Mars (4 page)

Fourth planet out from the sun, Mars never gets closer to the Earth than thirty-five million miles. It is a small world, roughly half the diameter of ours, with a surface gravity just a bit more than a third of Earth’s. A hundred pounds on Earth weighs only thirty-eight pounds on Mars.

Mars is known as the red planet because its surface is mainly a bone-dry desert of sandy iron oxides: rusty iron dust.

Yet there is water on Mars. The planet has bright polar caps, composed at least partially of frozen water—covered over most of the year by frozen carbon dioxide, dry ice.

For Mars is a
cold
world. It orbits roughly one and a half times farther from the sun than the Earth does. Its atmosphere is far too thin to retain solar heat. On a clear midsummer day along the Martian equator the afternoon high temperature might climb to seventy degrees Fahrenheit; that same night, however, it will plunge to a hundred below zero or lower.

The atmosphere of Mars is too thin to breathe, even if it
were pure oxygen. Which it is not. More than ninety-five percent of the Martian “air” is carbon dioxide; nearly three percent nitrogen. There is a tiny amount of oxygen and even less water vapor. The rest of the atmosphere consists of inert gases such as argon, neon and such, a whiff of carbon monoxide, and a trace of ozone.

Still, Mars is the most Earthlike of any other world in the solar system. There are seasons on Mars—spring, summer, autumn, and winter. Because its orbit is farther from the sun, the Martian year is nearly twice as long as Earth’s (a few minutes short of 689 Earth days) and its seasons are correspondingly much longer than Earth’s.

Mars rotates about its axis in almost the same time that Earth does. A day on Earth is 23 hours, 56 minutes, and 4.09 seconds long. A day on Mars is only slightly longer: 24 hours, 37 minutes, and 22.7 seconds.

To avoid confusion, space explorers refer to the Martian day as a “sol.” In one Martian year there are 669 sols, plus an untidy fourteen hours, forty-six minutes, and twelve seconds.

Is there life on Mars?

That question has haunted the human psyche for centuries. It is the primary force behind our drive to reach the red planet. We want to see for ourselves if life can exist there.

Or once did.

Or does now.

The first thing the scientists did, after their little arrival speeches, was collect contingency samples of the Martian rocks, soil, and atmosphere.

Just in case a sudden emergency forced them to scramble into their landing/ascent vehicle and blast back into orbit around the planet, they spent their first two hours on the surface stuffing rocks and soil samples into airtight cases and filling vials with whiffs of air taken from ground level on up to ten meters, the latter obtained with the use of a gangling titanium pole.

Meanwhile, the construction robot trundled across the rocky ground out to the three unmanned cargo carriers that had landed the previous day, scattered over a two-kilometer-wide radius from their nominal landing site. Like an oversized mechanical ant, the robot busily hauled their cargos back to the inflated dome that would be home to the explorers for the next eight weeks.

Mikhail Andreivitch Vosnesensky, veteran of a dozen space missions, sat up in the cockpit in the commander’s seat, one eye on the scientists and the other on the mission schedule. Beside him, Pete Connors monitored the robot and conversed with the expedition command in orbit around the planet. Although both men stayed in their hard suits, ready to dash outside if an emergency required their help, they had taken their helmets off.

Connors switched off the radio and turned to the Russian. “The guys in orbit confirm that we landed only a hundred thirty meters from our nominal target spot They send their congratulations.”

Vosnesensky offered a rare smile. “It would have been closer, but the boulders were too big farther south.”

“You did a damned good job,” said Connors. “Kaliningrad will be pleased.” His voice was a rich baritone, trained in church choirs. The American had a long, almost horsey face with a complexion the color of milk chocolate and large sorrowful brown eyes rimmed with red. His hair was cropped militarily short, showing the distinct vee of a widow’s peak.

“You know what the old pilots say,” Vosnesensky replied.

Connors chuckled. “Any landing you can walk away from is a good landing.”

“All systems are working. We are on schedule.” It was Vosnesensky’s way of making light of his skillful landing. The Russian did not trust flattery, even from a man he had worked with for nearly four years. A scowl was the normal expression on his broad, beefy face. His sky-blue eyes always looked suspicious.

“Yeah. And now the second team has to land where we are. Wonder how good Mironov and my old buddy Abell will be?”

“Mironov is very good. An excellent pilot. He could land on our roof, if he wanted to.”

Connors laughed, light and easy. “Now that would cause a helluva problem, wouldn’t it?”

Vosnesensky made his lips curl upward, but it obviously took an effort.

The scientists stored their contingency samples inside the airlock section of the L/AV. In an emergency, the airlock section and the cockpit atop it would lift off the ground. The lower half of the lander—the cargo bays and aerobrake—would remain on Mars. Even if one or more of the explorers were left behind, the precious samples would make it to the expedition spacecraft riding in orbit and then back to the scientists waiting on Earth.

That first chore completed to Vosnesensky’s satisfaction, he ordered the team to move supplies into the dome. They hurried to beat the oddly tiny sun as it got close to the western horizon. The construction vehicle towed the heavy pallets of equipment, while the explorers performed feats of seemingly superhuman strength, lifting man-tall green cylinders of oxygen tanks and bulky crates that would have weighed hundreds of pounds on Earth.

Sweating like a laborer inside his pressurized hard suit, Jamie smiled bitterly at the thought that the first task of the first explorers on Mars was to toil like coolies, grunting and lifting for hours in mindless drudgery. The public-relations statements and TV pictures make it all look so damned easy, he thought. Nobody ever watches a scientist at work—especially when he’s doing dog labor.

Neither he nor the others paid any special attention to their low-gravity strength. Over the nine-plus months of their flight from Earth their spacecraft had spun on a five-kilometer-long tether to simulate a feeling of weight, since prolonged periods in zero gravity weakened muscles dangerously and demineralized bones. Their artificial gravity began at a normal Earthly one g, then was slowly reduced during the months of their flight to the Martian value of roughly one-third g. Now, on the surface of Mars, they could walk normally yet still lift enormous weights with their Earth-evolved muscles.

At the end of their long, exhausting day they moved at last inside the inflated dome. The tiny sun was turning the sky flame-red and the temperature outside was already fifty below zero.

The dome was filled with breathable air at normal Earth pressure and temperature, according to the gauges. The thermometer read precisely twenty-one degrees Celsius: sixty-nine point eight degrees Fahrenheit.

The six of them were still inside their pressurized hard suits, however, and would stay in them until Vosnesensky decided it was safe to breathe the dome’s air. Jamie’s suit felt heavy against his shoulders. It no longer had that “new car” odor of clean plastic and untouched fabric; it smelled of sweat and machine oil. The backpack regenerator replaced carbon dioxide with breathable oxygen, but the filters and miniature fans inside the suit could not remove all of the odors that accumulated from strenuous work.

“Now comes the moment of truth,” he heard Ilona Malater’s husky voice, sounding sexy—or maybe just tired.

Vosnesensky had spent the past few hours checking the dome for leaks, monitoring the air pressure and composition, fussing over the life-support pumps and heaters grouped together in the center of the hardened plastic flooring. One by one, the others slowly drifted to him, clumping in their thick
boots, waiting for him to give the order they ail awaited with a strange mixture of eagerness and dread.

Like it or not, Vosnesensky was their team leader, and years of training had drilled them to obey their leader’s orders without a thought for his nationality. Everything they did on this dangerously different world would be carried out according to rules and regulations painstakingly developed on Earth. Vosnesensky’s first and most important task was to see that those rules and regulations were carried out here on Mars.

Now the Russian turned from the gently humming air-circulation fans and the row of backup oxygen tanks to see that his five team members had gathered around him. It was difficult to make out his face through the helmet visor, impossible to read his expression. In his barely accented American English he said, “All the gauges are in the normal range. It appears safe to get out of our suits.”

Jamie recalled a physicist at Albuquerque, frustrated over an experiment that refused to work right, telling him, “All of physics boils down to reading a goddam dial on a goddam gauge.”

Vosnesensky turned to Connors, the second-in-command. “Pete, the mission plan calls for you to test the air first.”

The American chuckled nervously from inside his helmet. “Yeah, I’m the guinea pig, I know.”

He took an exaggeratedly sighing breath that they could all hear in their earphones. Then, “Here goes.”

Connors opened his helmet visor a crack, took a sniff, then slid the visor all the way up and pulled in a deeper breath. He broke into a toothy grin. “Helluva lot better than what’s outside.”

They all laughed and the tension cracked. Each of them pushed up their visors, then unlocked the neck seals of their suits and lifted their helmets off altogether. Jamie’s ears popped, but nothing worse happened.

Ilona shook her short-clipped blonde curls and inhaled slowly, her slim nostrils flaring slightly. “Huh! It smells just like the training module. Too dry. Bad for the skin.”

Jamie took a long look around their new home, now that his vision was no longer restricted by the helmet.

He saw the dome rising into shadowed gloom over his head, ribbed with curving metal struts. It reminded him of
the first time he had gone into a planetarium, back when he’d been a kid in Santa Fe. The same hushed, awed feeling. The same soft coolness to the air. To Ilona the air felt too dry; to him it felt delicious.

The dome’s smooth plastic skin had been darkened by a polarizing electric current to keep the heat inside. In daylight the dome’s lower section would be made transparent to take advantage of solar heating, but at night it was like an oversized igloo sitting on the frozen Martian plain, darkened to retain heat and not allow it to radiate away into the thin, frigid Martian air. Strips of sunlight-equivalent fluorescent lamps lit the floor area softly, but the upper reaches of the dome were barely visible in the darkness gathering there.

The plastic skin of the dome was double walled, like insulating windows, to keep out the cold. The topmost section was opaque, filled in with a special dense plastic that would absorb harmful radiation and even stop small meteorites, according to the engineers. The thought of the dome getting punctured was scary. Patches and sealing compounds were placed along its perimeter, but would they have time to repair a puncture before all the air gushed out? Jamie remembered the hoary old joke of the parachute packers: “Don’t worry about it. If this chute doesn’t work, bring it back and we’ll give you a new one.”

The electric power that heated the dome came from the compact nuclear generator inside one of the cargo vehicles. Tomorrow, after the second team’s landing, the construction robot was scheduled to extract the generator and bury it in the Martian soil half a kilometer from the dome.

Mustn’t call it soil, Jamie reminded himself. Soil is alive with microorganisms and earthworms and other living creatures. Here on Mars it’s called regolith, just like the totally dead surface of the totally dead moon.

Is Mars really dead? Jamie asked himself. He remembered the stories he had read as a youngster, wild tales of Martians battling along their planet-girdling canals, beautiful fantasies of cities built like chess pieces and houses that turned to follow the sun like flowers. There were no canals on Mars, Jamie knew. No cities. But is the planet entirely lifeless? Are there fossils to be dug out of that red sand?

As they drove along the river, Yuri Zavgorodny gestured with his free hand.

“Like your New Mexico, no?” he asked in his hesitant English.

Jamie Waterman unconsciously rubbed his side. They had taken the stitches out only yesterday and the incision still felt sore.

“New Mexico,” Zavgorodny repeated. “Like this? Yes?”

Jamie almost answered, “No.” But the mission administrators had warned them all to be as diplomatic as possible with the Russians—and everyone else.

“Sort of,” Jamie murmured.

“Yes?” asked Zavgorodny over the rush of the searing wind blowing through the car windows.

“Yes,” said Jamie.

The flat brown country stretching out beyond the river looked nothing like New Mexico. The sky was a washed-out pale blue, the desert bleak and empty in every direction. This is an old, tired land, Jamie said to himself as he squinted against the baking hot wind. Used up. Dried out. Nothing like the vivid mountains and bold skies of his home. New Mexico was a new land, raw and magic and mystical. This dull dusty desert out here is ancient; it’s been worn flat by too many armies riding across it.

“Like Mars,” said one of the other Russians. His voice was a deep rumble, where Zavgorodny’s was reedy, like a snake-charmer’s flute. Jamie had been quickly introduced to all four of them but the only name that stuck was Zavgorodny’s.

Christ, I hope Mars isn’t this dull, Jamie said to himself.

Yesterday Jamie had been at Bethesda Naval Hospital, having the stitches from his appendectomy removed. All the Mars mission trainees had their appendixes taken out. Mission regulations. No sense risking an attack of appendicitis twenty million miles from the nearest hospital. Even though the decisions about who would actually go to Mars had not been made yet, everyone lost his or her appendix.