Return to Mars (16 page)

He heard Trumball, behind him. “So this is where it happened.” The younger man’s voice was softer than usual.

Turning to look at him, Jamie saw that Dex was peering through the hatch that connected to the rover’s middle segment, which had been converted into a mobile biology lab.

“This is where Brumado and Malater discovered the lichen,” Trumball said, almost as if he were gazing upon a holy shrine.

“That’s right,” Jamie said. The memory that came to his mind was of Joanna, frightened and lovely Joanna, with her big dark eyes and her lonely, vulnerable waifs face. The child-woman he had fallen in love with. The daughter of Alberto Brumado whom he had married. The woman who became an adult at last and walked away from him.

She never loved me, Jamie realized for the millionth time. Maybe »he thought she did, at first, but she never loved me. Was I really in love with her? Shaking his head inside the helmet, he thought, whatever it was, you certainly made a mess of the whole thing.

“Boy, what some museum would pay to have this chunk of hardware in their hands,” Trumball said, the awe in his voice giving way to excitement.

Jamie started to snap out a reply, but caught himself in time. This hardware’s much too heavy for us to carry back to Earth, he told himself. The ascent section of the L/AV couldn’t possibly lift it.

As if reading Jamie’s thoughts, Trumball went on, “We’ll make this into an exhibit for the visitors. Maybe park it back down on the Canyon floor, where the discovery was originally made, and bus the tourists out there.”

Jamie got a vision of the Navaho women who spread their blankets on the sidewalks along Santa Fe’s central plaza to sell trinkets to the tourists.

“Are you all right?” Stacy Dezhurova’s voice demanded in their earphones.

“We’re inside,” Jamie reported. “No problems.”

“I’m coming in,” she said. “We must check out the electrical systems.”

“Right.”

Nearly an hour later, Dezhurova announced what they had already known. “Dead as a dinosaur,” she said, sitting in the pilot’s chair.

Standing behind her, gazing at the blank screens and lifeless gauges of the control panel, Jamie nodded inside his helmet. What did you expect? he asked himself. She’s been sitting out here for six years, a hundred below zero every night, dust covering the solar panels. The batteries must’ve died within a few days, a week, at best. The fuel cells are gone, hydrogen leaked away.

“We’ll have to tow it,” Trumball said.

“If we can,” said Jamie.

“Why not?”

Jamie wanted to shrug, but the hard suit defeated it. “We’ll have to try it and see.”

“Okay,” said Dezhurova. “Let’s get to it before the sun goes down.”

JAMIE STILL FELT A SLIGHT SHUDDER OF UNEASE WHEN HE LOOKED AT THE sun; it was eerily small, shrunken, a visible reminder of how far they were from home.

Now the distant sun was almost touching the uneven horizon, an unblinking warning red eye set in a glowing coppery sky. Jamie had to turn his entire body inside his cumbersome hard suit to see the other way. The sky was dark there, with a few stars already glistening brightly. Earth was an evening star now, he knew, but he had no time to search it out or to wait for the aurora.

As the shadows of twilight reached across the cliffs toward them, they hitched a Buckyball cable from the winch drum sticking out from the nose of their rover to an attachment hook on the tail of the old vehicle, then went inside their vehicle, one by one. It took another half-hour to vacuum off the dust, although none of them got out of their suits.

Dezhurova slid her visor up and clomped to the cockpit. Trudy Hall was sitting in the right-hand seat, looking small, almost elfin, in only her coveralls.

Stacy checked out the control panel and began to power up the wheel motors. Jamie and Dex stood behind the two women. Both men had slid up their visors and taken off their gloves.

“You’re sure its wheels are in neutral?” Trumball asked.

Jamie nodded inside his helmet. “All drive wheels go to neutral once the power’s off, unless they’re actively set in gear.”

“Or locked in parking mode,” Dex added.

“They’re not locked,” Jamie insisted. “I was there; we didn’t lock the wheels when we fell into the dust. Just the opposite, we tried to back out of the crater.”

“Then they might he set in reverse.”

“They’re in neutral,” Jamie insisted.

Trumball’s glance slid from Jamie to Dezhurova, sitting in the pilot’s seat with her back to them. “I sure wish we could’ve checked the wheel settings,” he muttered.

“Not possible,” Stacy said, from her chair. “Not unless we run a power line to the old rover and boot up her electrical systems.”

“Maybe we ought to do that,” Trumball said.

“Let’s see if we can tow her without getting into that kind of work,” Jamie said.

“Spooling up,” Dezhurova muttered, engaging the drive motors. Jamie could not see her head, only the top of her gleaming white helmet.

“Take it easy, now,” said Trumball.

“Be quiet, Dex,” she snapped. “I know what I’m doing.”

Dex went silent. Jamie, beside him, stared straight ahead at the curved rear end of the old rover looming ten meters in front of the windshield.

The motors whined as Dezhurova began to slowly back the rover. The tether cable stretched taut.

“Come, come, my sweet one,” Dezhurova coaxed gently, in a whisper Jamie could barely hear. Then she lapsed into Russian, cooing softly, tenderly.

Standing behind Trudy’s seat, Jamie marveled at the cool, gentle, almost motherly softness of Stacy’s whispered urgings. Is this the same woman who was swearing like a biker at a screwdriver just a couple of hours ago?

The rover rocked slightly, and Jamie grabbed the back of Hall’s chair for support. The drive motors whined louder. Jamie thought he smelled something burning.

“Come, baby,” Dezhurova cooed.

Trumball muttered, “It’s not going …”

The rover lurched again, and Jamie reached out with his free hand to hold onto Trumball. Dex grappled for Jamie’s arm clumsily, rocking backwards in his hard suit and nearly tumbling over.

“Here she comes!” Dezhurova shouted.

The rounded end of the old rover trundled toward them in slow motion, bigger, bigger.

“Hang on!”

The tail of the old vehicle thumped against the projecting winch drum on the nose of their rover hard enough to rock Jamie against the cockpit’s rear bulkhead. Both vehicles stopped.

For a long moment none of them said anything. Then Trudy Hall giggled and declared, “Whiplash! Where’s the nearest lawyer?”

They all laughed, shakily.

“I guess the old bird’s wheels are in neutral,” Trumball admitted.

“I guess they are,” said Dezhurova.

Jamie noticed that she locked their rover’s wheels in park before she pushed herself up from the pilot’s chair.

“I have to pee,” she announced cheerfully.

Over dinner they planned how they would tow the old rover up to the Canyon rim. As usual, the two women sat on one of the lower bunks while Jamie and Trumball sat side-by-side on the other.

“Why not bring it all the way back to the base?” Trumball urged.

“Cuts into our fuel reserves,” Dezhurova said, looking across the foldout table to Jamie.

“Not by that much,” Trumball countered.

Jamie said, “Stacy, you’ll have to make the call as far as safety is concerned. I need to know exactly how much of our fuel the tow job would eat up.”

“I can give you an estimate, but I don’t know exactly how much fuel we’ll consume towing the beast.”

“Your best estimate, then,” Jamie said.

“We’ll want the rover at the base sooner or later,” Trumball went on. “Might’s well bring it along with us.”

“If we can,” said Jamie.

“Right. But I’m willing to bet that we can do it with no strain.”

“We’ll see.”

“Yes, Daddy,” Dex kidded.

After dinner they put away the table and folded down the upper bunks. Trumball took his turn in the lav while the two women went up to the cockpit together. Jamie squatted on his bunk, opened his laptop and checked in with the base. Rodriguez was at the comm desk.

“Did you get the imagery I sent last night?” he asked, his beefy face frowning with concern.

“Yes, I just haven’t had a chance to go over it.”

“Doesn’t show much. The soar plane’s not such a good platform for the kind of data you want.”

Sitting cross-legged on his bunk, Jamie shrugged. “It’s all we’ve got, for now.”

“Yeah, right.”

He went through the day’s report with Rodriguez. Possum Craig had the drill rig running again. Fuchida was plotting out his excursion to Olympus
Mons.
Rodriguez himself was beginning to assemble the manned rocketplane that would carry him and the biologist to the top of the tallest mountain in the solar system.

Jamie listened, watched inventory lists flicker down his screen, waited patiently until he heard himself ask, “What’s Shektar been doing?”

“Vijay? She’s tending Fuchida’s garden and looking after the bugs that Possum’s drill is bringing up. Want to talk with her?”

“Sure. Yes.”

Trumball came back from the lavatory and ducked low enough to grin at Jamie. “Don’t stay up too late now, chief. Big day tomorrow.”

“Right,” Jamie said. He reached for the earplug attachment to his laptop and pressed it into his ear, then pulled its microphone arm down until the pin mike was almost touching his lips.

As Trumball swung up on the top bunk, Rodriguez’s face on the screen was replaced by Vijay Shektar’s. She seemed to glisten, as if her skin had been oiled. Jamie thought again how much fun it would be to massage her with pungent balms.

She smiled and talked easily enough, answered Jamie’s questions about the iron-eating bacteria that Craig’s drill rig was now pulling up from several kilometers below the surface.

“They’re magnetically active,” she reported. “They align themselves with magnetic fields.”

“Must be from the iron they ingest,” Jamie guessed.

“Yes, but what advantage does that give them? Mars’ magnetic field is so weak that I can’t see how it helps them to survive.”

“Maybe it doesn’t,” Jamie said. “Maybe it’s just incidental.”

She looked doubtful.

“Or maybe Mars had a much stronger field once,” he suggested, “and the field has dissipated over time.”

“That could be,” Vijay said thoughtfully. Then she brightened. “They’re reproducing quite nicely in culture. They fission every hour, on average.”

“In ambient conditions?”

“Mitsuo’s rigged a special high-pressure box for them,” she answered. “They’ve got to be kept in total darkness. Light kills them.”

“What about heat?”

Her eyes flashed. “Oh, they’re thermophiles, all right. At eighty degrees they switch from fissioning to conjugation. You ought to see them, Jamie. The busy little buggers mate like rabbits!”

“Just what we need,” Jamie murmured. “Sex-crazed bacteria.”

“They’re just like most men,” Vijay said, smiling brightly. “They only do it in the dark—and under great pressure.”

“Australian men, you mean,” he said.

“Some Yanks, too.”

He had no reply for that one.

Still smiling, Vijay asked, “And how are you getting along?”

Jamie felt grateful for the change in subject. He returned to the safety of the work they were doing. As he told her about pulling the old rover out of the sand, he reminded himself that this very desirable woman could destroy this expedition if she had a mind to.

He remembered Ilona Malater, who decided that she would be the resident sex therapist for the first expedition. She caused tensions that became almost unbearable, particularly among the Russians.

Vijay was different. Younger, for one thing. And she seemed to be laughing at some private, inner joke. She admitted to having a wicked sense of humor, but Jamie felt that she was professional enough to keep it—and her other passions—under control.

She’d better, he said to himself.

Then a voice in his mind asked, What if she doesn’t? What are you going to do about it?

TOMAS RODRIGUEZ DRUMMED HIS FINGERS ABSENTLY AGAINST THE DESKTOP in rhythm to the trumpets and strings of the mariachi CD he was listening to while he squinted hard at the computer’s display screen. He was trying to force some sense out of what the soarplane’s cameras showed.

It was well past midnight. He was sitting alone in the dome’s geology lab, surrounded by shelves laden with red, pitted rocks and plastic containers of rusty red soil. The dome was dark and quiet; he kept the music low, just enough to keep him company while everyone else slept.

Rodriguez desperately wanted to see what Jamie Waterman thought he had seen: an artificial structure built into a niche two-thirds of the way up the steep rugged cliff of Tithonium Chasma’s northern face. He tried his best to see it.

The image on the screen showed the niche, a dark cleft in the massive cliff face with a bulging rock overhang above it. The overhang kept the niche in shadow, despite the fact that the sun was shining on the cliff wall.

The plane’s not a good platform for this, Rodriguez thought as he watched the niche get bigger and bigger, then slide out of view as the soarplane banked away and climbed out of the Canyon.

With a patient sigh he went back to the beginning of the sequence, slowed it down, and watched even more intently. The plane was flying almost straight into the cliff, its forward cameras aimed at the niche.

Rodriguez’s lingers clicked across the computer keyboard, calling up the best level of brightness the machine could produce. The cliff face washed out almost entirely, but the interior of the niche remained maddeningly unresolved.