Return to Mars (10 page)

The long months of the journey to Mars went smoothly enough, except for a communications breakdown when the main comm antenna responded to a faulty computer command and pointed itself away from Earth. For a whole day Dezhurova and Rodriguez tried every programming trick they knew to unlock the antenna, to no avail. At last the Russian and Craig had to suit up and go EVA to physically remove the antenna’s steering system and reprogram it inside the spacecraft, then go out and reinstall it. No damage done, and no one got hurt, although everyone was jittery until they reestablished contact with mission control on Tarawa.

Jamie noticed, though, that Trudy Hall was ashen-faced with tension. When he asked Vijay about her, Shektar told him she had given the biologist tranquilizers to calm her down.

The only other incident came when a solar flare erupted and they had to spend fifty-three hours in the spacecraft’s shielded storm cellar. Hall hyperventilated from anxiety, but otherwise everyone was all right. Trudy took a good deal of teasing about having to clap a retch bag over her face and breathe into it for almost twenty minutes.

Then late one night, when they were halfway to Mars, as he prepared for bed, Jamie heard muffled laughter from the next compartment: Dex’s quarters.

“What’s he ever done?” Through the thin partition between their compartments, Trumball’s voice sounded accusing, almost angry. “I mean, what’s he ever contributed to the field of geology?”

The answering voice was too low, too muffled for Jamie to make out cither the words or the speaker. It sounded like a woman’s voice, he thought.

“I’ll tell you what scientific contributions our big Injun chief has made,” Trumball went on, loud and clear. “Nothing. Zip. Nada. Zero.”

He’s talking about me! Jamie realized.

The woman said something; the tone sounded as if it might have been a protest.

“Oh, yeah, sure, he drove the first expedition to go to the Grand Canyon and they found the lichen there. But he didn’t make the discovery, the biologists did. He might have married one of ‘em, but he couldn’t even make that work.”

The woman spoke again, lower still.

“If he weren’t a redskin he wouldn’t be the mission director, I can tell you that,” Trumball insisted. “His scientific accomplishments have been zero. He’s a political choice, nothing more.”

Trumball went on for a while, in a lower tone, his words too muffled now for Jamie to make out.

Jamie sank down on his bunk, feeling empty inside, drained, defeated. He’s right, Jamie realized. I haven’t contributed much to the field. I got onto the first expedition by a fluke and I’m here as mission director because I campaigned for it.

He tried to sleep. But he could not. Is this what the rest of them think of me? Are they just tolerating me because I was on the first expedition? Or because I’m older than any of them?

Then he heard the woman giggle. Dex shushed her. Jamie tried not to listen, turned on his bunk and covered his head with the slim plastic pillow. Silence for a while. Then a soft moan, almost a sob. Jamie squeezed his eyes shut, tried to will himself to deafness. She moaned again, louder. It went on for what seemed like an hour.

Jamie could not tell for certain who was in there with Dex, but the woman sounded to him like Vijay.

It took several days before he could look her in the eye again. Before he could look at any of them without wondering what was going through their minds.

And he could not look at Trumball at all. Until the evening when he and Dex flared into open conflict.

Fuchida and Hall were giving a seminar to the rest of the scientists about the latest findings from Earth. Everyone was crowded on the benches that lined the one long table of the galley. The display screens along the curving bulkhead showed photomicrographs of the Martian lichen samples that had been returned to Earth by the first expedition.

“We knew before we took off,” Trudy Hall was saying, standing at the head of the table, “that the Martian lichen are remarkably like terrestrial lichen in several ways, but decidedly unlike in others.

“Like terrestrial lichen, they are colonies of algoids and fungoids living together in a symbiotic relationship that—”

“Without benefit of marriage?” Trumball cracked.

Unfazed, Hall replied, “They reproduce asexually.”

“That’s no fun.”

“How do you know if you haven’t tried it?”

Jamie leaned his forearms on the table and said softly, “Let’s get buck on the subject, please.”

Hall nodded and resumed, “The most interesting thing is that their nuclear material contains double-stranded molecules that are remarkably like our own DNA.”

“Their genetic programming,” Fuchida took over, getting to his feet lo stand beside Hall, “appears to be very similar to our genetic code.”

Pointing to a computer-graphic representation of a twining double helix, Fuchida said, “Their genes are composed of four base units, just us our own are.”

Jamie thought Fuchida’s voice was trembling slightly. Excitement that he was trying to suppress?

“You mean we’re related to them?” Shektar asked, wide-eyed awe in her tone.

“Not necessarily,” answered Fuchida, raising one hand slightly. “Their base units are not the same composition as ours. We have adenine, cytosine, guanine and thymine. The Martian base units are remarkably similar in function, but of different composition chemically. No formal names have been assigned to them as yet. They are known simply as Mars One, Mars Two, Mars Three, and—”

“Let me guess,” Trumball interrupted. “Mars Four?”

Fuchida made a miniaturized bow. “Yes, Mars Four.”

“Well now, that’s almost poetic,” muttered Possum Craig.

As Fuchida and Hall took turns showing how the Martian DNA worked, Jamie’s mind began to wander. Same system for passing genetic information from one generation to another, but different chemical structure. Are we related? Could Earth’s life have originated on Mars? Or vice versa?

The others were already arguing the same point, he realized.

“Had to be Mars-to-Earth,” Craig was insisting stubbornly. “Couldn’t be the other way ‘round.”

“Why not?” Shektar demanded.

“Gravity,” Trumball answered. “It’s a lot easier to blast a chunk of Mars rock loose and have it meander to Earth than it is to blast off a hunk of Earth and get it to Mars.”

“And Mars is much closer to the asteroid belt,” piped up Rodriguez, from the foot of the table. “It gets hit by meteoroids a lot more often than Earth does.”

“Yes, of course,” Hall said.

“Meteoroid strikes blast chunks of Martian rock into space,” Rodriguez went on doggedly. “Sonic of the rocks drift close enough to Earth for our gravity well to capture them and pull them down to the ground.”

They delved into a free-for-all about the chances that Mars life and Earth life were somehow related. Jamie listened with only half his attention, wondering about the links between Earth’s life and Mars. He forgot about Dex and his snide wisecracks, forgot about his worries of what the others thought of him. In his mind’s eye he saw the cliff dwelling in Mars’ Grand Canyon and others like it scattered throughout the southwestern desert.

He felt in his heart that there was a relationship, there had to be; two worlds close enough to be brothers and both of them bearing life. They had to be related. At some time, in some way, life seeded both the red world and the blue. How long ago? How did it come to pass?

That’s what we’re here to discover, his rational mind answered.

“We’d have to protect all the natural species, of course,” Trumball was saying. “Assuming there’s more than one species to be protected.”

Jamie snapped his full attention to their discussion.

“That’s rather far-fetched,” Hall said, “don’t you think?”

“No more far-fetched than finding life on the planet,” said Trumball, leaning back on the bench until his shoulders rested against the curving bulkhead.

Shektar was staring at him. “Do you really believe that we could alter the environment of the entire planet?”

“Make it so earthlike that people could walk out on the surface without suits?” Rodriguez looked clearly disbelieving.

“Why not?” Trumball replied easily. “There’s plenty of water in the permafrost. Heat it up, pump it out, and we can warm up the atmosphere. Use siderophile bacteria. Sow the atmosphere with blue-green algae and they’ll soak up the carbon dioxide in the air and give us a breathable oxygen/nitrogen atmosphere.”

“In a hundred thousand years or so,” Hall said.

“Don’t be a flathead,” Trumball snapped. “We’ve done studies that show you can do it in a century or two.”

Jamie saw the crooked, self-confident grin on Trumball’s face and remembered his sneering, What’s he ever contributed to the field of geology?

“And what happens to the native life-forms?” he asked quietly.

“They’ll have to be protected, like I said.”

“Assumin’ you can do all that,” Craig asked, “how’re you gonna pay for it?”

Trumball’s cocky grin widened. “That’s the beauty of it. The project pays for itself.”

“How?”

“Colonization.”

“Colonization?” several voices echoed.

“Sure, why not? They’ve got tourists taking flights to that orbital hotel, don’t they? And Moonbase is setting up facilities for retirees. Why not colonize Mars?”

“Very expensive, don’t you think?” said Dezhurova.

Jamie felt something like red-hot lava beginning to churn in his guts.

Trumball nonchalantly laced his fingers behind his head as he replied, “Look, you guys ought to get with the program. There are plenty of people right now who’d pay for a trip to Mars. So it costs ten million per person, what’s that to the CEO of Masterson Aerospace or the head of Yamagata Heavy Industries? Or to some video star? And the price’ll come down as we establish facilities here on Mars for refueling and growing food.”

“So you can build permanent colonies on Mars,” Rodriguez muttered.

“Sure,” Dex repeated. “Why the hell not?”

“Good lord,” Hall murmured.

“The big corporations will lead the way,” Trumball went on, “and the tourism industry will jump in with both feet. Vacation on Mars! See the Grand Canyon! Climb the tallest mountain in the solar system!”

“Why not ski down it?” Dezhurova muttered.

“We could make snow, sure!”

“But tourists don’t stay—”

“Yeah, but that’ll be just the beginning,” Dex replied, with growing enthusiasm. “We’ll have to build facilities for the tourists, right? That’ll be the start of permanent colonies, lemme tell you.”

“No,” said Jamie.

Trumball turned slowly to face him, the crooked grin still on his handsome face. “I didn’t think you’d go for it.”

“Mars is not going to be turned into a tourist site or a colony.”

“Wanna bet?”

“I think it’s utter nonsense,” Hall said with a huff.

“So’d your grandfather think about going into orbit for a honeymoon,” Trumball shot back, “but people are doing it now, aren’t they.”

“What you are talking about,” said Dezhurova, “transforming the entire planet—that is called terraforming, correct?”

“Terraforming, right.” Trumball nodded.

Trying to control the anger seething within him, Jamie said, “You want to change the entire planet, make it just like Earth.”

“That’s the basic idea. Then it’ll be a lot safer for visitors. Then we can build permanent settlements on Mars. Build cities, colonies.”

“Just like the Europeans did to the Americas,” Jamie said.

Trumball laughed out loud. “I knew it’d torque you. Cultural bias and all that.”

“And you’ll put the lichen on a reservation, where the visitors can come and stare at them.”

Trumball’s grin did not lade a centimeter. “Hey, don’t get so stoked. It’s the wave of the future, pal. And the thing is, you’ve done more than anybody here to make it possible.”

“I have?”

“Sure,” said Trumball. “You’re the guy who pushed the first expedition to the Grand Canyon, aren’t you? Without you they never would’ve found the lichen.”

Jamie felt suddenly off balance. Praise from Trumball was totally unexpected.

“And you even made a fuss about some cliff dwelling, didn’t you?” Dex continued. “Now that’d make a helluva tourist attraction! A native Martian village. People would pay a flippin’ fortune to see that, lemme tell you.”

“Not while I live,” Jamie said, with all the iron in his soul.

“You can’t stop it, chief,” Trumball said, with just as much steel. “It’s inevitable. We come, we see, we conquer.”

“Not while I live,” Jamie repeated. Then he added, “Nor in your lifetime, either.”

“Oh no? How much you want to bet that the next expedition to Mars carries tourists? Only a couple very rich old farts who don’t mind spending a few million bucks to prove their machismo. But they’ll come.”

“Perhaps media reporters,” Fuchida muttered.

“And ruin Mars the way the Europeans ruined everyplace they touched,” Jamie said.

“What ruin?” Trumball countered. “You wouldn’t be going to Mars if your precious Native Americans had their way. You’d still be hunting buffalo and weaving blankets.”

Jamie pushed himself to his feet, too furious to trust himself much further.

He pointed a finger at Trumball like a pistol. “No one’s going to fuck up Mars, Dex. Not you or anyone else. That, I promise you.”

Dex grinned lazily. “How’re you going to stop us, chief?”

Jamie had no answer.

JAMIE STOOD ALONE IN THE ANCIENT CITY, THE HOT SUN SO BRIGHT IN THE clear golden sky that its glare against the alabaster buildings made his eyes hurt. The heat of the sun felt good against his naked skin. The city was abandoned; still, silent, yet as beautiful as the day its builders had finished their work.