Mars

SOL 1: AFTERNOON

The first thing the scientists did, after their little arrival speeches, was collect contingency samples of the Martian rocks, soil, and atmosphere.

Just in case a sudden emergency forced them to scramble into their landing/ascent vehicle and blast back into orbit around the planet, they spent their first two hours on the surface stuffing rocks and soil samples into airtight cases and filling vials with whiffs of air taken from ground level on up to ten meters, the latter obtained with the use of a gangling titanium pole.

Meanwhile, the construction robot trundled across the rocky ground out to the three unmanned cargo carriers that had landed the previous day, scattered over a two-kilometer-wide radius from their nominal landing site. Like an oversized mechanical ant, the robot busily hauled their cargos back to the inflated dome that would be home to the explorers for the next eight weeks.

Mikhail Andreivitch Vosnesensky, veteran of a dozen space missions, sat up in the cockpit in the commander’s seat, one eye on the scientists and the other on the mission schedule. Beside him, Pete Connors monitored the robot and conversed with the expedition command in orbit around the planet. Although both men stayed in their hard suits, ready to dash outside if an emergency required their help, they had taken their helmets off.

Connors switched off the radio and turned to the Russian. “The guys in orbit confirm that we landed only a hundred thirty meters from our nominal target spot. They send their congratulations.”

Vosnesensky offered a rare smile. “It would have been closer, but the boulders were too big farther south.”

“You did a damned good job,” said Connors. “Kaliningrad will be pleased.” His voice was a rich baritone, trained in church choirs. The American had a long, almost horsey face with a complexion the color of milk chocolate and large sorrowful brown eyes rimmed with red His hair was cropped militarily short, showing the distinct vee of a widow’s peak.

“You know what the old pilots say,” Vosnesensky replied.

Connors chuckled. “Any landing you can walk away from is a good landing.”

“All systems are working. We are on schedule.” It was Vosnesensky’s way of making light of his skillful landing. The Russian did not trust flattery, even from a man he had worked with for nearly four years. A scowl was the normal expression on his broad, beefy face. His sky-blue eyes always looked suspicious.

“Yeah. And now the second team has to land where we are. Wonder how good Mironov and my old buddy Abell will be?”

“Mironov is very good. An excellent pilot. He could land on our roof, if he wanted to.”

Connors laughed, light and easy. “Now that would cause a helluva problem, wouldn’t it?

Vosnesensky made his lips curl upward, but it obviously took an effort.

The scientists stored their contingency samples inside the airlock section of the L/AV. In an emergency, the airlock section and the cockpit atop it would lift off the ground. The lower half of the lander—the cargo bays and aerobrake—would remain on Mars. Even if one or more of the explorers were left behind, the precious samples would make it to the expedition spacecraft riding in orbit and then back to the scientists waiting on Earth.

That first chore completed to Vosnesensky’s satisfaction, he ordered the team to move supplies into the dome. They hurried to beat the oddly tiny sun as it got close to the western horizon. The construction vehicle towed the heavy pallets of equipment, while the explorers performed feats of seemingly superhuman strength, lifting man-tall green cylinders of oxygen tanks and bulky crates that would have weighed hundreds of pounds on Earth.

Sweating like a laborer inside his pressurized hard suit, Jamie smiled bitterly at the thought that the first task of the first explorers on Mars was to toil like coolies, grunting and lifting for hours in mindless drudgery. The public-relations statements and TV pictures make it all look so damned easy, he thought. Nobody ever watches a scientist at work—especially when he’s doing dog labor.

Neither he nor the others paid any special attention to their low-gravity strength. Over the nine-plus months of their flight from Earth their spacecraft had spun on a five-kilometer-long tether to simulate a feeling of weight, since prolonged periods in zero gravity weakened muscles dangerously and demineralized bones. Their artificial gravity began at a normal Earthly one g, then was slowly reduced during the months of their flight to the Martian value of roughly one-third g. Now, on the surface of Mars, they could walk normally yet still lift enormous weights with their Earth-evolved muscles.

At the end of their long, exhausting day they moved at last inside the inflated dome. The tiny sun was turning the sky flame-red and the temperature outside was already fifty below zero.

The dome was filled with breathable air at normal Earth pressure and temperature, according to the gauges. The thermometer read precisely twenty-one degrees Celsius: sixty-nine point eight degrees Fahrenheit.

The six of them were still inside their pressurized hard suits, however, and would stay in them until Vosnesensky decided it was safe to breathe the dome’s air. Jamie’s suit felt heavy against his shoulders. It no longer had that “new car” odor of clean plastic and untouched fabric; it smelled of sweat and machine oil. The backpack regenerator replaced carbon dioxide with breathable oxygen, but the filters and miniature fans inside the suit could not remove all of the odors that accumulated from strenuous work.

“Now comes the moment of truth,” he heard Ilona Malater’s husky voice, sounding sexy—or maybe just tired.

Vosnesensky had spent the past few hours checking the dome for leaks, monitoring the air pressure and composition, fussing over the life-support pumps and heaters grouped together in the center of the hardened plastic flooring. One by one, the others slowly drifted to him, clumping in their thick boots, waiting for him to give the order they all awaited with a strange mixture of eagerness and dread.

Like it or not, Vosnesensky was their team leader, and years of training had drilled them to obey their leader’s orders without a thought for his nationality. Everything they did on this dangerously different world would be carried out according to rules and regulations painstakingly developed on Earth. Vosnesensky’s first and most important task was to see that those rules and regulations were carried out here on Mars.

Now the Russian turned from the gently humming air-circulation fans and the row of backup oxygen tanks to see that his five team members had gathered around him. It was difficult to make out his face through the helmet visor, impossible to read his expression. In his barely accented American English he said, “All the gauges are in the normal range. It appears safe to get out of our suits.”

Jamie recalled a physicist at Albuquerque, frustrated over an experiment that refused to work right, telling him, “All of physics boils down to reading a goddam dial on a goddam gauge.”

Vosnesensky turned to Connors, the second-in-command. “Pete, the mission plan calls for you to test the air first.”

The American chuckled nervously from inside his helmet. “Yeah, I’m the guinea pig, I know.”

He took an exaggeratedly sighing breath that they could all hear in their earphones. Then, “Here goes.”

Connors opened his helmet visor a crack, took a sniff, then slid the visor all the way up and pulled in a deeper breath. He broke into a toothy grin. “Helluva lot better than what’s outside.”

They all laughed and the tension cracked. Each of them pushed up their visors, then unlocked the neck seals of their suits and lifted their helmets off altogether. Jamie’s ears popped, but nothing worse happened.

Ilona shook her short-clipped blonde curls and inhaled slowly, her slim nostrils flaring slightly. “Huh! It smells just like the training module. Too dry. Bad for the skin.”

Jamie took a long look around their new home, now that his vision was no longer restricted by the helmet.

He saw the dome rising into shadowed gloom over his head, ribbed with curving metal struts. It reminded him of the first time he had gone into a planetarium, back when he’d been a kid in Santa Fe. The same hushed, awed feeling. The same soft coolness to the air. To Ilona the air felt too dry; to him it felt delicious.

The dome’s smooth plastic skin had been darkened by a polarizing electric current to keep the heat inside. In daylight the dome’s lower section would be made transparent to take advantage of solar heating, but at night it was like an oversized igloo sitting on the frozen Martian plain, darkened to retain heat and not allow it to radiate away into the thin, frigid Martian air. Strips of sunlight-equivalent fluorescent lamps lit the floor area softly, but the upper reaches of the dome were barely visible in the darkness gathering there.

The plastic skin of the dome was double walled, like insulating windows, to keep out the cold. The topmost section was opaque, filled in with a special dense plastic that would absorb harmful radiation and even stop small meteorites, according to the engineers.

The thought of the dome getting punctured was scary. Patches and sealing compounds were placed along its perimeter, but would they have time to repair a puncture before all the air gushed out? Jamie remembered the hoary old joke of the parachute packers: “Don’t worry about it. If this chute doesn’t work, bring it back and we’ll give you a new one.”

The electric power that heated the dome came from the compact nuclear generator inside one of the cargo vehicles. Tomorrow, after the second team’s landing, the construction robot was scheduled to extract the generator and bury it in the Martian soil half a kilometer from the dome.

Mustn’t call it soil, Jamie reminded himself. Soil is alive with microorganisms and earthworms and other living creatures. Here on Mars it’s called regolith, just like the totally dead surface of the totally dead moon.

Is Mars really dead? Jamie asked himself. He remembered the stories he had read as a youngster, wild tales of Martians battling along their planet-girdling canals, beautiful fantasies of cities built like chess pieces and houses that turned to follow the sun like flowers. There were no canals on Mars, Jamie knew. No cities. But is the planet entirely lifeless? Are there fossils to be dug out of that red sand?