Rescue Mode - eARC (33 page)

They nodded in unison.

On the TV screen, Steven Treadway appeared to be standing between the two spacesuited astronauts. Unlike them, he was wearing his usual white shirt and slacks. Virtual reality, Donaldson snorted. Just plain stupid.

The male astronaut—identified on the bottom of the screen as geologist Hiram McPherson—was holding a small bottle of water in his gloved hand.

Treadway was saying, “Do you mean that if you uncapped that bottle you’re holding, the water would boil away? Just like that?”

“That’s right, Steve. Look.”

The TV camera moved in closer as McPherson unscrewed the bottle’s cap. As soon as he removed it the water in the bottle began to froth furiously. In seconds it was all gone.

“Wow!” said Treadway. An intellectual giant, Donaldson thought. And wasn’t there a delay? This hd to be scripted.

“And the temperature right now is . . . ?”

McPherson raised his left hand and peered at the instrument cuff on his wrist. “It’s twenty-three degrees below zero, Steve. An average summer afternoon on Mars.”

“But the air pressure is so low that the water boils, even at such a low temperature.”

“That’s right, Steve.”

“Turn it off,” Donaldson snapped. “I’ve seen enough.”

The pert young woman who headed the senator’s public relations staff picked the remote from a corner of the senator’s desk and clicked the TV screen to darkness.

“Publicity stunt,” Donaldson grumbled.

“Yeah,” said his chief of staff, a pudgy, short, balding New Englander with a pouchy-eyed face that masked a keen analytical mind. He had successfully guided Donaldson through many political campaigns. “But that trick of writing your name in the sand with a magnet, that’s pretty neat.”

“Tomfoolery,” Donaldson groused.

“The sand’s loaded with iron,” said his third aide, his techie guru.

“A striking image,” said the PR woman.

Donaldson looked at them the way Julius Caesar must have looked at Brutus, at that last instant.

“Whose side are you people on?” he demanded.

“Yours, of course,” said his chief of staff. His normally cheerful round face was quite serious. As he sat up straighter in his chair his unbuttoned suit jacket flapped open around his corpulent middle.

“But this stuff coming from Mars is a real problem,” said the PR person. “Audiences have been tremendous, even with the religious groups that want the mission canceled.”

“A lot of kids, though,” the chief of staff said. “They don’t vote.”

The PR person was a light-skinned Hispanic woman. “Great publicity for the Mars people. The numbers show overwhelming support for sending the next mission out there to save their lives.”

Donaldson remembered the three laws of politics enunciated by the man for whom this Senate Office Building had been named, Ohio Senator Everett Dirksen. His three laws were: Get elected. Get reelected. Don’t get mad, get even.

“All right,” he said, putting his drink down on the green Vermont marble coaster atop his desk. “What do we do about this?”

His chief of staff said, “Harper’s going to ask you to reinstate funding for the follow-on mission.”

“I know that. What do we do about it?”

“You can’t oppose it,” the PR director said. “You’d look like an insensitive know-nothing.”

“Or a murderer,” said the tech guru.

Donaldson glared at him.

His chief of staff hauled himself out of the chair and headed for the bar, hidden behind a row of false book spines.

“You’ve got to give the appearance of going along with the follow-on mission,” he told the senator, over his shoulder.

“Give the appearance of caving in to Harper? Never!”

Bending over to pick a bottle of ginger ale from the bar’s refrigerator, the chief of staff said, “You want the party’s nomination next year? You go along with the follow-on. QED.”

“Never,” Donaldson repeated, but more softly.

With an amiable smile on his moon face, the staff chief said, “It’s politics, William. You’ve got to give something to get something.”

Donaldson frowned as his longtime friend and advisor settled himself back in his chair.

“After all,” the man went on, “you at least have to give the impression that you’re willing to bend in order to try to save those four nitwits on Mars.”

“Give the impression,” Donaldson muttered.

“You ask your subcommittee to study the possibility of replacing the funding for the follow-on. You tell the NASA people to appear before the subcommittee and lay out their plans for the mission, together with their best estimate for its chance of success.”

Donaldson nodded slowly.

“These things take time, of course. Drag it out until the party’s convention next July. Then, once you’ve got the nomination in your pocket, you just let the follow-on die a natural death. Who knows, by then those people on Mars might be dead anyway and most people will have forgotten all about the chemicals that the Chinese claim to have found.”

Donaldson glanced at his PR director, who gave the idea a tentative smile. “It could work,” she said.

The tech guru looked less happy.

“As president,” the chief of staff said, “you can see to it that we build a monument to the four dead heroes.”

Donaldson added, “As president, I’ll make sure we don’t waste any more money on sending people to Mars.”

November 15, 2035

07:14 Universal Time

Mars Landing Plus 10 Days

The
Arrow

Sitting in the command center, Benson held one of the Mars rocks in his hands. It had been sitting in an airtight plastic pouch in one of the ascent stage’s lockers, together with a scribbled note signed by Catherine and Hi:

Bee—Thanks for everything.

Here’s a remembrance for you. Bon voyage.

After thanking them, Benson got detailed instructions from Amanda Lynn on how to handle the rock. To prevent any possible contamination of the
Arrow
, she explained, the rock had to be heated to more than two hundred seventy-five degrees Fahrenheit for more than thirty minutes, long enough to kill any known bacteria, viruses or prions. Only then would it be safe to handle it in the ship’s open air. As the mission’s resident biologist, Amanda took an almost proprietary interest in the rock’s “care and feeding.”

Now Benson held the rock in his bare hands. It fit into his palm easily, a smooth oblong rust-red stone with flecks of pale gray spotting it. He couldn’t help marveling at it.

He held it up to the light for the umpteenth time, trying in vain to see something different about it, something exotic or alien.

It just looks like a rock,
he concluded. It would take trained geologists with their specialized instruments to see if there’ was anything extraordinary about it.

Swiveling his command chair slightly, he called, “Taki, would you come over here, please?”

The ship’s doctor was, by default, their chief biologist now that Amanda was down on the surface. She looked up from the console where she’d been checking the
Arrow
’s life-support system and pushed over to Benson.

“What’s up, Bee?” she asked as she grasped the back of his chair to stop herself.

“Have you found any signs of life in the samples you’ve cultured so far?”

She grinned at him. “If I had you would have known it by now. My whoop would probably be heard all the way back to Earth.”

Benson nodded. “Yes, I imagine so.”

More seriously, Nomura said, “No, so far all the cultures are negative. If there’s anything alive in these samples it’s not responding to any of the tests I know how to do. If there were any Earthlike bacteria, even just a few, the tests would have shown it in a matter of minutes. No viruses, either, as far as I can tell. I’m running a test for prions back in the bio lab right now, but I don’t expect any positive results.”

“Well, keep me posted, will you? I can hardly bring myself to put this one down. I keep expecting to see some little green creature wriggling out of it.”

With a laugh, Nomura replied, “If you see one, you let me know.”

“Right,” said Benson. Then, his tone darkening, “I hate to change the subject, but how’s Mikhail doing?”

“Today is a better day. He ate a full breakfast and he’s talking about resuming some of his shipboard duties. He wants to help with our departure for Earth. I think you should let him.”

“Good idea. I can task him with some of the checklists. He’s cross-trained for that, and it shouldn’t strain him too much. Besides, it won’t mess things up too much if he gets distracted.”

“Just make sure it’s meaningful, Bee,” said Nomura. “He’s no dummy. If it’s just a makework task he’ll know you’re humoring him and he’ll feel hurt.”

“Encourage him, not discourage him,” Benson said.

“That’s the ticket.” Nomura floated away from the chair and started for the hatch. “I’ll help him get dressed for duty. I’ll have him back here in about half an hour.”

“Right.” Benson watched Taki glide through the hatch, then turned and rested the rock atop the control panel, where he could see it as he worked. They were planning to break out of Mars orbit in two days and there was a lot to take care of before then.

Twenty-some minutes later, he head Prokhorov’s raspy voice. “Reporting for duty, Commander.”

Turning, Benson smiled to see the Russian standing as stiffly as he could in zero gravity, his right hand raised to his brow, a crooked smile on his lips. Prokhorov looked almost painfully thin: his coveralls hung on his gaunt frame like an oversized sheet. His face was pale and his cheekbones more prominent than they had been a few weeks earlier.

Benson returned the salute and said, “At ease, Mikhail,” going along with Prokhorov’s parody of military etiquette.

The Russian relaxed, floating weightlessly off the deck a few centimeters.

“How do you feel?”

“Not quite ready for the Olympics,” Prokhorov answered. “But I can work.”

“Fine. We’re leaving in two days and I can use all the help I can get. We’re shorthanded for the return trip, you know, with Ted and the others down on the surface.”

“What do you want me to do?”

Benson handed him a thick sheaf of checklists. “I need you to check out every item on these lists before we break orbit and start for home. It’s dog work but it needs to be done. Can you do that?”

Prokhorov glanced at the lists. “Aye-aye, sir!”

Benson grinned at him. “Right. Then get to work, sailor.”

November 16, 2035

10:56 Universal Time

Mars Landing Plus 11 Days

Elysium Planitia

Amanda Lynn slowly turned three hundred and sixty degrees, surveying the terrain with eager eyes.

“Pirouetting?” asked Connover.

“Yeah,” she teased. “Want to dance?”

This was Amanda’s third excursion outside the habitat, but the first she’d done with Connover. Mission protocol prohibited anyone going outside alone. Even so, one of the two people remaining inside had to suit up and prebreathe low-pressure oxygen, in case there was an emergency that required an extra pair of hands.

“I’m no Fred Astaire,” he wisecracked back at her, “but I bet I could do pretty well in this low gravity.”

“Or on the Moon, even better.”

Connover got a sudden flash of himself dancing with Vicki in the Moon’s one-sixth gravity.
Fred and Ginger
, he said to himself.

Amanda started walking toward the dessicated stream bed that Catherine and Hi had discovered. Connover trudged along behind her, carrying the core sampler over one shoulder.

“We should have placed the habitat farther north, up by the edge of the ice cap,” she complained. “Better chance of finding something there.”

“Something alive, you mean?” Ted asked, trudging along beside her.

“Or like the chemicals the Chinese found. Amino acids, PAHs, stuff like that. But what I’d really like to find are fossils. That would be a clear sign that more complex life once existed here.”

He felt his brows knitting. “How could you tell something’s a fossil when you don’t know what Martian life forms might look like?”

Amanda went silent for a few steps. “Well,” she said at last, “if it’s got legs, that’s a pretty good clue.”

“But what about microbes? Bacteria, single-cells organisms? They don’t have legs.”

“They leave chemical traces, like an elevated level of carbon twelve, or PAHs.”

“PAHs?”

“Polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons. They’re precursor compounds, tarry, sticky stuff that helps to glue bigger molecules together. It’d be hard to build up really big molecules, like amino acids or proteins, without them.”

“And carbon twelve?”

“The lightest isotope of carbon. Living organisms take up carbon twelve, in preference to the heavier forms of carbon. Find rocks or soil samples with a higher level of carbon twelve than normal, you’ve probably found the remnants of life.”

“Yeah, but how do we know what’s normal here on Mars?”

Even through her helmet visor, Ted could see the flash of Amanda’s grin. “That’s what we’re here to find out.”

Connover shook his head inside his helmet. “Well, anyway, I’ll settle for finding water.”

“Ice,” Amanda corrected.

“Yeah, right.”

“This is the fossil stream bed Catherine marked out,” she said.

“The arroyo, yeah,” said Ted, as he began to unlimber the core sampler. “Time to get to work.”

The sampler was a piece of specialized, Mars-unique engineering. Unlike a bulky, heavy traditional drill that would grind its way through the surface layers of sand and rock, the sampler was more like a mole. Only about a foot long, it looked like a mechanical bean bag.

Ted set it upright on its built-in mount and worked its head about six inches into the sand. Motioning Amanda to stand back, he thumbed the button that activated the tool.

Bam bam bam! Bam bam bam!
The sampler began to alternately shorten and lengthen itself as it burrowed into the ground. In less than a minute it disappeared from their view.

“So this is one of the toys our geologists play with?” Amanda asked.