Voyage (87 page)

She continued to move backwards, still crawling over the porch, feeling out with her right leg; eventually, her toe hit the top rung of the ladder.

Holding onto the handrails, she straightened up.

She was emerging into the shadow of
Challenger
; the rising sun was hidden by the bulk of the craft, and the sky above her was still black, though the stars were washing out. She turned, stiffly. To left and right she could see a flat, sharp, close horizon, delimiting a plain of dust and rocks. Everything was stained rust brown, like dried blood, the shadows long and sharp.

The change of scale was startling. She’d spent months inside the confines of the Mission Module, where everything in the universe had been either a few feet away – enclosed by the tight, curving walls – or at infinity. Now, the sense of height and depth, of scales opening out around her, was profound, disorienting; nothing in her training had prepared her for this. For a moment she felt as if she would fall backwards, and she hooked her hands around the handrails of the porch.

‘Natalie?’

‘I’m okay, Phil. It’s just –’

‘I know,’ Stone said. ‘A big moment, right?’

‘Yeah.’

Gershon asked, ‘Natalie, have you got out the MESA yet?’

The MESA, the Modularized Equipment Storage Assembly, was a panel on the descent stage, to the left of the ladder. York reached out and opened a latch; the panel swung down like a drawbridge, bearing a TV camera.

‘Ralph, the MESA came down all right.’

‘I copy that, Natalie. I’m turning the TV on now.’

The lens of the camera was dark, clean, watchful; she saw the camera swivel as Ralph worked its servo-motors, focusing on her. She felt absurdly self-conscious.

Gershon said, ‘I’m waiting for the TV. Man, I’m getting a picture. There’s a great deal of contrast in it – it’s just splashes of color – and currently the damn thing’s upside down. But I can see a fair amount of detail and – I got it, it’s corrected itself. Natalie, I can see you at the top of the ladder.’

York nodded to the camera.
But they can’t see my face behind this visor. She waved
.

She made her way down the ladder, rung by rung. They were big steps, and in the stiff suit she found the best way to go was to let herself drop from step to step.

The last rung was three feet from the ground, and she pushed herself away from the ladder and let herself fall. Her descent was distinctly slow-motion; it took nearly a second, she guessed, to cover that last yard. On Earth, it would have taken half that.

Her blue boots came to rest on the white metal of the descent stage’s three-feet-wide footpad. It was still so dark, here in the shadow of
Challenger,
that it was actually quite difficult to see.

She held onto the ladder with her fat-gloved hands, and tried to step back up to the ladder’s bottom rung. She had to make sure she could get back home. But the suit was too stiff, and she couldn’t lift her feet that high.

‘Fucking dumb design.’

‘Hot mike at this time, EV1,’ Gershon said blandly.

She gave up trying to make the step. She bent down a little and jumped. Her knees were stiff, inside the suit, and all her mobility came from her toes and ankles. The Martian gravity pulled her back, but feebly, and she overshot the bottom rung. She fell against the ladder with a clatter, but she managed to get her feet hooked over the rung.

Breathless, she dropped back to the footpad again.

She looked past the pad to the Martian surface.

‘Okay. I’m at the foot of the ladder. The MEM’s footpads are depressed in the surface a couple of inches, maybe three; the sides of the depressions they’ve made are quite distinct, sharp and clear. There’s little water here, of course, and I guess the soil’s cohesion is electrostatic …’
Don’t analyze, York; tell them what it looks like
. ‘The surface soil looks a little like beach sand. Wet sand. But as you get close to it it’s actually much finer-grained than sand, and it’s evident that it bonds well together. Here and there it’s very fine, powdery.’ She reached out her leg and kicked gently at the regolith, leaving furrows in the soil. ‘It’s easy for me to dig little trenches with my toe. The surface crunches when I kick it. I have the impression that the surface material is a duricrust. That is, dust particles cemented together by the upward seepage of water in the soil, with salts being precipitated out on evaporation.’

There had been a little Martian dust on the footpad, she saw, and now, when she lifted up her boot, she could see that a little of that had already transferred itself to her. ‘The dust is clinging in fine layers to the sole and sides of my boot. So it’s both cohesive and adhesive. It looks as if it will take a slope of around seventy degrees …’

Now Ralph Gershon said, ‘Natalie, I need you to get back facing the TV camera for a minute please.’

‘Say again, Ralph.’

‘Rager. I need you facing the field of view of the camera. Natalie, Phil, the President of the United States is in his office now and would like to say a few words to you.’

Stone replied for her. ‘That would be an honor, Ralph.’

She checked her cuff checklist. Reagan was right on cue. Trust an old actor.

She turned toward the MESA.

She imagined the TV pictures of herself now on their way to Earth: she would be a stiff, angular figure, posed on the footpad, her outline fuzzed by false colors against the crimson of Mars.

She took a still Hasselblad camera from the MESA platform. After some fumbling, she fitted the camera to a mount above her chest panel.

She turned around slowly, letting the camera snap a panoramic mosaic. Then she picked up a small TV camera, and fixed that in place on her chest, beside the Hasselblad.

The quality of the radio link changed; a Houston capcom came on the line. ‘Go ahead, Mr President. Out.’

Natalie and Phil, I’m talking to you by a radio link-up from the Oval Room at the White House
.

Reagan’s gravelly voice was lively, interested.
He sure plays the part well
. She found herself drawing a little more upright, as if coming to attention.

Now, the NASA technical people tell me that it will take four minutes for my words to reach you, and four more before I get to hear your reply. So I figure we can’t have much of a conversation. I just want to say this, as you talk to us from the Valley of Mangala. Our progress in space – continuing to take giant steps for all mankind – is a tribute to American teamwork and excellence. And we can be proud to say: We are first; we are the best; and we are so because we’re free
.

America has always been greatest when we dared to be great. We have reached for greatness again. We can follow our dreams to the planets and to distant stars, living and working in space for peaceful, economic, and scientific gain …

York – standing on the pad in the reality of the glowing landscape, and with the weight of her pack heavy on her back – endured the remote, distorted voice.

… Now I’m going to shut up, Natalie and Phil, but I want you
to indulge us with just a couple of minutes of your time. Please tell us how it feels to be, at last, on the surface of Mars
.

Reagan fell silent, and the radio link hissed.

Stone said: ‘Thank you, Mr President. It’s an honor and a privilege for us to be here, representing not only the United States, but all of mankind. Natalie …’

Natalie, tell them how it feels
.

The oldest question in the world, the most difficult to answer – and, maybe, the most important, she thought.

The one question the Apollo astronauts could never answer.

Now I must try
.

In the pink sky, the sun was continuing to strengthen, and the world was a bowl of shades of red and brown, of light scattering from the dust on the ground and suspended in the air. The light from the hatchway shone as brilliantly white as before, incongruous.

‘Okay, sir. The MEM is standing here on the flats north of Mangala Vallis. It’s a late fall morning – we’re only about eighty days away from the winter solstice, here in the northern hemisphere of Mars. The sky is uniformly ochre. The dust suffuses everything with a pale, salmon hue. The red planet isn’t really so red: the dominant color is a moderate yellow brown, reflected from the land. There’s no green, or blue, anywhere. If humans ever colonize Mars for good – no, make that
when
– we’ll have to invent a lot of new words for shades of brown.

‘I’m almost on the Martian equator. To give you some reference, the great Tharsis Bulge, with its three huge shield volcanoes, is a couple of thousand miles to the east of me; and Olympus Mons, the greatest volcano in the Solar System, is about the same distance to the north.

‘We’re close enough to Tharsis for this region to have been affected by the uplift of the Bulge. So, although the surface here looks as flat as a beach at low tide, I know that when I look away from the MEM I’m probably looking down a slope of a few tenths of a degree.’

She took a long, slow look around at the panorama of Mangala Vallis.

‘The MEM is standing on a surface which is littered with rocks. The rocks, I would say, range in size from maybe half a yard up to two yards. The rocks show vesicles. That is, there are small bubbles in the surface of the rocks; it means the rocks are probably bits of frozen lava. The rocks are uniformly pitted and fluted, I would guess by wind erosion. I can seem smaller formations that
look like pebbles, but I’m pretty sure they are duricrust aggregate. Just bits of the surface stuck together. The surface is not like sand; it’s evidently much finer grained. I’m sure that the dust is the result of the slow weathering of the rocks, with much oxidation having occurred; the rocks have the characteristic deep red-brown coloration of smectite clays …

‘I can see how geological processes are continuing to shape this landscape. The surface has clearly been scoured by wind: the landscape is eroded, and the dust under my feet has surely been transported from around the planet. From a geological point of view, there is clearly a sequence of events represented here: impact, wind, volcanic activity, possibly flooding, probably ground ice.

‘The Moon is an old world; we think its story ended, essentially, a billion or more years ago. But it’s obvious to me, standing here, that Mars, like Earth, is still evolving. Still alive.’

There was a long silence on the radio link.

‘Natalie,’ Stone said gendy. ‘Are you all right?’

‘Yes. Yes, I’m fine, Phil.’

She thought of her words dispersing, radiating away to Earth and beyond; she wished she could call them back.
It’s not enough. It could never be enough
.

But, I guess, it was the best I could do
.

It was time.

She said, ‘I’ll step off the footpad now.’

She held onto the ladder with her right hand and leaned out to the left. She raised her left boot over the lip of the footpad, pushed it out a little way, and – silendy, carefully – lowered it to the dust.

Nobody spoke: Stone, Gershon, remote Earth. It was as if the whole of creation was focused on her, on this moment. She tested her weight, bouncing on her left boot in the gentle gravity. The Martian regolith was firm enough to hold her. As she had known it would be.

She was standing with one foot on this clumsy artifact from Earth, the other on the virgin terrain of Mangala. She looked around, briefly, at the empty landscape, framed by the rounded rim of her faceplate, and she could see the play of soft ochre light over her nose and cheeks, the flesh of a human
face,
here on Mars.

Holding onto the ladder, she placed her right foot on the ground. Then, cautiously, she let go of the ladder. She was standing freely on Mars.

She took a step forward, then another.

Her boots left clear, firm prints, which showed the ridging of the soles. She wished she could take her shoes off, press her bare toes into the sand of this Martian beach, feel the fine, powdery stuff for herself.

Her suit was comfortable, warm. She could hear the whir of the twenty-thousand-rpm fans in her backpack. She had hundred-and-eighty-degree vision through her faceplate; she had no sense of enclosure, of confinement.

She took a few more steps.

She bounced across the surface. Moving on Mars was dream-like, somewhere between walking and floating. She had no real difficulty in moving around. In fact it was easier than the sims she’d performed on the ground. But she was very aware of the mass of the equipment on her back, and she had to lean forward to maintain her balance. It was difficult to bend at the knees, so that her movement came mostly from her ankles and toes; she suspected her legs would tire quickly.
But my monkey toes are strong, pawing through this Mars dust
.

Oddly, she felt as if the shades of Armstrong and Muldoon were beside her, as if she was echoing their first, famous expedition. It was a thought that somehow diminished this moment.

She turned to face
Challenger
. The MEM was an angular pyramid, huge before her, silhouetted against the light of the shrunken sun, and propped up in an unlikely fashion on its six fold-down legs. She was still in the shadow of
Challenger
. The ambient light was like a late sunset, with
Challenger
drenched in a weak, deep pink color; against that, the rectangle of fluorescent light from the hatch, framing Stone, was a harsh pearl gray, startlingly alien.

The dominant red tones came from dust suspended in the air. There was about ten times as much dust, she knew, as over Los Angeles on a smoggy day. And no rain, ever, to wash it out.

She walked away from
Challenger
now, working her way over into the sunlight, moving along the shadow of
Challenger,
toward the west. The MEM’s shadow was a long, sharp-edged cone on the rocky surface before her.

She passed beyond the edge of the shadow and into the light.

She turned. Sunlight shone into her face, casting reflections from the surfaces of her faceplate.

Sunrise on Mars
: the sky here was different, the way the light was scattered by the dust …