Return to Mars (2 page)

THE FIRST MARS EXPEDITION CONFIRMED MUCH OF WHAT EARLIER ROBOT spacecraft had discovered about the red planet.

Mars is a cold world. It orbits roughly one and a half times farther from the Sun than the Earth does. Its atmosphere is far too thin to retain solar heat. On a clear midsummer day along the Martian equator the afternoon ground temperature might climb to seventy degrees Fahrenheit; that same night, however, it will plunge to a hundred below /cm or lower.

The atmosphere of Mars is too thin to breathe, even if it were pure oxygen, which it is not. More than ninety-five percent of the Martian air is carbon dioxide; nearly three percent nitrogen. There is a tiny amount of tree oxygen and even less water vapor. The rest of the atmosphere consists of inert gases such as argon, neon and such, a whiff of carbon monoxide, and a trace of ozone.

The First Mars Expedition discovered, however, something that all the mechanical landers and orbiters had failed to find: life.

Tucked down at the floor of the mammoth Valles Marineris—the Grand Canyon that stretches some three thousand kilometers across the ruddy face of the planet—sparse colonies of lichenlike organisms eke out a perilous existence, hiding a few millimeters below the surface of the rocks. They soak up sunlight by day and absorb the water they need from the vanishingly tiny trace of water vapor in the air. At night they become dormant, waiting for the sun’s warmth to touch them once again. Their cells are bathed in an alcohol-rich liquid that keeps them from freezing even when the temperature falls to a hundred degrees below zero or more.

Fourth planet out from the Sun, Mars never gets closer to the Earth than fifty-six million kilometers, more than a hundred times farther than the Moon. Mars is a small world, roughly half the size of the Earth, with a surface gravity just a bit more than a third of Earth’s. A hundred kilograms on Earth weighs only thirty-eight kilos on Mars.

Mars is known as the red planet because its surface is mainly a bone-dry desert of sandy iron oxides: rusty iron dust.

Yet there is water on Mars. The planet has bright polar caps composed at least partially of frozen water—covered over most of the year by frozen carbon dioxide, dry ice. The First Mars Expedition confirmed that vast areas of the planet are underlain by permafrost: an ocean of frozen water lies beneath the red sands.

Mars is the most Earthlike of any world in the solar system. There are seasons on Mars—spring, summer, autumn and winter. Because its orbit is farther from the Sun, the Martian year is nearly twice as long as Earth’s (a few minutes short of 689 Earth days) and its seasons are consequently much longer than Earth’s. Mars rotates about its axis in almost the same time that Earth does. A day on Earth is 23 hours, 56 minutes, and 4.09 seconds long. A day on Mars is only slightly longer: 24 hours, 37 minutes, and 22.7 seconds.

To prevent confusion between Earth time and Martian, space explorers refer to the Martian day as a sol. In one Martian year there are 669 sols, plus an untidy fourteen hours, forty-six minutes and twelve seconds.

The discovery of the rock-dwelling Martian lichen raised new questions among the scientists: Are the lichen the only life form on the planet? Or is there an ecological web of various organisms? If so, why have none been found except the lichen?

Are these lowly organisms the highest achievement that life has attained on Mars?

Or are they the rugged survivors of what was once a much richer and more complex ecology?

It they are the sole survivors, what destroyed all the other life-forms on Mars?

“WE’RE BACK, GRANDFATHER,” JAMIE WATERMAN MURMURED. “WE’VE come back to Mars.”

Standing by the row of empty equipment racks just inside the domed habitat’s airlock, Jamie reached out and picked up the small stone carving from the shelf where it had waited for six years: a tiny piece of jet-black obsidian in the totem shape of a crouching bear. A miniature turquoise arrowhead was tied to its back with a rawhide thong, a wisp of a white eagle’s feather tucked atop it. He held the Navaho fetish in the palm of his gloved hand.

“What is that?” asked Stacy Dezhurova.

Jamie heard her strong bright voice in his helmet earphones. None of the eight members of the Second Mars Expedition had removed their spacesuits yet, nor even lifted the visors of their helmets. They stood in a rough semicircle just inside the airlock hatch, eight faceless men and women encased in their bulky white hard suits.

“A Navaho fetish,” Jamie replied. “Powerful magic.”

Dex Trumball shuffled awkwardly toward Jamie, his thick boots clomping heavily on the habitat’s plastic flooring.

“You brought this all the way with you?” Trumball asked, almost accusingly.

“On the first expedition,” Jamie said. “I left it here to guard the place while we were gone.”

Trumball’s face was hidden behind the tinted visor of his helmet, but the tone of his voice left no doubt about his opinion. “Heap big medicine, huh?”

Jamie suppressed a flash of anger. “That’s right,” he said, forcing his voice to stay calm, even. “The dome’s still here, isn’t it? Six years, and it’s still standing and ready for occupancy.”

Possum Craig said in his flat Texas twang, “Let’s pump us some breathable oxy in here before we start clappin’ ourselves on the back.”

“Six years,” Trumball muttered. “Left it waiting here all that time.”

Six years.

Even the discovery of life clinging precariously to the rocks at the bottom of Mars’ Grand Canyon had not made this return to the red planet easy or simple. It had taken six years to put together the people,

the equipment—and most important of all, the money—to make this Second Mars Expedition a reality.

To his surprise and anger, Jamie Waterman had been forced to fight for a berth on the second expedition, fight with every molecule of strength and skill he possessed. But his grandfather’s fetish must have truly been powerful: he had returned to Mars at last.

After five months in space between the two worlds, after a week in orbit around Mars, after the blazing fury of their descent through the thin Martian atmosphere heated to incandescence by their fiery passage, Jamie Waterman and the other seven members of the expedition had at last stepped out onto the rust-red sandy surface of Mars.

Five men and three women, each encased in bulbous hard-shelled spacesuits that made them look like lumbering tortoises rearing on their hind legs. All the suits were white, with color-coded stripes on their sleeves for easy identification. Jamie’s three stripes were fire-engine red.

The habitat that the first expedition had left looked unchanged. The dome was still inflated and appeared unscarred from its six-year wait.

The first thing the explorers did was to troop to the dome’s airlock and go inside. After a few moments of just gazing around its empty domed interior, they fell to their assigned tasks and checked out the life-support equipment. If the dome was unusable they would have to live for the entire year and a half of their stay on Mars in the spacecraft module that had carried them to the red planet and landed them on its surface. None of them wanted that. Five months cooped up in that tin can had been more than enough.

The dome was intact, its life-support equipment functioning adequately, its nuclear power generator still providing enough electricity to run the habitat.

I knew it would be, Jamie said to himself. Mars is a gentle world. It doesn’t want to harm us.

Possum Craig and Tomas Rodriguez, the NASA-provided astronaut, started the oxygen generator. It was cranky after six years of being idle, but they got it running at last and it began extracting breathable oxygen from the Martian atmosphere to mix with the nitrogen that had kept the dome inflated for the past six years.

The rest of the explorers went outside and fell to their assigned tasks of setting up the video cameras and virtual reality rigs to record their arrival on Mars and transmit the news back to Earth. With his stone fetish tucked into the thigh pocket of his spacesuit, Jamie remembered the political flap he had caused when the first expedition had set foot on Mars and he had spoken a few words of Navaho instead of the stiffly formal speech the NASA public relations people had written for him.

And he remembered one thing more: the ancient cliff dwelling he had seen, built into a high niche in the soaring cliff wall of the Grand Canyon. But he dared not mention that to the others.

Not yet.

JAMIE HAD MET THE EXPEDITION’S SCIENCE TEAM FOR THE FIRST TIME IN A tight little windowless conference room in NASA’s Johnson Space Center, near Houston. The two women and three men had been chosen out of thousands of candidates, their names announced weeks earlier. Jamie himself had been selected to be their leader only two days ago.

“I know what you’re going through,” Jamie said to the five of them.

This was the first time he had met the four scientists and the expedition’s physician face-to-face. Over the months of their training and Jamie’s own struggle to be included in the Second Mars Expedition, he had communicated with each of them by electronic mail and talked with them by Picturephone, but he had never been in the same room with them before.

Now he stood, a little uneasily, at the head of the narrow conference table, feeling like an instructor facing a very talented quintet of students: younger, more certain of themselves, even more highly qualified than he himself. The four scientists were seated along the rickety oblong table, their eyes on him. The physician/psychologist sat at the table’s end, an exotic-looking Hindu woman with dark chocolate skin and midnight-black hair pulled straight back from her face.

They were all in mission coveralls, coral pink, with name tags pinned above the breast pocket. The physician, V. J. Shektar, had tied a colorful scarf around her throat. She was watching Jamie with big, coal-black, almond-shaped eyes.

None of the others had added to their standard uniform, except C. Dexter Trumball, who had sewn patches on both his shoulders: one bore the microscope-and-telescope logo of the International Consortium of Universities, the other the flying T symbol of Trumball Industries.

“We’re going to be living together for more than three years,” Jamie continued, “counting the rest of your training and the mission itself. I thought it’s high time we got to know each other.”

Jamie had fought hard to be accepted for the second expedition. He would have been happy to be included as a mission scientist. Instead, the only way he could get aboard was to accept the responsibilities of mission director.

“You said our training,” the geophysicist, Dexter Trumball, interrupted. “Aren’t you training for the mission, too?”

Trumball was handsome, with dashing film-star looks, dark curly hair and lively bright eyes the blue-green color of the ocean. As he sat back comfortably in his padded chair, he wore a crooked little grin that hovered between self-confidence and cockiness. He was no taller than Jamie, but quite a bit slimmer: a nimble, graceful dancer’s body compared to Jamie’s thicker, more solid build. He was also ten years younger than Jamie, and the son of the man who had spearheaded the funding for the expedition.

“Of course I’m training, too,” Jamie answered quickly. “But a good deal of what you’re going through—the Antarctic duty, for example—I did for the first expedition.”

“Oh,” said Trumball. “Been there, done that, eh?”

Jamie nodded tightly. “Something like that.”

“But that was more than six years ago,” said Mitsuo Fuchida. The biologist was as slim as a sword blade, his face a sculpture of angles and planes.

“If you were a computer,” he added, with the slightest of smiles cracking his hatchet-sharp features, “you would be an entire generation behind.”

Jamie forced a returning smile. “I’m being upgraded. I’m requalifying on all the physical tests,” Jamie assured them, “and putting all the latest programming into my long-term memory. I won’t crash or succumb to bytelock, don’t worry.”

The others laughed politely.

Fuchida dipped his chin in acknowledgment. “Only joking,” he said, a bit sheepishly.

“Nothing to it,” Jamie said, smiling genuinely now.

“Well, I don’t know about the rest of y’all,” said the stubby, sad-faced geochemist that Jamie knew as Peter J. Craig, “but I’m damned glad we got an experienced man to come along with us.”

Craig had a bulbous nose and heavy jowls dark with stubble.

“Lemme tell you,” he went on, pronouncing you as yew, “I been out in the field a lotta years and there’s nothin’ that can replace real experience. We’re lucky to have Dr. Waterman headin’ up this rodeo.”

Before anyone could say anything more, Jamie spread his hands and told them, “Look, I didn’t come here this afternoon to talk about me. I just wanted to meet you all in person and sort of say hello. We’ll be talking to each other individually and in smaller groups over the next few weeks.”

They all nodded.

“You people are the best of the best,” Jamie went on. “You’ve been picked over thousands of other applicants. The research proposals you’ve presented are very impressive; I’ve studied them all and I like what I’ve seen, very much.”

“What about the cooperative studies?” Trumball asked.

While on Mars, each of the four scientists would carry out dozens of experiments and measurements under direction from researchers back on Earth. That was the only way to get the full cooperation—and funding help—from the major universities.

Jamie said, “I know they’re going to cut into the time you have for your own work, but they’re part of the mission plan and we’ll all have to pitch in on them.”

“You too?”

“Certainly me too. I’m not going to spend all my time on Mars at a desk.”

They grinned at that.

“And listen: If you run into problems with scheduling, or the demands from Earthside get to be troublesome, tell me about it. That’s what I’m here for. It’s my job to iron out conflicts.”

“Who gets priority?” Craig asked. “I mean, if it comes down to either doin’ my own stuff or doin’ what some department head from Cowflop U. wants, which way do we go?”

Jamie looked at him for a silent moment, thinking. This is a test, he realized. They’re sizing me up.

“We’ll have to take each case on its own merits,” he told Craig. “But my personal feeling is that in case of a tie, the guy on Mars gets the priority.”

Craig nodded agreement, acceptance.

Jamie looked around the table. Neither of the two women had said a word. Shektar was the medic, so he wasn’t surprised that she had nothing to say. But Trudy Hall was a cellular biologist and should contribute to the discussion.

Hall looked to Jamie like a slight little English sparrow. She was tiny, her thick curly brown hair clipped short, her coral coveralls undecorated except for her name tag. Alert gray-blue eyes, Jamie saw. She had the spare, lean figure of a marathon runner and the kind of perfect chiselled nose that other women pay plastic surgeons to obtain.

“Any questions?” Jamie said, looking directly at her.

Hall seemed to draw in a breath, then she said, “Yes, one.”

“What is it?” Jamie asked.

She glanced around at the others, then hunched forward slightly as she asked in a soft Yorkshire burr, “What’s it like on Mars? I mean, what’s it really like to be there?”

The others all edged forward in their seats, too, even Trumball, and Jamie knew that they would get along fine together. He spent the next two hours telling them about Mars.