Not a big surprise, really, in retrospect. Any hiker in the American west was tramping over lands where once tyrannosaurus and bison had wandered, but seldom did anybody notice a bone sticking out of the ground. Julia was more systematic and probed deeper in the obvious places, where water had once silted up and could have trapped recently dead organisms. Algal mats, perhaps, as with the first big life-forms on Earth. But she had no luck, even in a year and a half of snooping into myriad canyons and promising beds of truly ancient lakes. That didn’t mean life wasn’t somewhere on the planet. It had been warm and moist here for a billion years, enough for life to evolve, even if Mars had not supported surface life for perhaps three billion or more years.
She stamped her feet to help the circulation. Space heaters in the rover ran off the methane-oxy burn, but as always, the floor was cold. Mars never let you forget where you were.
She tried to envision how it must have been here, billions of years ago. This was her cliché daydream, trying to impose on the arid red wastes the romance of what they could have been, once upon a time.
Did life give way with a grudging struggle, trying every possible avenue before retreating underground or disappearing?
The planet did not die for want of heat or air, but of mass. With greater gravity it could have held on to the gases its volcanoes vented, prevented its water vapor from escaping into vacuum. Recycling of carbon didn’t happen on Mars, the CO2 was lost to carbonate rocks. The atmosphere thinned, the planet cooled…
Split from hydrogen by the sun’s stinging ultraviolet, the energetic oxygen promptly mated with the waiting iron in the rocks. The shallow gravitational well failed. Light hydrogen blew away into the yawning vastness of empty space. The early carbon dioxide fused into the rocks, bound forever as carbonate. Had Mars been nearer the sun, the sunlight and warmth would simply have driven water away faster.
So those early life-forms must have fought a slow, agonizing retreat. There were eras when lakes and even shallow, muddy seas had hosted simple life—Marc’s cores had uncovered plenty of ancient silted plains, now compressed into sedimentary rock. But no fossil forests, nothing with a backbone, nothing with shells or hard body parts. If higher forms had basked in the ancient warmth here, they had left no trace.
The squat hab came into view in the salmon sunset.
They had landed in the ancient flat bottom of Gusev Crater, whose distant ramparts reared over a kilometer into the rosy sky. A hundred fifty klicks across, Gusev was a geologist’s playground.
One of astronomy’s more arcane pleasures was eclectic naming. Gusev was a mini-United Nations. To the south lay the Ma’adim Vallis, “Martian Valley” in Arabic. Gusev himself had been a nineteenth-century Russian astronomer. Some French Planetary scientists working for the Americans had given the small crater near their base the Greek name Thyra.
She could see the slumped peaks of Thyra as she headed south. One of the major reasons to land here had been a tantalizing dark spot on Thyra’s southern rim. Under telepresence guidance from Earth, Rover Boy had found promising signs that the spot was a salt flat left by a thermal vent. True enough, but when they arrived they found that the site had not given off anything for maybe half a billion years. A crushing disappointment, that first month. But if there had been venting, maybe there was still, nearby. She had lived with that ebbing hope for a year and a half.
Well, now she had her vent. And it had injured Viktor within a few minutes.
Looking like a giant’s drum, seven meters high and eight meters across, the hab—their former command module—stood off the ground on sturdy metal struts. Sandbags on the roof cut their radiation exposure. Inside, the two stacked decks had the floor space of a smallish condo, their home for the last twenty months. A thousand carefully arranged square feet. Not for the claustrophobic, but they would certainly be nostalgic for it in the cramped quarters of the Return Vehicle they would shortly be boarding.
By now the hab was familiar to billions of Earthbound TV viewers and Net surfers. Everyone on Earth had the opportunity to follow their adventures, which were beamed daily from Ground Control and carried on the evening news. Their webpage registered over a hundred million hits in the week following the landing. Mars had ceased to be space and had become a place.
Raoul and Marc climbed down out of the hab as she approached in the last slanting rays of a ruddy sunset, two chubby figures in dark parka suits. Only Raoul’s slight limp from frostbitten toes distinguished them. The tracker system had alerted them. Thanks to the mission planners, they would not have to carry Viktor in. The rover mated directly to hab airlock.
But first, a little ceremony they had devised: salvaging water from the rover. Even with Viktor hurt, they followed procedure.
The methane-oxygen burn made carbon dioxide, which the engine vented, and pure water. She backed the rover to the conical return ship. The gaudy NASA emblem they had completely covered with a plated-on, red-on-white MARS CONSORTIUM in wrap-around letters a meter high. Axelrod had made a point of including that thumb-in-your-eye gesture in the payload.
Outside, Raoul and Marc hooked the water condensers to the input lines, so the chem factory inside could store it. They had full tanks of methane and oxygen for the liftoff, but water was always welcome, after the parching they had taken on the long flight here.
They waved to her. Their little rituals; the guys made the gesture as a way of saying “welcome home.” In the bleak, rusty dusk, the cold of night biting already through to her, the symbolism was important. Mars was sharp, cold, and unrelenting, and they all felt it to the bone.
4
APRIL 2015
“VIKTOR, YOU SHOULD GET OUT, GO FOR A WALK.”
“Thank you, no.”
Julia walked around to where he sat on the couch, watching a news channel in Russian. The story seemed to be about the latest shuffling of governments. From her very limited Russian, Julia gathered that somebody had been president for the total span of three hours.
“You can’t just veg out like this.”
“Vegetables have right to be left alone. Plant liberation.”
“I thought if we both go to Axelrod, explain how well we work together—”
“Work? Is what you call single entendre meaning?”
She got up and paced, not liking this edgy humor of his, but in an odd way respecting it. No astronaut was built to take failure. They all knew they could be cut from a list, and many had been.
But this list was the culmination of a lifetime, the A-grade ticket. Not just because everyone who returned would be wealthy—a rather new element in space careers, since NASA kept salaries at civil service levels for everybody. Because Mars was the sole destination that lifted the heart, that gave the inevitable risk a gravitas of immense historical and scientific heft.
And Viktor wasn’t going.
He sat on the couch and watched the trivid and drank dark beer. He had quite a capacity, she had to give him that. He had arranged the five bottles before him in an exact pentagonal pattern.
“Look, I’ll go to Axelrod.”
“I do not wish you to go begging for me.” He gave her a grave, owlish look.
“I don’t think four people is enough for this, anyway. I could start there—”
“Four is the design spec.”
“Look, all the thorough design studies at JSC showed—”
“That six was better. Of course is. But is not cheaper.”
“We aren’t even taking a doctor, for Chrissake, just me.”
“You have year of emergency medical training.”
