returned from the last run from the base to MS 88, having been cleaned from dust as thoroughly as possible in the pre-airlock chamber, and finally having got rid of the spacesuit which tired one out during the day and breathed the almost real air, Andrey and Sergey used their last efforts to take a shower of damp reusable napkins, had a quick meal and went to bed.
Having dumped half of the cave with modules and containers, they started to work by turns. The technology of assembling was worked out back on Earth: the construction reminded of several huge tourist tents with a complicated frame, connected with small lock tunnels between themselves.
The material consisted of many layers with cellular structure and somehow reminded of light and flexible armor…
The MS-88 spaceship itself stood not far from the edge of the canyon, the magnetic field, combined with numerous technologies of Russian military rockets, made it practically invisible both from the Earth and from most orbital and space telescopes.
They could see their rocket through a unique color filter integrated into the helmet in the suit of each person – each “Martian”, but not farther than a couple of kilometers from it.
Among the dead and oppressive silence of the Red Planet, the spaceship on its surface sometimes seemed a sort of a monument.
When Andrey looked at it, he suddenly remembered the other monuments on the launch site:
Back on Earth, he often went to the object “Pero” (“Feather”) to accept elements of the outfit for MS-88. In those times, the roads in that part of the launch site were even better than in Moscow.
The object itself was quite an ordinary military airfield. Why was it called in such an interesting way? Because it could not accept all kinds of planes, especially heavy ones, so it was light like a feather, hence the name. It had just one runway… Why should it have two or more, like large civil ones?
On the whole, servicemen liked to give beautiful, sometimes mysterious names to different objects, weapons, separate blocks and devices.
One of the radars was called “Storm”, different types of radio stations were called after flowers or plants: “Acacia” or “Birch”, and there were hundreds or even thousands of these beautiful names…
The road was stretching along the same huge Archangelsk taiga. Near a small fork it went to the right, and then it was ideally straight right to the airfield.
Sometimes, in the green triangle between the roads with no asphalt on it, Andrey noticed soldiers digging something.
There was a lot of work, and a great deal of constructing or digging was done on the launch site itself.
Once he was overcome by curiosity and stopped. About 5 soldiers were digging in quite a deep square trench, several soldiers stood on the surface smoking. Everybody had blue shoulder straps and blue tabs with stylized propellers on them.
Andrey came out and greeted them not exactly according to the regulations: Hello, military men! Hey, pilots, and why are you digging when there is a large construction battalion? The pilots with spades tried to salute, but Andrey waved his hand, as if saying: we are not on the drill field…The sergeant without a spade– the diggers’ commander – said: Well, Major, there will be a monument here.
Andrey frowned: there were several monuments on the launch site, and the saddest one was erected to 48 soldiers and officers from the launch crew of a regular “Vostok-2M” who were burned alive or later died of burns. The rocket was one of the most reliable ones, but during preparation for launch there was an explosion and fire burst out: about 200 tons of rocket fuel components were burning; it was a real Hell on Earth. The launch crew was surely much larger than 48 persons. The people burning alive, asphyxiating from deadly vapors, oxygen, kerosene and other chemicals, helped each other; officers, sergeants and soldiers, standing in the safe distance, rushed to help their dying comrades, and somebody died while helping…
The rocket engineers performed their military duties, and not only them, until the end, at the cost of their lives. The monument to those perished was erected near the launch pad where it all happened and in a small park by the lake in cosmodrome’s main camp – Mirny.
Though the town was the closest one, they say that the relatives of those who perished were allowed to come and stay to live there, near their deceased sons, husbands and brothers.
And who is this monument to? The sergeant replied: it’s not to a person… There will be a MI-4 helicopter here, it will be installed by 30-year anniversary of the launch site. In the technical and operational unit of our regiment there are two of them, they were written off and now stand almost disassembled. One will be assembled and put here. And the construction battalion builds larger and more serious objects, and it’s less than a kilometer here to our unit…
The surging remembrances of the Earth and the endless greenery of Arkhangelsk taiga disappeared. There was the same reddish-grey, sad and silent Martian landscape around.
The base was almost ready – the living modules were tested many times in the working mode and were now set to function automatically, without participation of any crew members.
It was something like the earthly summer on Mars, and at daytime the temperature in the valley of Marinera reached almost + 2 °C. The samples of the most alluring stones and ground from the planet surface have been collected and packed in sealed containers with reliable biological protection.
In a few days they mounted a mobile drilling rig and in a week drilled several wells with the depth of up to thirty meters within a kilometer range from the rocket.
There is so much to do here for real geologists or miners…
They brought a part of samples into the living module in the cave and gave the others to Marina for preliminary research. The biggest part was loaded into a special unit, the most protected one on MS 88, designed for the samples of Mars which did not seem so mysterious any more.
They worked, or now we can probably say – they lived in a group of just four on a big and empty planet. Just one could not go fishing or picking mushrooms to the forest, and the girls wanted to sunbathe and swim in the sea, or at least in a tiny shallow river.
Once Andrey proposed to embellish the dreary landscape a little bit: Brothers Martians! And what if we draw a four-letter word on the ground with our mars rovers? So that it could be seen from the Earth or some orbital telescope?
Can you imagine that?! A set of several thousand photos arrives to NASA, they start analyzing and studying them, and suddenly they see: FUCK you NASA! The scientist would probably faint – at once or a little later.
Svetka laughed: Andrey, you are not only a space maniac, but also a space rowdy!
Having finished laughing, Sergey said: No! The one who will notice this ”FUCK” will probably be dismissed… He will go to the higher bosses to report, and they will think he is making fun of them! Like he wrote it himself and inserted in the photo!
That’s the way they worked, lived and had fun, alone on the big silent planet.
-11-
The program, envisaged by the project MS 88, was gradually drawing to a close. There was one thing left: a long return to the Earth.
The part of Mars near the spaceship which stood there for too long and entrance to the lava tube where they made the base was now very familiar, but not native or even close. The only place where one wanted to stay for a longer time was the lava tunnel itself.
And it was not the section near the base: the longer went the pair of explorers, the calmer and more peaceful they felt, as if its many-meter thick walls protected not only from the radiation that pierced through Mars and dust storms, but also from something stronger and more ruthless – the time.
Sveta and Marina also liked to wander in it sometimes, not far from the base, and once asked the boys to take them farther, to the places which even Sergey and Andrey did not visit.
The tunnel reminded a little of lava tubes on the Hawaii, but they were real tubes back there! And here it was a huge tunnel, one hundred or sometimes more meters wide. Sometimes it contracted by ten times and became almost a metro tunnel, then it spread into the unknown, on all sides at once.
In the lowest parts of the tunnel, small basalt stalactites reminding of a skin of huge pineapples hung from above. Also, there were a lot of lava posts. There was not a single one near the base, but if you walked about two hundred meters inside the tunnel, they appeared even in groups, not like on Earth.
At first they were small and stood in pairs. Then they made groups of four and looked like a regular square,
