Mars (18 page)

The geologists could not make up their minds where they wanted to land, with an entire strange new world to sink their picks into. There were massive volcanoes to study, a rift valley longer than the distance from New York to San Francisco, regions where meteoric craters studded the landscape and made it appear as battered as the moon. There were areas that looked as if the ground were underlaid by layers of permafrost, oceans of water frozen underground. There were cliffs and highlands that undoubtedly bore the testimony of billions of years of weathering, and the huge Hellas Basin, a hole nearly a thousand miles wide and three miles deep.

The physicists wanted to study how energetic radiation and subatomic particles streaming in from the sun and stars interacted with the thin Martian atmosphere. They also wanted to probe the planet’s interior, to determine why Mars had no planetwide magnetic field, as Earth does.

The Russians especially wanted to examine the two tiny moons of Mars and test techniques for extracting rocket propellants from their rocky bodies. The Americans wanted to visit the old
Viking I
lander and place a plaque on it honoring a dead scientist.

The resolution of these conflicting desires was a compromise that pleased no one. The landing site picked was just north of the equator at one hundred degrees west latitude, on the edge of the massive upland rise called the Tharsis Bulge. To the south was the badlands of Noctis Labyrinthus; to the west the mammoth Tharsis shield volcanoes. But their actual landing site was an undistinguished, gently sloping flatland that was considered relatively safe for the landings, about equally distant from the western end of the monumental rift valley known as Valles Marineris and the chain of volcanoes that crowned the Tharsis highlands.

A special team in the orbiting spacecraft would visit Deimos and Phobos, the two moons of Mars, so that the Russians could test their ideas. One of the American astronauts could fly the soarplane to the
Viking I
site, if conditions permitted. The ground team commander, cosmonaut Mikhail Andreivitch Vosnesensky, would decide if the conditions were right. And the flight would take place only if the expedition commander, Dr. Li Chengdu, granted his approval.

The explorers had two sizable ground vehicles for crosscountry travel and two gossamer-winged soarplanes for covering longer distances.

Mission plans were specific and detailed. There would be brief excursions to the Noctis Labyrinthus badlands and to one of the Tharsis volcanoes. There would be extensive chemical tests of the Martian soil. There would be drilling to look for underground water. And of course, there would be the ongoing search for any sign that life might have once existed on Mars.

Of all the landing sites in all the regions of all the planet Mars, they had to pick this, Jamie grumbled to himself. Probably the dullest place they could find. A moderately cratered plain on an upland bulge, too far from the interesting line of volcanoes to even glimpse their sixteen-mile-high peaks above the horizon. Some sand dunes off to the west and the same old rocks that lay all across the surface everywhere you looked. The most interesting thing in this region would be the fracture ridges in the wild badlands to the south, but that’s nearly three hundred kilometers away.

Ah well, he sighed inwardly. They picked this spot for a safe landing, not for its geological interest. Get to work.

Jamie began by collecting rock samples. The broad open plain on which they had landed was covered with rocks ranging from pebble-sized to boulders as big as a man. Probably thrown up when a good-sized meteoroid hit the ground. Or maybe an eruption of one of the Tharsis volcanoes, although they didn’t look as if they had erupted so violently. Jamie’s equipment back in the dome would tell him which it was, he felt sure.

“Please be sure to look for any odd color,” Joanna’s voice came to him through his earphones.

Jamie turned his head and saw only the inside of his helmet.
He turned his entire body ninety degrees and there she was in her Day-Glo suit, a dozen meters away, with Monique Bonnet still close beside her.

“Any color in particular?” he half joked. “We’ve got a great assortment of reds and pinks here.”

“Green would be nice,” chirped Monique’s lightly pleasant voice.

“Any color at all that seems out of the ordinary,” Joanna said. “We are not particular. Not yet.”

Just outside the dome’s airlock Connors was setting up one of the TV cameras for his educational show. He had a little box of props at his feet. The others were stooped over as far as the suits would allow, intently searching the sandy soil like a squad of groundkeepers looking for litter. Or that famous painting, Jamie said to himself.
The Gleaners.
That’s what we’re doing, gleaning, trying to find scraps of food for our minds in this frozen desert.

Damned tough to see the ground inside the suit, Jamie grumbled silently. Hardly any flexibility at all. Whoever designed these aluminum cans wasn’t thinking about the work we have to do while we’re inside them.

Toshima was busily setting up a weather station about twenty meters from the dome, on the side away from the two landing vehicles. His peach-colored suit blended with the rust-red background much better than Jamie would have thought. He’s camouflaged. That could be a problem. The suit colors had been picked to stand out clearly against the Martian landscape. Who the hell okayed peach?

Ilona was scooping up the loose sandy soil with a small shovel and pouring it into a box. She, Joanna, and Monique were going to try to raise an assortment of beans, squash, peas, and cucumbers inside the dome, using as much of the native Martian resources as possible—including water, if they found any. One of the goals of their research was to see how the lighter Martian gravity would affect plant growth and size. They expected to bring their small agricultural test facility back to the orbiting spacecraft with them and continue the experiment on the return flight to Earth.

They’ll have to bake the oxides out of the soil first, Jamie knew. Otherwise it’ll be like planting seeds in bleach.

He turned his attention to the rocks. There was certainly no shortage of them. Big blocks more than a meter wide,
plenty of smaller stuff down to the size of pebbles. Many of the rocks looked pitted, etched by weathering. Couldn’t be rain, Jamie thought. Hasn’t rained here in a billion years, I’d bet. There was frost on winter mornings, though. The rocks expanded in the day’s heat, such as it was, and contracted during the bitterly cold nights.

But that wouldn’t pit them, Jamie thought. They ought to crack laterally and flake, not get pitted like golf balls. If they were volcanic, then the pitting could be from gases trapped inside the rocks bubbling out and escaping. Could they have been thrown all the way out here from the volcanoes six or seven hundred kilometers away? Or had they been blasted out of the ground by ancient meteor strikes and thrown clear of the atmosphere, reentering afterward like ballistic missiles?

He filled the two sacks he had brought with him with rocks of varying sizes, then realized with a start that he had been out for more than three hours. The sun was almost directly overhead, a strangely tiny and pale imitation of the sun he had known, shining weakly out of the salmon-colored sky.

Turning, he could no longer see the dome, although the blunt cylindrical tops of the two landers were still visible. In the distance he saw one of the unmanned spacecraft, its big cargo hatch gaping open, empty.

The horizon is shorter here, he reminded himself. Turn around, get yourself oriented properly.

“Waterman, you are out of range of the monitor cameras.” Vosnesensky’s voice sounded more annoyed than worried. “Can you hear me?”

“Yes, loud and clear.”

“You are almost at the limit of safe walk-back distance. Come back toward the dome.”

Jamie felt almost glad that he was being commanded to come back. It was one thing to be alone back home, in the mountains or desert scrubland. Out here, in this strange world without air to breathe or water to drink, Jamie had been almost frightened.

And yet—it felt good to be alone, away from the others. Solitude had been rare, nonexistent, over the past several years. Jamie stood as tall as his suit would allow and gazed
out toward the beckoning horizon, his back to the dome and the others. Even inside the hard shell of his suit he strove to get a feeling for this Martian landscape, a sense of harmony with this strange new world.

Then he saw a patch of green.

During initial excursion on Sol 3 pilot/astronaut P. Connors will demonstrate on camera the following:

1. Colors of Martian landscape. Pan camera to show ground color and color of sky.
   

2. A Martian rock. Pick up moderate-sized rock, show it to camera. Explain that red color is from oxidation of iron-based minerals.
   

3. Temperature. Place thermometer on ground, show temperature (approximately 60–70 degrees Fahrenheit). Lift thermometer to eye level, show mercury dropping to zero or below. Explain that this phenomenon is due to low heat-retention capacity of thin Martian atmosphere.
   

4. Low air pressure. Open flask of ordinary water and let camera see that it immediately boils, even at temperature of zero or below, because of extremely low air pressure. Explain that same would happen to blood in body if not protected by pressurized hard suit.
   

5. Low gravity. Drop rock hammer to show that it falls more slowly than similar object on Earth, although faster than on Moon. (Contrast with earlier videotape of Astronaut Connors dropping same rock hammer when on Moon.)
   

6. Moon of Mars. If visible against daylight sky, show inner moon, Phobos, as it rises in west and
   crosses Martian sky in four hours. (It is not necessary to show entire four-hour transit. Use telescopic lens to show Phobos changing phase from “new” to “quarter” to “full.” Tape can be edited to fit time allowed for broadcast.)
   

Jamie’s first instinct was to blink and rub his eyes, but his gloved hands bumped into the transparent visor of his helmet.

He stared at the rock. It was roughly two feet long, flat-topped and oblong. Its sides looked smooth, not pitted like most of the other rocks. And on one side of it there was a distinct patch of green.

He walked slowly around it, stepping over other small rocks and around the larger ones that were strewn everywhere. There was no green anywhere else. If I’d come up on the other side of it I’d never have noticed the color, he realized.

One rock. With a little area of green on one of its flat sides. One rock out of thousands. One bit of color in a world of rusty reds.

“Waterman, I do not see you,” Vosnesensky called.

“I’ve found something.”

“Come back toward the dome.”

“I’ve found some green,” Jamie said, annoyed.

“What?”

“Green.”

“Where are you?”

“What do you mean? What is it?”

Jamie scanned the area around him. “Can you see the big boulder with the cleft in its top?”

“No. Where …”

“I can!” Joanna’s voice, brimming with excitement. “Just to the west of the second lander. See it?”

“Ah, yes,” said Monique.

“This way,” Joanna called.

Within a minute seven hard-suited figures appeared over the horizon just to the right of the cleft boulder. Jamie waved to them and they waved back.

Then he turned to the rock, his rock. Sinking slowly to his knees in the awkward suit, he leaned as close to it as he dared. He almost expected to see ants or their Martian equivalent busily scurrying around the ground.

What he saw, instead, was nothing but the powdery red sand and the rust-colored rock with a streak of green running down its flattish side. Christ, it looks like a little vein of copper that’s been exposed to the air. But then Jamie remembered that there was precious little oxygen in the Martian air. Enough to turn a vein of copper green? How long had the vein been exposed to the air? Ten thousand years? Ten million?

He leaned back on his haunches, his back to the approaching scientists.

“Where is it?” Joanna asked breathlessly.

“You look as if you’re praying,” said Naguib’s reedy nasal voice. “Has it made a believer of you?”

“Don’t get too worked up,” Jamie told them, looking up as they surrounded him and the rock. “I think it’s just a streak of oxidized copper.”

Patel, in his yellow suit, clumsily got down on all fours to peer closely at the rock. “Yes, I believe that is so.”

Joanna flattened herself beside him. “It might be just the surface coating of a colony that lives inside the rock. Like the microflora in Antarctica, they use the rocks for shelter and absorb moisture from the frost that gathers on the rock’s surfaces.”

“I am afraid that it is nothing more than a patina of copper oxide,” Patel said in his Hindu cadence and British pronunciation.

“We must make certain,” said Monique, as calmly as if she were selecting a wine at a Paris bistro. Cool head, Jamie thought. Warm heart?

“We’ll have to take it inside …”

“Don’t touch it!” Joanna snapped.

“We can’t examine it in any detail out here,” Jamie said. “We’ve got to bring it inside the dome.”

“It is a possible biological sample,” Joanna said with unexpected proprietary fierceness.

It’s copper oxide, thought Jamie.

Struggling to her feet, Joanna said, “I left my bio sampling cases when you called. They can maintain the ambient conditions inside them. If you bring the rock into the dome and it is suddenly thrust into
our
environment it would kill any native organisms that may be inside it.”

Jamie nodded inside his helmet. She was right. Even though the chances were that the green streak was just a patina of copper oxide, there was no sense screwing up what might be the biggest discovery of all time.

“Please do not touch the rock,” Joanna said. “Perhaps the rest of you could look around this area to see if any other rocks show such color. But do not touch them in any way. Do you all understand?”

Suddenly she was in charge. She wasn’t whispering anymore. The lovely little butterfly had turned into a dragon lady. What had started out as a geology field trip had turned into a biology session, and Jamie was just one of the flunkies. He felt his lips pressing into a tight angry line.