one another.
The Russian did most of the driving; Jamie did most of the outside work. They covered little more than a hundred kilometers the first day out, driving only during the daylight hours. The dull upland plain of their landing site quickly gave way to the rougher terrain of Noctis Fossae, crisscrossed with cracks and faults like the battlefield of two entrenched armies.
The badlands grew much more rugged, until they were threading through a jagged stony forest of rock spires that loomed high above them; rock pillars carved into eerie sculptures that reminded Jamie of wildly abstract totem poles. The wind’s eroded away the soft stone and left these pillars of granitic stuff standing, he told himself. Then he realized that the gentle winds of Mars had to work for hundreds of millions of years to carve their magic this way.
For hours they drove through the towering spires of stone. Jamie sat fascinated, staring, waiting to see symbols of eagles or bears scratched into the rock.
The crevasses ran generally north-south, which made their southward journeying easier, but with the rocks that seemed to cover the ground everywhere, and the craters and spires and sand dunes, they seldom reached a speed of even thirty kilometers per hour.
Like driving a pickup on reservation land, Jamie said to himself as they rode jouncing through the desolate country. Except there are no roads at all. Not even a trail or an animal track.
They stopped virtually every hour. Jamie would go outside in his sky-blue hard suit to take rock and soil samples and plant an automated meteorology/geology beacon that would measure air temperature and pressure, humidity, wind velocity, and record heat flow coming up from underground, as well as any seismic activity. The beacon sent its signal to the pair of spacecraft hovering in synchronous orbit some twenty thousand kilometers above the equator. The communications equipment aboard the spacecraft automatically relayed the signals both to their base camp and back to Earth.
Despite the rover’s pressurized interior both Jamie and Vosnesensky found themselves living inside their hard suits. The Russian went strictly by the mission rules that said he had to be suited up whenever Jamie went outside, in case an emergency arose. More often than not, the cosmonaut came out with Jamie. At first he busied himself with inspecting the rover’s exterior: the wheels, the antennas, the way the iron-rich Martian sand powdered the finish of the rover’s skin.
By the second morning, though, it seemed to Jamie that Vosnesensky came outside merely to have some human company and to enjoy the scenery.
'You say your New Mexico looks like this?' the Russian asked.
Jamie heard his voice in his helmet earphones. Bent stiffly over a waist-deep gully that exposed a seam of basaltic rock, he said, 'Yep. Cliffs and arroyos-canyons. Clear skies. Not much rain.'
'It must be very barren, then.'
Smiling to himself, Jamie replied, 'Compared to this it’s the Garden of Eden.'
The Russian fell silent.
Jamie straightened up and took the video camera from his belt. The gully ran all the way out to the horizon, almost as straight as train tracks except for some slumping here and there where the ground had slid down to partially fill it in. A fault line, Jamie recognized. The area’s crisscrossed with them. But this one’s been eroded by running water. Had to be. Or mass wasting, permafrost melting beneath the surface and undermining everything. But when? There’s been no liquid water around here for hundreds of millions of years, most likely. Could a rill remain unchanged all that time?
He returned the camcorder to its clip on his belt and went to work chipping at the exposed rock ledge. Then he put the samples into a pouch and picked up the drill. As usual, the drill bit into the ground easily for the first meter or so, then hit resistance. Permafrost, thought Jamie. This whole region is sitting on top of a frozen ocean just a few feet below the surface. Once he had pulled the core sample from the drill bit and carefully deposited it in a sample case, he started back toward the rover.
Vosnesensky was standing there watching in his fire-engine red hard suit.
'Okay,' Jamie said. 'I’m finished here. All I’ve got to do is…'
He realized that the Russian had already taken one of his sensor beacons from the equipment bay in the rover’s middle section. Jamie took it from him.
'Thanks, Mikhail.'
He could sense the man’s shrug. 'I had nothing better to do.'
'Thanks,' Jamie repeated.
Minutes later they were back in the rover’s cockpit, Vosnesensky in the left seat. They had both removed their helmets and gloves; their hard suits bulked in the cockpit’s bucket seats like a pair of brightly colored armor- plated polar bears.
Vosnesensky steered between a boulder the size of a small house and a shallow circular depression that looked to Jamie like the weathered fossil of an ancient meteor crater. The Russian had small, almost delicate hands, Jamie noticed. He maneuvered the tiny steering wheel with nothing more than a fingertip’s pressure.
'We should reach the canyons today,' he said, 'if we do not have to make more stops.'
Jamie took the hint. 'We’ll stop only to fill in the net of beacons. Of course, if there’s some important change in the landforms…'
Vosnesensky smiled slightly without turning his eyes away from his driving. 'Of course.'
Jamie tried to settle back and get comfortable, but the hard shell of the pressure suit was not meant to sit in. The damned armpit was still chafing despite the padding he had packed into it. He watched the landscape unrolling as they drove slowly toward the strangely close horizon. It bothered him, seeing the horizon so near. Almost frightened him down at the subliminal level where nightmares take root. Jamie felt as if they were driving toward the edge of a cliff.
'The horizon looks awfully close, doesn’t it?' he said to Vosnesensky.
The Russian bobbed his head once. 'The smaller the planet the shorter the horizon. It is even closer on the moon.'
'I’ve never been to the moon.'
'Much closer than here. And much more barren.'
DiNardo had been on the moon, Jamie knew. I was called in so suddenly I never got farther off the Earth than the space stations until we started out for Mars.
He forced his attention away from the too-close horizon and concentrated on the land they were driving through. To anyone but a geologist the scenery would have looked dull, monotonous, barren. But Jamie’s mind was leaping from rock to fault crack, crater to sand dune, trying to puzzle out the forces that had shaped this land, sculpted it into its present form.
'I have flown over New Mexico,' Vosnesensky said, almost as if to himself. 'In the Mir 3 space station, while training for this mission.'
'Then you saw how much it looks like Mars.'
'I did not realize it at the time. I did not pay sufficient attention.'
Jamie studied the Russian’s face. He was dead serious, as always. Somber. Grim.
'Did you always want to be a cosmonaut?' Jamie asked suddenly. 'Ever since you were a little child?'
Vosnesensky swiveled his head toward Jamie for an instant, then immediately turned back to look ahead. The expression on his face, fleetingly, was almost angry.
I shouldn’t have asked, Jamie thought. He resents my prying into his personal history.
But the Russian muttered, 'When I was very little, before starting school even, I wanted to be a cosmonaut. To me it meant everything. Gagarin was my hero; I wanted to be like him.'
'The first man in space.'
Vosnesensky nodded again, another single curt bob of his head.
'Gagarin was first in orbit. Armstrong was first on the moon. I told myself I would be first on Mars.'
'And you were.'
'Yes.'
'You must feel very proud about it.'
The cosmonaut glanced at Jamie again. 'Proud, yes. Maybe even happy. But that moment has passed. Now I feel the responsibility. I am in charge. I am responsible for all your lives.'
