Mars Life (26 page)

“Good,” he said.

She gripped his arm, forcing him to turn and look at her. “If I tell you to stop and return to base, you stop and return. Understand?”

Nodding, “Sure. Right.”

“I mean it, Jamie. I want you to promise me.”

He was staring into her eyes. Then he broke into a slow, almost shy smile. “I promise, Vijay. I’ll come back to you.”

She made herself smile back at him even though she felt terribly worried about this sudden mission into the hundred-below-zero cold of the Martian night.

As they went to the airlock and the rack of nanosuits stored there, Vijay saw that half the dome’s people were gathered there, milling, buzzing. She glanced at her wristwatch: barely half an hour had passed since the meteor had hit.

Then she saw Carter Carleton off to one side of the crowd, looking more amused than anything else.

Jamie was moving through the crowd, which made way for him like the Red Sea parting for Moses. He saw Hasdrubal already in the extra-large nanosuit that he used, medical sensors attached to its inner lining.

Reaching for one of the medium-sized suits, Jamie asked, “Where’s Rosenberg?”

“Not coming,” said Hasdrubal. “He’s been replaced.”

Vijay wanted to kiss Jamie before he left, but there were too many people crowded around the airlock and once Jamie pulled up the hood of his nanosuit and inflated it into a bubble helmet it was impossible anyway.

So she watched him and the priest and Hasdrubal trudge to the airlock hatch. Jamie waved to her before stepping through. She waved back, feeling suddenly alone and afraid.

The hatch closed. The telltale lights on its control panel cycled from green, through amber and to red.

They’re outside now, she thought. They’re walking to the cable lifts.

The crowd broke up. Dr. Chang walked briskly toward the monitoring center, hands at his sides, shoulders bunched forward.

“You look like a lady who could use a drink.”

Carter Carleton was standing beside her, looking bemused. “I still have that single malt in my quarters,” he said.

“No,” Vijay said firmly. “I have work to do.” She started toward the infirmary, where the medical monitors were.

“They’ll be perfectly fine,” Carleton said, walking beside her. “Those suits are good to nearly two hundred below.”

“Are they?”

“They test them with liquid nitrogen, I’m told.”

Vijay shuddered at the thought of stepping into a vat of liquid nitrogen, suit or no suit.

Carleton reached for her arm, but Vijay kept striding determinedly.

“Look,” he coaxed, “they won’t even get to the cable for another ten minutes. You have time for a quick drink. Just one.”

“Not tonight, Carter,” Vijay answered, thinking, Not ever. Not with a man who tries to move in when my husband’s out risking his butt.

“When they come back then,” Carleton said easily. “We’ll have a celebratory drink together then.”

Without another word, Vijay left him standing in the middle of the open dome as she headed for the infirmary. He doesn’t give up easily, she said to herself. You’ve got to give him that.

Jamie knew it was only his imagination, but he felt cold in the nanosuit. Just a couple of molecules separate me from unbreathable air that’s close to a hundred below zero, he kept thinking. Just a couple of molecules.

They walked along the well-trodden ground, three little pools of light from the lamps built into the shoulders of their suits bobbing in the enormous empty black night of Mars. Overhead hung the stars, silent and solemn, spread across the sky so thickly Jamie could barely make out the familiar shape of Orion. The Milky Way flowed leisurely across the heavens, and one bright blue star beckoned to him: Earth, the blue world.

Jamie couldn’t reach into his coverall pocket to feel the bear fetish, but he knew it was there. Guide me, Grandfather, he prayed silently. Help me get through this.

“There’s the cables.” Hasdrubal’s voice in Jamie’s earphone sounded tense. He could hear DiNardo puffing, but the priest said nothing.

“We’ve reached the lift,” Jamie reported on the radio frequency that linked to the excursion controller. He pictured in his mind the group clustered around the controller’s console: Chang, Rosenberg . . . would Vijay be there or in the infirmary?

As if in answer, Vijay’s voice came through. “All your medical readouts are fine. No worries.”

Jamie still shivered involuntarily as he helped DiNardo clip the climbing harness across his barrel chest, then checked Hasdrubal’s harness.

“Hey, who checks you?” Hasdrubal asked.

Coyote, Jamie almost said aloud. Instead he answered, “I’ve been doing this since you were in diapers, friend.”

The three of them rode up on the cables side by side in almost complete silence. Jamie had expected Hasdrubal to make some chatter, but the lanky biologist kept his thoughts to himself. He thought he heard DiNardo mumbling something, praying perhaps. They were facing the cliff, which whisked by in a blur of strange, almost menacing shadows in the weak light of their shoulder lamps while their booted feet dangled in empty air.

It took almost fifteen minutes to reach the top of the cliff. Thanking the nanosuits for their flexibility, Jamie swung over and planted his boots on the solid rimrock. Hasdrubal did the same, then the two of them helped DiNardo get himself set on the ground and out of his harness.

Jamie held up his left arm to peer at the greenish glow of the GPS readout among the instruments on the pad he wore on his wrist.

“The dome’s this way,” he said, starting off toward the horizon.

“We have you on the positioning system,” came the voice of the excursion controller. “You’re exactly five hundred and seventy-two meters from the dome.”

The original dome from the First Expedition had been sited more than a hundred kilometers to the northwest, on the other side of the Noctis Labyrinthus badlands. When it became obvious that the main base for the explorers should be down on the floor of the rift valley, Jamie had approved the geologists’ insistence that they keep a pair of campers up on the plain for excursions to the Tharsis Bulge highlands and their massive shield volcanoes.

Now we’re going to examine an impact, Jamie said to himself as the rounded hump of the dome rose like a sharp-edged black shadow against the starry sky. That’s something different from the blue world, Jamie thought as they walked toward the dome: there’s hardly any haze on Mars, especially at night, when the temperature’s so cold. No foliage or buildings, either. You can see the stars right down to the horizon.

The dome was powered by a small nuclear reactor, buried half a kilometer away. It had provided electrical power for nearly twenty years; Jamie remembered that it would need refueling in another five years or so.

The dome’s airlock was big enough for all three of them to squeeze in together. Its dim red lighting still seemed bright to Jamie after spending nearly an hour out in the night.

Once they stepped through the airlock’s inner hatch, though, the dome lit up brilliantly. Jamie blinked and suppressed an urge to laugh out loud.

“Well, the lights work,” said Hasdrubal. He stepped quickly to the monitoring console that sat next to the airlock.

“The heat, too,” DiNardo said. 
“Gratia Dei.”

Jamie realized he wasn’t the only one who had felt cold out in the night.

Hasdrubal scanned the console screens. “According to the readouts, the air’s okay. Kind of chilly in here, though, not quite up to twenty degrees Celsius.”

Jamie grinned. “That’s better than outside.”

“Amen,” said Monsignor DiNardo.

The three of them pulled down the hoods of their suits as they looked around the dome. It was a spare facility: one row of cubicles for sleeping quarters, a compact galley that hadn’t been used in months, consoles that monitored the life-support systems, a communications console, and across the open floor sat the two campers.

Big enough to carry four persons in relative comfort, the campers were cylindrical in shape with big bug-eye windows up front. They rested on eight sets of springy wheels that always looked to Jamie as if they were too fragile to support the weight. But on Mars they were fine. Their once-gleaming aluminum skins were caked with red dust; it made them look rusty, hard used.

Glancing at his wristwatch, Jamie said, “Let’s check out the campers, then get some sleep. Big day tomorrow.”

“Dontcha think we should call base and let ‘em know we’re here?” Hasdrubal suggested.

Jamie knew it was strictly routine. Their monitors back at the base watched them every step of the way. Still, he called back to Dr. Chang. I’ll call Vijay once I’m in one of the sleeping cubicles, he told himself.

I‘m not going to kiss ass for those yahoos!”

Malcolm Fry wasn’t angry, but he was upset as he paced across the room they had set up to be his private office. As a candidate for the U.S. Senate, Fry spent precious little time at his campaign headquarters. He was on the road constantly, crisscrossing the state by plane, bus, and his personal hydrogen-fueled minivan.

Fry was “black enough” to entice the minority vote, but not so liberal that he frightened the conservatives. He had made his money the old-fashioned way, in construction and real estate, and now was spending a considerable portion of it in this exhausting campaign.

He was a big man, his hands still calloused from his early days as a construction worker. His smile had charmed voters—especially women voters—since he’d first gotten into politics, as a city councilman in Pasadena. He had climbed the greasy pole up to the point where the news media claimed he had an excellent chance to become California’s next senator. There were even whispers of him running for president later on. He was young enough for that.

But now he glowered at his campaign manager as he paced the spacious office, from its shuttered window to the big desk in the corner and back again.

His campaign manager, Howard McChesney, sat in a tense bundle of nerves in the armchair in front of the desk, his head swiveling back and forth, following his candidate’s pacing. McChesney was a wiry, edgy type, with a lantern-jawed face and cold blue eyes.

“They may be yahoos,” he said, his voice scratchy as fingernails on a chalk board, “but they can throw the election into your lap. Or into Gionfriddo’s.”

“The Mafia candidate,” Fry muttered bitterly.

“Mal, you’ve got to let them have their way with this,” McChesney insisted. “If you don’t, you lose the election. It’s that simple.”

Fry stopped his pacing and fixed McChesney with a look that had terrified labor gangs and corporate directors.

“Howie,” he said in a quietly intense voice, “they want me to withdraw my support for science courses in the public schools. I can’t do that! Hell, when I was on the school board I fought to keep science in the curriculum. They tried to slit my throat over that! Now you want me to buddy up to them?”

“If you want to be senator,” McChesney replied.

“I can’t do it.”

“You mean you won’t do it.”

“That’s right, I won’t.”

McChesney drew in a breath, then said, “Let me paint a picture for you, Malcolm.”

Fry sat on the edge of his desk and folded his arms across his chest. When McChesney called him “Malcolm,” he knew things were getting grim.

“So you stand up to the fundamentalists,” McChesney said, his head tilted back as if he were talking to the ceiling. “You insist on pushing for more funding for science courses in public schools.”

Fry nodded.

“The New Morality, the Catholic Church, and every Christian sect in this crazy state votes against you. You lose the election. Gionfriddo wins. What’s the first thing he does when he gets to Washington?”

Sullenly, Fry answered, “He votes to cut federal funding for science classes.”

McChesney spread his arms. “So there you are. What have you accomplished, except to lose the election?”

“I still don’t like it.”

“Neither do I. But there it is. It ain’t going to go away. Those yahoos, as you call ‘em, will work night and day for years and years to get what they want. They’re patient, they’re organized, and they’re absolutely certain that they’re right and anybody who’s against them is wrong. They’re certain that God’s on their side.”

Fry seemed to sag in on himself. “So I either give in to them or lose the election. Is that what you’re saying?”

“That’s what I’m saying.”

“There’s got to be some other way! Got to be!”

McChesney said nothing for several moments while Fry stared at him, silently pleading.

“Well, maybe . . .”

“What?”

The campaign manager pressed his lips into a thin line, gazed up at the ceiling again, then finally said, “Maybe we could try to outflank ‘em.”

“What do you mean?”

“The ultraconservatives are all worked up about this Mars business. They want to stop the program and bring all the scientists home.”