Mars (32 page)

As Jamie was washing up he heard Vosnesensky shout, “Jamie! Look at this!”

He ducked out of the narrow lavatory and saw that Vosnesensky was up in the cockpit. Squeezing past the table, Jamie hurried there.

Vosnesensky had pulled back the thermal shroud. The plastiglass bubble canopy was twinkling with faintly glistening little glimmers that winked on and disappeared like fireflies. Jamie felt his breath catch in his throat.

“Dewdrops,” Vosnesensky said. “Morning dew.”

“It condenses on the glass.” Jamie reached out his fingers to touch the bubble. It was cold but dry inside. Even while he watched more tiny droplets appeared and flickered out, evaporating before his eyes, vanishing so quickly that he would have missed them altogether if others had not glimmered into brief existence. Like tiny diamonds they sparkled for a heartbeat and then were gone. After a few minutes they stopped completely. Jamie realized that he would never have
suspected they had been there if he had not seen them himself. Mikhail caught them at just the right moment.

“There is moisture in the air here,” the Russian said. “A little, at least.”

“Frost,” Jamie murmured. “Must be ice particles that form in the air at night. They melted on the warm surface …”

“And evaporated immediately.”

“Where’s the moisture coming from?” Jamie asked. Turning to the Russian, “Mikhail, how far are we from the canyon?”

“An hour’s drive, perhaps a little more.” Vosnesensky slid into the pilot’s seat and punched up a map display on the control panel’s central screen. “Yes, about one hour.”

“Let’s get going! Right away! I’ll drive.”

“I will drive,” said Vosnesensky firmly. “You are too excited. You would drive like a cowboy, not an Indian.” Then he chuckled deep in his throat at his own wit.

Jamie blinked at the Russian. Humor, from Mikhail? That’s even more rare than morning dew on Mars.

Now the rover lurched and swayed as Vosnesensky threaded between rocks and over ridges, every ounce of his attention focused on his driving. He had the throttle full out and the segmented vehicle was making its best speed across the rusted desert. To Jamie, sitting at Vosnesensky’s right, the rover was a large metal caterpillar inching its way across the Martian landscape. The dusty red ground was strewn with rocks, as everywhere, although craters seemed to be much fewer than farther west. Boulders as large as houses lay here and there, making Jamie itch to go out and investigate them.

But they stayed inside the rover, comfortable in their coveralls, and stuck to their low-speed dash toward the Grand Canyon of Mars. Jamie gripped the stone fetish in his pocket. There’s moisture in the air in the morning, he kept repeating to himself. It must be coming from the canyon. Must be.

He worried in the back of his mind that Dr. Li’s approval might be countermanded by someone in the chain of command on Earth. He wanted to be at their destination when such a signal came in—or so close that they could do some exploring before they had to obey the command to return to
base. Mikhail seems to want it too, Jamie thought. In his own way he’s as excited as I am.

“I have never met an Indian before,” Vosnesensky said abruptly, without taking his eyes from his driving.

“I’m not much of an Indian,” Jamie replied. “I was brought up to be a white man.”

“But you are not white.”

“No, not entirely.” The rover jounced over a little rill, bouncing Jamie in his seat. “In the States we have people from every part of the world—all the nationalities of Europe, Asians, Africans …”

“I have heard about the problems of your blacks. We learned in school how they are held down by your racist system.”

Jamie felt himself bristling. “Then why is the only black man on Mars an American? Why haven’t the African nations joined in this expedition?”

“Because they are poor,” the Russian answered, deftly maneuvering the rover around a new-looking crater about the size of a swimming pool. “They cannot afford luxuries such as space exploration. They can barely feed their people.”

“Is this really a luxury, Mikhail? Do you think that reaching out into space is a waste of money?”

“No.” Vosnesensky’s answer was immediate and firm beyond the shadow of a doubt.

Thinking of the run-down pueblos and crumbling old adobe homes in New Mexico, Jamie mused, “I wonder. Sometimes I think the money could have been better used to help poor people.”

The Russian shot him a quick glance, then returned to his driving. For long moments he said nothing and Jamie watched the dusty red land pass by, rocks, tired worn gullies, craters, little wind-stirred dunes. Off toward the horizon he saw a dust swirl, as red as a devil, spiraling into the pink morning sky.

“What we do helps the poor,” Vosnesensky said. “We are not taking bread from their mouths. We are enlarging the habitat of the human species. History has shown that every expansion of the human habitat has brought about an increase in wealth and a rise in living standards. That is objective fact.”

“But the poor are still with us,” Jamie said.

A slight note of exasperation crept into the Russian’s voice. “The Russian Federation alone has spent thousands of billions on aid to poor nations. The United States even more. This expedition to Mars has not hurt the poor. What we spend here is a pittance compared to what they have already received. And what good does it do for them? They go out and produce more babies, make a new generation of poor. A larger generation. It is endless.”

“So they’re not going hungry because we’re here on Mars.”

“Definitely not. They lack discipline, that is their problem. In the Russian Federation we pulled ourselves up from a backward agricultural society to a powerful industrial nation in a single generation.”

Yes, Jamie replied silently, with Stalin in the driver’s seat. He didn’t care how many millions starved while he built his factories and power plants.

“But tell me, what was it like when you were growing up in New Mexico? It is near Texas?”

“Yes,” Jamie said. “Between Arizona and Texas.”

“I have been there. Houston.”

“New Mexico is nothing like Houston.” Jamie laughed. Then, “Actually, I did most of my growing up in California. Berkeley. That’s where my parents taught, at the university. I was a kid when we moved there. But I spent a lot of my summers in Santa Fe, with my grandfather.”

It had been a trying day. Jamie was almost seventeen, finishing high school, a vast disappointment to his parents because he had no clear idea of what he wanted to study in college.

His parents had flown with him to Santa Fe, where he was to spend the summer. His grandfather had just announced that he had secured a full scholarship for Jamie at the university in Albuquerque—if Jamie wanted it.

They were sitting in the dining room of Al’s house, up in the hills north of Santa Fe, the evening meal long finished as they sat and talked across the big oak table littered with the remains of roasted goat.

The dining room was large and cool, with a slanted beamed ceiling high above the floor of gleaming ochre tiles.
Through its broad window Jamie could see adobe-style town houses dotting the slopes that ran down to the city. Al owned most of them; rental condos for the skiers in the winter and the tourists who wanted to buy genuine Indian artifacts all year long. The sun was going down toward the darkening mountains. Soon there would be another spectacular New Mexico sunset painting the sky.

Jamie had gobbled every scrap of the
cabrito
, enjoying the spices that Al’s cook had used so generously. His mother, who would eat
lapin
and even frogs’ legs without a qualm, had barely touched her dinner. Jamie’s father had eaten his portion easily enough, but now he unconsciously rubbed his chest, as if the spices had been too much for him.

“I’m sure you meant well, Al,” Lucille was saying, with her sweetest, most persuasive little-girl smile, “but we had just assumed that Jamie would stay at home and attend Berkeley.”

“Do the boy good to get a different slant on things,” Al said, pulling a pack of slim dark cigarillos from his shirt pocket. “That’s what schoolin’s supposed to be all about, isn’t it: gettin’ an education? That means more than books and class work, don’t it?”

Lucille frowned as her father-in-law lit up and blew a cloud of thin gray smoke toward the beamed ceiling. She cast a sharp glance at her husband.

With a slight cough, Jerome Waterman said, “Dad, the boy hasn’t even made up his mind about what he wants to study yet, let alone about where he wants to go to school.”

They’re talking as if I get to make the decisions, Jamie thought. But they’re not even asking me what I think.

His father was going on, “Considering his grades and the results of his aptitude tests …”

“Aw, bullshit on all that crap!” Al blurted. Then he turned his most flattering smile on his daughter-in-law. “Sorry for the language, Lucille. But I don’t think those psychologists could find a skunk in their own clothes closet, let alone help a seventeen-year-old boy figure out where he wants to head in life.”

“I will not have Jamie turned into an Indian,” Lucille said firmly.

Al guffawed, a reaction Jamie had seen him use often in
his store when he needed a moment to frame his thoughts before replying to a tough question.

“What do you think, Lucy? You think I want him workin’ in a store, waitin’ on tourists from Beverly Hills or New York? You think I want him wastin’ away his life in some dumb-ass pueblo raisin’ sheep and drinkin’ beer the rest of his life?”

“He’s shown an aptitude for science,” Jerry said.

“Then let him study science! They got fine scientists at Albuquerque. All kinds of geologists and whatnot.”

Geology. Jamie had spent long hours collecting rocks in the arid hills and arroyos. Al had taken him up to Colorado to see the Mesa Verde cliff dwellings, and out to Arizona for the Grand Canyon and the big meteor crater.

“Some of the finest scientists in the world are at Berkeley,” Lucille was saying stiffly. “In the physics department alone …”

Al interrupted her. “Hell, here we are talkin’ about the boy’s future as if he wasn’t even here. Jamie! What do you think about all this? What’ve you got to say?”

Jamie remembered the Grand Canyon. That vast chasm carved into the Earth. The colors of the different layers of rock, layer after layer. The whole history of the world was painted on those rocks, a history that went incredibly farther back than the span of time human beings had existed.

“I like geology,” he said. “I’d like to study geology, I think.”

More than an hour had passed since they had started off. Jamie was fingering the bear fetish in his coverall pocket as the rover climbed the slope of a ridge, laboring up a steepening grade that was strewn with smallish rocks and pebbles. The red soil seemed sandy, crumbly. Jamie could hear the electric motors that drove each individual wheel whining, struggling.

Vosnesensky slowed the vehicle to a crawl. Looking out ahead, Jamie could see only the approaching top of the ridge and the pink sky beyond it. Not a cloud in that sky, it was as clear and empty as the deep blue skies he had known in New Mexico.

“Can’t we go any faster?” Jamie urged. “The moisture’ll be all baked out of the air by the time we reach …”

Abruptly Vosnesensky tramped on the brakes. Jamie lurched forward, reflexively jabbing his hands out to the control panel. He started to complain, then gaped at what lay outside the plastiglass canopy.

“We are here,” Vosnesensky said.

What Jamie had thought was the ridge line was actually the rim of the canyon. Beyond it there was a huge, vast, yawning emptiness. They were perched on the edge of a cliff that dropped away precipitously for miles and miles. Another few feet and the rover would have pitched over the rimrock and plunged down forever.

“Jesus Christ,” Jamie breathed.

Vosnesensky grunted.

Jamie stood up in his chair, peering as far as he could into the depths of the enormity of Tithonium Chasma. It was dizzying, and knowing that this gigantic cleft was merely one arm of Valles Marineris, that the valley system stretched more than three thousand kilometers eastward, made his head swim even more.

Then he felt his heart clutch in his chest. “Mikhail—it’s there. The mist …”

Frail gray feathers of clouds were wafting through the vast canyon far below, like a ghostly river that glided silently past their round staring eyes.

“The sunlight has not reached that deep into the canyon,” Vosnesensky said.

“Yeah.” Jamie pushed out of his seat and started back toward the airlock and the hard suits. “Come on, we’ve got to get this on tape before the clouds evaporate. There’s moisture down there, Mikhail! Water!”

“Ice particles,” the Russian said. He followed Jamie toward the suit locker.

“They melt into liquid water.”

“And evaporate.”

“And form again the next night.” Jamie was struggling into the lower half of his suit. “The moisture doesn’t go away. It stays in the valley—for a while, at least.”

He had never put on a hard suit so quickly. After the lower half, the boots (it was much easier that way), then the torso, finally the helmet. Vosnesensky helped him into his
backpack and checked all the seals and connections while Jamie quivered like a bird dog on the scent.

As he was grabbing for the video camera Vosnesensky said sternly, “Gloves!
Think
before you step outside. Go down the checklist no matter how excited you are.”

“Thanks,” Jamie said, feeling sheepish.

“In fact,” Vosnesensky said, sliding his helmet over his head and fastening the neck seal, “the more excited you are the more you must force yourself to stop and go through the checklist point by point.”

“You’re right,” Jamie said impatiently.

The Russian grinned at him, like a squat bear showing its teeth. “If you kill yourself here I will be in big trouble with Dr. Li and the controllers in Kaliningrad.”

Jamie found himself grinning back. “I wouldn’t want to get you in trouble, Mikhail.”

“Good. Now we are ready to go outside.”

It was not fair to call it a canyon. Jamie could not see the other side, it was beyond the horizon. The abyss named Tithonium Chasma was so vast, so awesome, that at first Jamie merely stared out from behind his tinted visor, numb with excitement and an overpowering feeling of reverence.