White Mars

2

My eyes had not been trained to see such a panorama. I was disoriented, like my entire physical body depended on my sight. Closing my eyes, I became aware of another source of strangeness. I was standing on solid ground, but I had lost pounds in weight.

Bracing myself, I tried to take account of our surroundings. Beyond the suited figures of my friends lay a world of solitude, infinite and tumbled, with nothing on which the gaze could rest. My mind, checking for something familiar, ran through a number of fantasy landscapes, from Dis to Barsoom, without relief. Grim? Oh yes, it was grim—but marvellously complex, built like a diabolical artist’s construct. I was looking at something wonderfully unknown, indigestible, hitherto inaccessible. And I was among the first to take it all in!

And suddenly I found myself flushing. Like a blow to the heart came the thought: But I am of a species more extraordinary than anything else there ever was.

One day all this desolation would be turned into a fertile world much like Earth.

We broke from our trance. Our first task was to unload the body of Captain Tracy from our vehicle and place it in its body bag on the Martian surface. Although he was in his late thirties, Guy Tracy had seemed to be the fittest among us, but the acceleration and later deceleration had brought on the heart attack that killed him before we landed.

This death in Mars’s orbit had seemed like a bad omen for the mission, but, as we laid his body down among the rocks of the regolith, a glassy effect flared into the sky as if in welcome. Low, almost beyond the visible, it was, we figured later, an aurora. Charged particles from the sun were interacting with molecules of the thin atmosphere trapped in Mars’s slight magnetic field. The ghostly phenomenon seemed to flutter almost at shoulder level. It faded and was gone as we stepped back from the body bag. For a planet receiving sunlight equivalent to only some 40 per cent of Earth’s generous ration, the little illumination show was encouraging.

Calls from base broke into our solemn thoughts. We were reluctant to talk back to Earth. They challenged us to say what had gone wrong.

“You have to be here to understand. You have to have made the journey. You have to experience Mars in its majesty to know that to try to alter—to terraform—this ancient place would be wrong. A terrible mistake. Not just for Mars. For us. For all mankind.”

There was a long pained argument. It takes forty minutes for a signal to traverse the distance between Earth and Mars and back—and between experiences. Night came on, sweeping over the plain. The stars glittered overhead.

We waited. We tried to explain.

Base ordered us to continue with our duties.

We said—everything was recorded—“It is our duty to tell you that humanity’s arrival on another planet marks a turning point in our history. We should not alter this planet. We must try to alter ourselves.”

Forty minutes passed. We waited uneasily.

“What do you mean by this talk? Why are you going moral on us?”

After some discussion, we replied, “There has to be a better way forward.”

After forty minutes, a different voice from base. “What in hell are you going on about up there? Have you all gone crazy?”

“We said you wouldn’t understand.” And we closed the link and went to our bunks. Not a sound disturbed our sleep.

Our salaries, like our training, came from the EUPACUS combine. I knew and trusted their engineering skills. Of their intentions I was less sure. To win the Mars tender, the consortium had agreed merely to run all travel arrangements for ten years and to organise expeditions. I was well aware that they intended to begin the long process of terraforming by the back door, so to speak. Their hidden intentions were to turn Mars into saleable real estate; profitability depended on it. So I was told.

EUPACUS was contracted to run all ground operations on Mars, and could prevent unwanted curiosity there. Their investors would be eager to get their money back with interest, without being too concerned with how it was done. I woke with a firm determination to defy the stockholders.

Like everyone else, our crew had seen and been seduced by computer-generated pictures of EUPACUS-format Mars. Domes and greenhouses were laid out in neat array. Factories were set up for the task of extracting oxygen from the Martian rock. Nuclear suns blazed in the blue sky. In no time, bronzed men in T-shirts stepped forth among green fields, or climbed into bubble cars and drove furiously among Martian mountains already turning green.

Standing amid that magnificent desolation, the salesman’s dream fizzled out like a punctured balloon.

We had landed almost on the equator, in the south-western corner of Amazonis Planitia, to the west of the high Tharsis Shield. Our parent ship acted as communication relay satellite, so that we could travel and keep in touch with one another. Highly necessary on a world where the horizon—supposing the terrain to be flat, which it mostly was not—was only 25 miles away. In its areosynchronous orbit, travelling 17,065 kilometres above ground, the ship appeared stationary to us, a reassuring sight when so much was strange.

But before we began our surveying we had to erect our geodesic dome to support a one-millimetre-thick dome fabric. We had been weakened by the months of flight, despite on board exercise. This weakness turned the building of the dome into a major task, impeded as we were by our spacesuits. Night was upon us before we were half finished. We had to retreat back into the module, to wait for morning.

When morning came, out we went again, determined not to let the structure beat us. We needed the dome. It would afford protection against the deepest cold and dust storms. We could exercise here and offload into it some of the machinery that made life in the module maddeningly cramped. Of course, as yet we had no means of filling it with breathable air at a tolerable pressure, even after we made it airtight. Since the dome had to go up, up it eventually went. When the last girders were bolted together and the last tie of the plastic lining secured—why, we needed no more exercise …

Our brief was to explore a few kilometres of the planet. Its enormous land area was as great in extent as Earth’s, if not quite as various. It had plains, escarpments, riverbeds, vast canyons greater than anything terrestrial and extinct volcanoes—none of them traversed by human beings. We activated the TV cameras, and climbed aboard the two methane-powered buggies, to head eastward.

The intensity of that experience will always remain with me. While folks back home might see nothing on their screens but a kind of broken desert, that journey for us carried a strong emotional charge. It was as if we had travelled back in time, to a period before life had begun in the universe. Everything lay waiting, still, latent, piercing. None of us spoke. We were experiencing a different version of reality—a reality somehow menacing but calming. It was like being under the thunderous eye of God.

As we climbed, the regolith became less rocky. We might have been traversing the palm of an old man’s withered hand. On either side were dried gulleys, forming intricate veins, and small impact craters, evidence of the bombardment of this world from space. We stopped periodically, taking up samples of rock and soil and storing them in an outer compartment for examination later, always marking the micro-environment from which they came. Since the ground temperature was sixty degrees below, we had little expectation of finding even a micro-organism.

Our progress became slower as the slope became steeper. We were now within sight of the flanks of the massive Tharsis Shield. August, lugubrious, it dominated the way ahead. It would be the subject of a later and better equipped exploration. Once we had caught sight of the graceful dome of Olympus Mons—a volcano long extinct—we turned the vehicles about and went back to base.

For the first kilometre of the return journey, the dust we had disturbed still hung in the thin atmosphere.

The laboratory was in my charge. By sundown, I had begun to test the first rock samples. The gas chromatograph mass spectrometer gave no indication of life. Part disappointed, part relieved, I went to join the others in the canteen for supper.

We were a strangely silent group. We knew something memorable had happened in the history of mankind and wanted to digest the meaning of the occasion. Drilling equipment had been set up in the dome before our excursion. A computer beeping summoned us to judge results. Water had been discovered 1.2 kilometres below ground level. Upon analysis, it was found to be relatively pure and inert. No traces of microorganisms.

We rejoiced. With a water supply, living on Mars was now practicable. But the way lay open for terraforming.