The Martian Race (23 page)

“We just forget?” Raoul asked.

“Until we get Earthside, yes,” Viktor said. “And in meantime we consider what Axelrod says at face value.”

Julia said, “We might as well.”

A long silence—while they searched out their feelings, Julia guessed. And how did
she
feel, anyway? Betrayed by Erika—if she was to blame. By Axelrod, maybe. But without proof of either, there was no point in belaboring the issue. Like so many things, it had to go on the shelf, marked DO NOT OPEN UNTIL ON EARTH.

She had developed a whole category of such matters. It helped to know that she was not accepting defeat, just putting off a battle.

Raoul looked pensive. “Well … okay. A while ago, I was going to say that I do want to go over the thruster assembly again. Some pressure releases might need adjustment after that misfired burn.” He hurried on, “But I can do it alone.”

Julia understood that Raoul wished to take responsibility for the repairs, needed to have time alone with his handiwork. He would be just as happy not to have two itchy scientists underfoot. Then he could take as much time as he liked, obsess over every detail.

A long moment passed. They skirted the edge of a rift.

Finally Viktor nodded agreement. He had followed Julia's arguments carefully, hoping to be convinced. Now he snapped back into mission commander mode. “Da. All right. Two days only.”

Julia's heart soared. She flashed him a brilliant smile, leaned over, and ignoring mission discipline, gave him a big kiss. Spending one final night in a hellishly cold rover would be the price, but well worth it. They all beamed at her and she saw that the many currents between them had suddenly, unaccountably, met and merged.

Worn down they might all be, yet there was a bond between them now that none could express.

She restrained herself from kissing every one of them.

17

JANUARY 18,2018

T
HEY SET OUT THE NEXT DAY AFTER LUNCH
. T
HE PANORAMA OF GUSEV
crater opened before them as they moved north across the rumpled, pitted floor that told, to a practiced eye, a story running back over billions of years. She watched closely the shifting scenery in its lurid pinks and rusty splashes, knowing she was seeing it for the last time. Somehow, each vista seemed fresh.

The Mars Outpost program, starting in 2009, had left at the site several long-lived robotic scientific experiments, the Rover Boy, and a small chem plant that sucked carbon dioxide from the atmosphere to make methane and oxygen. Above the outpost orbited three communication satellites, supplying constant contact with Earth. With several more satellites left over for navigation and surveillance of the area, Earth had known just about as much about the Gusev Crater region as it could without putting people on the ground. Maps galore. But all that technology had missed the most important facet: the wonder of it.

Nearly four billion years before, a huge asteroid had splashed into the crust here, opening a deep crater that nothing had been able to fill. To the south, as the highlands drained of water, a deep channel called the Ma'adim Vallis had cut through the kilometer-high crater wall, flooding it. A cooling lake had stood here for many tens of thousands of years—so Marc said, after careful study of his corings. It might have lapped at the highest cliffs. White-water rapids rushed from the highlands, sending great sheets foaming down in roaring waterfalls. Then the big volcano to the north had erupted, spewing lava and gas and water into the crater. Several nearby impacts had sent more liquid gushing from the warmed crust. Several times the crater's lake had frozen over, only to melt when an asteroid smash or the fitful climate of Mars allowed.

All this history was written on the ramparts that towered over them as they marched north in Red Rover. Marc had traced it all out.

“Y'know, my work here has been damned interesting,” he said as he carefully edged them over a sloping sand dune and down the face. “I can't shake the feeling that it's been mostly a waste, though—except for the pingos.”

“Come on!” Julia said, not taking her eyes off the moving scenery.

“No, that's the way I feel. Take that long trek we went on, through the subsidence morphology terrain and on up the Ma'adim Vallis. I got to show that a helluva lot of water ran through there once. Measured, bored, traced out the meanders—the works. Even found some benches to prove that there were earlier floor levels, which got undercut. So there was a big river running through that valley, a thousand klicks long and a klick deep. Where did it go?”

“It's somewhere under our feet, you told me,” Julia said helpfully, letting him run.

“Only place it could be, yeah.” Marc gazed morosely out at the ruddy cusp dunes and car-sized rocks. “I spent over a year trying to get some Mars ice, and only here at the last do I get lucky. Some geologist I am.”

She reached over and clenched his hand. He had been more closed up lately and this was more direct than he usually could be. “You worked your tail off.”

“Remember when I climbed up that wall in the Ma'adim? Thought I saw a real tributary mouth up there. Busted that tail of mine climbing four hundred meters, pinning myself to that rickety rock the whole way. I got to tell you, I was scared. Didn't want to say so, but I was.”

“I could tell.”

“It was that obvious?”

“People say all sorts of things when they're exhausted.”

“I was, when I got back, wasn't I? Damn fool stunt, but we didn't have enough gear to do it in a two-team rig.” His eyes never left their course but she could tell his inner recollection was more vivid than the rumpled plain before them. “So I violate protocols—”

“We
violated them. I was holding your drop line.”

“—risk my stubborn neck, and it turns out it was no feeding stream at all. Just a wale. No smaller channels in the upland surface to feed the ol’ Ma'adim. No runoff, so no rainfall. Only needed one!—to prove there had been rain. Couldn't find it.”

“There had to be rain.”

“Prove raindrops fell, four billion years later? The academics will want more than rock cores and arm-waving.”

“You've got the ice cores.”

“Which prove there were lakes. Sedimentary layering for sure. But the water could have oozed out of the ground. Fluid erosion features, that's all I've found. No little creeks, no feeder drainage networks carving up the plains.”

“The water is hiding underground. It's staying away from the sun, which would break it down. Smart water.”

He laughed, dispelling his own mood suddenly. “Smart water, dumb geologist.”

“It wasn't dumb to build that enhancement on the drill.”

“Raoul's idea, mostly.”

“But you made it work.”

“It was simple, once I thought to try it. I took too long.”

“Drilling into the pingos from the side? It wasn't obvious to me.”

“If they'd sent a wildcatter with common sense—”

“And your first five tries failed. A wildcatter would've walked before that.”

“I was lucky to find it in six.”

“Okay, so not all those pingo hills have water under them, at least not so shallow.”

“It was just good luck, last-minute luck.”

“Your ‘luck’ was mostly sweat and intuition.”

They reached the first of the pingo hills in midafternoon, running exactly in the tracks of Marc and Raoul's last expedition. Protocol: avoid new dangers. A new route would hold unknowns, perhaps deadfalls or a rock slide just waiting for a passing vibration to start it downhill.

Marc kept up a lazy discussion of the vent, and she answered, but her mind was elsewhere. She had devoted her life to space, but in the end it was this hostile yet beautiful land that she loved.

Until now, all active astronauts had been exclusively near-Earth-orbit guys, never out of sight of the looming custard clouds below. The deep range of the blackness between the worlds felt utterly different from near-Earth space, where the great ice cream planet hung over you like an ever-changing artwork of milky white swirls and hard blues and misty greens, encased in the precariously thin eggshell film of pale air.

Just going to Mars had changed that forever. On the long voyage they had hung between the eternity of diamond-shard stars as though frozen in their embrace, unmoving but for the hab's gravity-giving cart-wheel. No reassuring Earth hovering nearby. Longer and longer pauses within radio conversations, until those became impossible.

Awaiting them was a real place—ruddy mystery, not just a slice of vacuum. Living here was different in a way she could not name. Not like a space station, though there were locks and gear and procedures in common. Not like the moon, though it had dust and dryness. She had never been there, but she knew that Mars resembled the moon, with bad weather and more danger. But more, it had a deep history it concealed artfully.

She wrestled with this, tried to talk about it with Marc, and could not find the words. Traditionally astronauts were minimal talkers. Here they still slung around the space cadet lingo now and then, but as the mission wore on they found English more useful. TWAs—three-word acronyms—faded, especially after you forgot what they stood for. But personal stuff was as hard as ever. Finally she descended to cheerleading. “Look, we give this vent a good shot, then we can go home with more than we had any right to expect.”

“I still want to find out if it ever rained here.”

“And I want to find out if those fossil microbes in your cores were the last Martians, or the first.”

“Lots of luck. Me, I've got my eyes on other prizes.”

It was quite like him to leave a leading question open like that. “Such as?”

“My agent, Carlos Avila? I got good news from him. A contract for a co-lead in a big new syndicated space epic.”

“Wow. Movie?”

“No, vid.”

“Think you can pretend to be a big-time space guy?”

Marc gave her a smile that might as well have a canary feather sticking out of it. “I start a month after we get back.”

“You've got the looks for it.”

“Hey, Carlos said we all do, for stuff like that. It turns out that actors are usually short, compact people. Something with the way our features photograph.”

“I'm not short.”

“Not
short
short. Compact.”

“We're strong, sturdy.”

“So was Arnold Schwarzenegger. He was also shorter than you.”

“Really?” She laughed. All four of them were light. Astronauts generally were, to fit into tight spaces and consume fewer expendables. So far they had not suffered for it here; the 0.38 gravity helped.

She mulled over the idea. “So we should all go Hollywood?”

“What's left, after Mars?”

Somehow the question stuck with her.
What's left?

An odd sensation, looking down the slope of her life from this pinnacle. It was hard for her to think that this was truly
it,
the last big thing she would ever do. Going back would be six months of boredom followed by endless Earthside ticker-tape parades and fawning fans. Pleasant enough, maybe, but astronauts were not attention-hounds. They wanted to
do,
not just
be.
Acting in fake spectacle vids and making speeches to the Rotarians …

She shook her head.
Stay in the present. Mars isn't over …yet.

When at last they rolled up to the vent she insisted on going out. That meant suiting up and Marc didn't want to. Getting into a lobster suit was a chore and he was comfortable where he was. “Let's do the setup in the morning.”

“Nope, I want to eyeball the site. And I want to spend all the time tomorrow underground.”

So they violated protocol. He watched her on the external camera while she checked the vent in the waning sunset light. Carefully she followed the boot prints she and Viktor had left, partly filled in by dust already.

“No change that I can see,” she sent over comm. “No signs of another outgassing here, either.”

Disappointing, but then, ice would have sublimed away here within a few days. Her heart pounded just to see the place again, even if it was a rather unimpressive little hole in the fading light.

She carefully walked back up the incline, remembering hauling Viktor this way. Their boot prints were wind-blurred.

She unhitched the two winch assemblies and freed the climbing harnesses from their mounts. Cables were still neatly coiled, the yokes ready. Neatness counts, especially on Mars. The cables were incredibly strong and light, the best carbon fiber. Thin wires threaded through the carbon also carried their suit comm transmissions back to Red Rover, for relay back to base if they needed it. Carefully she checked the connections and sent a hailing signal to the ship, whose onboard answered automatically.

“All set!” Job done.

Now for a reward. The first month here she had often gone out to witness the splendid ruby wonder of sunset. Dawn was even better, with ice clouds that quickly vanished, but much colder. Already a hard chill came stealing up from her boots.

What she had truly come out to see was rising as the glorious crimson sunset began to fade. A ruby radiance suffused the horizon, and above it rose a lustrous blue-white dot. Earthrise.

A resplendent smudge, brimming brighter than Venus. She peered closely and could make out the small white point to one side. The only primary-and-moon visible to the naked eye in the solar system.

Until now, that tiny little interval had been the full extent of the human reach. On the bigger creamy-blue dot, a million years of hominid drama had been acted out, blood and dreams playing on a stage a few miles thick, under a blanket of forgiving air.

Then those brawling hominids had reached out. Half a century of sweat and ingenuity and courage had taken the species to the other dot, its alabaster, beckoning brilliance.

Now she could stand here and see the twin worlds of her birthplace for their true nature, a small neighborhood wonderland gliding through a hard darkness. One world was an airless desert, the other a moist promise.

The ground she stood upon had also held promise, once. Water had swirled here, Marc said, a kilometer deep. Volcanoes had belched and fumed into that ancient lake bed. Cooked by heat and violence, organic chemistry had worked its slow magic. Life arose and briefly bloomed.