Red Thunder (45 page)

One mile. Half a mile.

"There they are!"
Kelly shouted. I followed her pointing
finger to a screen showing two regular shapes in the sea of shallow
craters and rocks of every size.

"I see them," Travis said in our headphones. "Please don't holler so loud."

"Sorry," Kelly said.

One thousand feet. Five hundred feet. Travis meant to land us
someplace where the Chinese might not spot us on the way down. It
wasn't critical that we not be seen, but it would help. The Chinese
were following the pattern of the Russians during the Soviet Union
days, landing completely on automatic, just like the pathfinder ships.
Communists apparently just hated to relinquish any control they didn't
have to, so Soviet and now Chinese cosmonauts had to be content to let
machines handle chores that our own "Right Stuff" astronauts would have
claimed as their own.

"One hundred feet," Travis called out. "Picking up some dust. Fifty
feet. Thirty feet. Fifty feet to starboard. Still thirty feet
elevation." There had been a big rock at the spot Travis had been about
to land on. He moved over, then again. Twenty feet. Ten feet.

"I have a touchdown signal on strut two, Captain," Dak said. Then, quickly, "Touchdown on strut one... and strut three."

"Cabin listing less than two degrees," I called out.

"Air systems four by four," Alicia shouted.

"Cutting power," Travis said, and the roar of the engines—not
nearly so loud in the thin atmosphere of Mars—tapered off and
died. I kept my eyes glued to the tilt-meter, which settled another
degree, then half of a degree. If tilt exceeded five degrees I was to
recommend another liftoff and touchdown... something Travis could of
course see and do from his own instruments. But on a ship you back
everything
up.

The meter stabilized.

"We're down, guys and gals," Travis shouted from above.

Somebody should have thought to bring some ticker tape and confetti. We made up for the lack by cheering our lungs out.

We had made it. We were on Mars.

FIRST WE ALL had to crowd into the cockpit, wearing
our bomber jackets and big, goofy grins. Kelly the shutterbug took
pictures of us. The view was stunning. I'm a Florida boy who's never
been anywhere. There was nothing like this in Florida. Not a speck of
green to be seen anywhere. Rocks everywhere you looked, though this
spot wasn't as stony as the places where previous Mars probes had
landed. It was midday, and the sky was a pale pinkish on the horizon
and a deep blue straight up. Wisps of high cloud so thin you could
barely see them. Dust, I think, not water.

The external thermometer was reading minus eight degrees, Fahrenheit.

"Time to suit up, don't you think?" Travis said. He got no argument.
We all trooped down to the crossroads deck and then down into the suit
room.

I don't know if Dak and Kelly and Alicia were holding their breaths, as I was. We'd never discussed this part of the journey.

Who gets to be first? Who gets the headline in the history books,
and who ends up in the fine print? Travis was the captain, so didn't he
have the right to be first? But, being the captain, didn't he have an
obligation to stay with his ship? And if he did, who would tell him? I
wasn't eager to try.

"You kids get to be first," Travis said, and smiled at the guilty
looks on our faces. "Sure, I've thought about it. But, plain truth,
none of this would have happened without you four. And Mars belongs to
the young. And... well, hell! Get your suits on before I change my mind
and beat y'all out the door!"

We didn't need more prompting. We all set new records getting into
the things. Then down into the lock, Travis sealing the hatch behind
us. Final suit checks, buddying each other. Then cycle the lock, watch
the pressure equalize with the breath of carbon dioxide gas outside,
and open the outer lock door.

Dak deployed the ramp, made of metal mesh, impossible to slip on. We started down the ramp, suddenly shy about it.

We had talked about the famous "first words." Everybody knows the
pressure Neil Armstrong was under, how they had a camera set up just to
capture that moment, that first step, and all America was asking, "What
will his first words from the surface of the moon be?" Armstrong must
have worried about it. And once there, he blew it, though he always
maintained he
really
said, "One small step for
a
man..."

I had toyed with the idea of something like, "Holy crap! We're on
Mars." But I knew I didn't have the nerve for that, and it would have
stunk to high heaven, anyway. But, gosh darn it... I don't think any of
us were up to saying something like, "What hath God wrought?"

So I had an idea, and while we were still standing on the ramp I
told the others about it. It was agreed to with no objections. We all
went to the foot of the ramp.

"On my signal, kick off with the left foot," I said.

"Roger."

"Will do."

"Weeee're..."
and we all stepped off.

"...off to see the Wizard!..."
We skipped ahead a few
feet—skipping's not easy in a space suit, even at one-third
gee—and then nearly collapsed laughing.

I swore a mighty oath the Chinese were not going to steal this moment from us. The truth was going to get out, no matter what.

We were the first!

WE HAD TALKED about running up a flag. All the Apollo astronauts did. We knew the Chinese planned to. But what flag?

We were all Americans, all proud to be Americans. But we were not,
strictly speaking, an American mission. We had no connection to our
government, and that's the way we wanted to keep it.

The United Nations flag? But Travis didn't have a very high opinion
of the UN, and neither did Kelly. Dak and Alicia were like me,
politically not very involved. We were willing to go along with Travis
and Kelly.

"How about the state of Florida?" Dak had suggested, not very seriously.

"Looking at what Florida has done to the land," Kelly said, "I
wouldn't trust those idiots in Tallahassee to run a mud puddle, much
less a whole planet."

"Besides, they wouldn't be interested," I pointed out. "There's no beachfront land to screw up."

Travis suggested they use the flag of his old alma mater, Tulane.

"Do they have a flag?" Alicia asked.

"I could find out. Better yet, how about the flag of MIT? That ought to get you guys a full scholarship, don't you figure?"

In the end we decided to go flagless.

We set aside thirty minutes for just looking around, for getting
used to the idea that we were really on Mars. "Gosh-wow!" time. Travis
had put us down in a small valley. We walked up the gentle slope of the
dune north of us and took a look around. Walking was easy in the .38
gravity, even with the pressurization that made space suits a bit hard
to bend, even with the added weight of suit and backpack.

I'd hoped the trio of volcanoes in a straight line, Arsia Mons,
Pavonis Mons, and Ascraeus Mons, might be visible in the distance. The
map scale had deceived me. We were over four hundred miles away from
them, with Olympus Mons another five hundred beyond that. From the rise
we saw more of the same terrain we had landed in. The spectacular views
in these parts were
down,
not up, and we wouldn't see it until we were standing on the edge of the Grand Canyon of Mars.

So we took a few pictures, or Kelly did, with her camera in a
plastic box usually used for underwater photography. Then we went down
to deploy our surface vehicle.

We had loaded it into Module Four. It was hard to believe that, a few months before, it had been Dak's pride and joy,
Blue Thunder.
All that was left of it was the pickup bed and body. Sort of like those
"stock cars" they drive at Daytona, called Fords or Chevys, actually
nothing but car-shaped Fiberglas shells surrounding an engine and
chassis, built from the ground up.

Module Four had been pressurized and heated during our flight. Now
Dak climbed up a ladder and found a control that released the 15 psi
atmosphere inside. When that was done the simple plug-type door was
pulled in and up by an ordinary garage-door opener. He stepped inside
and handed out six metal tracks, which me and Kelly and Alicia fitted
together into two corrugated metal ramps. We lifted one end of each
track so Dak could fit them into slots on the module, then carefully
aligned them.

Dak operated an electric winch and slowly, slowly,
Blue Thunder
came down toward us. When it reached the ramp Dak shoved it until its
wheels were in the tracks, then we lowered it the rest of the way.

Its undercarriage had been greatly modified. A framework of steel
and giant shock absorbers supported the truck body a full three feet
above its wheels. But those wheels were just for getting it down the
ramp. When we'd rolled the vehicle away from the ramp Dak operated a
second winch, and the
real
wheels came down, like four pink donuts on a spike. They were earthmover tires, a bit over seven feet high.

But... pink?

"The only color they had in stock," Dak had said. "They'll do the job."

The job they had to do was to protect the rubber of the gigantic
tires from freezing and flaking away, like his experimental tire had
done. It turned out sixteen was how many electric blankets they needed,
modified with zippers around the edges, to cover the tires. Each
nestled in its own pink cocoon, like weird, flattened Easter eggs.

We got the wheels down and unwrapped, then jacked
Blue Thunder
up to the proper height, removed the regular tires and replaced them
with the big ones. Each wheel weighed eight hundred pounds on Earth,
but just three hundred on Mars. We could horse them around without too
much trouble.

They call it a Bigfoot, at monster truck rallies. They are all
descendants of the original Big Foot, made by some maniac a long time
ago. They have only one use: to bounce recklessly over lines of junk
car bodies as quickly as possible, preferably without killing the
driver by turning over on him.

Only one use, until we took one to Mars, that is.

"It's perfect," Dak had said, when Dak and Sam first revealed their
creation to us, back at the warehouse. "You've seen the pictures, Mars
is scattered with rocks, lots and lots of rocks, any size you want.
This baby will crawl right over any rock smaller than a Buick. Bigger
than a Buick, I figure we'll drive around it."

"Isn't the center of gravity kind of high?" Travis had asked. "I've seen them turn over, on television."

"That's in a race," Dak had said. "Fools be driving those rigs way
too fast. Keep it down to five, ten miles an hour, it'll climb over
most anything."

"Yeah, but who'll be driving at five, ten miles an hour?"

"You're lookin' at him. I don't always drive like I did that night I almost run you over. Right, Manny?"

"Dak can be an extremely careful driver, when he wants to be," I said.

"And he damn sure
will
be, won't you, son?" Sam had glared at his son.

It took about two hours, Travis barking in our radios if he thought we weren't being careful enough, to reassemble
Blue Thunder.
I was glad we'd put in all that suit time at the bottom of Travis's
pool. You don't dare get careless in a suit, not when there's nothing
outside it but extremely cold, thin, poisonous gas.

Travis wanted us to come in for the night, but it was still several
hours away so we talked him into allowing just a short jaunt. After
all, we had to see if it worked as well on Mars as it had in the
warehouse where we'd first seen it, didn't we?

So Dak climbed up into the cab, which had been completely stripped
of doors, windshield, seats, roof, and most of its instrument panel.
Dak had new instruments to look at, and simple plastic seats. He still
had a steering wheel, but because space-suit boots were not very
flexible he and Sam had substituted a hand control for the foot pedals.
Push it forward to go, pull back to stop.

Alicia pulled herself into the shotgun seat, and that was all the
seats there were, except a backward-facing bench in the bed. Kelly and
I climbed up there and secured our safety lines to a pipe that ran just
below the roll bar. Standing up was by far the best way to ride, and
Dak had promised to take it slow.

Dak deliberately picked out some fair-sized rocks to climb and
Blue Thunder
performed perfectly... all in an eerie silence that was partly because
of the thin air and partly because of the most important modification
that had been made. Under the hood, where you'd expect to find an
engine, there was now only two big tanks, one for oxygen and the other
for hydrogen. The engine was sitting on the floor of Sam's garage, and
Blue Thunder
was now powered by four electric motors, one for each wheel. Beneath my feet, under the truck bed, were six fuel cells.
Blue Thunder
could operate with only two of them online, but today, as the Martian
evening progressed, I could see a line of six green lights on Dak's
dashboard.

"One mile, tops," Travis said over our radios.

"Gotcha, Captain," Dak said.

There was a computer screen on the dash in front of Alicia. It
showed a map of our landing area, part of the extremely detailed map we
had downloaded, free, from NASA. Alicia's job was to try to match the
terrain with the real-time map
Blue Thunder's
navigational
computer was generating. That information was being fed constantly by
our inertial tracker, which was accurate down to about one
inch.

The shallow gully we had landed in was curving off to the west as
Dak drove down it, and we tried several gullies on the map, sort of
like moving a transparent overlay map over a more detailed topographic
map. Alicia moved the cursor into a place that might be right, but the
computer didn't like it. Again, same result. But on the third try the
computer signaled we'd hit the jackpot.