Mars gt-4 Page 12

“When will you know for sure?” his father asked.

  They walked him into the book-lined library, where the bright sunshine was blocked from the window by a tall azalea bush that threatened to undermine the house’s foundation one day.

  “Monday, I guess. I won’t have a chance to get away once they make their final decision.”

  The house was much as Jamie remembered it: comfortable, disordered, books and journals scattered everywhere, upholstered chairs and chintz-covered sofas that bore the imprint of his mother’s and his father’s bodies. Mama Bear has her chair and Papa Bear has his, Jamie remembered from childhood.

  He sat on the edge of the library sofa, tense and nervous. Mama and Papa took their individual chairs, facing him.

  “You really want to go?” his mother asked for the thousandth time in the past four years.

  Jamie nodded.

  “I thought that priest was the one they picked,” said his father.

  “He came down with a gall bladder attack. Too much wine, I guess.”

  None of them so much as smiled.

  The afternoon and evening inched along. Jamie could see that his mother did not want him to go, that she was desperately trying to think of some argument, some reason that would keep him safely near her. His father seemed bemused by the whole matter; pleased that his son was at last finding some measure of success, but uncertain about the wisdom of the entire effort.

  Over dinner his father said, “I’ve never been able to satisfy myself that Mars is worth all the money we’re spending on it.”

  Jamie felt a wave of relief wash through him. It was easier to debate national policy than to watch his mother struggling to hold back tears.

  They went through all the arguments, pro and con, that they had disputed back and forth with his every visit home. Without rancor. Without polemics. Without raising their voices or stirring their blood. Like a classroom exercise. As he discussed the question of Mars in calm debater’s logic Jamie realized that his father had become the compleat academic: nothing really touched him anymore; he saw everything in the abstract; not even the obvious pain of his wife, sitting across the table three feet from him, could shake him out of the comfortable cocoon he had woven around himself.

  My god, Jamie thought, Dad’s gotten old. Bloodless and old. Is that the way I’m going to be?

  It was not until long after dinner was finished, as he started upstairs toward the bedroom he had slept in since childhood, that his mother asked:

  “Must you leave tomorrow? Can’t you stay just a little longer?”

  I can’t take another day of this, Jamie knew. As gently as he could he told his mother, “I’ve got to be at the space center first thing Monday morning.”

  “But you don’t have to leave so soon, do you?”

  He hesitated. “I want to see grandfather Al.”

  “Oh.” The one syllable carried a lifetime of grief and distaste.

  His father overheard them and came into the hallway. “You’d rather be with your grandfather than with your mother?” he asked sharply.

  Jamie was surprised at that; almost glad of it.

  “He’s the only grandparent I’ve got left. It doesn’t seem right to go without saying good-bye to him.”

  Jerome Waterman huffed, but said nothing more.

  3

  Jamie had to be satisfied with a commercial flight from Oakland International to Albuquerque. Al was waiting for him at the airport. With a rental helicopter and pilot.

  “What’s this all about?” Jamie asked as he clambered into the little glass-bubble chopper.

  Al was grinning broadly, his leathery face a geological map of happiness.

  “You only got a few hours here, right? Thought we’d take a run up to Mesa Verde instead of sittin’ around the house.”

  “Mesa Verde?” Jamie yelled over the whine of the copter engine start-up. “You’re not going mystical on me, are you?”

  Al laughed. “Maybe. We’ll see.”

  The first snow of the season was already on the mountains and Jamie felt cold in his lightweight windbreaker as he and Al trekked through the well-marked trail from the helicopter landing pad to the rim of the canyon.

  “I should have brought a couple of coats,” Al muttered. He was in a worn old denim jacket and jeans.

  “It’s okay. The sun’s warming things up.”

  The sky was cloudless blue. Big dollops of wet snow were melting out of the ponderosas and pinons, dropping like scoops of ice cream to splatter on the gravel trail. Jamie’s high-tech Reeboks were getting soaked. Al wore his usual boots, tough and comfortable. And his drooping, broad-brimmed hat protected his head from the falling snow. Jamie, bareheaded, had to keep an eye on the trees and dodge the falls.

  The air was thin up this high. Jamie heard his grandfather wheezing. He had seen the Anasazi ruins before, of course, but for some reason Al wanted him to see them once again before he took off for another world.

  They reached the crest of the high ridge, walked along the edge for a few silent, puffing minutes, then stepped out from behind a stand of pine.

  Across a bend in the ridge, a hundred feet down, the old ruins huddled in a cleft of the ancient solid stone. Even to this day the adobe brick dwellings were protected from the wind and snow by the overhanging rock. Reddish brown sandstone, Jamie knew. Almost the same color as Mars.

  “Your ancestors built that village five hundred years before Columbus was born,” Al said quietly.

  “I know,” said Jamie.

  “Son, when you go to Mars, you’ll be taking them with you. The Old Ones. They’re in your blood.”

  Jamie smiled at his grandfather. “By god, Al, you are going mystical.”

  His grandfather’s face was entirely serious. “It’s important for a man to know who he is. You can’t be in balance without that. You can’t know where you’re heading for if you don’t know where you’ve come from.”

  “I understand, Grandfather.”

  “Your father…” Al hesitated. The old man had never called him his son as long as Jamie could remember. “Your father turned his back on all this. He wanted to be accepted by the whites so badly! He turned himself into an Anglo. I don’t blame him. It’s my own fault, I guess. I didn’t teach him half of what I’ve taught you, Jamie. I was too busy then, with the store and all. I didn’t take the time to raise him like I should have.”

  “It’s not your fault, Al.”

  “I think it is. I wasn’t as good a father to him as I’ve been a grandfather to you. I can see why he felt he had to take the path he did. But I want you to remember who you are, son. You’ll be traveling where no one has gone before. You’ll be facing dangers no one’s ever dealt with. It’ll go better for you if you remember all this, keep it in your mind always.”

  Looking out on the ancient adobe village, the square dwellings with their empty windows, the brick-walled circles of kivas where the men held their religious ceremonies in the heady smoke of precious tobacco, Jamie nodded to his grandfather.

  “I knew you would go to Mars,” Al said, his voice almost cracking. “Never had the slightest doubt that you’d go.”

  “I’ll remember this,” Jamie said. “I’ll keep it in my heart.”

  Al reached into the pocket of his denim jacket. “Here,” he said. “A reminder.”

  Jamie saw that his grandfather was offering him a carved piece of jet-black obsidian in the totem shape of a crouching bear. A tiny turquoise arrowhead was tied to its back with a leather thong, with a wisp of a white feather tucked atop it.

  A fetish, Jamie realized. A protective piece of Navaho magic.

  “That’s an eagle feather,” Al said, unable to suppress his shopkeeper’s pride.

  Jamie took the fetish. It was small in his palm, but weighty, solid, strong.

  “I’ll keep this with me every minute, Grandfather.”

  Al grinned, almost embarrassed. “Go with beauty, son.”

  4

  Jamie made
it back to Houston Sunday night and crawled into his apartment bed emotionally exhausted. While he slept his future was decided, more than ten thousand kilometers away, in Star City.

  Alberto Brumado dozed in the limousine that had met his plane on its arrival in Moscow. Alone in the spacious backseat, jet-lagged by his supersonic flight from Washington, Brumado paid no attention to the lines of tall apartment blocks and low gray clouds that stretched eastward toward the true steppe country of Russia. For more than an hour the car sped along the wide concrete highway; traffic thinned away until there was little more than the occasional massive tractor-trailer rig, diesel engine belching sooty exhaust plumes into the air.

  Past Kaliningrad they drove, past woods and lakes and over a railroad crossing, heading toward Star City.

  The actual name of the community is Zvyozdniy Gorodok: literally, “Starry Town.” But ever since the first cooperative Soviet-American space venture, the Apollo-Soyuz mission of 1975, a slight misinterpretation by a NASA translator turned it into Star City, and so it has been called by the western media ever since.

  Once it had been a town, nothing more than a handful of apartment blocks and a dozen big concrete buildings that housed the cosmonaut training center, deliberately placed in the barren emptiness between a thick pine forest and a scattering of small lakes. Now, as Alberto Brumado’s car drove past the guard post at the perimeter fence, it had grown into a sizable city. Scientists and astronauts from all over the world trained here for Mars. The world’s media focused their attention here. A true city had grown around the clear blue lakes, homes for workers who served the training center, shops and open-air markets and entertainment complexes. Close by the main gate of the training center itself stood the Space Museum, a gracefully sweeping concrete form that captured the spirit of flight.

  Brumado had learned the traveler’s secret years earlier: sleep whenever you can. Now, as the limousine pulled up to the main office building at the training center, he roused himself from his nap, ready to step out and face his responsibilities, alert if not actually refreshed.

  Dr. Li Chengdu came almost loping down the front steps of the building on his long legs to greet Brumado and guide him to the office that the Russians had set aside for his use. Dr. Li was wearing an expensive-looking running suit of maroon and slate gray. The white pinstripe down the legs made him look even taller and leaner than usual. His face seemed strained, grayish, almost ill. Perhaps it’s that maroon top, Brumado thought. It’s not good for his coloring. He himself was still in his Washington clothes: a dark blue business suit. He had removed the tie and stuffed it into his jacket pocket hours earlier. The shirt was limp and wrinkled from his long trip.

  The office to which Li escorted him was big enough to contain a broad polished conference table, Brumado saw. Good. And its own lavatory. Even better. The second rule of the inveterate traveler: never pass a toilet without using it.

  Three minutes later, his bladder emptied, his face washed, and his hair freshly combed, Brumado pulled out a chair from the middle of the conference table, ignoring the massive desk and the high-backed swivel chair behind it. Brumado felt he was here to help solve a sudden problem, not to impress others with the trappings of power.

  Besides, he told himself, I have no real power here, no authority over these men and women. My strength lies in moral persuasion, nothing more.

  Dr. Li was pacing the office from the draped windows to the head of the conference table and back again, more nervous than Brumado had ever seen him.

  “Please sit here next to me,” Brumado said mildly. “It hurts my neck to look up at you.”

  Li’s thin ascetic face looked startled momentarily, then apologetic. He took the chair next to Brumado’s.

  “You seem very upset,” Brumado said. “What is wrong?”

  Li drummed his long fingers on the tabletop before answering. “We seem to have a virtual mutiny on our hands. And your daughter, sir, is apparently the ringleader.”

  “Joanna?”

  “Once it became clear that DiNardo could not make the mission, your daughter — and others — demanded that Professor Hoffman be replaced as well.”

  Brumado felt confused. Joanna would never do such a thing. Never!

  “I don’t understand,” he said.

  “Your daughter and several other scientists here have refused to go on the mission if Hoffman is included. It is mutiny, pure and simple.”

  “Mutiny,” Brumado echoed, feeling dull, stupid, as if his brain could not grasp the meaning of Li’s words.

  “We cannot announce the final selections for the mission, we cannot begin transporting the scientific staff to the assembly station in orbit, if they refuse to go.” Li’s voice was high and strained, nearly cracking.

  Brumado had never seen Li like this, close to panic.

  “What can we do?” Li asked, raising his hands in a gesture of helplessness. “We cannot tell Professor Hoffman that he has been removed from flight status because a cabal of his fellow scientists don’t like him! What can we do?”

  Brumado took in a deep breath, unconsciously trying to calm Li by calming himself. “I think the first thing I should do is speak to my daughter.”

  “Yes,” Li said. “Certainly.”

  He sprang up from the chair, all six and a half feet of him, and nearly sprinted to the desk where the phone was. Brumado wormed out of his jacket and tossed it onto another chair. He was rolling up his shirtsleeves when Joanna stepped into the office. She too was wearing a softly comfortable running suit, butter yellow and muted orange. Brumado wondered idly what the Russians thought about this craze for American fashion.

  “I will leave the two of you alone,” said Li softly, nearly whispering. He scurried from the room like a wisp of smoke wafted away on a strong breeze.

  Joanna came over to her father, bussed him on both cheeks, and sat in the chair that Li had used earlier.

  Brumado studied her face. She looked serious, but not upset. More determined than fearful.

  “Dr. Li tells me you are leading a mutiny among the scientists.” Brumado found himself smiling at her as he said it. Not only did he find it difficult to believe such an outrageous story, but even if it were true he could not be angry with his lovely daughter.

  “We took a vote last night,” Joanna said in their native Brazilian Portuguese. “Out of the sixteen scientists scheduled to fly the mission, eleven will not go if Hoffman is included.”

  Brumado brushed his upper lip with a fingertip, a throwback to his youth when he had sported a luxuriant moustache.

  “The sixteen includes Hoffman himself. Did he vote?”

  Joanna laughed. “No. Of course not. We did not ask him.”

  “Why?” her father asked. “What is the reason for this?”

  She made a small sigh. “None of us really likes Hoffman. He is a very difficult personality. We feel that it will be impossible to work with him under the very close conditions of the mission.”

  “But why wait until now? Why didn’t you say something sooner?”

  “We thought that Father DiNardo could keep Hoffman under control. Hoffman admired DiNardo, looked up to him. But the thought of having Hoffman without Father DiNardo — having him as the prime geologist for the mission — we realized we could not stand that. He would be insufferable. Unbearable.”

  Brumado said nothing, thinking: I’m not going into space with them. I’m not going to be cooped up inside a spacecraft for nearly two years with someone I can’t stand.

  “Besides,” his daughter went on, “Hoffman was chosen mainly for political reasons. You know that.”

  “He is an excellent geologist,” Brumado replied absently, thinking now about the difficulties he was asking his daughter to face. Two years in space. The stresses. The dangers.

  “There are other geologists who have gone through training with us.” Joanna said, leaning slightly closer to her father. “O’Hara is from Australia. He can move up. And there is that Navaho me
stizo, Waterman.”

  Brumado’s attention suddenly focused on his daughter’s eyes. “The man who stayed on at McMurdo to help your group through your Antarctic training.”

  “And the following groups. Yes, him.”

  “And O’Hara.”

  “Waterman has done extensive work on meteor impacts. He even found a Martian meteorite in Antarctica, although Hoffman took the credit for it.”

  “Is he the man you want?”

  She pulled back again. “I think he is the best-qualified person, isn’t he? And everyone seemed to get along with him very well.”

  “But he’s an American,” Brumado muttered. “The politicians don’t want more Americans than Russians. Or vice versa.”

  “He’s an American Indian, Papa. It’s not really the same thing. And O’Hara will make the Australians happy.”

  “The politicians wanted Hoffman to help represent Europe.”

  “We already have a Greek, a Pole, and a German to represent Europe. As well as an Englishman. If Hoffman goes on the mission there will be trouble,” Joanna said firmly. “His psychological profile is awful! We have tried to work with him, Papa. He is simply unbearable!”

  “So you took a vote.”

  “Yes. We have decided. If Hoffman is chosen there are at least eleven of us who will resign from the program immediately.”

  Again Brumado fell silent. He did not know what to say, how to handle this situation.

  “Ask Antony Reed,” Joanna suggested. “He has had more training in psychology than any of the others selected for the mission. It was his idea to take the vote.”

  “Was it?”

  “Yes! I didn’t do all this by myself, Papa. Most of the others cannot stand Hoffman.”

  Brumado got up slowly and went to the desk. Picking up the telephone, he asked the man who answered to find Dr. Reed. The Englishman opened the office door before Brumado could return to the conference table. My god, he thought, they must all be sitting in the outer office. I wonder if Hoffman is there too.

  Reed seemed faintly amused by it all.