Mars

SOL 3: MORNING

“Today’s the big day, huh?”

Despite the fact that he had been a jet fighter pilot and an astronaut with more than twenty shuttle missions on his record, Pete Connors reminded Jamie of a high school football player moments before the opening kickoff. His dark brown eyes, usually sorrowful, now showed an excitement that most men lose after their teen years, a barely suppressed sense of adventure.

Connors, Jamie, and most of the others were suiting up for their first day of actual scientific work on Mars. Bright sunshine streamed through the clear double-walled plastic of the inflated dome’s lower section; the weather forecast was for a typical late-summer day: clear skies, light wind, high temperature climbing up into the sixties after an overnight low of minus one hundred twelve.

“The big day,” Jamie agreed, tugging on the sky-blue outer pants of his hard suit.

They dressed in layers. First the form-fitting underwear that was honeycombed with thin, flexible water tubes. The water carried away body heat and kept the wearer at a reasonable temperature inside the heavily insulated hard suit. Next came the fabric coveralls and then the hard suit itself, built to contain a normal terrestrial air pressure of roughly fourteen pounds per square inch inside even if there were nothing but pure vacuum on the other side of its metal and plastic shell.

You leaned against a locker and laboriously tugged the hard-suit pants over your hips. The torso shell stood on a rack so you could duck under it and slide your arms through the sleeves while pushing your head through the bright metal ring of the neck seal. Once inside the suit it was virtually impossible to bend over to pull on the boots. The explorers always dressed in pairs and helped each other with the boots and the backpacks that bold the air regenerator, batteries, heater, pumps, and fans of the life-support system.

The first time Jamie had tried to don a hard suit, back on Earth, it had taken more than an hour and seemed like a particularly sophisticated combination of torture and humiliation. The first time he had tried it in Martian gravity, as their spacecraft approached the red planet, things had gone much more easily. Now, however, he was getting accustomed to the light gravity of Mars, and putting on the suit was becoming a chore again.

Eight of the team were preparing to go outside the dome, struggling into their suits like a short-handed football team getting into its padding and uniforms. Or like knights putting on their armor. Jamie wondered if King Arthur’s men grumbled and swore while they suited up for battle.

Their dressing area was a line of racks and lockers where the suits were stored, with a pair of long plastic benches laid out in front of them. Built for Martian gravity, the benches looked to Jamie to be too thin to sit on safely, their slim legs too far apart.

But Connors thumped down on one, suit and all, to let Jamie help him into his heavy cleated boots. The others were doing the same, Jamie saw. The benches sagged slightly under the weight, but only slightly.

Boots zippered, Connors got up and stamped his feet on the plastic flooring.

“Good,” he said, nodding from inside the suit. “Now let’s get yours on.”

Jamie sat warily. He noticed Ilona Malater standing beside Joanna, both of them fully suited except for their helmets, talking together softly and earnestly, like school chums or sisters. Biochemist and microbiologist. Jamie thought that of all the scientists brought to Mars the two of them had the most to gain. Or lose. If they found any evidence for life at all they would become international celebrities. But if they failed to find any evidence of life the whole world, perhaps even the scientific community, would always wonder if they had overlooked something.

Was that why the board picked all women for the life sciences? The third member of the bio team was Monique Bonnet, the French geochemist who had taken a cram course in paleontology, just in case they should discover fossils in the red sands or rocks.

The tall Israeli leaned closer to Joanna and said something that made her smile, then cover her mouth with a hand to keep from laughing out loud. They’re looking at me, Jamie realized. All the others are already in their suits, waiting to go. I’m the laggard.

He was sitting on the bench, hands clenched on its back edge, with one leg raised up so that his foot rested approximately in Connors’s groin. The women find that funny, Jamie thought, his face reddening.

“That’s it, friend,” said Connors.

Jamie put his leg down and got to his feet. The suit felt cumbersome, stiff. He clomped past the rack where it had hung, now looking like a pathetic dead plastic tree, and took his helmet from the shelf atop it. He started to put it on, more to hide his blushing than anything else.

“Gloves,” Connors said. “You don’t want to go outside without your gloves, man.”

Flustered, Jamie yanked his gloves from the clip on the rack and tucked them into the pouch on his right thigh. He had carefully placed the fetish his grandfather had given him in the left thigh pouch. It was small enough so that no one noticed him doing it. Following Connors and the others, he walked toward the airlock and the next set of racks, where the backpacks waited.

“Got to remember to do everything by the numbers,” Connors told him as he helped Jamie into the backpack.

“Right.”

“It’s not so bad now, everything’s new, we’re all real aware of what we’re doing. But later on, a few days from now or a few weeks, when it’s all so routine we don’t even think about it — that’s when you can make a mistake that’ll kill you. Or kill somebody else.”

Jamie nodded. He knew that Connors was right. Mission regulations insisted that one astronaut be part of the team whenever anyone went outside the dome. The astronaut served as safety officer; his responsibility was to make certain that all safety rules were strictly followed. His authority was absolute.

“What’s your assignment for today?” Jamie asked as he turned to help Connors. “Or are you just going outside to watch us like a safety patrolman?”

Glancing back over his shoulder at Jamie, Connors said, “Sure I got a job. Decontamination and cleanup. I got to make sure all of us clean off whatever dust we pick up on our suits before we come back inside again.”

Before Jamie could say anything, Connors added, “You know they’d make the black man into the janitor, don’tcha?”

For a moment Jamie felt startled, upset. Then Connors broke into a toothy grin. “My main task this morning is taping a TV show for the kids back home.”

Jamie felt relieved. Connors had never shown the slightest trace of ill humor; he seemed always cheerful, not an angry bone in his body.

“I’m going to be Dr. Science on Mars. Show the local scenery, do a few simple demonstrations of the low air pressure and gravity. For educational TV. I’ll be a media star all around the world!”

Laughing, Jamie said, “Good for you.”

At last they were all ready. Jamie remembered to pull on his gloves and seal them to the metal cuffs of his suit. The backs of the gloves were ridged like an external skeleton of slim plastic “bones”; the palms and fingertips were clear plastic, hardly thicker than kitchen cling wrap.

Like the others, Jamie took the tools he needed for the morning’s work and clipped them to the web belt at his waist. Rock pick. Scoop. Corer. Sample bags. He held in one hand the long telescoping titanium pole that could serve as a lever or extended handle.

“A true spear carrier.”

Jamie turned to see Joanna standing beside him, a lovely butterfly trapped inside a glaring orange cocoon. Both her hands were filled with bulky silvered cases.

“You look like an encyclopedia salesman,” he said.

She blinked, puzzled.

“Okay, listen up,” Connors called to them. “We go through the airlock in Noah’s ark fashion: two by two. Visors down, everybody.”

Joanna had to put her instrument cases on the floor before she could deal with her helmet visor.

“Check seals and air flow.” Connors’s melodious voice now came humming through the helmet earphones.

The astronaut personally checked each of the scientists before starting them through the airlock. He and Monique Bonnet went through together, clean white and tricolor blue. Then Patel in his butter-yellow suit with Naguib, kelly green. Ilona and Toshima were next, the green of her suit a shade or two darker than the Egyptian’s, while the Japanese meteorologist’s softly peach-colored suit bristled with instruments and equipment that dangled from every conceivable type of belt and harness. Jamie thought that Toshima barely was able to raise his booted feet over the lip of the airlock hatch. If he ever trips and falls it’ll take two of us to haul him back up to his feet.

Finally it was Jamie’s turn, with Joanna. The two Russians, Abell, and Tony Reed remained inside. Mironov and Reed were assigned to monitor the scientists on the surface; the hard suits had instrumentation built into them that automatically reported on body temperature, heart and breathing rate, and oxygen/carbon dioxide ratio inside the suit. Astronaut Abell ran the comm console, maintaining contact with the expedition command in orbit while Vosnesensky watched everybody and everything with the eye of a Russian eagle.

With its visor down Jamie’s hard suit served as a shell that protected him from the gaze of others. He was glad of it. He had been embarrassed minutes earlier, and now he felt his stomach fluttering and his palms getting damp. It was not fear so much as anticipation. He was about to step out onto the surface of Mars and begin the work that he had dreamed about for so many years.

Let me go in beauty, he found himself thinking. Let me find harmony and beauty out there.

The noise of the airlock pumps dwindled down until Jamie could only feel their vibration through his boots. The telltale light on the tiny control panel turned red, indicating that the chamber had been pumped down to the ambient pressure outside. He leaned on the control button and the outer hatch sighed open a crack.

Pushing it all the way open, Jamie waited until Joanna went through before he stepped out onto the sandy red, rock-strewn desert to begin his morning’s work.

Like almost everything else about the mission, the selection of their landing site had been a political compromise.

The biologists had wanted to land near the polar cap, where beneath the layers of ice and frozen carbon dioxide there might be hidden pools of liquid water — and some form of life. Experiments conducted by unmanned landing probes, starting with the original Viking I and II back in 1976, had shown that there was unusual chemical activity in the Martian soil. Could life exist in that soil, if there was liquid water available?

The geologists could not make up their minds where they wanted to land, with an entire strange new world to sink their picks into. There were massive volcanoes to study, a rift valley longer than the distance from New York to San Francisco, regions where meteoric craters studded the landscape and made it appear as battered as the moon. There were areas that looked as if the ground were underlaid by layers of permafrost, oceans of water frozen underground. There were cliffs and highlands that undoubtedly bore the testimony of billions of years of weathering, and the huge Hellas Basin, a hole nearly a thousand miles wide and three miles deep.

The physicists wanted to study how energetic radiation and subatomic particles streaming in from the sun and stars interacted with the thin Martian atmosphere. They also wanted to probe the planet’s interior, to determine why Mars had no planetwide magnetic field, as Earth does.

The Russians especially wanted to examine the two tiny moons of Mars and test techniques for extracting rocket propellants from their rocky bodies. The Americans wanted to visit the old Viking I lander and place a plaque on it honoring a dead scientist.

The resolution of these conflicting desires was a compromise that pleased no one. The landing site picked was just north of the equator at one hundred degrees west latitude, on the edge of the massive upland rise called the Tharsis Bulge. To the south was the badlands of Noctis Labyrinthus; to the west the mammoth Tharsis shield volcanoes. But their actual landing site was an undistinguished, gently sloping flatland that was considered relatively safe for the landings, about equally distant from the western end of the monumental rift valley known as Valles Marineris and the chain of volcanoes that crowned the Tharsis highlands.

A special team in the orbiting spacecraft would visit Deimos and Phobos, the two moons of Mars, so that the Russians could test their ideas. One of the American astronauts could fly the soarplane to the Viking I site, if conditions permitted. The ground team commander, cosmonaut Mikhail Andreivitch Vosnesensky, would decide if the conditions were right. And the flight would take place only if the expedition commander, Dr. Li Chengdu, granted his approval.

The explorers had two sizable ground vehicles for cross-country travel and two gossamer-winged soarplanes for covering longer distances.

Mission plans were specific and detailed. There would be brief excursions to the Noctis Labyrinthus badlands and to one of the Tharsis volcanoes. There would be extensive chemical tests of the Martian soil. There would be drilling to look for underground water. And of course, there would be the ongoing search for any sign that life might have once existed on Mars.

Of all the landing sites in all the regions of all the planet Mars, they had to pick this, Jamie grumbled to himself. Probably the dullest place they could find. A moderately cratered plain on an upland bulge, too far from the interesting line of volcanoes to even glimpse their sixteen-mile-high peaks above the horizon. Some sand dunes off to the west and the same old rocks that lay all across the surface everywhere you looked. The most interesting thing in this region would be the fracture ridges in the wild badlands to the south, but that’s nearly three hundred kilometers away.

Ah well, he sighed inwardly. They picked this spot for a safe landing, not for its geological interest. Get to work.

Jamie began by collecting rock samples. The broad open plain on which they had landed was covered with rocks ranging from pebble-sized to boulders as big as a man. Probably thrown up when a good-sized meteoroid hit the ground. Or maybe an eruption of one of the Tharsis volcanoes, although they didn’t look as if they had erupted so violently. Jamie’s equipment back in the dome would tell him which it was, he felt sure.

“Please be sure to look for any odd color,” Joanna’s voice came to him through his earphones.

Jamie turned his head and saw only the inside of his helmet. He turned his entire body ninety degrees and there she was in her dayglo suit, a dozen meters away, with Monique Bonnet still close beside her.

“Any color in particular?” he half joked. “We’ve got a great assortment of reds and pinks here.”

“Green would be nice,” chirped Monique’s lightly pleasant voice.

“Any color at all that seems out of the ordinary,” Joanna said. “We are not particular. Not yet.”

Just outside the dome’s airlock Connors was setting up one of the TV cameras for his educational show. He had a little box of props at his feet. The others were stooped over as far as the suits would allow, intently searching the sandy soil like a squad of groundkeepers looking for litter. Or that famous painting, Jamie said to himself. The Gleaners. That’s what we’re doing, gleaning, trying to find scraps of food for our minds in this frozen desert.

Damned tough to see the ground inside the suit, Jamie grumbled silently. Hardly any flexibility at all. Whoever designed these aluminum cans wasn’t thinking about the work we have to do while we’re inside them.

Toshima was busily setting up a weather station about twenty meters from the dome, on the side away from the two landing vehicles. His peach-colored suit blended with the rust-red background much better than Jamie would have thought. He’s camouflaged. That could be a problem. The suit colors had been picked to stand out clearly against the Martian landscape. Who the hell okayed peach?

Ilona was scooping up the loose sandy soil with a small shovel and pouring it into a box. She, Joanna, and Monique were going to try to raise an assortment of beans, squash, peas, and cucumbers inside the dome, using as much of the native Martian resources as possible — including water, if they found any. One of the goals of their research was to see how the lighter Martian gravity would affect plant growth and size. They expected to bring their small agricultural test facility back to the orbiting spacecraft with them and continue the experiment on the return flight to Earth.

They’ll have to bake the oxides out of the soil first, Jamie knew. Otherwise it’ll be like planting seeds in bleach.

He turned his attention to the rocks. There was certainly no shortage of them. Big blocks more than a meter wide, plenty of smaller stuff down to the size of pebbles. Many of the rocks looked pitted, etched by weathering. Couldn’t be rain, Jamie thought. Hasn’t rained here in a billion years, I’d bet. There was frost on winter mornings, though. The rocks expanded in the day’s heat, such as it was, and contracted during the bitterly cold nights.

But that wouldn’t pit them, Jamie thought. They ought to crack laterally and flake, not get pitted like golf balls. If they were volcanic, then the pitting could be from gases trapped inside the rocks bubbling out and escaping. Could they have been thrown all the way out here from the volcanoes six or seven hundred kilometers away? Or had they been blasted out of the ground by ancient meteor strikes and thrown clear of the atmosphere, reentering afterward like ballistic missiles?

He filled the two sacks he had brought with him with rocks of varying sizes, then realized with a start that he had been out for more than three hours. The sun was almost directly overhead, a strangely tiny and pale imitation of the sun he had known, shining weakly out of the salmon-colored sky.

Turning, he could no longer see the dome, although the blunt cylindrical tops of the two landers were still visible. In the distance he saw one of the unmanned spacecraft, its big cargo hatch gaping open, empty.

The horizon is shorter here, he reminded himself. Turn around, get yourself oriented properly.

“Waterman, you are out of range of the monitor cameras.” Vosnesensky’s voice sounded more annoyed than worried. “Can you hear me?”

“Yes, loud and clear.”

“You are almost at the limit of safe walk-back distance. Come back toward the dome.”

Jamie felt almost glad that he was being commanded to come back. It was one thing to be alone back home, in the mountains or desert scrubland. Out here, in this strange world without air to breathe or water to drink, Jamie had been almost frightened.

And yet — it felt good to be alone, away from the others. Solitude had been rare, nonexistent, over the past several years. Jamie stood as tall as his suit would allow and gazed out toward the beckoning horizon, his back to the dome and the others. Even inside the hard shell of his suit he strove to get a feeling for this Martian landscape, a sense of harmony with this strange new world.

Then he saw a patch of green.