Return to Mars (29 page)
“And if it doesn’t?”
“Then we’ll be ridin’ along without a backup power system, the way we are now.”
“I don’t like it.”
“The alternative,” Trumball’s voice interjected, “is to scrub this excursion and come home with our tails between our legs.”
“That’s what your father wants,” Jamie said. He had intended to wait until evening and speak to Dex privately about the elder Trumball’s ire. Dex’s father had sent three replies to Jamie’s last message within the past twelve hours, each one more furious than the one preceding it.
A hand engulfed the view of the rover’s cockpit and swivelled the camera to focus on Dex.
“Dear old Dad’s prone to displays of temper,” he said easily, grinning. “Just relay his messages to me. I’ll handle him.”
“You just might be shooting down the funding for the next expedition, Dex,” Jamie said.
Trumball shook his head vigorously. ”No way. Once we bring back this Pathfinder hardware, investors will be running after us with money in their hands.”
So that you can come back to Mars and loot it of anything else you can lay your hands on, Jamie thought. He pictured Trumball in a conquistador’s steel cuirass and helmet.
A hand swivelled the camera again. “I ain’t worried ‘bout the next expedition,” Craig said somberly. “I just want to get through with this excursion in one piece.”
“I’ll have to talk to Tarawa,” Jamie said, hating himself for bucking the decision upstairs.
“Okay, fine,” came Trumball’s voice. “It’ll take us at least another week to reach the generator.”
Damn! thought Jamie as he went through the motions of continuing their discussion. Dex knows damned well that the farther out they are, the less chance of calling them back.
Once he signed off and cut the connection to the rover, though, a different thought wormed into his consciousness: The longer they’re out on their excursion, the longer Dex is away from here. Away from Vijay.
He hated himself even more for that.
“You all set?” Rodriguez asked.
Fuchida had the climbing harness buckled over his hard suit, the tether firmly clipped to the yoke that ran under his arms.
“Ready to go,” the biologist replied, with an assurance he did not truly feel. That dark, yawning abyss stirred a primal fear in both men, but Fuchida did not want to admit it to himself, much less to his teammate.
Rodriguez had spent the morning setting up the climbing rig while Fuchida collected rock samples and then did a half-hour VR show for viewers hack on Earth. The rocks were sparser here atop Olympus Mons than they were down on the plains below, and none of them showed the intrusions of color that marked colonies of Martian lichen.
Still, sample collection was the biologist’s first order of business. Me thought of it as his gift to the geologists, since he felt a dreary certainty that there was no biology going on here on the roof of this world. But down below, inside the caldera … that might be a different matter.
Fuchida still had the virtual reality rig clamped to his helmet. They would not do a real-time transmission, but the recording of the first descent into Olympus Mons’ main caldera would be very useful both for science and entertainment.
“Okay,” Rodriguez said, letting his reluctance show in his voice. “I’m ready whenever you are.”
Nodding inside his helmet, Fuchida said, “Then let’s get started.”
“Be careful now,” said Rodriguez as the biologist backed slowly away from him.
Fuchida did not reply. He turned and started over the softly rounded lip of the giant hole in the ground. The caldera was so big that it would take half an hour to sink below the level where Rodriguez could still see him without moving from his station beside the tether winch.
I should have read Dante’s Inferno in preparation for this task, Fuchida thought to himself.
The road to hell begins with a gradual slope, he knew. It will get steep enough soon.
Then both his booted feet slipped out from under him.
DIARY ENTRY
Sometimes I think I’m invisible. They just don’t see me. I’m in among them, doing my work, but to them I ‘m not there. I speak and they don’t hear me. At least, they don’t listen. I’m as good as any of them but they all look right through me almost all the time. Invisible. I’m nothing to them.
“YOU OKAY?” RODRIGUEZ’S VOICE SOUNDED ANXIOUS IN FUCHIDA’S earphones.
“I hit a slick spot. There must be patches of dry ice coating the rock here in the shadows.”
The biologist was lying on his side, his hip throbbing painfully from his fall. At this rate, he thought, I’ll be black-and-blue from the waist down.
“Can you get up?”
“Yes. Certainly.” Fuchida felt more embarrassed than hurt. He grabbed angrily at the tether and pulled himself to his feet. Even in the one-third gravity of Mars it took an effort, with the suit and backpack weighing him down. And all the equipment that dangled from his belt and harness.
Once on his feet he stared down once more into the darkness of the caldera’s yawning maw. It’s like the mouth of a great beast, a voice in his mind said. Like the gateway to the eternal pit.
He took a deep breath, then said into his helmet microphone, “Okay. I’m starting down again.”
“Be careful, man.”
“Thanks for the advice,” Fuchida snapped.
Rodriguez seemed untroubled by his irritation. “Maybe I oughtta keep the line tighter,” he suggested. “Not so much slack.”
Regretting his temper, Fuchida agreed, “Yes, that might help to keep me on my feet.” The hip really hurt, and his rump was still sore from his first fall.
I’m lucky I didn’t rupture the suit, he thought. Or damage the backpack.
“Okay, I’ve adjusted the tension. Take it easy, now.”
A journey of a thousand miles must begin with a single step. Mitsuo Fuchida quoted Laotzu’s ancient dictum as he planted one booted foot on the ground ahead of him. The bare rock seemed to offer good traction.
You can’t see the ice, he told himself. It’s too thin a coating to be visible. Several dozen meters to his right, sunlight slanted down into the gradually sloping side of the caldera. There’ll be no ice there, Fuchida thought. He moved off in that direction, slowly, testing his footing every step of the way.
The tether connected to his harness at his chest, so he could easily disconnect it if necessary. The increased tension of the line made walking all the more difficult. Fuchida felt almost like a marionette on a string.
“Slack off a little,” he called to Rodriguez.
“You sure?”
He turned back to look up at his teammate, and was startled to see that the astronaut was nothing more than a tiny blob of a figure up on the rim, standing in bright sunlight with the deep blue sky behind him.
“Yes, I’m certain,” he said, with deliberate patience.
A few moments later Rodriguez asked, “How’s that?”
The difference was imperceptible, but Fuchida replied, “Better.”
He saw a ledge in the sunlight some twenty meters below him and decided to head for it. Slowly, carefully he descended.
“I can’t see you.” Rodriguez’s voice in his earphones sounded only slightly concerned.
Looking up, Fuchida saw the expanse of deep blue sky and nothing else except the gentle slope of the bare rock. And the tether, his lifeline, holding strong.
“It’s all right,” he said. “I’m using the VR cameras to record my descent. I’m going to stop at a ledge and chip out some rock samples there.”
“Y’know, we shoulda flown out to the Pathfinder site,” Wiley Craig mused as he drove the rover through the dry, cold afternoon across the Plains of the Moon.
“Tired of driving?” Dex Trumball asked, sitting in the cockpit’s right seat.
“Kinda boring right now.”
“I checked out the idea,” Dex said. “The rocketplane doesn’t have the range to make it out to Ares Vallis.”
“Coulda hopped the fuel generator and gassed ‘er up, just like we’re doin’ for this wagon.”
“I suppose so. But we’d need a couple of fillups and that would mean flying the generator at least two different hops. And landing the plane twice more, too.”
“Too risky, huh?”
“Oh, I wouldn’t mind the risk,” Dex said quickly. “But the rocketplane couldn’t carry the hardware once we got there. Not with a full fuel load, at least.”
Craig let out a long sigh that was almost a moan. “So we drive.”
“We’re getting there, Wiley.”
“Awful slow.”
“We’re setting a record for a land traverse of an alien world. We’ll be covering close to ten thousand klicks before we’re back at the base.”
“More’n those guys who circumnavigated Mare Imbrium back on th’ Moon?”
“Oh, hell yes. They only covered twenty-five hundred kilometers.”
“Huh.”
“Pikers.”
“Small-time stuff.”
Trumball grinned at his partner. They were both unshaven, their chins and cheeks bristly with the beginnings of beards they had agreed not to cut off until they returned to the domed base.
“We’re driving across what used to be the bottom of an ancient sea,” Trumball said, gesturing at the undulating ground outside. “I bet if we stopped to do some digging we’d find plenty of fossils.”
Craig cocked a brow at him. “And how’d you recognize what’s a fossil and what’s just a plain ol’ rock? Think you’ll find trilobites or a chambered nautilus that looks just like fossils on Earth?”
Dex took a deep breath, almost a sigh. “I know that, Wiley. I told Jamie about that the day we landed.”
Craig grunted.
After a few moments of silence, Dex said, “Let me ask you something, Wiley.”
“What?”
“About this matter of moving the base into the Canyon: Whose side are you on? Mine or Jamie’s?”
Jamie stared at the three-dimensional image of the cliff face, bending over the immersion table display and concentrating as if he could force the ancient village to appear before his eyes by sheer willpower.
Stacy Dezhurova was at the comm console, as usual. Trudy and Vijay were tending the hydroponic garden. And Jamie was growing impatient.
I should never have let Dex go out on this crazy excursion of his, he told himself. Not only is it getting me in hot water with his father, it’s screwing up the mission to the ancient village.
Jamie knew that he could not head out for the Canyon while four of the expedition’s people were in the field. He had to wait for them to come back to the dome. Fuchida and Rodriguez would return in a few days, unless they ran into trouble. But Dex and Possum won’t be back for another four weeks, minimum.
Don’t let yourself get so worked up about it, he said silently. Be patient. If it’s really an ancient village tucked in those cliffs, it’s been there a long, long time. Another few weeks isn’t going to make much difference.
Still he burned to get going, to get out of this dome, out in the field, away from the others.
Away from Vijay, he realized.
She’s got me wound up like a spring. First no and then yes and now maybe. Is she doing it on purpose? Trying to drive me crazy? Is it her sense of humor?
Strangely, he found himself grinning at the thought. We’re already crazy. We wouldn’t be here otherwise. This just adds another dimension to the craziness.
Be calm, the Navaho side of his mind advised. Seek the balanced path. Only when you’re in balance can you find beauty.
Sex. We tie ourselves into knots over it. Why? She won’t get pregnant. Not here. Not unless she really wants to and she’s too smart to want that. So what difference does a little roll in the hay make?
Then he thought of her admission that she had slept with Trumball, and Jamie knew that sex could be a fuse that kindles an explosion.
Take it one step at a time, he thought. One day at a time. Then he grinned again. One night at a time.
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