Red Mars (28 page)

“Behind the heating pad.”

They went to work on it with Nadia’s tools, and got it open. Behind the plate was another colony of Underhill algae. Nadia poked around at the edges of the plate and discovered a pair of small hinges where the top of the plate met the inside of the container wall. “Look, it’s made to open.”

“But who opens it?” Arkady said.

“Radio?”

“Well I’ll be damned.” Arkady stood, walked up and down the narrow corridor. “I mean . . .”

“How many dirigible trips have been made so far, ten? Twenty? And all of them dropping these things?”

Arkady started to laugh. He tilted his head back, and his huge crazed grin split his red beard in two, and he laughed until he held his sides. “Ah, ha ha ha ha ha ha!”

Nadia, who didn’t think it was funny at all, nevertheless felt her face grinning at the sight of him. “It’s not funny!” she protested. “We’re in big trouble!”

“Maybe,” he said.

“Definitely! And it’s all your fault! Some of those fool biologists in the trailer park took your anarchist rant seriously!”

“Well,” he said, “that at least is a point in their favor, the bastards. I mean—” he went back to the kitchen table to stare at the clump of blue stuff—”who exactly do you think we’re talking about, anyway? How many of our friends are in on this? And why in the world didn’t they tell
me
?”

This really rankled, she could tell. In fact the more he thought about it, the less amused he was, because the algae meant there was a subculture in their group that was acting outside UNOMA supervision
but had not let Arkady in on it
, even though he had been the first and most vocal advocate of such subversion. What did that mean? Were there people who were on his side but didn’t trust him? Were there dissidents with a competing program?

They had no way of telling. Eventually they pulled anchor, and sailed on over Amazonis. They passed a medium-sized crater named Pettit, and Arkady remarked that it would make a good site for a windmill, but Nadia only snarled. They flew by, talking the situation over. Certainly several people in the bioengineering labs had to be in on it; probably most of them; maybe all. And then Sax, the designer of the windmills, certainly had to be a part of it. And Hiroko had been an advocate of the windmills, but they had neither been sure why— it was impossible to judge whether she would approve of something like this or not, as she was simply too close with her opinions. But it was possible.

As they talked it over, they took the broken windmill completely apart. The heating plate doubled as a gate for the compartment containing the algae; when the gate opened, the algae would be released into an area that would be a bit warmer because of the hot plate itself. Each windmill thus functioned as a micro-oasis, and if the algae managed to survive with its help, and then grow beyond the small area warmed by the hot plate, then good. If not it was not going to do very well on Mars anyway. The hot plate served to give it a good sendoff, nothing more. Or so its designers must have thought. “We’ve been made into Johnny Appleseed,” Arkady said.

“Johnny what?”

“American folktale.” He told her about it.

“Yeah, right. And now Paul Bunyan is going to come kick our ass.”

“Ha. Never. Big Man is much bigger than Paul Bunyan, believe me.”

“Big Man?”

“You know, all those names for landscape features. Big Man’s Footprints, Big Man’s Bathtub, Big Man’s Golf Course, whatever.”

“Ah yeah.”

“Anyway, I don’t see why we should get in trouble. We didn’t know anything about it.”

“Now who’s going to believe that?”

“. . . Good point. Those
bastards
, they really got me with this one.”

Clearly this was what bothered Arkady most. Not that they had contaminated Mars with alien biota, but that he had been kept out of a secret. Men were such egomaniacs when it came down to it. And Arkady, he had his own group of friends, perhaps more than that: people who agreed with him, followers of a sort. The whole Phobos crew, a lot of the programmers in Underhill. And if some of his own people were keeping things from him, that was bad; but if another group had secret plans of its own, that was worse, apparently, because they were at least interference, and perhaps competition.

Or so he seemed to think. He wouldn’t say much of this explicitly, but it became obvious in his mutterings, and his sudden sharp curses, which were genuine even though they alternated with bursts of hilarity. He couldn’t seem to make up his mind whether he was pleased or angry, and Nadia finally believed that he was both at once. That was Arkady; he felt things freely and to the full, and wasn’t much worried about consistency. But she wasn’t too sure she liked his reasons this time, for either his anger or his amusement, and she told him so with considerable irritation.

“Well, but come on!” he cried. “Why should they keep it a secret from me, when it was my idea to begin with?”

“Because they knew I might come along with you. If they told you, you would have had to tell me. And if you told me, I would have stopped it!”

Arkady laughed outrageously at this. “So it was pretty considerate of them after all!”

“Fuck.”

The bioengineers, Sax, the people in the Quarter who had actually constructed the things. Someone in communications, probably . . . there were quite a few who must have known.

“What about Hiroko?” Arkady asked.

They couldn’t decide. They didn’t know enough of her views to be able to guess what she might think. Nadia was pretty sure she was in on it, but couldn’t explain why. “I suppose,” she said, thinking about it, “I suppose I feel like there is this group around Hiroko, the whole farm team and a fair number of others, who respect her and . . . follow her. Even Ann, in a way. Although Ann will hate this when she hears about it! Whew! Anyway, it just seems to me that Hiroko would know about anything secret going on. Especially something having to do with ecological systems. The bioengineering group works with her most of the time, after all, and for some of them she’s like a guru, they almost worship her. They probably got her advice when they were splicing this algae together!”

“Hmm. . . .”

“So they probably got her agreement for the idea. Maybe I should even say her permission.”

Arkady nodded. “I see your point.”

On and on they talked, hashing over every point of it. The land they passed over, flat and immobile, looked different to Nadia now. It was seeded, fertilized; it was going to change, now, inevitably. They talked about the other parts of Sax’s terraforming plans, giant orbiting mirrors reflecting sunlight onto the dawn and dusk terminators, carbon distributed over the polar caps, areothermal heat, the ice asteroids. It was all really going to happen, it seemed. The debate had been bypassed; they were going to change the face of Mars.

The second evening after their momentous discovery, as they were cooking dinner in a crater’s lee anchorage, they got a call from Underhill, relayed off one of the comm satellites. “Hey you two!” John Boone said by way of greeting. “We’ve got a problem!”

“
You’ve
got a problem,” Nadia replied.

“Why, something wrong out there?”

“No no.”

“Well good, because really it’s you guys who have the problem, and I wouldn’t want you to have more than one! A dust storm has started down in the Claritas Fossae region, and it’s growing, and coming north at a good rate. We think it’ll reach you in a day or so.”

“Isn’t it early for dust storms?” Arkady asked.

“Well no, we’re at Ls = 240, which is pretty much the usual season for it. Southern spring. Anyway, there it is, and it’s coming your way.”

He sent a satellite photo of the storm, and they studied their TV screen closely. The region south of Tharsis was now obscured by an amorphous yellow cloud.

“We’d better take off for home right now,” Nadia said after studying the photo.

“At night?”

“We can run the props on batteries tonight, and recharge the batteries tomorrow morning. After that we may not have much sunlight, unless we can get above the dust.”

After some discussion with John, and then with Ann, they cast off. The wind was pushing them east-northeast, and on this heading they would pass just to the south of Olympus Mons. After that their hope was to get around the north flank of Tharsis, which would protect them from the dust storm for at least a while.

It seemed louder flying at night. The wind’s rush over the fabric of the bag was a fluctuating moan, the sound of their engines a pitiful little hum. They sat in the cockpit, lit only by dim green instrument lights, and talked in low voices as they moved over the black land below. They had about 3,000 kilometers to go before reaching Underhill; that was about 300 hours of flying time. If they went round the clock, it would be twelve days or so. But the storm, if it grew in the usual pattern, would reach them long before then. After that . . . it was hard to tell how it would go. Without sunlight the props would drain the batteries, and then—”Can we just float on the wind?” Nadia said. “Use the props for occasional directional nudges?”

“Maybe. But these things are designed with the props as part of the lift, you know.”

“Yeah.” She made coffee and brought mugs of it up to the cockpit. They sat and drank, and looked out at the black landscape, or the green sweep of the little radar screen. “We probably ought to drop everything we don’t need. Especially those damned windmills.”

“It’s all ballast, save it for when we need the lift.”

The hours of the night wore on. They traded shifts at the helm, and Nadia caught an uneasy hour’s sleep. When she returned to the cockpit, she saw that the black bulk of Tharsis had rolled over the horizon ahead of them: the two northernmost of the three prince volcanoes, Ascraeus Mons and Pavonis Mons, were visible as humps of occluded stars, out at the edge of the world. To their left Olympus Mons still bulked well above the horizon, and taken with the other two volcanoes, it looked as if they flew low in some truly gigantic canyon. The radar screen reproduced the view in miniature, in green lines on the screen’s gridwork.

Then, in the hour before dawn, it seemed as though another massive volcano were rising behind them. The whole southern horizon was lifting, low stars disappearing as they watched, Orion drowned in black. The storm was coming.

It caught them just at daybreak, choking off the red in the eastern sky, rolling over them, returning the world to rusty darkness. The wind picked up until it swept them along in a muted roar from the land below. The view out the windows was of a few meters of swirling yellow dust, like a close-up of the clouds of Jupiter. Eddies twisted the dirigible’s frame and the gondola trembled and bounced.

They were lucky north was the direction they wanted to go. At one point Arkady said, “The wind should hopefully wrap around the north shoulder of Tharsis.”

Nadia nodded silently. They hadn’t gotten the chance to recharge the batteries after the night’s flight, and without sunlight the motors wouldn’t run too much longer. “Hiroko told me sunlight on the ground during a storm is supposed to be about fifteen percent of normal,” she said. “Higher there should be more. So we’ll get some recharge, but it’ll be slow. Could be that over the course of the day we might get enough to use the props a bit tonight.” She flicked on a computer to do the calculations. Something in the expression on Arkady’s face— not fear, not even anxiety, but a curious little
smile
— made her aware of how much danger they were in. If they couldn’t use the props, they wouldn’t be able to direct their movement, and they might not even be able to stay aloft. They could descend, it was true, and try to anchor, but they had only a few weeks’ more food, and storms like these often persisted for two months, sometimes three.

“There’s Ascraeus Mons,” Arkady said, pointing at the radar screen. “Good image.” He laughed. “Best view of it we’re going to get this time around, I’m afraid. Too bad, I was really looking forward to seeing them! Remember Elysium?”

“Yeah yeah,” Nadia said, busy running simulations of the batteries’ efficiency. Daily sunlight was near its perihelion peak, which was why the storm had started in the first place; and the instruments said that about 20 percent of full daylight was penetrating to this level (it felt to her eye more like 30 or 40); therefore it might be possible to run the props half the time, which would help tremendously. Without them they were losing altitude although that might just be the ground rising under them. With the props they might be able to hold a steady altitude, and influence their course by a degree or two.

“How thick is this dust, do you think?”

“How thick?”

“You know, grams per cubic meter. Try to get Ann or Hiroko on the radio and find out, will you?”

She went back to see what they had on board that could be used to power the props. Hydrazine, for the bomb-bay vacuum pumps; the pump motors could be wired to the props, probably. Then there were spare solar panels, and the solar panels in the emergency kit. If she could get them outside she could run whatever extra insolation they caught into the prop batteries. Also, in a sandstorm like this there was light coming from all directions, so some should probably be pointed down. As she rooted through the equipment locker looking for wire and transformer sand tools she told Arkady the idea, and he laughed his madman laugh. “Good idea, Nadia! Great idea.”

“If it works.” She rummaged through the tool kit, sadly smaller than her usual supply. The light in the gondola was eerie, a dim yellow glow flickering with every gust. The view out the side windows shifted from pockets of complete clarity, with thick yellow clouds like thunderheads sailing north with them, to complete obscurity, all the window surfaces streaming with dust that wormed and spun like a particularly unpleasant screensaver. Even at twelve millibars the blast of the wind was tossing the dirigible about; up in the cockpit Arkady was cursing the autopilot’s insufficiency. “Reprogram it,” Nadia called forward, and then remembered all his sadistic simulations on the
Ares
, and laughed out loud: “Problem run! Problem run!” She laughed again at his shouted curses, and went back to work. Arkady yelled back information from Ann. The dust was extremely fine, average particle size about 2.5 microns; total column mass about 1-3 grams per cm-2, pretty evenly distributed from top to bottom of the column. That wasn’t so bad; drop it on the ground and it would be a really thin layer, which was consistent with what they had seen on the oldest freight drops at Underhill.