Return to Mars (42 page)

What we need here is a forensic structural engineer, Jamie told himself. If there is such a person. Maybe Wiley could make some sense of it.

He took dozens of photographs of the damaged areas and transmitted them back to Tarawa for their analysis. There was nothing more he could think to do, but he kept feeling that he was missing something. Something important.

What is it, Grandfather? He asked silently. What have I overlooked?

Once in the comm center he slumped down on the little chair and put through another message to Tarawa.

“Pete: The greenhouse dome looks okay now, but I’m worried about what might happen in the next storm. Maybe that won’t be for another year, but it’s a problem we ought to think about now, not when the dust starts blowing again. It’s obvious that we overlooked this problem, but with twenty-twenty hindsight I think we ought to pay attention to it.

“Can you get the world’s assembled experts to figure out how we can protect the greenhouse dome with the materials we have on hand? That includes native Martian materials, of course. What I’m wondering is, can we make glass bricks out of the Martian sand? Build an igloo that’s transparent? Look into it for me, will you?”

The wind died down almost completely after sunset. Jamie was tempted to put on a suit and go out to see if the stars were still in their places, but he felt too tired. The outside cameras showed that the planes were still there, although what condition their solar panels might be in would have to wait for a closer inspection.

The dome was quiet, hack to normal, when Jamie finally went to his quarters. Vijay was already there, in the bunk. He blinked with surprise.

“Tomas is bunking with Trudy,” she said, matter-of-factly.

Nodding, Jamie muttered, “I wonder if Mitsuo and Stacy are going to get it on?”

Vijay giggled softly. “Not bloody likely.”

“Why not?”

“Stacy’s gay.”

Jamie’s eyes popped open. “What?”

“Stacy’s a lesbian.” s

There’s nothing wrong with that, Jamie told himself. Still, he felt shocked.

“Poor Mitsuo,” he heard himself whisper as he got under the covers beside her.

Vijay moved over to make room for him on the narrow bunk. “I don’t know about him. He hasn’t come on to any of the women.”

“Maybe he’s gay, too?”

“I doubt it. I think he’s just got more self-control than you Western ape-men.”

Jamie wanted to debate the point, but instead he closed his eyes and fell instantly asleep.

PETE CONNORS STARED GLOOMILY AT THE THICK STACK OF PAPERS ON HIS desk. It’s always a mistake asking the experts how to do something, he reminded himself. They snow you under with every detail they’ve ever come across.

Still, he thought, the NASA guys and the university profs provided the material we asked for damned fast. If only there wasn’t so much of it!

He took a deep breath, then booted up his computer and called up the communications program. The tiny red light on the camera atop the display screen winked on.

“Jamie, I’m going to be sending you half a ton of documentation about how to make glass bricks out of in situ materials. It won’t be an easy job, but it can be done.

“I’ll squirt the technical write-ups to you on the other channel. It’s from all sorts of bright thinkers at NASA, MIT, Caltech, places like that. I think maybe some of ‘em are Eskimos.

“First thing you’ll have to do is build a solar reflector. You can scavenge one of the spare dish antennas from stores and coat it with aluminum spray. The reflector will be the heat source for your furnace; you need to produce temperatures of two thousand degrees Celsius to melt the sand particles from the Martian soil. First you’ll have to crush the sand grains down real fine …”

Half an hour later, Connors finished with, “… and then you’ll have glass bricks, buddy. Nothing to it.”

Finally, with a weary sigh, Connors turned to the subject he would have preferred to ignore. But he couldn’t.

“Jamie, old man Trumball is still pushing to get you out as mission director …”

“I SEE IT!” DEX YELPED.

They had just topped a low bluff, and the rover was nosing down the steep incline toward the broad low swale where the Pathfinder and its tiny wheeled Sojourner had been waiting silently for nearly thirty years.

Craig was driving. Both men were shaggy, bearded, their coveralls limp and sweat-stained. They were both grinning from ear to ear.

“Look!” Dex cried, rising halfway out of his seat and pointing at the rocks. “There’s the twin peaks! And Yogi! And Barnacle Bill!”

Craig laughed. “You’re actin’ like you didn’t expect they’d be here.”

Dex plopped back in the chair, his insides fluttering. They’re all here. They’re really here. After all the years of looking at the pictures and watching the videos, it’s all real. It really all happened. They landed the spacecraft here back when they could barely fly a ton of payload to Mars.

This hardware’s worth billions! Dex told himself. A lot more than it cost in the first place. Like a painting by DaVinci or Van Gogh.

He wanted to drive the rover, wanted to stomp on the accelerator and race down there in a swirl of dust. But he knew that Wiley wouldn’t let him, and he realized it was probably a good thing. Christ on a crutch, Dex thought. I’m wound up like a little kid at Christmas.

“Maybe you oughtta call hack to base and tell ‘em we’re here,” Craig suggested.

“Right,” Dex agreed. “And make sure the cameras are getting all this. This is history, y’know!”

Craig chuckled.

They parked a five-minute walk away from the Pathfinder, so they could survey the area carefully and not disturb the site with their rover’s cleated wheel tracks.

The old spacecraft sat there, flat and square, with its shriveled protective shroud pulled up around it like an old lady holding up her skirts. The machine looked strange, alien in the Martian landscape, an angular metal contrivance in the midst of weathered rocks and rust-red sand. Sojourner, so tiny it looked like a wheeled toy some child might have put together from a kit, was still nosed against the rock that had been dubbed Yogi.

Dex was trembling with anticipation as he and Craig got into their hard suits. Once outside, once actually on the ground and standing beside the old hardware, the excitement began to ebb away.

It’s all so small, Dex thought. Hell, I had a toy car bigger than Pathfinder when I was ten years old. And I could carry Sojourner under one arm, just about.

He turned a full circle, surveying the area with a geologist’s analytical eye. Water rushed through here, all right. A river, or maybe a big flood that broke through an ice dam. You can see the marks of flowing water all over the area.

“Come on,” Craig called, “let’s get to work.”

Carefully they photographed the area for comparison with the catalogue imagery from the Pathfinder itself three decades earlier.

“Water came down from over there,” Craig said, pointing. “Busted right along here at a pretty good clip, I’d say.”

“Yeah, but where did it go?”

Craig pointed toward the ground. “Let’s see how deep it went.”

They went back to the rover and broke out the power drill and other tools. While Craig began digging to find the permafrost layer, Dex planted three beacons at the distance of ten-minute walks from the Pathfinder.

The sun was nearing the gently rolling horizon when Craig finally said, “Better roll our buggy up here now. I don’t wanta bust a gut carryin’ this rig any distance.”

“It weighs less than three hundred pounds in this gravity,” Dex pointed out.

But Craig was already on his way back to the rover. “And more’n two-fifty,” he countered. “The less distance we have to tote it, the better off we’ll be. You don’t want a hernia out here, do you?”

Dex laughed and started to put the cores that the drill had pulled up into insulated sample boxes. If Wiley had hit a permafrost layer it wasn’t obvious; the drilling had gone down to thirty meters without much change in the underlying rock’s consistency.

The rover came jinking and squeaking across the red sand like a giant metal caterpillar, its wheels clambering over the rocks scattered across the ground. Craig stopped it when the hatch to the center module was no more than five meters from the silent, squat Pathfinder.

Grunting, straining, together they hoisted the machine up off the ground and, with, “Watch out for the shroud,” and “Okay, I’ve got it,” they lugged it to the lip of the hatch and rested it there. Then Craig climbed awkwardly inside the module and, with him pulling and Dex pushing, they shoved it safely inside.

Sweat was stinging Dex’s eyes as he sank down to a sitting position and rested the back of his helmet against one of the rover’s metal wheels.

“You okay?” Craig asked, hopping down from the hatch. For the first time in weeks, Dex noticed that a man jumps slower in Mars’ light gravity than he would on Earth.

“I’m fine,” Dex answered. “Wish I could wipe my eyes, though.”

“You mean you don’t know how to wriggle your arm outta the sleeve and work a hand up past your neck ring?”

Dex blinked sweat away. “You mean you can?”

“Sure.”

“You really can?”

“Sure,” Craig said. “Only problem is it dislocates your shoulder doin’ it.” He burst into raucous laughter.

Dex made a sour face but it did no good, since Wiley couldn’t see it through the tinted visor.

“C’mon,” Craig said, offering a gloved hand to pull Dex up to his feet. “Let’s get the little fella and then call it a day.”

They trudged slowly over to the tiny Sojourner rover, still sitting faithfully with its proton X-ray spectrometer almost touching the bulbous rock named Yogi. It weighed less than twelve pounds on Mars, so Dex easily lifted it off the ground and turned to head back to the rover.

He saw Craig bend down, a laborious job in the hard suit.

“What’re you doing, Wiley?”

“Puttin’ a marker down, so’s people’ll be able to see where she sat.”

“Oh. You do that with the Pathfinder, too?”

“Yup.”

“What’d you use for a marker?”

“Silver dollars.”

Dex felt his eyes go wide. “Silver dollars? What the hell are you doing with silver dollars out here?”

He sensed Wiley trying to shrug inside the suit. “I always carry ‘em. For luck. Brought seven of ‘em.”

They were almost at the rover hatch. Dex looked at the spot where the Pathfinder had sat for nearly three decades. Sure enough, a bright new silver dollar rested there.

“Started carryin’ ‘em when I was out on the oil rigs,” Craig explained. “Guys’d play cards off-shift and they didn’t use chips, lemme tell you. Hard cash or nothin’. So I started totin’ some silver dollars with me.”

Dex just shook his head.

“Jamie, I’m going to be sending you half a ton of documentation about how to make glass bricks out of in situ materials,” Pete Connors was saying.

Jamie grinned as he watched Connors’ image on his laptop screen. A glass igloo would be the answer they needed for the greenhouse. It didn’t even have to be an igloo, he thought as Connors chattered on. We could build a square enclosure around the greenhouse dome, Jamie said to himself, then take the dome down.

Or maybe not, he mused. The plastic dome can be polarized to make it opaque overnight. Keep the heat inside. Can’t polarize glass bricks.

He was about to split his screen and check on the technical data when Connors sighed wearily and his voice turned down a pitch.

”Jamie, old man Trumball is still pushing to get you out as mission director. It doesn’t matter that Dex and Possum got through the storm okay. He wants your scalp and he’s pushing damned hard to get it.”

Jamie almost smiled at Connors’ choice of words, then wondered in the back of his mind why he didn’t mind the black astronaut using Native American similes, but it riled him when Dex Trumball did.

Because you’re not competing with Pete, he answered himself. Because you’ve been through so much with him. Because he’s your friend.

Jamie listened to Connors’ tale of woe to the end. Trumball had called a special meeting of the ICU board. Li Chengdu had told the astronaut that funding for the next expedition was going to be decided at the meeting. The implication was clear: either they removed Jamie from command, or Trumball would turn off the money flow.

When at last Connors had finished, Jamie transmitted, “Thanks for the information, Pete, both the good news and the bad. I’ve sent the daily report to you on the data channel; nothing outstanding to report, except that Dex and Craig have picked up the Pathfinder hardware successfully. They’ll start on their way back here tomorrow morning.

“Oh, by the way, Craig prefers to be called Wiley instead of Possum. He’s a little touchy about that. Otherwise we’re all well and healthy here. That’s all for now.”

Jamie was still in the comm center when Fuchida came in, limping slightly, and asked him to come to the biology lab.

“As soon as Stacy comes back,” Jamie replied.

Fuchida nodded, almost bowed, and left.

Nearly half an hour later Jamie tapped lightly on the doorframe of the bio lab. Fuchida turned on his swivel stool and swiftly got to his feet.

“Sit, Mitsuo, sit down and take it easy,” Jamie said, pulling up the other stool to sit beside the biologist.

Fuchida sat, but his back remained rigid. He glanced at the open doorway, then reached across the lab bench and pulled his laptop computer toward him.

“What did you want to show me?” Jamie asked. “Any new species show up from the core samples?”

“This is not biology,” Fuchida said as he booted up the laptop.

“No?”