Return to Mars (20 page)

Pilots’ wisdom. Astronaut humor. But it was true, Jamie knew. If we wanted to be totally safe, we’d still be in our homes back on Earth. Hell, we’d still be in caves, too scared to try to use fire.

“I was promised a stroll out in the countryside,” Shektar reminded him.

“Right,” he said quickly. “Stay with it, Tomas.”

“What else do I have to do?”

Jamie and Vijay walked around the plane’s high sweeping tail and headed out toward the setting sun. They switched their suit radios from the general communications frequency to another freak that would allow them to converse without bothering Rodriguez or anyone back in the dome who might be monitoring the general frequency.

Without preamble, Vijay said, “Tommy seems to be okay now.”

Surprised, Jamie replied, “Did he tell you about his problem?”

“Him? No way, mate.”

“Then how did you know …?”

“I’d be some psychologist if I couldn’t see his bedraggled looks, wouldn’t I?” Shektar’s voice sounded slightly amused in his earphones. “I mean, the poor lad was staggering around like a stunned mullet.”

Jamie said, “He felt responsible for the soarplane crash.”

“He’s worked his way through it.”

“With your help?”

She did not answer for a heartbeat or two. Then, “Oh, I gave him a couple of big smiles and a pat on the back. Seemed to cheer him a bit.”

“Will he be all right to fly?”

“Best thing for him, actually,” she replied. “If you tried to take him off the mission now he’d be totally crushed.”

Jamie nodded inside his helmet, wondering how much of this morale-boosting Vijay wrote into her official records.

They walked slowly away from the dome, across the rock-strewn red sand.

“God, it’s even bleaker than the outback,” Vijay murmured.

Jamie said, “But beautiful.”

“You think this is beautiful?” Her voice was filled with disbelief.

“You’re comparing it with Earth, with someplace that you know, maybe someplace you love.”

“It makes Coober Pedy look like the bloody Garden of Eden.”

Jamie shook his head. “Don’t make comparisons. This is a different world, Vijay. Look at it Tor what it is. Look at it with fresh eyes.”

Even as he said it, Jamie realized that he himself instinctively compared the Martian landscape to the rugged desert of the Navaho reservation. Take your own advice, he thought. Look at it with fresh eyes.

And he saw beauty. The world lying before their eyes was a symphony of reds: rocks the color of rust scattered everywhere, gentle dunes of ocher and maroon stretching out to the hilly uneven horizon, the sky a delicate pinkish tan deepening to blue overhead. A soft breeze thrummed past; he could hear its friendly murmur through his helmet. It was right, harmonious, a balanced world without pressure, without noisy crowds or massive buildings or busy streets.

Without people, he realized. Maybe we weren’t meant to live in crowded cities. Maybe we’re meant to live in small families, little groups with plenty of open space around us.

“You know,” Vijay said slowly, “it really is kind of lovely, in a way. Peaceful.”

Yes, Jamie thought. Peaceful. But let Dex have his way and there’ll be tourists tramping through here and contractors building cities and an army of engineers swarming everywhere trying to change all this and make it just like Phoenix or Tokyo or New York.

“Of course,” Vijay went on, “it’s peaceful because we’ve got to stay inside these suits. It’s lovely because we can’t really live here, we can only visit.”

“Mars tolerates us,” said Jamie. “As long as we respect its world.”

“We’re not really on Mars, are we? I mean, we can’t feel the wind or run barefoot through the sand.”

“No. We’re visitors. Guests.”

She moved closer to him and Jamie tried to put his arm around her shoulders. In the oversized hard suits with their bulging backpacks it was impossible.

Instead, he took her by the arm and wordlessly walked her to the crest of a low curving rocky ridge, the late afternoon sun throwing their long shadows ahead of them across the barren sand dunes that marched in symmetric order out to the disturbingly close horizon. There was no warmth in the sunlight; if they had not been encased in the protective hard suits, they would have quickly frozen to death. Without the air from the tanks on their backpacks they would have asphyxiated even sooner.

Yet the uncanny beauty of the Martian landscape stirred a chord within Jamie, this red world. It was a soft landscape, barren and empty, yet somehow gentle and beckoning to him. What’s over the next hill? he wondered. What’s beyond the horizon?

Yet he stopped.

“Why have you stopped?” she asked. “Let’s go over to those dunes.”

Jamie tapped her shoulder with one gloved hand and pointed back behind them with the other. “We’d be out of camera range.”

One of the pole-mounted surveillance cameras poked just clear of the horizon behind them. Their bootprints were clearly visible in the iron-rich sand, side by side. They’ll stay there until the next big storm, Jamie told himself. This soft wind wafting by doesn’t have enough strength to push the rusty sand grains.

He said to Vijay, “We can walk along the crest a while. It’s still early, we’ve got time.”

“I’d like that.”

“We can’t stay out very long,” Jamie said. “It’ll get dark as soon as the sun sets.”

“Stacy told me you showed her the aurora,” she replied.

“That’s right,” he said. “I did.”

After a few minutes of walking in silence, Jamie stopped and turned completely around. The sky off in the east was already darkening, even though the sun had not quite touched the undulating western horizon.

There ought to be, Jamie thought … yes! There it is!

Clutching Vijay’s shoulder and pointing with his other hand, Jamie said, “Look up there.”

“Where? What is—an airplane!”

“No,” Jamie corrected. “It’s Phobos, the nearer moon.”

A bright spark was moving purposefully across the sky, unblinking, unhurried, traveling across the darkening sky as if on a mission of its own.

“It’s too small to make a disk,” Jamie explained, “and so close to the planet that it moves like an artificial satellite in low orbit, from east to west.”

“I can see a star,” she said, pointing.

“Probably Deimos, the bigger moon.” Jamie looked to where she was pointing and realized he was wrong. He felt the breath gush out of him.

“That’s Earth,” he said. Whispered, really.

“Earth?”

Jamie nodded inside his helmet. “Big and blue. That’s Earth. It’s the evening star here, for the next several months.”

“Earth.” Vijay’s voice was hollow with wonder.

Stacy Dezhurova’s voice shattered the moment. “Base to Waterman. Sun is on the horizon. Start back home.”

He turned and saw that the sun had indeed touched the distant hills. “Okay,” he said reluctantly. “We’re heading in.”

Safety regulations. Even with the helmet lamps they were not permitted to walk around outside at night. Not a smart thing to do unless there was some overriding reason for it. Still, Jamie would have enjoyed at least a few minutes alone with Vijay and the glittering night sky of Mars.

“No aurora, I’m afraid,” he said ruefully.

“Stacy’s jealous.”

“No, she’s just following the regulations.”

“Well … thanks for the walk,” she said as they started back.

“I’m glad you enjoyed it,” he said.

“I should get out more often. I’ve been cooped up in that dome too long.”

“You don’t mind being cooped up in a suit?”

“Not really. Do you?”

“Not really,” he echoed. “I feel kind of free out here, almost like I could take off the suit and run off to the horizon.”

“Do you?”

The sudden change in the tone of her voice alarmed Jamie. “Oh-oh. I shouldn’t have admitted that to the team psychologist, should I?”

She laughed. “No worries. It’s off the record.”

Jamie knew better. He tried to make light of it. “I’m not really delusional, you know.”

“Not yet,” she bantered back at him.

“I’ve wondered why we needed a psychologist on this mission,” he said. “We got along fine on the first expedition without one.”

Vijay replied, “You need a psychologist because you’re all borderline crazy.”

“Crazy?”

‘ ‘Who else but a madman would journey millions of kilometers to this frozen desert? I could write a research paper on each and every individual on the mission. Every one of them.”

“The women too?”

“Yes,” she answered easily. “Myself also. Sometimes I think I must be the maddest one of us all.”

“You?” He was genuinely surprised.

“Me.”

“But you’re so level-headed. Always full of good spirits and all that.”

She sighed. “I must tell you the story of my life someday.”

“Anytime.”

“In the meanwhile,” she said, quite serious now, “it seems to me that you and Dex are managing to get along rather smoothly.”

“Dex isn’t that bad … as long as he gets what he wants.”

“He’s a very ambitious young man, and quite accustomed to getting his own way. The more you give in to him the more demands he’ll make on you.”

And what demands is he making on you? Jamie wanted to ask. But lie buried that and said instead, “As mission director, it’s my job to make certain that we don’t have any personal conflicts that will interfere with the expedition’s work.”

“That is ridiculous, Jamie. Neither you nor anyone else can avoid personal conflicts. You have four very intelligent, highly motivated and thoroughly individualistic scientists under your leadership. Not to mention the two astronauts, who also have their quirks.”

“Plus the expedition’s physician/psychologist.”

“Her too,” Vijay admitted.

“And we’re all borderline lunatics, according to you.”

“We’re living under extremely stressful conditions,” she countered. “We’re millions of kilometers from home, Jamie.”

“We’ve all been trained to deal with that,” he said.

“Perhaps so, but there will be conflicts,” she continued, deadly serious. “You won’t be able to smooth everyone’s feelings all the time.”

They walked in silence for several uneasy minutes, passing the plane that Rodriguez had been working on. No sign of him; he must already be inside, Jamie thought.

“Well,” he said lamely, “we’ve survived the first three weeks okay.”

The sun was dipping behind the hills now. They were in shadow now. Twilight lasted only a little while, unless a recent dust storm filled the air with particles that scattered the dying sunlight. The curve of the dome was just visible over the rim of the hill before them. Jamie turned as he walked toward the airlock, took a final look at the red world.

“I love it here.” The words surprised him. He didn’t realize he was going to say them until they tumbled from his lips.

Vijay followed his gaze across the broken rocks scattered across the rusty landscape and the wind-sculpted dunes that waited for the next big sandstorm to rearrange them.

“It’s so barren,” she said. “So cold and bleak.”

“It’s like home to me,” he said.

“It’s not home, Jamie. It’s an alien world that could kill you in the flash of a second.”

He stared for a moment at her spacesuited figure. ‘ ‘Mars is a gentle world, Vijay. It means us no harm.”

“Not until the air in your suit runs out.”

He tried to shrug. “Yes, there is that.”

“There’s always the urge to live,” she said. “The impact of reality. It limits our dreams.”

“Maybe.”

They trudged back toward the shelter. Jamie saw the rounded hump of the dome rising slowly above the horizon with each step. He felt reluctant; he knew he really would prefer to walk out past the dune field, out into the unknown, across the lace of this red world.

“You were married to Joanna Brumado, weren’t you?”

Startled by her question, Jamie answered, “It didn’t work out.”

“Do you blame yourself for that?” Vijay asked.

He stopped walking, forcing her to stop and turn to face him.

“Is this part of your psych profiling?” Jamie asked coldly.

“I suppose so,” she said.

“In that case, no, I don’t blame myself for the divorce. I don’t blame anybody. It just didn’t work out, that’s all.”

“I see.”

“No-fault divorce. Nobody’s to blame.”

“Yes.”

Wondering why he felt so angry, Jamie said, “I don’t see what my marriage has to do with my job performance here. Hell, the marriage didn’t even last three years.”

“I’m sorry I asked,” Vijay said. “I din’t realize it would upset you so.”

“I’m not upset!”

“No, I can see that you’re not.”