Return to Mars (30 page)

Dezhurova’s voice cut into his awareness. “Jamie, you should take a look at this.”

Jamie straightened up, felt his vertebrae pop, and turned toward the comm console, where Stacy was sitting with a headset clipped over her limp sandy-blond pageboy.

“What is it?”

“Latest met forecast from Tarawa.”

Jamie saw a polar projection map of Mars’ two hemispheres, side by side, on Dezhurova’s main screen. Meteorological isobars and symbols for highs and lows were sprinkled across it.

Stacy tapped a fingernail on a red L deep in the southern hemisphere. Jamie noticed that her nails were manicured and lacquered a dark purple.

“That is a dust storm,” she said.

Bending over her shoulder to peer at the map, Jamie nodded. And noticed that Stacy was wearing a flowery perfume.

“Way down on the other side of Hellas,” he muttered.

“But they’re forecasting it to grow.” She touched a key and the next day’s map appeared on the screen. The storm was bigger, and moving westward.

“Still way below the equator,” Jamie said.

“Even so.”

“Can you get a real-time view of the area?”

“On two,” she replied. The screen immediately to her right brightened to show a satellite view of the region.

“Dust storm, all right,” Jamie said. “Big one.”

“And growing.”

He thought aloud, “Even if it grows to global size, it’ll take more than a week to bother us here. Fuchida and Rodriguez will be back well before then.”

“But Dex and Possum …”

Jamie pictured Dex’s reaction to being called back to base because of the possibility of a dust storm engulfing him. I’d have to order him to return, Jamie knew. And he might just ignore the order.

“Tell Tarawa I need to talk to the meteorology people right away,” he said to Stacy.

“Right.”

“Hey, Mitsuo,” Rodriguez called.

Automatically, Fuchida looked up. But the astronaut was beyond his view. Fuchida was alone down on the ledge in the caldera’s sloping flank of solid rock. The Buckyball tether that connected him to the winch up above also carried their suit-to-suit radio transmissions.

“What is it?” he replied, grateful to hear Rodriguez’s voice.

“How’s it going, man?”

“That depends,” said Fuchida.

“On what?”

The biologist hesitated. He had been working on this rock ledge for hours, chipping out samples, measuring heat flow, patiently working an auger into the hard basalt to see if there might be water ice trapped in the rock.

He was in shadow now. The sun had moved away. Looking up, he saw with relief that the sky was still a deep blue. It was still daylight up there. Rodriguez would not let him stay down after sunset, he knew, yet he still felt comforted to see that there was still daylight up there.

“It depends,” he answered slowly, “on what you are looking for. Whether you are a geologist or a biologist.”

“Oh,” said Rodriguez.

“A geologist would be very happy here. There is a considerable amount of heat still trapped in these rocks. Much more than can be accounted for by solar warming alone.”

“You mean the volcano’s still active?”

“No, no, no. It is dead, but the corpse is still warm—a little.”

Rodriguez did not reply.

“Do you realize what this means? This volcano must be much younger than was thought. Much younger!”

“How young?”

“Perhaps only a few million years,” Fuchida said excitedly. “No more than ten million.”

“Sounds pretty damned old to me, amigo.”

“But there might be life here! If there is heat, there might be liquid water within the rock.”

“I thought water couldn’t stay liquid on Mars.”

“Not on the surface.” Fuchida said, feeling the exhilaration quivering within him. “But deeper down, inside the rock where the pressure is higher … maybe…”

“Looks pretty dark down there.”

“It is,” Fuchida answered, peering over the lip of the ledge on which he sat. The suit’s heater seemed to be working fine; it might be a hundred below zero in these shadows, but he felt comfortably warm.

“I don’t like the idea of your being down there in the dark.”

“Neither do I, but that’s why we’re here, isn’t it?”

No answer.

”I mean, we still have several hundred meters of tether to unwind, don’t we?”

Rodriguez said, “Eleven hundred and ninety-two, according to the meter.”

“So I can go down a long way, then.”

“I don’t like the dark.”

“My helmet lamp is working fine.”

“Still…”

“Don’t worry about it,” Fuchida insisted, cutting off the astronaut’s worries. It was bad enough to battle his own fears; he wanted no part of Rodriguez’s.

“I saw a crevice at the end of this ledge,” he told the astronaut. “It looks like the opening of an old lava tube. It probably leads down a considerable distance.”

“Do you think that’s a good idea?”

“I’ll take a look into it.”

“Don’t take any chances you don’t have to.”

Fuchida grimaced as he climbed slowly to his feet. His whole body ached from the bruising he’d received in his falls and he felt stiff after sitting on the ledge for so long. Walk carefully, he warned himself. Even though the rock is warmer down here, there could still be patches of ice.

“You hear me?” Rodriguez called.

“If I followed your advice I’d be in my bed in Nagasaki,” he said, trying to make it sound light and witty.

“Yeah, sure.”

Stiffly he walked toward the fissure he had seen earlier. His helmet lamp threw a glare of light before him, but he had to bend over slightly to make the light reach the ground.

There it is, he saw. A narrow, slightly rounded hole in the basalt face. Like the mouth of a pirate’s cave.

Fuchida took a step into the opening and turned from side to side, playing his helmet lamp on the walls of the cave.

It was a lava tube, he was certain of it. Like a tunnel made by some giant extraterrestrial worm, it curved downward. How far down? he wondered.

Stifling a voice in his head that whispered of fear and danger, Fuchida started into the cold, dark lava tube.

DEX TRUMBALL FROWNED AS HE LISTENED TO JAMIE ON THE ROVER’S comm link.

“The meteorology people don’t expect the storm to get across the equator, but they’re keeping an eye on it.”

“So what’s the problem?” Trumball asked, glancing over at Craig, driving the rover.

The ground they were traversing was rising slightly, and rougher than the earlier going. A range of rugged hills rose on their left, and the last rays of the dying sun threw enormously elongated shadows across their path, turning even the smallest rocks into dark phantoms reaching out to block their way.

“It’s a question of timing,” Jamie replied. “Each day you get farther from the base. If we wait to recall you until the storm’s a real threat, it might be too late.”

“But you don’t know that the storm’s going to be a real threat, do you?”

“The prudent thing to do,” Jamie said, “is to turn back and try this excursion again late in the summer, when the threat of storms is practically zero.”

“I don’t want to turn back because of some theoretical threat that probably won’t materialize.”

“It’s better than getting caught in a dust storm, Dex.”

Trumball looked across at Craig again. The older man gave him a sidelong glance, then returned to staring straight ahead.

“You made it through a dust storm, didn’t you?” he said.

It took several moments for Jamie to reply, “We had no choice. You do.”

”Well, lemme tell you something, Jamie. I choose to keep on going. I’m not going to stop and turn back because of some asshole of a storm that’s a couple thousand klicks away.”

Sitting in front of the comm console, with Stacy beside him and Vijay at his back, Jamie kneaded his fists into his thighs.

If I order him to return and he refuses, then whatever authority I have over these people goes down the drain. But if I let him continue then they’ll all know that Dex can do whatever he wants to and I have no way to control him.

He realized that it was Dex who was making the decisions. The idea of putting Craig in charge was a farce from the beginning. Possum was not raising his voice, not saying a word at all.

Which way? Which path? Jamie thought furiously for several silent moments. He drew up in his mind an image of Trumball’s route across Lunae Planum and into Xanthe Terra.

“Hold on for a minute, Dex,” he said, and cut off the transmission.

Turning to Dezhurova, he ordered, “Let me see their itinerary, Stacy.”

She punched up the image on the screen before Jamie’s chair. A black line snaked across the map, with pips marking the position expected at the end of each day. Jamie scanned it swiftly, then hit the transmit key again.

“Dex?”

“We’re still here, chief.”

“If the storm crosses the equator and threatens you, it won’t happen for at least four or five more days. By then you’ll be much closer to the fuel generator than to the base, here.”

“Yeah?” Trumball’s voice sounded wary.

“In two days from now you ought to be at the halfway point between here and the generator.”

“Right.”

“That’s going to be our decision point. The point of no return. I’ll decide then whether you can keep going or have to turn back.”

“In two days.”

“Yes. In the meantime we’ll keep close track of the storm. Stay in touch with us hourly.”

This time it was Trumball who hesitated for several moments before answering, “Okay. Sure.”

“Good,” said Jamie.

“We’ll be bedding down for the night in another hour,” Trumball said. “Call you then.”

“Good,” Jamie repeated.

He cut the transmission and leaned back in the little wheeled chair, feeling as if he had sparred ten rounds with a professional boxer.

Fifteen minutes later, Jamie was in the geology lab, running an analysis of the core samples that Craig’s drill had brought up, happy to be dealing with rocks and dirt instead of people. Sedimentary deposits, no doubt about it. This dome is sitting on the door of an ancient seabed. If we’d been here a few hundred million years ago, he thought, we’d have needed scuba gear.

“Jamie,” Stacy Dezhurova called out sharply over the loudspeakers, “we have an emergency message from Rodriguez.”

He instantly forgot his musings when Dezhurova’s voice rang through the dome. Jamie left the core sample in the electron microscope without turning it off and sprinted across the dome to the comm center.

Dezhurova looked grim as she silently handed Jamie a headset.

Rodriguez’s voice was calm but tight with tension. “… down there more than two hours now and then radio contact cut off,” the astronaut was saying.

Sitting again on the wheeled chair next to Dezhurova as he adjusted the pin microphone, Jamie said, “This is Waterman. What’s happening, Tomas?”

“Mitsuo went down into the caldera as scheduled. He found a lava tube about fifty-sixty meters down and went into it. Then his radio transmission was cut off.”

“How long—”

“It’s more than half an hour now. I’ve tried yanking on his tether, but I’m getting no response.”

“What do you think?”

“Either he’s unconscious or his radio’s failed. I mean, I really pulled on the tether. Nothing.”

The astronaut did not mention the third possibility: that Fuchida was dead. But the thought blazed in Jamie’s mind.

“You say your radio contact with him cut off while he was still in the lava tube?”

“Yeah, right. That was more’n half an hour ago.”

A thousand possibilities spun through Jamie’s mind. The tether’s too tough to break, he knew. Those Buckyballs can take tons of tension.

“It’s going to be dark soon,” Rodriguez said.

“You’re going to have to go down after him,” Jamie said.

“I know.”

“Just go down far enough to see what’s happened to him. Find out what’s happened and call back here.”

“Yeah. Right.”

“I don’t like it, but that’s what you’re going to have to do.”

“I don’t like it much, either,” said Rodriguez.

Through a haze of pain, Mitsuo Fuchida saw the irony of the situation. He had made a great discovery, but he would probably not live to tell anyone about it.

When he entered the lava tube he felt an unaccustomed sense of dread, like a character in an old horror movie, stepping slowly, fearfully down the narrow corridor of a haunted house, lit only by the flicker of a candle. Except this corridor was a tube melted out of the solid rock by an ancient stream of red-hot lava, and Fuchida’s light came from the lamp on his hard suit helmet.

Nonsense! he snapped silently. You are safe in your hard suit, and the tether connects you to Rodriguez, up at the surface. But he called to the astronaut and chatted inanely with him, just to reassure himself that he was not truly cut off from the rest of the universe down in this dark, narrow passageway.

The VR cameras fixed to his helmet were recording everything he saw, but Fuchida thought that only a geologist would be interested in this cramped, claustrophobic tunnel.

The tube slanted downward, its walls fairly smooth, almost glassy in places. The black rock gleamed in the light of his lamp. The tunnel grew narrower in spots, then widened again, although nowhere was it wide enough for him to spread his arms fully.

Perspiration was beading Fuchida’s lip and brow, trickling coldly down his ribs. Stop this foolishness, he admonished himself. You’ve been in tighter caves than this.

He thought of Elizabeth, waiting for him back in Japan, accepting the subtle snubs of deep-seated racism because she loved him and wanted to be with him when he returned. I’ll get back to you, he vowed, even if this tunnel leads down to hell itself.