Mars

1

During the long years of training, Jamie had traveled so much that he often awoke in the morning with the feeling that he had never really left Houston; some mysterious organization had merely changed the city outside his hotel window. The cities out there were gigantic stage sets and all the people in them were hired actors. Or perhaps very clever robots.

After several weeks aboard the Mars 1 spacecraft coasting toward its distant destination, Jamie began to think that all spacecraft were stage sets, too.

They all looked alike from the inside. The space stations in Earth orbit, the shuttles that carried the Mars explorers to them, the Mars-bound craft themselves—their interiors were all almost identical. Cramped compartments, narrow passageways, the constant hum of electrical equipment, the glare-free, shadowless, flat lighting, the same smell of cold metal and canned stale air. The packed-in feeling that someone was waiting in line behind you, even in the toilet.

Now that the two spacecraft had been spun up, though, there was at least a feeling of gravity. One could walk down the central corridor, sit in a chair, sleep with the solidity of a mattress and blanket that did not float away when you turned over.

There was only one place on the Mars 1 craft that was not claustrophobic: the observation port that looked out on the universe. Jamie found himself going there more and more often as the long wearisome weeks passed by. It would take more than nine months before they reached the red planet and established a safe orbit around it. Nine months of inactivity, living cheek by jowl like a dozen sardines inside an aluminum can. No, not a can, Jamie said to himself. A pressure cooker.

There was work for them to do, of sorts. And a strict schedule of physical exercises in the closet-sized gymnasium. But it was all perfunctory. Jamie put in his required hours on the exercise machines; they kept his muscles in shape, but his mind wandered—he was bored, moody, dull.

Every two or three days he received a call from DiNardo, recovered now from his surgery. The Jesuit reviewed the work going on in several terrestrial laboratories, further analysis of the rocks and soil samples returned from Mars by the unmanned robot exploratory vehicles. The various analyses differed only in the minutest details: the soil samples were sterile, although a few of the rocks contained traces of organic material, carbon-rich chemicals that might be the precursors of living organisms.

The chemicals of life might exist in those rocks, but that’s about as exciting as looking at the bottles of aspirin tablets in a drugstore display case. They haven’t found anything alive in the samples, not even an amoeba.

Nearly four months into the flight, Jamie suddenly asked, “How is Professor Hoffman? Is he involved in these analyses?”

It took several minutes for messages to travel the distance between the spacecraft and Earth. As he watched the little display screen of the communications console Jamie saw DiNardo’s swarthy face register surprise, then something else. Guilt? The priest ran a hand over his shaved scalp before answering.

“Professor Hoffman has apparently suffered a nervous breakdown. He is in a rest home in Vienna for the present.”

Jamie felt the same surprise flaring into guilt that seared his guts.

“I have visited him myself,” DiNardo went on. “His doctors assure me that he will be fine in a few weeks or so.”

I wonder how I’d have reacted to being yanked off the mission at the last minute, Jamie asked himself. He changed the subject back to geology and concluded his conversation with the priest as swiftly as he could.

He left the communications console up on the flight deck and rushed down the length of the habitat module toward the observation port. By common custom the section housing the port was considered private. Whenever someone entered it and closed the hatch that separated it from the rest of the module, no one else in the crew would enter. It was the one place aboard the Mars spacecraft where a person could be alone.

Jamie needed to be alone, to be away from all the others. Yet as he hurried down the narrow passageway he felt a sullen tide of anger rising within him. Not guilt. Not pity. Anger. They always have to take something away from you, he heard a voice in his mind complain. They can never let you have the whole cake; they always lick the icing off first. Or piss on it. So I’m on my way to Mars and Hoffman’s in a funny farm. Great.

Then he remembered his grandfather years ago, when Jamie had been an eager young high schooler bursting to show off how much he had learned in his science classes. He had tried to explain to Al the laws of thermodynamics, throwing in terms such as “entropy” and “heat flow” and “thermal equilibrium.”

“Aw, I know all about that stuff,” Al had said.

“You do?” Jamie had been extremely skeptical of his grandfather’s claim.

“Sure. Comes up every day in the store. Or when I play poker. What it boils down to is, you can’t win, you can’t even break even, and you can’t get out of the game.”

Jamie had gaped at his grandfather. Al had explained the concepts of thermodynamics as succinctly as he would ever hear.

“Main thing,” Al said, grinning at his surprised grandson, “is to stay in balance with life. That way no matter what happens it won’t throw you. Stay in balance. Never lean so far in one direction that a puff of wind can knock you over.”

What it boils down to is that you have to pay for everything you get, and the price is always more than the value of the thing you’re after. And you can’t get out of the game. Even millions of miles from Earth, you can’t get out of the game.

The hatch to the observation area was open. No one was there. Good.

The astronomers hated the spin that produced a feeling of gravity within the Mars-bound ships. It meant that their telescopes, even though placed outside the ships along the tethers connecting them, had to be mounted on complex motorized bearings that moved exactly opposite to the spin so that they could remain focused on the same distant speck of light for weeks or months at a time.

The spin had bothered Jamie, too, at first. The stars rotated past the oblong window in a slow steady procession instead of remaining fixed against the dark backdrop the way they did on Earth. But they don’t really stay still on Earth, Jamie told himself. They rotate around the sky too slow for you to notice. Out here we’ve just speeded things up. We’ve made our own little world and it spins around every two and a half minutes instead of every twenty-four hours.

It felt cold in the observation section. He knew it was only his imagination, but the cold of that deep empty darkness out there seemed to seep through the window and chill him to the bone.

Someone was already there. As Jamie stepped through the open hatch he saw the tall, lithe form of Ilona Malater standing by the long window. She was staring out at the stars, her face solemn, immobile. In the faint light her honey-colored hair looked gray, her tan coveralls nearly colorless.

As Jamie approached the window he almost felt glad that someone else was there. His desire to be alone faded beneath his need for human warmth. He realized that Ilona was tall and slim enough to be a high-fashion model. Her aristocratic face had that magazine-cover haughtiness to it, as well.

“Hello,” he said.

She whirled, startled, then relaxed and smiled. “Jamie. What are you doing up here?”

“Same as you, I guess.”

“I thought this was my private hideaway.” Ilona’s voice was a rich, throaty contralto.

With a rueful grin Jamie said, “Me too.” He hesitated, then offered, “I can go back…”

“No, that’s all right.” She smiled back at Jamie. “Perhaps I need someone to talk to more than I need solitude.”

The only light in the area came from the faintly glowing guide strips on the floor. And the starlight. Barely enough to see her face, to catch the expression in her eyes. The electrical hum that pervaded the spacecraft seemed fainter here, muted.

“You heard about Hoffman?” Jamie asked.

“What has he done now?”

“He’s had a nervous breakdown.”

Ilona arched an eyebrow. “Serves him right, the pig.”

“That’s a hell of an attitude!”

“He was a womanizer. I imagine he’s the terror of the female undergraduates wherever he teaches.”

Jamie blinked at her. He had never thought of Hoffman as anything but a geologist who stood between himself and Mars.

“He tried to seduce every woman he met during training.”

“He hit on you?”

Ilona laughed. “He tried to. I hit him back. I told him that if he could not satisfy his wife why did he think he could satisfy me? He never spoke another word to me.”

Jamie thought it less than funny. There was a fierceness in this woman that he had never suspected, an anger seething within her.

Then it occurred to him. “He must have hit on Joanna too.”

“Yes. Certainly.”

That’s why Joanna wanted him off the mission, Jamie said to himself. Not to get me aboard. Just to get rid of a man who bothered her.

He felt suddenly awkward. There was no place to sit except the chill metal floor, no one to turn to for support. He looked out the non-reflective window and saw nothing but the starry emptiness; the Mars 2 craft was out of sight, literally over their heads.

“Is Hoffman’s breakdown what brought you up here?” Ilona asked.

Jamie nodded. “And you?”

“I had to get away,” she said, her voice lowering. “I am becoming depressed.”

“Why? What’s wrong?”

“Mars is wrong. I am wrong. It was wrong to include a biochemist on this expedition. There is no life on Mars for me to study.”

“We don’t know that for certain,” Jamie said. “Not yet.”

“Don’t we?” Ilona spoke the words with a weary sigh. Then she turned and stretched her arm toward a glowing ruddy point of light swinging past in the starry blackness.

“Look at the planet, Jamie. Think of all the rocks and soil samples and photographs we have studied. We get new photos and data every day from the orbiters they’ve put around the planet. Not a trace of life. Nothing. Mars is absolutely barren. Lifeless.”

He turned from the red glow of Mars to focus on her sorrowing face once more. “But we’ve only had a few dozen samples. You’re talking about a whole world. There must be…”

She laid a long manicured finger on Jamie’s lips, silencing him. “You have heard of Gaia?” Ilona asked.

Jamie said, “The idea that the Earth is a living entity?”

Ilona gave him a scant smile. “That’s close. Not bad for a geologist.”

He found himself grinning back at her. “All right, what about Gaia? And what’s it got to do with Mars?”

“The Gaia hypothesis states that all life on Earth works together as a self-regulating feedback system that maintains itself. No single species of life—not even the human race—lives in isolation. All species are part of the whole, part of the totally integrated living Gaia.”

“I don’t see what that’s got to do with Mars,” Jamie said.

“Life has spread itself all across the Earth,” Ilona replied. “Down in the deepest ocean trenches there is life. The air teems with microorganisms, even up in the stratosphere there are yeast molds floating about. Even in the most barren Antarctic deserts there are rocks that hold colonies of lichens just below their surfaces.”

“And Mars looks barren.”

“Mars is barren. The probes have found nothing in the air. There is no liquid water. The soil is so loaded with superoxides it’s like an intense bleach; no living organism could survive in it.”

“Some of the rocks bear organic chemicals,” Jamie reminded her. — “But if life existed on Mars it would not be confined to one place!” Ilona’s husky voice was almost pleading now. “If there were a Martian equivalent of Gaia we would see life everywhere we looked, just as we do on Earth.”

Stubbornly Jamie shook his head. “But Earth is warmer, Earth has liquid water everywhere you look, it’s easy for life to grow and spread on Earth. Mars isn’t that rich. Life would have a tougher time there.”

Ilona shook her head too. “No, I don’t believe that’s the reason why Mars looks so bleak. The planet is truly barren. There is no life there and there probably never was. I have wasted the past three years of my life. Sending anyone involved in biology was a mistake.”

She stood there framed by the oblong window, the slowly circling stars behind her. Ilona no longer looked haughty or regal. She looked depressed, disheartened.

Jamie shrugged and muttered, “I don’t think you can give up before you’ve even started. No matter what you believe you can’t really say anything definite until you’ve gotten there and looked for yourself. Mars probably has a few surprises in store for you. For all of us.”

“Perhaps.” Ilona sighed again. Then she wrapped her arms around herself and shivered. “It’s always so cold in here! I should have worn my thermal underwear.”

“I’m sorry I don’t have a sweater or jacket…”

“It’s my own fault,” she said. “I acted on impulse, coming here in just these coveralls.”

Jamie grinned at her. “That’s against the rules. How many times has Vosnesensky drilled it into us: think ten times before you do anything.”

“Vosnesensky.” She growled the name, like a lioness snarling.

“What’s wrong with Mikhail?” Jamie asked. “He doesn’t seem like such a bad guy to me.”

“He is a Russian.”

“So what?”

“Half my family was murdered by Russians in nineteen fifty-six. My grandmother barely escaped the country. My grandfather was hanged. As if he were a criminal, the Russians hanged him.”

“That wasn’t Vosnesensky’s fault. Russia’s changed a lot since then. So has Hungary. It all happened half a century ago.”

“It’s easy for you Americans to forgive and forget. Not so easy for me and my people.”

Jamie did not know what to say. There’s nothing I can say, he realized. For several moments they stood facing each other while the stars arced around them and the background buzz of electrical equipment hummed its faint note like a distant chorus of Tibetan lamas droning a mantra.

Ilona shuddered. “It is cold up here.” She moved closer to Jamie, pressed against him.

“We could go back,” Jamie said. Yet he slid one arm around her waist. It seemed the right thing to do.

“No, not yet. I have been worried about you,” said Ilona. Her voice was low, sensuous. Her face so close to Jamie’s that he could smell the faint perfume in her honey-blonde hair.

“Worried about me?”

“You seem… withdrawn. Lonely.”

He made half a shrug. “We’re a long way from home.”

“You avoid us.”

“Avoid you?” Jamie felt stupid repeating her words, but she was catching him unprepared.

“Joanna and me. Katrin. You avoid us. Didn’t you realize that?”

“We’re not supposed to get emotionally involved with one another.”

“Another rule, I know. But does that mean you can’t sit next to us at meals? I’ve been watching you very carefully. You deliberately stay as far from us as you can.”

A hundred thoughts raced through Jamie’s mind. He muttered, “Lead us not into temptation.”

“Are you in love with Joanna?”

“No! Of course not.”

“Of course not,” Ilona mimicked, smiling at him. “The rules forbid us to fall in love, don’t they.”

“Not just the rules,” Jamie replied.

“You don’t want to get involved emotionally, is that it?”

He nodded, thinking of Edith back in Houston, wondering suddenly where she was, who she was with now.

Ilona wrapped her arms around Jamie’s neck. “When is the last time you made love?”

“What? I don’t think…”

“I’ll wager you haven’t made love since the last time you went home to California, have you?”

“No, you’re wrong.”

“Certainly not since we arrived at the assembly station. Not since then.”

Jamie’s mind was telling him to disengage from her and get away but his arms were clasping Ilona close to him, holding her tightly against his body. Their lips were almost touching.

“I want to make love with you, Jamie. Right here and now. I want to make love with my strong silent friend here among the stars. I want your strength, your warmth.”

She kissed him fiercely, then whispered, “The rules say nothing against fucking, Jamie. Fuck me, red man, fuck me.”

Slowly, languidly, almost like a man hypnotized, Jamie pulled open the front of Ilona’s coveralls; the Velcro seam split with the same noise as ripping fabric. As if in a dream he watched himself slide the garment over her shoulders and down her long arms. She wore nothing at all beneath the coveralls. The skin of her bare shoulders and slight breasts looked milky white in the starlight. All the long months of denial exploded in a sudden frenzy as Jamie pulled Ilona to the hard metal flooring, impervious to the cold, uncaring about Mars or Gaia or anything else except this eager tigress. The stars wheeled impassively about them.

2

The next morning at breakfast Jamie felt terribly embarrassed. He could not face Joanna at all, and found that it was difficult for him even to look into Ilona’s face. She smiled at him, though, from across the narrow wardroom table as he sat down with his tray between Tony Reed and Tadeusz Sliwa, the golden-haired Polish backup biochemist.

Jamie hurried through his breakfast and headed quickly up toward the communications console, where he intended to contact the growing library at Houston and bury himself in reading more details about the odd, oxygen-rich chemistry of the soil of Mars.

“You seem to be in a hurry.”

It was Tony Reed, striding up the narrow passageway behind him.

“I’ve got some reading to do,” Jamie said.

“Afraid I have to conduct some official business with you, my friend.”

Jamie stopped and turned around to face Reed. “Official business?”

“As the ship’s resident physician, yes.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Please come with me to my office,” said Reed, smiling crookedly.

The ship’s infirmary was situated just behind the exercise room. It was a cubicle no larger than any of the individual quarters for the personnel, cramped and crowded even with only two people in it.

Reed slid the accordion-fold door shut and carefully latched it in place. Jamie could hear the groaning squeal of the weight machine from the other side of the partition and the puffing grunts of whoever was working out with it.

“We missed you yesterday afternoon,” Tony said, a sly grin on his face.

“I needed some privacy,” he said.

“So did Ilona, apparently.”

Reed squeezed past Jamie and sat on the edge of the built-in desk, folding his arms across his chest. He nodded toward the stool resting beside the locked medicine cabinet.

Jamie remained standing. He wondered who might be in the exercise room next door and how much he could hear through the thin partition wall.

Reed was practically leering. “You seemed to disappear right after she did. And then you both returned to us at about the same time.”

“Hoffman’s had a nervous breakdown,” Jamie said. “I was pretty upset by the news.”

“So you consoled yourself by taking your turn with our in-house sexual therapist.”

“My turn…?” Jamie’s insides went hollow, as if he had suddenly become weightless.

The grin on Tony’s face was positively evil. “Didn’t you know? Ilona’s decided to have her fun with each of the males aboard. Except for Vosnesensky and Ivshenko, of course. She hates the Russkies. I think she’s doing what she’s doing merely to drive our poor Russian leader and his backup insane with jealousy. It might work, too.”

Jamie felt as if he were gasping for air.

“Now then.” Reed cleared his throat and put on a more serious, professional face. “There’s the matter of your sexual conduct.”

Jamie frowned. “My sexual conduct?”

“I am required to give you standard lecture number double-ought one: sexual responsibility and its consequences.” The grin had come back to Reed’s face.

“Do you give this lecture to Ilona, too?”

“Yes, of course,” He was smirking. “With some variations, of course.”

“Every time?”

“Every time I can.”

Jamie glowered at the Englishman.

“Seriously, James, I must warn you that if your sexual conduct threatens to create a problem aboard ship, it is my duty to report to Dr. Li — and to take certain steps.”

“Make me take saltpeter?”

“Oh, we have much better stuff than saltpeter,” Reed said. “Pharmacology has come a long way. The only trouble is, whatever suppressant we dose you with will shrink your gonads.”

“Shrink…!”

“Can’t be helped. They’ll grow back to normal once the medication is stopped, of course. We won’t castrate you, not even chemically.”

Jamie asked, “What if I won’t take the medication—assuming I’m going to be such a lecher that you’ll want to dose me.”

“Oh, you’ll take it, one way or the other. I can always doctor your meals, you know. Or spike the drinking water. Just as I would do if you refused to take your vitamin supplements. It wouldn’t be difficult.”

Jamie heard himself mutter, “Son of a bitch.”

“That’s exactly what we’re trying to prevent, actually,” said Reed. Then he laughed out loud at his own little joke.

3

“I wish these bunks were just a bit wider.”

“You don’t like being so close?”

“My arm’s fallen asleep.”

“As long as nothing else on you has gone asleep.”

“So what did you think of our wild Indian?”

“He was quite wild, once he got started.”

“As good as I?”

She laughed softly. “As a famous film star once said, ‘Goodness had nothing to do with it.’ ”

“That completes the roster, doesn’t it? Except for the Russkies.”

“I will not let them touch me!”

“Pity. Poor Mikhail Andreivitch looks as if he’ll explode any day now.”

“Let him. I don’t care.”

“And Ivshenko seems like a jolly chap. Perhaps if I accompanied you we could make a threesome out of it.”

“You’re already complaining about the bunks being too narrow.”

“Um, yes, there is that.”

“I will not approach the Russians. Let them stew in their own juices.”

“But otherwise…”

“Waterman was the last holdout.”

“And now he’s fallen.”

“What about you? How successful have you been?”

“Actually, Katrin and I had a little workout in the gymnasium again.”

“But what about Joanna?”

A long silence.

“Well?”

“One has to be very circumspect with Joanna, you know. I believe she’s still a virgin.”

“Only three women on the ship and you’ve failed with one of them.”

“I’m working on it.”

“I’ve succeeded with every one of the men now.”

“Except the Russians.”

“Pah! You fuck the Russians if you’re so worried about them.”

“Hardly! It’s little Joanna I want.”

“Then you’re going to have to try harder, aren’t you?”

“You mean this isn’t hard enough to suit you?”

“Hmm… well… I suppose it will do for now.”

Hours later, alone and still sleepless, Tony Reed told himself that it was all a game, a pleasant way to pass the boring weeks while they were all packed together inside the spacecraft. We’re harming no one. Except perhaps the Russians, but that’s not my doing. Perhaps Katrin is accommodating them, a little Russo-German friendship pact.

He turned in the bunk, trying to find a more comfortable position. It’s only a game, a delightful game. Yet a deeper voice in his mind reminded him that soldiers on their way to battle play a similar game. Fear is the spur, the voice said to Tony. You go through the motions of creating life because you are so terrified of impending death.

Nonsense, Tony replied to his inner voice. We’re perfectly safe inside this spacecraft. We’re protected by the work of the best minds in the world. There is a certain element of risk, of course. That’s what makes it all so interesting.

The voice was not placated. Death is waiting a mere few centimeters from you, on the other side of this spacecraft’s thin metal skin. Play your game, try to get the fear out of your mind or expiate it with bursts of lovemaking. But death is waiting for us all, and we are flying toward it.