Red Thunder (46 page)

"I've got our position now, Travis," Alicia said. "Uh... Dak, why
don't you turn right here... I mean, west. Go up that slope, and there
should be a crater, about forty feet wide, on the other side.

"West it is, hon," Dak said, and Kelly and I held on, though the
safety lines held us securely, as Dak powered up a slope of about 20
percent.

"Just like four-wheelin' in the hills!" Dak chortled. He was having
the time of his life. How many NASCAR drivers got to hot-rod around on
another planet?

We got to the top of the ridge, a bit higher than the one we'd
walked up, earlier, and down there at the bottom was exactly the crater
Alicia had described.

"We'll call it Alicia Crater," Dak suggested.

"The hell we will," she said. "We get to name stuff? If we do, you better name something a lot more impressive than
that
after me."

"Okay, baby." Dak sounded so contrite that we all laughed, Travis, too.

He drove us along the ridge for a while, but Travis's voice came
again, like a leash on a frisky dog. "I make you one point one miles
from the ship right now, Dak. Time to turn around."

"Yassuh, boss," Dak said. "Manny, Kelly, can you see anything from up there?"

We'd been headed toward the Valles Marineris; the map showed it only 3.4 miles ahead....

"I see a line, a little darker, maybe," Kelly said.

"Maybe," I said. "But the horizon here is confusing. Too close. We
know it's there, the valley, but I wouldn't swear we're seeing it."

"Me either," Kelly agreed.

"Tomorrow is another day," Dak said, and brought
Blue Thunder
smartly around. We followed her outward-bound tracks for a short
distance, then Dak went down through the next gully, up the crater
wall, down to the inside, then up and out. We made about a quarter of a
circle of
Red Thunder,
and came back home from the west.

We got out except for Dak, and we laid electric blankets on the
ground in front of each of the wheels. Dak drove onto them, and in
another thirty minutes we had the blankets laced around the wheels and
plugged into ship's power. It was exhausting work, a lot harder than
I'd expected, just like assembling the vehicle had been. Travis laughed
when I mentioned it.

"Now are you glad I had your lazy asses out running every lousy morning?"

"I'd be even happier if you'd worked off that beer gut, Travis," Alicia said.

BACK INSIDE, WE all gathered in the cockpit to watch
our first Martian sunset... the first Martian sunset ever seen by human
eyes. We were the first!

The stars came out, much brighter than I'd ever seen them on
Earth... well, from Florida, anyway. Hundreds of years of industrial
revolution had filled Earth's skies with a lot of smoke and chemicals,
the ozone layer seemed to be in trouble, and maybe the whole planet was
warming up....

It was impossible to worry about things like that while we watched
the stars come out. But you had to wonder, would Jubal's miracle drive
make it possible for humans to live on more than just one, vulnerable
planet? If we could lift things on a large scale, it would be possible
to have a self-sustaining outpost on Mars in only a few years... and
then there were those wild-eyed dreamers who spoke of "terraforming,"
of changing the very nature of Mars to make it more Earth-like, to fill
its basins with water and its air with oxygen. But even the most
optimistic of those dreamers said it would be a project for centuries,
not years. I'd not live to see it. I wasn't even sure if it was a good
idea. Because... there were the stars, waiting out there. Some of those
stars would have planets that were already Earth-like. Some of those
Earth-like planets might already have intelligent life forms on them,
but some may not.

I might live to see that. I really might.

Now the faint light of the sun from under the horizon faded out
completely, and I realized what I'd been seeing before was nothing.
Nothing at all. More stars in all their glory, endless thousands of
them, and splashed across the sky like... well, like spilled milk, was
the incredible immensity of the Milky Way, our galaxy, a hundred
billion stars so thick you couldn't pick out a single one.

My arm was around Kelly, and I hugged her tighter.

I don't know how long we stayed there like that, but eventually Travis suggested we all get some sack time.

"Big day tomorrow," he said. "Luckily, we get an extra thirty-seven
minutes." That was because it takes Mars twenty-four hours and
thirty-seven minutes to turn once on its axis. We had decided to stick
to Greenwich Mean Time for the ship's log, and to simply tailor our
working days as morning, noon, and evening. There was little to be done
at night, with the temperature just outside that clear plastic porthole
already down to one hundred degrees below zero.

Of course, there were other things two people could do during off hours. Kelly and I retired to our room and did most of them.

Mile High Club, Million Mile High Club, and now the Mars Club...

We were the first!

THE NEXT MORNING, judging by the expressions on Dak's
and Alicia's faces, we weren't the first Mars Club members by much.
Suiting up, Travis looked at us one at a time, and shook his head.

"You guys are disgusting," he groused. "Don't you know we're making history here? Don't you have any—"

"Who says you can't make history in bed?" Alicia wanted to know.

"We made some history last night," Kelly agreed. Suiting up had to wait a few minutes until we all stopped laughing.

ONE OF OUR hard and fast rules was that
Red Thunder
was never to be left empty. Another was that Dak was the official driver of
Blue Thunder,
unless he chose to delegate it, and none of us figured he would. Only
fair, I guess. It was his truck. Since we planned to use the truck
every time we went out, it meant that the other four of us had to share
the ship duty. We tossed a coin—slowly, in the low
gravity—and Alicia drew watch duty the second day. She was
disappointed, as we all would have been, since it was to be a big, big
day, but she submitted gracefully.

Once outside we removed the heat blankets from the tires and
inspected them all very closely. They seemed to have come through the
incredible cold of the night without any trouble. All systems checks
were nominal, as they say at NASA, all six fuel cells humming—or
gurgling?—along most satisfactorily. We boarded, Kelly and I in
the back again, and took off in search of the Chinese pathfinder
landers.

They weren't hard to find. Our map was spot on, and we had marked
the valley where we needed to be, a bit over four miles to the east of
us. Dak got us there in no time, dodging around all Buick-sized rocks,
as he had promised. We retired to a spot a few gullies back, parked,
and waited.

We knew when the Chinese landing was to be, just about an hour from
the time we parked. We hadn't been in contact, so we couldn't be 100
percent sure they'd be on time. That they would land
here
was
a total certainty; that they would land at the appointed time about 98
percent certain, according to Travis. I had no reason to doubt him. But
it was a nervous hour.

Actually, fifty minutes, because we spotted the ship with ten
minutes of retro-fire still to go, way, way up there in the beautiful
sky. It was leaving a faint contrail in the icy air, and it was an
awesome sight. I choked up, thinking about four frail human beings in
that little ship, descending into this awful vastness.

We had a surprise prepared for them. I almost felt sorry for them... I
did
feel sorry for them as fellow humans, but I had no sympathy at all for
the cynical old men who had sent them here and who had arranged a riot
that had killed a fellow American. May they all choke on their moo shoo
pork.

"Come on, come on, baby." I don't think Travis was aware he was
coaxing the descending rocket to a soft landing. Politics are forgotten
at a time like that.

The ship was a simple cylinder, wider than any of our seven tank
cars, but not much taller. The rocket drive would take up a lot of the
bottom part. Those guys expected to be staying a long time in a habitat
smaller than some jail cells.

It came down frighteningly fast for a long time, then put on a burst
of energy that must have subjected the crew to a lot of gees, hovered
at about fifty feet, then started easing down at about three feet per
second. Another pause at the five-foot level, then it was bouncing on
its big springs. We all looked at each other, and let out a cheer.

"I gotta hand it to him, that was one sweet landing," Travis said.
"Yessir, whoever wrote that landing program was really good." And he
laughed.

We set up a television camera with a long lens, so that it was just
peeking over the slight rise we had hidden behind. We moved back to
Blue Thunder
and waited again, this time watching the image on the television
screen, which showed the lower part of the Chinese ship. We figured
they had orders to get out and onto the planet soon, just in case those
lousy Americans actually existed and had not blown up halfway into
their journey.

It took them a little over an hour. Then the lock door opened, a
ramp was deployed, and a single cosmonaut came down it and, with no
ceremony at all, stepped onto the Martian soil and set up a television
camera on a tripod.

"I think we're witnessing a little white lie," Kelly said.

"How you figure?" Travis asked.

"That camera, they're going to send the picture from that as they
all come out at once, and say that is the first human steps on Mars."

"I think you're right. Well, it worked for Douglas MacArthur." He
saw our blank looks, and shook his head, as much as you can in a space
suit.

"We know who Douglas MacArthur is," Kelly said—and she could
speak for herself, as far as I was concerned, I had only a vague idea
he was a general. "What's the story, that's what I don't know." So
Travis told us how the general reenacted his "first steps" wading onto
Philippine soil during the Second World War. He'd apparently made a
promise, something like, "I'll be back."

Sure enough, five minutes later the door opened again and all four
Chinese cosmonauts got together on the ramp... and just as we had done,
kicked off in step so their feet touched the ground at the same time.

"Time to saddle up and go," Travis said. "Dak, you got a good idea where their camera is aimed?"

"No sweat, Captain."

So we boarded and Dak drove down the gully to a spot that ought to
be right in the center of the Chinese camera's field of vision. Then he
gunned it.

Blue Thunder
was a little friskier than he'd counted on. We
left the ground with all four wheels as we topped the rise, then
settled back easily in the low gravity, and the Chinese cameras caught
it perfectly. "Sorry, Captain," Dak said.

"What the heck. Go for it."

The terrain was almost free of rocks, so Dak moved at a speed he
hadn't attempted before. He drove to within a hundred feet of the
assembled Chinese and skidded to a stop. Old Glory, the Stars and
Stripes, slashed back and forth from its mount on the end of our
fifteen-foot radio antenna.

Their backs were to us, they were lining up to salute the flag they
had just erected, when something told one of them we were behind them,
maybe a reflection in his ship's shiny metal skin. He turned, jumped
right into the air in surprise, and almost fell over coming down. He
must have shouted, because the others turned, too, in time to see us
clambering down from
Blue Thunder.

Travis was in the lead, holding up a sign he had made that said
CHANNEL 4 in English, Russian, and Chinese. The first guy—who
turned out to be the leader of the expedition, Captain Xu
Tong—switched channels. Almost at once I could hear excited
chatter in Chinese, then Travis's voice booming over it...

"Welcome to Mars!" he said, extending his hand. Xu was still
suffering from shell shock. He let Travis shake his hand, and then took
my hand when I offered it.

It was at that point that the live television feed was cut, back on
Earth... cut in China, anyway. But all of the television networks in
the rest of the world were still sending out the signal for all to see.
We lost a billion viewers at one stroke. That left only three billion
watching....

And that's what Travis meant when he said we were going to hijack their expedition.

AFTER THAT, RELATIONS between the two crews were surprisingly cordial.

The
Heavenly Harmony
crew had not been informed about the launch of
Red Thunder,
and they were furious about that. Not that they could do anything about
it, or even dare mention it when they got home, but with us they could
express their frustration.

After introductions were made we got down to the serious business of
taking pictures of each other. Kelly used four rolls of film and Kuang
Mei-Ling, the exobiologist who spoke a little English, shot at least
that many. Then we were invited in for lunch.

The decks of the
Heavenly Harmony
were a bit wider than
ours, but there weren't as many of them. Basically, it was command and
control on top, common room one floor below, and sleeping quarters
below that. They did have a tiny shower, which Kelly eyed hungrily as
we were given the tour, but their toilets were chemical like our own,
if a bit fancier.

So we sat down together and we were treated to some sort of noodle
soup with chunks of pork and vegetables in it, along with bowls of
rice. Luckily, there was no bird-nest soup or thousand-year-old eggs or
sautéed ducks heads, or anything gross like that. We all cleaned
our plates.