Mars (47 page)

Tony graduated second in his class. The peasant somehow took first honors. He infuriated Tony. Yet they had never exchanged more words than the common civilities in all the four years of college. Tony never saw him again after graduation and he was glad of it.

“Travel to India?” His father was nearly apoplectic. “You’re going to medical school, young man! You’ve been
accepted at my old college and, by damn, that’s where you are going and nowhere else!”

“But I don’t think I’m ready yet …”

“Bah! I know you, you schemer. You’re terrified that you might actually have to knuckle down and study. Frightened of hard work, that’s what you are. Do you good, a bit of hard work. It’s medical school for you, my boy. I won’t listen to another word.”

Thus Tony went to medical school. His father had been right; he was filled with trepidation. Once there, however, Tony found it was even more of a lark than the university. There were crib books and test cassettes for sale almost openly. Yet after the first few months Tony found himself becoming genuinely fascinated with the study of the human body. To his utter surprise he found that he enjoyed learning. He actually began to work hard at his studies. He wanted to excel.

And there was always Mars—hovering in the background of his thoughts, hanging just over the horizon of his existence. He would forget about it for long months, for years even, and then suddenly a news broadcast would show another rocket lifting off in a roar of flame and steam to carry a robot landing vehicle to the red planet. Or a guest lecturer would speak on the problems of medicine in the microgravity environment of a space station and mention in passing the similar problems to be encountered on a mission to Mars. Or Alberto Brumado, gray now but still sparkling with youthful zeal, would host a telly special about the origin of life on Earth and ask wistfully if it were possible that life had arisen on Mars too.

His father was shocked and angered when Tony refused to step into the family practice.

Red-faced, portly with years and too much living, sputtering with rage, his father roared, “I’ve spent my entire life building up this practice! You
must
carry it on!”

Tony smiled coolly, trying to hide the terror that his father’s wrath always stirred inside him. “Father, there’s nothing for it. I am not going to follow in your sacred footsteps.”

“What’s the matter with you?” his father roared. “Afraid of a little blood? Is that it? Surgery scares the liver out of you, eh? Damned sniveling coward!”

Tony stood his ground.

“By god, at your age I was sewing up wounded men on a hospital ship in the middle of the South Atlantic winter storms.”

“You’ve told us of your glorious exploits in the Falklands War many times, Father.”

“You’re a coward! A damned trembling, shaking little coward!” The old man turned on his wife. “You’ve raised a coward for a son.”

Tony felt his blood turn to flame. “Don’t bully her!”

His father stared at him for a long moment, then with an exasperated grunt he stormed out of the room. Tony turned to his mother, sitting silently, patiently. They heard the front door open and then slam shut.

“You don’t think I’m a coward, do you?” Tony asked his mama.

“Of course not, dear.”

Two days later Tony applied for a post in the British government’s space program. Within a fortnight he received notification that he had been tentatively accepted; he was to report to the training center for tests and evaluation. His father was not home when the letter came; there was no one in the house except Tony and his mother.

“They need physicians,” he told her, still aching with wounded pride. “I may very well be selected for the Mars training team if Britain joins the program.”

He had expected that she would be horrified, break into tears, beg him to reconsider. Instead his mother smiled and kissed him on the forehead and told him that whatever he wanted to do was what he should do.

In the end Tony was accepted by the Mars Project, a stranger bought the lucrative practice when his father retired, and his mother dragged the old man off to Nassau where he suffered an incapacitating stroke their first year in the sun, leaving him helpless and totally dependent on the loving care of his long-neglected wife.

Tony loved being part of the Mars Project. Most of the other trainees were either astronauts or scientists, dullard technicians or researchers so narrowly specialized that they knew practically nothing of the larger world of the arts and society. Tony enjoyed himself immensely, the sophisticated center of attraction and interest at all times. While others worried themselves into near hysteria over the selection process,
Tony never doubted that he would be picked to go to Mars. If he feared the thought of riding millions of miles through space to an empty, harshly inhospitable world, he kept such apprehensions to himself. Only in his dreams did such terrors confront him, and then it was always in the shape of his father looming over him like a horrible devouring ogre, while his mother wept helplessly.

During his waking hours Tony made only one move that he would consider a mistake. He helped Joanna to get rid of Hoffman and bring the Navaho along with them to Mars. A blunder, Tony considered it in retrospect. The Navaho has become the center of everyone’s attention. Even Joanna’s. Especially Joanna’s.

Aleksander Mironov hummed softly as he checked Jamie’s backpack. The rover’s airlock was crowded with just the two of them in it:-Mironov in his fire-engine red hard suit, Jamie in his sky-blue, with a gray spare helmet to replace his meteorite-gouged original.

Mironov’s visor was up, and Jamie could see that the Russian was smiling as he clomped back into his view. Mironov’s face looked chunky, almost compressed in his helmet, as if stuffed into a container a half size too small. It was a broad-cheeked, snub-nosed face, slightly ruddy, sprinkled lightly with freckles, with pale blue eyes and eyebrows so fair they were barely visible.

“Gloves?” Mironov asked.

“Right here on my belt, Alex.” Jamie tugged them on. Of all the equipment on the mission, the gloves were the most advanced piece of technology. Thin enough to be easily flexible and give the wearer a good feel for whatever he grasped, yet tough enough to protect the hands against the near vacuum of the Martian atmosphere.

“Visor down,” Mironov said. Only after they had both sealed their helmets did he turn to the pumps and start them chugging.

“You look tired,” the cosmonaut said over the suit-to-suit radio.

Surprised, Jamie said to the gold-tinted visor, “I feel okay.”

“You were outside four hours yesterday, then you stayed up very late last night. You were outside all morning, and now you go again.”

The pumps stopped. The indicator light turned red. Mironov pushed the hatch open.

“We’ve only got three days here,” Jamie replied as they stepped through the hatch and down the short ladder to the rough, blackened ground. “We’ve got to make the most of them.”

“Patel makes you feel guilty.”

Jamie forgot himself and tried to shrug inside the suit. All he got for his effort was a fresh irritation under his armpit, where the suit chafed him.

“You must not drive yourself so hard,” Mironov went on. “When you are tired you make mistakes. Mistakes can kill a man.”

“I’ll be all right. The others are pushing just as hard,” Jamie said.

“I gave them the same lecture,” said the Russian. His voice sounded more disappointed than distressed.

“And?” Jamie asked.

Mironov pointed a gloved finger toward the butter yellow and dark green figures of Patel and Naguib. “They ignored me just as you arc ignoring me.”

Patel and Naguib were already chipping samples of the dark basaltic rock that spread as far as the eye could see. Old lava flow, Jamie knew. Pavonis Mons had erupted over and over again, red-hot magma flowing in all directions. How long ago? The samples they were taking would give them the answer. They had decided to spend these three precious days at the base of the volcano’s shield, collecting as many samples from as many different locations as possible. They would start to analyze them on the trek back to the base, they had agreed.

Yet none of the three scientists could resist testing the samples they had collected. Last night they had stayed up for hours, while Mironov reminded them of the mission schedule like an ineffectual camp counselor. They ran a dozen samples through the portable GC/MS in the rover’s lab module.

The mass spectrometer told them that their samples were iron-rich basalts, no more than five hundred million years old, based on their ratio of potassium to argon.

“But the argon might have outgassed,” Jamie warned. “Some of it may have escaped into the atmosphere.”

“Much of it may be missing,” Naguib agreed.

“Which means that the samples could be much older,” said Jamie.

Patel, still refusing to meet Jamie’s eyes, said to the Egyptian, “We will run more definitive tests back at the base, where we can irradiate the samples in the power reactor.”

Naguib nodded and said, “Yes. If the remote handling system is working. It was down …”

“Pete said he’d have it running by the time we got back,” Jamie said.

“Astronaut Connors!” Patel almost snorted. “He spends all his time flying the RPV instead of attending to maintenance.”

“Pete will have the remote handlers working by the time we get back,” Jamie insisted.

Finally they folded down their bunks for sleep: Patel and Naguib on the uppers, Mironov and Jamie below. Jamie fell asleep quickly, only to be awakened by a whining, almost sobbing sound from above: One of them’s having a nightmare, he realized. He turned his face toward the curving wall of the rover and went back to sleep. His last conscious thought was that the metal skin of the vehicle felt cold; the freezing night of Mars waited outside, less than an inch away.

Over breakfast they had agreed that their best strategy was to work along the line of fissures and sinkholes that ran up one side of the volcano’s massive base. They would go as far as they could up the gentle slope of the shield, with Mironov driving the rover behind them so they would not exceed the safe walk-back distance specified in the mission regulations.

All three of these volcanoes sit astride this big fault line, Jamie said to himself as he laboriously chipped away at the tough black basalt. Looking back toward the rover, he saw Mironov planting another beacon into the ground. It was not easy work; this was real rock, not the compacted sands they had found around their domed base. The thin layer of reddish dust that covered the rock was easily scuffed away. Jamie wondered why the wind did not remove it entirely.

Inside his hard suit Jamie could not feel any wind, and there were no clouds in the salmon sky to show air movements. Yet the meteorology instruments on their beacons
showed a fairly steady breeze of more than forty miles per hour running up the long gradual slope toward the volcano’s distant summit. At night the wind direction reversed to downslope and slowed to little more than twenty miles per hour.

Forty miles per hour would be a stiff gale on Earth, Jamie knew. But in the thin air of Mars there was no strength in the wind, not even enough to scour the last layer of sand off the rocks.

Jamie put his hands on his knees and let the suit’s fans cool him down for a while. His visor was starting to fog over from his exertion. He waited, scanning the barren rocky waste that stretched all around him. Dead rock, as rough and bare as the worst badlands he had ever seen in New Mexico. Blasted and pitted by meteor craters, some as big as a football field, most nothing more than the dent a hammer might make on the hood of a car. There were cracks in the solidified lava, vents and fissures that twisted from one crater pit to another. The ground rose almost imperceptibly toward the volcano’s high caldera, so far away that it was well over the horizon.

Strangely, not so many rocks were scattered around. The molten basalt must have pushed them downslope. Jamie pictured the black rocky field on which he stood as it must once have been: a broad surging stream of red-hot lava spewing from those vents to flow sluggishly down toward the plain, melting or bulldozing the rocks in its path.

Heat must be coming up from the interior along this fault line, Jamie reasoned. Molten magma flowing time and time again, building these big cones, spilling out to form the shields. Then what about Olympus Mons, some fifteen hundred kilometers to the northwest? It’s not sitting on a fault, not that we can see. But it’s probably younger than these three beauties. Could there be a hot spot down below that built Pavonis and its two companions, then migrated northwest to build Olympus?

Jamie realized his back ached from stooping awkwardly in the cumbersome suit. He straightened up, wondering, Does Mars have plate tectonics, like Earth? Wouldn’t think so, the planet’s so small that its core can’t possibly have enough heat energy to move whole continents of mantle rock. But there
was enough heat energy to build these volcanoes. Where did it come from? Is it still flowing?

He looked upslope, his eye following the rugged, dark landscape as it climbed into the pink sky. When’s the last time you burped, Pavonis, my friend? Have you gone completely cold, or will you spread lava across this ground again one day?

Suddenly a flicker of motion in the corner of his eye startled him. It was gone by the time he turned his face toward it. A shadow flitting across the ground? Like a bird flying overhead …?

Jamie looked upward and saw the silvery speck of the soarplane glinting in the sunlight high above. His-heart was pounding from the sudden rush of adrenaline. It made him feel foolish. No Martian hawks circling up there; just Pete Connors trying to photo-map Pavonis’s caldera. Hope it makes Patel happy.

“Voice check.” Mironov’s boyish tenor in his earphones startled Jamie. He looked around and saw that his shadow stretched long across the ground. The sun was getting close to the horizon.

“Patel here.”

The rover was parked a hundred meters or so down the slope, between a meteor crater twice its size and a zigzag fissure that might once have been a lava vent. You were right, Rava, Jamie said silently. These volcanoes have so much to tell us, and we won’t be here long enough to even begin to understand their story.