A Step Beyond (16 page)

“You are wicked,” he whispered. “Perhaps that is why I like you so.”

“You like me so,” she said, pressing her body against his, “because I am the only female aboard this ship, and you can’t wait another year and a half for your wife.”

“She is taking advantage of my absence.” He could feel her nipples harden against his chest. “So why should I not take advantage of hers?”

“I wouldn’t want to say anything that might change your mind.”

“I’m sure you wouldn’t,” he said, pressing his mouth hard against hers as he pushed her back against the door.

He grabbed her shirt and ripped it open. As she struggled to pull the shirt off, he took her breasts into his hands and kissed them. With trembling fingers she reached down and unbut-toned her pants and pushed them down below her knees, where they fell to the floor. She could feel the cold door against her back.

“I want you,” she said.

Mars Orbit Injection

C
olonel Tom Nelson pulled tightly on the restraint straps that held him secure in the contoured chair designed to protect him against high g forces. The
Liberty
was about to pierce the upper layers of Mars’s thin atmosphere, a maneuver that would reduce its approach speed. He checked the command console to make certain the ship’s trajectory did not require a correction. From the portal it looked as if they were going to crash into the very edge of the planet. The console contained a graphic that displayed the
Liberty
’s position with respect to its desired flight path. Two lines indicted upper and lower safe limits. Nelson verified that the oblong symbol, which represented the
Liberty
, was between the two lines. He scanned the vertical and horizontal position displays and lingered upon the attitude-direction indictor, which gave the pitch and yaw of the ship. His eyes dropped to the scale that indicated their current velocity. They were traveling at 26,332 kilometers per hour. The event timer clicked five seconds. Nelson gripped the arms of his chair to brace himself.

The sudden roar was deafening. He was thrown back hard against his seat. The g force plastered his body into the contours of his chair. His face became a distorted rubber mask that vibrated uncontrollably, and his lips turned white and peeled back, baring his teeth and gums. Unable to move, he could feel the ship shake and tremble. It felt as though it were coming apart. He could hear the metal screech as the hull bent under the impact. The sound was loud and sudden. Air rushing past the umbrella-like aeroshield burst into flames and engulfed the ship in fire. He could see the flames through the portal.

He attempted to read the numbers on the center screen, but they jumped and vibrated so fiercely they had disassembled into jagged lines. It did not really matter. There was very little he could do. He simply wanted to reassure himself that the ship was still on course. He started to keep track of the time by counting the seconds. One one thousand, he said to himself. Two one thousand . . .

Then suddenly a great weight was lifted from his chest, the ship stopped shaking, and the howling ceased. Nelson looked down at the event timer. Six minutes and twenty-three seconds had passed. They were still alive. The
Liberty
had plunged into the Martian atmosphere and emerged intact. They had come within forty-five kilometers of the planet’s surface. He scanned the flight deck to make certain that all systems were functioning properly. The screens were clear of warning messages, and the ship appeared to be on course.

“Abort check,” Nelson said.

“All systems check,” Carter responded.

The
Liberty
was in a highly elliptical orbit that would, if left unaltered, pull the craft back into the atmosphere. A main engine burn was necessary to raise its perigee to 480 kilometers. Its apogee would remain at 32,000. They felt a gentle push as the reaction-control system fired jets of hydrazine to align the
Liberty
for the burn. As the ship rotated, the Martian surface rolled by on the monitors. The ground was reddish orange and cratered. They could make out mountain ranges and canyons and what looked like dried-up riverbeds. The sight filled them with awe. Carter pointed at a volcano and attempted to lean forward to get a better look but was pulled back by his safety straps.

“Engine ignition armed.”

“Roger. All systems go,” Carter replied.

“We are go for burn.”

“Ten seconds to ignition.”

Nelson could feel his heart beating as he waited and watched the final seconds tick away. If the main engines failed to fire, they would fall back into the Martian atmosphere, but this time they would not emerge. The ship wouldn’t have the necessary velocity to escape the planet’s gravitational pull. It would crash into the surface. They felt a slight jolt as the engines fired. Moments later the computer indicated the
Liberty
had achieved its parking orbit.

Carter whistled loudly as he unstrapped himself from the pilot’s chair. His eyes were wild with excitement. He was looking for signs that the others shared his enthusiasm when his attention was diverted by a low-to-high whistle originating from the communications window. Carter opened the channel.

“Comrades, we have arrived,” Komarov said in a booming voice. “Our ship is intact. All systems operational. How did the
Liberty
handle the aerobrake?”

“Everything appears to be in order,” Nelson replied. “Won’t know for sure until we run a full diagnostic. It was a little bumpy there at the end.”

“That was to be expected,” Komarov said, as if he had done it a thousand times before. They could hear the others talking excitedly in the background. “We, too, will have to run diagnostics. And afterward we will celebrate. We are only a few days away from being the first men to set foot on another planet.”

“Go easy on the vodka,” Nelson said. “I wouldn’t want you to find pink elephants on Mars.”

“Pink elephants?”

“Just an expression,” Nelson said, deciding an explanation would take too long. Besides, he wasn’t certain if Komarov would take it as an insult. Nelson watched the window disappear into an icon, then turned to face his men, his pulse still beating hard. “Gentlemen, we’ve got work to do.”

“A
ugustus, you chose your guardian well,” Satomura said, looking down through the portal at the dusty red planet, with a plastic container of warm sake dangling from his tired hand. It was Augustus who had made the Roman deity Mars the personal protector of the emperor.

Satomura pressed his nose up against the glass and pulled back when his breath began to condense and obscure his view. He wiped the portal with his sleeve, then shook his head and scrunched his eyes together to steady the planet. It was scarred with deep, long gashes that stretched for thousands of kilometers across the surface. The gashes were the dried-up remains of dead rivers. He could see Valles Marineris, an intricate labyrinth of canyons that carved a bent path along the equator. “Noctis Labyrinthus,” he mumbled, “Tithonium Chasma, Coprates Chasma, and Candor Chasma.” He pointed with his long fingers at Candor Chasma. It was there they would land. He could see the V-shaped tributaries and layered rock that suggested the canyon had once housed an ancient lake. He knew the area well. After the others had retired for the night he would pour himself another coffee and peruse the maps of Mars, filling his computer screen with shaded reliefs and photo mosaics. And when he had finally decided upon a site he would don his goggles. Footprints would appear behind him as if he were actually on the surface. He took another drink from the container.

He was tired and drunk, but his mind was racing. His thoughts became more vivid when he closed his eyes, which was why he could not fall asleep. Just northwest of the canyons were three prominent volcanoes standing like giants side by side. They were perched on top of the Tharsis bulge, a large swelling in the Martian surface. “Ascraeus Mons, Pavonis Mons, and Arsia Mons.” His speech was slurred. He looked down at the calderas and wondered what the volcanoes might have looked liked when they were active. He could visualize fire spewing from the vents and dark smoke twirling high in the air and glowing red lava flowing slowly down the sides. They were dead now, but remnants of their past glory scarred the surrounding land. The ground was rippled, with snakelike extensions where the lava had stopped and hardened. Portions of the volcanoes were buried in their own lava, from fissures along their flanks that had erupted.

His eyes were drawn to a single volcano northwest of the others. Surrounded by low-level plains stood the largest known volcano in the solar system. Olympus Mons. Home of the Greek gods. It was where the American-led crew would land, approximately thirty-five hundred kilometers northwest of Candor Chasma, well outside the range of the manned rovers, but within the range of the Russian airship. He studied the peculiar land formation encircling the volcano. The geologists referred to it as the aureole because it looked like a radiant halo. Its origin was a mystery. Some speculated it was the collapsed remains of an even larger volcano. Others believed it was formed by massive landslides. Satomura favored the first explanation.

He focused on the very top of the volcano. Despite the small aperture, he knew it to be a mammoth caldera over eighty kilometers in diameter. It had, at one time in its past, contained a sea of bubbling magma. He was envious of the Americans, who would be sending rocket-driven probes into the caldera.

With the aid of a computer simulation, he had stood at the very edge of Olympus Mons, but all he had been able to see was a wall of rock. The base was a sheer cliff that stretched six kilometers into the sky. No matter how far back he moved he was unable to make out that Olympus Mons was a volcano. Above the cliff the upward slope was gradual, almost imperceptible.

He took another drink from the container and allowed his eyes to wander. The planet was barren. Other than the whisper-thin clouds of water and carbon dioxide that floated in the upper atmosphere, there was no movement. The surface beneath the clouds was motionless. It was heavily cratered and covered with rock. Water did not flow through the riverbeds, and smoke did not vent from the volcanoes. Unlike Earth, it was not painted in pleasant colors: it was murky shades of gold and maroon and dark crimson, except for the north and south poles, which were ashen white.

Satomura grunted as he stretched, and having forgotten he was in a weightless environment soon found himself floating backwards. There was little he could do but wait until he reached the far wall.

“Oh well,” he said, and took the last sip from the container. “Close portal.”

The metallic shutters that protected the portal glass from micrometeoroids closed shut and replaced Mars with a white panel.

“I must go to sleep,” he said to the empty container of sake, and shook it to mimic agreement.

“W
e are go for separation,” Carter said. He was seated next to Nelson inside the lander. The seat behind them was empty.

“All systems check,” Endicott said over the intercom. “Roger,” Nelson replied. “Ten seconds to separation.”

The first few seconds passed in silence, then Endicott started the countdown.

“Docking latches have been released,” Carter announced.

The Mars excursion module was pushed outside the
Liberty
by a spring inside the docking bay. A television camera transmitted the event back to Earth. Several billion people, crowded around high-definitions, would be watching the images twenty-one minutes and thirty-three seconds later, the time it took for the transmission to reach Earth. Carter, who had maintained a perpetual five o’clock shadow for the past several months, was clean-shaven in honor of the occasion.

“The
Shepard
has just come into view,” Endicott said. The lander was named after Alan Shepard, the first American astronaut to fly in space. The Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin had orbited the Earth twenty-three days earlier. Endicott was watching the craft through the
Liberty
’s forward portal.

There were two red buttons, both marked ABORT, that

Carter would have to push simultaneously to terminate the landing. The computer would recommend an abort if something went wrong, but it would be up to him to activate the sequence. He would have to decide whether the computer had advised him correctly or whether a glitch in the software or a malfunction in the hardware had resulted in a false warning. If the hazard was real, he would have to decide whether he could pull them out of the danger by taking manual control. They only had one chance to land. It was his opinion that the abort thresholds were set too low. He was determined not to abort unless he had absolutely no other choice.

“Burn attitude obtained,” Endicott said. “Fifteen minutes to deorbit burn.”

They were going to fire the braking engines of the
Shepard
to lower its orbit. If it were to make a direct descent from its current orbit, the deceleration would be too great for the astronauts to withstand without risk of injury. At the time the mission was being planned it was not known exactly how much calcium their bones would lose. And although they were in much better shape than they would have been without the artificial gravity on the
Liberty
, their bones were still more fragile than they had been on Earth. The four-point-nine g’s they would have undergone was considered unacceptable. By lowering their orbit they would reduce the deceleration to two-point-two g’s.

“Engines have been armed,” Carter announced. “Forty-five seconds to burn.”

“Roger, you are go for deorbit burn.”

“Countdown to burn: seven . . . six . . . five . . . four . . . three . . . two . . . one . . . ignition.”

“I have visual confirmation, over.”

They were pushed back as the braking engine fired. The ship started to slow down and descend. The burn lasted forty-eight seconds.

“Burn complete,” Carter announced, as the lander began to drop. “Deorbit engine shutdown. E minus fifty-seven minutes.”

Carter allowed his head to fall back on his shoulders and roll to one side as he savored the taste of the gum he had placed in his mouth prior to locking down his helmet. He was in his element. The
Shepard
was his baby. He would take over the controls from the computer when they were close enough to pick out a landing site visually. He wanted to take over now, but knew he had to wait. The entry was too complex for a human to handle. From the corner of his eye, he peeked up at the high-definition to see how Endicott was holding up. He was alone now and would be for the next three months. Well, that’s what he said he wanted. Endicott smiled back awkwardly.