Mars Life (29 page)

“In orbit?” Quintana looked doubtful.

“Place him in a cargo container and fly him into orbit in an L/AV. Leave the container in space. The cold will preserve the body, won’t it?”

A slow smile crept across Hasdrubal’s face. “Like dunking him in a vat of liquid nitrogen. Better, even.”

“Cryonic preservation,” Quintana murmured.

Chang nodded. “Thank you, Dr. Waterman. We should have seen that possibility earlier.”

Jamie grinned at the mission director. “Forests and trees, Dr. Chang. Forests and trees.”

Chuck Jones let his arms float weightlessly up from the lander/ascent vehicle’s instrument panel.

“Orbital insertion,” he said into the headphone clipped to his ear.

“Copy orbital insertion,” came the voice of the mission controller, back at the base.

Turning to his copilot, Kristin Dvorak, Jones grinned and said, “Okay, let’s unload the priest.”

Dvorak was a Czech, so diminutive she barely made the minimums for an astronaut. Like Jones, she was wearing a nanofabric space suit, although neither of them had pulled the inflatable helmets over their heads. Her hair was the color of straw, thickly curled. Jones kept his thinning brown hair trimmed down to a buzz cut.

She slid out of the copilot’s seat and floated toward the cockpit’s hatch. Jones went after her.

“Never thought I’d preside at a funeral,” he said as she slipped through the open hatch that led into the L/AV’s cargo bay.

“This is not a funeral,” Dvorak said, in heavily accented English. “We are merely placing his body in cold storage until the next flight from Earth arrives to take him home.”

The cargo bay was empty except for a solitary cylinder, ordinarily used to hold supplies.

Jones was almost too big to meet the specifications for an astronaut. He always thought about one of the first Americans to go into space, Scott Carpenter: when informed that the height limit for astronauts was six feet, he wrote in his application form that he was five feet, thirteen inches tall. And he got away with it.

As they unhitched the cylinder from the straps holding it to the deck and floated it into the airlock, Jones mused, “You know, maybe when I die I’ll have my body sent into space.”

“Not buried?” Dvorak asked.

“Nah. Why stick yourself into the ground when you can go floating out to the stars?”

“Recycling,” she said.

He shook his head. “I think I’d rather go into space.”

Dvorak smiled slightly. “It makes no difference, really. Once you are dead, nothing matters.”

As he swung the airlock hatch shut, Jones admitted, “Maybe so. But still. . .”

Once they sealed the inner hatch shut, Dvorak asked, “Will you return to Earth on the next resupply flight?”

Jones said, “No. I’ll wait it out.”

“We will all have to go back sooner or later.”

“I guess so.”

“I have applied for a job with Masterson Aerospace. At Selene.”

“You want to live on the Moon?”

“Why not? It would be more interesting. Not so many jobs for astronauts on Earth.”

“I’ll go back to Florida,” Jones said. “After a year on Mars, I want some sun and swimming.”

“More jobs at Selene,” Dvorak insisted.

“More women in Florida,” said Jones, with a leer. “In bikinis.”

She smiled back at him. “Higher ratio of men to women at Selene. Intelligent men, scientists and engineers.”

Laughing, they went back to the cockpit and launched the mortal remains of Dr. Fulvio A. DiNardo, S.J., into orbit around Mars.

Jamie decided to hold the news conference in the greenhouse. He knew it was going to be grueling, but he wanted to show the viewers on Earth that the Martian explorers were safe and comfortable.

Edith Elgin had volunteered to moderate the news conference from Selene, for which Jamie was immensely grateful. She coordinated the reporters’ questions and acted as hostess for the show. She relayed the questions to Jamie, who planned to respond to each one in turn, then wait for backup questions to reach him on Mars. It was tedious, but when the various segments were spliced together the conference would appear almost seamless, almost as though it had taken place in real time.

So Jamie stood in the greenhouse dome with the long hydroponics trays and their lush green plants behind him. Off to one side was Kalman Torok’s little plot of a garden, tended now by Sal Hasdrubal and one of the new arrivals from Selene.

And up in orbit circling Mars, Monsignor DiNardo’s body waited for the fusion torch ship that would come from Earth and return him to the land of his birth.

Edith’s bright, youthful face filled the portable screen that one of the communications technicians had set up in the greenhouse. She couldn’t look glum if she tried, Jamie thought, watching her as she introduced him and explained how the conference would be handled.

“To you viewers,” she was saying, “it will look like this is a realtime interview. But remember that Dr. Waterman is really on Mars, about ninety-seven million kilometers from Earth as we record his statements.”

Behind the screen stood a pair of comm techs running the cameras and Vijay, her dark face serious, her radiant eyes fixed on Jamie. He tried to smile for her, then decided it wouldn’t look right for the cameras. “Serious, composed, distressed but determined,” Edith had told him earlier, smiling encouragingly. “That’s how you’ve got to come across. Show ‘em some of that Navaho dignity and strength of character.”

Strength of character, Jamie thought. How can I tell the world that DiNardo deliberately kept the knowledge of his cardiac problem from us? How do I tell them that the medics who examined him missed the fact that he was taking blood-pressure pills? It makes us all look stupid, or at least too anxious to have the priest here to do a really careful job of examining him. I’ve got to avoid that. I’ve got to keep that out of sight.

The first question was from the famous Orlando Ventura of World Wide News: “Dr. Waterman, we understand that Monsignor DiNardo had a preexisting cardiac problem, yet he was allowed to go to Mars. Do you feel some responsibility for his death?”

Are you still beating your wife? Jamie asked himself. The screen froze on an image of Ventura’s lean, sculpted face. He looks like a coyote, Jamie thought: the same cold eyes.

Taking a breath, Jamie began, “The medical consensus is that being on Mars had nothing to do with Monsignor DiNardo’s death. He might have suffered a fatal stroke in the Vatican.”

Glad that there was no way for the interviewer to interrupt him, he went on, “Monsignor DiNardo wanted very much to come to Mars, to help in the exploration of this world. I guess you could say he gave his life for that purpose. He believed that he was doing god’s work, exploring a world and a people that god had created just as he created Earth, created us. He died in my arms, and I can tell you that he was smiling when he died. He was at peace.”

Ventura second question, scripted days earlier, was predictable.

“Has Monsignor DiNardo’s death forced you to reconsider the safety of all the other men and women on Mars? And if not, why not?”

So it went, for nearly four hours. Jamie stood there in the greenhouse, on Mars, answering their repetitive questions and trying to convince them—and ultimately their viewers—that the exploration of Mars was safe and important.

Over and again he stressed the same points as he answered the same questions.

“Our base here certainly isn’t luxurious,” he said, sounding weary in his own ears, “but it’s comfortable and quite safe. As you can see, we grow a fair amount of our own food. We produce water from the permafrost underground. We get our oxygen from the Martian atmosphere. As much as possible, we live on local resources.”

One reporter wanted to know how much it cost to run the operation on Mars.

Jamie forced a slow smile and replied, “Not nearly as much as Americans spend on pizza. And our funding comes entirely from private sources. No tax money is involved.”

At last it was over. The screen went dark. The technicians started to fold their cameras into their carrying cases. Vijay rushed around them and into Jamie’s arms.

“You look like a man who could use a drink,” she said, after kissing him soundly.

“I wish we had some beer,” he admitted.

They ate a brief, quiet dinner in the cafeteria by themselves, although Chang and several others came by their table to ask how the interview went. Jamie shrugged and said he thought it would be okay.

“It all depends on the editing,” he said to each of the questioners, knowing that a clever editor can snip statements out of context and make anyone look foolish, heartless, or even malicious. Edith’s doing the editing, he knew. She’ll do a good job. But once the vid is in the hands of the networks, what will they do to it?

Dead tired, he went with Vijay to their quarters. By the time they were crawling into bed a message from Selene came through.

“Thought y’all’d like to see the rough cut,” said Edith Elgin, with a gleaming smile. “You did a good job, Jamie.”

Almost two hours later, Jamie decided that Edith had done a good job, too. The questions and his answers were now arranged in a clear flow, with much of the repetition edited out.

“She’s awfully good, isn’t she?” Vijay said, sitting in bed beside Jamie.

“She sure is,” he said, feeling dog tired, heavy lidded. But he slid an arm around her bare shoulders. “You’re a lot better, though.”

Vijay smiled at him. “And a lot closer, eh?”

It’s funny, thought Douglas Stavenger as he took a seat toward the end of the long conference table. I haven’t been chairman of the council in years; I’m not even a voting member anymore. But wherever I sit, everybody turns to me as if I were still in charge.

Power. Some people spend their lives scrabbling for power. Others run away from it, from the responsibilities and the neverending pressure to make decisions. Stavenger shook his head in bemused wonderment. I never sought power. At least, I didn’t consciously. It just sort of fell into my lap. And I can’t get rid of it.

The conference room was in one of the two office towers that supported the massive concrete dome of the Grand Plaza. Through the long window that took up most of one wall, Stavenger could see the miniature trees and flowering shrubs that lined the plaza’s winding walkways, the curving shell of the open-air bandstand, the Olympic-sized swimming pool with its thirty-meter diving platform.

As the other council members took their seats, Stavenger glanced up the table at the chairman, sitting at the head of the table. He was a retired engineer who had come to Selene originally on a one-year contract to work on the solar energy farms spread out across the floor of the crater Alphonsus. He had never left the Moon. Assigned to a term on the governing council by the computer-operated lottery that picked new members from the general population, he had stayed through three terms and risen to the chairmanship.

He was a round-faced, smiling Swiss who made friends easily and handled administrative chores mainly by delegating responsibility to his minuscule staff. He would have to step down from the council at the end of this term, unless the entire population of Selene voted by a three-to-one majority to extend his time in office.

“Are we all here?” he asked, looking up and down the table. Every seat was filled. “All those who are absent will please raise their hands.”

A patter of weak laughs went around the table. It was the chairman’s standard joke, part of his sense of humor that had apparently taken root in his mind when he was in high school.

Stavenger settled back in the comfortably cushioned chair as the meeting commenced. He noted with wry amusement that even the chairman focused on him when he spoke, as if he were still in charge.

The meeting ran smoothly enough. No major problems outside of the usual disputes over water allocations and proposals to enlarge the underground city so that still more refugees from Earth could become citizens of Selene.

“We have enough of these refugees,” one of the councilwomen complained. “The more we let in, the more they influence our politics.”

“Well, that’s only fair, isn’t it?” said another woman, sitting on the other side of the table. “If they’re citizens they ought to influence our politics.”

“It’s time to shut the door,” the first councilwoman said, looking squarely at Stavenger.

He straightened up in his chair. “It’s hard to refuse people who’ve lost their homes on Earth.”

“It’s their own damned fault! They sat on their hands for years and years and let the greenhouse overwhelm them. Now they want to run away from it and come here.”

The debate grew hot, with some council members insisting that no more refugees be accepted for citizenship.

As their voices rose, Stavenger held up his hand and asked the chairman to recognize him. The angry arguing stopped and all eyes turned to him.