Return to Mars (15 page)

“Do we just ignore Mars altogether?”

The oldest woman at the table—she must have been approaching forty, at least—tapped a forefinger against her chin. “I remember …”

“What?” asked Newell.

“Something they showed us in school … when I was—no! It was in tin-media history class I took a couple of years ago.”

“What?” Newell repeated, with some exasperation.

“Cronkite did it! Yeah, that’s right.”

“What?” the others chorused.

“There was some kind of crisis. Hostages or something. Dragged m for more than a year. At the end of every broadcast, Cronkite would say. ‘This is the fifty-fourth day’ of whatever it was.”

“Like a countdown?”

“More like a reminder. A calendar, sort of.”

Newell cocked his head to one side, a sign that he was thinking. The others stayed silent.

“I like it,” he said at last. “At the end of the evening news we have the anchor say, “This is the fifty-fourth day that our explorers are on Mars.’ “

“Whatever the right number is.”

“Of course.”

“The phrasing needs work, I think.”

“That’s what we’ve got writers for,” said Newell, somewhat crossly.

“This way, we remind the audience that those people are still on Mars.”

“But we don’t waste air time doing a science story.”

“Unless something happens to them.”

“Oh, if they get into trouble we’ll hop on it with both feet,” Newell promised. “Nothing like real danger to boost the ratings.”

DARRYL C. TRUMBALL HAD BEEN MUCH TOO BUSY TO PLUG INTO THE LATEST virtual reality transmission from Mars. He had watched the first two of them, which his son had conducted on the first two days of their arrival on the planet. That was enough.

He kept tabs on the income from the VR transmissions, of course. The first two broadcasts had an audience of slightly more than twenty million. Twenty million paying viewers, at ten dollars each, had watched the explorers on the day they landed on Mars and the next day, when Dex took them on a tour through the dome in which they were going to live for the next year and a half.

And then the audience had quickly dwindled to about three million. If you’ve seen Mars rocks once, who wants to see them again, except school kids and space nuts? But three million was respectable: it meant thirty million dollars for the expedition with every transmission.

Of course, not everybody paid their ten bucks, Trumball knew. It was ten dollars per receiver, not ten bucks per head. A school class of thirty kids paid only ten dollars. A family could pay their ten dollars and plug in all their relatives. Bars full of drunks paid their ten bucks and that was that. Trumball fumed at the thought, but there was no practical way to stop the freeloaders.

Now the VR equipment had broken down. That damned Indian broke something while he was out frolicking over some damned rocks.

They’d better get it repaired P.D.Q., Trumball groused. We’re losing thirty million dollars a shot.

“THERE SHE is!” DEX TRUMBALL EXCLAIMED.

He was sitting in the copilot’s chair as Stacy Dezhurova piloted the rover up the gentle grade of the ancient landslide.

“Did you expect it’d moved off?” Trudy Hall asked lightly. She was sitting in the jumpseat behind Jamie; Trumball sat in the fold-down behind Dezhurova.

Jamie tapped at the comm console and got Mitsuo Fuchida’s face on the control panel’s small screen.

“We’re approaching the old rover,” Jamie reported. “We’re going to stop and inspect it.”

“I understand,” Fuchida said.

“How’s everything there?”

With the barest dip of his head, the biologist answered, “Rodriguez and Craig are repairing the drill rig. Vijay is—”

“Repairing the drill?” Jamie interrupted. “What happened?”

Fuchida blinked twice, rapidly. “The hydraulic line to the auger head froze overnight. Possum believes the electrical heating system failed.”

“How serious is it?”

With a slight shrug of his slim shoulders, Fuchida said, “I don’t know. Possum didn’t seem very upset about it.”

Jamie settled back in his seat. “Ask him to call me when he gets a chance, please.”

“Yes, I will. It probably won’t be until nightfall, though.”

“That’s okay. I think we’ll be outside checking out the old rover until then, anyway.”

Fuchida nodded, then said, “We’ve received half a dozen more messages from Boston inquiring about the VR system.”

“Whatever’s wrong with it,” Dex said from behind Jamie, “it’s more than I can handle. It’ll have to wait until we get back to the dome.”

“Perhaps Possum could work with you on it from here,” Fuchida suggested.

“The scientific tasks have priority,” Jamie said. “We don’t have much time to work on the entertainment system.”

Fuchida’s brows rose. “Mr. Trumball in Boston is very insistent.”

“I’ll send him a message tonight,” Dex said. “I’ll calm him down.”

Jamie turned to look at Dex. “Thanks,” he said.

Dex shrugged.

Turning back to the display screen, Jamie waited for Fuchida to say something more, but when the biologist stayed silent, he realized he had to ask, “What about Shektar? What’s she doing?” He also realized he felt somewhere between nettled and embarrassed about asking.

Fuchida replied as if it were a routine question, “She’s been running the comm link with Tarawa most of the day. I believe she’s been reviewing our medical records.”

“Any problems?”

“Not that I’m aware of. We all seem to be healthy enough, even though several of us have lost a kilo or two.”

Trumball piped up, “With this vegetarian diet from the garden, what can you expect?”

Fuchida smiled. “What’s the matter, you don’t like soy derivatives? The garden crops produce a completely balanced diet. “

“Yeah, sure,” said Dex. “Microwaved soyburgers and eggplant.”

The biologist’s smile widened. “No steaks on Mars, my friend.”

Trumball leaned closer between Jamie’s seat and Dezhurova’s. “No sushi, either, pal.”

“Ah, but we could cultivate fish,” Fuchida retorted. “I am writing a prospectus on adding fish tanks to the garden.”

“Just what we need,” Trumball said breezily, “fish crap in our water supply.”

Jamie glanced at him, over his shoulder, then turned back to the screen. “All right, we’ll he at the old rover until nightfall, at least. Might spend the night there.”

“Understood,” Fuchida said, all business again. “1 will have Possum call you when he comes in.”

“I’d like to see the imagery from the soarplane as soon as Tomas can send it,” Jamie said.

Fuchida’s eyes widened for the barest flash of a moment. “He sent it last night. It should be in your incoming data.”

Surprised, Jamie said, “I’ll check it out … wait a minute.”

He switched from the biologist’s image to a list of his incoming messages. Sure enough, there was one from Rodriguez marked “imagery”: several dozen gigabytes.

Putting Fuchida back on the screen, Jamie said, “Yep, it’s here, all right. I’ll review it tonight. Thank Tomas for me, please.”

“I will,” said Fuchida.

After Jamie ended the transmission, Trumball said softly, “Missed your mail, huh? Maybe you oughtta tell Rodriguez to send up smoke signals.”

Jamie did not turn around to look at Dex. He knew the smug grin that would be on his face. And he didn’t want Dex to see the annoyance on his own.

That was dumb, he raged to himself. Stupid. You should have checked your incoming messages last night. That’s the second time you’ve made that mistake. Jamie knew that what nettled him most was not that he had neglected to check his mail, but that he had let Trumball and everyone else see his oversight.

“How close do you want to get?” Dezhurova asked.

Jamie looked up and saw through the windshield that they were less than a hundred meters from the old, abandoned rover.

“Close enough to attach a tow line,” he said, then added, “But be careful of the footing.”

“Don’t worry,” she replied. “I don’t want to get us stuck in the dust.”

“You can see the edge of the old crater,” Trumball said, pointing his extended arm between Dezhurova and Jamie. “Shouldn’t be a problem.”

True enough, Jamie saw. The phantom outline of the old crater was easy enough to see, if you knew what you were looking for. The oval of the crater was rimmed with dark rock, raised a few centimeters above the rest of the sloping ground. Within the crater, the dust formed tiny dunes, like wavelets lapping across a pond.

I should have seen them when I was driving the rover, Jamie said to himself. I should have spotted it and driven around it. Even sick and exhausted, a geologist shouldn’t have missed something so goddamned obvious.

He glanced over his shoulder at Trumball. The look on the younger man’s face seemed almost gloating, he thought.

As Stacy Dezhurova carefully edged the rover up to the rear end of the old vehicle, she reached down with her right hand and activated the laser rangefinder.

“Read it out for me, will you, Jamie?”

“Thirty meters,” he said, watching the green glowing digital numbers. “Twenty-eight … twenty-five…”

“Ten meters okay?”

“Fine,” Trumball answered.

“Jamie?”

“Fine,” he echoed.

She slowed the rover still more as Jamie called out, “Nineteen meters … seventeen…”

At precisely ten meters Dezhurova stopped the rover. The old vehicle’s rounded rear was dead ahead, scoured to glistening metal by six years of wind-driven iron-rich dust particles.

“Piece of cake,” Dezhurova said, shutting down the drive motors. Then she added, “So far.”

Jamie, Trumball and Dezhurova suited up and, one by one, went through the airlock and outside. They left Trudy Hall in the rover. She could call the base for help if an emergency arose. As if help could come in time to do any good, Jamie thought. Still, the safety regulations required that at least one person remain inside the rover at all times. If worst came to worst, Trudy would have to drive back to the base by herself.

They walked around the back end of the rover.

“Sand has piled up high on this side,” Dezhurova said, her voice sounding calm, almost clinical, in Jamie’s earphones.

“It’s pretty soft stuff,” Jamie said. “Like fluff. Connors and I were able to shovel it away after we got caught in a sandstorm down on the Canyon floor.”

Trumball dug a gloved hand into the sand bank. “Fluff is right. Look!” He tossed his handful of sand into the air; it drifted like powder, falling slowly in the light Martian gravity.

“We could ski on this,” Trumball said. “Hey, that’d be something for the tourists! Ski Mars!”

He laughed while Jamie gritted his teeth. Is he serious, Jamie wondered, or is he just trying to get a rise out of me?

“The solar panels are caked with the dust,” Dezhurova pointed out.

Looking up toward the top of the rover’s segments, Jamie saw that she was right. “Wind blew the sand onto the panels, but didn’t blow it off again.”

Trumball said. “This stuff is pretty damned gritty, too. Probably gouged up the panels.”

“Come this way,” Dezhurova said. “The hatch is on the lee side.”

Jamie followed her, watching the prints her boots made on the ground. It was firm here, but a few meters away was the lip of the crater.

Dezhurova pressed the hatch’s control stud. “No joy.”

“With the solar panels out, the batteries must’ve died years ago,” Trumball, said.

“We must go to manual,” Dezhurova muttered, pulling a slim cordless power screwdriver from the tool set nestled in her suit’s thigh patch.

Jamie watched her unfasten the panel that covered the manual control. The screws resisted, frozen by time and gritty dust. Dezhurova began swearing softly in Russian as the power screwdriver whined away. Jamie heard her mumbling in his earphones and worried that a slip of the screwdriver could tear her gloves. A rip in the space suit’s gloves would be far worse than a skinned knuckle.

The power driver finally got the first screw moving, and Dezhurova’s muttered curses stopped. The other screws went much more easily.

“Always the way,” she said, without looking up from her work. “The first one you pick is always the bitch.”

The wheel that opened the hatch manually was even tougher. Dezhurova could not budge it. Trumball eagerly grabbed at it, and together the two of them grunted and heaved until the airlock hatch cracked open. Then the turning became easier and the door slid all the way open.

“Okay, Jamie,” Dezhurova said, panting. “After you.”

“You stay outside, Stacy,” he reminded her, “until we check out the interior.”

“Right, chief,” she said.

Wondering if she were using Trumball’s nickname for him unconsciously or deliberately, Jamie wedged one boot on the middle rung of the short ladder and gripped the edges of the open hatch with both hands. Then he pulled himself up inside the airlock, noting in the back of his mind that being accustomed to Mars’ one-third gravity had its drawbacks: in the suit and backpack it took a real effort to lift himself.

The manual override for the inner hatch was just beneath the electrical control panel. It too was hard to turn at first, but Jamie got the wheel turning by himself and the inner hatch cranked slowly open.

“Okay, I’m going in,” he said.

“Me too,” said Trumball. Hearing him grunt as he pulled himself into the airlock, Jamie grinned inwardly that Dex had to exert himself to climb up, too.

The interior was a mess. The four of them had been sick with scurvy when the Russians had come to rescue them. They had left the rover without a thought to tidying up. The sheets on the bunks were roiled and wrinkled, just as they had left them. Jamie thought they still looked sweaty, though he knew that any moisture would have evaporated years ago.