A Step Beyond (28 page)

“Proceeding to the descent site,” she said.

“Yes,” Satomura responded, “yes, of course.”

The descent site was the slope of Candor Mensa, which they were to scale in two weeks. Because of Carter’s accident, several officials had questioned the wisdom of another climb and were insisting upon additional photographs. It was the only scheduled stop on the way to the layered deposits.

After taking a few seconds to look over the console, Satomura wrapped his fingers around the hand control for the high-definition cameras mounted outside the cabin. A window in the active-matrix display opened. He pressed the zoom button and watched as the surface came rushing toward him.

“There it is,” Tatiana announced.

As the ship turned, the towering wall of the mesa came slowly into view. It stood 1.3 kilometers high. From a distance it would have looked like a gigantic tree stump, neatly severed. The dirigible descended several hundred meters, and the mesa wall filled the entire forward window. Satomura had to look over his shoulder, out the side window, to see the sky. The dirigible, which only minutes earlier had so impressed him with its size, now seemed insignificant against this mammoth backdrop.

From the corner of his eye, he saw Tatiana’s finger pointing toward the top of the cliff. The dirigible was not equipped with a heads-up display.

“There,” she said, pressing her finger against the glass. Satomura recognized the site almost immediately. He had spent the previous evening studying photographs taken from a balloon they had launched several weeks earlier. The site occupied a tiny fraction of the cliff, and the vastness of its surrounding, despite his excitement, made him think of how much would go unexplored. Their stay was more than half-over, and five weeks was not nearly enough time to do all the things he wanted to do.

“Do you see it?” Tatiana asked.

“Of course.”

He turned the recorder on and zoomed in upon the site. The slope of the path they were to take varied from ten to thirty degrees. Promising was a horizontal strip of land a few meters thick that was darker than the ground above and below it, and, more importantly, much thinner than the other strata of the canyon. A rare smile cracked Satomura’s wrinkled skin. At that point in the planet’s surface a significant change had taken place in a relatively short period of time. Satomura saw that the path took them down to the stratum. He wondered if Tatiana had noticed his excitement. He glanced over at her. She was looking directly at him.

He put her out of his mind and returned to the active-matrix display. He was supposed to be filming the site, but he could not tear himself from the thin layer of rock. He focused the camera upon the dark red line and tracked its path until it disappeared around the corner of the mesa.

“Five more minutes,” Tatiana warned.

“Right, right,” he responded.

“Do you think it’s too dangerous?” she asked.

Annoyed at being interrupted, Satomura wondered if her concern extended to himself, or whether it was confined to her lover. It certainly wasn’t for her own safety, since she wasn’t going to participate in the climb. He wanted to talk to her about Komarov, but not now. There was too much to do. He returned the camera to the site, forgetting that she had even asked the question, and took shots to placate the officials who were worried about safety. The path never exceeded thirty degrees. He had negotiated greater slopes during his EVAs, and no one had even raised an eyebrow. It was as if they believed the slope was covered with marblelike rocks—someone had actually raised the possibility—and that the moment he set foot upon the treacherous surface he would be sent rolling down the cliff with his equipment tumbling after him.

“Well?” Tatiana asked.

“Well, what?”

“In your opinion, is it too dangerous?”

Couched in the negative, he thought; how so very much like a woman. “Absolutely not.”

“Good then,” she replied. “You still have one minute.”

“All finished here,” he said. “Let’s proceed.”

She turned the dirigible away from the cliff and pointed the bow northward. The large craft descended into the canyon like a submarine submerging into the depths of the sea. They dipped beneath a light mist. Satomura wondered what might have been left behind when the great sea had evaporated into the atmosphere. He imagined the fossilized remains of giant fish and drew a deep breath of oxygen from the life-support tanks as if it were fresh salt air from the Japanese coast.

The sun had climbed high enough to illuminate the canyon with an orange glow. Most of what he could see lay directly beneath him; the canyon walls were too distant to make out clearly. In the dawn’s light, the canyon floor took on a surreal aspect. The depressions were dark gray, outlined in orange. Satomura picked several gorges and traced their snakelike paths through the broken terrain. He wanted to be closer to the surface. The resolution from his current height was little better than that detailed in the satellite mosaics.

“Lower,” he requested eagerly.

“We are descending, Takashi,” Tatiana responded.

“Indeed,” he replied. He was quiet for several minutes as he waited for the dirigible to descend lower. “See how the surface is so rough?”

She nodded without bothering to look down at the surface. “Great forces were involved here,” he said. “The very same forces that spawned the volcanoes Arsia, Pavonis, and Ascraeus Mons. The tectonic upheaval was so great that it almost ripped the planet apart.”

He looked briefly at the faint mist above him. A fog appeared in the canyons every morning and hovered there until the midday sun burned it off. He felt certain the source of moisture was an underground river that flowed below the surface. Most of his colleagues believed it was from the permafrost. He imagined their faces when he proved them wrong and broke out with a loud laugh. Tatiana was startled by the outburst.

“What is so amusing?” she asked.

“Maybe later,” Satomura replied.

“Keeping secrets, are we?” she said with a mischievous smile. But the smile transformed into a look of misgiving, and she turned her head away.

Satomura deduced immediately that she was thinking of Vladimir and decided that it was best to act as if he had not noticed. He did not want to discuss her problems at that moment, which, he knew from experience with his late wife, could take much more time than he was willing to give. His wife had gone on for hours about concerns she had somehow construed to be monumental. Most often he had considered them mundane at best. And no matter what he said, she could twist it into something he had not at all intended. He returned his attention to the surface below.

The next hour passed quickly. Satomura busied himself filming the terrain before it disappeared behind the blimp. He frequently instructed Tatiana to deviate from the planned course to capture something of interest, and at first she did so without complaint, her mind obviously elsewhere. But as they neared their destination she became more herself and refused his requests because they had fallen behind schedule.

The ship came to a stop.

“I have never seen anything like it,” Tatiana said.

Satomura, who was occupied with the surface directly beneath, looked up in surprise.

“My,” was all he could manage to utter.

Before them loomed a wall with thick maroon stripes stretched horizontal across its length. The wall towered over five kilometers into the Martian sky and was scarred by ridges and gullies. At the foot of the gully before them, Satomura could see the remnants of a massive landslide, which he judged to be relatively young—a few hundred thousand years. To the east was the great divide between Ophir and Candor Chasma. A long, thin hill with a flat top and finely fluted slopes was situated inside the divide. The slopes formed such a regular pattern that they looked as if they had been tilled. These were the layered deposits. He swung the camera in the direction of the deposits and panned back and forth across their length.

“Fascinating,” he said at last. “They have every appearance of having been created by a large body of standing water.”

“How’s that?” Tatiana asked.

“Notice the regularity of the layers. Such regularity would not be evident if they had been created by mass wasting or a catastrophic event. A lake, on the other hand, probably could have produced that pattern.”

“It must have been a rather large lake,” she said as she scanned her surroundings.

“Large, indeed.”

“Where to?” Tatiana asked.

Satomura extended a gnarled finger, held it stiffly upright as he contemplated the alternatives, then pointed toward a spot at the base of the layered deposits. “We should land there.”

Tatiana surveyed the proposed site and, seeing that it was reasonably flat and clear of rocks, accepted his suggestion.

“Hurry,” Satomura said.

The giant dirigible descended slowly toward the site. At three hundred meters, Satomura abandoned the cameras and pressed his helmet against the window so that he could see all of the approaching floor. His eye caught a bright reflection, and before the image had fully registered in his mind, he was shouting new instructions to Tatiana. As the ship turned the reflection disappeared. Satomura searched the surface, his fingers gripping the sill of the window. It could have been light reflected from ice, he thought to himself.

“Did you see it?” he demanded.

“See what?”

“The light,” he shouted. “The light.”

A full two minutes passed before a second flash exploded into view.

“Over there,” he shouted, twisting to his right.

“I saw it this time,” she said. Tatiana found herself caught up in his excitement. She had no idea what it was she had seen, but whatever it was she felt it must be important. In all her time with Satomura, she had never seen him so excited.

The flash flickered rapidly several times, then stopped. She eyed a clearing where they could land the dirigible and headed directly for it.

“It is ice!” Satomura exclaimed.

“I believe you’re right,” Tatiana said.

“This may very well be what I was looking for.” His voice shook as he spoke. He tore his eyes away from the ice to glance at her and saw that she seemed excited. He smiled, pleased to have someone to share his discovery with, and placed his hand on hers. Her eyes opened wide in surprise. He continued to hold her hand as he gazed down at the pool below.

The descent passed swiftly. Moments after the ship had landed, Satomura jumped onto the surface and strode hastily toward the ice. He twirled his head back over his shoulder and shouted at the diminishing Tatiana, “Quickly.”

“No need to shout,” Tatiana retorted. “My headset works just fine.”

Rocks of pinkish ice were scattered across the surface. Satomura walked past them, and upon reaching what he assumed to be their source, a pool of ice nearly five meters in diameter, he fell to his knees and began examining the surface of the pool. He was crawling on all fours around the outer edges of the pool when Tatiana arrived several minutes later. Loaded down with equipment, she sat upon a rock to catch her breath and watch.

“This must be recent,” he said without looking up. “Water ice is unstable at this latitude.”

“So where did all this ice come from?” she asked.

“From this geyser, of course,” Satomura said. “It must have reached at least fifty meters, judging from the scattering of the ice. A similar phenomenon has been observed on Neptune’s moon Triton. I can show you photographs of active geysers spewing frozen nitrogen several kilometers into the sky.” He paused to consider the implications of the discovery. “Water at this latitude would have to reside nearly a kilometer beneath the surface for it not to freeze. What a spectacular sight the eruption must have made.” He stood up and brushed the red dirt from his space suit.

“I must film this,” he said.

The pool of ice was frosty white with a slight pink tinge. Wisps of smoke floated over its surface like a miniature fog. Strewn around its perimeter were small blocks of ice, no larger than a fist, each with its own little cloud. With a slow, sweeping motion, he filmed the pool and its surrounding area. He then walked around the pool and filmed it from the opposite side. Touching a control on his chest plate, Satomura displayed the outside temperature on his visor. It read negative fifty-three degrees Celsius. He considered this for a while, his eyes affixed to the light mist that hovered above the ice.

“I believe the ice may be serving as a cap.” He stepped up to the edge to get a better look.

“When did it last erupt?” Tatiana asked.

“It must have been fairly recent. Last night, perhaps.”

“Are you saying this thing is active?” she asked wide-eyed. “Oh, there’s no doubt about that.”

Komarov, who had been listening from the
Gagarin
, suddenly grew interested. “When will it explode again?”

“Difficult to say,” Satomura responded. “It will erupt whenever the pressure inside the geyser is great enough to blow off the cap.”

“I want you out of there,” Komarov demanded.

“Yes, of course,” Satomura responded, sounding somewhat annoyed. “That was my intention all along. But first, I must set up the equipment and gather some samples. With the geo-phones in place we should be able to predict an eruption well before it happens.”

“How much time do you need?”

“No more than an hour.”

“You’ve got thirty minutes, and at the slightest sign of a disturbance I want you out of there.”

Satomura smiled because thirty minutes was actually all he needed. Folding his arms, he surveyed his surroundings, walked to the north side of the geyser, then motioned for Tatiana to approach. “Deploy a geophone at this spot here and position the other in the center of that depression.” He pointed a thickly gloved finger at a clearing north of their position. “We’ll set up the camera on the way out.”

Satomura bent down at the base of the ice and, waving aside the gases, touched it with his glove. It was pockmarked with ragged holes. He selected the chisel from his utility belt and struck the outer edge of the ice. After he had knocked loose several large chunks, he looked up to note Tatiana’s progress. She would require the full thirty minutes. He scooped up several handfuls of ice and placed the cubes in the Teflon-coated sample-collection bag. He sealed the airtight bag, and then double-checked the seal for leaks.