Rescue Mode - eARC (32 page)

Benson sighed inwardly. There was no sense denying that he was jealous of Ted for taking what was supposed to be
his
role. But on the other hand, he knew that it had to be this way.

In just a few days, if all went according to plan, Ted would send up a collection of rocks gathered by Hi and Catherine aboard the lander’s ascent stage, flying on autopilot. And the vital water from the
Fermi
habitat.

A stray thought wandered into his mind.
Will Amanda find anything she’ll want to send back to Earth? Some evidence that life once existed down there?

Whatever, he said to himself, once we pump the water into our tanks and remove whatever rocks they’ve sent up, we crash the
Hercules
on the other side of the planet from the habitat. Give the seismologists back on Earth a sampling of data about Mars’ internal structure. If the seismometers in the habitat register any data.

And then it’s time to go home. It’s going to be a long trip, in more ways than just the number of days they’d be in flight. I hope Mikhail makes it all they way. Taki says his chances are only fifty-fifty. But at least we’ll have enough water to make it.

The
Arrow
was too far from the habitat to see it from orbit. I’d need a telescope anyway, it’s too small to see with the unaided eye.

“Thanks, Ted,” Benson murmured. “I just hope your sacrifice won’t be in vain.”

And the
Arrow
slipped into the darkness of the night side of Mars.

November 8, 2035

12:10 Universal Time

Mars Landing Plus 3 Days

Mars Base
Fermi

Standing in the airlock, McPherson called through the open hatch, “Come on, Catherine. It’s time to get out and collect those samples.”

He was smiling inside his suit helmet, knowing full well that he sounded like a stereotypical husband waiting for his wife to get ready for a trip outdoors. Some things remain the same, Hi thought, even on another planet. Fortunately for him, Catherine had no problem with his stereotypical behavior. She had her own stereotype.

“Be patient,
mon tresor
,” she replied.

McPherson’s grin threatened to split his beard.
Mon tresor
, he thought. She calls me her treasure.

He looked through the open hatch at the module that served as their “all purpose” room. It was here that they had spent their first two days on Mars, storing their supplies, eating, talking, and, when the cold Martian night set in, sleeping. Hi frowned when he thought about sleeping in those damned hammocks. It was one thing to put up with the hammocks for thirty days, as the mission plan originally called for. But two years? And there was no privacy at all; the four of them slept within arm’s reach of one another.

When are we going to make love? Then an idea occurred to him. Maybe here in the airlock. Close the inner hatch and it’s totally private in here. Not even a window. Or better yet, the auxiliary airlock, on the other side of the habitat. Nobody will be using that one; it’s just for emergencies.

Well, he told himself, this is an emergency if there ever was one.

Catherine rounded the corner from the right inflated wing of the habitat, in suit and helmet, with Amanda close behind her, in her coveralls. The right wing was where they had stored their food and general supplies. For some reason it seemed colder in the right wing than the left, though McPherson hadn’t felt really warm since they had landed.

Connover approached from the left wing, coffee mug in hand. Hiram had quickly learned that Ted wasn’t quite human in the morning until he’d had at least one cup of coffee. Hi hoped the supply of the stuff they had brought with them would last the whole time they were on Mars. He didn’t know if their medical supplies included caffeine pills.

“Okay,” Ted said, jovially, “now’s the time for you geologists to earn your keep. You’re scheduled for a three-hour EVA this morning. You stay within walking distance of the habitat. Then an extra hour for you to transfer the samples you’ve collected to the
Hercules
ascent stage.”

Standing in the airlock, McPherson thought, Tell me something I don’t know, Ted.

Connover plowed ahead. “Tomorrow you’ve got another EVA with a similar timeline. After that, Amanda and I will go out to the
Hercules
and prep her for launch back to the
Arrow
. Are you good with that?”

“So a total of six hours is all we get to collect samples?” McPherson complained. “And how much did this trip cost the taxpayers?”

“You’ll have plenty of time to go rock hunting after Bee starts the
Arrow
back to Earth,” Connover replied.

McPherson understood what Ted left unsaid. The rocks that go back with the
Arrow
have a decent chance of getting into the hands of geologists on Earth. The rocks we pick up afterward might never leave Mars.

Amanda broke into his thoughts. “Remember, you two have to wait inside the airlock while the UV lamps decontaminate you. We don’t want Earth microbes polluting the Mars environment.”

“As if they could survive out there,” McPherson grumbled. “It’s below freezing, there’s no oxygen in the air, no water.”

“
Practically
no oxygen or water vapor,” Amanda corrected. “We can’t take chances.”

“We understand,” said Catherine, as she stepped over the lip of the inner airlock hatch.

“Remember those bacteria that survived more than two years on the Moon, stowing away on board one of the Surveyor probes,” Amanda reminded them. “No air at all, no water, yet they stayed alive.”

“Stubborn little buggers,” McPherson admitted.

Waggling a stubby finger at his tall, lanky form, Amanda insisted, “Well, we don’t want any of those stubborn little bugs infecting Mars.”

“Yes, ma’am,” said McPherson, with the proper degree of contrition in his voice.

Amanda was smiling as the airlock’s inner hatch swung closed. The panel next to the outer hatch showed a green light, indicating that the airlock was filled with air at normal pressure, and a blue light which signaled that the ultraviolet lamps were on.

McPherson fidgeted impatiently.

Standing beside him in the narrow compartment, Catherine murmured, “
Patience, mon amour.
”

She had been trying to teach Hi some conversational French, but he was not a fast learner. He had decided, though, that taking time to learn his wife’s language was a good way to keep his mind diverted from the struggle for survival they were facing.

“
Oui
,” he replied.

Catherine laughed, a delightful sound in his ears. “Conversation in French.
Merveilleux
.”

He grinned back at her.

Then the blue light winked off and they heard the clatter of the pump sucking the air out of the chamber. The green light turned amber. The sound of the pump grew fainter and higher-pitched. Then it quit altogether and the panel’s red light showed that the airlock was now in vacuum.

Clicking off his suit radio, Hi leaned close enough to Catherine so that their helmets touched. “I was thinking,” he whispered, his voice carried to her ears by conduction, “that we could turn the auxiliary airlock into a honeymoon suite.”

She looked surprised, but then she smiled and nodded. “Tonight.”

“
Ce soir
,” he agreed.

Then he pressed a gloved finger on the control button and the hatch swung open. They stepped out onto the surface of Mars.

November 8, 2035

12:24 Universal Time

Mars Landing Plus 3 Days

Elysium Planitia

I’ve seen this before, somewhere,
McPherson thought as he and Catherine stood outside the airlock. The hint of familiarity tugged at his memory.

The plain that humans had named Elysium stretched out to the horizon and beyond. Although McPherson knew it was well below freezing outside his suit, the area looked warm, almost inviting, with the Sun shining bountifully out of the cloudless sky.

All around them was rusty desert in shades of orange and red. The ground undulated, dipping here and there in little gulleys, rising in sinuous mounds. Rocks and pebbles were sprinkled everywhere, some of them as big as a compact automobile. Very few craters, although he noticed some pockmarks, as if fingertips had been poked into the sand. Off by the horizon was a row of reddish bare hills, their flanks creased with furrows.

Pointing to the hills, Catherine said, “Water flowed there once, long ago.”

“Water, or some other kind of liquid,” he replied.

“Water.” She had made up her mind.

Absolutely barren, McPherson saw. Not a tree or a bush or even a blade of grass.

“Well, there’s no water here now.”

“Below the ground,” said Catherine. “Permafrost. The satellite sensors showed it.”

Nodding inside his helmet, McPherson thought that the earlier satellite readings
indicated
the presence of permafrost below the surface. They didn’t prove it. And they didn’t show how deep underground the ice might be.

“I’ve been here before,” he murmured.

“
Quoi
?” What?

Searching his memory, McPherson realized, “Arizona. Up in the Navaho territory. It looks like this.”

“Truly?”

Chuckling, he explained, “Oh, the badlands out there look like a Garden of Eden compared to this. But the feeling is the same. Not desolation, but . . . well, a stark kind of beauty.”

“I prefer Tahiti,” said Catherine. “Even with the tourists.”

McPherson laughed. “No tourists here.”

“Not yet.”

She started toward the
Hercules
, standing against the butterscotch sky, but McPherson touched her arm and pointed off toward their right.

“Let’s go this way,” he said. “We’ve seen the area between here and the lander. Let’s go someplace different.”

Catherine couldn’t shrug inside her surface suit, but he heard it in her voice. “If you wish.”

A little over an hour later, Catherine and Hi were making good progress eastward. They had no roving vehicle, so their exploration was limited to how far their feet could take hem. Both carried sample collection bags slung over their shoulders, high-resolution cameras tucked into their leg pouches and spindly-looking ExtendArms clipped to their right wrists. Their prime objective was to locate and mark any sites that looked promising for finding water ice.

Catherine suddenly gasped. “Look! A stream bed!”

It certainly looked like the bed of a stream that had dried up long ago, McPherson thought. Like an arroyo in the Arizona desert, waiting for the next cloudburst to fill it with rushing water.
There hasn’t been a cloudburst here for a billion years or more
, he knew.
But here it is, like it’s been waiting for us to discover it.

Catherine began picking up rocks with her ExtendArm implement. Electronically slaved to the movements of her right hand, it allowed her to pick up rocks without needing to bend over or kneel on the Martian sand, potentially damaging her suit.

She held up one of the smooth, rounded pebbles in her gloved left hand. “Eroded by water flow,” she pronounced, holding it up for McPherson to examine.

“We’ll have to check their chemical composition,” he said, “see if there’s phosphates or other indicators of water.”

“Indeed,” Catherine said, stuffing the samples into the collection bag she carried slung over her shoulder. “Indeed.”

Looking beyond her, McPherson saw a curved ridge of rock that rose a few centimeters above the sand. Ancient crater rim? he asked himself. Leaving Catherine in the arroyo, he went to the rim and started chipping out samples of its rock.

“Two hours,” Connover’s voice sounded in their helmets.

“Already?” cried Catherine.

“Stow what you’ve picked up in the ascent stage,” Ted commanded, “then come back in.”

“Too soon!” Catherine pleaded. “Another hour, please. Thirty minutes, at least.”

McPherson couldn’t see her face, her back was to him. But he heard the plaintive supplication in her voice, like a child begging her father to be allowed to stay up just a few minutes more.

Connover replied, “Thirty minutes, Catherine, and that’s
it
. No arguments.”

“No arguments,” she said gratefully. “
Merci
.”

They rode the elevator up to the
Hercules
’ airlock and, after spending nearly an hour carefully labeling each sample case with the precise location and date of its collection, they sealed their finds in the spacecraft’s lockers. Both Catherine and Hi kept about half the samples they had picked up. They intended to study them in the habitat’s miniature geology lab.

As they trudged back to the habitat, McPherson looked back at the plain of Elysium. Their footprints looked new and bright in the reddish sand. But not strange, not intrusive.
It’s like we belong here,
he thought.
It’s like Mars has been waiting for us to show up.

He smiled at the thought.

November 10, 2035

18:40 Universal Time

Mars Landing Plus 5 Days

Dirksen Senate Office Building

Senator William Donaldson sat sourly behind his imposing desk, absently swirling a heavy crystal glass of single-malt scotch in one hand as he scowled at the big flat panel TV screen set into the wall above his office’s fireplace.

The fireplace was strictly for show, it had never been lit, as far as Donaldson knew. And what was playing on the TV screen was strictly for show, too, he knew. A big, stupid public relations show promoting those idiots on Mars.

Two of them were out in the open, wearing their white suits and helmets. But the suits weren’t lily-white anymore. Five days out on the sands of Mars and the suits were turning pink, especially their boots and leggings, and their gloves.

“The atmosphere here on Mars is so thin,” the male astronaut was saying from inside his helmet, “that water boils away immediately, even though the temperature is well below freezing.”

“Having that damned news reporter with them makes it all look completely ridiculous,” Donaldson grumbled to the trio of aides who were watching the broadcast with him.