Return to Mars (5 page)

JAMIE FOUND HIS OLD PERSONAL CUBICLE UNCHANGED FROM SIX YEARS earlier. The bunk with its thin Martian-gravity legs was waiting for him. The plastic unit that combined desk and clothes closet stood empty, just as he had left it.

Everything’s in good working order, he marveled. They had filled the dome with inert nitrogen when they’d left, six years earlier. Now the air was an Earth-normal mix of nitrogen and oxygen, so they could live inside the dome in their shirtsleeves. Or less.

During the first expedition they had been hit by a meteor swarm, almost microscopic little pebbles that had punctured the dome in several places and even grazed Jamie’s spacesuit helmet. One in a trillion chance, the astronomers from Earth had told them. Jamie nodded, hoping that the odds remained that way.

Someone had gotten the loudspeakers going and was playing a soothing classical piano recording. Beethoven, Jamie thought. He remembered how the cosmonauts played Tchaikovsky and other Russian composers during the first expedition.

Yet the dome felt subtly different. Its new-car smell was gone. The first expedition had occupied it for only forty-five days, but that had been enough to take the shine off it. The dome felt like home, true enough, but not exactly the way Jamie had remembered it.

“Toilets ain’t workin’.”

Jamie turned to see Possum Craig standing in his doorway, a gloomy frown on his heavy-jowled face. I he accordion-slide door had been left open, so there had been no need ID knock.

“Both toilets?” Jainie asked.

Craig nodded glumly. “Must be the water line clogged up. Or froze.”

Officially, Craig was a geochemist, recruited from a Texas oil company to run the drilling rig. The biologists theorized that Martian life thrived underground, perhaps miles underground, and the lichen they had found in the surface rocks were merely an extension of this below-ground ecology. “Plutonian biosphere,” they called it.

Unofficially, Craig was the expedition’s repairman. There wasn’t a tool he could not wield expertly. He was plumber, electrician, and general handyman, all wrapped in one package. Trumball had started calling him “Wiley J. Coyote” within a week of their launch toward Mars, when Craig had cleverly repaired a malfunctioning computer display screen with little more than a screwdriver and a pair of tweezers from the medical equipment.

Craig preferred the new name to his usual “Possum,” an old oilfield reference to his painfully prominent nose.

“You think it’s frozen?” Jamie asked, crossing his compartment in two strides and stepping past Craig, out into the dome’s open space.

“Most likely. We shoulda buried it, first thing.”

“And the recycling system’s not on-line yet.”

“I could try overpressurin’ the line, but I don’t wanta run the risk of splittin’ the pipe. You don’t want that kinda mess, not the first night.”

Stacy Dezhurova came up to them, a troubled pair of furrows between her heavy brows. Her hair was sandy brown; she wore it in a short pageboy that looked as if she’d put a bowl over her head and chopped away herself.

“Possum has told you the news?” she asked gloomily.

Jamie nodded. Across the open area, at the row of lockers next to their airlock, he saw Rodriguez worming his arms through the torso of his hard suit.

“Tomas is going outside?”

“The chemical toilets are in the lander. He’s going to bring them in here for tonight.”

“It’s already dark out.” That meant the temperature was plunging.

“We must have toilets,” Dezhurova said firmly. She was almost always somber and serious, an impressive and very capable woman whose formidable exterior masked a keen, dry sense of humor. But now she was in her no-nonsense mode. “Toilets are primary.”

“Who’s going with Tomas?” Jamie asked. Safety regulations forbade anyone from going out alone, even a NASA-trained astronaut.

“I’ll go,” Craig said, without much enthusiasm.

Dezhurova shook her head. “No, I will do it.”

“Not you, Stacy,” Jamie countered. “We can’t have both our astronauts outside at the same time if we can avoid it.”

Craig walked off toward the lockers. After a moment, Stacy said, “I will help them check out their suits.”

“Fine,” said Jamie.

Left alone in front of his cubicle, Jamie saw that the two other women, Hall and Shektar, were talking quietly together at the galley table. Trumball and Fuchida were not in sight, probably in one of the labs. He went back into his compartment, slid the door shut, and booted up his laptop computer. Time to make my report back to Tarawa, he told himself, debating mentally whether the toilet problem was important enough to mention.

Let the news media find out our toilets aren’t working and that’s all they’ll talk about for the next two weeks, he told himself.

Jamie had insisted, from the very beginning of the expedition’s planning, that the whole team should have dinner together whenever possible. Everyone in the dome must come together for the evening meal; only those out on field excursions were excused. There had to be one time during each day when they could all get together, discuss the day’s work casually, informally, and relax and socialize.

Once the chemical toilets were carried into the dome and installed in the two lavatories, everyone washed up from the water supply they had brought with them and congregated at the galley tables. Jamie started pushing the tables together to make one large table; Fuchida immediately came over to help.

Then they lined up at the microwave ovens, heating the precooked meals that each person had taken from his or her personal store of supplies.

“It’s been an eventful day,” Jamie said, once they were all seated.

“Tomorrow will be better,” said Trudy Hall. It was a line she had used almost every day of their journey from Earth. She said it with an enforced, almost desperate kind of cheerfulness that made Jamie wonder about her.

“Tomorrow will be better only if the toilets are working,” Stacy Dezhurova added. She was sitting next to Hall, thickset big-boned Russian next to the slight little English sparrow.

“They will be,” said Trumball confidently. Then he turned to Craig. “Won’t they, Wiley?”

“Sure, sure,” Craig said, pronouncing it, Shore, shore.

Rodriguez looked up from his tamales and retried beans. “They better be,” he said.

Jamie wanted to get off the subject. “Dex,” he called out, “what about the backup water generator? Will we have to move it?”

Trumball sat exactly opposite Jamie. Deliberately, Jamie had chosen a seat in the middle of the table. He did not want to appear to be placing himself at its head. Trumball hail taken the chair on the other side.

The backup water generator had been launched two years earlier, on the same booster as the methane fuel generator. The uncrewed landing vehicle, without direct human guidance, had set itself down more than two kilometers away from the dome.

Before Trumball could reply, Craig said, “It’s just th’ backup; we brought the primary along with us.”

“I know,” Jamie said. “But if the primary breaks down, then what? Is it smart to have our backup water supply sitting two klicks away?”

Trumball chewed thoughtfully on a mouthful of roast beef, then answered, “We’ve got three options. Either we run piping out to the backup, or we jack the module up and tow it closer to home base with one of the tractors.”

“The third option?” Dezhurova asked.

With an impish grin, Trumball said, “We take a walk out there every time the primary gunks up on us.”

Most of the people around the table laughed politely.

“Do we have enough piping to cover that distance?” Jamie asked.

Trumball nodded. “Plenty.”

“I don’t think it’s such a good idea to run piping all that distance,” Craig said. “It’ll freeze ever’ night, ‘less we bury it really deep, below the permafrost line.”

Trumball shrugged nonchalantly. “Then we’ll have to move the rig.”

Craig nodded his agreement.

The one problem they had encountered with Plan Z was that the modules sent ahead of the human team could not be piloted to a sufficient accuracy. The communications lag between Earth and Mars prevented real-time control from Tarawa of the uncrewed modules’ landings. A two-kilometer radius was excellent shooting over a distance of a hundred million klicks. But it was not quite good enough for the needs of the explorers.

“All right,” Jamie said slowly. “First order of business tomorrow is to bring the backup closer to home.”

“And then we head for the Canyon,” Trumball said.

“Possum starts drilling core samples,” Jamie said.

“I move the garden out of the ship and into its own dome,” said Fuchida, with a happy grin.

“While we head for the Canyon,” Trumball insisted. “While we head for the Canyon,” Jamie conceded. Trumball nodded, apparently satisfied.

“We’ve got a big job ahead of us,” Jamie said to them all. “We’re going to be living here for a year and a half. We’ve been able to grow food crops in the ship; now we’ve got to really start living off the land—growing the food we need and generating our air and fuel from local resources. We have to make ourselves as self-sufficient as possible.”

They all nodded.

“Mars will test us,” Fuchida murmured.

“What?”

The Japanese biologist looked surprised that anyone had heard his comment. “I merely meant that Mars will present challenges to each of us.”

Jamie nodded. “Challenges … and opportunities.”

“Make no mistake about it,” Fuchida countered. “Each of us will be tested by Mars. Our strength, our intelligence, our character—all will be tested by this alien world.”

“The eight of us against Mars,” murmured Stacy Dezhurova.

Dex Trumball said, “Just like the Seven Against Thebes.”

“The what?” Rodriguez asked.

“It’s an ancient Greek play,” Trumball replied. “By Euripides.”

“By Aeschylus,” corrected Fuchida.

Dex glared at him. “Euripides.”

“Euripides wrote ‘The Phoenician Women,’ ” Fuchida said confidently. “It was Aeschylus who wrote ‘The Seven Against Thebes.’ “

Interrupting their dispute, Jamie said, “It’s not the eight of us against Mars. We’re here to learn how to live with Mars. To teach the others who’ll follow us how to live here.”

“Damn straight,” muttered Possum Craig.

Trumball conceded the point with a nod, then probed, “So when are we going to move our base of operations to the Canyon area?”

It was an argument they had gone over for months during the flight. Life had been found in the bottom of the Grand Canyon, why not establish the expedition’s base there?

Suppressing a burst of irritation, Jamie said, ‘ ‘It makes no sense to move our base. We can traverse out to the Canyon and survey the area for a secondary base when the next team comes.”

“If a next team comes,” Trumball muttered.

“This isn’t going to be the last expedition to Mars,” Jamie said firmly. “We’re part of an ongoing effort—”

“Not if we just diddle around and don’t accomplish anything.”

Jamie felt his temper simmering. “We’re here to accomplish several goals. This base is well situated and working fine.”

“Except for the toilets,” Dezhurova chipped in. She said it with an unlikely grin, but no one laughed.

“It would take a month or more to move this camp,” Jamie went on, tightly. “And by going to the Canyon we move away from the volcanoes.”

‘Look,” Trumball said, hunching forward eagerly, I’m just as interested in the volcanoes as you are. I’m a geophysicist, remember?”

Before Jamie could reply, Dex went on, “But the people who’ve put up the money for this expedition want to see results. Everybody’s screaming to know what those lichen are all about. The volcanoes are dead! Let’s get our priorities straight, for god’s sake.”

“Who says the volcanoes are dead?” Fuchida snapped. “We don’t know that!”

Jamie took a breath. “Our priorities were decided more than two years ago, and the people who are funding us agreed to them. We’re not here for show business. We’re here to determine how widespread life is on this planet, if we can.”

Trumball slouched back in his chair, the grin on his face close to a sneer. “If we can,” he mimicked.

Trudy Hall spoke up. “I want to get down into that Canyon and study the lichen, of course,” she said, in her soft Yorkshire accent. “But I also want to see if there’s life elsewhere: the volcanoes, the cores Possum’s going to drill, up at the ice cap—we’ve got a whole world to explore.”

Before Trumball could argue, Jamie said, “Look, Dex … everybody: We’re going to be here for a year and a half. Moving the base isn’t a decision we have to make tonight.”

“Especially with the toilets not working,” Dezhurova piped.

“You mean you’ll consider moving later on?” Trumball probed eagerly.

Feeling tired of the whole matter, Jamie nodded. “I’ll consider it, depending on what we find both at the Canyon and elsewhere.”

Trumball’s expectant grin faded. “That’s like a parent telling his kid, ‘We’ll see.’ It means no, but you don’t want to argue about it.”

“I’m not your daddy, Dex.”

Trumball snorted. “That’s for damned sure.”

“As your faithful physician,” Vijay Shektar said, a bright smile on her dark-skinned face, “I have the authority to prescribe a certain amount of celebratory stimulant for this occasion.”

Like all the others, she was wearing tan coveralls. But with her lush figure, the strained fabric looked enticing.

“Medicinal alcohol?” said Stacy Dezhurova, her somber face lighting up.

“Australian champagne, actually,” Shektar replied. “I brought two bottles.”

“I have an excellent Scotch whisky,” Fuchida said enthusiastically.