The City and the Stars / The Sands of Mars (54 page)

W
ell, it’s certainly nice to see you all again,” said Gibson, carrying the drinks carefully across from the bar. “Now I suppose you’re going to paint Port Lowell red. I presume the first move will be to contact the local girl friends?”

“That’s never very easy,” said Norden. “They
will
get married between trips and you’ve got to be tactful. By the way, George, what’s happened to Miss Margaret Mackinnon?”

“You mean Mrs. Henry Lewis,” said George. “Such a fine baby boy, too.”

“Has she called it John?” asked Bradley, not particularly
sotto voce.

“Oh, well,” sighed Norden, “I hope she’s saved me some of the wedding cake. Here’s to you, Martin.”

“And to the
Ares,
” said Gibson, clinking glasses. “I hope you’ve put her together again. She looked in a pretty bad way the last time I saw her.”

Norden chuckled.

“Oh, that! No, we’ll leave all the plating off until we reload. The rain isn’t likely to get in!”

“What do you think of Mars, Jimmy?” asked Gibson. “You’re the only other new boy here besides myself.”

“I haven’t seen much of it yet,” Jimmy replied cautiously. “Everything seems rather small, though.”

Gibson spluttered violently and had to be patted on the back.

“I remember your saying just the opposite when we were on Deimos. But I guess you’ve forgotten it. You were slightly drunk at the time.”

“I’ve never been drunk,” said Jimmy indignantly.

“Then I compliment you on a first-rate imitation: it deceived me completely. But I’m interested in what you say, because that’s exactly how I felt after the first couple of days, as soon as I’d seen all there was to look at inside the dome. There’s only one cure— you have to go outside and stretch your legs. I’ve had a couple of short walks around, but now I’ve managed to grab a Sand Flea from Transport. I’m going to gallop up into the hills tomorrow. Like to come?”

Jimmy’s eyes glistened.

“Thanks very much— I’d love to.”

“Hey, what about us?” protested Norden.

“You’ve done it before,” said Gibson. “But there’ll be one spare seat, so you can toss for it. We’ve got to take an official driver; they won’t let us go out by ourselves with one of their precious vehicles, and I suppose you can hardly blame them.”

Mackay won the toss, whereupon the others immediately explained that they didn’t really want to go anyway.

“Well, that settles that,” said Gibson. “Meet me at Transport Section, Dome Four, at 10 tomorrow. Now I must be off. I’ve got three articles to write— or at any rate one article with three different titles.”

The explorers met promptly on time, carrying the full protective equipment which they had been issued on arrival but so far had found no occasion to use. This comprised the headpiece, oxygen cylinders, and air purifier— all that was necessary out of doors on Mars on a warm day— and the heat-insulating suit with its compact power cells. This could keep one warm and comfortable even when the temperature outside was more than a hundred below. It would not be needed on this trip, unless an accident to the Flea left them stranded a long way away from home.

The driver was a tough young geologist who claimed to have spent as much time outside Port Lowell as in it. He looked extremely competent and resourceful, and Gibson felt no qualms at handing his valuable person into his keeping.

“Do these machines ever break down outside?” he asked as they climbed into the Flea.

“Not very often. They’ve got a terrific safety factor and there’s really very little to go wrong. Of course, sometimes a careless driver gets stuck, but you can usually haul yourself out of anything with the winch. There have only been a couple of cases of people having to walk home in the last month.”

“I trust we won’t make a third,” said Mackay, as the vehicle rolled into the lock.

“I shouldn’t worry about that,” laughed the driver, waiting for the outer door to open. “We won’t be going far from base, so we can always get back even if the worst comes to the worst.”

With a surge of power they shot through the lock and out of the city. A narrow road had been cut through the low, vivid vegetation— a road which circled the port and from which other highways radiated to the nearby mines, to the radio station and observatory on the hills, and to the landing ground on which even now the
Ares’
freight was being unloaded as the rockets ferried it down from Deimos.

“Well,” said the driver, halting at the first junction. “It’s all yours. Which way do we go?”

Gibson was struggling with a map three sizes too big for the cabin. Their guide looked at it with scorn.

“I don’t know where you got hold of
that,
” he said. “I suppose Admin gave it to you. It’s completely out of date, anyway. If you’ll tell me where you want to go I can take you there without bothering about that thing.”

“Very well,” Gibson replied meekly. “I suggest we climb up into the hills and get a good look round. Let’s go to the Observatory.”

The Flea leapt forward along the narrow road and the brilliant green around them merged into a featureless blur.

“How fast can these things go?” asked Gibson, when he had climbed out of Mackay’s lap.

“Oh, at least a hundred on a good road. But as there aren’t any good roads on Mars, we have to take it easy. I’m doing sixty now. On rough ground you’ll be lucky to average half that.”

“And what about range?” said Gibson, obviously still a little nervous.

“A good thousand kilometers on one charge, even allowing pretty generously for heating, cooking, and the rest. For really long trips we tow a trailer with spare power cells. The record’s about five thousand kilometers; I’ve done three before now, prospecting out in Argyre. When you’re doing that sort of thing, you arrange to get supplies dropped from the air.”

Though they had now been traveling for no more than a couple of minutes, Port Lowell was already falling below the horizon. The steep curvature of Mars made it very difficult to judge distances, and the fact that the domes were now half concealed by the curve of the planet made one imagine that they were much larger objects at a far greater distance than they really were.

Soon afterwards, they began to reappear as the Flea started climbing towards higher ground. The hills above Port Lowell were less than a kilometer high, but they formed a useful break for the cold winter winds from the south, and gave vantage points for radio station and observatory.

They reached the radio station half an hour after leaving the city. Feeling it was time to do some walking, they adjusted their masks and dismounted from the Flea, taking turns to go through the tiny collapsible airlock.

The view was not really very impressive. To the north, the domes of Port Lowell floated like bubbles on an emerald sea. Over to the west Gibson could just catch a glimpse of crimson from the desert which encircled the entire planet. As the crest of the hills still lay a little above him, he could not see southwards, but he knew that the green band of vegetation stretched for several hundred kilometers until it petered out into the Mare Erythraeum. There were hardly any plants here on the hilltop, and he presumed that this was due to the absence of moisture.

He walked over to the radio station. It was quite automatic, so there was no one he could buttonhole in the usual way, but he knew enough about the subject to guess what was going on. The giant parabolic reflector lay almost on its back, pointing a little east of the zenith— pointing to Earth, sixty million kilometers Sunwards. Along its invisible beam were coming and going the messages that linked these two worlds together. Perhaps at this very moment one of his own articles was flying Earthwards— or one of Ruth Goldstein’s directives was winging its way towards him.

Mackay’s voice, distorted and feeble in this thin air, made him turn round.

“Someone’s coming in to land down there— over on the right.”

With some difficulty, Gibson spotted the tiny arrowhead of the rocket moving swiftly across the sky, racing in on a free glide just as he had done a week before. It banked over the city and was lost behind the domes as it touched down on the landing strip. Gibson hoped it was bringing in the remainder of his luggage, which seemed to have taken a long time to catch up with him.

The Observatory was about five kilometers farther south, just over the brow of the hills, where the lights of Port Lowell would not interfere with its work. Gibson had half expected to see the gleaming domes which on Earth were the trademarks of the astronomers, but instead the only dome was the small plastic bubble of the living quarters. The instruments themselves were in the open, though there was provision for covering them up in the very rare event of bad weather.

Everything appeared to be completely deserted as the Flea approached. They halted beside the largest instrument— a reflector with a mirror which, Gibson guessed, was less than a meter across. It was an astonishingly small instrument for the chief observatory on Mars. There were two small refractors, and a complicated horizontal affair which Mackay said was a mirror-transit— whatever that might be. And this, apart from the pressurized dome, seemed to be about all.

There was obviously someone at home, for a small Sand Flea was parked outside the building.

“They’re quite a sociable crowd,” said the driver as he brought the vehicle to a halt. “It’s a pretty dull life up here and they’re always glad to see people. And there’ll be room inside the dome for us to stretch our legs and have dinner in comfort.”

“Surely we can’t expect them to provide a meal for us,” protested Gibson, who had a dislike of incurring obligations he couldn’t readily discharge. The driver looked genuinely surprised; then he laughed heartily.

“This isn’t Earth, you know. On Mars, everyone helps everyone else— we have to, or we’d never get anywhere. But I’ve brought our provisions along— all I want to use is their stove. If you’d ever tried to cook a meal inside a Sand Flea with four aboard you’d know why.”

As predicted, the two astronomers on duty greeted them warmly, and the little plastic bubble’s air-conditioning plant was soon dealing with the odors of cookery. While this was going on, Mackay had grabbed the senior member of the staff and started a technical discussion about the Observatory’s work. Most of it was quite over Gibson’s head, but he tried to gather what he could from the conversation.

Most of the work done here was, it seemed, positional astronomy— the dull but essential business of finding longitudes and latitudes, providing time signals and linking radio fixes with the main Martian grid. Very little observational work was done at all; the huge instruments on Earth’s moon had taken
that
over long ago, and these small telescopes, with the additional handicap of an atmosphere above them, could not hope to compete. The parallaxes of a few nearer stars had been measured, but the very slight increase of accuracy provided by the wider orbit of Mars made it hardly worth while.

As he ate his dinner— finding to his surprise that his appetite was better than at any time since reaching Mars— Gibson felt a glow of satisfaction at having done a little to brighten the dull lives of these devoted men. Because he had never met enough of them to shatter the illusion, Gibson had an altogether disproportionate respect for astronomers, whom he regarded as leading lives of monkish dedication on their remote mountain eyries. Even his first encounter with the excellent cocktail bar on Mount Palomar had not destroyed this simple faith.

After the meal, at which everyone helped so conscientiously with the washing-up that it took twice as long as necessary, the visitors were invited to have a look through the large reflector. Since it was early afternoon, Gibson did not imagine that there would be a great deal to see; but this was an oversight on his part.

For a moment the picture was blurred, and he adjusted the focusing screw with clumsy fingers. It was not easy to observe with the special eyepiece needed when one was wearing a breathing mask, but after a while Gibson got the knack of it.

Hanging in the field of view, against the almost black sky near the zenith, was a beautiful pearly crescent like a three-day-old moon. Some markings were just visible on the illuminated portion, but though Gibson strained his eyes to the utmost he could not identify them. Too much of the planet was in darkness for him to see any of the major continents.

Not far away floated an identically shaped but much smaller and fainter crescent, and Gibson could distinctly see some of the familiar craters along its edge. They formed a beautiful couple, the twin planets Earth and Moon, but somehow they seemed too remote and ethereal to give him any feeling of homesickness or regret for all that he had left behind.

One of the astronomers was speaking, his helmet held close to Gibson’s.

“When it’s dark you can see the lights of the cities down there on the night side. New York and London are easy. The prettiest sight, though, is the reflections of the Sun off the sea. You get it near the edge of the disc when there’s no cloud about— a sort of brilliant, shimmering star. It isn’t visible now because it’s mostly land on the crescent portion.”

Before leaving the Observatory, they had a look at Deimos, which was rising in its leisurely fashion in the east. Under the highest power of the telescope the rugged little moon seemed only a few kilometers away, and to his surprise Gibson could see the
Ares
quite clearly as two gleaming dots close together. He also wanted to look at Phobos, but the inner moon had not yet risen.

When there was nothing more to be seen, they bade farewell to the two astronomers, who waved back rather glumly as the Flea drove off along the brow of the hill. The driver explained that he wanted to make a private detour to pick up some rock specimens, and as to Gibson one part of Mars was very much like another he raised no objection.

There was no real road over the hills, but ages ago all irregularities had been worn away so that the ground was perfectly smooth. Here and there a few stubborn boulders still jutted above the surface, displaying a fantastic riot of color and shape, but these obstacles were easily avoided. Once or twice they passed small trees— if one could call them that— of a type which Gibson had never seen before. They looked rather like pieces of coral, completely stiff and petrified. According to their driver they were immensely old, for though they were certainly alive no one had yet been able to measure their rate of growth. The smallest value which could be derived for their age was fifty thousand years, and their method of reproduction was a complete mystery.