Return to Mars Read online

  You can’t see the ice, he told himself. It’s too thin a coating to be visible. Several dozen meters to his right, sunlight slanted down into the gradually sloping side of the caldera. There’ll be no ice there, Fuchida thought. He moved off in that direction, slowly, testing his footing every step of the way.

  The tether connected to his harness at his chest, so he could easily disconnect it if necessary. The increased tension of the line made walking all the more difficult. Fuchida felt almost like a marionette on a string.

  “Slack off a little,” he called to Rodriguez.

  “You sure?”

  He turned back to look up at his teammate, and was startled to see that the astronaut was nothing more than a tiny blob of a figure up on the rim, standing in bright sunlight with the deep blue sky behind him.

  “Yes, I’m certain,” he said, with deliberate patience.

  A few moments later Rodriguez asked, “How’s that?”

  The difference was imperceptible, but Fuchida replied, “Better.”

  He saw a ledge in the sunlight some twenty meters below him and decided to head for it. Slowly, carefully he descended.

  “I can’t see you.” Rodriguez’s voice in his earphones sounded only slightly concerned.

  Looking up, Fuchida saw the expanse of deep blue sky and nothing else except the gentle slope of the bare rock. And the tether, his lifeline, holding strong.

  “It’s all right,” he said. “I’m using the VR cameras to record my descent. I’m going to stop at a ledge and chip out some rock samples there.”

  “Y’know, we shoulda flown out to the Pathfinder site,” Wiley Craig mused as he drove the rover through the dry, cold afternoon across the Plains of the Moon.

  “Tired of driving?” Dex Trumball asked, sitting in the cockpit’s right seat.

  “Kinda boring right now.”

  “I checked out the idea,” Dex said. “The rocketplane doesn’t have the range to make it out to Ares Vallis.”

  “Coulda hopped the fuel generator and gassed ‘er up, just like we’re doin’ for this wagon.”

  “I suppose so. But we’d need a couple of fillups and that would mean flying the generator at least two different hops. And landing the plane twice more, too.”

  “Too risky, huh?”

  “Oh, I wouldn’t mind the risk,” Dex said quickly. “But the rocketplane couldn’t carry the hardware once we got there. Not with a full fuel load, at least.”

  Craig let out a long sigh that was almost a moan. “So we drive.”

  “We’re getting there, Wiley.”

  “Awful slow.”

  “We’re setting a record for a land traverse of an alien world. We’ll be covering close to ten thousand klicks before we’re back at the base.”

  “More’n those guys who circumnavigated Mare Imbrium back on th’ Moon?”

  “Oh, hell yes. They only covered twenty-five hundred kilometers.”

  “Huh.”

  “Pikers.”

  “Small-time stuff.”

  Trumball grinned at his partner. They were both unshaven, their chins and cheeks bristly with the beginnings of beards they had agreed not to cut off until they returned to the domed base.

  “We’re driving across what used to be the bottom of an ancient sea,” Trumball said, gesturing at the undulating ground outside. “I bet if we stopped to do some digging we’d find plenty of fossils.”

  Craig cocked a brow at him. “And how’d you recognize what’s a fossil and what’s just a plain ol’ rock? Think you’ll find trilobites or a chambered nautilus that looks just like fossils on Earth?”

  Dex took a deep breath, almost a sigh. “I know that, Wiley. I told Jamie about that the day we landed.”

  Craig grunted.

  After a few moments of silence, Dex said, “Let me ask you something, Wiley.”

  “What?”

  “About this matter of moving the base into the Canyon: Whose side are you on? Mine or Jamie’s?”

  Jamie stared at the three-dimensional image of the cliff face, bending over the immersion table display and concentrating as if he could force the ancient village to appear before his eyes by sheer willpower.

  Stacy Dezhurova was at the comm console, as usual. Trudy and Vijay were tending the hydroponic garden. And Jamie was growing impatient.

  I should never have let Dex go out on this crazy excursion of his, he told himself. Not only is it getting me in hot water with his father, it’s screwing up the mission to the ancient village.

  Jamie knew that he could not head out for the Canyon while four of the expedition’s people were in the field. He had to wait for them to come back to the dome. Fuchida and Rodriguez would return in a few days, unless they ran into trouble. But Dex and Possum won’t be back for another four weeks, minimum.

  Don’t let yourself get so worked up about it, he said silently. Be patient. If it’s really an ancient village tucked in those cliffs, it’s been there a long, long time. Another few weeks isn’t going to make much difference.

  Still he burned to get going, to get out of this dome, out in the field, away from the others.

  Away from Vijay, he realized.

  She’s got me wound up like a spring. First no and then yes and now maybe. Is she doing it on purpose? Trying to drive me crazy? Is it her sense of humor?

  Strangely, he found himself grinning at the thought. We’re already crazy. We wouldn’t be here otherwise. This just adds another dimension to the craziness.

  Be calm, the Navaho side of his mind advised. Seek the balanced path. Only when you’re in balance can you find beauty.

  Sex. We tie ourselves into knots over it. Why? She won’t get pregnant. Not here. Not unless she really wants to and she’s too smart to want that. So what difference does a little roll in the hay make?

  Then he thought of her admission that she had slept with Trumball, and Jamie knew that sex could be a fuse that kindles an explosion.

  Take it one step at a time, he thought. One day at a time. Then he grinned again. One night at a time.

  Dezhurova’s voice cut into his awareness. “Jamie, you should take a look at this.”

  Jamie straightened up, felt his vertebrae pop, and turned toward the comm console, where Stacy was sitting with a headset clipped over her limp sandy-blond pageboy.

  “What is it?”

  “Latest met forecast from Tarawa.”

  Jamie saw a polar projection map of Mars’ two hemispheres, side by side, on Dezhurova’s main screen. Meteorological isobars and symbols for highs and lows were sprinkled across it.

  Stacy tapped a fingernail on a red L deep in the southern hemisphere. Jamie noticed that her nails were manicured and lacquered a dark purple.

  “That is a dust storm,” she said.

  Bending over her shoulder to peer at the map, Jamie nodded. And noticed that Stacy was wearing a flowery perfume.

  “Way down on the other side of Hellas,” he muttered.

  “But they’re forecasting it to grow.” She touched a key and the next day’s map appeared on the screen. The storm was bigger, and moving westward.

  “Still way below the equator,” Jamie said.

  “Even so.”

  “Can you get a real-time view of the area?”

  “On two,” she replied. The screen immediately to her right brightened to show a satellite view of the region.

  “Dust storm, all right,” Jamie said. “Big one.”

  “And growing.”

  He thought aloud, “Even if it grows to global size, it’ll take more than a week to bother us here. Fuchida and Rodriguez will be back well before then.”

  “But Dex and Possum …”

  Jamie pictured Dex’s reaction to being called back to base because of the possibility of a dust storm engulfing him. I’d have to order him to return, Jamie knew. And he might just ignore the order.

  “Tell Tarawa I need to talk to the meteorology people right away,” he said to Stacy.

  “R
ight.”

  “Hey, Mitsuo,” Rodriguez called.

  Automatically, Fuchida looked up. But the astronaut was beyond his view. Fuchida was alone down on the ledge in the caldera’s sloping flank of solid rock. The Buckyball tether that connected him to the winch up above also carried their suit-to-suit radio transmissions.

  “What is it?” he replied, grateful to hear Rodriguez’s voice.

  “How’s it going, man?”

  “That depends,” said Fuchida.

  “On what?”

  The biologist hesitated. He had been working on this rock ledge for hours, chipping out samples, measuring heat flow, patiently working an auger into the hard basalt to see if there might be water ice trapped in the rock.

  He was in shadow now. The sun had moved away. Looking up, he saw with relief that the sky was still a deep blue. It was still daylight up there. Rodriguez would not let him stay down after sunset, he knew, yet he still felt comforted to see that there was still daylight up there.

  “It depends,” he answered slowly, “on what you are looking for. Whether you are a geologist or a biologist.”

  “Oh,” said Rodriguez.

  “A geologist would be very happy here. There is a considerable amount of heat still trapped in these rocks. Much more than can be accounted for by solar warming alone.”

  “You mean the volcano’s still active?”

  “No, no, no. It is dead, but the corpse is still warm—a little.”

  Rodriguez did not reply.

  “Do you realize what this means? This volcano must be much younger than was thought. Much younger!”

  “How young?”

  “Perhaps only a few million years,” Fuchida said excitedly. “No more than ten million.”

  “Sounds pretty damned old to me, amigo.”

  “But there might be life here! If there is heat, there might be liquid water within the rock.”

  “I thought water couldn’t stay liquid on Mars.”

  “Not on the surface.” Fuchida said, feeling the exhilaration quivering within him. “But deeper down, inside the rock where the pressure is higher … maybe…”

  “Looks pretty dark down there.”

  “It is,” Fuchida answered, peering over the lip of the ledge on which he sat. The suit’s heater seemed to be working fine; it might be a hundred below zero in these shadows, but he felt comfortably warm.

  “I don’t like the idea of your being down there in the dark.”

  “Neither do I, but that’s why we’re here, isn’t it?”

  No answer.

  ”I mean, we still have several hundred meters of tether to unwind, don’t we?”

  Rodriguez said, “Eleven hundred and ninety-two, according to the meter.”

  “So I can go down a long way, then.”

  “I don’t like the dark.”

  “My helmet lamp is working fine.”

  “Still…”

  “Don’t worry about it,” Fuchida insisted, cutting off the astronaut’s worries. It was bad enough to battle his own fears; he wanted no part of Rodriguez’s.

  “I saw a crevice at the end of this ledge,” he told the astronaut. “It looks like the opening of an old lava tube. It probably leads down a considerable distance.”

  “Do you think that’s a good idea?”

  “I’ll take a look into it.”

  “Don’t take any chances you don’t have to.”

  Fuchida grimaced as he climbed slowly to his feet. His whole body ached from the bruising he’d received in his falls and he felt stiff after sitting on the ledge for so long. Walk carefully, he warned himself. Even though the rock is warmer down here, there could still be patches of ice.

  “You hear me?” Rodriguez called.

  “If I followed your advice I’d be in my bed in Nagasaki,” he said, trying to make it sound light and witty.

  “Yeah, sure.”

  Stiffly he walked toward the fissure he had seen earlier. His helmet lamp threw a glare of light before him, but he had to bend over slightly to make the light reach the ground.

  There it is, he saw. A narrow, slightly rounded hole in the basalt face. Like the mouth of a pirate’s cave.

  Fuchida took a step into the opening and turned from side to side, playing his helmet lamp on the walls of the cave.

  It was a lava tube, he was certain of it. Like a tunnel made by some giant extraterrestrial worm, it curved downward. How far down? he wondered.

  Stifling a voice in his head that whispered of fear and danger, Fuchida started into the cold, dark lava tube.

  SUNDOWN: SOL 49

  DEX TRUMBALL FROWNED AS HE LISTENED TO JAMIE ON THE ROVER’S comm link.

  “The meteorology people don’t expect the storm to get across the equator, but they’re keeping an eye on it.”

  “So what’s the problem?” Trumball asked, glancing over at Craig, driving the rover.

  The ground they were traversing was rising slightly, and rougher than the earlier going. A range of rugged hills rose on their left, and the last rays of the dying sun threw enormously elongated shadows across their path, turning even the smallest rocks into dark phantoms reaching out to block their way.

  “It’s a question of timing,” Jamie replied. “Each day you get farther from the base. If we wait to recall you until the storm’s a real threat, it might be too late.”

  “But you don’t know that the storm’s going to be a real threat, do you?”

  “The prudent thing to do,” Jamie said, “is to turn back and try this excursion again late in the summer, when the threat of storms is practically zero.”

  “I don’t want to turn back because of some theoretical threat that probably won’t materialize.”

  “It’s better than getting caught in a dust storm, Dex.”

  Trumball looked across at Craig again. The older man gave him a sidelong glance, then returned to staring straight ahead.

  “You made it through a dust storm, didn’t you?” he said.

  It took several moments for Jamie to reply, “We had no choice. You do.”

  ”Well, lemme tell you something, Jamie. I choose to keep on going. I’m not going to stop and turn back because of some asshole of a storm that’s a couple thousand klicks away.”

  Sitting in front of the comm console, with Stacy beside him and Vijay at his back, Jamie kneaded his fists into his thighs.

  If I order him to return and he refuses, then whatever authority I have over these people goes down the drain. But if I let him continue then they’ll all know that Dex can do whatever he wants to and I have no way to control him.

  He realized that it was Dex who was making the decisions. The idea of putting Craig in charge was a farce from the beginning. Possum was not raising his voice, not saying a word at all.

  Which way? Which path? Jamie thought furiously for several silent moments. He drew up in his mind an image of Trumball’s route across Lunae Planum and into Xanthe Terra.

  “Hold on for a minute, Dex,” he said, and cut off the transmission.

  Turning to Dezhurova, he ordered, “Let me see their itinerary, Stacy.”

  She punched up the image on the screen before Jamie’s chair. A black line snaked across the map, with pips marking the position expected at the end of each day. Jamie scanned it swiftly, then hit the transmit key again.

  “Dex?”

  “We’re still here, chief.”

  “If the storm crosses the equator and threatens you, it won’t happen for at least four or five more days. By then you’ll be much closer to the fuel generator than to the base, here.”

  “Yeah?” Trumball’s voice sounded wary.

  “In two days from now you ought to be at the halfway point between here and the generator.”

  “Right.”

  “That’s going to be our decision point. The point of no return. I’ll decide then whether you can keep going or have to turn back.”

  “In two days.”

  “Yes. In the meantime w
e’ll keep close track of the storm. Stay in touch with us hourly.”

  This time it was Trumball who hesitated for several moments before answering, “Okay. Sure.”

  “Good,” said Jamie.

  “We’ll be bedding down for the night in another hour,” Trumball said. “Call you then.”

  “Good,” Jamie repeated.

  He cut the transmission and leaned back in the little wheeled chair, feeling as if he had sparred ten rounds with a professional boxer.

  Fifteen minutes later, Jamie was in the geology lab, running an analysis of the core samples that Craig’s drill had brought up, happy to be dealing with rocks and dirt instead of people. Sedimentary deposits, no doubt about it. This dome is sitting on the door of an ancient seabed. If we’d been here a few hundred million years ago, he thought, we’d have needed scuba gear.

  “Jamie,” Stacy Dezhurova called out sharply over the loudspeakers, “we have an emergency message from Rodriguez.”

  He instantly forgot his musings when Dezhurova’s voice rang through the dome. Jamie left the core sample in the electron microscope without turning it off and sprinted across the dome to the comm center.

  Dezhurova looked grim as she silently handed Jamie a headset.

  Rodriguez’s voice was calm but tight with tension. “… down there more than two hours now and then radio contact cut off,” the astronaut was saying.

  Sitting again on the wheeled chair next to Dezhurova as he adjusted the pin microphone, Jamie said, “This is Waterman. What’s happening, Tomas?”

  “Mitsuo went down into the caldera as scheduled. He found a lava tube about fifty-sixty meters down and went into it. Then his radio transmission was cut off.”

  “How long—”

  “It’s more than half an hour now. I’ve tried yanking on his tether, but I’m getting no response.”

  “What do you think?”

  “Either he’s unconscious or his radio’s failed. I mean, I really pulled on the tether. Nothing.”

  The astronaut did not mention the third possibility: that Fuchida was dead. But the thought blazed in Jamie’s mind.

  “You say your radio contact with him cut off while he was still in the lava tube?”