Tales of the Grand Tour Page 12

  Her father was a rocket engineer, a hard-working, sober, humorless man whose work took him away from their Moscow apartment for long months at a time. He travelled mostly to the mammoth launch facility in the dreary dust-brown desert of Kazakhstan and returned home tired and sour, but always with a doll or some other present for his baby daughter. Nastasia was his one joy in life.

  Anastasia’s mother was a concert cellist who played in the Moscow symphony, a bright and intelligent woman who learned very early in her marriage that life was more enjoyable when her husband was a thousand kilometers away. She could give parties in their apartment then; people would laugh and play music. Often one of the men would remain the night.

  As Nastasia grew into awareness and understanding, her mother swore her to secrecy. “We don’t want to hurt your father’s feelings,” she would tell her ten-year-old daughter. Later, when Nastasia was a teenager, her mother would say, “And do you think he remains faithful during all those months he’s away? Men are not like that.”

  Nastasia discovered what men are like while she was in secondary school. One of the male students invited her to a party. On the way home, he stopped the car (his father’s) and began to maul her. When Nastasia resisted, he tore her clothing and raped her.

  Her mother cried with her and then called the police. The investigators made Nastasia feel as if she had committed the crime, not the boy. Her attacker was not punished and she was stigmatized. Even her father turned against her, saying that she must have given the boy the impression she was available.

  When she was selected for the technical university in Novosibersk she left Moscow willingly, gladly, and buried herself in her studies. She avoided all socializing with men, and found that love and warmth and safety could be had with other women.

  She also found that she was very bright, and very capable. She began to delight in beating men in areas where they thought they were supreme. She learned to fly and went on to become a cosmonaut: Not merely a cosmonaut but the first woman cosmonaut to command an orbital team of twelve men; the first woman cosmonaut to set a new endurance record for months spent aboard a space station; the first woman cosmonaut to go to Mars.

  The Second Mars Expedition included two small tractors for hauling heavy loads and two larger, segmented rover vehicles for overland traverses. The rovers were externally the same as those used in the first expedition: Each was a trio of cylindrical aluminum modules, mounted on springy, loose-jointed wheels that could crawl over fair-sized rocks without upsetting the vehicle. They represented a considerable financial savings for the expedition: The cost of developing and testing them had already been absorbed by the first expedition. The second expedition merely had to buy two of them off the shelf.

  One of the cylindrical modules was the fuel tank, big enough to keep the vehicle out in the field for two weeks or more. The middle segment usually held equipment and supplies, although it could be modified and pressurized to serve as a small mobile laboratory if necessary. The front segment, largest of the three, was pressurized like a spacecraft so people could live in it in their shirtsleeves. There was an airlock at its rear, where it linked with the second module. Its front end was a bulbous transparent canopy, which made the entire assembly look something like a giant metallic caterpillar.

  Each rover was designed to carry four in reasonable comfort, although the entire complement of eight explorers could be squeezed into one in an emergency.

  The rover that Craig and Trumball were using, however, was an old one, left abandoned by the first expedition after it had sunk into a crater filled with treacherous dust. At Dex’s insistence, they had found the rover, towed it back to the base camp, and refurbished it for this trek to the Sagan site at Ares Vallis.

  It was already night on the broad rolling plain of Lunae Planum, yet Possum Craig was still driving the old rover—cautiously, at a mere ten kilometers per hour. He and Dex Trumball had agreed that they could mooch out a little extra mileage after sunset, before they stopped for the night.

  Trumball had the radio set to the general comm frequency, so they heard Rodriguez’s and Fuchida’s landing at Olympus Mons at the same time the four in the base camp did.

  “Those two poor bastards gotta live in their suits until they get back to th’ dome,” Craig said.

  “Look on the bright side, Wiley. They get to test the FES.” Dex had bestowed the nickname Wiley J. Coyote on Craig during the five-month-long flight from Earth, for the older man’s nearly mystical ability to fix any kind of machinery.

  The hard suits had a special fitting that was supposed to make an airtight connection to the chemical toilet seat. The engineers called it the Fecal Elimination System.

  “The ol’ trapdoor,” Craig muttered. “I bet they wind up usin’ Kaopectate.”

  “Or getting hemorrhoids.”

  Craig whooped with laughter.

  Sitting beside him in the cockpit, Dex added with a grin, “While we’ve got all the comforts of home.”

  Craig made a thoughtful face. “For an old clunker, this travelin’ machine is doin’ purty well. No complaints.”

  “Not yet.”

  Dex had spent most of the day in his hard suit. They had stopped the rover every hundred klicks for him to go outside and plant geology/meteorology beacons. Now he sat relaxed in his coveralls, watching the scant slice of ground illuminated by the rover’s headlights.

  “You could goose her up to twenty,” Dex prodded.

  “Yeah, and I could slide ’er into a crater before we had time to stop or turn away,” Craig shot back. He tapped a forefinger on the digital clock display. “Time to call it a day, anyway.”

  “You tired already?”

  “Nope, and I don’t want to drive when I am tired.”

  “I could drive for a while,” said Dex.

  Pressing gently on the brake pedals, Craig said, “Let’s just call it a day, buddy. We’ve made good time. Enough is enough.”

  Trumball seemed to think it over for a moment, then pulled himself out of the cockpit chair. “Okay. You’re the boss.”

  Craig laughed. “Shore I am.”

  “Now, what’s that supposed to mean?” Trumball asked over his shoulder as he headed back to the minuscule galley.

  Craig slid the plastic heat-retaining screen across the windshield, then got up and stretched so hard that Dex could hear his tendons pop.

  “It means that I’m th’ boss long’s you want to be agreeable.”

  “I’m agreeable,” Dex said.

  “Then ever’thing’s fine and dandy.”

  Sliding one of the prepackaged meals from its freezer tray, Trumball said to the older man, “No, seriously, Wiley. Jamie put you in charge. I’ve got no bitch with that.”

  Still stretching, his hands scraping the curved overhead, Craig said, “Okay. Fine.”

  “Something bugging you?”

  “Naw. Forget it.”

  As he put the meal tray into the microwave cooker, Dex said, “Hey, come on, Wiley. It’s just you and me out here. If something’s wrong, tell me about it.”

  Craig made a face somewhere between annoyed and sheepish. “Well, it’s kinda silly, I guess.”

  “What is it, for chrissakes?”

  With a tired puff of breath, Craig sank onto his bunk.

  “Well, I’m kinda pissed about bein’ a second-class citizen around here.”

  Trumball stared at him in amazement. “Second-class citizen?”

  “Yeah, you know—they all think I’m nothin’ more’n a repairman, for shit’s sake.”

  “Well—”

  “I’m a scientist, just like you and the rest of y’all,” Craig grumbled. “Maybe I didn’t get my degree from a big-name school, and maybe I’ve spent most of my time workin’ for oil companies . . .” he pronounced oil as awl “. . . but I was smart enough to get picked over a lotta guys with fancier pedigrees.”

  “Sure you are.”

  “That Fuchida. Damned Jap’s so uptight I
think if he sneezed he’d come apart. Looks at me like I’m a servant or something.”

  “That’s just his way.”

  “And the women! They act like I’m a grandfather or somethin’. Hell, I’m younger’n Jamie. I’m younger than Stacy is, did you know that?”

  For the first time, Dex Trumball understood that Craig was hurting. And vulnerable. This jowly, shaggy, good-natured bear of a man with the prominent snoot and permanent five-o’clock shadow wants to be treated with some respect. That makes him usable, Dex realized.

  “Listen, Wiley,” Dex began, “I didn’t know that we were hurting your feelings.”

  “Not you, so much. It’s the rest of ’em. They think I’m just here to be their bleepin’ repairman. Least you call me Wiley. Never did like bein’ called Possum. My name’s Peter J. Craig.”

  The microwave oven chimed. Dex ignored it and sat on his own bunk, opposite Craig’s. “I’ll get them to call you Wiley, then. Or Peter, if you prefer.”

  “Wiley is fine.”

  A smile crept across Trumball’s face. “Okay, then. It’s going to be Wiley from now on. I’ll make certain that Jamie and the others get the word.”

  Looking embarrassed, Craig mumbled, “Kinda silly, ain’t it?”

  “No, no,” Dex said. “If Jamie and the others are bothering you, you’ve got a right to complain about it.”

  To himself Trumball thought, If and when we get to a place where I’ve got to out-gun Jamie, I’ll need Wiley on my side. Wiley, and as many of the others as I can round up.

  DOSSIER: C. DEXTER TRUMBALL

  No matter how well he did, no matter what he accomplished, Dex Trumball could never satisfy his coldly indifferent father.

  Darryl C. Trumball was a self-made man, he firmly proclaimed to anyone and everyone. One of Dex’s firmest memories was his father cornering a U.S. senator at a house party and tapping him on the shoulder with each and every word as he declared with quiet insistence, “I started with nothing but my bare hands and my brain, and I built a fortune for myself.”

  In truth, the old man had started with a meager inheritance: A decrepit auto body shop that was on the verge of bankruptcy when Dex’s grandfather died of a massive stroke in the middle of his fourth beer at the neighborhood bar.

  Dex had been just a baby then, an only child. His mother was pretty, frail, and ineffectual: totally unable to stand up to her hard-driving husband. Dex’s father, blade-slim, fast, and agile, had attended Holy Cross on a track scholarship. He never graduated; he had to take over the family business instead. His dream of going to the Boston College Law School, as he had been promised, was shattered, leaving him bitter and resentful.

  And filled with an icy, relentless energy.

  Darryl C. Trumball quickly learned that business depends on politics. Although the body shop was practically worthless, the land on which it stood could become extremely valuable if it could be converted to upscale condominiums for the white-collar types who worked in Boston’s financial district. He pushed feverishly to get the old neighborhood rezoned, then sold the shop and his mother’s house for a sizable sum.

  By the time Dex was ready for college, his father was very wealthy, and known in the financial community for his cold-blooded ruthlessness. Money was important to him, and he spent every waking hour striving to increase his net worth. When Dex expressed an interest in science, the elder Trumball snorted disdainfully: “You’ll never be able to support yourself that way! Why, when I was your age I was taking care of your grandmother, your two aunts, your mother, and you.”

  Dex listened obediently and registered anyway for physics at Yale. His high school grades (and his father’s money) were good enough to be acceptable to Harvard and half a dozen other Ivy League schools, but Dex decided on Yale. New Haven was close enough to Boston for him to get home easily, yet far enough away for him to be free of his father’s chilling presence.

  Dex had always found school to be ridiculously easy. Where others pored over textbooks and sweated out exams, Dex breezed through with a near-photographic memory and a clever ability to tell his teachers exactly what they wanted to hear. His relationships with his peers were much the same: They did what he wanted, almost always. Dex got the brilliant ideas and his friends got into trouble carrying them out. Yet they never complained; they admired his dash and felt grateful when he noticed them at all.

  Sex was equally easy for him, even on campuses electrified by charges of harassment. Dex had his pick of the women: The more intelligent they were, the more they seemed to bask in the temporary sunshine of his affection. And they never complained afterward.

  Physics was not for Dex, but he found himself drawn to geophysics: the study of the Earth, its interior and its atmosphere. His grades were well-nigh perfect. He was a campus leader in everything from the school television station to the tennis team. Yet his father was never pleased.

  “An educated bum, that’s what you are,” his father taunted. “I’ll have to support you all my life and keep on supporting you even after I’m gone.”

  Which suited Dex just fine. But deep within, he longed to hear one approving word from his father. He ached to have the callous old man smile at him.

  His life changed forever at a planetarium show. Dex liked to take his dates to the planetarium. It was cheap, it impressed young women with his seriousness and intelligence, and it was the darkest place in town. Very romantic, really, sitting in the back row with the splendors of the heavens spangled above.

  One particular show was about the planet Mars. After several failures, an automated spacecraft had successfully returned actual samples of Martian rocks and soil to a laboratory in orbit around the Earth. Now there was talk of sending human explorers there. Suddenly Dex stopped fondling the young woman who had accompanied him and sat up straight in his chair.

  “There’s more than one planet to study!” he said aloud, eliciting a chorus of shushing hisses from around him, and the utter humiliation of his date.

  Dex spent that summer at the University of Nevada, taking a special course in geology. The next summer he went to a seminar on planetary geology in Berkeley.

  By the time the first expedition had returned from Mars, triumphantly bearing samples of living Martian organisms, Dex had degrees from Yale and Berkeley. He went to the struggling Moonbase settlement for six months to do fieldwork on the massive meteorites that lay buried deep beneath Mare Nubium and Mare Imbrium.

  Much to his father’s dismay.

  “I give the government fortunes of tax money for this space stuff,” the old man complained bitterly. “What damned good is it?”

  Dex’s father was a real-estate tycoon now, with long fingers in several New England–based banks and business interests in Europe, Asia, and Latin America. He kept in touch with his far-flung associates through satellite-relayed electronic links and even leased space in an orbital factory that manufactured ultrapure pharmaceuticals.

  Dex smiled brightly for his father. “Don’t be a flathead, Dad. I want to be on the next expedition to Mars.”

  His father stared at him coldly. “When are you going to start bringing some money in to this family, instead of spending it like it’s water?”

  Challenged, wanting to please his father and win his approval for once, Dex blurted, “We could make money from Mars.”

  His father was neither surprised nor stopped by the younger man’s assertion. He simply asked one question: “How?”

  That was when Dex began planning an expedition to Mars that would be funded by private donors. To be sure, a good deal of taxpayers’ money went into the pot. But once Dex enlisted the interest and drive of his profit-oriented father, funding for the Second Martian Expedition came mainly from private sources.

  Dex was determined to make the expedition profitable. He wanted his father’s praise, just once. Then he could tell the old man to go bust a blood vessel and drop dead.

  Jamie spent nearly an hour after dinner talking with Rodriguez a
nd Fuchida out atop Olympus Mons. They were spending the night in their seats in the plane’s cockpit. Like trying to sleep in an airliner, Jamie thought. Tourist class. In the hard suits. He did not envy them their creature comforts.

  Still in the comm center, he scrolled through the messages that had accumulated through the long, eventful, draining day. It took more than another hour to deal with them: everything from a request for more VR sessions from the International Council of Science Teachers to a reminder that his mission status report for the week was due in the morning.

  One message was from Darryl C. Trumball. Since it was marked PERSONAL AND CONFIDENTIAL, Jamie saved it, planning to go to his own quarters before he looked at it.

  But when he finished all the other messages, he glanced up from the comm screen and saw that the dome was darkened for the night. Suddenly it seemed chilly, as if the frigid cold of the Martian night were seeping through the dome’s plastic walls.

  No one seemed to be about. No voices, only the background sounds of the machinery and, if he listened carefully enough, the soft sighing of the night wind outside.

  So he opened Trumball’s personal message.

  Darryl C. Trumball’s eyes were blazing, his skull-like face grim as death.

  “Who in the hell gave you the authority to send my son out on this excursion to the Sagan site?” he began, furious, with no preamble.

  “Goddammit to hell and back, Waterman, I specifically gave orders not to allow Dex out on that excursion!”

  And so it went, for nearly fifteen blistering minutes. Jamie watched Trumball’s angry face, flabbergasted at first, then growing angry.

  But as the older man blathered on, Jamie’s anger slowly dissolved. Behind Trumball’s bluster, he saw a man worried about his son’s safety, a man accustomed to power and authority, but totally frustrated now because there was no way he could control the men and women on Mars. No way he could control his own son.

  He can’t even talk to us face-to-face, Jamie knew. All he can do is rant and rave and wait to see if we respond to him.

  Trumball finally wound down and finished with, “I want you to know, Waterman, that you can’t countermand my orders and get away with it. You’ll pay for this! And if anything happens to my son, you’ll pay with your goddamned blood!”