Mars Page 28

  “The entire base?”

  Reed cocked his head slightly, sending a boyish lock of sandy hair over his forehead. “If Jamie’s right and the canyon is the best place to look for life, then we should at least set up a secondary camp there, don’t you think?”

  Nodding slowly, Joanna said, “But we can’t pick up this entire dome and move it.”

  “With that silly Japanese getting himself killed,” Reed answered, “the mission controllers probably won’t allow us to do anything that’s even a millimeter off our official schedule.”

  “But the schedule was meant to be flexible! They cannot hold us to a preset routine, as if we were puppets.”

  “You think not? I can’t help supposing, though, that if DiNardo were here we’d already be working out a plan to set up a camp on the floor of the canyon.”

  “That is what Jamie wants to do, is it not?”

  “Rather. But he’s in trouble with his own politicos back in the States, you know, over this Navaho nonsense he said when we landed. I doubt that his recommendations would be accepted by the powers that be.”

  Joanna studied the English physician’s face. He was no longer grinning. He seemed completely serious.

  “I can speak to my father about it,” she said. “I am sure he already knows about the possibility—or he will, as soon as today’s data reaches mission control.”

  “Yes, surely your father would be helpful. I was thinking more of DiNardo, though. If we can get his agreement that we should set up a secondary camp in the canyon, that would help enormously, I should think.”

  Joanna felt a thrill of excitement run through her. “Yes! Of course! They could not fail to agree with Father DiNardo.”

  “Hardly,” said Reed.

  “I will contact him myself,” Joanna said. “And suggest to my father that he enlist Father DiNardo’s aid, as well.”

  “Yes, that’s the ticket.”

  “I will send a message now, this evening. Right away.”

  “Good show,” said Reed. He straightened up and got off the stool. Leaning closer to Joanna he whispered, “We can accomplish a great deal, you and I, working behind the Scenes.”

  “Oh, yes. Thank you. I am grateful for your help.”

  “Think nothing of it, dear lady.”

  But as he strolled casually away from the biology lab back toward his own cubicle, Reed thought: She’s hot for Jamie, that’s for certain. Now the game is to work things out so that he remains out there in the Grand Canyon and she stays here. A thousand kilometers or so between them ought to give me enough working room. I’ll have her, sooner or later. All I need is patience. And a little help, which she herself will provide. How nice!

  He actually whistled, tunelessly, as he strode past the wardroom where most of the others sat huddled together, discussing the day’s events like a gaggle of schoolchildren. Reed ignored them and headed for his cot and his dreams.

  Jamie and Vosnesensky sat in the rover’s cockpit as they made their evening report. Once they were finished with their official duty, Pete Connors filled them in on the reactions to Konoye’s accident. While he watched the astronaut’s troubled features on the display screen in the center of the cockpit control panel, Jamie glanced at the secondary screen. The glowing curves of its graphic display showed that the ozone outgassing from the Martian dust in the airlock was now down almost to zero.

  “The accident’s got everybody pretty down,” Connors was saying worriedly. “Dr. Li has been on the horn with Kaliningrad for hours now. God knows what they’re going to do.”

  “But nothing went wrong with the equipment,” Jamie said. “The cosmonaut and the rest of the team worked just the way they’ve been trained. Konoye just had a stroke.”

  “Or panicked for some reason and then suffered the stroke,” Vosnesensky said, heavy with gloom.

  Connors was also deeply somber. “Whatever happened, the politicians are going apeshit. It doesn’t look good to have somebody killed. …”

  “He wasn’t killed,” Jamie snapped. “He died.”

  “D’you think that matters in Tokyo? Or Washington?” Connors growled.

  “No, I guess it doesn’t.”

  Vosnesensky said, “We will start back at first light tomorrow morning, as ordered. In the meantime, I will transmit to you all the videotape and other data we have accumulated.”

  “Okay. I’ll set up the computer to receive your transmission.”

  He’s not even mentioning the cliff dwellings, Jamie realized. Not a word about them.

  “Can I talk with Dr. Patel, please?” he asked Connors. “Is he there?”

  “Sure.”

  In a few moments Connors’s image was replaced by the round, dark face of the geologist from India. Both the geologists on this mission are Indians, Jamie thought without humor. We can thank Columbus and his wacky sense of direction for that.

  Patel’s dark skin seemed to shine always, as if covered with a fine sheen of perspiration or newly rubbed with oil. His eyes were large and liquid, giving him the innocent look of a child near tears.

  “I would appreciate it, Rava, if you’d get O’Hara to put the videotape footage we shot today through the image-enhancement program,” Jamie said to his fellow geologist.

  “Is there something in particular you wish me to examine?”

  Jamie realized his fellow geologist had not bothered to listen to his oral report. Probably too busy gossiping with the rest of them about the accident.

  “You’ll see a formation in a cleft set into the cliff face,” he said. After a moment’s hesitation, “It—it almost looks like buildings erected there deliberately.”

  Those liquid dark eyes went even rounder. “Buildings?” Patel squeaked. “Artificial buildings?”

  Jamie forced himself to state calmly, “The odds against them being artifacts are tremendous; you know that as well as I do.” He took a breath. “But they sure remind me of the cliff dwellings I’ve seen in the southwest.”

  Patel blinked several times. Then he said, “Yes, of course. I will study the tapes most carefully. I will ask Dr. O’Hara to put them through the image-enhancement program. By the time you return here we will have the data thoroughly analyzed, I assure you.”

  Jamie said, “Thanks.” In his gut he felt an irrational suspicion that they would distort the data, mess up the images, fix it so that the cliff dwellings he had seen would look like nothing more than weathered old rock.

  He crawled into his bunk at last. Vosnesensky turned out all the lights except the dim telltales on the control panel up in the cockpit.

  “Sleep well, Jamie,” the Russian said, yawning as he stretched out in the bunk on the opposite wall.

  “You too, Mikhail.”

  The soft night wind of Mars brushed past the parked rover, stroking its metallic skin mere inches away from Jamie’s listening ears. He strained to catch a hint of a voice in the wind, even the moaning wail of a long-dead Martian spirit. Nothing.

  No ghosts haunting the night here, Jamie said drowsily to himself. He felt disappointed.

  DEATH

  The red world was not only farther from Father Sun than the blue world. It was also much closer to the small worldlets that still swarmed in the darkness of the void, leftover bits and pieces from the time of the beginning. Often they streaked down onto the red world, howling like monsters as they traced their demon’s trails of fire across the pale sky.

  Small, cold, bombarded by sky-demons, its air and water slowly wasting away, if the red world bore any life at all its creatures must have struggled mightily to keep the spark of existence glowing within them.

  Even so, death struck swiftly, and without remorse.

  One of the biggest of those devil worlds drifted close enough to the red world to feel its pull. It was a huge mountain of rock roaming through the darkness of space, a thousand times bigger than the rock that caused the Meteor Crater to the south of the land where The People live. For a thousand thousand years it danc
ed a delicate ceremony with the red world, approaching it and then slipping away into the outer depths of the emptiness. Like the ritual dancers of The People it moved to the rhythm of eternity. Each time it approached the red world it skimmed closer, each near-miss a temporary reprieve, a promise of what was to come.

  Finally it plunged down into the red world, roaring like all the furies of hell as it smashed into the crust. Under that titanic violence the rocks turned liquid almost down to the very core of the red world. An enormous cloud of burning dust boiled high into the atmosphere and spread swiftly from pole to pole. The shock rang through the whole body of the poor tortured red world, lifting up the ground on the opposite side of the globe into a gigantic bulge. The very air of the red world was blown away almost completely.

  Darkness covered the face of the red world. There was no day; only black night. The waters froze, later to be covered by the red dust sifting down through the pitifully thin air. The crust hardened over once again, but deep below, the rocks were still white-hot, liquid, seething. Volcanoes erupted for thousands of centuries afterward.

  When the skies cleared at last, the red world was a scene of utter devastation. The seas were gone. The atmosphere was nothing more than a thin wisp of what it had once been. The ground was barren. Life, if it had ever existed on the red world at all, was nowhere to be seen.

  EARTH

  NEW YORK: Alberto Brumado squinted when the overhead lights were turned on; then his eyes adjusted to the brightness. How much of my life have I spent in television studios? he asked himself. It must be years, many years, if you add up all the minutes and hours.

  For the first time in his memory, though, he felt nervous about the impending interview. Not because it was American network television. Not because he would have to face a trio of experienced senior interrogators from the most prestigious newspaper, news magazine, and television network news department in the United States. He had fenced with such before.

  The anxiety that rippled through his heart was that the interviewers smelled blood. The death of Dr. Konoye had brought the sharks out, circling, circling what they perceived as a wounded and bleeding Mars Project. There would be no gentility about this interview, no kid gloves. Brumado knew that he was in for a rough ordeal.

  The technical crew had been uniformly kind, as usual. The matronly makeup woman smiled and chatted with him as she patted pancake on Brumado’s browned face. While he was still in the barber-type chair, the harried-looking producer had come in. Standing behind him and speaking to Brumado’s reflection in the big wall mirror, she assured him that all he had to do was to be natural, be himself, and the audience “will love you up.” The young assistant producer, younger than his own daughter, had done everything she could to put Brumado at ease. Accustomed to smilingly evasive politicians and brash entertainment stars who hid their anxieties behind banalities, she offered Brumado coffee, soft drinks, even a Bloody Mary. Smiling tensely, he refused everything except water.

  Now he was in the studio with the crew hiding behind their cameras and the electrician pinning the cordless microphone to his necktie just under his chin.

  The show’s moderator walked onto the brightly lit set, up the carpeted two steps to the chair next to Brumado’s.

  Extending a hand, he said, “Please don’t get up, Dr. Brumado. It was good of you to come on such short notice.”

  “I want to dispel any doubts that may be in the public’s mind about this unfortunate tragedy,” Brumado replied as the moderator sat down. His microphone was already in place, hardly visible against his dark blue tie. He also wore a minuscule flesh-toned earphone like a hearing aid.

  “Good, good,” said the moderator absently, his eyes focused on the notes scrolling across the small display screen cleverly built into the coffee table in front of them so that it could not be seen by the cameras.

  The three inquisitors arrived in a group, smiling, chatting among themselves. Two men and a woman whose ebony hair glowed like a steel helmet. Handshakes all around. Brumado thought of a prizefight. Now go to your corners and come out punching.

  The floor director scurried in and out of the shadows among the cameras. The big clock beneath the monitor screen clicked down the final seconds, its second hand stopping discernibly at each notch on the dial.

  The floor director pointed to the moderator.

  “Good morning, and welcome to Face the People. This morning we are fortunate to have with us Dr. Alberto Brumado. …”

  Brumado could feel his pulse quickening as the moderator introduced the three “distinguished journalists” who would be questioning him.

  “At the outset,” the moderator said, turning to face Brumado, “I’d like to ask this basic question: What does the death of Dr. Konoye mean for the Mars Project?”

  Brumado slid into his fatherly smile as he always did at interviews. “It will have only a slight effect on the exploration of Mars. The mission was planned from the outset with the knowledge that exploring a distant planet can be dangerous. That is why there are backup members of the team for each scientist and astronaut. The team will be able to continue the exploration of Mars, of course, and even the work on Deimos and Phobos that Dr. Konoye was supposed to do. …”

  “Are you saying that a man’s death doesn’t matter to you?” the newspaperman interjected, frowning like a gargoyle.

  “Of course it matters to me,” Brumado replied. “It matters to all of us, especially to Dr. Konoye’s wife and children. But it will hot stop the exploration of Mars and its moons.”

  “What went wrong, Dr. Brumado?” asked the woman. She was the TV reporter, dressed in a sleekly stylish red skirt and mannish white blouse.

  “Nothing went wrong. Dr. Konoye suffered a stroke. It could have happened in his office in Osaka, I suppose. Or in his home.”

  “But it happened on Mars.”

  “It happened during an EVA,” observed the magazine man. “Did that contribute to the cerebral hemorrhage? Was being weightless a factor?”

  Brumado shock his head. “Weightlessness should have had nothing to do with it. If anything, microgravity is beneficial to the cardiovascular system.”

  “How could it be that he was accepted for this hazardous work when he had a cardiovascular problem?”

  “He had no cardiovascular problem.”

  “The man died of a stroke!”

  “But there was no history of a medical problem. He was thoroughly examined and tested, just as all the other mission crew were. He went through years of training and medical examinations without the slightest hint of a problem. He was only forty-two years old. Even his family medical records show no evidence of cardiovascular disease.”

  “Then how do you explain the stroke?”

  “No one can explain it. It happened. It is unfortunate. Very sad.”

  “But you won’t stop the mission or change its operation in any way?”

  Brumado smiled again, this time to hide his growing anger. “To begin with, I have no official capacity in the Mars Project. I am merely an advisor.”

  “Come on now! You’re known all over the world as the soul of the Mars Project.”

  “I am not involved in the day-to-day operation of the project. Nor do I have any official position. My influence ended, really, when the spacecraft left for Mars.”

  “Do you mean to tell us that if you went to the mission controllers in Houston …”

  “Kaliningrad,” Brumado corrected.

  “Wherever—if you went to them and advised them to shut down the project and get those people back home to safety, they wouldn’t listen to you?”

  “I would hope not. If I gave them that kind of advice, I would hope that they would be wise enough to ignore it.”

  “You’re not concerned about the safety of those men and women on Mars?”

  Brumado hesitated just a fraction of a second, enough to remind himself not to let them lead him into statements he did not wish to make.

  “You must
remember that what has happened was not an accident, not a failure of a piece of equipment or even a shortcoming of our planning. The man suffered a stroke. He was a hundred million kilometers from Earth when it happened, but it would have been the same if it had happened in his bed.”

  Turning to look squarely into the camera that had its red light lit, Brumado went on, “Should we stop the exploration of Mars because a man has died? Did Americans stop expanding westward because people died on the frontier? Did the exploration of the world stop because some ships were sunk? If we stopped reaching outward for fear of danger we would still be squatting in caves, groveling every time it thunders outside.”

  The moderator gave a big smile and said, “We’ll continue right after this important message.”

  The overhead lights dimmed. Brumado reached for the glass of water on the coffee table.

  “Good timing. It’s going very well,” said the moderator. “Keep it up.”

  The second segment of the show was much like the first: the interviewers almost accusative, Brumado defending the Mars Project against their unsubtle insinuations of insensitivity or outright incompetence.

  “And despite what’s happened,” hammered the newspaper gargoyle, “you really don’t accept the idea that it’s too dangerous out there for human beings?”

  Brumado played his trump card. “One of those human beings is my daughter. If I thought she was in an unacceptably dangerous situation, I would do everything in my power to bring all the exploration team back to safety, believe me.”

  At the next commercial break the moderator asked, “Okay, we’ve got four minutes for a wrap-up. Is there anything we haven’t covered that we ought to?”

  Brumado replied mildly, “We have not said a word yet about what has been discovered on Mars so far.”

  “Okay. Fair enough.” The moderator glanced at the three interviewers. They nodded without much enthusiasm.

  The floor director pointed at the moderator and the red light on the camera aimed at him winked on again. Before he could open his mouth, though, the newspaper reporter jumped in: “What I’d like to know is, just what are we getting out of this mission? Have the scientists found anything on Mars that’s worth five hundred billion dollars?”