Mars (11 page)

“I’m sorry,” Jamie said. “I didn’t mean to upset you.”

“It’s just …” Joanna almost wrung her hands. “I cannot get involved with anyone, Jamie. Not now. You understand that, don’t you? It would ruin everything.”

“Sure,” he said. “I understand.”

She wasn’t talking about calling her father anymore. She wasn’t worried about injustice or being Alberto Brumado’s pawn. And there’s no sense in her getting involved with a guy who’s not going to make the team, Jamie told himself silently.

“I’ve got to get down to the lab now,” Joanna said.

He stepped aside and let her pass, then went out into the narrow corridor and watched her hurry toward the laboratory.

At dinner that evening in the crowded dining room Joanna kept her distance from him. When the others congratulated him on’ having found a Martian rock that actually contained a trace of organic chemicals in it, Jamie muttered his thanks and told them he had been lucky.

“You realize, of course,” said Hoffman, sitting across the table from Jamie, “that since
I
am the official geologist in this group and you are nothing more than a guide, that I will
conduct the further examination of the meteorite. It is my responsibility now, not yours.”

Dead silence fell across the table, Jamie stared into the Austrian’s eyes and saw, deep beneath the arrogant exterior, a sort of pleading, like a drowning man reaching ’desperately for a hand to help him.

“I thought we would work together on it,” he said tightly.

“Of course, you may assist me,” said Hoffman.

Jamie nodded once, got up, and left the dining room. Get away before you break something. Go off by yourself, like a wounded coyote. He hurried down the dimly lit corridor back to his room and threw himself on his bunk, still fully clothed, feeling like six different kinds of fool while the blizzard raged on outside the snowbound base.

“I must speak with you, privately, in your official capacity.” Joanna’s voice was trembling.

Antony Reed looked up from the computer screen. She was standing in the doorway of the dispensary looking as if she would burst into tears in another moment.

“Come in,” he said, rising from the desk chair. “Close the door and sit down.”

Joanna was dressed almost formally, considering the lax standards of the base: tailored white blouse and snug whipcord jeans that emphasized her hourglass figure. She sat tensely on the wooden chair in front of the desk, biting her lower lip.

“I assure you that anything you tell me will remain strictly confidential between us,” Reed said, leaning back in his swivel chair. It creaked slightly.

She was terribly upset, he saw. Nervous and fearful. He realized that Hoffman had gone after her at last. The Austrian has nibbled at the bait.

“What I have to say may have a bearing on our work, on the personnel selected for the mission,” Joanna said.

Reed kept his face perfectly serious.

“I must have your promise that you will not reveal anything I tell you to the project administrators.”

Leaning forward and placing his forearms on the desk, Reed said in his best professionally grave manner, “If what you are about to tell me actually does have a serious bearing on the mission, then you are placing me in an ethical dilemma.”

She nodded and drew in a deep breath. Reed admired the way her blouse moved, even though it was buttoned up to the neck.

“I must be free to speak with you off the record,” she said. “When I have finished we can decide what is important for the mission and what is purely personal. Is that all right?” Her voice was almost pleading.

Leaning back in the complaining chair again Reed said airily, “Yes, yes, of course. That will be fine. I want you to feel free to speak openly.”

Joanna stared at the computer on the desk. Reed smiled, reached over, and turned it off.

“Now then,” he said, “what seems to be the matter?”

She hesitated. Then, “A … a certain member of the group …” She went silent.

Reed waited for a few moments, then prompted, “A member of the group did what? Insulted you? Attacked you? What?”

Her eyes went wide. “Oh, nothing like that!”

“Really?”

She almost seemed relieved. “One of the men tried to make advances, but that was no problem. We have all learned how to deal with that.”

“We?”

“All the women in the group.”

“You’re saying that some of the men make improper overtures to you?” Reed asked.

Joanna actually smiled. “Of course they do. We can handle that. It is not a problem.”

“The men don’t persist? They don’t become threatening?”

She dismissed that idea with a feminine little shrug. “There is only one who makes a real pest of himself.”

“Dr. Hoffman,” Reed prompted.

“How did you know?”

“Has
Hoffman bothered you?”

“He has tried. I was a bit concerned at first; he seemed so insistent.”

“And?”

“I have learned to deal with him. We women help each other, you know.”

Reed fought to keep himself from frowning. “What’s your problem, then?”

Joanna’s faint smile disappeared. She looked troubled once again. Glancing around the room before replying, she finally said, “It is Dr. Waterman.”

“Jamie?”

“He has given up his chance to go on the mission in order to help me.”

“As I understand it,” Reed said stiffly, “he did not volunteer for that. Dr. Li ordered him to do it.”

“Yes, I know,” Joanna said. “But still—he is very kind, very helpful. Under other circumstances …”

“Good lord, young lady, you’re not telling me that you’ve fallen in love with him!” Reed was aghast.

“No, no, of course not,” she answered too quickly. “We have only been together a few days. But …” Her voice trailed off again; she looked away from Reed.

Feeling a puzzling confusion roiling inside him, Tony said, “It would be extremely unwise to become emotionally involved with a man you will probably never see again, once your tour here at McMurdo is finished.”

“I know. I understand that.”

“Then what is your problem?” Reed demanded.

“I feel terribly guilty that he is giving up his chance to make the mission because of me.”

“I see.” Reed relaxed, leaned back again and steepled his fingers. “Of course you do. It’s a perfectly natural reaction.”

“What should I do?”

He spread his hands vaguely. “Do? There’s nothing for you to do. The decision to keep Waterman here was not made by you; you’re not responsible for his fate.”

“But I am! Don’t you see?”

Pointing to the computer screen and smiling, Reed said, in his most persuasive doctor-knows-best manner, “My dear young lady, Waterman was picked to help you—and the others, I might add—because Li and the selection board had
already decided he would not be included in the Mars team. Do you think for one moment that they would take someone already chosen for Mars and scratch him from the roster merely to help you here? No. Certainly not. Waterman’s fate was already decided. You had nothing to do with it.”

Joanna stared at him for a long wordless moment. Finally she asked, “You are sure of this?”

Nodding toward the silent computer once more, Reed said, “I do have access to all the personnel files, you know.”

She breathed out a deeply relieved sigh.

Watching her blouse, Reed felt seething disappointment burning in his gut. Hoffman’s so inept that he doesn’t frighten her. And now she’s allowed herself to form a romantic attachment to this red man from the wild west. This isn’t what I had planned for her. Not at all.

Standing out in the open, Jamie realized once more how much Mars reminded him of the rocky, mountainous desert of northwestern New Mexico. In the dawn’s slanting light the cliffs to the west glowed red, just as they did at home.

But the sky was pink, not blue, and the rock-strewn ground was utterly bare. Not a twig or a leaf. Not a lizard or a spider or even a patch of moss to break the endless rusty reds and oranges of the desert. The sun was small and weak, too far away to-give warmth.

Magnificent desolation. An astronaut had said that about the moon, decades ago. Jamie thought it more appropriate for Mars. The world he saw was magnificent, beautiful in a strange, clean, untouched way. Proud and austere, its desert harsh and totally empty, its cliffs stark and bare, Mars was barren yet splendidly beautiful in its own uncompromised severity.

Looking out to the horizon, Jamie felt an urge to walk out as far as he could, just keep on going forever across this magnificent landscape that was so alien yet so much like home. He snorted angrily to himself. Leave the mysticism behind you, he chided himself. You don’t want to be the first man to die on Mars.

Yet it looked like a good place for dying—a dead world. On Earth life has crawled into every crevice and corner it can find, from pole to pole. Even in the dry Antarctic deserts there’s life hidden inside the rocks. But this place
looks
dead. Dead as the moon. If any life at all exists here it should have changed the way the place looks.

Jamie recalled tales of creatures made of silicon and green-skinned Martians with six limbs. Don’t judge without
evidence, his scientific conscience warned. Be patient, said a deeper voice within him. The rules of life may be different on this new world.

He shook his head inside his helmet as if trying to clear away the argument within. The suit had acquired that faintly acrid, not unpleasant odor of his own body now. We’ve personalized our suits, Jamie thought, as he carried another bulky crate of medical supplies from the lander to the airlock hatch of their dome, balancing it on his shoulder as if it weighed no more than a sack of cornmeal.

“Look! There they are!”

It was Connors’s voice, high with excitement. Jamie and the American astronaut were unloading the last of the supplies from the lander. Vosnesensky and Reed were carrying them from the airlock to their proper storage places inside the dome. The two women had been assigned to checking off the stores on the computer’s inventory lists. So much for equal rights, thought Jamie.

He straightened up and tried to follow Connors’s pointing outstretched arm. The top of his helmet blocked his view for a moment, but by tilting his head inside the helmet slightly, Jamie managed to see the thin streak of a contrail blazing across the pink sky.

“Right on time,” Connors said, holding his left wrist up in front of his visor. “They’ll be landing on schedule.”

As if to confirm the observation, Vosnesensky’s heavy voice came through Jamie’s earphones. “Team two is in reentry trajectory. We must be finished off-loading by the time they land, in … fifty-eight minutes.”

Fifty-eight minutes later all six members of the first team stood between their own lander and the inflated dome, watching the fiery descent of the second lander.

Everything about the Mars expedition was done in pairs. There were two landing parties, two backup teams who remained in orbit around the planet, duplicates of every piece of equipment and milligram of supplies.

The expedition had been planned around the “split-sprint” mode of operation, which meant (stripped of the technical jargon) that the expedition took the quickest possible route to Mars and planned to stay at the planet for a minimal length of time—two months. That was the “sprint” mode. The scientists had fought against it with logic and
economics; they had failed in the face of the politicians’ desire for quick and spectacular results.

For while it was true that the sprint mode was more, costly overall than a more gradual approach that would permit a r longer stay time at Mars, the politicians knew that a quick mission would require fewer years of wrangling and painful budgetary crises than a longer one. Moreover, practically every politician involved in the Mars mission wanted to see humans on the red planet while he or she might still be in office to take the credit.

So the expedition sprinted to Mars.

The “split” mode simply meant that the expedition rode across the interplanetary gulf in two sets of spacecraft. The rationale was that if disaster hit one set, the other was self-sufficient and could complete the mission.

Now Jamie and the others stood waiting for the second half of their expedition to touch down on the dusty surface.

“There!” Vosnesensky blurted, and they all turned to see a dot in the sky hurtling toward them. Shapeless, formless, it was still too high to be anything more than a dark blur falling across the pink sky like a rock, dragging a bright flaming contrail behind it like a falling star.

My god, Jamie thought, that’s what we looked like yesterday.

Then a streak of color streamed from the top of the speck and billowed into a trio of broad white parachutes. The lander slowed, coasted, swaying slightly, gliding toward the ground with the three huge chutes spread above it like angels’ wings or the shade awnings of a desert tribe. But it was still falling fast, too fast. Jamie watched for several minutes, his heart in his throat, as the lander floated rapidly downward.

It grew and grew into an ungainly looking combination of saucer and teacup: the circular aeroshell drag brake topped by the cylindrical body of the landing vehicle. Jamie saw that the ceramic underside of the aeroshell was blackened and streaked from its burning flight through the upper Martian atmosphere.

Abruptly the parachutes separated from the lander and flapped away, lost angels wandering across the Martian landscape. The craft seemed to stagger in midair. Puffs of gray-white
steam spurted from its control jets as the lander teetered and righted itself, hovering for an instant.

The retro-rockets fired fitful short bursts, blasting grit and swirling dust devils up from the ground as slowly, slowly the oversized saucer and teacup settled downward, cushioned by the hot rocket exhaust. Through his helmet Jamie could hear the intermittent screeching of the retros, like the staccato shrill of a frightened bird.

The lander was coming down more than a hundred meters away, yet a miniature sandstorm was pelting against his hard suit. He resisted the Earth-trained impulse to lean into the wind; there was no real pressure pushing against him in this thin atmosphere.