She had developed a whole category of such matters. It helped to know that she was not accepting defeat, just putting off a battle.
Raoul looked pensive. “Well…okay. A while ago, I was going to say that I do want to go over the thruster assembly again. Some pressure releases might need adjustment after that misfired burn.” He hurried on, “But I can do it alone.”
Julia understood that Raoul wished to take responsibility for the repairs, needed to have time alone with his handiwork. He would be just as happy not to have two itchy scientists underfoot. Then he could take as much time as he liked, obsess over every detail.
A long moment passed. They skirted the edge of a rift.
Finally Viktor nodded agreement. He had followed Julia’s arguments carefully, hoping to be convinced. Now he snapped back into mission commander mode. “Da. All right. Two days only.”
Julia’s heart soared. She flashed him a brilliant smile, leaned over, and ignoring mission discipline, gave him a big kiss. Spending one final night in a hellishly cold rover would be the price, but well worth it. They all beamed at her and she saw that the many currents between them had suddenly, unaccountably, met and merged.
Worn down they might all be, yet there was a bond between them now that none could express.
She restrained herself from kissing every one of them.
17
JANUARY 18, 2018
THEY SET OUT THE NEXT DAY AFTER LUNCH. THE PANORAMA OF GUSEV crater opened before them as they moved north across the rumpled, pitted floor that told, to a practiced eye, a story running back over billions of years. She watched closely the shifting scenery in its lurid pinks and rusty splashes, knowing she was seeing it for the last time. Somehow, each vista seemed fresh.
The Mars Outpost program, starting in 2009, had left at the site several long-lived robotic scientific experiments, the Rover Boy, and a small chem plant that sucked carbon dioxide from the atmosphere to make methane and oxygen. Above the outpost orbited three communication satellites, supplying constant contact with Earth. With several more satellites left over for navigation and surveillance of the area, Earth had known just about as much about the Gusev Crater region as it could without putting people on the ground. Maps galore. But all that technology had missed the most important facet: the wonder of it.
Nearly four billion years before, a huge asteroid had splashed into the crust here, opening a deep crater that nothing had been able to fill. To the south, as the highlands drained of water, a deep channel called the Ma’adim Vallis had cut through the kilometer-high crater wall, flooding it. A cooling lake had stood here for many tens of thousands of years—so Marc said, after careful study of his corings. It might have lapped at the highest cliffs. White-water rapids rushed from the highlands, sending great sheets foaming down in roaring waterfalls. Then the big volcano to the north had erupted, spewing lava and gas and water into the crater. Several nearby impacts had sent more liquid gushing from the warmed crust. Several times the crater’s lake had frozen over, only to melt when an asteroid smash or the fitful climate of Mars allowed.
All this history was written on the ramparts that towered over them as they marched north in Red Rover. Marc had traced it all out.
“Y’know, my work here has been damned interesting,” he said as he carefully edged them over a sloping sand dune and down the face. “I can’t shake the feeling that it’s been mostly a waste, though—except for the pingos.”
“Come on!” Julia said, not taking her eyes off the moving scenery.
“No, that’s the way I feel. Take that long trek we went on, through the subsidence morphology terrain and on up the Ma’adim Vallis. I got to show that a helluva lot of water ran through there once. Measured, bored, traced out the meanders—the works. Even found some benches to prove that there were earlier floor levels, which got undercut. So there was a big river running through that valley, a thousand klicks long and a klick deep. Where did it go?”
“It’s somewhere under our feet, you told me,” Julia said helpfully, letting him run.
“Only place it could be, yeah.” Marc gazed morosely out at the ruddy cusp dunes and car-sized rocks. “I spent over a year trying to get some Mars ice, and only here at the last do I get lucky. Some geologist I am.”
She reached over and clenched his hand. He had been more closed up lately and this was more direct than he usually could be. “You worked your tail off.”
“Remember when I climbed up that wall in the Ma’adim? Thought I saw a real tributary mouth up there. Busted that tail of mine climbing four hundred meters, pinning myself to that rickety rock the whole way. I got to tell you, I was scared. Didn’t want to say so, but I was.”
“I could tell.”
“It was that obvious?”
“People say all sorts of things when they’re exhausted.”
“I was, when I got back, wasn’t I? Damn fool stunt, but we didn’t have enough gear to do it in a two-team rig.” His eyes never left their course but she could tell his inner recollection was more vivid than the rumpled plain before them. “So I violate protocols—”
“We violated them. I was holding your drop line.”
“—risk my stubborn neck, and it turns out it was no feeding stream at all. Just a wale. No smaller channels in the upland surface to feed the ol’ Ma’adim. No runoff, so no rainfall. Only needed one!—to prove there had been rain. Couldn’t find it.”
“There had to be rain.”
“Prove raindrops fell, four billion years later? The academics will want more than rock cores and arm-waving.”
“You’ve got the ice cores.”
“Which prove there were lakes. Sedimentary layering for sure. But the water could have oozed out of the ground. Fluid erosion features, that’s all I’ve found. No little creeks, no feeder drainage networks carving up the plains.”
“The water is hiding underground. It’s staying away from the sun, which would break it down. Smart water.”
He laughed, dispelling his own mood suddenly. “Smart water, dumb geologist.”
“It wasn’t dumb to build that enhancement on the drill.”
“Raoul’s idea, mostly.”
“But you made it work.”
“It was simple, once I thought to try it. I took too long.”
“Drilling into the pingos from the side? It wasn’t obvious to me.”
“If they’d sent a wildcatter with common sense—”
“And your first five tries failed. A wildcatter would’ve walked before that.”
