Mars gt-4 Page 6

  Most of all, he had to be from a neutral nation: neither East nor West, neither Arab nor Jew, neither Hindu nor Moslem.

  Dr. Li Chengdu was an ascetically lean, sallow-faced man who had been born in Singapore of a Chinese merchant family, educated in Shanghai and Geneva, and was rumored to be in line for a Nobel Prize for his research in atmospheric physics: he had found a way to reverse the depletion of the ozone layer and close the long-dreaded ozone hole in the upper atmosphere. A man in his early fifties, he was young and hale enough to make the long journey to Mars, yet old and respected enough to be the unquestioned leader of the expedition in fact as well as in name.

  “Enter please,” came Dr. Li’s voice, only slightly muffled by the thin pressed-wood door.

  Jamie stepped into the room that served as Li’s office and living quarters. Li got to his feet from behind the desk that had been shoe-horned in between the bunk bed and the sloping curve of the outer wall. He was so tall that he had to stoop to avoid hitting his head against the curving ceiling panels.

  The room had no personality in it at all, no stamp of an individual’s presence. Li had come in only a few days ago and was scheduled to leave with Jamie’s group the following morning. The desk was bare except for a laptop computer that hummed softly, its screen glowing a pale orange. The bed was made with military precision, blankets meticulously tucked in under the thin mattress. The one window was blocked by the plowed snow heaped against the side of the building. A strip of fluorescent lamps ran along the low ceiling, turning Li’s sallow skin tones into something almost ghastly.

  When he had first met Dr. Li, two years earlier, Jamie had been surprised at the man’s height. Now he felt surprised all over again. Li was almost six-five, lean to the point of gauntness, a tall scarecrow of a man, with hollow cheeks and long slim fingers. The newly named expedition commander wore a soft velour shirt of deep charcoal that hung loosely on his thin frame.

  “Ah, Dr. Waterman. Please sit down.” Li indicated the only other chair in the room, a government-issue piece of worn dull-gray steel with a thin plastic cushion that felt iron hard.

  Li took his chair behind the desk once again. For a long moment he said nothing. He peered intently at Jamie, as if trying to see inside him. Jamie returned the gaze calmly. He had watched his grandfather conversing with other Navahos often enough; they were never in a hurry to speak. It was important to allow time for thought, for reflection, for sizing up the other man.

  Jamie studied Li’s face. His hair was still dark, though receding from his high domed forehead. Decidedly oriental eyes, hooded, unfathomable; with the drooping moustache they made him look like an ancient Chinese sage, or perhaps the villain in an old-fashioned tale of intrigue. He ought to be dressed in a long silk robe and be living in a palace in Beijing, not stuck in the snow down at the ass end of the world.

  There was a slightly cloying odor in the tiny room. Incense? Cologne? It almost smelled like marijuana.

  “I have a favor to ask of you,” said Dr. Li at last. His voice had become soft, almost a whisper. Jamie found himself leaning forward slightly to catch his words over the incessant hiss of the air blowing through the heating ducts.

  With an almost furtive glance at the orange display screen of the computer on his desk, Li went on, “You have done very good work here — and in your other training activities, as well.”

  “Thank you.” Jamie bowed his head slightly.

  “I wonder if you would consider staying here for another six weeks?”

  “Stay? Here?”

  “The group you have been working with is scheduled to go to Utah next, I believe.” Another glance at the computer screen. “Yes, survival training on high desert.”

  Before Jamie could reply, Li added, “I would appreciate it if you would remain here at McMurdo and help the next group to acclimatize themselves to the Antarctic environment. It would be extremely helpful to me and to your fellow scientists.”

  Jamie’s mind was racing. He’s just been appointed expedition commander. It wouldn’t be smart to refuse his request. But why is he asking me to do this? Why is he asking me?

  “Uh… the ten of us have been training pretty much as a unit, you know.”

  “I realize that,” said Dr. Li. “But you understand that these groupings made for training will not be the same as the teams selected for the actual flight.”

  Jamie nodded, wondering what was going on and why.

  “Among the group due to come here next is Dr. Joanna Brumado. She is an excellent microbiologist.”

  “I’ve met her.”

  Li nodded slowly. In his softest voice he said, “Daughter of Alberto Brumado.”

  Jamie leaned back in his chair. Now he understood. Alberto Brumado’s daughter would get special consideration. With the rest of the scientists it was sink or swim, survive the rigors of training or get scratched from the list of possible Mars team members. But with Brumado’s daughter the situation was different. They want to make sure she gets through her six weeks here without packing it in.

  Because he did not know what else to do, Jamie said, “I see. Okay, sure. I’ll stay over the next six weeks and help them all I can.”

  Dr. Li smiled, but to Jamie it seemed more sad than happy. “Thank you, Dr. Waterman. I am deeply grateful.”

  Jamie got up from the chair. Dr. Li extended his hand and wished him good fortune.

  It was not until he was halfway down the corridor on the way back to his own quarters that Jamie realized the implications of Li’s request. He would miss the next six weeks of training. He was being asked to act as a special teacher-guide-escort for Alberto Brumado’s daughter.

  They had already scratched him from the Mars mission roster. He had been relegated to the status of an instructor. They had no intention of letting him go to Mars.

  2

  All the scientists under consideration for the Mars expedition had met one another, of course, and often more than once, as their training took them hopscotching around the world. But it had been many months since Jamie had seen Joanna Brumado. He had barely said a dozen words to the woman.

  Jamie went to the entrance area of the snow-covered base, more to say good-bye to the men and women he had been training with than to welcome the new arrivals. His group members were already looking at him with pity in their eyes, sympathy for a man who was obviously not going to make it. Some of them almost shied away from him at that last moment, as if afraid to be contaminated by the touch of a loser.

  Dr. Li took off one glove and shook Jamie’s hand solemnly, wordlessly, before departing. His hand felt dry and limp, like a dead lizard.

  Jamie stood inside the doorway, just out of the cutting wind, wrapped in his bulky parka, and watched his ex-teammates trot out to the waiting bus that would take them to the airstrip scraped out of the ice shelf. The bus was towed by a huge earth mover with a snowplow attached to its front. Overkill, thought Jamie. The base’s streets had been plowed and there had been no snowfall for days.

  Ten people, bundled up in hooded parkas so that you could not tell the women from the men, sprinted from the hut’s entrance to the bus, bent against the frigid wind. All of them carried silvered metal cases and floppy garment bags—their precious personal items of clothing and scientific equipment. All except the cadaverous Dr. Li, who carried only his laptop and a small duffel bag. The scarecrow travels light, Jamie thought.

  Ten similarly clothed and burdened figures made their way through the snarling wind from the bus to the doorway where Jamie was standing. Jamie recognized tiny Joanna Brumado easily among the ten who trooped into the entranceway, stamping the snow off their boots after the brief run between the bus and the hut’s doorway. He also saw that Antony Reed was among the newcomers.

  So was Franz Hoffman.

  Without a word Jamie turned toward the wooden stairs that led down into the hut’s main floor and headed for his quarters.

  It was not until the new group met in the dining hall, ju
st before lunch, that Jamie worked up the strength to go out and greet them.

  The dining hall was the largest room in the hut that had been donated to the Mars Project: big enough to seat fully thirty persons at its long Formica-topped tables. Joanna was sitting at the end of one of them with Tony Reed and Dorothy Loring, a Canadian biologist.

  “Mind if I join you?” Jamie asked.

  Reed looked up. “Waterman? What are you still doing here?”

  Keeping his face impassive as he pulled up a chair, Jamie said, “I’ve been asked to hang around and help get you people acclimatized.”

  Reed glanced at Joanna, then quickly returned his focus to Jamie. “I see.”

  The word for Antony Reed was “suave.” He looked like the average American’s idea of an upper-class Englishman, which in fact he almost was. A trim, slight frame, the kind of spare figure that comes from tennis and handball and perhaps polo. Handsome face, with elegant cheekbones and a chiseled profile. Neat little moustache, sandy hair that flopped roguishly over his forehead. He wore precisely creased royal-blue coveralls over a white turtleneck and managed to look almost as if it were a jaunty yachting costume. Yet his eyes were too old for his face, Jamie thought. Ice-blue, coldly calculating eyes.

  Reed was a physician who had refused to take over his father’s posh practice in London, preferring to join the British astronaut corps as a flight surgeon. When the European Community joined the international Mars Project, Reed immediately applied. He exuded the calm self-confidence of a man possessed of the certain knowledge that he would be picked as the team physician for the Mars explorers.

  Jamie sat between the Englishman and Joanna Brumado, who smiled her welcome to him.

  “I did not know that you were going to stay on here,” she said. Her voice was a whisper, like a little girl who had been trained to stay as quiet as possible.

  “It was Dr. Li’s idea,” Jamie replied tightly. “The base commander will explain everything at the briefing, right after lunch.”

  “I wonder if our crafty Chinese has some sort of mano a mano up his sleeve,” Reed mused.

  Jamie kept himself from glaring at him.

  “Mano a mano?” asked Dorothy Loring. “Like in a bullfight?” She was a big-boned blonde, completely at home in her thick sweater and heavy-duty jeans, a latter-day Valkyrie, a descendant of Vikings who had gone from her family’s farm in Manitoba to a doctorate at McGill and postdoc work at the Salk Institute in La Jolla.

  Reed pointed with his eyes. At the other end of the table sat Franz Hoffman, alone, intently frowning into the display screen of a computer he had set up on the tabletop.

  Jamie said nothing.

  Neither did Joanna, but her eyes showed that she understood Reed’s implication. They were beautifully soft brown eyes, large and liquid, wide-spaced like a child’s. Joanna was small and round, almost hidden inside a bulky brown sweater. Her face was heart shaped, framed by a dark mass of hair that curled thickly even though it had been cropped short. To Jamie she looked like a waif, a lost child, with her small stature and those big brown eyes that seemed troubled, almost frightened.

  “Our Viennese friend,” Reed said in a lower voice, “is not very well liked, I fear.”

  “You should not say that,” Joanna whispered.

  “Why not?” Reed asked. “Good lord, the man has all the charm of a Prussian drillmaster. And the eating habits to match.”

  Loring broke into a giggle, then quickly put her hand to her mouth to stifle it. Jamie, sitting where he looked directly down the table at Hoffman, saw that the Austrian never glanced up from his computer, never acknowledged by so much as a flicker that anyone else was in the room.

  3

  “I do not understand,” said Franz Hoffman. “Does Dr. Li think that I need an assistant? A Sherpa guide to carry my baggage up the mountain?”

  Jamie held onto his swooping temper, just barely. He had decided that there would be no way to avoid Hoffman in the crowded, snow-buried base so he would make a virtue of necessity by offering to help the Austrian to continue the meteorite search out on the glacier.

  Hoffman had been unpacking his clothes when Jamie knocked on the half-ajar door to his quarters. It happened to be the same room that Dr. Li had just left. But already Hoffman had turned it into his personal domain. A five-foot-long photomosaic map of Mars was pinned up on the flat wall above the bunk bed. On the curving wall beside the desk the geologist had taped a smaller satellite photo of the Markham glacier, already marked with red circles where meteorites had been located. A framed color photograph sat on the government-issue three-drawer bureau, a round-cheeked young woman with twin babies in her arms smiling dubiously into the camera.

  “Look,” Jamie said, leaning against the doorjamb, “Li asked me to help your group through your six weeks here. If you’re interested in continuing the search for meteorites I’m willing to help.”

  Hoffman eyed Jamie silently, then went back to taking folded clothes out of a large suitcase on the bed and placing them in precise stacks in the bureau drawers.

  “At the very least,” Jamie said, “I can show you which areas I’ve already covered. Save you going over areas where nothing’s been found.”

  “That information is in the data bank, is it not?” Hoffman asked.

  He was about Jamie’s own age and height, but thin and almost weak-looking where Jamie was solid and chunky. Hoffman was round-shouldered and round faced. His hair was already turning gray, and it was cropped close to his skull. His face was a picture of darkly brooding suspicion, eyes small and squinting, narrow lips pressed firmly together. Jamie thought, Put a monocle in his eye and he’d look like an old-time Nazi general.

  “Yes, the computer has a complete file of my treks on the glacier,” Jamie replied evenly. “But once you’re out there on the ice the computer data loses a lot of its meaning. Even the satellite pictures aren’t much help when you’re actually out there.”

  “I have done field work,” Hoffman said stiffly. “I was born in the shadow of the Alps. None of this is new to me.”

  “Suit yourself,” Jamie said. He turned to leave.

  “Wait.”

  “For what?”

  Hoffman stood in the middle of the room, his fingers drumming unconsciously against the sides of his heavy wool slacks.

  “Tell me,” he said, his voice a little less sharp, “why does Dr. Li think that I need an assistant?”

  “It’s not…”

  Hoffman did not let Jamie finish his sentence. “You did not have an assistant. None of the other geologists had assistants. Does Li think I’m incapable? Does he think I can’t make it on my own? Is this his subtle way of getting rid of me?”

  Jamie felt his mouth drop open. Hoffman was just as worried and frightened as he was. Behind the brittle facade was a man who feared he would be left behind, just as Jamie feared.

  Shit! Jamie snarled to himself. It would be so much easier to hate him.

  4

  After lunch and the base commander’s brief orientation lecture, Jamie spent the rest of the day saying hello to each of the newcomers, telling them that he was there to give them any help or advice they required. He felt awkward, more like an unwanted and unneeded accessory than a valued and trusted associate.

  His insides were in turmoil over Hoffman. Walk a mile in the other guy’s moccasins, he thought. Sure. Great. No wonder the Indians got swamped by the whites.

  By the time he had spoken to the first three of the newcomers, Jamie had worked out a little speech that explained quickly, with a minimum of embarrassment, why he had remained at the base and what he was offering to do. “The newcomers’ reactions varied from Hoffman’s fear of inadequacy to Tony Reed’s cynical smile of understanding.

  “Does little Joanna know that you’re to be her personal chaperon?” Reed asked.

  “I don’t think anybody’s spelled it out to her,” Jamie replied.

  Reed’s lopsided grin turned almost into a sneer.
“She’d be a fool if she didn’t figure it out for herself.”

  “Maybe,” said Jamie.

  He had left Joanna for last, and now, feeling as frustrated and exhausted as he had the winter he had tried to sell magazine subscriptions bicycling through his Berkeley neighborhood, he tapped at the door to Joanna’s room.

  She opened the door, looked up at him, and smiled.

  “Come in,” said Joanna Brumado in her little girl’s voice. “Sit down.”

  She still wore the sweater and jeans she had arrived in. Her room was neatly arranged, emptied suitcases stacked in the far corner, garment bag hanging behind the door. Her laptop computer was open on the desktop but its screen was dark and silent. There were no pictures on the walls, no personal items in sight.

  Jamie took the chair that stood by the bunk.

  “I’ve told all the others,” Jamie began, “that Dr. Li asked me to stay here at McMurdo to help you and the rest of your group get through your six weeks here as easily and profitably as possible.”

  Joanna went to the desk and sat at the chair behind it, turning the desk into a protective barrier.

  Her face entirely serious, she said, “We can be honest with one another, James.”

  “Jamie.”

  Her lips did not curve up into a smile. Her luminous dark eyes were somber. “You are here to make certain that I get through this part of the training. You have stayed behind because I am Alberto Brumado’s daughter and for no other reason.”

  Well, she’s no fool, Jamie said to himself. She’s under no illusions. No pretensions.

  “Dr. Li asked me to remain here,” he said.

  “Because of me.”

  “It was his first big decision as expedition commander.”

  Her eyes would not leave his. “And what about your training? Your own group is going ahead with its regular schedule, is it not?”