Mars (42 page)

Ilona made a low whistle. Naguib chuckled softly. The others grinned and nodded.

Tony Reed got slowly to his feet and made a slight bow in Jamie’s direction. “Touché,” he said. “And now, if no one objects, I think I’ll make myself a spot of dinner.”

One by one the others got up and began to prepare their evening meals. Jamie sat alone at the table, staring at his damaged helmet, wondering why human beings had to inflict pain on one another to gain respect.

For all the months that they had coasted across the dark emptiness between worlds, the members of the expedition had watched Mars steadily grow from a bright red star to a ruddy disc to a fully three-dimensional globe that hung before their eyes like a gigantic prize waiting to be seized.

Once the two spacecraft established themselves in orbit around the planet Jamie found himself spending hours at the observation port watching the strange world of rust and brick and almost bloody reds. The window bristled with instruments now, but peering between them Jamie could see Mars sliding past his feasting eyes slowly as the spacecraft turned in its stately revolutions. Jamie saw massive volcano cones projecting upward like the turreted eyes of lizards, staring at him impassively. The vast twisted gash of Valles Marineris called to him with memories of river-carved canyons back home.

He saw dust storms spring up and sweep across a quarter of the globe before dying away as mysteriously as they had started. Huge craters smashed out by ancient meteor strikes; some of them had blasted out the smaller meteoroids that had eventually made their way to Earth to be found on the Antarctic ice.

“Are you ready to go down there and start to work?”

Jamie recognized Ilona Malater’s throaty voice even before he turned his head.

He nodded solemnly. “Aren’t you?”

She gave a wintry smile. “After nine months in this concentration camp I’d be willing to run along the sand dunes in the nude.”

Jamie laughed.

In the reflected reddish light of Mars Ilona’s haughty face looked almost as coppery as Jamie’s. Her short-cropped golden hair took on glints of fire.

“Haye you remained celibate?” she asked, the corners of her lips curving upward slightly.

It was more of a challenge than a question, Jamie thought. He nodded once more.

“You must have interesting dreams,” Ilona said.

He felt a surge of anger heating his face. “You know, Ilona, you have a reputation for being the local sex therapist.”

Her smile widened. “And why not? Tony Reed assures me that no one aboard is carrying any communicable diseases worse than the cold you gave us all. Why not make life a little less tedious?”

“Less tedious, maybe, but a lot more tense.”

“Really?” Ilona arched a brow. “I would think that sex lowers tensions among us.”

“Not among the Russians.”

“Oh, them! Let them jerk each other off.”

Jamie huffed and turned away from her.

“You’re such a prude, Jamie,” Ilona said, still smiling. “I thought that once we made love you would relax, but you’re not the kind who can take sex casually, are you?”

“That’s
why we’re here,” he shot back, jabbing a finger toward the observation window and the red bulk of Mars hanging beyond. “To explore that planet. Not for high-school fun and games.”

“My god, you’re so serious!”

“We’re on a serious mission, Ilona. Very serious.”

“I’m not hurting anyone. In fact, I think the tensions aboard this prison would have been a lot worse.” Her eyes were dancing with amusement. “Tony agrees with me; he says my contributions to the team’s morale have been invaluable.”

“Tell it to Mikhail and Dmitri.”

“Come on, now, Jamie. You could use some relaxation yourself.”

“No thanks.”

“Think of it as research,” Ilona teased. “I think you don’t really get to know a man until you see him with his pants down.”

He stared at her for a wordless moment. Then, “Do Katrin and Joanna feel the same way?”

“You mean, are they doing what I’ve been doing?”

He started to reply, but heard voices drifting toward them from the passageway. Tony Reed and Joanna Brumado turned the corner and stepped into the observation area.

“I thought it was you, Ilona,” Reed said amiably. “I’d recognize that sexy voice anywhere.”

Jamie realized his eyes were fixed on Joanna. With an effort he pulled them away.

The four of them chatted about the landing they would make the next day, keeping their talk strictly on the business of the expedition. Reed seemed casual and relaxed, as ever. Joanna was serious, as usual, her dark eyes focused on Mars as if she realized for the first time that she was actually going to go down to the surface of that alien world.

Jamie felt almost like an automaton. He answered questions they addressed to him; he spoke the correct words and kept up his end of the four-way conversation. But his mind was racing, remembering the brief moments of wild animal heat he had shared with Ilona, remembering the sad, solemn expression on Joanna’s face when he had kissed her, wondering why he could not relax and play with Ilona and forget about everything else.

“I must get back to my quarters,” Joanna said quietly, almost timidly. “My father will be calling in another few minutes.”

Tony Reed held out his arm for her. “I’ll escort you there, if I may.”

She glanced toward Jamie, then back to Reed. “Of course. Thank you.”

Ilona watched them leave the observation blister, an enigmatic smile playing across her face. Once they were out of earshot she turned back to Jamie.

“The answer to your question is that Katrin has been much more discreet about her amours than I. And little Joanna, as far as I know, has been completely virtuous. Does that make you happy, Jamie?”

He nodded, trying to keep his face from betraying his emotions.

“But have you noticed,” Ilona added devilishly, “that Tony follows her wherever she goes?”

Jamie blinked, surprised. “He does?”

“Watch him,” she said. “He trails after her like, a dog following a bitch in heat.”

That sly, smiling bastard, Jamie thought. Who lectures him? Who doctors his food?

“Tony’s not satisfied with me or Katrin,” Ilona went on. “He wants the unobtainable.”

And so do I, Jamie realized. So do I.

“This is kind of awkward, Edith,” Jamie said into the camera.

He was sitting on the bunk of his privacy cubicle, the vidcam perched on the flimsy little desk opposite him, focused on his face. First thing in the morning, before his scheduled work hours, he had suited up and gone outside to take a few minutes’ worth of panoramic shots of the rocks and dunes and distant mountains in the area around the dome. Now he sat on his bunk, wondering what he should say to Edith.

“Yesterday we had a bit of a scare. Things still aren’t quite back to normal yet. A stray meteorite punctured our dome. Just a little puncture. We never even found the meteorite; it must’ve been so small it evaporated from the energy of the impact. But it leaked out some of our air and for a couple of minutes everything was pretty tense.”

He looked upward. The dome was bathed in sunlight. The pumps and fans were throbbing their usual low notes. Jamie could hear voices and the cowboy twang of a country-and-western song from somebody’s tape player.

“We’re still breathing pure oxygen in here. We’ve got to tiptoe around and be extremely careful. In a pure oxygen atmosphere, the slightest spark could set the whole dome on fire. The separators are accumulating nitrogen from the air outside, but we won’t be back on normal air for another day or two.

“There wasn’t any damage, except for the puncture itself, which Vosnesensky and Paul Abell fixed inside of a couple of minutes. I was outside when it happened and another micro-meteorite scratched my helmet. Oh yes, Tony Reed knocked
over a whole bottle full of vitamin pills. He’s getting kidded about being so clumsy.”

Jamie turned off the camera with the remote control box in his hand and made a wide, long, exaggerated yawn. The pure oxygen atmosphere seemed to be affecting his ears. They felt clogged, as if they needed to pop. The yawn helped, but not much.

Turning the camera on again, he continued, “The meteors were probably the last remains of an old, ancient comet. Just a bunch of stray pebbles floating around the solar system that happened to drift right into our spot on Mars. Couldn’t happen again in a million years.”

Jamie hesitated for an instant. There was hardly any more news to tell her.

“I sure appreciated the tape you sent. And I’m glad you’re moving up in the world. Going to New York must have taken a lot of guts. If there’s anything I can do, like an interview or some background information about our work here on the surface, just send a request through the mission directors and I’ll be happy to tell you whatever you need to know.”

Jamie stopped the vidcam again, thinking, How much can I really tell her? How much would the mission directors let me tell her? He decided for now to stick to science and stay away from politics and personalities.

“It turns out that there’s a lot more water beneath the ground than the earlier unmanned landers led us to believe. It’s frozen, of course. We’re sitting on top of an ocean of permafrost that probably extends all the way down to the Valles Marineris—the Grand Canyon of Mars, that is. Maybe farther, but we haven’t crossed the canyon and investigated the other side.”

Jamie described the brief traverse to the canyon and his hopes that he would be able to return there, skipping over the arguments and debates he had triggered. He carefully avoided mentioning the “village”; time enough for that when we’ve got definite evidence, one way or the other, he thought. Instead, he told Edith about the copper-green rock they had found. Then he ran out of things to say.

Fingering the remote control nervously, he finally flicked the camera on again. “I’m glad all that nonsense about my speaking Navaho has settled down. At least, I presume it has.
We haven’t seen much in the way of news here—mostly BBC stuff.”

He clicked it off again, licked his lips while he thought of what else he could tell Edith.

“Well, I guess that’s about it for now. We haven’t found any signs of life yet, living or fossils, but maybe conditions down in the Grand Canyon will be more conducive. Monique Bonnet has a nice little garden growing out of Martian soil, using Martian water for it. I don’t know what a few days of pure oxygen is going to do for her plants, though. We all go over and breathe on them now and then, to give them some carbon dioxide. It was nice of you to call me, Edith. I’ll be talking with you some more, later on.”

He turned the vidcam off for good, thinking, I can edit this tape for A1 and for my parents and have mission control send it to them. That’ll surprise them. Maybe my parents will even send me a message in return.

Seiji Toshima had listened to all the arguments raging between Waterman and the rest of the team without once opening his mouth. Their fight had nothing to do with him, and he had been trained from earliest childhood to refrain from interjecting his own opinions where they had not been specifically requested.

But now Waterman was asking, not for his opinion, but for knowledge. That was different. Toshima was happy to exchange knowledge with the American Indian. After all, that was the purpose of this expedition to Mars, was it not? To gain knowledge. And what good is knowledge if it is not exchanged with others?

Jamie Waterman sat on a spindly-legged plastic stool in the center of the Japanese meteorologist’s laboratory. Toshima’s area had been dubbed “weather central” by the team. It was the smallest of all the labs, as neat and gleamingly clean as if a squad of maintenance robots scrubbed and dusted the place every half hour.

The area looked like a showcase for an electronics shop. Where the other scientists’ workbenches were cluttered with glassware and instruments, Toshima had a row of computers humming quietly, their display screens showing graphs and curves. At the far end of the row, where it bent in an ell
shape at the corner of the partitions, was a scanner that could take videotape and digitize the images for computer storage.

Toshima sat in the other corner on a rickety-looking stool. He had given Jamie his best stool, the only one with a back.

Since the death of Isoruku Konoye, Toshima felt an unexpected weight of responsibility on his shoulders; the responsibility of honor, of upholding the proud name of Japan even here, on this strange world. He knew that most of the others belittled everything Japanese; he could see it in their eyes when they spoke to him, in the barely tolerant smugness of men like Antony Reed and the overly solicitous politeness of the Americans and the Russians.

Back oh Earth, Japan was a power to be reckoned with. Without Japan’s contributions of funding and technology the Mars Project would have died in bickering and cost-accounting among the Europeans, the Russians, and the Americans. Yet no Japanese was among the first group to land on Mars. And the only man to have been killed on this expedition had been the brilliant Japanese geochemist Konoye.

Seiji Toshima was the son of a factory worker, but within him beat the heart of a samurai. I will uphold the honor of the Japanese people. I will make these aliens respect Japan. I will make the entire world recognize the contributions of Japan to the exploration of Mars.

Suddenly he realized where his thoughts were leading. This is unworthy, he told himself. We are scientists. Knowledge knows no nationality. I am part of a team, not a medieval egomaniac.

“We can use the central processor,” he was saying to Jamie Waterman, unconsciously bending over to pat the minicomputer that stood slightly more than knee-high in that corner of the lab. Waterman was a curious one; as withdrawn and inward as a Japanese, almost. A man who understands correct behavior, Toshima thought, yet is willing to do battle for his beliefs.

“Can you access the geological file from here or should I go to the geology computer and copy it onto a floppy?” Jamie asked.

“I should be able to access it,” Toshima replied, his round flat face intently serious. Then he smiled slightly. “Unless
you have put a special restrictive code on the file to keep it secret.”