A Meeting With Medusa (25 page)

When this story was written the date 1984 did not seem impossible for a Mars landing—in fact that had already been proposed soon after the Apollo programme! There’ll be another transit in 2084—but I hope humans will be on Mars long before then.

Testing, one, two, three, four, five…

Evans speaking. I will continue to record as long as possible. This is a two-hour capsule, but I doubt if I’ll fill it.

That photograph has haunted me all my life; now, too late, I know why. (But would it have made any difference if I
had
known? That’s one of those meaningless and unanswerable questions the mind keeps returning to endlessly, like the tongue exploring a broken tooth.)

I’ve not seen it for years, but I’ve only to close my eyes and I’m back in a landscape almost as hostile—and as beautiful—as this one. Fifty million miles sunward, and seventy-two years in the past, five men face the camera amid the Antarctic snows. Not even the bulky furs can hide the exhaustion and defeat that mark every line of their bodies; and their faces are already touched by Death.

There were five of them. There were five of us, and of course we also took a group photograph. But everything else was different. We were smiling—cheerful, confident. And our picture was on all the screens of Earth within ten minutes. It was months before
their
camera was found and brought back to civilisation.

And we die in comfort, with all modern conveniences—including many that Robert Falcon Scott could never have imagined, when he stood at the South Pole in 1912.

Two hours later. I’ll start giving exact times when it becomes important.

All the facts are in the log, and by now the whole world knows them. So I guess I’m doing this largely to settle my mind—to talk myself into facing the inevitable. The trouble is, I’m not sure what subjects to avoid, and which to tackle head on. Well, there’s only one way to find out.

The first item: in twenty-four hours, at the very most, all the oxygen will be gone. That leaves me with the three classical choices. I can let the carbon dioxide build up until I become unconscious. I can step outside and crack the suit, leaving Mars to do the job in about two minutes. Or I can use one of the tablets in the med kit.

CO
₂
build-up. Everyone says that’s quite easy—just like going to sleep. I’ve no doubt that’s true; unfortunately, in my case it’s associated with nightmare number one….

I wish I’d never come across that damn book
True Stories of World War Two
, or whatever it was called. There was one chapter about a German submarine, found and salvaged after the war. The crew was still inside it—
two
men per bunk. And between each pair of skeletons, the single respirator set they’d been sharing….

Well, at least that won’t happen here. But I know, with a deadly certainty, that as soon as I find it hard to breathe, I’ll be back in that doomed U-boat.

So what about the quicker way? When you’re exposed to vacuum, you’re unconscious in ten or fifteen seconds, and people who’ve been through it say it’s not painful—just peculiar. But trying to breathe something that isn’t there brings me altogether too neatly to nightmare number two.

This time, it’s a personal experience. As a kid, I used to do a lot of skin diving, when my family went to the Caribbean for vacations. There was an old freighter that had sunk twenty years before, out on a reef, with its deck only a couple of yards below the surface. Most of the hatches were open, so it was easy to get inside, to look for souvenirs and hunt the big fish that like to shelter in such places.

Of course it was dangerous if you did it without scuba gear. So what boy could resist the challenge?

My favourite route involved diving into a hatch on the foredeck, swimming about fifty feet along a passageway dimly lit by portholes a few yards apart, then angling up a short flight of stairs and emerging through a door in the battered superstructure. The whole trip took less than a minute—an easy dive for anyone in good condition. There was even time to do some sight-seeing, or to play with a few fish along the route. And sometimes, for a change, I’d switch directions, going in the door and coming out again through the hatch.

That was the way I did it the last time. I hadn’t dived for a week—there had been a big storm, and the sea was too rough—so I was impatient to get going.

I deep-breathed on the surface for about two minutes, until I felt the tingling in my finger tips that told me it was time to stop. Then I jackknifed and slid gently down toward the black rectangle of the open doorway.

It always looked ominous and menacing—that was part of the thrill. And for the first few yards I was almost completely blind; the contrast between the tropical glare above water and the gloom between decks was so great that it took quite a while for my eyes to adjust. Usually, I was halfway along the corridor before I could see anything clearly. Then the illumination would steadily increase as I approached the open hatch, where a shaft of sunlight would paint a dazzling rectangle on the rusty, barnacled metal floor.

I’d almost made it when I realised that, this time, the light wasn’t getting better. There was no slanting column of sunlight ahead of me, leading up to the world of air and life.

I had a second of baffled confusion, wondering if I’d lost my way. Then I knew what had happened—and confusion turned into sheer panic. Sometime during the storm, the hatch must have slammed shut. It weighed at least a quarter of a ton.

I don’t remember making a U turn; the next thing I recall is swimming quite slowly back along the passage and telling myself: Don’t hurry; your air will last longer if you take it easy. I could see very well now, because my eyes had had plenty of time to become dark-adapted. There were lots of details I’d never noticed before, like the red squirrelfish lurking in the shadows, the green fronds and algae growing in the little patches of light around the portholes, and even a single rubber boot, apparently in excellent condition, lying where someone must have kicked it off. And once, out of a side corridor, I noticed a big grouper staring at me with bulbous eyes, his thick lips half parted, as if he was astonished at my intrusion.

The band around my chest was getting tighter and tighter. It was impossible to hold my breath any longer. Yet the stairway still seemed an infinite distance ahead. I let some bubbles of air dribble out of my mouth. That improved matters for a moment, but, once I had exhaled, the ache in my lungs became even more unendurable.

Now there was no point in conserving strength by flippering along with that steady, unhurried stroke. I snatched the ultimate few cubic inches of air from my face mask—feeling it flatten against my nose as I did so—and swallowed them down into my starving lungs. At the same time, I shifted gear and drove forward with every last atom of strength….

And that’s all I remember until I found myself spluttering and coughing in the daylight, clinging to the broken stub of the mast. The water around me was stained with blood, and I wondered why. Then, to my great surprise, I noticed a deep gash in my right calf. I must have banged into some sharp obstruction, but I’d never noticed it and even then felt no pain.

That was the end of my skin diving until I started astronaut training ten years later and went into the underwater zero-gee simulator. Then it was different, because I was using scuba gear. But I had some nasty moments that I was afraid the psychologists would notice, and I always made sure that I got nowhere near emptying my tank. Having nearly suffocated once, I’d no intention of risking it again….

I know exactly what it will feel like to breathe the freezing wisp of near-vacuum that passes for atmosphere on Mars. No thank you. So what’s wrong with poison? Nothing, I suppose. The stuff we’ve got takes only fifteen seconds, they told us. But all my instincts are against it, even when there’s no sensible alternative.

Did Scott have poison with him? I doubt it. And if he did, I’m sure he never used it.

I’m not going to replay this. I hope it’s been of some use, but I can’t be sure.

The radio has just printed out a message from Earth, reminding me that transit starts in two hours. As if I’m likely to forget—when four men have already died so that I can be the first human being to see it. And the only one, for exactly a hundred years. It isn’t often that Sun, Earth, and Mars line up neatly like this; the last time was in 1905, when poor old Lowell was still writing his beautiful nonsense about the canals and the great dying civilisation that had built them. Too bad it was all delusion.

I’d better check the telescope and the timing equipment.

The Sun is quiet today—as it should be, anyway, near the middle of the cycle. Just a few small spots, and some minor areas of disturbance around them. The solar weather is set calm for months to come. That’s one thing the others won’t have to worry about, on their way home.

I think that was the worst moment, watching
Olympus
lift off Phobos and head back to Earth. Even though we’d known for weeks that nothing could be done, that was the final closing of the door.

It was night, and we could see everything perfectly. Phobos had come leaping up out of the west a few hours earlier, and was doing its mad backward rush across the sky, growing from a tiny crescent to a half-moon; before it reached the zenith it would disappear as it plunged into the shadow of Mars and became eclipsed.

We’d been listening to the countdown, of course, trying to go about our normal work. It wasn’t easy, accepting at last the fact that fifteen of us had come to Mars and only ten would return. Even then, I suppose there were millions back on Earth who still could not understand. They must have found it impossible to believe that
Olympus
couldn’t descend a mere four thousand miles to pick us up. The Space Administration had been bombarded with crazy rescue schemes; heaven knows, we’d thought of enough ourselves. But when the permafrost under Landing Pad Three finally gave way and
Pegasus
toppled, that was that. It still seems a miracle that the ship didn’t blow up when the propellant tank ruptured….

I’m wandering again. Back to Phobos and the countdown.

On the telescope monitor, we could clearly see the fissured plateau where
Olympus
had touched down after we’d separated and begun our own descent. Though our friends would never land on Mars, at least they’d had a little world of their own to explore; even for a satellite as small as Phobos, it worked out at thirty square miles per man. A lot of territory to search for strange minerals and debris from space—or to carve your name so that future ages would know that you were the first of all men to come this way.

The ship was clearly visible as a stubby, bright cylinder against the dull-grey rocks; from time to time some flat surface would catch the light of the swiftly moving sun, and would flash with mirror brilliance. But about five minutes before lift-off, the picture became suddenly pink, then crimson—then vanished completely as Phobos rushed into eclipse.

The countdown was still at ten seconds when we were startled by a blast of light. For a moment, we wondered if
Olympus
had also met with catastrophe. Then we realised that someone was filming the take-off, and the external floodlights had been switched on.

During those last few seconds, I think we all forgot our own predicament; we were up there aboard
Olympus
, willing the thrust to build up smoothly and lift the ship out of the tiny gravitational field of Phobos, and then away from Mars for the long fall sunward. We heard Commander Richmond say ‘Ignition’, there was a brief burst of interference, and the patch of light began to move in the field of the telescope.

That was all. There was no blazing column of fire, because, of course, there’s really no ignition when a nuclear rocket lights up. ‘Lights up’ indeed! That’s another hangover from the old chemical technology. But a hot hydrogen blast is completely invisible; it seems a pity that we’ll never again see anything so spectacular as a Saturn or a Korolov blast-off.

Just before the end of the burn,
Olympus
left the shadow of Mars and burst out into sunlight again, reappearing almost instantly as a brilliant, swiftly moving star. The blaze of light must have startled them aboard the ship, because we heard someone call out: ‘Cover that window!’ Then, a few seconds later, Richmond announced: ‘Engine cutoff.’ Whatever happened,
Olympus
was now irrevocably headed back to Earth.

A voice I didn’t recognise—though it must have been the Commander’s—said ‘Goodbye,
Pegasus
‘, and the radio transmission switched off. There was, of course, no point in saying ‘Good luck’. That had all been settled weeks ago.

I’ve just played this back. Talking of luck, there’s been one compensation, though not for us. With a crew of only ten,
Olympus
has been able to dump a third of her expendables and lighten herself by several tons. So now she’ll get home a month ahead of schedule.

Plenty of things could have gone wrong in that month; we may yet have saved the expedition. Of course, we’ll never know—but it’s a nice thought.