Mars (31 page)

“Yes, yes.” Vosnesensky pointed to the panels of lights that showed the condition of the rest of the ship. Most of the lights were green. “The equipment was built to withstand radiation. It is only we fragile creatures of flesh and bone who need protection.”

Cheerful, Jamie thought. Very cheerful.

Fourteen hours later the radiation levels outside the shelter had not gone down discernibly. Jamie had dozed for a while, slumped back on the bench that lined the compartment’s wall. Joanna and the Polish biochemist who was Ilona’s backup had found enough room on the opposite bench to curl up and sleep. There were foldout cots built into the walls above the benches, but no one had bothered to use them.

Looking around with blurry eyes, Jamie saw that all four
pilots were sitting up near the hatch and the comm console. The Christmas tree of monitoring panels still showed mostly green lights, although there were more red ones than before. Tony Reed was chatting amiably with Ilona and the Aussie geologist, George O’Hara, at the other end of the compartment, where food and drink dispensers were built into the rear wall.

Jamie pulled himself to his feet, feeling stiff arid dull-headed. O’Hara was redhaired, rawboned, tall enough to need to stoop slightly unless he stood exactly in the midline of the compartment. Otherwise his head brushed the curving ceiling panels. He seemed an amiable enough sort. Jamie had not detected a trace of jealousy over the fact that O’Hara was to stay aboard the ship while he would be the one to go down to the surface.

“… in Coober Pedy the miners live underground most of the year,” O’Hara was saying. “Too bloody hot to live up on the surface, so they’ve built a by-damn city down in the shafts and galleries. Swimming pools and everything.”

Ilona was not impressed. “How much longer must we stay in here?”

“Don’t be so anxious to go out,” Tony said. “This is the best place in the entire solar system to be, right now.”

“Except for Earth,” said Jamie.

“Ah well,” Reed admitted, “we can’t have everything now, can we?”

“Reminds me of being stuck inside a bloody airliner,” O’Hara said, grinning down at Ilona. “I remember once a couple years ago at Washington National, they had us buttoned up on the rampway and made us wait five bloody hours inside the bloody airplane before we could take off. Some mechanical problem they took their sweet time fixing. We drank all the booze on board and we still hadn’t moved a fucking inch. It was like a zoo by the time we actually took off.”

“I’m feeling as if I’m in a zoo,” Ilona muttered. “In a cage.”

“Steady on,” Tony said in his best British stiff-upper-lip manner. But he looked tight to Jamie, tense, his smile forced.

“How much longer will it be?” Joanna’s sleepy voice came from behind Jamie.

It was a rhetorical question. She pushed past them and went into the lavatory.

“Ever wonder why they always put the pisser next to the water fountain?” O’Hara asked no one in particular.

“Plumbing,” Jamie said.

“Or recycling?” suggested Reed.

Jamie walked the length of the compartment, as much to Stretch his legs and get some circulation going as to reach the pilots up by the comm console and equipment monitors. Katrin Diels, the German physicist, was deep in earnest conversation, a headset clamped over her blonde curls.

“When did the intensity peak?” she asked into the pin-sized microphone in front of her lips.

Jamie almost smiled at the fierce intensity on her snub-nosed freckled face. She was slight of frame, as butter blonde and blue-eyed as the people you would see in a travel poster advertising Oktoberfest. The pilots had made room for her and she sat on the end of the bench where she could operate the communications console.

She whipped the headset off and sprang to her feet.

“Good news, everybody!” she called out. “The lunar observatory reports that the storm’s intensity peaked there almost an hour ago.”

Smiles broke out. Heads nodded. Everyone murmured happily.

“According to the orbiting magnetosphere observatories,” Diels continued, “the storm should be over in another twelve to sixteen hours.”

Groans. “Another sixteen hours in here?”

Tony Reed raised his arms for silence. “Now don’t complain. As long as the toilet works we should be perfectly fine.”

Ilona was not amused. “Sixteen more hours. Ugh!”

“Try to relax,” Reed urged. “Take a nap.”

“Would you like to play a game of bridge?” asked the Greek biologist.

“Not with you,” O’Hara snapped. “It’s like swimming with a bloody shark.”

Xenophanes laughed, but to Jamie it seemed strained.

Vosnesensky said, “We should not sit idly for another fourteen hours.”

Ilona’s lips curled into the start of a sneering reply, but before she could say anything Reed jumped in.

“What would you suggest, Mikhail Andreivitch?” the Englishman asked.

“A workers’ council,” the Russian replied. “We are all here. None of us has pressing duties to perform. Now is the time for a self-analysis session.”

“A quality circle, like the Japanese?” asked lad Sliwa, the backup biochemist.

“More like a self-criticism circle,” said Ilona, “like prisoners in Siberia.”

Vosnesensky’s beefy face flushed slightly, but he did not reply to her. Ivshenko, lean in face and body, darkly handsome in an almost Levantine way, said, “Self-analysis can be a very useful way to examine interpersonal problems.”

There was some argument, but Vosnesensky was determined and none of the others really had any suggestion to offer as an alternative. So the twelve men and women sat along the benches facing one another.

“How do we start?” asked Ollie Zieman.

“I will start,” Vosnesensky said. “This was my idea, so I will be the first volunteer.”

“Go right ahead,” said Reed, sitting across the central aisle from the Russian.

Vosnesensky glanced at Ilona, then turned his gaze to sweep the men and women on the bench opposite him. “I feel resentment from some of you. Resentment that I am in command. Resentment, perhaps, that a Russian is in command.”

“That’s rather natural, is it not?” asked Katrin Diels. “There is bound to be some resentment against any authority figure.”

That started the discussion, and around and around it went. Jamie watched in silence, noticing that Ilona sat leaning back against the wall like a cat, her eyes following from one speaker to the next, her lips slightly curled in what might have been a smile. But she did not volunteer a word.

Like meetings of the student council, Jamie thought, remembering his undergraduate days. The ones who did most of the talking were the ones who were already in charge. The
ones who needed to talk the most Were the ones who stayed silent and kept their anger bottled up inside them.

After nearly an hour Jamie was startled to hear O’Hara say, “Well, if we’re baring our souls and all that—I don’t particularly like the idea that I’m going to be sitting up in orbit all during our stay at Mars while my esteemed colleague here,” he jabbed a thumb in Jamie’s direction, “gets to spend the whole seven weeks down on the surface. I don’t think that’s fair.”

“I agree with you,” Jamie heard himself say. “It’s not fair.” But, he added silently, that’s the way the mission plan has been written and that’s the way it’s going to be.

O’Hara’s gripe launched another hour’s debate on why the mission had been planned the way it had been, and whether or not they could appeal to Dr. Li to change the procedure so that the backup teams could spend some time on the surface.

“It would be useless,” Vosnesensky said flatly. “All these procedures were examined very thoroughly for years. One team stays on the surface and the backup team remains in orbit. That will not be changed. I know this for a fact.”

“I agree with George,” Ollie Zieman grumbled. “It’s not fair.”

“But more efficient,” Vosnesensky countered, with the flat finality of a man who had decided the subject was closed.

“Why must the leader of each team be a Russian?” Ilona asked, her throaty voice purring, almost sleepy.

Everyone turned toward her.

“I mean, we have men and women of every nationality on this mission. Yet of the four teams, each group is headed by a Russian. A Russian
male
, at that.”

For a long moment there was absolute silence. Jamie could hear the electrical hum of the ship’s equipment and the quiet hiss of the air fans.

“I can answer that,” said Pete Connors.

“Please do,” Ilona said.

The black astronaut was sitting beside Vosnesensky, who had the other cosmonaut, Ivshenko, on his other side. Connors gave them a small grin, then turned back to Ilona.

“First,” he raised a long finger, “the commander of each team must be a pilot. A man from the military, accustomed to giving orders and having them obeyed. Accustomed to
receiving orders from higher authority and carrying them out. Without discipline we could all get killed. This is no weekend hiking trip we’re on.”

“You said a man,” Katrin Diels interrupted. “Why not a woman?”

Connors made an elaborate shrug. “Guess they couldn’t find any women with, the necessary qualifications.”

All three women hooted at him. Even most of the men laughed.

Once they calmed down, Connors resumed, “Second, the Russian Federation has provided the boosters and the life-support equipment for this mission. Soviet cosmonauts have more experience in spaceflight than anyone on Earth; they’ve been doing long-term missions aboard their space station since 1971, for god’s sake!”

“Because you Americans waited twenty-five years before you put up a permanent space station,” Xenophanes said, practically sneering.

“Yeah, that’s true,” Connors agreed. “So when we started planning the Mars mission, the American government agreed that the team leaders would be picked from military pilots who had the most experience in spaceflight.”

“Meaning Russians,” said Xenophanes.

“That’s the way it worked out.”

Sliwa huffed, “The Russians outsmarted you at the very start of the program. They have always been clever at negotiations.”

“I don’t think you can say that Mikhail or Dmitri are here because some Russian politician outslicked his American counterpart,” Connors objected.

Sliwa hunched his shoulders. Vosnesensky was glaring at the Pole.

Ivshenko glanced at his compatriot, then said, “The Russian Federation has made some sacrifices for this
privilege
of providing leadership. No Russian scientist was selected for the ground team, even though we have many men—and women—who are highly qualified in the fields of planetary sciences.”

“Same thing with the States,” added Connors. “We have astronauts on all four teams, but no scientists on the ground team except for Jamie here.”

They all turned toward Jamie, who forced himself to remain
silent. I’m here by accident, he told himself. They all know that. And back in the States I’m only half American, whichever way you look at it.

“Perhaps we should change the subject,” Reed suggested. “This kind of argument will get us nowhere.”

Jamie was tempted to ask Reed to explain how he could sneak sex-suppressant drugs into their food or drink. But he thought better of it. No sense starting a real fight, he told himself. So he remained quiet while the others stared at one another, unable or unwilling to find a new topic for discussion.

“Well then, perhaps we should get some sleep,” Reed said.

Vosnesensky nodded vigorously. “Yes. A good idea. In ten hours or so the radiation levels should be low enough for us to leave this shelter. Then we will have to check the ship’s systems and all our equipment thoroughly to assess what damage the storm has done, and then repair it. We should sleep now.”

It was an order, not a suggestion. No one argued, not even Ilona.

Jamie and Vosnesensky had started as soon as the morning sunlight made the ground around them visible. All the previous day they had taken turns driving the rover at breakneck speed along the broken, rugged badlands country, heading north by east, away from the faulted canyons of Noctis Labyrinthus, away from their base camp. Breakneck speed, for the rover, was not quite forty kilometers per hour—almost the speed limit in a school zone.

Still they were exhausted by the time the sun had finally dropped behind the ragged horizon at their backs and the dark cold shadows of night overtook their vehicle. Two straight days of continuous driving, much of it detours around ridges too steep to climb or crevasses too deep to traverse, had sapped them physically and emotionally. They ate a sparse dinner in moody silence; then Vosnesensky checked in with Dr. Li and the base camp. Everything was going smoothly at the base, and to Jamie’s continuing surprise and delight, Li still did not order them to turn around and return to the domed camp.

“The mission controllers haven’t vetoed our excursion,” he said, leaning back on the bench that would later unfold to be his bunk. Vosnesensky sat across from him, the narrow folding table between them.

“Not yet,” said the cosmonaut, like a man waiting for the ax to fall.

Feeling something between guilt and embarrassment, Jamie said, “I’m sorry I had to go over your head about this.”

Vosnesensky shrugged his heavy shoulders. “It was your right to do so.” He looked into Jamie’s eyes and added, “My responsibility was to stick to the mission plan until higher
authority changed the plan. I was only doing my duty. I was not objecting on personal grounds.”

A tendril of relief wormed along Jamie’s spine. “Then you’re not angry?”

“Why should I be? Do you think you scientists have a monopoly on curiosity?”

Jamie smiled broadly. “That’s great! I was afraid I’d made you sore.”

The Russian grinned back at him. “Not so. Once Dr. Li took the responsibility of allowing this change in the traverse, my objections vanished. I would like to see this Grand Canyon too.”

Jamie slept soundly, dreaming of Mesa Verde and his grandfather.

They awakened after their third night aboard the rover at the first eerie light of dawn, the faintest pale pink brightening of the sky along the flat eastern horizon. Jamie pulled his coveralls over his briefs, then set up the folding table between their bunks and popped two precooked breakfasts into the microwave while Vosnesensky was in the lavatory. The Russian, already in his tan coveralls and soft slipper-socks, spooned down his steaming oatmeal while Jamie took his turn at the toilet.