Voyage (22 page)

It looked very real, the rocks so sharply pictured it was almost as if she could reach into the frames and pick them up …

‘Natalie? Are you okay?’

She looked up at him. He looked blurred; she found some kind of hot liquid rolling down her left cheek.

‘Natalie?’

‘Yeah.’ She wiped her eyes, quickly, with a napkin. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘You don’t have to apologize.’

‘It’s just that it’s as if I’m
there
. Sitting on top of the lander, on Mars itself …’

I know where I am, precisely
.

I am in Hellas. One of the deepest impact basins on the planet
.

It is a little before the solstice: deep midwinter, here in the southern hemisphere of Mars
.

The surface is reddish, boulder-strewn. Over there I can see what look like impact craters, between the dunes. Those dunes are obviously of windborne material. And I see other wind effects, such as those trails of fine grains lying between the boulders. That tells me that the prevailing winds here are in quite consistent directions
.

But it’s obvious that the landscape doesn’t owe its morphology just to erosion and deposition by winds. Over there, I see stretches
of a hardened vitrified surface. Vitrified: a crust of mineral salts, left behind by evaporation
.

There has been water here, shaping the surface …

He ordered them both more beers; she drank, and felt the cool glow of the alcohol suffusing her.

‘Now. Look at this stuff.’ Ben dug out a photostatted report. ‘This is the real pay dirt.’

She scanned it quickly. It was a statement of preliminary conclusions by Academician Boris N. Petrov, of the Soviets’ life sciences team. The report seemed very guarded. It was couched in the language of a discipline with which she had only a nodding acquaintance, and further masked by cautious Soviet official-speak.

She dropped the paper back on the table. ‘It’s so damn circumspect. It’s hard to make out anything at all.’

‘Yeah.’ He cradled his glass. ‘Well, the results are ambiguous. The life experiment is a gas chromatography mass spectrometer.’

‘We’d have done better. Viking would have carried –’

‘Yeah, I know. Anyway, the GCMS looked for organic molecules in the regolith.’

‘And?’

‘The GCMS found nothing, Natalie.’

‘Nothing? But that’s impossible …’

Organic molecules didn’t necessarily imply the existence of life. ‘Organic’ just meant ‘carbon-based.’ But organic molecules were a necessary precursor to Earth-type life, and they had been expected on the Martian surface; organic materials had even been found in meteorites from outer space.

Ben said, ‘The JPL guys figure there must be some process on Mars that actively
destroys
organics. Ultraviolet flux from the sun, maybe.’

‘So the surface is actually sterilized.’ She felt a crushing disappointment. She had, she realized, been hoping, unreasonably, that some kind of life might turn up after all. Maybe a hardy lichen clinging to the lee side of a rock … ‘Mars is dead.’

‘Should you be jumping to conclusions like that, a true scientist like you?’ He found another piece of paper. ‘Hey, listen to this. It’s from their meteorology team.
Winds in the late afternoon were again out of a generally easterly direction. Once again the winds went to the southwesterly after midnight and oscillated about that direction through what appears to be two cycles. The maximum wind speed was twenty-four feet per second but gusts were detected
reaching forty-five feet per second. The minimum temperature attained, just before dawn, was almost the same as on the previous day, minus ninety-six degrees centigrade. The maximum, measured at two sixteen p.m. local time, was minus forty-three degrees. This was two degrees colder than at the same time on the previous day. The mean pressure …
Natalie, my God, this is a weather report from Mars.’

She looked up at him. His blue eyes were on her, his face gentle; she felt as if he were looking right into her.

For years, she thought, she had been heading toward Ben Priest, maybe toward this moment, like some dumb spacecraft on its blind trajectory to a target planet.

She pushed close to him, leaning across the photographs of Mars. Their lips touched, gently, almost timidly. His skin felt cool, a little rough. She pressed again, and this time the kiss was deep.

This has been coming for a hell of a long time
. Ben Priest, and Mars. It was a potent combination.

Eventually they broke.

He touched her cheek. ‘Now, where the hell did that come from?’

‘The Soviets have sent pictures from the surface of Mars,’ she said. ‘It’s a hell of a day for all of us, for all of humanity. Maybe a new step in our evolutionary history. What else do you want to do to celebrate?’ She reached into the pocket of her shirt, and dug out her room key. ‘Come on.’

Long after Ben had fallen asleep, York remained awake. It had turned into a hell of a night, the darkness laden with heat and humidity; the sheets lay loosely over her, faintly damp against her skin. She heard the ticking of the small clock beside the bed, the creak of the window shutters as they cooled. Mars 9 pictures and print-outs were scattered over the floor at the end of the bed, with clothes piled loosely on top.

She could feel the tousled warmth of Ben beside her. Ben had flown around the Moon, and now here he was, in her bed.

She remembered Ben’s question.
Where the hell did that come from?
Where, indeed. And where were they going now?

She wondered if she should ask him about Karen, and Peter.

He hadn’t mentioned them; York didn’t even know where Karen was right now. He had told her they were having difficulties with their boy: young, enthusiastic Petey had metamorphosed into Peter, a difficult seventeen-year-old, who had painted the walls of his room black – covering up the stars and astronaut pictures he’d
pasted there – and spent more time listening to Alice Cooper than his father.

But Ben didn’t say much about that, even though she could see it caused him distress. Ben rarely did talk about his family, in fact.

And York was being a hypocritical asshole. A couple of hours ago, she couldn’t have given a damn about Karen.

Would Ben ever leave Karen? They went back a long time, obviously. And theirs was a Navy marriage. When Karen married Ben, she took on a lot of separation, of anxiety. Perhaps Ben thought he owed her.

Anyhow, if he did leave her – what then? Would York want him?

What about Mike?

It was all, she thought, just one hell of a mess. It was hard to understand how come, for a person who had advanced so far on her rationality and logic, she could work out so little about a small affair of a handful of people, and their unexceptional relationships to each other.

She stopped thinking about it.

She picked the folder off the floor and, as quietly as she could, she dug further through the contents of the Soviet file.

She found XRF results. The X-ray fluorescence device had sent back to Earth a preliminary assay of the composition of Martian regolith. She scanned it quickly. Silicon dioxide, forty five per cent; ferrous oxide, eighteen per cent … There was a lot of silicon, iron, magnesium, aluminum, calcium and sodium. But the proportions weren’t like any terrestrial rock. There was a lot of iron there. And not much potassium. That was probably significant; it meant that Martian rock hadn’t suffered as much differentiation by internal heating as had the Earth. Maybe Mars hadn’t got a large core of nickel and iron, as Earth had …

She swore under her breath. She was speculating. This data was so limited. That Soviet lander had set down in just one spot, on a planet with a land area the same as the Earth’s. And she could see the limitations of the sampling scoop just by looking at the photos of it. It was only going to be able to sample loose, friable material; what geologists called fines. It just wasn’t enough to give a complete picture.

What we need is someone out there, climbing off the lander, with a spade and a hammer
.

Now she’d got over her initial disappointment, she didn’t much care about the life results. It was geology that fascinated her; life was a just second-order consequence of geology, after all. A positive
biology result would have been convenient, though.
If only we had seen a silicon-based gorilla jumping up and down on the damn Russian camera, we’d be going to Mars tomorrow. Even a fossilized trilobite would do
.

She remembered those scratchy Mariner 4 pictures. And later, those astonishing images of Phobos, and the Olympus Mons, from Mariner 9. Humanity had learned more about Mars from the probes in the last decade or so than in the whole of previous human history. She was lucky to live at such a time, when so many ancient mysteries were being resolved.

Lucky. Maybe
.

But it was as if Mars was somehow teasing her. Enticing her.

She put down the reports. It was time she was honest with herself. This dribble of data wasn’t enough. She didn’t want to spend the next thirty years as she had the last two or three, poring over grainy Mariner images, constructing hypotheses she could never confirm.
I want to go to Mars, damn it. I want to get down on my hands and knees on that rocky ground, and dig a trench, and bury my gloved fingers in the surface. I want to see the pink sky, and the twin moons, and drive to the peak of Olympus Mons, and stand on the lip of the Valles Marineris …

Mars, with its slow, teasing unveiling, was seducing her. She realized now that Ben saw this more clearly than she did. And certainly more clearly than Mike, who could barely see anything beyond his own concerns.

But the dream, the ambition itself, wasn’t the problem. The problem was, she had an outside chance of getting there. As Ben kept telling her, York was the right age, with the right qualifications, to compete for a place in NASA.

The problem was, she might actually try to do this. But joining NASA, trying to get to Mars, meant throwing away her whole life. It meant she’d have to go back to school, and she’d have to go through endless, meaningless training with those assholes at NASA, and she might spend years in low Earth orbit working on crap outside her specialty.

It probably meant, too – it occurred to her suddenly – that she wouldn’t have any kids.

Did she really want to sacrifice all that, to go through so much shit, just for an outside chance of walking on the slopes of Tharsis?

But her fingers itched to get into that dirt, to dig around, to get beyond the loose surface crust of Mars.

The very next day, she was supposed to meet Mike. She’d booked them into a hotel in downtown LA, so they could spend some time together.

After last night she felt truly shitty about going ahead with the meeting, or date, or whatever the hell she was supposed to call it at this point in her relationship with Mike. But she decided to go anyhow; she didn’t see she had much choice.

Before they parted, Ben dug a leaflet out of his jacket pocket. ‘Here,’ he said. ‘For you.’

Eighteen hours later, in their LA motel room, York rubbed the tension out of Mike’s shoulders, and at last he slept.

After that it was York who seemed to be stuck awake.

She was stiff and a little cold, and the sheets beneath her were crumpled, digging into her back as she lay there. The mellow feeling from the mini-bar brandies had worn off, leaving her feeling stale, her heart over-stimulated.

And besides, she had something she needed to talk over with Mike.

She opened the drawer of the bedside table and pulled out Ben’s leaflet.

In the soft glow of the splinters of light on the ceiling she couldn’t read any of it, but she could make out some of the images: the famous photograph of Joe Muldoon standing on the Moon with his gloved hand across his chest, little schematic diagrams of spacecraft flying around the Solar System. At the back there was a tear-off application form; she ran her finger-tip along the perforation.

Issued by the National Academy of Sciences on behalf of NASA, the leaflet was titled ‘Opportunities for Scientists as Astronauts.’ It set out a glowing future in space: expanded laboratories in Earth orbit, more stations around the Moon, even semi-permanent scientific colonies on the surface to follow the preliminary toe-dips of Apollo. And then there were NASA’s goals beyond cislunar space: the first manned Mars mission, orbital surveys of Venus – and manned flights to the asteroids and the Jovian system. All within the lifetimes of scientists working now.

It was an application form to be an astronaut.

She’d been tempted to throw the leaflet into the trash. She was immensely disappointed by this garbage: typical NASA dreaming, predicated on an unwavering expansion of funding, and an unrelenting political will. For this, she should sacrifice her career, throw
away a decade of her life? After all, none of this astounding program was
real …

None of it. Except, maybe, Mars.

Everyone knew about the problems: Mike’s NERVA program was years behind schedule, there were delays in the enhanced Saturn booster development, and the Mars lander base technology project was underfunded and lacking focus … And so forth. In the end, if it succeeded at all, NASA would probably reach Mars much as it had reached the Moon: not as part of any long-term integrated strategy of expansion into the Solar System, as set out in this glossy little pamphlet, but as a precarious one-of-a-kind stunt. NASA seemed organizationally equipped for no other mode of working.

But, for all that, progress was being made, and funding seemed secured for the near future. Jimmy Carter’s attitude to space remained to be demonstrated, but Ben told her that Fred Michaels, the NASA Administrator, had thrown his weight behind Ted Kennedy as Vice President, and helped him secure the nomination against Walter Mondale – who was well known as a critic of the space program, all the way back to the 1960s. Carter/Kennedy were now clear favorites to win the November election. And after that, things would look better for Michaels, with his links to the Democrats, and allies among the Kennedys both inside and outside the White House …