A Step Beyond (20 page)

“Well, ol’ chap,” he said, “are you ready?”

“Commander Komarov is ready.”

“OK, Tom, go for it.”

“Opening portal,” Nelson said. He turned his back to the monitor and punched in the code to unlock the portal. A green light appeared. He pushed the portal back upon its hinge. The ground was rusty red, strewn with rocks and boulders that extended to the edge of the horizon. The sky overhead was a delicate pink. There was a maroon sand dune in the distance. He could see the cliffs of Olympus Mons. The bare red rock that formed the nearest precipice stretched majestically upward. He stepped to the edge of the portal and took a deep breath.

“Extending ladder,” he said.

“Roger.”

Nelson pulled the latch that released the ladder. He watched as it unfolded toward the ground. It consisted of thirty-seven rungs. Taking a deep breath, he turned his back to the portal and lowered his foot behind him.

“I am on the ladder.” He had to announce his position so he didn’t get too far ahead or behind the Russian.

“Colonel Nelson is on the ladder,” Carter repeated. “Colonel Komarov has stepped on the ladder,” Satomura responded.

Nelson placed his left foot on the next rung. The space suit made the simple movement seem awkward. Tightening his grip on the edge of the door, he looked down to make sure his foot was planted solidly. The sound of his breathing was amplified by his helmet.

“I have you on the forward camera,” Carter said.

Nelson heard the words as distant sounds. He was concentrating on lowering his boot onto the next step. When he was halfway down the ladder he paused to look over his shoulder. The landscape looked like a surreal painting. He was about to step onto another world. He loosened his grip on the ladder and continued downward.

“I am on the last step,” Nelson said. His heart was pounding wildly.

“Roger,” Carter said. “
Gagarin
, we are ready.”

“One moment,” Satomura replied.

“I am ready,” Komarov said in Russian.

“We are ready,” Satomura said.

“Roger,” Carter said. “Proceed.”

Nelson looked down at his foot and watched it as it left the ladder and descended gently into the Martian soil. The ground felt solid. He placed his other foot down next to it. The sand crept up around the edges of his boot. He let go of the ladder. He felt as if he were in a dream. He turned around away from the lander and took a step. Nothing but a vast wasteland of sand and rock. He could hear Russian in his helmet. He had almost forgotten the words. He was to say them at the same time Komarov said them in Russian.

“From this day forward the people of Earth are one.”

A wave of euphoria swept through him. He had just joined the ranks of the great explorers. He thought of Neil Armstrong and how he must have felt when he stepped onto the moon. He looked down at his feet. Grains of sand were resting on the top of his boots. He reached down and dipped his glove into the soil. He picked up a handful and drew it close to his helmet. The grains slipped through his fingers like flakes of gold dust. He watched the dust flicker as it floated to the ground. He raised his arms above his head to greet the strange world. Waves of adrenaline surged through his body. He looked for a spot from which he could survey his surroundings. There was a rock directly in front of him. It stood half a meter high and appeared relatively flat.

He had a few minutes before he was supposed to start gathering samples, so he walked over to the rock and jumped on top of it. The rock had less room than he had first thought. He looked back at the
Shepard
and waved at the dark window. The lander was dwarfed by Olympus Mons. NASA was stenciled in blue along its side. The United Nations flag was located just underneath the window. He wondered what the Martian flag would look like and how many years it would be before a Martian colony designed one. And then a peculiar thought crossed his mind. He wondered if there had ever been a Martian flag. Judging by the barren landscape it did not seem possible.

“How’s the view?” Carter’s voice startled him. “Remarkable.”

“See anything scurrying about?”

“Negative, but I’ll keep my eyes open.”

“Your biostats look good.”

“Roger. Proceeding with the sample collection.”

Nelson took one last look at the Martian landscape, then hopped off the rock. He flew farther and fell more slowly than he would have on Earth. He was familiar with the feeling because his weight was very close to what it had been on the
Liberty
, where the spinning trusses had produced an artificial gravity of .4 g’s. The ground kicked up softly in a fine mist of reddish dust.

Once again his eyes were drawn to Olympus Mons. The cliff at the base of the volcano towered five kilometers straight up. In the space suit it was difficult for Nelson to see the top of the cliff. It was composed of wide bands of red-layered rock. Because of its size the cliff appeared to be only a few hundred meters away. He felt as though he could walk over and touch it, but he knew better. It was actually twenty-seven kilometers away. In three weeks he would be scaling the cliff. He looked down at the rocks at his feet.

His first official task was to collect samples and return them to the ship, so that there would be Martian rock aboard in the event they had to leave the planet unexpectedly. He pulled out the field sample bag and dropped to one knee. He picked up a few rocks and studied them. They didn’t look particularly interesting. Reddish black with porous holes. He was not a geologist, but he could tell that they were volcanic in origin. He sealed the bag and pulled out another. This one he filled with sand. He got up and moved to a spot farther away from the lander, where the ground appeared to be slightly darker, and filled another bag. He thought of Major Brunnet, whose responsibility it had been to collect the rocks. The thought tempered his elation. He wondered what rocks Brunnet would have selected. They all looked very much the same. His instructions were to select as many different types as possible. It did not take him long to fill the bags. He waved with boyish enthusiasm at the black rectangle in the side of the ship.

“I’m coming in,” he said.

“Roger,” Carter replied.

He climbed up the ladder and deposited the sample-collection bags inside the pressure chamber. On the floor was a cylindrical tube. Once again he was reminded of Brunnet, but this time his spirits rose with pride for what they had done. It had been the right thing. The original flag was in orbit around the sun, wrapped around Brunnet’s body. The flag inside the tube had been patched together by Endicott. He did not tell anyone he was making it, and when he finally presented it they did not know what to say. Endicott spread the flag out on a table and stood back so they could see it better. It was not perfect. Some of the continents were misshapen. Nelson remembered thinking that from a distance no one would be able to tell the difference. He climbed down the ladder with the tube in hand.

“There’s a good spot twenty meters southeast,” Carter said. “I see it.”

Their primary concern was that the camera have a clear view of the flag. They had rehearsed the event several times back on Earth. He located a spot clear of rock and slightly elevated. He turned to look at the
Shepard
. The black rectangle was dead center of the ship.

“Hold it right there,” Carter said. “Give me a second to get both cameras in focus.”

“Roger.”

“Proceed.”

The seal had already been broken. His fingers were trembling. He unrolled the flag and held it out at arm’s length so that he could look at it. He thought the imperfections gave it character. He extended the pole and pushed it into the sand, adjusting it so it stood perfectly straight. He stepped beside the flag and turned toward the black rectangle. He was not to say anything, just salute, but when his glove touched his helmet he felt impelled to say something.

“For Major Jean Paul Brunnet.”

Carter repeated the words, then Endicott, whose voice cracked like that of an adolescent’s. Nelson held the salute for nearly a minute. He picked up the empty tube and the cap and headed back to the ship.

T
atiana was beneath the
Gagarin
inspecting the undercarriage for structural damage and had been quiet for quite some time. Komarov asked what was wrong. She ignored him, and he knew better than to ask again. She had been in a foul mood the entire EVA.

The inspection was exhausting work. They had to examine every inch of the outer hull, most of which was difficult to reach because of its sheer size. With the use of ropes and pulleys, Tatiana managed to scale the outside of the ship. She marked each section she had inspected with colored markers so that she would not inspect it twice. She would visually check the section, then rub her hand over it to feel for anomalies. It was the moving about that was the most demanding. Komarov was on the ground taking in or letting out rope while Tatiana pulled herself from one section to the next. It had taken nearly all day to finish the top half, and all she had found wrong were a few small chips in the heat shielding. The chips had been caused by particles striking the hull during atmospheric entry. They had not found any damage to the craft caused by the landing other than some minor buckling in the landing gear itself. She blamed Komarov for the inspections. It was his decision not to abort. A bead of sweat dropped into her eye, blurring her vision. She cursed out loud.

“What is it now?” Komarov asked, regretting the question before he had even finished asking it.

“Damn sweat,” she said. She was shaking her helmet back and forth. Silence, Komarov decided, was the safest course. She would find fault with whatever he said, that he was certain of. She was in one of those moods.

“Damn,” she repeated. “We don’t even have the right equipment.” She turned to confront Komarov. “Enough is enough.”

Komarov looked down inside his helmet to check the time. A neon green light indicated the portable life-support system had forty-five minutes of normal operations remaining. He wondered why with her he always seemed to be struggling to maintain his authority. He blamed it on the psychology of human relationships. There was something about intimacy that undermined respect. Forty-five minutes. It was hardly worth it. He looked up from the neon numbers and back into her eyes. They were bulging from their sockets, straining against the veinlike muscles that held them back.

“A good time to break,” he said.

“You are so right,” she said as she stormed past him. He watched the back of her suit as she climbed up the ladder. She could have been a man in that suit. Each step radiated defiance. He surveyed the sections of the hull that still had to be inspected. It would take at least another thirteen hours. There was no point in continuing by himself.

“To hell with it,” he said.

Tatiana was about to shut the exterior portal when he appeared. He smiled. She returned the smile with a triumphant look, then turned her back to him.

“Locking exterior portal,” Komarov said, alerting Satomura, who was monitoring the entry programs. “Lock complete.”

“Commencing pressurization,” Satomura said automatically. Komarov could hear the hiss of oxygen as it filled the airlock. Tatiana’s back was to him. Her hands were against the wall above her head. He pulled out the vacuum and removed the dust from the back of her suit. When she turned around, he saw that she looked tired. He did not say anything. He was careful not to linger too long in certain areas. She was studying him. He handed the vacuum to her and placed his hands against the wall. He was relieved that she took her time.

Tatiana’s hair came tumbling out as she removed her helmet. She tucked the helmet under her arm and waited for the internal door to open. He decided to take a chance.

“My quarters tonight?” he whispered into her ear. He thought he could actually see the hair rise on her neck.

“You do realize there is no guarantee that this thing will take off,” she blurted. She charged through the portal without waiting for a reply.

S
atomura was standing at the edge of the mesa in the middle of Candor Chasma looking out upon what he felt certain to be the grandest sight any human had ever laid eyes upon. They had gone to the Grand Canyon to train in a similar environment, and he had been impressed by the Grand Canyon, overwhelmingly so, but the great canyon before him dwarfed anything he had ever seen. The enormous size and vastness of his surroundings filled him with awe. The mesa seemed to possess a mystical quality, the way its edges just fell away, as if it were a floating valley. He stepped a foot closer to the edge and looked down at the canyon floor. The 1.3-kilometer drop would have caused most men to step back with vertigo. But Satomura surveyed the chasm with the unrestrained delight of a child.

He was to locate a suitable spot to scale. He noted that the strata were thicker at top, their coloring consistent with volcanic deposits. They could probably descend the first several hundred meters without their climbing gear. He scanned the wall for an area that contained tightly packed layers of rock. It did not take him long to find what he was looking for. Pleased, he took the binoculars and examined the canyon more closely. The walls did not look like they had been formed by water erosion. They were much too chaotic and irregular. The rocks were jagged, as if they had been ripped apart, not smooth like those of the Grand Canyon. They resembled the rocks they had found in the faults of Antarctica. Sharp and pointed. The Antarctic canyons had been formed by the rock collapsing under its own weight. But this looked slightly different. It looked almost as though the planet had started to split apart. They were at the very edge of a great mound known as the Tharsis Bulge, which stood nearly nine kilometers high. Three gigantic volcanoes lay at the center of the bulge. Whatever forces had created Tharsis were also responsible, at least in part, for the canyon. There were several theories, but the one Satomura favored was that it had been created by an asteroid that had struck the opposite side of the planet. He did not see anything that disproved the theory.