Return to Mars (4 page)

”Yeah, sure. And Martian proteins have a few different amino acids in ‘em. But they still need water.”

They had reached the crest of the rim rock. Jamie could see the camera atop its high skinny pole peering at them.

Reluctantly, he said, “We’d better get back to the dome and help finish the unloading.”

She answered, “Yes, I suppose we should.”

Jamie couldn’t see Trumball’s face behind the heavily tinted visor of his helmet, but he heard the younger man laugh.

Hefting his container box, Trumball said, “Well, some of us have important work to do. Have fun playing stevedores.”

And he loped across the rock-strewn ground toward the base shelter, leaving Jamie and Shektar standing on the rim of the ancient crater.

LATER THAT AFTERNOON, C. DEXTER TRUMBALL WAS STILL EXCITED AS HE clicked the two miniaturized VR cameras into the slots just above his visor. They were slaved to the movements of his eyes, if the electronics rig worked right. Together with the molecular-thin data gloves he had already wormed over his spacesuit gloves, he would be able to show the millions of viewers on Earth whatever he himself saw or touched.

Briefly he looked back at the rest of the crew, now carrying crates and bulky canisters through the dome’s airlock. They would spend the rest of the day setting up equipment and making the dome livable. Trumball’s job was to entertain the people back home who were helping to pay for this expedition.

The first expedition to Mars had been run by national governments and had cost nearly a quarter-trillion dollar. This second expedition was financed mostly by private sources and cost less than a tenth as much.

Of course, the six years between the two missions had seen the advent of Clipperships, reusable spacecraft that brought down the cost of flying into orbit from thousands of dollars per pound to hundreds. Masterson Corporation and the other big aerospace firms had donated dozens of flights into Earth orbit to the Mars expedition; it was good public relations for them and their new Clipperships.

And Dex’s father had indeed spearheaded the drive that raised the money for the expedition. The elder Trumball had personally donated nearly half a billion dollars of his own wealth, then shivvied, cajoled, or shamed fellow billionaires into contributing to the cause.

But the real reason for the lower cost was that this second expedition was going to live off the land. Instead of carrying every gram of water, oxygen and fuel all the way from Earth, they had sent automated equipment ahead of them to land on Mars and start producing water, oxygen and fuel from the planet’s atmosphere and soil. Dex Trumball dubbed the procedure “Plan Z,” after the engineer who had pioneered the concept decades earlier, Robert Zubrin.

Still, even with Plan Z, the expedition ran into problems before its first module took off from Earth.

Nuclear rockets would cut the travel time between Earth and Mars almost in half. But there was still so much controversy in the United States and Europe over using nuclear propulsion that the expedition planners moved the main launch site to the island nation of Kiribati, out in the middle of the Pacific. There the nuclear engines were launched into orbit on Clipperships, to he mated with the living and equipment modules launched from the United States and Russia. Anti-nuclear demonstrators were not allowed within two hundred miles of the island launch site.

Kiribati’s price for being so obliging was to have the expedition’s mission control center established at their capital, Tarawa. Pete Connors, astronaut veteran of the first expedition, and the other controllers did not at all mind moving to the balmy atoll. And Kiribati got global attention for its fine hotels and tourist facilities. And security.

The biggest problem had been selection of the personnel to go to Mars. Two biologists and two geologists would be the entire scientific staff, and the competition among eager, intense young scientists was ferocious. Dex sometimes asked himself if he would have been selected as one of the geologists even if his father had not been so munificent. Doesn’t matter, he always answered himself. I’m on the team and the rest of them can torque themselves inside out for all I care.

Trumball grimaced as he checked out the VR electronics with his head-up display. The diagnostic display flickered across his visor. Everything operational except the damned gloves. Their icon blinked red at him.

The first law of engineering: when something doesn’t work, kick it. As he jiggered the hair-thin optical fiber wires that connected the gloves to the transmitter on his backpack, Trumball told himself once again that he was the only man on the team who understood the economics of this mission. And the economics determined what could or could not be accomplished.

Waterman and the rest of the scientists always have their heads in the clouds, he thought. They’re here to do science. They want to convert their curiosity into Nobel Prizes. Yeah, but unless somebody foots the frigging bills they’d still be back on some campus on Earth spending their nights chatting about Mars over the Internet.

Hell, I want to do good science, too. But the thing is, somebody’s got to pay for all this. They look down on me because I’m the only realist in the crowd.

The glove icon at last flicked to green in his HUD. He was ready to start the virtual reality tour.

Trumball cleared the display from his visor, then tapped his wrist keypad for the radio frequency back to mission control at Tarawa. It would be twenty-eight minutes before his signal reached Earth and their confirmation and go-ahead returned to him. He spent the time plotting out the route he would follow through this little travelogue.

“Mission control to Trumball,” at last came Connors’ rich baritone voice across a hundred million kilometers. “You are go for the VR tour. We have sixteen point nine million subscribers on-line, with more logging in as we announce your start time.”

We’ll hit twenty million easy, Trumball thought happily. At ten bucks u head, that pays for almost half of our ground equipment. We’re going to make a profit out of this expedition!

The Zieman family—father, mother, nine-year-old son and five-year-old daughter—sat in the entertainment room of their suburban Kansas City house in front of the wall-to-wall video screen.

Only one corner of the screen was activated: a serious-looking black man was explaining that the transmission from Mars took fourteen minutes to cover the distance between the two planets, even with the signal traveling at the speed of light, “which is three hundred thousand kilometers per second,” he emphasized.

The nine-year-old shook his head emphatically. “It’s two hundred and ninety-nine point seven nine kilometers per second,” he corrected righteously.

His sister hissed, “Ssshh!”

“Put your helmets on,” their father said. “They’re going to start in a couple of seconds.”

All four of them donned plastic helmets that held padded earphones and slide-down visors. They worked their fingers into the wired data gloves—mother helping her daughter, the boy proudly doing it for himself—then pulled the visors down when the man on the screen told them the tour was about to start.

The black man’s voice counted down, “Three … two … one…”

And they were on Mars!

They were looking out on a red, rock-strewn plain, a ruddy, dusty desert stretching out as far as the eye could see, rust-colored boulders scattered across the barren gently rolling land like toys left behind by a careless child. The uneven horizon seemed closer than it should be. The sky was a bright butterscotch color. Small wind-shaped dunes heaped in precise rows, and the reddish sand piled against some of the bigger rocks. In the distance was something that looked like a flat-topped mesa jutting up over the horizon.

“This is our landing site,” Dexter Trumball’s voice was telling them. “We’re on the westernmost extension of a region called Lunae Planum—the Plain of the Moon. Astronomers gave Martian geography bizarre names back in the old days.”

The view shifted as Trumball turned slowly. They saw the habitat dome.

“That’s where we’ll be living for the next year and a half. Tomorrow I’ll take you on a tour inside. Right now, the other members of the expedition are busy setting things in order; you know, housekeeping stuff. By tomorrow we’ll be able to walk through and see what it’s like.”

Not a word from any of the Ziemans. Across the country, across the world, people sat staring at Mars, fascinated, engrossed.

“Hear that faint, kind of whispering sound?” Trumball asked. ‘That’s the wind. It’s blowing at about thirty knots, practically a gale force wind on Earth, but here on Mars the air’s so thin that it’s not even stirring up the dust from the ground. See?”

They felt their right hands groping into a pouch on the hard suit’s leg. “Now watch this,” Trumball said.

They pulled out a toy-store horseshoe magnet, red and white.

“The sand here on Mars is rich with iron ores,” Trumball explained, “so we can use this magnet…”

They crouched down laboriously in the bulky hard suit and wrote out the letters M-A-R-S in the sand with the magnet as Trumball said, “See, we don’t have to touch the sand. The magnet pushes against the iron in the grains.”

“I want to write my name!” said the Zieman daughter.

“Shut up!” her brother snapped.

Both parents shushed them.

Trumball pocketed the magnet, then bent down and picked up a palm-sized rock. The viewers felt its weight and solidity in their gloved hands.

“The rocks that’re scattered all around here were torn out of the ground,” Trumball explained, straightening up. “Some of them might be from volcanic eruptions, but most of ‘em were blasted out by meteor impacts. Mars is a lot closer to the asteroid belt than Earth is, y’know, and so gets hit by meteors a lot more.”

They seemed to be walking away from the dome, out toward a boulder the size of a house. Red sand was piled up on one side of it.

“You can see a field of sand dunes out there,” said Trumball, and they saw his gloved hand pointing. “They must be pretty stable, because they were there six years ago, when the first expedition landed.”

The pointing hand shifted against the tawny sky. “Over that way you can see the land starts rising. That’s the eastern edge of the Tharsis bulge, where the big volcanoes are. Pavonis Mons is roughly six hundred kilometers from us, just about due west.”

The view shifted again, fast enough to make some viewers slightly giddy. “To the south is the badlands, Noctis Labyrinthus, and about six hundred kilometers to the southeast is Tithonium Chasma, the western end of the big Grand Canyon. That’s where the first expedition found the Martian lichen.”

Turning again, Trumball walked toward a small tractor. It looked almost like a dune buggy, but its wheels were thin and springy looking. It was completely open, no cabin; the seats were surrounded by a cage of impossibly slim metal bars.

The viewers saw themselves slide into the driver’s seat. The Zieman boy muttered, “Way cool!”

“I want to show you our standby fuel generator,” Trumball said as he started up the tractor’s engine. It clattered like a diesel, but strangely high-pitched in the thin Martian air. “It’s about two klicks— kilometers—from the dome. Been sitting out there for more than two years now, taking carbon dioxide out of the air and water from the permafrost beneath the ground and making methane for us. Methane is natural gas; it’s the fuel we’ll use for our ground rovers.”

Before putting the tractor in motion he turned around and leaned slightly over the vehicle’s edge. “Take a look at the bootprints,” Trumball said. “Human prints on the red sands of Mars. No one’s ever walked here before, not in this precise spot. Maybe you’ll put your footprints on Mars someday.”

“Yah!” the nine-year-old whooped.

Trumball drove twenty-eight million paying viewers (and their friends or families) slowly toward the fuel generator.

“It’s not much to look at,” he admitted, “but it’s a very important piece of equipment for us. So important, in fact, that we carried another one along with us.”

Once they reached the squat cylindrical module, Trumball got out of the tractor and rested a gloved hand on the smooth curving metal side of the generator.

“Feel that vibration?” Dozens of millions did. “The generator’s chugging away, making fuel for us. It also produces drinkable water for us.”

“I’m thirsty,” the five-year-old whined.

Trumball walked them around the automated module, found the main water tap and poured a splash of water into a metal cup he had brought with him.

“This water is Martian,” he said, holding up the cup. “It comes from the permafrost beneath the surface of the ground. It’s laced with carbon dioxide, sort of like fizzy soda water. But it’s drinkable—once we filter out the impurities.”

As he spoke the water boiled away, leaving the cup utterly dry.

“Martian air’s so thin that water boils even though the temperature here is below zero,” Trumball explained. “The important thing, though, is that there’s an ocean of water beneath our feet, all frozen for millions and millions of years. Enough water to supply millions and millions of people, someday.”

Mrs. Zieman murmured, “I didn’t know that.”

After precisely one full hour, Trumball said, “Well, that’s all for today. Got to pack it in now. Tomorrow we’ll walk through the dome. In a few days we’ll be sending a team in one of the ground rovers out to the Grand Canyon. Later on, we’ll fly two people out to the shield volcanoes in the rocketplane. And we’ll be flying the unmanned soar-planes over longer distances, too. If all goes well, we’ll fly them out to the old Viking 1 landing site and maybe even farther north, to the edge of the ice cap.”

Through all this, the viewers stared out at the Martian vista.

“But that’s all for the future,” Trumball concluded. “For now, so long from Mars. Thanks for being with us.”

For long moments the Zieman family sat unmoving, unspeaking. At last they reluctantly pulled off their helmets.

“I wanna go to Mars,” announced the nine-year-old. “When I grow up I’m gonna be a scientist and go to Mars.”

“Me too!” his sister added.