Return to Mars (12 page)

“Fly the … that’s crazy!”

“We’ll have to put the backup water recycler back on the fuel generator, too,” Dex added.

“Even crazier.”

“The fuel generator’s just sitting two klicks from the base, standing by for an emergency, isn’t it? And we don’t need the spare water recycler now that the garden’s working. So why not put ‘em to use?”

“How can you fly it?” Stacy demanded.

“The descent engines have enough thrust to lob it on a ballistic trajectory. I’ve checked out the numbers seventeen ways from Friday. It’ll work.”

“Fly our backup fuel generator to Ares Vallis,” Dezhurova muttered. “Insane.”

“I can show you the computer evaluation,” Trumball said, unperturbed.

“Those descent engines were not built for repeated use,” Dezhurova pointed out. “They don’t have enough thrust—”

Trumball wagged a finger in the air. “I checked it all out with the manufacturer months ago, Stacy baby. You can get a half-dozen burns out of those engines, no sweat. And if they can soft-land the bird, they can lift it again. We’re not talking orbit now, just a little hop across the desert.”

“If it doesn’t work—”

“Worst case, we lose the backup fuel generator. Best case, we pick up a billion dollars worth of hardware for auction back at Sotheby’s.”

Jamie sat there and let Stacy and Dex argue it out. I don’t want to be in the middle of this, he told himself. Yet he knew that, ultimately, inescapably, he would be the one to make the real decision.

Trudy Hall made a sardonic face. “Why not pick up one of the original Viking landers while you’re at it?”

“Too big,” Trumball answered, matter-of-factly. “Pathfinder’s small enough for us to carry back with us. The Vikings are big clunkers.”

“There are a half-dozen other landers scattered around the planet,” Dezhurova said.

Trumball made a wry face. “Yeah, but most of ‘em are too big or too far away to reach. Besides, if we take too much of the old hardware back, their value starts to go down. Got to play this game smart, kiddo.”

He’s been thinking about this for a long time, Jamie realized. Doing computer evaluations. Dex doesn’t do anything without planning it all out first.

They were leaving the old rover behind. The mist was clearing from the Canyon floor.

Trumball tapped Jamie on the shoulder. “Well, big chief, what do you have to say about it?”

Jamie grimaced at Trumball’s ethnic wisecrack, but he said only, “I think your idea will have to wait until the next expedition, Dex.”

“That’s about what I thought you’d say,” Trumball replied.

Jamie had expected him to be sullen, piqued at being rebuffed.

Instead, Trumball looked like a young man who held a trump card up his sleeve.

“Suppose we make a trade,” he suggested, his smile turning crafty. “I go for the Pathfinder and you can go look for your cliff dwellings.”

NO MATTER HOW WELL HE DID, NO MATTER WHAT HE ACCOMPLISHED.

Dex Trumball could never satisfy his coldly indifferent father.

Darryl C. Trumball was a self-made man, he firmly proclaimed to anyone and everyone. One of Dex’s earliest memories was his father cornering a U.S. senator at a house party and tapping him on the shoulder with each and every word as he declared with quiet insistence, “I started with nothing but my bare hands and my brain, and I built a fortune for myself.”

In truth, the old man had started with a meager inheritance: a decrepit auto body shop that was on the verge of bankruptcy when Dex’s grandfather died of a massive stroke in the middle of his fourth beer at the neighborhood bar.

Dex had been just a baby then, an only child. His mother was pretty, frail, and ineffectual; totally unable to stand up to her implacably driven husband. Dex’s father, blade-slim, fast and agile, had attended Holy Cross on a track scholarship. He never graduated; he had to take over the family business instead. His dream of going to the Boston College Law School, as he had been promised, was shattered, leaving him bitter and resentful.

And filled with an icy, relentless energy.

Darryl C. Trumball quickly learned that business depends on politics. Although the body shop was practically worthless, the land on which it stood could become extremely valuable if it could be converted to upscale condominiums for the white-collar types who worked in Boston’s financial district. He pushed feverishly to get the old neighborhood rezoned, then sold the shop and his mother’s house for a sizable sum.

By the time Dex was ready for college, his father was very wealthy, and known in the financial community for his cold-blooded ruthlessness. Money was important to him, and he spent every waking hour striving to increase his net worth. When Dex expressed an interest in science, the elder Trumball snorted disdainfully:

“You’ll never he able to support yourself that way! Why, when I was your age I was taking care of your grandmother, your two aunts, your mother and you.”

Dex listened obediently and registered anyway for physics at Yale. His high-school grades (and his father’s money) were good enough to be acceptable to Harvard and half a dozen other Ivy League schools, but Dex decided on Yale. New Haven was close enough to Boston for him to get home easily, yet far away enough for him to be free of his lather’s chilling presence.

Dex had always found school to be ridiculously easy. Where others pored over textbooks and sweated out exams, Dex breezed through with a near-photographic memory and a clever ability to tell his teachers exactly what they wanted to hear. His relationships with his peers were much the same: they did what he wanted, almost always. Dex got the lit brilliant ideas and his friends got into trouble carrying them out. Yet they never complained; they admired his dash and felt grateful when he noticed them at all.

Sex was equally easy for him, even on campuses electrified by charges of harassment. Dex had his pick of the women: the more intelligent they were, the more they seemed to bask in the temporary sunshine of his affection. And they never complained afterward.

Physics was not for Dex, but he found himself drawn to geophysics: the study of the Earth, its interior and its atmosphere. His grades were well-nigh perfect. He was a campus leader in everything from the school television station to the tennis team. Yet his father was never pleased.

“An educated bum, that’s what you are,” his father taunted. “I’ll have to support you all my life and keep on supporting you even after I’m gone.”

Which suited Dex just fine. But deep within, he longed to hear one approving word from his father. He ached to have the callous old man smile at him.

His life changed forever at a planetarium show. Dex liked to take his dates to the planetarium. It was cheap, it impressed young women with his seriousness and intelligence, and it was the darkest place in town. Very romantic, really, sitting in the back row with the splendors of the heavens spangled above.

One particular show was about the planet Mars. After several failures, an automated spacecraft had successfully returned actual samples of Martian rocks and soil to a laboratory in orbit around the Earth. Now there was talk of sending human explorers there. Suddenly Dex stopped fondling the young woman who had accompanied him and sat up straight in his chair.

“There’s more than one planet to study!” he said aloud, eliciting a chorus of shushing hisses from around him, and the utter humiliation of his date.

Dex spent that summer at the University of Nevada, taking a special course in geology. The next summer he went to a seminar on planetary geology in Berkeley.

By the time the first expedition had returned from Mars, triumphantly bearing samples of living Martian organisms, Dex had degrees from Yale and Berkeley. He went to the struggling Moonbase settlement for six months to do field work on the massive meteorites that lay buried deep beneath Mare Nubium and Mare Imbrium.

Much to his father’s dismay.

“I give the government fortunes of tax money for this space stuff,” the old man complained bitterly. “What damned good is it?”

Dex’s father was a real-estate tycoon now, with long fingers in several New England-based banks and business interests in Europe, Asia and Latin America. He kept in touch with his far-flung associates through satellite-relayed electronic links and even leased space in an orbital factory that manufactured ultrapure pharmaceuticals.

Dex smiled brightly for his father. “Don’t be a flathead, Dad. I want to be on the next expedition to Mars.”

His father stared at him coldly. “When are you going to start bringing some money in to this family, instead of spending it like it’s water?”

Challenged, wanting to please his father and win his approval for once, Dex blurted, “We could make money from Mars.”

His father fixed Dex with an icy, disbelieving expression in his flinty eyes.

“We could, really,” Dex said, groping for something that would convince the old man. “Besides, it’d make your name in history, Dad. The man who led the way back to Mars. It’d be your monument.”

Darryl C. Trumball seemed unmoved by thoughts of a monument. Yet he asked, ”You think we could make money out of an expedition to Mars?”

Dex nodded vigorously. “That’s right.”

“How?”

That was when Dex began planning an expedition to Mars that would be funded by private donors. To be sure, a good deal of taxpayers’ money went into the pot. But once Dex enlisted the interest and drive of his profit-oriented father, funding for the Second Martian Expedition came mainly from private sources.

Dex was determined to make the expedition profitable. He wanted his father’s praise, just once. Then he could tell the old man to go bust a blood vessel and drop dead.

“THE CLIFF DWELLING,” JAMIE ECHOED.

With a knowing grin, Trumball said easily, “Sure. You want to go chase down the cliff dwelling you think you saw and I want to get the Pathfinder hardware. You scratch my itch and I’ll scratch yours.”

Jamie glanced at Stacy Dezhurova, sitting beside him in the pilot’s Heat. The rover was almost to the bottom of the landslide now. Morning sunlight had reached the floor of the Canyon, driving the mist away.

“I’ve heard about your cliff dwellings,” Trudy Hall said from behind Jamie, very softly, as if it was a dangerous topic.

“It’s only one,” Jamie corrected, “and it’s not my cliff dwelling.”

“But you’re the only one who believes it is an artifact,” Trumball pointed out.

“It’s not on the mission schedule,” Hall said, still in a hushed, almost scared voice.

“There’s plenty of flexibility built into the schedule,” Jamie pointed out.

“Enough for us to salvage the old rover and go after the Pathfinder,” said Trumball brightly.

“Maybe.”

“Why not? We could tow the old clunker out of the sand on our way back from here,”

Jamie nodded slowly, his mind racing. I’m the mission director, he told himself. I can set an excursion to the cliff site when I see fit. I don’t need his permission or even his cooperation. I don’t have to let him go off on this crazy jaunt after the Pathfinder. I don’t have to offer him a bribe to do what I want to do.

Yet he heard himself say, “We’ll stop and inspect the old rover on our way back to base, Dex.”

“Great!”

“That doesn’t mean that we’ll do anything more,” Jamie warned. “I agree with you to this extent: we ought to see if the old rover is still usable.”

“It will be.”

“Because you want it to be?”

“Because it will be,” said Dex, as convinced of the notion as a little boy who still believes in Santa Claus.

For three days Trudy Hull studied the lichen living just beneath the surface of the rocks at the base of the Canyon cliffs. Three days and three nights.

Hall’s purpose was to study the organisms in their natural habitat, especially their diurnal cycles. To do so, she had to leave the lichen undisturbed, so her instruments were mainly remote sensors. She took photographs, set up thermometers that recorded the exterior and interior temperatures of the rocks continuously, sampled the Martian air micrometers from the lichen and monitored with infrared cameras the heat flow from rocks that bore lichen and others that did not.

On the second day she began making more direct measurements of some of the lichen: with Jamie’s help she inserted probes into several of the rocks to measure chemical balances.

Trumball, meanwhile, collected rock samples, dug shallow cores (finding no permafrost at all), and began the detailed geological mapping of the area. And, of course, he planted a half-dozen geology/ meteorology beacons along a carefully paced path that paralleled the cliff face. Jamie helped him. Dex made a few cracks about the mission director serving as his assistant. Jamie let them slide past without comment.

“We need to get samples from the cliff itself,” he told Jamie the second evening of their stay in the Canyon. “And implant beacons in the cliffs.”

Jamie nodded agreement. The two of them were just inside the airlock hatch, vacuuming off the dust from their hard suits with handheld cordless Dustbusters. The Martian dust smelled pungent with ozone, enough to make eyes water if it wasn’t cleaned off immediately.

“Still no permafrost?” Jamie asked, over the whine of the vacuums.

“Not a bit. Must be deeper below the surface. It’s a couple of degrees warmer down here, y’know.”

“But the heat flow measurements—”

“Yeah, I know,” Trumball interrupted, bending over to clean his boots. “Less heat flow from the interior here than up topside.”

“But no permafrost.”

“It’s got to be deeper down.”

Jamie shook his head. “Doesn’t make sense. How can the lichen live here if there’s not as much heat coming up from the interior and water is farther away?”