Return to Mars (3 page)

THEY HAD LANDED ONLY MINUTES AFTER LOCAL DAWN, TO GIVE themselves as much time in daylight as possible for unloading their landing/ ascent vehicle and getting their domed habitat restarted. And they had to allow time to transmit a landing ceremony back to Earth.

It had been agreed that the explorers would check the habitability of the old dome first, and only after that conduct the ritual of presenting themselves to the Earth’s waiting, watching billions.

Of course, the instant they had touched down, cosmonaut Anastasia Dezhurova had notified mission control in Tarawa that they had landed safely. Their L/AV’s instrumentation automatically telemetered that information back to Earth, but for the first time since Jamie had met Stacy, the Russian’s broad, stolid face beamed with delight as she announced the news that was played on every television station on Earth:

“Touchdown! Humankind has returned to Mars!”

The mission controllers, a hundred million kilometers away on the Pacific atoll of Tarawa, had broken into whoops and yowls of joy, hugging each other and dancing in their relief and excitement.

Jamie blinked sweat from his eyes as the eight of them lined up before the vidcams that Trumball and Rodriguez had set up on their Mars-thin tripods. He touched the keypad on his wrist that turned up the suit fans to maximum and heard their insect’s buzz whine to a higher pitch. Strange to feel hot and sweaty on a world where the temperature was almost always below freezing. Can’t be from exertion, Jamie thought. It must be nervous excitement.

He wished he could open his visor and wipe at his eyes, but he knew that his blood would boil out of his lungs at the pitifully low Martian atmospheric pressure.

Later, Dex Trumball would take the viewers from Earth on a virtual reality tour of their landing site while everyone else worked at bringing out the tractors and unloading the spacecraft. For now, all eight of them would go through the arrival ceremony.

As mission director, it fell to Jamie to make the first statement before the camera. It would take nearly a quarter of an hour for his words to cross the gulf between the two worlds. There were no conversations between Mars and Earth, only monologues traveling in opposite directions.

Six years earlier, when he had been the last member of the expedition to speak, he had said simply the old Navaho greeting, “Ya’aa’tey.” It is good.

Now, though, he was mission director and more was expected of him.

At least this second expedition was not as rigidly controlled as the first one had been. Instead of the almost military hierarchy imposed by the governments who sponsored the First Mars Expedition, Jamie had worked out a more relaxed, more collegiate organization of equals. The two astronauts and six scientists lived and worked together as a harmonious team—most of the time.

“You ready?” Trumball’s voice buzzed in Jamie’s helmet earphones.

Jamie nodded, then realized that no one could see the gesture. “Ready as I’ll ever be,” he said as he stepped in front of the hand-sized vidcams.

Trumball, standing behind the spindly tripods, jabbed a finger at him. Jamie raised his hand and said, “Greetings from the planet Mars. The Second Mars Expedition has landed as planned at the site of the habitat left by the First Expedition.”

Turning slightly, Jamie waved an arm in the general direction of the dome. “As you can see, the habitat is in excellent shape and we’re looking forward to spending the next year and a half here.

“Later,” he continued, “Dr. Trumball will conduct a virtual reality tour of the area. Right now, I’d like to thank the International Consortium of Universities, the Space Transportation Association, and the taxpayers of the United States, Australia, Japan, the European Community, and the island nation of Kiribati for providing the funds that have made this expedition possible.”

They had drawn lots weeks earlier to decide the order of appearances. Vijay Shektar stepped up to the camera next, anonymous in her bulbous hard suit, except for the bright green rings on its arms.

‘ ‘Hullo to everyone on Earth, and especially to the people of Australia,” she said, in her decidedly Aussie accent. Her voice belied her heritage: Shektar was of Hindu descent, dark skin and wide black onyx eyes. But she had been born and raised in Melbourne. She was a first-rate physician and psychologist who would also assist the biology team.

After Shektar’s little speech, Mitsuo Fuchida, one of the expedition’s two biologists, gave his greetings: first in Japanese, then in English.

Dex Trumball, with his royal blue armbands, followed.

“… and I want to thank the aerospace companies who donated so much of their equipment and personnel to us,” he said after the ritual salutations and compliments, “and the more than forty-five universities around the world who have contributed to this expedition. Without your financial and material and personal support, we wouldn’t be standing here on Mars now.”

Jamie felt his nose wrinkling slightly. 1 should’ve expected Dex to work a commercial in. He’s more interested in making money out of this expedition than doing science.

“And a very special thanks to my father, Darryl C. Trumball, whose energy, vision and generosity has been a primal force in creating this expedition and an inspiration to us all.”

Jamie and Dex had argued about the expedition’s goals for the whole five months of their flight to Mars. Politely, at first, like two mannerly academicians. But over the long months of their passage in space their ideological differences inevitably sharpened into shouting matches; real anger had developed between them.

I’m going to have to iron that out, Jamie told himself. We can’t go on snarling at each other. We’ve got to be able to work together, as a team.

Find the balance, the Navaho part of his mind whispered. Find the path that leads to harmony. Only harmony can bring you to beauty.

His rational mind agreed, but still he seethed at Trumball’s cavalier assumption that the expedition should be aimed at making a profit.

The last person to appear before the camera was Trudy Hall, the English cellular biologist.

“I’ve been rehearsing this speech for months,” she said, her voice high with excitement, “but now that we’re here—well, all I can say is: Crikey! This is a bit of all right! Let’s get on with it!”

Jamie laughed to himself inside the privacy of his helmet. So much for English aplomb, he thought.

The brief ceremonies over, Trumball started to move the cameras while most of the others headed for the cargo hatch of their spacecraft and the labor of unloading.

Nobody sees us at work, Jamie thought. The sweat of unloading our equipment and supplies isn’t glamorous enough for the media and the folks back home. They want drama and excitement; just hauling supplies from the L/AV to the dome isn’t thrilling enough for them.

He turned and gazed out across the Martian landscape. Once we thought it was dead. Dry and cold and barren. But now we know better. He blinked, and thought for a moment he was looking out at the Navaho land in New Mexico where his grandfather had taken him so many times. Many summers ago. A lifetime ago, on another world. That land looked dry and dead, too. Yet the People lived there. Thrived there, in a hard and bitter land.

The Martian landscape held an uncanny beauty. It stirred a chord within Jamie, this red world. It was a soft landscape, barren and empty, yet somehow gentle and beckoning to him. Jamie saw that the shaded sides of the rocks and dunes were coated with a light powdering of white that sparkled and winked and vanished where the new-risen sun touched them.

I’m home, he thought. Alter six years, I’ve come back to where I belong.

“What’s that white stuff?”

Jamie heard Vijay Shektar’s smoky feline voice in his earphones, softly curious. He turned his head, but the helmet blocked his view; he had to turn his whole body to see her standing beside him.

“Frost,” Jamie answered.

“Frost?”

“Water vapor in the atmosphere freezes out on the ground and the rocks.”

“But this is spring, isn’t it?” Her voice sounded slightly puzzled, unsure.

Nodding, Jamie answered, “That’s right. It won’t be summer for another four months.”

“But frosts should come in autumn, not in spring,” she said.

Jamie smiled. “On Earth. This is Mars.”

“Oh.” She seemed to consider that for a moment, then said with a gleeful lilt in her voice, “We can have a snowball fight, then?”

Jamie shook his head. “Afraid not. The ice here won’t compact. It’s not wet enough; not enough hydrogen bonding.”

“I don’t understand.”

“It’s like very dry, very powdery snow. Much drier and more powdery than anything on Earth.” Jamie wondered if she had ever gone skiing in Australia. Maybe New Zealand, he thought. They have good ski mountains there.

“Can’t make snowballs, then,” Shektar said. She sounded disappointed.

Raising his arm to point toward the horizon, Jamie answered, ‘ ‘You could once, long ago. There was an ocean here … or at least a sizeable sea. Like the Gulf of Mexico, most likely: fairly shallow, warmed by the sun.”

“Really?”

“Sure. See the terracing? The scallop-shaped indentations?”

“That was caused by an ocean?”

Jamie nodded inside his helmet. “It lapped up to the slope of the Tharsis bulge, off to the west there. Where we’re standing was probably seashore, once. There might be fossils of seashells beneath our feet.”

“And what would Martian seashells look like?” Dex Trumball asked sharply. “How would you recognize a fossil here? The forms would be completely different from Earth.”

Jamie turned and saw Dex’s hard suit with its royal blue armbands nearly a hundred meters away. He’d been eavesdropping on their suit-to-suit frequency.

There’s always bilateral symmetry,” Jamie said, trying to keep the resentment out of Ins voice.

Trumball laughed.

Vijay added, “Something with legs would help.”

Bounding across the iron-red sand toward them, clutching a plastic sample case in one gloved hand, Dex said, “But that stuff about the ocean is good. I could use that in my VR tour. Give me a couple hours with the computer and I could even show a visual simulation to the viewers back home!”

Dex was all youthful enthusiasm and vigor. Jamie felt distinctly annoyed.

The geophysicist hustled up the slight rocky incline in two-meter-long strides to where Jamie and Vijay stood.

“It’s really frost, all right. Look at it! Come on, I want to get some samples before the sun evaporates all of it.” He hoisted the insulated sample case.

Without waiting for Jamie, Trumball started down the slope toward the frost-rimed dunes.

Jamie clicked the keyboard on his left cuff to the suit radio’s base frequency. ‘ ‘Waterman to base. Shektar, Trumball and I are going down into the dune field.”

Stacy Dezhurova’s answering voice sounded slightly nettled. “You will be out of camera range, Jamie.”

“Understood,” Jamie said. “We should be no longer than thirty minutes and we won’t go beyond walk-back range.”

Dezhurova made a sound somewhere between a sigh and a snort. “Copy thirty minutes max in walk-back range.”

As senior of the two astronauts, Dezhurova was responsible for enforcing the safety regulations. Her primary station was at the dome’s communications center, watching everyone working outside through the surveillance cameras spotted around the dome.

I can understand why she’s ticked off, Jamie thought. We ought to be at the dome, helping to stow the equipment and consumables instead of wandering off across the landscape. The others had both the small tractors trundling between their L/AV and the dome.

Still, he turned his back to the work and walked slowly beside Vijay, ready to offer his hand if she stumbled on the rocks scattered across the ground. His geologist’s eye took in the area. This must be a really old impact crater, he told himself. Weathering on Mars takes eons, and this rim is almost eroded down to the level of the sand floor. Must have been a big hit, from the size of the basin. What’s left of it.

Trumball was already down in the shadows, on his knees, carefully scraping the fragile, paper-thin coating of ice into an open sample container.

“It’s water ice, all right,” he was saying over the suit-to-suit frequency as they approached him. “Same isotopic composition as the ice at the north pole, I bet. Stuff sublimes into vapor up there and the atmosphere transports it down toward the equator.”

Vijay pointed with a gloved finger. “It’s melting where the sun is hitting it.”

“Subliming,” Trumball said without looking up from his work. “It doesn’t melt, it sublimes.”

“Goes from ice to vapor,” Jamie explained, “with no liquid phase in between.”

“I understand,” she replied.

“The atmosphere’s so thin, liquid water evaporates immediately.”

“Yes, I know,” she said, with a slight edge in her voice.

Trumball snapped the container shut and inserted it into his sample case. “This’ll help us nail down the global circulation of the atmosphere.”

“Will this water be carbonated, too?”

Closing the plastic box and climbing to his feet, Trumball said, “Sure. Just like the water from the permafrost underground. Martian Perrier, loaded with carbon dioxide.”

Jamie started them back toward the base, feeling left out of the conversation but not knowing how to jump in without making it seem obvious that he was competing with the younger man.

“Life has the same needs here as on Earth,” Vijay was saying.

“Why not?” Trumball replied, waving his free hand. “It’s all the same, basically: DNA, proteins—same on both planets.”

“But there are differences,” Jamie said. “Martian DNA has the same double-helix structure as ours, but the base pairs are different chemicals.”