Mars (46 page)

“The next thing you will tell me is that this is the will of Allah,” said Patel.

“I am an atheist,” Naguib replied, smiling gently. “But I realize that our Navaho friend has prevailed with the mission directors, and the Americans have seized control of the mission plan. There is nothing we can do about it.”

They heard the clumping of the two other men entering the airlock. Patel’s slim hands clenched into fists, and for a moment Naguib thought that he would gladly murder Waterman.

While the three geological scientists were off on their excursion, the three biological scientists spent their spare time planning the coming trip to Tithonium Chasma.

They sat at the galley table, strewn with maps and photographs taken from the orbiting spacecraft. They had all watched Jamie’s videotapes until they knew them by heart.

“Is it possible to believe that the formation could be a building of some kind?” Monique Bonnet asked.

Tony Reed, who had joined the three women when he saw them bringing their photos and papers to the galley, dismissed the idea. “It’s projection on Jamie’s part, a well-known psychological phenomenon,” he said. “We see what we want to see. We hear what we want to hear. That’s how palm readers make their money, telling their customers what they want to hear, no matter how outrageous it is. Something in Jamie’s subconscious wanted to see cliff dwellings and,
voilà!
he saw them.”

Ilona leaned back in her chair, reminding Reed of a tawny jaguar stretching on a tree branch.

“The formation truly exists. It is not imaginary. We will see for ourselves whether it is natural or artificial once we get there,” she said, her husky voice sounding almost bored with the subject. “For now, we must decide which of us goes on the excursion with Jamie.”

Joanna nodded agreement and turned to Monique.

“You go,” said the French geochemist. “The two of you. I will remain here and tend the plants.”

Ilona frowned at her.

“You don’t want to go?” Joanna asked.

Monique made a Gallic shrug. “You want to much more
than I do. It makes more sense for our biologist and biochemist to go.”

“But you are a part of our biology team, too,” said Ilona, straightening up in her chair. “We will need your expertise to test the soil at the bottom of the canyon.”

“You can bring samples back here to me.”

“But what about fossils?” Joanna asked, looking worried. “You have the most training in paleontology. We might miss something.”

Monique laughed lightly. “If there are any bones or skulls out there I’m sure you can find them as easily as I.”

“Microfossils?” Reed asked.

She turned her dimpled smiling face to the Englishman. “Tony, I have scanned every soil sample that we have taken. I have cracked rocks open and put microtome-thin slices under the microscope. There are no fossils. No microbes, living or long dead.”

Reed fingered his slim moustache. “Well …”

“But, Monique,” said Joanna, “suppose we come across fossils at the bottom of the canyon but we don’t recognize them as such? Organisms native to Mars. How would we know that we are looking at fossils?”

“How would I know?” Monique shot back. “How would any of us?”

Joanna cast an uneasy glance at her colleagues around the table.

Reed broke into a wide grin. “A classic problem, isn’t it? How do you recognize something that you’ve never seen before?”

The three women had no answer.

Jamie could feel the hostility building within the cramped confines of the rover with every kilometer they covered on their way to Pavonis Mons.

Dinner that evening was virtually silent. Even Mironov, whose normal expression was a pleasant smile, had nothing to say, no jokes to offer. Patel, perched like a nervous bird on the edge of the bench across the narrow table from Jamie, would not look at him.

Naguib tried to ease the tension.

“Tomorrow we reach the fracture zone, at last,” he said,
mopping up the last bits of his meal with a thin piece of pita bread.

Feeling grateful, Jamie answered the older man, “Right. And we begin to get some absolute dates for the age of the lava flows.”

Patel put his fork down. “We have three little days to do the work that was originally scheduled for a full week.”

“I’m willing to work double shifts for those three days, Rava,” said Jamie. “I know you …”

“You know nothing!” the Hindu snapped. “Nothing except your mad desire to go to the canyon again and make yourself the hero of this expedition.”

“Hero?”

“Do you know how many years I have spent studying the Tharsis volcanoes? Not three. Not five. Not ten.” Patel was trembling with rage. “Fifteen years! Since I was an undergraduate in Delhi! For fifteen years I have pored over photographs of those shields, studied the remote measurements made by spacecraft. And now that I am finally here, you have cut down my time to three miserable days.”

Jamie felt no anger. He knew exactly what Patel was going through. He remembered how he had felt when Vosnesensky cut short his examination of the canyon and the cliff dwellings because of Konoye’s death.

“You’re right, Rava,” he said slowly, his voice deep and calm and implacable. “Only three days. I’ll do everything I can to help you learn as much as possible during our stay at Pavonis. But after three days we go back.”

“So you can ride out to the canyon.”

“Yes.”

“And look for your absurd cliff dwellings.”

“Look for life.”

“Bah! Nonsense! Absolute nonsense.”

“Rava, if I truly had my way we would stay here on Mars for a year or more. We would have new teams arriving. We would be exploring this planet on a rational scientific basis. But I don’t have my way. None of us does.”

“You have more of your way than I have of mine,” Patel grumbled.

Jamie acknowledged the point with a dip of his head. “Yes, that’s so. But if you want to come back to Mars someday and spend as much time as you like studying these volcanoes,
then we’ve got to bring the politicians something that they can’t ignore. They can’t ignore evidence of life, Rava. And the most likely place to find life—even evidence of extinct life—is at the bottom of Tithonium Chasma.”

“There are other places,” Naguib said, “equally likely. Hellas, for example …”

“We can’t reach that far on this mission,” said Jamie. “It’s halfway around the planet. The canyon is as far as we can get this time, and even that’s stretching things.”

“You can be perfectly rational, can’t you, when you are getting what you want,” Patel said.

“I’m not going to argue with you, Rava,” Jamie replied. “I understand how you feel. I’d feel the same way if our positions were reversed.”

“Yes, of course.”

Jamie slid out from behind the narrow table and stood at his full height. Looking down at Patel he said, “If my jaunt out to the canyon had been scrubbed in favor of extending your stay at the volcanoes, I’d be sore as hell. But I’d accept it and try to do my best to make your excursion a success.”

Patel turned away from him.

Mironov, his usual smile long disappeared, said quietly, “I suggest that we drop this topic of conversation. The mission plan is firm. We spend the next three days at Pavonis Mons and then return to the base. No further arguments.”

Jamie nodded and headed up toward the cockpit. Naguib made a small shrug of acceptance. Patel grimaced and stared after Jamie, his dark eyes burning.

When Tony Reed tried to sleep he heard the night wind of Mars moaning outside the dome. The noise unsettled him. One little meteor hit, a bit of dust so small that they could find no trace of it afterward, had almost killed them all. Oh, it’s very well for Vosnesensky and the others to boast that all the safety systems worked and we were never in actual danger: My left foot! We could have all been asphyxiated. No, we wouldn’t have lasted that long. The blood and fluids in our bodies would have boiled. We would have popped like overcooked sausages, exploded like pricked balloons.

He shuddered beneath his light blanket.

I’m not a coward. Tony almost said it aloud. He pictured
his father standing over his cot, glowering at him. I’m not a coward. It isn’t cowardly to fear real danger. We’re constantly on the edge of death here. Each breath we draw might be our last.

He squeezed his eyes shut and tried to force himself to sleep. Unbidden, the memory of his mother came to him: all the times she let him crawl into bed with her when a clap of thunder or some other noise had frightened him.

He wished his mother were here to comfort him now. Ilona had refused to come to his bed once they had landed on Mars. If he suggested it to Monique she would smile and pat his cheek and walk away, laughing softly to herself. He was certain of that.

Joanna. If only Joanna would come to him, comfort him. He needed her warmth here on this world of cold and danger. He longed to feel her arms enfold him in safety.

Tony Reed was barely four years old, lying in a hospital bed feeling very small and very frightened. His father bustled in, bundled in a heavy dark overcoat and a muffler striped gray and red, his nose and cheeks pinkly glowing from the winter’s cold that frosted the hospital windows.

“And how are you, my little man?” his father asked, sitting on the edge of the bed.

Tony could not speak. He was in no pain, but his entire throat felt frozen, numb. His father was a big man, physically imposing, with a loud insistent voice and a constant air of urgency about him. His father frightened him more than a little. The two of them had never been close. Tony, an only child, was never allowed to have dinner with his parents when his father was at home. Only when his father was gone could he sit at the big dining room table with his mama.

“They tell me you were crying all night,” his father said sternly.

Tony could not answer, but tears sprang up in his eyes. They had left him alone in the strange hospital room, without Mama, without even his nanny.

“Now listen to me, Antony,” said his father. “These people here in the hospital are my colleagues. They look up to me and respect me. It wouldn’t do for them to think that my son is a coward, now would it?”

Slowly, reluctantly, Tony shook his head.

“So we’ll have no more of this crying, eh? Chin up. Brave lad. Do what you’re told and don’t give the sisters any difficulty. Right?”

Tony nodded.

“Good! That’s the spirit. Now look what I’ve brought
you.” His father pulled a small packet from his overcoat pocket. It was wrapped in bright gold paper.

“Open it up, go on.”

Tony pulled at the paper ineffectually. His father’s smile withered into an exasperated frown; he took the packet into his big, deft-fingered hands and swiftly removed the wrapping. Then he opened the slim box and showed Tony what was inside it.

A hand-sized telly! Tony goggled at it. Lifting it from the little box, he turned it over in his trembling fingers until he found the postage-stamp screen and the red power button. He pressed the button and the screen came to life instantly.

His father showed him how to pull the earphone from its all-but-invisible socket. Tony wormed it into his left ear.

The picture on the screen was of the red planet, Mars. The voice he heard was that of a young Brazilian scientist named Alberto Brumado, who was saying in a softly beguiling Latin accent, “Someday human explorers will travel to Mars to unravel the mysteries of its red sands …”

His father tousled his hair roughly and then left Tony watching the tiny pictures of Mars.

Tony’s parents lived entirely separate lives under the single roof of their Chelsea home. As he grew up, Tony began to understand that his father kept a series of mistresses elsewhere in London. He changed them every year or so, like buying a new outfit of clothes for the spring. But he was never without a mistress for long.

His father paid Tony almost no attention whatever; the big gruff man always seemed preoccupied, busy, on his way out of the house somewhere. And when he did notice his son it was:

“Tennis? That’s a damned silly game. When I was your age I was all for football. Now there’s fun!”

No matter that Tony was slim and lithe where his father was bulky and powerful.

“Tennis,” the old man fumed. “Game for foreigners and effeminates.”

It was easy to get his graying mother’s attention. She was a sweet, porcelain-white woman with the grace and beauty of a china doll. She looked frail, long-suffering, but Tony knew she could protect him from his cold yet demanding father. Everyone who met her loved her, and Tony loved her most of
all. All he had to do to get her attention was to pretend to be ill. A cough or a sneeze would bring her fluttering to him. Before he was nine Tony learned how to fake a fever by holding the thermometer under the hot water tap. As he grew up he began to suspect that his mother knew all his little tricks, and forgave him unconditionally. He was the man of the house most of the time. He had his mother all to himself except when his father was home.

Tony had been secretly frightened at the thought of going away to university, but he quickly found that campus life was unalloyed joy. It was ludicrously easy to become the center of everyone’s attention, the undisputed leader of his set. The other students seemed mostly dull, fit only to be the brunt of his practical jokes or the victims of his cruel wit. The more he humiliated them, the more they kowtowed to him, seeking his favor, turning themselves into lackeys to escape his annoyance.

It was something of a surprise to Tony that women fell for him so easily. They mistook his disguise of self-assurance and his utter self-interest for sophistication. Tony delighted in this reaffirmation that women could be manipulated more easily than men.

The only one in his class who did not bow to him was a stubborn, stolid son of a Manchester factory worker who ignored the campus’s social life and stuck to his books with the single-minded intensity of desperation. He seemed as unimaginative and cautious as a peasant, yet he never fell for any of Tony’s little schemes. He always detected the bucket of water balanced atop the half-opened door. He never fell for the compliant young ladies that Tony sent to tempt him. When he found his bed soaked in beer he patiently, uncomplainingly turned over the mattress and changed the linen and showed up in class the next morning as if nothing had happened.