Return to Mars (28 page)

Sitting there idly, Dex scanned the horizon. Nothing. Dead as Beethoven. Deader. Nothing but rocks and sand and every shade of red the human eye could register. Not a thing moving out there—

He snapped bolt upright, not an easy thing to do in the hard suit.

Something wax moving out there! Just a flicker, off on the horizon, and then it was gone.

Dex went hack to the equipment lockers beneath the bunks in the module’s midsection. Bending over in the suit was awkward, he had to lower himself to his knees to reach the latches that opened the lockers. Cursing the suit and its gloves, he fumbled through the neatly ordered sets of tools until he found the electronically boosted binoculars. Then he hurried back to the cockpit, like some old movie monster trying to gallop.

His helmet visor was up, so Dex could put the binoculars against his eyes to scan the horizon. Nothing. Whatever it was had disappeared, gone away.

Wait! A flicker …

Dex adjusted the focus and it came into crisp view. A dust devil. A swirling little eddy of dust, red as a real devil. It would have been called a pillar of fire in the Old Testament, Dex thought, except that this one is on Mars, not Israel or Egypt. It occurred to him that there was a region on Mars called Sinai, south of the Grand Canyon.

“You ought to be down there, pal,” he murmured while he watched the minicyclone twist and dance across the distant horizon.

As he put the binoculars down Dex remembered that giant dust storms sometimes blanketed Mars almost from pole to pole. Usually during the spring season. He shook his head inside his helmet. It’s too late in the season now; we timed the landing so the storms would be over. Besides, there weren’t any this year.

Not yet, warned a tiny voice in his head. Spring lasts six months on Mars.

Jamie felt decidedly awkward at breakfast. Usually the team members took their morning meal when they chose to; there was no set time when everyone gathered at the galley each morning. It just happened that when Jamie came out of his quarters, the three women were already sitting at the table, heads together, chatting busily.

When they saw Jamie approaching their chat stopped. He said “Good morning” to them and got a chorus of the same in return. Then watchful silence as he picked a breakfast package from the freezer. He could feel their eyes on him.

“The strawberries ought to be ready for picking in another few days,” he announced to no one in particular.

“Yes, and the tomatoes, too,” answered Trudy Hall.

Jamie sat at the head of the table, with Trudy and Stacy on his left and Vijay at the other end, facing him. She smiled at him and he made a self-conscious smile back at her.

“Sleep well?” Trudy asked, her face the picture of innocent curiosity.

Jamie nodded and turned his attention to the bowl of instant cereal in front of him.

Conversation was a strain. No matter what Hall or Dezhurova said, it sounded to Jamie like arch references to sex. Vijay seemed perfectly relaxed, though. She’s enjoying this banter, Jamie thought.

He went through his meal as quickly as he could and then headed for the comm center.

“I’ve got to check in with the others,” he said to them.

“I already talked with both teams,” Stacy called to his retreating back. “Possum has a cranky fuel cell, but otherwise everything is okay.”

Jamie stopped and turned back toward her. “And Tomas?”

“They are heading off for the big caldera, on schedule.”

“Good,” said Jamie. Then he kept on walking toward the comm center.

A few minutes after he had spoken with Fuchida, Vijay slipped into the cubicle and sat beside him.

“It isn’t a crime, you know,” she said, a slight smile curving her lips.

“I know.”

“Consenting adults and all that.”

“I know,” he repeated.

“Did you think the others’d be jealous?”

“Aw, come on, Vijay…”

She laughed lightly. “That’s better. Lord, you were uptight back there!”

“Do they know?”

“I didn’t say anything, but the way you were behaving they must have guessed it.”

“Damn.”

“It’s nothing to be ashamed of.”

“I know, but—”

”It happened, Jamie. Now forget about it. Get on with the program. I’m not trying to force a commitment out of you. I don’t want that.”

He felt relieved and disappointed at the same time. “Vijay, I … look, this kind of complicates everything.”

She shook her head. “No worries, mate. No complications. It happened and it was very nice. Maybe it’ll happen again, when the moon is right. Maybe not. Don’t give it another thought.”

“How the hell can I not give it another thought?”

Her smile returned. “That’s what I wanted to hear from you, Jamie. That’s all I wanted to hear.”

RODRIGUEZ FELT A CHILL OF APPREHENSION TINGLING THROUGH HIM AS they stared down into the caldera. It was like being on the edge of an enormous hole in the world, a hole that went all the way down into hell.

“Nietzsche was right,” Fuchida said, his voice sounding awed, almost frightened, in Rodriguez’s earphones.

Rodriguez had to turn his entire torso from the hips to see the Japanese biologist standing beside him, anonymous in his bulky hard suit except for the blue stripes on his arms.

“You mean about when you stare into the abyss the abyss stares back.”

“You’ve read Nietzsche?”

Rodriguez grunted. “In Spanish.”

“That must have been interesting. I read him in Japanese.”

Breaking into a chuckle, Rodriguez said, “So neither one of us can read German, huh?”

It was as good a way as any to break the tension. The caldera was huge, a mammoth pit that stretched from horizon to horizon. Standing there on its lip, looking down into the dark, shadowy depths that dropped away for who knew how far, was distinctly unnerving.

“That’s a helluva hole,” Rodriguez muttered.

“It’s big enough to swallow Mt. Everest,” said Fuchida, his voice slightly hollow with awe.

“How long’s this beast been dead?” Rodriguez asked.

“Tens of millions of years, at least. Possibly much longer. That’s one of the things we want to establish while we’re here.”

“Think it’s due for another blow?”

Fuchida laughed shakily. “We’ll get plenty of warning, don’t worry.”

“What, me worry?”

They began to unload the equipment they had dragged on the skid. Its two runners were lined with small Teflon-coated wheels so it could ride along rough ground without needing more than the muscle power of the two men. Much of the equipment was mountaineering gear: chocks and pitons and long coiled lengths of Buckyball cable.

“You really want to go down there?” Rodriguez asked while he drilled holes in the hard basalt for Fuchida to implant geo/met beacons.

“I spent a lot of time exploring caves,” Fuchida answered, gripping one of the beacons in his gloved hands. “I’ve been preparing for this for a long time.”

“Spelunking? You?”

“They call it caving. Spelunking is a term used by non-cavers.”

“So you’re all set to go down there, huh?”

Fuchida realized that he did not truly want to go. Every time he had entered a cave on Earth he had felt an irrational sense of dread. But he had forced himself to explore the caverns because he knew it would be an important point in his favor in the competition for a berth on the Mars expedition.

“I’m all set,” the biologist answered, grunting as he worked the first beacon into its hole.

“It’s a dirty job,” Rodriguez joked, over the whine of the auger’s electric motor, “but somebody’s got to do it.”

“A man’s got to do what a man’s got to do,” Fuchida replied, matching his teammate’s bravado.

Rodriguez laughed. “That ain’t Nietzsche.”

“No. John Wayne.”

They finished planting the beacons and headed back to the lip of the caldera. Slowly. Reluctantly, Rodriguez thought. Well, he told himself, even if we break our asses poking around down there, at least we’ve got the beacons up and running.

Fuchida stopped to check the readouts coming from the beacons.

“They all transmitting okay?” Rodriguez asked.

“Yes,” came the reply in his earphones. “Interesting …”

“What?”

“Heat flow from below ground is much higher here than at the dome or even down in the Canyon.”

Rodriguez felt his eyebrows crawl upward. “You mean she’s still active?”

“No, no, no. That can’t be. But there is still some thermal energy down there.”

“We should’ve brought marshmallows.”

“Perhaps. Or maybe there’ll be something to picnic on down there waiting for us!” The biologist’s voice sounded excited.

“Whattaya mean?”

“Heat energy! Energy for life, perhaps.”

A vision of bad videos flashed through Rodriguez’s mind: slimy alien monsters with tentacles and bulging eyes. He forced himself not to laugh aloud. Don’t worry, they’re only interested in blondes with big boobs.

Fuchida called, “Help me get the lines attached and make certain the anchors are firmly imbedded.”

He’s not reluctant anymore, Rodriguez saw. He’s itching to go down into that huge hole and see what kind of alien creatures he can find.

“Hydrogen is the cussedest damned stuff in the universe,” Craig was muttering as he drove the rover. That red warning light still glared from the control panel.

Sitting beside him, Dex said, “But the Lord must’ve loved hydrogen—”

“Because He made so much of it,” Craig finished for him. “Yeah, I know.”

“Ninety percent of the universe is hydrogen, Wiley. More.”

“That’s why the universe is so damned cantankerous.”

“What’ve you got against hydrogen—beside the fact that it’s leaked out of the fuel cells?”

“Stuff always leaks. It’s sneaky-pete stuff, leaks through seals and gaskets that’d hold anything else.”

“The seals on that fuel cell should’ve held the hydrogen,” Trumball said, more seriously. “The manufacturer’s going to pay a forfeiture fee because they didn’t make the seals hydrogen-tight.”

“Helluva lot of good that’ll do us if we get ourselves killed out here.”

“Hey, lighten up, Wiley! It’s not that serious. We’re okay.”

“I don’t like headin’ away from the base with our backup power system dead.”

“We can take on more hydrogen when we get to the fuel generator,” Trumball said.

“Uh-uh. The generator produces methane and oxy. Not hydrogen.”

“There’s the water recycler on board, remember?”

“Yeah.”

“So,” Trumball waved a hand in the air, “we take on extra water and electrolyze it into oxygen and hydrogen. Voila!”

Craig cast him a sour look. “Electrolyze the water.”

“Right. With electricity from the solar panels.”

“And what do we drink, amigo?”

“Water from the fuel cells.”

“Now wait a minute …”

“Naw, you listen to me, Wiley. Here’s the thing of it: We take on the water, electrolyze it and use the hydrogen to run the fuel cells.”

“What about the oxygen?”

“Store it, dump it, whatever. We’ve got plenty oxy anyway. You with me so far?”

“We pump the hydrogen into the goddamned leaky fuel cells, big deal.”

“Yeah, but we run the fuel cells to provide our electricity at night, instead of the lithium batteries.”

“Now, why the hell—”

“So it doesn’t matter if the fuel cells leak; we’ll work ‘em and get power out of ‘em before the hydrogen leaks away.”

Both hands on the rover’s steering wheel, his eyes fixed on the land ahead, Craig looked like a man waiting for a card shark to deal him a deuce.

“Now what else do the fuel cells produce besides electricity?” Trumball asked, grinning with all his teeth.

“Water.”

“Which we drink a little of and electrolyze the rest into fresh hydrogen and oxygen to run the fuel cells!”

Craig shook his head. “Great. You’ve invented the perpetual motion machine.”

“Yeah, sure. I’m not that dufo, Wiley. We’ll lose hydrogen all the time, I know that. But the loss’ll be slow enough so we can use the fuel cells for overnight power all the way out to Ares Vallis and back to the generator! Save the batteries for backup.”

“You done the math?”

“I did some rough numbers. I’ll put it through the computer as soon as you give me an accurate fix for the fuel cells’ normal efficiency rating.”

Scratching his stubbly jaw, Craig said, ”That data oughtta be in the computer files.”

“Okay, go get it.”

The older man hesitated. “We’ll need approval. I’ll have to tell Jamie what we’re plannin’ to do and he’ll prob’ly buck it up to Tarawa.”

Trumball grinned his widest. “Ask for all the approvals you want, Wiley, as long as we do it anyway.”

“Now wait a minute—”

“What’re they going to say?” Trumball interrupted. “If they say no, they’re effectively cancelling the excursion. And we won’t let them do that to us, will we?”

“You mean, even if they say no we go ahead anyway?”

“Sure! Why not? How’re they going to stop us?”

“Use the fuel cells for overnight power?” Jamie asked, not certain he had heard Craig correctly.

“It’s sorta like turnin’ a lemon into lemonade,” Possum replied.

Jamie stared at the display screen. Craig’s unshaven face was dead serious. He appeared to be sitting in the cockpit, in his coveralls. Dex must be right beside him, driving. A glance at the data readouts on the displays beside the main screen showed that the rover was plowing ahead at a steady thirty kilometers per hour.

“It sounds risky to me,” Jamie said, stalling for time to think.

“We been through the numbers,” Craig replied. “It oughtta work.”