The Mountain Cage (20 page)

The next order of business was to dispose of the bodies. Dan put on his spacesuit and tried not to look at the food- stained faces of his dead comrades as he dragged them one by one into the airlock.

They deserved a prayer. The only ones he knew were Christian prayers, but maybe Kiichi and Ahmed wouldn’t mind, and he suspected Sergei was more religious than he let on. He whispered the Lord’s Prayer, and then another he had often used at prayer breakfasts. Too late, he realized that a prayer said at meals might not be the most appropriate thing, given that his companions had died over their chow.

He looked up from the bodies as the outside door slid slowly open to reveal the blackness of space. His comrades deserved a few more words before he consigned them to the darkness.

“You guys,” he whispered, “you were some of the best friends I ever had. You were definitely the smartest.”

It took a while to get the bodies outside. As he watched them drift away from the ship, tears rose to his eyes. He was really going to miss them.

Sallie contacted Dan an hour before the President was to address the nation and the world. The most important thing now was for Dan to seem in control of himself when it was time for his own broadcast. The NASA scientists were fairly certain that Dan wouldn’t suffer the fate of the others; there was only a slight chance that the mysterious virus would reappear to infect him. He didn’t find this very consoling, since there had been only a slight chance of such a thing happening in the first place.

“Do me a favor, Sallie,” Dan said. “If I do kick off, don’t let the media have tapes of it or anything. I mean, I don’t want Marilyn and my kids watching that stuff on CNN or something.” He waited. The time for round-trip signals was growing longer.

“You got it, Dan-o.”

The President made his announcement, and Dan went on an hour later to show that he was still able to function. He had no prepared speech, but the most important thing was to look calm and not hysterical. He succeeded in that, mostly because he felt too stunned and empty to crack up in front of the hundreds of millions who would be viewing him from Earth.

Sallie spoke to him after his appearance. Ashana Washington’s parents and brother had already retained counsel, and there was talk of massive lawsuits. He might have known that the lawyers would get in on this immediately.

“The most important thing now,” Sallie said, “is to bring you home as fast as possible. You’ll reach your destination four days from now.” She narrowed her eyes. “The Burroughs is already programmed to orbit Mars automatically, so all we have to do is let it swing around and head back to Earth. You can get back in—”

“I’m not going to land?” he asked, and waited even longer.

Sallie sat up. “Land?”

“I want to land, Sallie. Don’t you understand? I have to now. The others would have expected me to—I’ve got to do it for them.” He searched for another phrase. “It means they won’t have died in vain. I can do it—you can program the lander, and I can go down to the surface. Maybe I can’t do the experiments and stuff they were going to, but I can set up the cameras and bring back soil samples. It wouldn’t be right not to try. And if I’m going to die, I might as well die doing something.”

He waited for his words to reach her. “Dan,” she said at last, “you surprise me.”

It would probably surprise the hell out of the President, too. “I’ve got to do it, Sallie.” He frowned, struggling with the effort of all this thinking. “Look, if I land, it’ll inspire the world to bigger and better space triumphs. We’ll get that bigger space station built and the more advanced ships, too. But if you just bring me back, all the nuts will start whining again about what a waste all this was and how four people died for nothing.” He waited.

“I’ll do what I can, Dan.” She shook her head. “I don’t have much to say about this, but I can speak up for you. In the end, though, it’s probably going to be up to the President.”

“Then put me through to him now.”

He hashed it out with the President in the slow motion of radio delay, listened to the objections, and replied by invoking the memory of his dead comrades. When the President, looking tense and even more hyper than usual, signed off by saying he would have to consult with his advisors, Dan was certain he had won. He felt no surprise when word came twelve hours later that he would be allowed to undertake the landing.

After all, if the President didn’t let him go ahead, it was like admitting publicly that he had put an incompetent without adequate training aboard the
Burroughs
. The President, having finally salvaged his place in history, wasn’t about to go down in the record books as a doofus.

David Bowie was singing about Major Tom and Ground Control. Kiichi had been a David Bowie fan, so a lot of Bowie’s music, everything from his Ziggy Stardust phase up through Tin Machine, was in the
Burroughs’s
music collection. Dan had never been into David Bowie, who struck him as being kind of fruity, but now he felt as if he understood this particular song.

Sometimes, during his work with the President’s Council on Space, Dan had wondered why some early astronauts had gotten kind of flaky after returning to Earth. These were macho test pilot guys, not the kind of men anyone would expect to get mystical or weirded out. But as he moved around the ship, which was usually silent except for the low throbbing hum of the engine and an occasional beep from the consoles, he was beginning to feel a bit odd himself, as if his mind had somehow moved outside of his body.

He had never thought all that much about God. He had, of course, never doubted that God was out there going about His business; he had simply never thought about the Lord that much, except when he was in church or saying a prayer. When he was a boy, he had imagined a God something like his grandfather Pulliam, an angry old man ready to smite all those liberal Democrats, Communists, and other forces of darkness. Later on, when he was older and more mature, God had seemed more like a sort of basketball coach or golf pro.

Now, when he gazed at the image of Mars on his screen, a rust-red dot surrounded by blackness, he had the strangest feeling that he had never really understood the Lord at all. God had created all this, the planets and the space between them and the stars that were so far away he could not even comprehend the distance. God, in some ways, was a lot like the NASA computers, but there was even more to Him than that. Dan wasn’t quite sure how to put it; things like that were hard to explain. He supposed that was what it meant to be mystical—having weird feelings you couldn’t quite put into words. And faith was believing what no one in his right mind would believe even though it was true.

NASA kept him busy during his waking hours programming the Mars lander and checking out its systems. After supper, he usually worked on his speech, with some suggestions NASA was passing along from his speechwriters. They had given him another speech earlier, but he couldn’t use that one now. With what had happened, this one would have to be really inspiring.

Yet he still had his moments of solitude, the times when he felt, for the first time in his life, what it was like to be utterly alone. He couldn’t actually be alone, he supposed, since God had to be somewhere in the vicinity, but there were times when it seemed that the emptiness of space had seeped into him.

Mars swelled until it filled the screen, and then his ship was falling around the planet. There was no way to avoid weightlessness now; the
Burroughs
had begun to decelerate after the halfway point of the journey, and its engine had finally shut down. Dan put on his spacesuit and floated through the tunnel that connected the crew’s quarters with the module holding the base assembly. He wouldn’t be setting up a Mars base, though, since NASA didn’t want him fooling around down there for very long. He entered the last module, which held the lander.

He pressed his hand against the lander’s door; it slid open. The lander had food, a small lavatory, and equipment for experiments. There was even a Mars rover on board so that he could ride around on the surface. He wouldn’t be doing much, though, except for shooting a bunch of stuff with the cameras and gathering soil samples. The important thing was to land, make his speech, mess around for a little while, catch some shut-eye, and then get back to the
Burroughs.

He strapped himself into one of the chairs. The four empty seats made him feel as if the ghosts of the others were with him. NASA had allowed each of the astronauts to bring along a small personal possession to take down to the Martian surface, and Dan had his companions’ choices with him in the lander. Ahmed had brought a Koran, Kiichi a vintage Louisville Slugger with Joe DiMaggio’s signature engraved on it, Sergei a set of Russian dolls, and Ashana a pair of Nikes personally autographed by Michael Jordan. A lump rose in his throat.

The doors to the outside were opening; he tensed. The President had spoken to him just a couple of hours ago, telling him that everyone in the world would be waiting for his first transmission from the surface. In spite of the tragedy, Dan’s determination to carry out the landing had inspired everybody in the country. Having come so far, humankind would not be discouraged by this setback; the Vice-President had shown the way. Construction of the next ship was moving along; it would probably be spaceworthy by spring, and a follow-up Mars mission would give an even bigger boost to Dan’s candidacy. At this point, he would probably carry all the states, and even D.C., in the general election.

“Asteroids,” the President had said. “Lotta resources there. Just get one of those things in Earth orbit, where we can go into, uh, a mining mode, and supply-side economics can work.” It was nice for Dan to think that, when he finally became President, things might be moving along so well that he’d have plenty of time for golf, the way Eisenhower had.

The lander glided forward toward the new world below.

Mars filled his screen. Dan, pressed against his seat, braced himself. He had known what to expect; his training had included maneuvers with a model of the Mars rover in areas much like the Martian surface. Yet actually seeing it this close up still awed him. It looked, he thought, like the biggest sand trap in the universe.

His chair trembled under him as he landed. Dan waited, wanting to make sure everything was all right before he got up. Time to contact Earth, but in the excitement of actually being on Mars, he had forgotten what he was supposed to say.

He cleared his throat. “Guys,” he said, “I’m down.” That ought to do the job.

Over four minutes passed before he heard what sounded like cheers at the other end. Sallie was saying something, but he couldn’t make out the words. By then, he was rummaging through the compartments of his spacesuit looking for the cards that held his speech.

“—all ecstatic,” Sallie’s voice said. “Congratulations, and God bless you—you don’t know how much—”

He sighed, realizing at last that he had forgotten the cards. He might have known that, during the most important moment of his life, he would have to ad lib.

Dan waited in the small airlock until the door slid open. Above him was the pinkish-red sky of an alien world. A rust-colored barren landscape stretched to the horizon, which, he noticed, seemed closer than it should be, then remembered that Mars was smaller than Earth. He felt a lot lighter, too, since Mars, being a smaller place, didn’t have as much gravity.

He made his way down the ladder to the surface, then inhaled slowly. “Whoa,” he said aloud, overcome with awe at the immensity of this accomplishment and sorrow that his dead comrades could not share the moment with him. “Jeez.” He pressed his lips together, suddenly realizing that history would record man’s first words on the surface of Mars as “Whoa” and “Jeez.”

“Well, here I am,” he said, knowing he would have to wing it. “I almost can’t believe I’m here. Man, if anybody had told me when I was a kid that I’d go to Mars, I would have thought—” He paused. “Anyway, the thing is, I wish the others were here with me, because they’re the ones who really deserved to make this trip. What I mean is, I’m really going to miss them, but I can tell you all I’m not ever going to forget them. It’s why I’m here, because of them. In other words, I figured I had to come down and stand here for them.” He remembered that he was supposed to plant the United Nations flag about now, and took the pole out from under his arm. “Now we’ll go forward.” The words he had planned to say at this point were something like that. “And someday, other people will come here and turn into Martians.” Dan cleared his throat. “Guess I’ll show you around a little now.” He scanned the landscape with a camera, then went back to the lander. By then, the President had given him his congratulations, and Marilyn had gotten on to talk to him after that. He was happy to hear his wife’s voice, even though, what with having to wait a few minutes until she heard him and could reply, it wasn’t actually possible to have what he would call a real conversation. This far from Earth, the signals had to work even harder to reach him.

The rover had been lowered from another side of the lander on a platform. Since about all he could do was take pictures and gather soil samples, NASA wanted him to drive around and take them in different places. They didn’t want him to go too far or take any unnecessary risks, and maybe, now that he’d given a speech of sorts, he could let the images of the Martian surface speak for themselves.