Mars (71 page)

The chief controller shook his head. “We’d have to keep them all quiet for the rest of their lives, wouldn’t we?” He tangled his fingers in the abused Vandyke again.

“I know what you’re thinking. It’s one thing if the politicians learn of this in private. We can explain it to them reasonably and make them see that it was an unavoidable accident. But if the media get hold of it and ballyhoo it, the politicians will have to react to what the media is saying, not what we tell them.”

“Exactly. That will mean the end of the Mars Project. There will be no return mission.”

“’Tis a thorny problem.”

The chief controller stared out the window at the falling snow. “It’s too bad we can’t keep them all on Mars permanently.”

The Scotsman smiled grimly.

By the time Jamie awoke it was fully light. Ivshenko was up in the cockpit; Vosnesensky had already suited up and gone through the airlock to winch himself across the treacherous lake of sand to the mired rover. It was the grating buzz of the winch motor that had pulled Jamie up from his sleep.

Once he realized Jamie was awake, Reed brought him a tray of hot breakfast with six gelatinous capsules resting beside a plastic cup filled with orange juice.

“Reed’s recipe for recovering your health,” the Englishman said when Jamie looked up at him questioningly. “Enough vitamins to lift a horse into orbit.”

Jamie still felt weak and aching, but better than the day before. He realized that it was not his physical symptoms that had eased; rather, the terrible fear he had kept bottled up within him was gone. The body will heal, he knew, once the
mind has been convinced that healing is possible. The real agony is in the mind, always.

He took a deep breath. The pain in his chest was gone. The turmoil in his mind had cleared away, too. Everything looked different, clearer than he had ever seen it before. As if he had looked at the world through a veil. Until now.

For the first time in his life Jamie felt an inner serenity, a certainty. He felt as sure and solid as the ancient mountains. This is what Grandfather Al told me about. I’ve found my balance, my place in the scheme of things. I know who I am now. I know where I belong. What I went through out there in the darkness has changed everything. Once you accept death nothing else can harm you. I can face anything now. Anything. He smiled inwardly. Not this time, Life Taker. Not yet.

“I want to thank you again, Tony. …”

Reed’s brows knit together. “There’s been enough of that. I’d prefer that you drop the subject, if you don’t mind.”

Jamie sat up and accepted the tray from Reed’s hands. “Where’s Mikhail?” he asked.

“Off to help your stranded comrades.”

“By himself? Is he strong enough?”

“He got seven solid hours of sleep,” said Reed. “He feels much better this morning. The vitamins are taking effect in him.”

Ivshenko called back to them from the cockpit, “Mikhail has made it to their rover. He is helping Connors into his suit.”

“I’d better get into mine,” Reed muttered. “I’m assigned to greeting our guests at the airlock hatch.”

“I’ll help,” said Jamie.

“You rest,” Reed said firmly. “You’ve done enough. We can handle the remainder.”

Reed went back to the airlock. Jamie gulped down his reconstituted eggs and lemon-laced tea, then made his way forward. Ivshenko grinned at him as he ducked into the cockpit. The cosmonaut’s left leg was encased in a rigid plastic cast that stuck out awkwardly. Jamie was careful not to bang it as he slipped into the left-hand seat.

Through the bulbous canopy Jamie could see the winch line stretching tautly to the mired rover, on the far side of the dust-drowned crater.

“Connors is fully suited up,” Ivshenko said.

“What about Joanna and Ilona?” Jamie asked as he clamped on a headphone set.

“Dr. Malater is apparently too sick to get out of her bunk without help. Dr. Brumado seems somewhat better than that, but not much.”

“Maybe I ought to go back there and help them.”

“You stay here,” Ivshenko said firmly. “Mikhail Andreivitch gave strict orders. He will get the job done.”

Jamie felt his body tense with something between frustration and guilt. He wanted to be helping, to be active, not sitting like a spectator. But a part of his mind told him, You’re in no shape to go outside again. You’ve done your share. You can’t do it all. Let the others help. The tension eased away.

Reluctantly, he accepted the situation and sat there in the cockpit, listening to the chatter among the people in the other rover. Joanna refused to go without her sample cases, the boxes that contained the precious specimens of Martian lichen. Jamie listened to their argument over the intercom radio link. Joanna’s voice was weak, exhausted, breathless. Yet her will was stronger than the toughest steel. She absolutely refused to leave the rover without the sample cases.

Vosnesensky abruptly dumped the problem in Jamie’s lap. “Waterman, you are the scientific leader. What do you recommend?”

Ivshenko glanced across the cramped cockpit to Jamie.

“The reason we came all this way was to see if life exists here,” Jamie said. “Can’t you attach the cases to the cable and send them here along with the people?”

A long pause, then Vosnesensky muttered, “Very well.”

“Thank you,” Joanna’s voice said, as if from a great distance away.

The rover’s exterior camera was aimed forward, along the taut cable that stretched between the two vehicles, and cranked up to maximum magnification. In the display screen set into the center of the control panel Jamie saw the half-buried rover’s airlock hatch swing open. There stood Joanna, encased in her Day-Glo-orange hard suit, with Vosnesensky’s blaring red suit beside her. The cosmonaut helped her into the climbing harness, then attached it to the winch line.

“We are ready,” Jamie heard in his earphone. “Start the winch.”

The motor began whining. Joanna was pulled off her feet and began moving toward Jamie, dangling in the harness, her boots trailing bare centimeters above the rippled sand. Behind her, Vosnesensky attached four bulky boxes to the cable: the bio cases, with their samples of the Martian lichen safely inside them.

Joanna was absolutely silent as she rode across the treacherous lake of sand. Jamie heard Vosnesensky and Connors talking over the intercom, grunting and panting with the exertion of getting the half-conscious Ilona into her hard suit. Joanna’s suited figure rode past him, her gloved hands gripping the cable, but her feet dangling as if she were unconscious. Or dead.

She’s all right, Jamie said to himself. She just doesn’t know how to hang on properly. She’s forgotten what they showed us in training about riding the safety cable out of the shuttle if there’s a malfunction on the launch pad. She’ll be okay.

Still, it seemed like an hour before he heard the airlock hatch sigh open behind him. Jamie twisted in the cockpit seat to see Joanna step wearily into the module, encased in her bright suit, with Reed in his yellow suit supporting her like a solicitous robot helping one of its own kind. The pair of them clumped as far as the midship area, where Joanna half collapsed on one of the folded-up benches.

Jamie pulled himself out of his seat and stumbled aft toward her, surprised at how weak he still was.

“Can you take care of her?” Reed’s voice was muffled from inside his helmet. “The sample cases are on their way and Mikhail’s already yelling at me to take them off the cable.”

“Sure, I’ll take her,” Jamie said, his voice shaking.

He helped Joanna lift off her helmet. She smiled at him feebly. Gently, he moved her to a half-reclining position, her back against the rover bulkhead, then tried to pull off her dust-spattered boots. The tang of ozone almost felt good, reviving, like smelling salts.

“I think I can manage the rest,” Joanna said, once he had tugged her boots off.

Jamie sagged down onto the bench beside her, then turned her halfway around so he could reach her backpack.

“I’ll help you.”

“I was afraid … you had died out there.”

“So was I.”

“It was a very brave thing you did.”

He tried to laugh. It came out more like a groan. “Bravery is the other side of fear, I guess. I was afraid we were all going to die.”

“You saved us. You saved me.”

“Tony saved me. Tony and Mikhail. There’s enough heroism to go around for everybody.”

He unclipped the last of the backpack connectors and lifted the bulky pack off her. It felt heavy, heavier than Jamie had remembered. Reaching across, he put it down on the opposite bench. Then he began to help unseal the suit’s hard-shell torso.

“Please, Jamie,” Joanna said. “I can do it for myself now. You should be ready to help Ilona. She is really in bad condition.”

He nodded. “Okay.”

Before he could get up from the bench, though, Joanna reached a hand to his cheek and pulled his face to hers. She kissed him tenderly.

“Thank you,” she whispered.

He clasped one hand around the nape of her neck, feeling the silky softness of her thick dark hair, and kissed her.

Before he could think of anything to say they both heard thumping sounds from the airlock.

“Ilona,” Joanna said. “She’ll need help.”

Jamie got up and went to the airlock hatch. Ilona was barely conscious and totally unable to stand on her own feet under the weight of her hard suit. Jamie and Reed laid her out on the bench opposite Joanna and removed her helmet and backpack.

She looks half dead, Jamie thought. Her eyes were vacant, glazed, bloodshot, with deep black circles beneath them. Her cheeks were hollow, gaunt, her breath fetid.

But she forced a little smile as she looked up at Jamie. “A man should never … see a woman … first thing in the morning.”

“This morning doesn’t count,” Jamie said.

“All right … but just … this once.”

Connors and finally Vosnesensky rode the cable across the sand-filled crater. By the time the sun was at high noon, they were all out of their suits and Vosnesensky was at the controls in the cockpit, grinning hugely.

“Now we return to the dome,” he said. “And from there to orbit in a few days.”

“And from orbit, back to Earth,” Connors said, perched on one of the benches.

Ivshenko was up in the cockpit with Vosnesensky. Jamie was sitting on the bench between Joanna and the astronaut. Reed was standing beside the galley, his back to the airlock hatch. They had pulled down the lower bunk on the opposite side so that Ilona could lie on it. She seemed to be asleep as the rover lurched into motion.

“You saved our necks, man,” said Connors.

“Not me,” Jamie said. “Tony …”

But Joanna interrupted him by laying a hand on his thigh. “You saved us. And not only us. You saved our Martian specimens.”

Jamie looked down at her urchin’s face, drawn and pale. Is that why she kissed me? Because I saved her damned lichen?

Alberto Brumado smiled tiredly into the dazzling lights. He thought he knew how exhausted the explorers on Mars must feel; he felt the same way. He had lost track of how many hours he had been sitting before the lights and cameras and reporters, answering their questions, feeding them the news of the stranded team as it became available to him.

The little lobby of the hotel had quickly proved too small for Brumado’s impromptu news conference, so they had moved—reporters, camera crews, lights, and all—to the largest conference room in the hotel and quickly jammed it to the walls and out into the corridor beyond its wide double doors.

The Mars Project officials at the Johnson Space Center had been furious, at first, that Brumado was talking off the cuff to the media. But after the first few hours, and hurried phone discussions with Washington and Kaliningrad, the project bigwigs had offered Brumado their own spacious conference hall at the Johnson Center.

None of the media people wanted to shut down and move to Johnson, not while they had Brumado live, giving a bravura marathon performance. So, swallowing their resentment, the Johnson people began passing information to Brumado as it came in from Mars.

Brumado was sitting on a folding chair behind a little table, up on the makeshift dais that had been quickly erected at the far end of the room. Perspiring, hair tousled, suit rumpled, tie long gone from his collar, he took another sheet of paper from Edith’s hand, scanned it quickly, then smiled up at the cameras.

“They are safe,” he said, the three most wonderful words
he had ever spoken. “Dr. Waterman carried the cable line to the second rover and cosmonaut Vosnesensky has brought the others to their vehicle. They have started on their way back to the dome.”

He could not see the pack of reporters beyond the glare of the TV lights, but he heard them sigh audibly, then break into spontaneous applause. Brumado felt surprised at that; then he wondered if they were applauding the good news or his own performance. The good news, of course. Joanna is safe. She will live. He stood up on weak, trembling legs and raised both his hands.

“If you will excuse me, I would like to take a break now. The public-information people at Johnson can take over, if you would be kind enough to go there.”

They applauded again, startling him anew. This time he realized it was for him. Alberto Brumado smiled boyishly and realized he needed to go to the toilet very badly.

Edith, standing off to one side of the dais, knew that Brumado would immediately want to speak to his daughter. She intended to be there when he did. It would be her chance to see Jamie.

He’s safe, Edith said to herself. And a hero. She felt proud of him. And of Alberto, who had turned this near disaster into a global media triumph.

It was only then, after more than twelve nonstop hours, that Edith began to think about how this event could be used to further her own career.

Everyone feels so damned happy to be leaving, Jamie thought. Why don’t I?

They had packed their specimens and computer disks aboard the ascent modules of the L/AVs. All the lab equipment and what remained of their supplies had been carefully covered and sealed, to be left inside the dome with the furniture and life-support equipment, ready to be used by the next explorers—if there was to be a second Mars expedition.