Species II (2 page)

The module lurched and picked up speed, the cockpit rattling around him with enough noise bleed-through to make him feel like a piece of popcorn in a microwave. He ground his teeth and found the radio switch. “Dennis, ease up on those thrusters, would you? Bring turbo alignment to negative seven, over.”

“Roger that.” Dennis’s voice sounded grainy and already far away. “ETA twenty-eight minutes, seventeen seconds.” A beat of silence, then Dennis spoke again. “Make that fifteen . . . no, wait. Fourteen.”

Patrick grinned and ignored him, feeling the module’s movement smooth out under the navigator’s capable hand. Never a doubt, obviously—he knew no one else in the world who could do a better job of this than Dennis Gamble. The black man was the best and could steer a missile ship into a landing bay with the door half-closed, his good eye taped shut and only one finger free. And Ross’s opinion had nothing to do with the fact that Dennis Gamble was his best friend.

He’d thought the next half hour would pass slowly, each torturous minute trudging along while he fidgeted beneath the straps—he hated these tiny cockpits with a vengeance—and Dennis did all the work back on the mother ship. Anne, too, was likely buried in last-minute calculations and notes, that overly intelligent mind of hers no doubt cranking out another two dozen experiments to conduct on the soil samples he would bring back. Patrick had pictured himself sitting bored and impatient in the module while he performed his routine checks, just another matter-of-fact landing well on its way to completion.

Yeah, right.

The half hour was gone—
zip
—seemingly before Patrick could blink, the slice of time utterly erased by the sight of the sprawling Martian landscape that filled the screen of his console. His training still carried him through the flight routines but had he not been tied into his chair, he would’ve jumped in surprise at the voice crackling over the communications line from Mission Control. “Copy that,” he said instantly, his gaze tracking the numbers on the instrument panels. “Descent target zero one niner. Synchronous orbit phase-cycle is a go. We are on the mark.”

“Turbo alignment is two seven Cavalier. Descend, defend, watch your rear end.”

Patrick chuckled but before he could respond, Anne’s voice came over the transmitter. “And don’t forget to watch out for little green men.”

This time he laughed. “If there were any little men here, I’m fairly certain they’d be the color of rust. Don’t worry, Annie. I’ll be fine.”

“Of course you will,” Dennis shot back. “You’re Patrick Ross, all-American hero, remember?”

“Aren’t I supposed to have a cape?”

“Forget it. It gets tangled with the EVA suit.”

Patrick laughed again, then grew serious and frowned at his instruments. “Hey, shouldn’t I be—?”

“You
are,”
Dennis said smoothly as the module lurched to one side, then the other . . .

. . . and settled itself on the bleak red rubble of Martian soil.

I
nside the
Excursion,
Dennis Gamble and Dr. Anne Sampas slammed their palms together in a high-five that neither would admit was painful. “Yee-ha!” Anne whooped. “We made it, Dennis!”

Her partner gave her a wide grin, then turned back to the console. “Mission Control,” he announced loudly. “We have surface interface. I repeat, we have surface interface. IMU alignment is complete. We show two eight degrees, three six minutes. Over.” He paused, then spoke again. “Patrick, do you copy?”

“Loud and clear.”

Damn, Dennis thought as his smile widened, along with Anne’s. If I get any happier, my face is going to split in two. “Congratulations, brother,” he said into the microphone. “You just became the first man on Mars. Set your digital readout. You’ve got one hour till party time. Make yourself useful until then and bring back some souvenirs for our scientist friend here.”

“I can handle that.”

Anne pushed her hair behind her ears and leaned over the console. “Is everything functional down there?” Her voice had gone from jovial to strictly professional. “No problems to report?”

“Not a one,” Patrick came back immediately. “You see me on the video screen?”

“Got it,” Dennis said. “Clear as Monday-Night Football.”

They heard Patrick snicker, then saw him reach for an LED display and start the counter. Every now and then, a white line of solar interference would cut across the display, but that was to be expected, and they still saw the bright numbers start counting up from 0:00 as the astronaut in the module adjusted an array of telemetry switches. “Annie,” Patrick said, “I think things are just about ready for you on my end. If your connection is clear, we can go on and fire up your toys.”

Anne Sampas nodded, her eyes glittering emerald green with excitement in the glow of the instrument panels. “I’m going to switch on an external camera,” she said. “Right . . . now.” She gave a flick of her forefinger and there it was in full color—red and orange and rusted brown—so completely spectacular that it nearly took her breath away.

“Man,” Dennis said from his seat. “Is that unbelievable or what?”

“God, yes. And Patrick—he’s down there, right
on
the surface. He’s going to
walk
on it in just an hour.” She shook her head, but her gaze never left the display. “Can you imagine how completely, utterly
tiny
he must feel?”

“I heard that, Annie. You forgot to toggle off the transmitter.”

She blinked and looked at Dennis guiltily, but he only gave her an it’s-too-late-now shrug. “Sorry, Patrick, It was just a foolish thought—”

But the first video display showed their comrade down on the surface as he waved a hand in dismissal. “Aw, I’m just kidding. And anyway, you’re right. It’s a pretty damned lonely feeling—but I know I’ve got you guys looking out for me.” On the vaguely grainy display, Dennis and Anne could see one corner of his mouth lift.

“You bet,” Dennis cut in. “Annie, let’s get those Land Rovers going. We need to bring ’em out and at least start collecting our samples before Patrick hits the ground. Can’t have him doing all the work.”

She nodded and settled herself at the console. “I’m set. Patrick, are you ready to synchronize?”

“Ready when you are.”

“Great. One, two, three,
mark.”
On the dual cue, a small hatch in one side of Patrick’s landing module flipped down with a precise movement of hydraulics. “I’ve got the camera carrier,” Anne said, her voice shaking with exhilaration. “You’re in charge of the drill.”

“I knew it,” Dennis quipped. “The man comes all this way and gets stuck digging in the dirt.”

“Always did like making mud pies.” Patrick’s voice was enthusiastic, his face set with concentration despite his easy words, his fingers light on the remote controls in the landing module as he worked his Rover around the rock obstacles on the surface.

“I’m afraid for those you’ll need water,” the doctor said absently. She was piloting her camera-armed Rover close to where Patrick’s mechanism had stopped on the near side of a dark-colored, three-foot-long rock and was slowly working a drill into the barren soil. “Not enough of that on Mars.”

“There’s considerable evidence of subsurface ice,” Dennis commented.

“True,” Anne agreed. “But liquid water can’t exist on the planet’s surface at the present time. I’m afraid Patrick’s mud pies would have had to be made in the first third of the planet’s life—the last of the Noachian Period, or perhaps the first part of the Hesperian Period.”

“More?” Patrick asked, breaking into the discussion. They saw him point toward the Rovers and the small pile of red material it had gouged free of the Martian landscape.

“Yes, please. There are three canisters in the storage hatch. Ultimately you’ll need enough samples to fill all of them, and from different depths and areas, too. You might as well get started before you go out, so you have more time to explore the terrain. Besides, the less time you’re in proximity to the drilling mechanism, the happier we’ll be.”

Patrick nodded and bent back to his task, then looked up and smiled. “Go on, Anne. Take your Rover out for a ride. Mine is positioned so that I can see well enough with the module’s external camera, and we’ll want as much film as we can get. Staring at the same spot on the ground is no fun.”

The doctor’s face lit up. “Wonderful!” She bent closer to the screen, nose nearly touching its surface as she focused on piloting her miniature Land Rover in a tight arc around the base of the landing module. “God, look at this. Wouldn’t it be great if we had one of those ships they’re always flying in those science-fiction shows? Then we could just zoom around wherever we wanted, see what’s really in the deeper regions of the Valles Marineris canyon system, the Hebes Chasma.” Her words were starting to come so fast they were running together. “Or the Olympic Mons—can you imagine going down into the crater of a volcano that rises over fifty
thousand
feet high?”

“I wouldn’t go,” Dennis said, more to slow her down than anything else. Not just an observer, he was continually monitoring and adjusting the position of the
Excursion
relative to the landing module down on the Martian surface. “What if the volcano erupted?”

“Oh, there’s no indication of current volcanic activity,” Anne responded. “Face it, this place is empty.”

Dennis glanced at her. “I distinctly remember a media blitz a few years back about microbes having been discovered in a Martian meteorite—”

Anne raised an eyebrow at him. “Dead microbes are a long way from the kind of life needed to make mud pies, Mr. Gamble. There’s nothing out there now but wind and oxidized dust.”

Patrick’s voice interrupted them. “Afraid I’m going to have to side with Annie on this one, buddy.” A pause, then, “What do you say? Are we ready for me to go out and start the in-person collection process?”

Dennis chewed his lower lip nervously and checked the digital readout—1:00:37. Jesus, where had the time gone? Finally, he nodded. “Ready when you are.”

For a few moments, the radio remained silent. At last Patrick’s determined voice spilled from the multiple speakers in the control panel at the same time they saw his image on the screen reach for the space-suit helmet. When it was in place and locked down, Patrick said one more thing over the solo feed to the mother ship to make sure the audio connection was working:

“All right, Mars. Say hello to the human race.”

P
atrick Ross stepped off the landing module’s ladder and onto Martian soil at about ten minutes after eleven on what was a perfect Saturday morning back on his home planet. If he could have seen the celebrations across the United States, he would have been embarrassed at all the fuss; he wasn’t quite sure how he’d become an all-American hero, and the truth was, all this attention just made him flustered. He couldn’t show that, of course—he’d been raised to speak clearly and proudly in public and to do right by the image of his father, Senator Judson Ross. There was the memory of his mother to consider, too—if he didn’t always agree with his father, he was determined to do right by her. She had been sweet, patient, and taken from the family way too soon. Without getting too Freudian, Patrick saw some of the same character qualities in his lovely girlfriend, Melissa. She didn’t know it yet, but someday she’d be the wife of an American astronaut and the mother of his children.

He felt the life-support system on his EVA suit register the swift drop in external temperature and adjust the body temperature-control unit to accommodate it. Numbers flashed across the small optical display just above eye level on the inside of his helmet, and one of those numbers told him it was slightly under one hundred and eighty degrees Kelvin on the Martian surface—a staggering one hundred thirty-five degrees below zero Fahrenheit. After all these years and all the moon and space walks he’d done, it
still
amazed Patrick that he, or any man or woman, could actually be walking around in an environment that brutal.

He stopped and just stood there for a few moments, drinking in the sight of the Martian landscape in a close-up way that no one else in history had ever experienced: the terrain filled with dark, porous rocks; the rusty-red, sandy-textured soil; a sky painted the color of salmon from atmospheric dust. The view stretched across his vision and beyond for as far as he could see with a stark, unrelenting beauty that was almost mesmerizing.

Patrick broke the spell himself, knowing that if he didn’t move forward soon, the radio would cut into the silence around him and ruin the moment. With graceless movement, he turned and punched in the code to unlock the exterior storage compartment; when the hatch dropped open, he lifted out a small folded package and the rack containing Anne’s trio of bright orange canisters. Five halting steps took him far enough away from the landing module to give the mother ship a view on the video screen that was unmarred by any man-made object but the one he painstakingly unfolded. He snapped open the metal rod at one end, then pushed it deep into the dry, blood-colored soil. Patrick knew that when he spoke, the transmission would fill his voice with static from atmospheric interference, so he said his words slowly and as clearly as he could, while the cold Martian wind straightened the folds of the American flag:

“Not for one nation, one people, or one creed, but for all humankind.”

Mankind had finally conquered Mars.

Back Home on Earth

M
illions of people across the nation raised their voices in celebration, hoisting everything from beer bottles to coffee cups to cans of soda. Fixed before their television sets at home, in bars, in health clubs, and during reluctant Saturday work sessions at the office, they all listened, exhilarated by the success of the Mars mission and captivated by the voice of Peter Jennings.

In a world beset by violence, hunger and strife, there are still occasions when mankind surpasses the petty struggles of daily existence.

Nowhere, however, was the elation more intense than at Mission Control in Houston, Texas.