Red Planet Run (18 page)

“Anchor released.”

“Roger anchor released. Reel in the line.”

“Reeling.” I waited. “Line in, anchor up, flywheel locked.”

“Roger anchor up and locked. Stand by.”

“Standing by.” Her response was prompt and very crisp, and I smiled to myself. Paddy was enjoying herself. For that matter, so was I.

Something moved outside the port. I looked up from the board, and through the curved graphplex panel saw the walls of the canyon descending. No, we were ascending, and gaining momentum with every meter we climbed. I put a hand on the deflation port lever, just in case, and my fingers tightened as we gathered speed.

We burst out of the top of the canyon like the cork out of a champagne bottle, only rather more controlled, and the cracked and chasmed expanse of the Martian landscape rolled back beneath us in every direction, as if someone had taken hold of the edge of the planet and shook it out flat for our inspection. I knew the horizon curved, but on first sight that first day up, the wrinkled landscape seemed to go on forever, folds of pachydermal Martian skin with blood and heartbeat frozen just beneath the surface. The sight so overwhelmed us that I don’t think anyone said a word for the rest of the day. We just looked, and looked, and looked.

We kept on looking during the days and weeks that followed. We drifted all that third month, at the whim of the Martian winds, maintaining a discreet altitude so that there would be no emergency deploying of jibs or red-lining of He-maker to get us out of sudden ends to any box canyon we might have taken a fancy to wander up. “Wind-surfing,” Sean called it, using the leading edge of the nearest available weather front to keep us afloat on an endless, rust-red sea. Somedays it was our friend the zephyr, others a laughing gust, but it was always there. We could feel it herd us on our way, we could measure it on our instruments should we disbelieve our senses; it was a palpable force with which we had to reckon each and every day. In the Belt, to get from rock to rock you moved yourself or you didn’t move. On Mars, you moved whether you would or not. Or at least you did if you were hitching a ride on a balloon.

Landscape, and weather, and then there was all that sky. Tucked away in the bottom of our canyon, the sky had not seemed quite so omnipresent, but once we were up and out, our perspective changed. As thin and insubstantial as the Martian atmosphere was, it hung over us with a tangible presence that wrapped us about and made us feel somehow snug. The Martian moons, too, hovered over our journey, constant guardian angels. Phobos did not so much rise as it did spring into the western sky, a pale oval that looked like Luna’s little sister, so curious as regards our presence on her planet that she checked in on us every eleven hours.

Phobos’ orbit was decaying, Paddy informed us, as usual overcome with the romance of our situation. In a hundred million years or so, it would break up and crash to the Martian surface. For now, it traveled around Mars in 7.7 hours, 6,200 klicks above the planet’s equator, in an almost perfectly circular orbit. If and when the Martian winds took us above or below 70 degrees Martian latitude, we would not be able to see Phobos at all.

Deimos, on the other hand, was barely ten kilometers in diameter and over 21,000 kilometers from Mars in synchronous orbit; it looked like a bright star and, in comparison with Phobos, a very slow one. It was so far away, in fact, Paddy informed us, still in that didactic tone, that it teetered on the edge of escaping Martian gravity and leaving the Red Planet’s orbit altogether, which it would do eventually anyway. It orbited in the Martian equatorial plane, and remained in our view for as long as sixty hours.

Phobos and Deimos both turned on their axis in the same time it took for rotation, showing the same face always to Mars, as Luna did to Terra. “This view could get old,” Paddy had said disparagingly back on Outpost, but then Paddy had never looked anywhere but up, and had no soul besides. How could anyone not fall instantly and irrevocably in love with the hurtling moons of Barsoom?

God, Mars was gorgeous!

Let’s face it, when vacuum isn’t scaring the hell out of you, it’s pretty dull to look at. I mean, how many different ways can you look at black on black? Even the myriad different stars superimposed on vacuum’s black backdrop begin to look alike after a while; they don’t even twinkle when you’re not looking at them through an atmosphere.

I’d forgotten how beautiful a planet could be. The surprise of colors in the strata of rock formations, the difference in texture between the corded remnants of riverbeds old when Terra was young, the sheer, solid surfaces of cliffs, the exhilarating rise and fall of flatland to foothill to peak to gorge. There were columned buttes, Doric and Corinthian, the abandoned cities of some race of prehistoric giants. The desiccated fingers of old riverbeds clawed into the upthrusting bulks of stolid plateaus. The tortuous switchbacks of Lowell’s canals isolated massive, table-topped mesas, huge and square and indestructible. Delicate pillars reached for the stars between sheer-walled canyons cutting deeply into the sides of the Valley. Above them all, there was an endless horizon at the edge of a sky that began its day flushed with the pink of good health, faded to a clear, bright peach at zenith, only to meld into a subdued ocher landscape with the setting of the sun. The sun looked larger from Mars than I remembered from Terra, because of the amount of dust in the air and the diffusion of light. The subsequent moody effect Sol had on the Martian landscape was as unexpected as it was enchanting. Sunrises were intimate and secretive, zeniths brassy and boisterous, sunsets sleepy and a little sad.

Our first sunrise was a complete surprise. We’d forgotten curtains. There were shutters on the windows of private quarters on Outpost because of all the activity going on nonstop outside. On Mars, we assumed there would be only us and a few hundred Russians we hadn’t run into yet, and we had taken our privacy for granted. After our strange encounter with Johnny Ozone, which felt as if it had occurred in a dimension beyond sight and sound anyway, and then the horrible wreckage of the
Tallship
colony, I realized Mars was determined not to be treated as if she were harmless. I still never thought of curtains.

That first morning my side of the
Kayak
faced east, and I got it first: a sharp spill of bright light right through graphplex, covers, eyelid, cornea, pupil, lens, vitreous humor, and up the optical nerve into the cerebral cortex. Without consciously moving. I found myself standing in the center of my stateroom, heart pounding, short of breath, blinking into the dawn’s early light and wondering what the hell was
that
and who forgot to turn down the cabin lights the night before?

I’d been working off-Terra for almost thirty years; I hadn’t set foot on Luna in sixteen; in their young lives Paddy and Sean had never been closer to Sol than Ceres. It was an adjustment for all of us.

Once we became accustomed to being up with the chickens, the days fell into a pattern. There was a real danger in being so far removed from any authority, in being accountable only to yourself for the work that must be done. It was a hard lesson learned in hiring personnel to babysit asteroid refineries for the long haul to Terran orbit. There was a potentially fatal and always economically disastrous tendency on the part of the crew to let things slide, to drift from day to day, week to week, month to month, to procrastinate until well inside the range of Terranova Traffic Control. In the interim, skills deteriorated and morale waned. The rock jockeys called it mental mañana.

The only effective preventative for mental mañana was a strict, rigorous, daily schedule. During the admittedly brief planning stages of this mission, Charlie had pointed out to me that even our method of transportation would meander; the challenge lay in not allowing the
Kayak
’s method of transportation to dictate our actions, or in this case, inaction.

Of course back then we had not been aware that we would be doing quite so much traveling; at any rate it was impractical to rely on the constant newness of our surroundings to keep us continually at a point of enthusiasm; the twins and I had already seen too much of the Solar System to be forever awed by new sights, although from the first day we never slept through a sunrise, nor were we ever very far from a port during a sunset. The solution lay more in the assigning of responsibilities to each crew member, and then holding each one accountable for his or her duties.

A kid on a space station grew up smart or didn’t grow up. Sean and Paddy had been rabid overachievers from the age of two, and vacuum is a great disciplinarian. That sense of discipline paid off in spades on Mars.

We rose with the sun and ate breakfast as the air inside the Montgolfier heated. By the end of the meal the helium inside the Charliere had warmed and expanded. I retracted the rotary drills up into the legs, and by the time the galley was cleared and locked down, we were aloft. For the first still hour or two following the dawn we rose slowly, straight up, and remained more or less stationary above the campsite of the night before. Our lack of motion combined with the long shadows cast by the rising sun made this the best time for photography. Each of us had been trained in the operation of every machine the gondola carried; as time passed, Sean displayed an increasing facility with wide angle, high-definition photography. He got so he could assemble a collection of pixels and come up with a recognizable topographic feature with little or no help from the computer. He started testing himself against the imaging program and beat it often enough to give me a mild sense of alarm.

Paddy’s affinity seemed to be for the spectroscope, which I should have been able to guess would happen, considering the waking hours she spent glued to the ocular of her telescope. The spectroscope examined the optical spectra of Mars, as emitted by the various topographical formations over which we were passing. Paddy identified and charted deposits of calcium carbonates, zinc, magnesium, phosphorous, and, of course, iron. “It’s the Red Planet, all right,” she remarked one day. “There’s almost nothing but Fe on this rock.” After six weeks she could identify the bluish-white crystalline of zinc at a single glance, and began using the scope more for confirmation than identification.

As the need to oversee photography and spectroscopy grew less, I began spending more time at the cartography station, plotting our course and speed, making sun sights and polar fixes, and plugging new topographical information into the PlanetView.

The value of a map is to put things in perspective. Where have you been? Where are you going? Where are you now? Good question, on any given day during those first months on Mars. The Martian prime meridian, comparing to zero degrees longitude through Greenwich on Terra, passed through Airy-o, a small, well-defined crater near the Martian equator. Once we signed on with Deneb and got our geographical bearings, I fed the data into our cartography program. It already contained major geographic features such as Olympus Mons and Valles Marineris; all I had to do was fill in the blanks.

But no flat map could show a globe without distortion. I could have encoded flat maps until the cows came home and transmitted the data to Maria Mitchell for compilation into a global representation, but this would take time and Helen didn’t want to wait; she wanted an accurate scale diagram of Cydonia ASAP. She fussed over this problem until in self-defense Simon and Sam invented the HT PlanetView. The PlanetView was little more than a keyboard and a holographic tri-dee projector connected by a little black box, one of Simon’s better efforts, that translated the keystrokes into contour lines. Its lens projected a scaled globe with the lines of latitude and longitude already drawn. Depending on which key you hit, the globe displayed Martian geography, geology, or meteorology. Other modes could be programmed in at need, including a to-scale close-up of what we knew thus far of Cydonia, at which I had yet to look.

Our tasks had the gratification of immediacy: We saw a butte that morning, Sean had registered its photographic representation by noon, Paddy had a spectral analysis of its composition in the computer before dinner, and I had the butte on the PlanetView before we went to bed that night. It was very satisfying work.

We broke for lunch at noon and afterward retired to our respective cabins for some alone time. At two we met in the galley for the twins’ lessons. There were syllabi and course schedules already laid out on the computer; I tried to jazz things up by playing devil’s advocate and giving the twins something with a pulse to ask questions of, a privilege they generally disdained. They were both very, very bright, a fact I occasionally deplored and frequently cursed.

School got out at five. We rotated the chores of cooking, housekeeping, and tending the crops. Dinner was at six. At my insistence we ate together; if Paddy’d had her druthers she would have crammed food in her mouth as she leaned into the bubble port, peering through the ocular at the approaching dusk. I made them sit up at the table like civilized human beings, use knives and forks and napkins, and maintain a conversation consisting of more than single-syllable grunts when their mouths weren’t full. Mother would have approved, but I wasn’t sure either one of the twins would ever forgive me.

By seven the galley was clear again and available for reading, playing board games, watching tapes, and general recreation and pursuit of hobbies. Roger Lindbergh had slipped a disk with a lot of medieval herbal texts stored on it into Sean’s personal luggage. He spent a lot of computer time trying to decipher them, and wowed us at mealtimes with statements like “Ye bay leaf boiled with ye peel of orange maketh a water for the washing of hands at ye table” and “Take parsley and hyssop and sage and hack it small and boil it in wine and in water and a little powder of pepper and mess it forth; it will heal all manner of evils of the mouth,” not to mention “Ye maidens make garlands of marigold when they go to feasts or bridals because it hath fair yellow flowers and ruddy.”