Mars Life (16 page)

Hasdrubal and Rosenberg were arguing again as they drove in the springy-wheeled camper along the floor of the Tithonium valley.

“I say she’s a lesbian,” Hasdrubal insisted.

“So what if she is? Shirley’s a virgin, I’m rather certain, but she’s as heterosexual as you or I.”

Hasdrubal looked down at his partner, sitting in the cockpit seat beside him. The seat’s pseudoleather padding was worn smooth, cracked in places, he noticed. Rosenberg was driving, both hands gripping the little steering wheel, his eyes focused on the bumpy, rock-strewn landscape before them. Rugged red cliffs towered over them on their left.

“She’s always hanging out with other women,” Hasdrubal said, ticking points off on his long, slim fingers. “Far’s I know she hasn’t come on to any of the guys—”

“You mean she hasn’t come on to you.”

Raising a third finger, “And when a guy gets near her she runs in the other direction.”

Rosenberg broke into a grin. “Aha! She ran away from you. Can’t blame her, actually: you must have frightened her.”

“Me?”

“You can appear rather fearsome, you know. Like some Watusi warrior in coveralls.”

“Bullshit,” Hasdrubal grumbled.

Still smiling, Rosenberg murmured, “When at a loss for 
le mot juste, 
lapse into profanity.”

“Double bullshit,” Hasdrubal said. He slid out of the right-hand seat and got to his feet like a jointed ladder unfolding, stooping to keep his head clear of the bulbous glassteel canopy that curved above. He used both hands to steady himself against the folded-up bunks as the camper swayed and jounced over the rough ground.

“Extraordinary,” Rosenberg muttered as the biologist headed back toward the lavatory. Shirley’s no lesbian, he told himself. At least she didn’t indicate it on her personnel file. The personnel files were strictly confidential, of course, but any member of the exploration team who had even a limited knowledge of computer hacking could sneak a peek at them. Rosenberg ran a hand through his tightly curled thatch of strawberry hair. Perhaps Shirley’s clever enough to know that the files aren’t actually all that secure, he thought. Perhaps she put herself down as hetero because she doesn’t want anyone to know her true orientation.

The camper rocked sharply as it trundled across a shallow crater.

“Hey, watch it!” Hasdrubal’s voice boomed from the lavatory. Rosenberg quickly put his free hand back on the steering wheel. Hasdrubal came back past the bunks and bent over Rosenberg’s scat. “You need a break?” he asked.

Glancing at the digital clock on the control panel, Rosenberg said, “In another fifteen minutes.”

“We’ll be there by then.”

“Right. We can stop and have a bite of lunch before we go outside.”

“Good enough,” Hasdrubal muttered, sliding back into the right-hand seat. “Just try to avoid the major potholes, will ya?”

Rosenberg frowned at his partner.

Ground truth, Hasdrubal said to himself. That’s why Chang’s sent us out this time, to determine if the deep radar imagery from the satellites has really spotted the outlines of another buried ancient village. The sensors can provide us with all sorts of data, but until somebody digs up hard, palpable evidence, the kind you can hold in your hand, the sensor data is suspect. It’s not enough, never enough. You need ground truth before you can actually believe it.

Well, it’s okay with me. Gives me an excuse to dig up soil samples from another spot. Might find some bugs if we bore down deeper than the damned superoxide layer covering the surface.

He tapped the map display on the control panel. “Coming up on the coordinates.”

“So I see,” said Rosenberg. “Why don’t we set up camp by that large boulder there, at two o’clock.”

Hasdrubal glanced at the house-sized boulder, then looked down at the map display again. “Okay. That’s damn near spang on top of the village.”

“If it’s actually there.”

“It’s there,” Hasdrubal said firmly. “The big job is to prove it.”

“Rather.” Rosenberg braked the camper slowly to a full stop. “But let’s have a spot of lunch first.”

Two hours later the two of them stood panting with exertion beside the probe they had set up where the radar imagery indicated the village’s gridwork pattern of streets was laid out thirty-some meters below the valley floor. Their nanosuits were spattered with red dust up to their knees; their gloves and forearms were also coated with rust.

The probe stood vertically, one end stuck into the ground, the other pointing skyward, a flimsy-looking quartet of slanting legs supporting it. Rosenberg thought it looked like a minimalist’s model of the Eiffel Tower. A thick power cable ran back to the external outlets on the curving side of the camper.

“How deep is it now?” Hasdrubal asked, straightening up from his kneeling position. Placing both hands on his hips, he arched backward slightly, trying to ease the strain on his spine.

Rosenberg read from the meter on the probe’s cluster of instruments. “Seventeen meters. We still have quite a ways to go.”

“Ready to pop the laser again?”

“One tick.” Rosenberg ran a gloved finger down the indicator lights on the miniaturized box of the instrument panel. “All right. The laser’s recharged and primed to go.”

Stepping back from the probe, Hasdrubal said, “Okay, hit it.”

A puff of gritty, grayish gas spurted out of the hole and wafted away slowly in the calm air.

“Down another two meters,” said Rosenberg.

“Good. But we’re not going to be deep enough before the sun sets.”

“No. We’ll finish tomorrow.”

“Why don’t we knock off now,” Hasdrubal said. It was more I ban a suggestion. “My back’s killing me.”

Rosenberg nodded inside the inflated bubble of his helmet. “I’m with you. Too bad someone can’t develop nanomachines to do the digging for us.”

Hasdrubal grinned at his partner. “Too expensive. We’re a lot cheaper.”

“Slave labor.”

“Damned near.”

They shut down the probe for the night and trudged wearily back toward the camper, two thoroughly tired men alone in the rocky cold wilderness of Mars. The massive cliffs loomed over them, glowing russet and pink in the slanting light of the setting sun. Their camper sat like a fat metal caterpillar, sunlight glinting off its curved bug-eye canopy.

Hasdrubal reached the airlock hatch and popped it open. “Well, tomorrow we’ll have to guide the supply rocket down.”

Rosenberg grunted. “I don’t really trust those automated hoppers. Some of them have been in service for nearly twenty years.”

“That’s why we take over their final guidance,” Hasdrubal said, climbing into the airlock.

Rosenberg looked unconvinced.

“Don’t worry. I’ll put ‘er down nice and easy. No sweat.”

Rosenberg still looked unconvinced.

In the few days she had been at the base, Vijay had come to recognize that Nari Quintana ruled the infirmary with a stainless steel fist. The daughter of a Venezuelan oil millionaire and his Japanese wife, Dr. Quintana was serving her second term of duty on Mars. Small, spare, with straight dull hair, she reminded Vijay of a little brown sparrow hopping from bed to bed, making her morning rounds. But everyone warned that this little sparrow had the ferocity of an eagle whenever anyone stirred her wrath.

“Her first name means thunderclap in Japanese,” one of the medical technicians had told Vijay when she’d first come into the infirmary, uninvited, to see what she could do to help. “It’s very appropriate.”

So far, Vijay and the formidable Dr. Quintana had gotten along tolerably well. Quintana was obviously suspicious that the wife of Jamie Waterman would try to usurp her authority. But Vijay smiled as she explained that she only wanted to help in any way she could.

Now she sat before Dr. Quintana’s desk. The woman’s office wasn’t much larger than a phone booth, Vijay thought, and it was as austere and undecorated as Quintana herself.

“I’d like to make more of a contribution than I have so far,” Vijay said, as sweetly as she could manage. “I mean, there must be something more that I could do, besides checking the supply stocks for hitchhiking insects and running routine physicals on the staff.”

Quintana’s sharp eyes flickered. “You’ve had enough of the nitpicking, eh?”

Smiling, Vijay replied, “I know someone has to make certain that the packages in storage don’t harbor bugs, but I do have a degree in psychology, if that could be of use to you.”

“Yes, I know,” was as much as Quintana would unbend.

For several moments, Quintana said nothing. Then, abruptly, she stood up.

“Come with me,” she said peremptorily as she headed for the door of her office.

Vijay jumped to her feet and followed the doctor.

“Morning rounds,” Quintana said over her shoulder as she led Vijay to the infirmary’s row of eight beds. Four of them were empty. Vijay understood that most of Quintana’s patients were suffering from rather minor accidents rather than disease. The exploration team were mostly young and never left Earth until their health had been thoroughly checked. And Martian microbes were enough different from terrestrial biology that there was nothing on Mars that could infect humans. At least, that’s what the biologists concluded.

This morning, though, a young maintenance technician was lying asleep in one of the beds, an intravenous drip tube in his arm.

“Gastric ulcer,” Quintana said, eying the computer display screen over the head of the bed.

“He seems awfully young to have an ulcer,” Vijay said, also peering at the display screen.

“Allergic to aspirin. He took aspirin every morning to protect his heart,” Quintana explained to Vijay. “But it attacked his stomach, instead.”

“Some people are allergic to aspirin and don’t know it,” Vijay murmured as they moved to the next bed, a woman who had twisted her ankle when she slipped on a wet tile in the cafeteria.

“Until a stomach ulcer explodes and they lose half their blood supply in a few minutes.”

Vijay said, “An allergy like that wouldn’t show up on a routine screening, either.”

“Yes, true. Everyone here has been thoroughly screened before being accepted for the Mars program, but the screening can’t possibly catch everything.” Quintana spoke in flat midwestern American English.

Physical screening is easier than psychological, Vijay thought, remembering Trudy Hall. She had been thoroughly screened for the Second Expedition, yet she had cracked up emotionally and nearly killed the entire team. Psychological testing could only go so deep, she knew. Mars tests each of us in its own way.

“They seem a healthy enough lot,” Vijay replied as she walked along the row of beds beside Quintana. “Of course, they’re mostly pretty young. That helps, doesn’t it?”

Quintana almost smiled. “Chang, Carleton and your husband are the oldest here.”

“And me,” Vijay pointed out. “I’m forty-two.”

The chief physician actually did smile. “I am thirty-nine.”

“Are you married?” Vijay asked.

“Divorced.”

“Oh. I’m so sorry.”

“Twice.”

Vijay had the sense to shut her mouth.

The three accident cases were minor injuries, except for one of Carleton’s digging crew who had jumped into the excavation pit thinking that Mars’s light gravity would make the thirty-meter drop easy. He had broken both his ankles, and learned that although weight is only one-third of normal on Mars, mass—the amount of matter in a body—doesn’t change because of the lower gravity. His bones had broken just as they would have on Earth.

“The major causes of human pain and suffering,” Quintana pronounced as they left the man’s bed: “pride and stupidity. They often go together.”

Vijay thought that maybe the young man—who was a meteorologist who’d volunteered to help Carleton—was trying to show off for some of the women at the dig. Testosterone is the most dangerous drug of all, she thought.

“What are you doing for him?” Vijay asked.

Quintana glanced back at the young man lying in his bed. “We’ve harvested stem cells from his bone marrow and now we’re cultivating them. In a few days we can reinject them and rebuild the bones good as new.”

Vijay nodded. Stem cell therapy was once considered miraculous; now it was routine.

“He doesn’t deserve it,” Quintana added. “Stupidity like his needs a stronger lesson.”

Tough love, Vijay thought. Quintana’s a hard case, all right.

As they started back toward Quintana’s office, Vijay asked, “Would it be possible for me to set up shop as the resident psychologist? Would that be helpful to you?”

“We do psych tests regularly,” Quintana said quickly. “The program office beams questionnaires up from Earth. Everyone is required to participate.”

“I see,” Vijay said. “I just thought I might offer a kind of counseling service . . . if anyone needs it.”

Quintana said nothing until they reached her office again. Sliding its door shut, she went around her desk and sat once more in the wobbly little chair behind it. Vijay took the only other chair.

“I am the chief physician here,” Quintana began. “I am also the only physician here. That is, until you arrived.”

“There are the medical technicians, though,” said Vijay.

“Of course. Five of them. Usually they outnumber our patients.”

“What you’re saying is that you don’t need me.”

Quintana shook her head hard enough to make her mousy hair flutter. “You are here because you are Jamie Waterman’s wife and you want to be with your husband. You are also a trained physician with a background in psychology. It would be foolish not to use your talents in some manner.”

“Yes, but how?”

Pursing her lips, Quintana said, “You tell me. You’ve seen the infirmary and the kinds of cases we get here. What can you do to help?”

Vijay hesitated, thinking, She’s batted the ball back into my side of the court.

“I don’t require an answer this minute,” Quintana said. “Take your time. Think about it.”

“I know what I’d like to do,” Vijay said.

“Yes?”

“I’d like to run a psych profile on the people here. Not the kind of multiple-choice tests they beam up from Earth, but real, personal, in-depth interviews with as many of the personnel as will sit down with me.”

“You plan to write a paper for a psychology journal?”

Nodding, Vijay said, “That would be appropriate, don’t you think? A psychological profile of the men and women on Mars. You and I could be coauthors.”

“I am not a psychologist.”

“No, but you’re the chief physician here. Your input and insights would be very important to the study. Either way, I’ll be available to help you with your patients in any way I can, whenever you need me.”

Quintana tapped her desk top absently. Vijay noted that her fingernails were unpolished and clipped very short. Yet the nails on her right hand were longer and well-shaped.

“You play the guitar?” she asked.

Quintana blinked with surprise. “My father taught me when I was a little girl. I brought two of them to Mars with me.”

“How wonderful. I can play piano a little.”

“No piano here.” Quintana’s suspicion and anxiety eased somewhat. “But I can teach you the guitar, if you like.”