Return to Mars (21 page)

JAMIE LINGERED OVER A CUP OF WEAK COFFEE, FEELING ALMOST SATISFIED.

“Four thousand kilometers,” said Vijay. “No one’s gone even half that distance before.”

She was the only other one sitting at the galley table with Jamie. Dinner was over, the table cleared except for their dishes. Rodriguez and Fuchida had trooped off to the bio lab, while Trumball, Craig and Stacy Dezhurova had gone to the geology lab. They were planning two excursions: a trek across nearly four thousand kilometers to Ares Vallis and a flight to the tallest mountain in the solar system. Trudy Hall had pulled the final comm center shift before they all went to sleep.

”I think the trip to Olympus Mons will get more attention from the media,” Jamie said.

“Dex is so excited about retrieving the Pathfinder spacecraft, though. Don’t you think the media will get excited, too?”

He shrugged. “I suppose so, once they get there. But Dex and Possum are going to be driving across the landscape for several weeks. Pretty boring.”

“Unless they run into trouble.”

“Yeah,” said Jamie. “There is that.”

He had been mildly surprised when the technical directors at Tarawa had agreed to the long-distance run. God knows what kind of pressure Trumball and the other financial backers put on them, Jamie thought. Must have been pretty fierce.

“D’you really think the flight to the volcano will draw more attention from the media?” Vijay asked.

“It won’t be exactly the same as climbing Mt. Everest,” he replied, “but it should draw a lot of interest.”

She seemed to think it over before agreeing. “If the virtual reality rig works, millions of people can share in the moment.”

The VR equipment had been cranky for more than a week.

“I shouldn’t have gone up on that boulder,” Jamie admitted. “I shook something loose, I guess.”

“That’s the technical term for it,” Vijay said, with a grin.

Possum Craig had gone over the VR rig briefly and found no identifiable fault. Yet the equipment worked only in sputters now; it would function well enough for a while, then cut off unpredictably.

“I wish Possum had more time to spare,” Jamie said. “I’m getting pressure from Tarawa about the lack of VR sessions.”

“Dex says we’re losing money,” said Vijay. “He means, we’re not making the money we could make if the VR sessions were going smoothly.”

Jamie nodded gloomily. “I’ve got half a dozen messages from Dex’s father. He’s not an easy guy.”

“Could I see them?” she asked.

Jamie felt his eyebrows rise. “Trumball’s messages to me?”

“They might help me understand Dex,” she explained. “See what kind of father he’s got.”

Jamie thought it over briefly, then said, “Okay, come on.”

He got up and went to the comm center, Vijay alongside him. As they approached the geology lab they heard the passionate voices of Dex and Stacy, heatedly arguing.

Then Craig’s calm, flat Texas twang broke in. “You two are just engagin’ in a spittin’ contest. Doesn’t matter what particular spot y’all pick for landin’ the fuel generator, it ain’t gonna be the spot y’all actually land it, I can guarantee that.”

Jamie glanced in as they passed the lab’s open door. Dex was glowering at Craig, but Stacy’s strong, heavy features seemed stolid, unemotional.

“He is right, Dex,” the cosmonaut said. “I can put the bird down exactly where you want it, but I will bet there will be a field of big, stupid boulders right at that spot and we will have to jink the bird over to a smoother area.”

“But we’ve got the satellite imagery of the territory,” Dex insisted as Vijay and Jamie passed the lab.

“Yeah, with a resolution of one meter,” Craig grumbled. “Got any idea what a one-meter rock’ll do to the landing struts of yore fuel percolator?”

Vijay laughed softly. “It’s hard to argue with Possum. He doesn’t open his mouth unless he’s got the facts.”

“I wish he could find out what’s wrong with the VR rig,” Jamie said.

“What about the backup?”

“Mitsuo’s taking it on the Olympus Mons excursion.”

“Oh. Of course.”

They stepped through the open doorway of the comm center. Even though its partitions were only two and a half meters high, the room felt warmer to Jamie than anywhere else in the dome. Maybe it’s the equipment always running, giving off heat, he thought. But the life-support equipment was always running, too, and that section of the dome didn’t feel as warm. With an inward shrug he told himself, It’s your imagination. It’s all in your mind.

Trudy was sitting at the main console, twitching in rhythm to the primal rock music playing in the earphones she had clamped to her boyishly styled dark brown hair. Jamie could hear its heavy thump even through the earphones.

She turned and pulled the headset off. A blast of shrill noise filled the comm center; Trudy quickly clicked it off.

“How did you hear us come in?” Jamie asked, incredulous.

“Didn’t, actually,” Hall said, “but you’re not vampires, are you?”

“Huh?”

She hiked a thumb toward the monitor screen. “I saw your reflection in the display.”

“Oh.”

“I’m all finished here.” She got up from her chair. “Everything’s tucked in for the night.”

“You really shouldn’t play that stuff so loud,” Vijay said, quite seriously. “It can damage your hearing.”

“What?” Trudy cupped an ear, pretending deafness. Both women laughed and Trudy headed for the doorway with a lighthearted, “Ta.”

As Trudy pranced out of the comm center she passed the square, boxy form of the immersion table. I ought to be spending more time planning my own trip out to the cliff dwelling, Jamie told himself. I ought to spend as much time on that as Dex is spending on this damned silly excursion to Ares Vallis. But I’m stuck doing the stratigraphy work that he should be doing instead of planning my own excursion.

Feeling almost weary, he sat in one of the wheeled swivel chairs and pulled up the elder Trumball’s messages on one of the display screens. Vijay sat beside him and stared in silence at the icily demanding old man. There were six messages so far, the shortest of them running more than twelve minutes.

“… this is a totally unacceptable situation, Waterman,” Darryl C. Trumball was saying. “Totally unacceptable! Each VR transmission is worth upwards of thirty million dollars to us. Thirty million dollars! That’s how much money you’re pissing down the drain because you and your pack of brilliant scientists can’t get some simple electronics equipment to function properly!”

Vijay sat through all six of Trumball’s increasingly vitriolic tirades without speaking. When the last of them was finished she said, “Wow!”

Jamie blanked the display screen. “I’m glad there’s a hundred million kilometers between us.”

“That’s what Dex has had to deal with all his life,” she murmured. “No wonder he’s so driven.”

Jamie said nothing. She’s not worried about what I have to put up with; she’s thinking about Dex.

“What are you doing to placate him?” Vijay asked.

Jamie said, “Nothing will placate him unless we get the VR transmissions going again. I’ve thought about using the backup equipment, hut Mitsuo’s going to use it at Olympus Mons and I don’t want to take the chance of messing it up before then.”

“I suppose that’s right,” Vijay said, nodding slowly. “And Possum can’t fix this rig?”

“He’s looked at it and he can’t find what’s wrong. He calls it engineer’s hell: everything checks but nothing works.”

A pair of tiny furrows took form between Vijay’s brows. She looked as if she were trying to fix the situation by thinking hard on it.

“The fault must be in the VR system’s computer,” Jamie said. “The cameras and data gloves look okay.”

“Can we switch another computer …?”

“No, it’s built into the system.”

She leaned back in the chair. “You’ve got a problem, mate.”

“It’s an annoyance,” Jamie said. “Not a problem. I can’t get too worked up about it, even if it’s giving Dex’s dad a stroke.”

She looked at him curiously. “Well, I’d certainly be worked up about it if somebody was coming down on me like he’s leaning on you.”

Jamie smiled. “What’s he going to do, fire me?”

“There is that.” She smiled back.

“Some things are important and others aren’t. You’ve got to find the path that lets you deal with the important things.”

“And ignore the rest?”

He shook his head. “Not ignore them. Just keep them in their proper balance.”

Vijay’s gaze took on a slightly different air. “You know, Jamie, you just might be the sanest man I know.”

“I thought we were all crazy.”

“Oh, we are,” she said, standing up. “Certainly we are. But for a madman, you’re quite level-headed.”

He got up beside her and noticed again that she barely reached his shoulder. “Do you like level-headed men?”

She cocked her head, as if thinking. “Actually, I think the crazy ones are more interesting.”

“Is that a personal reaction or a professional one?”

“A little of both, I imagine.”

Without thinking, without even knowing he was going to do it, Jamie put his arms around her waist, pulled her to him, and kissed her.

Vijay lingered in his arms for a few breathless moments, then gently disengaged.

“I don’t think we should …”

“I’m not crazy enough to interest you?”

She took a step back from him. “It’s not that, Jamie. It’s not you, not who you are or what you are. It’s … it’s here, this place. We’re a hundred million bloody kilometers from home. What we’re doing here, what we feel … it’s not really us. It’s loneliness and fear.”

“I don’t feel lonely or fearful,” Jamie said softly. “I like it here.”

“Then you really are the maddest one of us all,” Vijay whispered. She turned and fled from the comm center.

Jamie stood there alone, thinking: Beneath her kidding and joking she’s scared. She’s scared of Mars. She’s scared that what she feels isn’t real, it’s just a reaction to being here.

Would she feel the same way about Dex? he asked himself. Does she feel the same way about Dex?

IT’S A DULL PARTY, JAMIE THOUGHT. BUT WHAT CAN YOU EXPECT WHEN you’re being watching by ten or twenty million strangers?

They had broken the record of the first expedition at noon, local time, but delayed the celebration until after dinner. Dex had worked out the time for their ”party” with the public relations people in Tarawa and New York—as if he didn’t have enough to do, Jamie groused silently.

So, with Dex wearing the backup virtual reality cameras clamped to his head like an extra pair of eyes, and the nubby data gloves on his hands, the eight explorers solemnly toasted the new Martian endurance record with fruit juices, coffee and tea.

It was early afternoon in New York. Roger Newell sat behind his broad-sweeping utterly clear desk and participated in the staid little festivity on Mars. It was being broadcast to some ten million VR sets, according to his information, but his network would show snippets of it on the evening news broadcast for all the others who could not afford a virtual reality rig.

“No more than a minute,” Newell muttered to himself from inside the VR helmet. “Thirty seconds, tops.” Christ, what a bunch of amateurs, he thought. These scientists can make even a party look dull.

“And here,” Dex Trumball was saying, “is Dr. James Waterman, our mission director. He was on the first expedition, too.”

Jamie felt suddenly tongue-tied, with Dex standing before him staring at him with that extra pair of electronic eyes perched atop his head. He hadn’t paid attention to the routine that Dex and the PR people had scripted. But he knew he had to say something.

“We’re very happy to be here on Mars, learning more about this planet,” he dithered, stalling for time to think. Unconsciously, he raised the cup he’d been drinking from and explained, “Of course, we don’t use alcoholic beverages here, but the fruit juices we’re drinking come from our own garden. Dex, you should show them the garden.”