Return to Mars (23 page)

Before closing it, though, he turned back to Jamie and Vijay.

“By the way, Jamie, I didn’t get a chance to say so long to my father. Would you give him a buzz and tell him I’m on my way?”

“Certainly,” Jamie said, surprised at the sweet reasonableness in Trumball’s voice.

The hatch slid shut. Jamie started toward the comm center, Shektar walking alongside him.

Vijay asked, “Did you have to do that?”

“What?” Jamie asked.

“Humiliate him.”

“Humiliate?” Jamie felt a pang, but it wasn’t surprise. It was disappointment that Vijay saw his decision this way.

“Making him officially subordinate to Possum,” she went on. “That’s belittling him.”

Striding along the partitions that marked off the team’s sleeping cubicles, Jamie said, “I didn’t do it to Dex, I did it for Possum.”

“Really?”

“Dex would try to steamroller Possum whenever they had a difference of opinion. This way, Possum’s got the clout to make the final decisions. That might save both their lives.”

“Really?” she said again.

“Yes, really.”

He looked down at her. Her expression showed a great deal of disbelief.

By the time they reached the comm center, Craig and Trumball had climbed into the rover and started up its electrical generator.

“The boss is going to let me drive,” Dex exclaimed, his radio voice brimming with mock delight. “Goodie, goodie.”

With Rodriguez sitting beside her, Stacy Dezhurova went down the rover checklist with him, then cleared them for departure.

“We’re off to see the Wizard,” Dex said. “Be back in a month or so.”

“Sooner,” Craig’s voice added.

“Better be sooner,” Rodriguez said into his lip mike. “Thanksgiving’s in four weeks.”

“Save me a drumstick,” said Dex.

In Dezhurova’s display screen Jamie saw the rover shudder to life, then lurch into motion. It rolled forward slowly at first, then turned in a quarter-circle and headed off toward the east.

“Oh, Jamie,” Trumball called as they trundled toward the horizon, “please don’t forget to call my dad, okay?”

“You can call him yourself, right now,” Jamie responded.

“No, I want to concentrate on my driving. You do it for me, huh? Please?”

Jamie said, “Sure. I’ll send him a message right away.”

“Thanks a lot, chief.”

JAMIE WENT TO HIS QUARTERS AND SENT A BRIEF MESSAGE EARTHWARD, telling Darryl C. Trumball that his son was on his way to Ares Vallis and wanted him to know that everything was going well.

As he looked up from his laptop screen, he saw Stacy Dezhurova at his open doorway. She looked even moodier than she had at break-last, almost worried.

“What’s the matter, Stacy?”

The cosmonaut stepped into Jamie’s cubicle but didn’t take the empty desk chair. She remained standing.

With a shake of her head that made her pageboy flutter, she answered, “I can’t help thinking that I should be out in that rover with them.”

Jamie shut down his computer and closed its lid. “Stacy, we went over that a couple of hundred times. You can’t be everyplace.”

“The safety regulations say an astronaut must be on every excursion.”

“I know, but this trek of Dex’s is an extra task that we didn’t plan on.”

“Still…”

“Sit down,” Jamie said, pointing to the desk chair. He immediately felt silly; there was no other chair in the cubicle.

She sat heavily, like a tired old woman, and Jamie leaned toward her from the edge of his bunk. “We just don’t have enough people to send you along with them. You know that.”

“Yes.”

“And Possum’s about as good as they come—for a guy who’s not an astronaut.”

“Yes,” she said again.

“They’ll be okay.”

“But if something happens,” she said, “I will feel responsible. It is my job to go out with the scientists and make certain they don’t get themselves killed.”

Jamie sat up straighter. “If something happens, it’s my responsibility, not yours. I made the decision, Stacy.”

“I know, but…” Her voice trailed off.

“Look: Tomas has got to go with Mitsuo, there’s no way around that. We need you here at the base. We don’t have any other astronauts! What do you expect me to do, clone you?”

She let a weak grin break her dour expression. “I understand. But I don’t like it.”

“They’ll be okay. Possum’s no daredevil.”

“I suppose so.”

“How’s Tomas coming along?”

The grin faded. “He ate a big lunch. He is not worried about the flight.”

Jamie realized he had skipped lunch. “I imagine he’s excited about it.”

“I would be.”

Is that it? Jamie wondered. Is she sore because Tomas is flying the plane to Olympus instead of her? But she knew that’s how it would be. God, we made that decision before we moved to Tarawa.

For the past three weeks Rodriguez had been test-flying the rocketplane, taking it out on jaunts that started with a simple circle around their base camp and gradually extended as far as Olympus Mons and back again. Never once did Stacy ask to fly the plane. Never once did she show that she was unhappy that Tomas would be the pilot while she “flew” the comm console here at the base.

Now she was showing how unhappy it made her. Astronauts are fliers, Jamie realized. She’s a pilot and she’s not being allowed to fly. He remembered how he had felt when it looked as if he would not be selected for the expedition to Mars.

Leaning closer to her, Jamie said, “Stacy, the Navaho teach that each person has to find the right path for his life. Or hers. I’m sorry that your path is keeping you on the ground while Tomas gets to fly. But there’ll be other flights, other missions. You’ll get into the air before we leave Mars, I promise you.”

She brightened only slightly. “I know. I am being selfish. But still … damn! I wish it was me.”

“You’re too important to us right now to risk on an excursion. We need you here, Stacy. I need you here.”

Dezhurova blinked with surprise. “You do?”

“I do,” Jamie said.

“I didn’t think of it that way.”

“Find the right path, Stacy. Find the balance that brings beauty to your life.”

“That is the Navaho way, eh?”

“It’s the way that works.”

She pulled her gaze away from Jamie’s eyes.

“Well,” he said, getting to his feet. “Dex and Possum are on their way, and Tomas and Mitsuo ought to be suiting up by now, right?”

“Right,” she said, standing also.

Jamie looked into her sky-blue eyes and made u grin for her. “It’s not like you don’t have anything to do around here,” he said.

She forced a grin hack at him. “Yes. Right.”

She went to the doorway, then turned back and said, “I just wish I was out where the action is.”

“What you’re doing here is extremely important,” Jamie said. “Just about everything depends on you, Stacy.”

“Yes. Of course.”

She turned and left his cubicle. Jamie stood there for a moment, thinking that her eyes were sky blue only on Earth. Martian skies were shades of orange-brown, almost always.

IT WAS THE AMERICANS WHO CALLED HER STACY. HER FATHER’S PET NAME for her was Nastasia.

Her father was a rocket engineer, a hard-working, sober, humorless man whose job took him away from their Moscow apartment for long months at a time. He traveled mostly to the mammoth launch facility in the dreary dust-brown desert of Kazakhstan and returned home tired and sour, but always with a doll or some other present for his baby daughter. Nastasia was his one joy in life.

Anastasia’s mother was a concert cellist who played in the Moscow symphony, a bright and intelligent woman who learned very early in her marriage that life was more enjoyable when her husband was a thousand kilometers away. She could give parties in their apartment then; people would laugh and play music. Often one of the men would remain the night.

As Nastasia grew into awareness and understanding, her mother swore her to secrecy. “We don’t want to hurt your father’s feelings,” she would tell her ten-year-old daughter. Later, when Nastasia was a teenager, her mother would say, ‘‘and do you think he remains faithful during all those months he’s away? Men are not like that.”

Nastasia discovered what men are like while she was in secondary school. One of the male students invited her to a party. On the way home, he stopped the car (his father’s) and began to maul her. When Nastasia resisted, he tore her clothing and raped her.

Her mother cried with her and then called the police. The investigators made Nastasia feel as if she had committed the crime, not the boy.

Her attacker was not punished and she was stigmatized. Even her father turned against her, saying that she must have given the boy the impression she was available.

When she was selected for the technical university in Novosibersk she left Moscow willingly, gladly, and buried herself in her studies. She avoided all socializing with men, and found that love and warmth and safety could be had with other women.

She also found that she was very bright and very capable. She began to delight in beating men in areas where they thought they were supreme. She learned to fly and went on to become a cosmonaut, not merely a cosmonaut but the first woman cosmonaut to command an orbital team of twelve men; the first woman cosmonaut to set a new endurance record for time spent aboard a space station; the first woman cosmonaut to go to Mars.

IT HAD COST THE EXPEDITION AN EXTRA ROCKET BOOSTER TO CARRY THE plane and its spare parts to Mars. The unmanned soarplanes were small, light, little more than gliders with solar-powered motors to get them off the ground and up to an altitude where they could ride the Martian air currents.

The manned plane had to be bigger. It had to accommodate two fragile human beings and their life-support systems. It had to carry supplies enough to last them several days. It had to be able to take off and land on rough ground.

And it had to carry enough fuel and oxygen to take them to Olympus Mons and back again without refueling.

“This bird’s a flying fuel truck,” Rodriguez quipped more than once as he tested the plane, checked out its performance, its quirks. “She flies like a fuel truck, too.”

It had taken several days to clear and smooth a runway area for the plane. The expedition’s two little tractors, programmed to run by themselves while monitored from inside the dome, pushed rocks and leveled minor sand dunes until the engineers from Earth were satisfied with the makeshift runway.

Their landing site, atop Olympus Mons, would not be so smooth, although close-up video and still photos from a dozen soarplane reconnaissance flights showed broad areas up at the top of the solar system’s tallest mountain that looked smooth and clear enough to serve as a landing area.

The unexplained crash of one of the unmanned planes had delayed Fuchida’s excursion. Dezhurova, Rodriguez and the mission controllers hack at Tarawa spent a week trying to determine why the soarplane disappeared. For the next three weeks they sent the remaining two unmanned planes out to Olympus Mons every day, retracing the missing plane’s route, searching for wreckage, clues, explanations.

Finally Jamie decided they were not going to be able to find out why the plane had crashed. It was either scrub Fuchida’s mission altogether or go despite the mishap. Jamie decided on going. After several days of fevered communications back and forth to Tarawa and Boston, his decision was confirmed.

The final decision about landing on the volcano would be Rodriguez’s, and no one else’s. If he were nervous or anxious about the responsibility, he did not show it one bit.

He looked as happy as a puppy with an old sock to chew on as he and Fuchida got into their hard suits.

“I’m gonna be in the Guinness Book of Records,” he proclaimed happily to Jamie, who was helping him get suited up. Trudy Hall was assisting Fuchida while Stacy Dezhurova sat in the comm center, monitoring the dome’s systems and the equipment outside. Jamie had no idea where Vijay was, probably in her infirmary.

“Highest aircraft landing and takeoff,” Rodriguez chattered cheerfully as he wormed his fingers into the suit’s gloves. “Longest flight of a manned solar-powered aircraft. Highest altitude for a manned solar-powered aircraft.”

“Crewed,” Hall murmured, “not manned.”

Unperturbed by her correction, Rodriguez continued, “I might even bust the record for unmanned solar-powered flight.”

“Isn’t it cheating to compare a flight on Mars to flights on Earth?” Trudy asked as she helped Fuchida latch his life-support pack onto the back of his suit.

Rodriguez shook his head vigorously. “All that counts in the record book is the numbers, chica. Just the numbers.”

“Won’t they put an asterisk next to the numbers and a footnote that says, ‘This was done on Mars.’?”

Rodriguez tried to shrug, but not even he could manage that inside the hard suit. “Who cares, as long as they spell my name right?”

Jamie noticed that Fuchida was utterly silent through the suit-up procedure. Tomas is doing enough talking for them both, he thought. But he wondered, Is Mitsuo worried, nervous? He looks calm enough, but that might just be a mask. Come to think of it, the way Tomas is blathering, he must be wired tighter than a drum.

He was jabbering away like a fast-pitch salesman. Jamie wondered if it was nerves or relief to be out on his own, in charge. Or maybe, Jamie thought, the guy was simply overjoyed at the prospect of flying.

Both men were suited up at last, helmet visors down, life-support systems functioning, radio checks completed. Jamie and Trudy walked with them to the airlock hatch: two Earthlings accompanying a pair of ponderous robots.