinks I’ll fuck things up. He doesn’t trust me. I’m on fucking Mars and he still doesn’t trust me! Even if everything goes exactly right and we bring the hardware back here without a hitch he’d still be able to say that I didn’t do it, I didn’t have the smarts or the guts to go out and do it.

Well, the hell with you, Pop! I’m going. And there’s not a damned thing you can do about it. I’m going out there myself and show you I can get the job done. By the time you find out about it I’ll be on my way. Stuff that up your nose, Daddy old pal. I’m free of you. No matter what you say or do, I’m on my own out here.

“I thought you said this was free time for you.” Vijay’s voice sounded slightly amused in Jamie’s helmet earphones.

The two of them were walking toward the manned rocketplane that Rodriguez had been assembling over the past week. Like the remotely piloted soarplanes, it was built of gossamer-thin plastic skin stretched over a framework of ceramic-plastic cerplast. To Jamie it looked like an oversized model airplane made of some kind of kitchen wrap, complete with a weirdly curved six-bladed propeller on its nose.

But it was big enough to carry two people. Huge, compared to the unmanned soarplanes. Rodriguez said it was nothing more than a fuel tank with wings. The wings stretched wide, drooping to the ground at their tips. The cockpit looked tiny, nothing more than a glass bubble up front. The rocket engines, tucked in where the wing roots joined the fuselage, looked too small to lilt the thing off the ground.

The plane was designed to use its rocket engines for takeoffs, then once at altitude, it would run on the prop. Solar panels painted onto the wing’s upper surface would provide the electricity to run the electrical engine. There was too little oxygen in the Martian air to run a jet engine; the rockets were the plane’s main muscle, the solar cells its secondary energy source.

“This is free time for me,” Jamie told Shektar. “Might as well say hello to Tomas while we’re strolling by, don’t you think?”

“And with all of Mars around us you just happen to walk in this direction,” she countered.

He could hear the puckish teasing in her voice. Instead of trying to keep up with her, Jamie called to Rodriguez, “Hola, Tomas! Que pasa?”

The astronaut’s spacesuited figure was kneeling beneath one of the plane’s wing roots, both gloved hands inside an open access panel on the engine nacelle. It was impossible to see if he turned his head inside the helmet, but Rodriguez’s troubled voice came through their earphones:

“Tengo un problema con este maldito … uh, fuel injector.”

“What did he say?” Shektar asked.

“What’s the problem?” Jamie asked in English.

He heard Rodriguez chuckle. “Glad you switched to English, man. I don’t think my Spanish is good enough to explain about gas lubrication joints and low-temperature ignition systems.”

Rodriguez seemed to have gotten over his blues about losing the unmanned soarplane. Jamie had been watching him closely, knowing that Tomas was slated to pilot Fuchida in the manned plane to the same area where the soarplane went down. The astronaut had tried hard to determine why the unmanned plane had crashed, but the closer they came to his own flight the less he seemed to care about the cause of the crash.

For several minutes Jamie and Rodriguez chatted in tech-speak English that was all but incomprehensible to Shektar.

Finally, Jamie asked, “Well, will she fly, Orville?”

Rodriguez laughed. “She’ll fly, Wilbur. Even if I have to use my own blood to lubricate the damned stubborn propellant pumps.”

Jamie realized that Rodriguez was totally serious, despite his light tone. He would be piloting this bird, with Fuchida as his passenger. If anything went wrong, it was his butt on the line.

And mine, Jamie realized. I’ve got to give the final okay for their flight. It doesn’t matter how many technical people back on Earth review his work and okay it. The final responsibility is mine. Is Tomas emotionally prepared for this mission? Maybe I should talk it over with Vijay.

He remembered something Connors had told him back during his training days, even before the first expedition.

“Behold the lowly turtle,” the astronaut had quoted. “He only makes progress when he sticks his neck out.”