Mars (17 page)

It was still dark when the phone woke Jamie. He struggled up from a dream of ancient men trying to build a tower on the windswept top of a bare grassless mesa. The bricks kept melting away in the hot sunshine, the tower never rose higher than his own reach.

The phone buzzed insistently. Jamie finally opened his eyes, remembered that he was back in his own apartment again, alone, and groped for the telephone on the bedside table. The digital clock read 6:26
A.M.
There was no hint of sunrise through the drawn blinds of the bedroom window.

“Dr. Waterman?” a man’s voice asked crisply.

“Right.”

“This is an official message from Kaliningrad. I am Yegorov, personnel section.”

“Yes?” Jamie was instantly wide-awake.

“You are to report to the Johnson Space Center at eight hundred hours local time and receive your orders for immediate transportation to the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. From there you will board the space shuttle for transport to the orbital assembly facility.”

“You mean I’m going to Mars?” Jamie shouted into the phone.

“Oh, yes. Did you not know? You have been selected as geologist on the first landing team. Good luck.”

Jamie’s first impulse was to give an ear-splitting war whoop. But instead he merely said, “Thank you.”

He hung up, suddenly feeling hollow inside, empty, as if he had finally pushed through a door that had been locked against him and found that it opened onto thin air.

He got out of bed, showered, shaved, repacked his well-used travel bag, and drove out to the center. Sure enough, there was a team of grinning men and women at the travel office waiting for him.

“A plane will be ready for you at the airstrip in about half an hour.”

“What about my car?” Jamie suddenly realized he had made no plans about the car, the apartment, his furniture. Absurdly, he wondered what to do with his magazine and journal subscriptions.

“We’ll take care of all the details. Just sign these forms.”

Jamie scribbled his name without reading the forms. Fuck it, he thought. They can have the car and everything else. Won’t need it on Mars!

They drove him to the airstrip, the whole roomful of clerks piled into one gray agency station wagon, pressing against Jamie, wanting to be as close as they could be to the man who was going to Mars. Jamie did not mind the closeness, he was thankful for the ride; he did not trust himself to drive. The excitement was getting to him. Mars. Geologist on the first landing team. Mars.

Edith was standing at the entrance to the hangar, in jeans and a light sweater. Obviously not her working clothes. He suddenly felt ashamed for not phoning her.

“How’d you know?” he asked, travel bag in one hand.

She grinned up at him. “I have my sources. I work in news, y’know.”

“I …” Jamie did not know what to say. The clerks who had driven him here, the airplane mechanics, there were too many people watching them.

Edith’s grin turned rueful. “Well, we knew it wouldn’t last forever. It was fun, though.”

“I think the world of you, Edith.”

“Only this world, though. Now you got another one to think about.”

“Yes.” He laughed, feeling shaky, unsure.

She twined her arms around his neck and kissed him soundly. “Good luck, Jamie. Best luck in two worlds to you.”

All he could think to say was, “I’ll be back.”

She answered, “Sure you will.”

“Today’s the big day, huh?”

Despite the fact that he had been a jet fighter pilot and an astronaut with more than twenty shuttle missions on his record, Pete Connors reminded Jamie of a high school football player moments before the opening kickoff. His dark brown eyes, usually sorrowful, now showed an excitement that most men lose after their teen years, a barely suppressed sense of adventure.

Connors, Jamie, and most of the others were suiting up for their first day of actual scientific work on Mars. Bright sunshine streamed through the clear double-walled plastic of the inflated dome’s lower section; the weather forecast was for a typical late-summer day: clear skies, light wind, high temperature climbing up into the sixties after an overnight low of minus one hundred twelve.

“The big day,” Jamie agreed, tugging on the sky-blue outer pants of his hard suit.

They dressed in layers. First the form-fitting underwear that was honeycombed with thin, flexible water tubes. The water carried away body heat and kept the wearer at a reasonable temperature inside the heavily insulated hard suit. Next came the fabric coveralls and then the hard suit itself, built to contain a normal terrestrial air pressure of roughly fourteen pounds per square inch inside even if there were nothing but pure vacuum on the other side of its metal and plastic shell.

You leaned against a locker and laboriously tugged the hard-suit pants over your hips. The torso shell stood on a rack so you could duck under it and slide your arms through the sleeves while pushing your head through the bright metal
ring of the neck seal. Once inside the suit it was virtually impossible to bend over to pull on the boots. The explorers always dressed in pairs and helped each other with the boots and the backpacks that held the air regenerator, batteries, heater, pumps, and fans of the life-support system.

The first time Jamie had tried to don a hard suit, back oh Earth, it had taken more than an hour and seemed like a particularly sophisticated combination of torture and humiliation. The first time he had tried it in Martian gravity, as their spacecraft approached the red planet, things had gone much more easily. Now, however, he was getting accustomed to the light gravity of Mars, and putting on the suit was becoming a chore again.

Eight of the team were preparing to go outside the dome, struggling into their suits like a short-handed football team getting into its padding and uniforms. Or like knights putting on their armor. Jamie wondered if King Arthur’s men grumbled and swore while they suited up for battle.

Their dressing area was a line of racks and lockers where the suits were stored, with a pair of long plastic benches laid out in front of them. Built for Martian gravity, the benches looked to Jamie to be too thin to sit on safely, their slim legs too far apart.

But Connors thumped down on one, suit and all, to let Jamie help him into his heavy cleated boots. The others were doing the same, Jamie saw. The benches sagged slightly under the weight, but only slightly.

Boots zippered, Connors got up and stamped his feet on the plastic flooring.

“Good,” he said, nodding from inside the suit. “Now let’s get yours on.”

Jamie sat warily. He noticed Ilona Malater standing beside Joanna, both of them fully suited except for their helmets, talking together softly and earnestly, like school chums or sisters. Biochemist and microbiologist. Jamie thought that of all the scientists brought to Mars the two of them had the most to gain. Or lose. If they found any evidence for life at all they would become international celebrities. But if they failed to find any evidence of life the whole world, perhaps even the scientific community, would always wonder if they had overlooked something.

Was that why the board picked all women for the life
sciences? The third member of the bio team was Monique Bonnet, the French geochemist who had taken a cram course in paleontology, just in case they should discover fossils in the red sands or rocks.

The tall Israeli leaned closer to Joanna and said something that made her smile, then cover her mouth with a hand to keep from laughing out loud. They’re looking at me, Jamie realized. All the others are already in their suits, waiting to go. I’m the laggard.

He was sitting on the bench, hands clenched on its back edge, with one leg raised up so that his foot rested approximately in Connors’s groin. The women find that funny, Jamie thought, his face reddening.

“That’s it, friend,” said Connors.

Jamie put his leg down and got to his feet. The suit felt cumbersome, stiff. He clomped past the rack where it had hung, now looking like a pathetic dead plastic tree, and took his helmet from the shelf atop it. He started to put it on, more to hide his blushing than anything else.

“Gloves,” Connors said. “You don’t want to go outside without your gloves, man.”

Flustered, Jamie yanked his gloves from the clip on the rack and tucked them into the pouch on his right thigh. He had carefully placed the fetish his grandfather had given him in the left thigh pouch. It was small enough so that no one noticed him doing it. Following Connors and the others, he walked toward the airlock and the next set of racks, where the backpacks waited.

“Got to remember to do everything by the numbers,” Connors told him as he helped Jamie into the backpack.

“Right.”

“It’s not so bad now, everything’s new, we’re all real aware of what we’re doing. But later on, a few days from now or a few weeks, when it’s all so routine we don’t even think about it—that’s when you can make a mistake that’ll kill you. Or kill somebody else.”

Jamie nodded. He knew that Connors was right. Mission regulations insisted that one astronaut be part of the team whenever anyone went outside the dome. The astronaut served as safety officer; his responsibility was to make certain that all safety rules were strictly followed. His authority was absolute.

“What’s your assignment for today?” Jamie asked as he turned to help Connors. “Or are you just going outside to watch us like a safety patrolman?”

Glancing back over his shoulder at Jamie, Connors said, “Sure I got a job. Decontamination and cleanup. I got to make sure all of us clean off whatever dust we pick up on our suits before we come back inside again.”

Before Jamie could say anything, Connors added, “You know they’d make the black man into the janitor, don’tcha?”

For a moment Jamie felt startled, upset. Then Connors broke into a toothy grin. “My main task this morning is taping a TV show for the kids back home.”

Jamie felt relieved. Connors had never shown the slightest trace of ill humor; he seemed always cheerful, not an angry bone in his body.

“I’m going to be Dr. Science on Mars. Show the local scenery, do a few simple demonstrations of the low air pressure and gravity. For educational TV. I’ll be a media star all around the world!”

Laughing, Jamie said, “Good for you.”

At last they were all ready. Jamie remembered to pull on his gloves and seal them to the metal cuffs of his suit. The backs of the gloves were ridged like an external skeleton of slim plastic “bones”; the palms and fingertips were clear plastic, hardly thicker than kitchen cling wrap.

Like the others, Jamie took the tools he needed for the morning’s work and clipped them to the web belt at his waist. Rock pick. Scoop. Corer. Sample bags. He held in one hand the long telescoping titanium pole that could serve as a lever or extended handle.

“A true spear carrier.”

Jamie turned to see Joanna standing beside him, a lovely butterfly trapped inside a glaring orange cocoon. Both her hands were filled with bulky silvered cases.

“You look like an encyclopedia salesman,” he said.

She blinked, puzzled.

“Okay, listen up,” Connors called to them. “We go through the airlock in Noah’s ark fashion: two by two. Visors down, everybody.”

Joanna had to put her instrument cases on the floor before she could deal with her helmet visor.

“Check seals and air flow.” Connors’s melodious voice now came humming through the helmet earphones.

The astronaut personally checked each of the scientists before starting them through the airlock. He and Monique Bonnet went through together, clean white and tricolor blue. Then Patel in his butter-yellow suit with Naguib, kelly green. Ilona and Toshima were next, the green of her suit a shade or two darker than the Egyptian’s, while the Japanese meteorologist’s softly peach-colored suit bristled with instruments and equipment that dangled from every conceivable type of belt and harness. Jamie thought that Toshima barely was able to raise his booted feet over the lip of the airlock hatch. If he ever trips and falls it’ll take two of us to haul him back up to his feet.

Finally it was Jamie’s turn, with Joanna. The two Russians, Abell, and Tony Reed remained inside. Mironov and Reed were assigned to monitor the scientists on the surface; the hard suits had instrumentation built into them that automatically reported on body temperature, heart and breathing rate, and oxygen/carbon dioxide ratio inside the suit. Astronaut Abell ran the comm console, maintaining contact with the expedition command in orbit while Vosnesensky watched everybody and everything with the eye of a Russian eagle.

With its visor down Jamie’s hard suit served as a shell that protected him from the gaze of others. He was glad of it. He had been embarrassed minutes earlier, and now he felt his stomach fluttering and his palms getting damp. It was not fear so much as anticipation. He was about to step out onto the surface of Mars and begin the work that he had dreamed about for so many years.

Let me go in beauty, he found himself thinking. Let me find harmony and beauty out there.

The noise of the airlock pumps dwindled down until Jamie could only feel their vibration through his boots. The telltale light on the tiny control panel turned red, indicating that the chamber had been pumped down to the ambient pressure outside. He leaned on the control button and the outer hatch sighed open a crack.

Pushing it all the way open, Jamie waited until Joanna went through before he stepped out onto the sandy red, rock-strewn desert to begin his morning’s work.

Like almost everything else about the mission, the selection of their landing site had been a political compromise.

The biologists had wanted to land near the polar cap, where beneath the layers of ice and frozen carbon dioxide there might be hidden pools of liquid water—and some form of life. Experiments conducted by unmanned landing probes, starting with the original
Viking I
and
II
back in 1976, had shown that there was unusual chemical activity in the Martian soil. Could life exist in that soil, if there was liquid water available?