Return to Mars (34 page)

“And calling in, the third,” Dezhurova said, much more mildly.

“Right,” said Rodriguez.

“I’m getting his readouts,” Vijay said, studying the medical diagnostic screen.

“Yeah, his suit’s okay now that the battery’s reconnected.”

“Is his L.C.G. working?” Vijay asked.

“Should be,” Rodriguez said. “Wait one …”

They saw the astronaut lean over and touch his helmet to the unconscious Fuchida’s shoulder.

“Yep,” he announced, after a moment. “I can hear the pump chugging. Water oughtta be circulating through his longjohns just fine.”

“That should bring his temperature down,” Vijay muttered, half to herself. “The problem is, he might be in shock from overheating.”

“What do I do about that?” Rodriguez asked.

The physician shook her head. ‘ ‘Not much you can do, mate. Especially with the two of you sealed into your suits.”

For a long moment they were all silent. Vijay stared at the medical screen. Fuchida’s temperature was coming down. Heart rate slowing nicely. Breathing almost normal. He should be—

The biologist coughed and stirred. “What happened?” he asked weakly.

All four of the people at the comm center broke into grins. None of them could see Rodriguez’s face behind his visor, but they heard the relief in his voice:

“Naw, Mitsuo; you’re supposed to ask, ‘Where am I?’ “

The biologist sat up straighter. “Is Trudy there?”

“Don’t worry about—”

“I’m right here, Mitsuo,” said Trudy Hall, leaning in between Dezhurova and Vijay. “What is it?”

“Siderophiles!” Fuchida exclaimed. “Iron-eating bacteria live in the caldera.”

“Did you get samples?”

“Yes, of course.”

Jamie stepped back as the two biologists chattered together. Fuchida nearly gets himself killed, but what’s important to him is finding a new kind of organism. With an inward smile, Jamie admitted, maybe he’s right.

BEFORE THE EXPLORERS LANDED ON THE SURFACE OF MARS, WHILE THEY were still in orbit, goggling at the rusty worn immensity of the red planet, they released the balloons.

Six winecase-sized capsules retrofired from their orbiting supply vessel and blazed into the thin Martian atmosphere, then released a dozen balloons each. The balloons were brilliantly simple, little more than long narrow tubes of exquisitely thin yet tough Mylar inflated with hydrogen gas automatically when they reached the proper altitude to float across the landscape like improbable giant white cigarettes.

Dangling below each long, thin balloon was a “snake,” a flexible slim metal pipe that contained sensing instruments, radio, batteries and a heater to protect the equipment against the frigid weather.

By day the balloons wafted high in the Martian atmosphere, sampling the temperature (low), pressure (lower), humidity (lower still) and chemical composition of the air. The altitude at which any individual balloon flew was governed by the amount of hydrogen filling its slender cigarette shape. The daytime winds carried them across the red landscape like dandelion puffs.

At night, when the temperatures became so frigid that even the hydrogen inside the balloons began to condense, they all sank toward the ground like a chorus of ballerinas tiredly drooping. Often, the “snakes” of instruments actually touched the ground and dutifully transmitted data on the surface conditions each night while the balloons bobbed in the dark winds, still buoyant enough to hover safely above the rock-strewn ground. Barely.

Similar balloons had been a major success during the First Mars Expedition, even though many of them eventually snagged on mountainsides or disappeared for reasons unknown. Most drifted gracefully across the face of Mars for weeks on end, descending slowly each night and rising again when the morning sunlight warmed their hydrogen-filled envelopes, carrying on silently, effortlessly, living with the Martian day/night cycle and faithfully reporting on the environment from pole to pole.

JAMIE WAS NOT SURPRISED TO SEE HIS GRANDFATHER WAITING FOR HIM IN the cliff village.

He remembered climbing down from the rim of the Canyon, then slowly and deliberately taking off his hard suit once he had reached the niche in the cliff face. He felt warm and safe walking through the silent ruins in nothing more than his coveralls.

Grandfather Al was sitting on a wooden bench in the bright sunlight, leaning back against the adobe wall of one of the dwellings, his broad-brimmed hat pulled low over his eyes.

“Are you sleeping, Grandfather?” Jamie asked softly. He was nine years old again, and he couldn’t tell if he were on Mars or back at the old pueblo where Al bargained for rugs and pottery to sell in his store in Santa Fe.

“Naw, I’m not sleeping, Jamie. I was waiting for you.”

“I’m here.”

Al looked at his grandson and smiled. “That’s good.”

Spreading his arms, Jamie asked, ‘ ‘Where is everybody? The village is empty.”

“They’ve all gone.”

“Gone where?”

“I don’t know. Nobody knows. That’s what you’ve got to find out, Grandson.”

“But where could they have gone?”

“To find their destiny,” said Al. “To find their own right path.”

Jamie sat on the bench beside his grandfather. The sun felt warm and strengthening.

“Tell me about them, Grandfather. Tell me about the people who lived here.”

Al laughed, a low, happy chuckle. “Naw. I can’t tell you, Jamie boy. You have to tell me.”

Jamie felt puzzled. “But I don’t know.”

“Then you’ll have to find out, son.”

Jamie’s eyes popped open. For once, his dream did not fade from him. It was as vivid as any real memory.

Me pushed back the thin sheet that covered him and got to his feet.

After the long night they had all put in, he should have felt tired, drained. Yet he was awake, alert, eager to start the day.

Quickly he stepped to his desk and booted up his laptop, then opened the communications channel to Rodriguez and Fuchida. With a glance at the desktop clock he saw that it was 6:33. He hesitated for only a moment, though, then put through a call to the two men at Olympus
Mons.

As he suspected, they were both awake. Jamie’s laptop screen showed the two of them side-by-side in the plane’s cockpit.

“Good morning,” he said. “Did you sleep well?”

“Extremely well,” said Fuchida.

“This cockpit looked like the best hotel suite in the world when we got into it last night,” Rodriguez said.

Jamie nodded. “Yeah, I guess it did.”

Rodriguez gave a crisp, terse morning report. Fuchida happily praised the astronaut for purging his suit of the foul air and fixing the electrical connection that had banged loose in his backpack.

“My suit fans are buzzing faithfully,” he said. “But I’m afraid I won’t be able to do much useful work on my bad ankle.”

They had discussed the ankle injury the previous night, once Fuchida had regained consciousness. Vijay guessed that it was a sprain, but wanted to get the biologist back to the dome as quickly as possible for an X-ray.

Jamie had decided to let Rodriguez carry out as much of their planned work as he could, alone, before returning. Their schedule called for another half day on the mountaintop, then a takeoff in the early afternoon for the flight back to dome. They should land at the base well before sunset.

“I’ll be happy to take off this suit,” Fuchida confessed.

“We’re not gonna smell so good when we do,” Rodriguez added.

Jamie found himself peering hard at the small screen of his laptop, trying to see past their visors. Impossible, of course. But they both sounded cheerful enough. The fears and dangers of the previous night were gone; daylight and the relative safety of the plane brightened their outlook.

Rodriguez said, “We’ve decided that I’m going back down inside the caldera and properly implant the beacon we left on the ledge there.”

“So we can get good data from it,” Fuchida added, as if he were afraid Jamie would countermand their decision.

Jamie asked, “Do you really think you should try that?”

“Oughtta be simple enough,” Rodriguez said easily, “long as I don’t go near that damned lava tube again.”

“Is there enough sunlight where you want to plant the beacon?” Jamie asked.

Ho sensed the biologist nodding inside his helmet. “Oh yes, the ledge receives a few hours of sunlight each day.”

“So we’ll get data from inside the caldera,” Rodriguez prompted.

“Not very far inside,” Fuchida added, “but it will be better than no data at all.”

“You’re really set on doing this?”

“Yes,” they both said. Jamie could feel their determination. It was their little victory over Olympus Mons, their way of telling themselves that they were not afraid of the giant volcano.

“Okay, then,” Jamie said. “But be careful, now.”

“We’re always careful,” said Fuchida.

“Most of the time,” Rodriguez added, with a laugh.

“How’s the weather report?” Craig asked.

“About the same,” Dex Trumball replied, from up in the rover’s cockpit. He was driving while Craig cleaned up their breakfast crumbs and folded the table back down into the floor between the bunks.

Craig came up and sat in the right-hand seat. The sun was just clear of the increasingly rugged eastern horizon.

“Want me to drive?” he asked.

“No way, Wiley. I’m going to break the interplanetary speed record today and get this baby up to thirty-five klicks per hour.”

Craig made a snorting laugh. “You’ll need a helluva tail wind for that, buddy.”

“Nope, just some downhill slope.”

“Lotsa luck.”

“I’m not kidding, Wiley. The plain slopes downhill all the way to Xanthe.”

“Shore,” said Craig. “And if we had a good breeze behind us we could really make time.”

Trumball glanced at him, then said, “Check the incoming messages, huh?”

There were two messages in the file, both from Stacy. The first one told them about Fuchida’s accident and Rodriguez’s rescue of him. And the biologist’s discovery of the siderophiles. The two men listened to Hall’s brief summary, then glanced at each other.

Craig let out a low whistle. “I wonder what Mitsuo’s Jockey shorts look like.”

Trumball laughed and shook his head. “I don’t want to know.”

Dezhurova’s second message was a weather report. The dust storm was spreading, but still confined below the equator.

“As long as it stays in the southern hemisphere we’re free and clear,” Trumball, said happily.

Craig was less cheerful. As he stared at the weather map on their screen he muttered, “It’s growin’ though. If it crosses the equator we’re gonna he in trouble.”

“Don’t be a dweeb, Wiley. This vehicle’s been through a dust storm before, y’know.”

“Yeah, and I’ve jumped off a burning oil platform into th’ Gulf of Mexico, too. Doesn’t mean I wanna do it again.”

Trumball’s answer was to lean harder on the accelerator. Craig watched the speedometer edge up past thirty-one kilometers per hour. With a grim smile, he remembered an old prizefighter’s maxim: You can run but you can’t hide.

PETE CONNORS WAS OFF DUTY, ACTUALLY ENJOYING THE BEACH IN FRONT of the two-story condo where he was living, when the phone call came.

Since he was the chief of mission control for the Mars expedition, Connors carried a cellular phone wherever he went—not that you could get very far from the control center on the narrow islets of the atoll.

He was lying comfortably on an old blanket, his heels wedged into the soft white sand, listening to the rhythmic beat of the surf against the reef, when the little phone beeped. Even from inside the plastic beach bag it managed to sound urgent.

With a sigh of exasperation, Connors pulled himself up to a sitting position and groped in the bag for the phone. He had brought the video attachment, too, but decided not to bother with it unless he had to look at some data.

“Connors,” he said crisply, as a gull swooped low across the beach, looking for leftovers.

“Dr. Li Chengdu here,” came the Chinese academician’s voice, as clear as if he were on the islet with him.

“Dr. Li! How are you?” Connors sat up straighten

“My health is excellent. And you?”

“Couldn’t be better,” Connors said, ritually. The truth was he hadn’t gotten enough sleep since the explorers had landed on Mars and it made him feel cranky much of the time.

“I want to apprise you of a possible problem,” Li’s voice said, flat and steady, no emotion in it.

“A problem?”

“Perhaps I am being overly pessimistic, but you were more friendly with Waterman than I was, and—”

“A problem with Jamie?” Connors felt startled.

“Not with him. About him.”

“What do you mean?”

Li hesitated only a heartbeat. ‘ ‘As you know, I am on the advisory board of the International Consortium of Universities’ committee for the Mars expedition.”

“The ICU, yeah.”

“I just received a call from the committee chairwoman, Professor Quentin, of Cambridge.”

“I know who she is,” Connors said, wondering when Li was going to get to the point.

“She, in turn, was called earlier by Mr. Trumball.”

Oh, oh, thought Connors. The money man is sore about something.

“Mr. Trumball,” Li went on, “is suggesting that Waterman be replaced as mission director.”

“Replaced?” Connors snapped. “That’s bullshi—er, hogwash.”

“Trumball is very insistent, I fear.”

“How the hell can they replace Jamie while the team’s out there on Mars?”

This time Li’s hesitation was more noticeable. “This could affect funding for the next expedition, of course.”