The Attempt (The Martian Manifesto Book 1) (8 page)

Commander Grant Styles and Biologist Charles Winston had been driving for over three hours in the MMTV across the Martian surface. The Mars transportation vehicle was simply a large horizontal tube with six wheels, but it was fairly comfortable. It was pressurized, thus allowing both Grant and Charles to drive long distances without needing to be constantly in their spacesuits. Behind the vehicle, they were towing a small open flatbed, which would be used to transport the retrieved rover.

Charles could see off in the distance a huge dust devil dancing across the landscape. These were fairly common, but could safely be ignored. The low pressure of the Martian atmosphere meant that, even if they were caught in one, it was hardly felt. All they would need to do would be to stop and wait for visibility to clear as the vortex passed.
Since the commander was driving, Charles had time to reflect upon what he was seeing.
“I understand perfectly why Buzz Aldrin called the Moon ‘magnificent desolation,’”
he mused.
“So far it’s been a whole planet of dust and craters. There’s got to be some life here somewhere; there simply must.”

His eyes traveled back within the cabin,
returning to the task of riding shotgun. “Coming up on the rover, Commander,” Charles said as he looked down at the radar and GPS systems on the dashboard. “It should be just over that rise ahead.”

As they topped the small hill, Grant stopped the vehicle. About a hundred yards ahead, he and Charles could see the rover. It was lying sideways in the Martian dust. It was too far away, however, for them to see any details.

“Well, at least it didn’t drop into a hole,” Grant said. “I’ll pull up next to it.”

As the vehicle came to a halt, they
walked to the rear to reach their click-suits, which were built into the back of the MMTV. These were ingeniously designed spacesuits which allowed the astronauts to simple step into and then seal up. Once they were sealed inside the click-suits, a panel inside the transport slid down and depressurized the small space between it and the back of the suits. The astronauts then simply walked away from the back of the transport vehicle, which remained closed behind them. When the astronauts returned, they would back up and ‘click’ back in. The separating transport panel would repressurize the small space, initiate a leak check, and then open, allowing the astronauts to step backwards into the interior of their transport. This design kept all the Martian dust out of the inside of their conveyance, as well as not requiring the pressurization and depressurization of the interior.

Grant exited first, and turned around. The rover was only a few feet away.
As he walked over to it, Charles stepped up beside him. “Wow, look at that,” Charles said. “The tread on this side broke off.”

Grant knelt down and ran
his hand over the sand. “It seems no deeper than the normal sand we’ve seen so far, so the rover didn’t get stuck in a sandpit,” he said. “And there are no sharp rocks here that I can find that could have sliced up the tread.”

Charles picked up the piece of tread that had fallen off. “
Hmm, it has a bunch of holes in it. Are you sure there aren’t any small abrasive rocks down there either?”

Grant ran his hand back and forth, and then dug a small pit. “Nope, nothing.”

Charles looked at the wheels the tread normally encompassed. “There are no burrs on the wheels either that could have done this. You know, it almost looks like it had been chewed by something.”

“Don’t be dramatic, Charles. You’re not going to discover any
Martian sand sharks, you know.”

“Sand sharks?”

“You know, like from that old science fiction TV series,
The Outer Limits
. The second voyage to Mars is sent to find out what happened to the first expedition. There’s this area of totally smooth sand with no rocks that the sand sharks live in. One astronaut gets trapped on a lone rock with the sharks circling and…” Grant looked at Charles’ puzzled face. “Oh, never mind. Let’s tip the rover over and look at the other tread.”

They both grabbed the ‘neck’ of the rover that telescoped above the main body and pulled. In a moment they had managed to right the machine. Charles whistled. “This tread has a bunch of holes in it too, although it didn’t detach from the rover.”

“Well that’s weird. But maybe it was just accumulated wear as the rover traversed multiple sharp rocks at other places before it got here. Maybe this is just where the tread finally failed.”

“But look here. There are scorch marks on
both the front and back of the rover,” Charles observed. “I could understand the front, but there are no electronics in this rear section.”

“I guess the rover’s falling must have caused a major electrical short that arced across the whole machine. It’s no wonder that Serge couldn’t revive it.”

Charles was getting a creepy feeling from all of this.
He looked around the Martian landscape. Nothing seemed to add up. There was nothing in the Mars sand that they had ever discovered that could have caused this much wear, and the scorch marks on the back didn’t make sense to him. From the corner of his eye, he saw a small flash of light in the distance, and turned towards it.

“C’mon, Chuck. Let’s haul this into the MMTV’s storage section and get it back to Serge for diagnosis.”

“Wait, Commander. I saw a glint of something from just over there,” he said, pointing. “I think that’s the crater the rover was heading for. Let me take a quick look and see if there’s that meteor that NASA wanted us to find. Plus, Brad will have a conniption if there’s something there and we don’t at least check it out. I saw a small light reflection which might be caused by some sort of mica. I know Brad has been looking for that. He keeps muttering on our past rover trips ‘quartz feldspar pegmatite has to be here somewhere.’ He’s drilled it into me to watch for any light reflections in our surveys.”

“
Okay, fine, but make it quick. I’ll go get the tow winch out and hook it to the rover while you’re doing that.”

“Aye, Aye, Captain. I’ll be right back,” Charles quipped
, turning for the lip at the top of the crater in front of him. He set off using the modified kangaroo lope they had all developed for moving quickly across the Martian sand.

# # #

“Warning, Warning, Proximity Alert!”

Probe Spit
shut down Hopper One’s alert mechanism. It had been monitoring the situation with alarm. First, a giant six-wheeled conveyance had appeared. Then, it had disgorged two bipeds. The new creatures seemed to be sentient biological entities, since they had methodically surveyed the incapacitated robot and tested the nearby ground.

“This is most unusual,”
it thought.
“There should be no large organisms on this planet.”
Spit’s instructions had not accounted for this. The programmers had been negligent, astounding as that seemed.

As it watched Hopper O
ne’s feed, it saw one of the entities leave its companion and start approaching straight for the hopper! In a matter of moments, the biological would be upon it!

Spit’s emergency protocols kicked in. It withdrew all protruding appendages underground, including its eye.
It instructed Hopper Two, Three and Four to do likewise.  Hopper One was expendable. It was too late to have it disengage undetected, so Spit gave it the command to disintegrate.

Probe
Spit decided it would monitor the situation using its vibration sensors. It briefly considered whether to put the electro-biosynths, which were now lying next to it, on protect mode
. “They could possibly be able to eliminate the approaching entity, but then the other biped would escape and this would be unacceptable,”
it determined.
“I will use the biosynths only if discovered.”

Spit would not move until it had determined
through its ground sensors that the entities and their vehicle had departed. Discovery this early in its mission would be disastrous.

# # #

“There it is again!”
Charles thought as he went up the slight rise towards the crater lip.
“There’s definitely some sort of reflection from that little rock right there just to the right. Just a few more meters.”

Charles stopped at the top of the crater rim, looking down at his feet. The rock was moving!

Quickly he knelt down to get a closer look. The rock was slumping down, almost like it was melting. Little bits of Martian sand were sloughing off as the thing slowly flattened. He reached into his suit pocket and pulled out a small container which looked like a thermos. Putting it on one side of the rock, he used his other hand to push it into the container
. “I’d better get some of the sand that came off of it, too. We’ll need to examine this back at the habitat. Perhaps there are some microorganisms in here which caused the rock to do that. Or maybe it had some dry ice that evaporated in the sun, causing it to fall apart. Brad will be excited if there’s some mica in here which caused that reflection. This could tell us more about the early conditions on Mars.”
He brushed some additional sand that had fallen off of the rock into the container, and then twisted on the cap. 

Charles stood up and looked at the inside of the crater
that was the original target of the rover. The crater was not large, and he could easily see the whole interior. He could see nothing but sand and numerous small rocks. He loped down the small slope and towards the center.

“Hmm, no indentations, and no meteorite that I can spot,”
he mused.
“I wonder if Mission Control gave us the right coordinates. The meteorite would have to be fairly big for NASA to send us over here to investigate.”
Charles walked around a bit, nudging rocks here and there to see if any others would fall apart. He pulled out a small pick and poked a few apart also, looking to see if there were signs of life inside any of them.

Suddenly he stopped and looked around. He was in the center of the crater
. “Well this is most peculiar,”
he thought.
“There aren’t any rocks in a circle all around me, and the sand here is totally smooth. Maybe the meteorite buried itself?”

Charles got that creepy feeling again, especially after Grant
’s story about the Martian sand sharks, but he shook it off. He knelt down and started to reach down through the sand to see if he could feel anything. Slowly he started wiggling his hand in the loose soil as he pushed. “Up to my wrist, and still nothing,” he muttered. “C’mon, meteorite, where are you?”

“CHUCK!”

Charles jumped up. The radio had startled him. “Hey, don’t yell like that, Commander. I almost jumped out of my skin!”

“
Well, what’s taking so long?” came back through his suit radio. “I’ve got the rover towed over to the MMTV and need a hand getting it up on the trailer and locked down properly.”

Charles decided that, if there was a large meteorite here, then it was probably too deep to reach by hand. They would need to return with more equipment.
He brushed off the dust on his arm. “Okay, Grant,” Charles radioed back. “There’s nothing in here but some nondescript rocks and sand anyway. Mission Control might have been mistaken. I think we’ll need to return eventually with some digging equipment, so I’ll be there in a few seconds.” Charles turned around and loped back the way he had come. He resisted the urge to look back over his shoulder.

Soon the two astronauts had finished securing the rover, and
were driving back to the Star-Kissed habitat.

“I did find one unusual rock,” Charles explained. “I
t glinted, and when I got to it, it fell apart.”

“You mean, it fell apart when you
scooped it up, right?”

“No, it did that before I touched it.”

“Well, that’s interesting. See, this is why NASA has kept telling the public that we need people on Mars exploring. Automated rovers might have taken years, if ever, to find something like you just did. Let’s hope your little rock leads to some big discovery. We could use some luck in that department.”

“Amen to that, Grant,” Charles
said with a nod. “I can’t wait to get back to examine our find with Brad.”

# # #

Spit waited two complete days. The vibrations had indicated the departure of the aliens, but it was cautious, very cautious.

“
Additional electro-biosynths would be too small to handle this threat if it returned,”
it thought. The probe cycled through its defense plans to the final section. The largest weapon listed was a hunter-killer.
“However, if I use one of these, I could definitely be discovered.”
It was conflicted. It had two prime directives that had to be satisfied before it could deploy its main payload. Spit could not guarantee both mission directives of non-discovery as well as self-protection.

As it turned to its emergency protocols, there was really only one option.
“I will need a Master,”
it decided.
“First, I must expand the micro-factory.”
The probe released ten picograms of anti-matter to the task. It then sent the command to the three remaining hoppers to redistribute along the rim of the crater to cover all approaches, and settled down to wait. As soon as the larger factory was created in approximately thirty of the planet’s days, the programming would cause a release of a large portion of the reserve anti-matter to initiate the next step—a ‘Nest.’