Mars (10 page)

Joanna placed her hand atop his. A small soft feminine hand, pale against his own, roughened and darkened by years of field work.

“I will write to my father,” she said softly. “Perhaps there is something he can do.”

Jamie said nothing, but he thought to himself bleakly, They’ve already got one part-Indian set for the mission. They won’t need another.

It was cold in the helicopter. Cold and noisy. The big chopper clattered and lurched in the gusty wind blowing down from the summit of Mount Markham. Glancing out the window of the rattling, vibrating cargo door Jamie saw the broad white expanse of the glacier stretching below them, glaring reflected sunlight into his eyes, glittering where snow had drifted into mountainous dunes.

“Several of the meteorites found in this area have been proven to be from the moon,” Hoffman was telling Joanna, bellowing to be heard over the roar of the turbine engines.

She was sitting in the middle seat, safety harness buckled
tightly across her shoulders and lap, her gloved hands clenched into rigid little fists, her head turned toward Hoffman so that she would not have to look out at the desolate world of ice below them.

Hoffman was lecturing at the top of his voice. To anyone else it would have sounded like the ultimate in arrogance, but Jamie knew that the Austrian was just as frightened as Joanna was. He was talking to stay in control of himself, telling Joanna every last detail about the meteorites that had been found on the glacier.

By me, Jamie reflected sourly. I found the damned meteorites. That part he doesn’t mention.

“Have any of them been definitely identified as Martian?” Joanna yelled back at him.

“Only two have matched comparisons with stones brought back from Mars by the automated probes,” Hoffman hollered. “And those were found more than twenty years ago. None of the meteorites located recently have proved to be of Martian origin.”

“Some of the stones found elsewhere in Antarctica have microflora living in cracks in their surfaces,” Joanna shouted, shifting the subject to her field of expertise to keep the throat-straining conversation going and avoid thinking about being alone out there on the ice.

“Yes, I know,” answered Hoffman. “A form of lichen that protects itself from the wind by living inside the surface cracks.”

“They are close enough to the surface to catch sunlight for photosynthesis.”

“And they also absorb warmth from the rock when it is heated by the sun, do they not?”

“Yes,” Joanna yelled. “They get water from the frost that ices the rocks.”

Jamie had heard all this before. And so had they, of course. He had been out on the glacier before, though, and they had not.

The chopper landed near the site Hoffman had chosen for the day’s search, then took off again in a roaring whirl of snow and ice particles that turned the pristine sky into a kaleidoscope of sparkling rainbow colors. Jamie watched the bird dwindle off into the clear blue until the sound of its
engines was lost in the moaning of the wind rushing down the glacier.

The three of them stood there against the crystalline sky in hooded, fur-lined, electrically heated parkas and leggings, face masks and goggles, thickly lined gloves and heavy spiked boots. They carried long-handled picks that doubled as walking staffs. A pallet of equipment, food, and emergency gear stood beside them, mounted on slick Teflon-coated skids that could traverse ice or deep snow with equal ease.

“Mars will be easy after this,” Jamie said. He meant it to sound cheerful but it came out otherwise.

Four hours later they were plodding across the broken rough ice, leaning heavily on their picks, the two men taking turns dragging the equipment skid behind them.

The wind poured mercilessly down the glacier in a raging torrent, howling like evil incarnate. Their electrically heated parkas and leggings barely kept them going against the buffeting, roaring wind that clawed at them like a furious beast trying to knock them over and suck the life warmth out of them.

Despite the heated suit Jamie felt the cold prying at him, working its freezing fingers in between his face mask and parka hood, worming past his gloves and up his sleeves. The air was so cold that even with the preheating that the face mask provided, Jamie’s nasal passages were getting raw. Each breath hurt.

It would be better if we could use the space suits, he thought. Then we’d be totally encased in their insulated hard shells. But the suits weighed too much to be used on Earth.

For the hundredth time Jamie straightened up and wiped a gloved hand across his frosting goggles. The other two stopped when he did, wordless now, gasping with exertion. Jamie saw the little clouds of steam puffing from their masks. It took a lot of energy merely to keep moving in cold like this.

His two charges were just trying to get through the day. Jamie was searching for a bit of Mars that might have come to Earth. Show me a dark stone, glacier, Jamie pleaded silently. Just one. One that came from Mars. Don’t hide it from me. Let me find it. Soon.

He knew that the glacier held its secrets deep within its icy bosom. There were ancient meteorites hidden out here,
chunks of stone and metal that had fallen out of the sky long ages ago and buried themselves in the snow. But once in a while a stone worked its way up to the surface. Jamie scoured the ice field for such a meteorite and prayed to the glacier to be generous.

Don’t hold your secrets from me, he said silently to the glacier. Show me the stones from Mars. They don’t belong to you; give them up gracefully.

But the glacier was so
big.
It was a river that had been frozen for millions of years, wider and more powerful than any Amazon of liquid water. It flowed only a few feet per day, yet it was inexorable, unstoppable in its patient journey from the summit of Mount Markham down to the quarter-mile-thick crust of the Ross Ice Shelf.

In all the times he had been out on the glacier Jamie had never experienced such cold. Even with a face mask and goggles and heated parka the raw blustering wind was numbing him down to the bone. Little Joanna had slowed terribly; she seemed barely able to walk. Still, he knew if he called for the helicopter to evacuate them back to the base it would be noted by the administrators and marked against her.

Hoffman seemed to be in better shape, yet he had not uttered a word in the past hour. He and Jamie took turns leaning into the harness that pulled the equipment pallet, but it seemed to Jamie that Hoffman’s turns were getting shorter and shorter.

“How are you doing?” he shouted over the wind.

Hoffman merely nodded from behind his mask and half raised one hand.

Joanna’s voice wavered as if she were losing control of it. “I … am … all right.” He could barely hear her over the wind.

“Is your heater turned up to max?”

“Yes. … Of course.”

Why am I putting up with this? Jamie asked himself. Why should I suffer through this kind of agony when I’m not going to be picked for the mission anyway? Then he thought, Suppose I call for the chopper and say that Hoffman is getting too weak to continue? Put the blame on him.

But he knew he couldn’t do it. He had never learned to lie convincingly. “Stay out of the retail trade,” his grandfather Al had often told him. “And never play poker with strangers.
Or anybody else, for that matter. Whatever’s on your mind is in your face, Jamie. Some redskin!”

Joanna was a different matter. The daughter of Alberto Brumado had to make it through training. She had to be on the first team, everyone agreed. But why do I have to half kill myself to help her get to Mars?

Maybe more than half kill, he thought soberly. The sky that had looked as clear as a crystal bowl of pale ice Mie was turning an ominous milky white. Already the summit of the mountain was lost in billowing mist. Squinting through his goggles, Jamie was certain he saw swirls of snow heading down the glacier’s broad rugged highway toward them.

The thermometer strapped to the cuff of his parka showed that the temperature was dropping quickly. It was down to thirty-eight below zero; with the wind chill it must be more like eighty below or even worse.

“I’m going to call McMurdo for the chopper,” he shouted at Hoffman and Joanna.

“No! Please!” she shouted back, her voice muffled by the mask. “Not for me. I will be all right.”

“You’re freezing.”

She did not answer, but stubbornly shook her head. Hoffman said nothing; he simply stood there, gloved fists planted on his hips, obviously laboring to draw in breath. Jamie focused his attention on Joanna, a tiny miserable bundle inside the bulky hooded parka and goggled face mask.

Uncertain, a tendril of fear worming up his spine, he turned to look back up the glacier toward the approaching storm. Maybe an hour, he estimated. Maybe less.

Then he saw the stone, about the size of a man’s fist, sitting dark and incongruous on the rough cracked expanse of the glacier as if it had been waiting for him, as if someone had placed it there for him to notice.

“Look!” He pointed.

He ran to it, nearly tripping on the broken jagged ice, leaving Hoffman by the equipment pallet, forgetting the exhausted freezing woman standing wearily beside the other geologist.

He knelt on the ice and stared at his discovery. Black, pitted like a missile’s reentry nose cone, the rock was clearly a meteorite. Could it be from Mars? Jamie had picked up four other rocks in his treks across the glacier. They had all
been disappointments, nothing more than ordinary “falling stars.”

This one looked different, though. A shergottite, I’ll bet. Blasted off Mars a couple hundred million years ago by a giant meteor strike. God knows how long it wandered through space before it finally got caught by Earth’s gravity well and plunged into this glacier. Probably been trapped in the ice for millions of years, waiting to rise up to the surface where somebody could find it. Me.

“Is it …?”

Jamie turned to see Hoffman leaning over his shoulder.

“It’s a Martian!” Jamie shouted.

“Are you sure?” The Austrian’s teeth were chattering audibly.

“Look at it! Where it’s not blackened it’s pink, for god’s sake!” he said, unable to hide the excitement he felt. “At the very least it’s good enough to get us home.” Fumbling in his parka’s deep pockets he finally grasped the palm-sized radio and pulled it up to the mouth flap of his face mask. “I’m calling for the chopper. We’ve found something important. This rock is our ticket back to McMurdo.”

No one could fault them for cutting short their time on the glacier. Not with a possible piece of Mars in their gloved hands and a roaring snowstorm coming down the mountain at them.

Nearly twelve hours later Jamie was walking tiredly from the geology lab toward his quarters, still feeling chilled inside. The storm that had been marching down the mountain range had enveloped the base at McMurdo Sound, howling outside the thickly insulated walls like an attacking barbarian army, piling snow up to the roof line. The base was snugly warm, though, as Jamie trudged slowly down the narrow low-ceilinged corridor toward his tiny cell of a room. Yet he still did not feel fully thawed out.

Joanna’s room was near his and her door was open. He
glanced in. Joanna was at her desk, her fingers flickering over her laptop computer’s keyboard.

She looked up and saw Jamie.

“Please come in,” she said. “I was waiting for you.”

She got up from the desk chair and came toward him. Joanna still looked almost like a child to Jamie. Delicate little hands, big deep brown eyes. But in form-fitting coveralls her body was not childlike. He felt a stirring inside himself as he stepped through her doorway and stood awkwardly before her.

“I was writing a letter to my father to tell him what you did out there on the glacier,” she said. “I wanted to thank you for it.”

“What I did?”

Joanna smiled up at him and Jamie realized how sensuous her lips were.

“You could have called for the helicopter to pick us up hours earlier. You saw how poorly I was doing.”

He did not know what to say. Suddenly his hands were as clumsy as if encased in boxing gloves. He finally settled on hooking his thumbs in the pockets of his jeans.

“If we had to be pulled off the glacier early,” Joanna went on in her whispery voice, “it would have meant the end of my hopes to be on the first team. And Dr. Hoffman’s, perhaps.”

“Not necessarily,” Jamie muttered.

“I appreciate your staying with me and protecting me the way you did.”

He shrugged.

“It would break my father’s heart if I was not on the first team,” she said softly. “He wanted so much to go to Mars himself. If I fail him …”

Jamie wanted to take her by the shoulders and pull her to him and kiss her. Instead he heard himself saying, “They would have sent the chopper to us anyway, what with the storm bearing down on us.”

“Yes. Perhaps.” Her eyes were fastened on him.

“The … uh, meteorite looks Martian, all right,” Jamie said. “Right ratio of inert gas isotopes. High pyroxene content.”

Her brows went up slightly. “Organics?”

“Dorothy Loring is slicing some thin sections for the microscope.”

Turning back toward her desk to shut down the laptop Joanna said, “I must get to the laboratory. She should have called me.”

Jamie stepped back toward the doorway as she flicked through the file of miniature floppy disks on her desk, pulled one out, and slid it into the snug pocket of her coveralls.

Then she looked at Jamie as if she had forgotten he was in the room with her. “I do want to thank you for helping me. I appreciate it very much.”

“De nada.”

She came around the desk again and stopped half a step in front of him. “It was very important to me.”

Looking down into her uplifted dark eyes Jamie brushed his fingertips against her soft cheek, uncertain, tentative.

Joanna flinched and backed away from him, her face reddening. “You mustn’t do that!”

“I didn’t …”

She shook her head. “We cannot get involved emotionally. You know that. They would never allow us on the mission if they thought…”