to take flying lessons. He had done well that school year, even winning academic honors now that he had given up the mechanic’s job.
That was the summer Mikhail learned that he loved flying, and flying loved him. He was good at it, very good. He took to the air as naturally as an eagle, his instructor told him. He was actually in the air on his first solo flight when his older brother was killed in a senseless accident. A drunken truck driver smashed into the city bus he was riding. Fourteen injured and one killed. Nikolai.
Somehow his parents seemed to blame Mikhail for Nikolai’s death. They raised no objection when he told them he had been accepted for cosmonaut training and would be leaving Volgograd. It was while he was in training that his mother quietly passed away in her sleep. When he went home for her funeral his father and sister treated him so coldly that Mikhail never returned.
Mikhail had not even been born when Yuri Gagarin made his epochal first flight in orbit. Vaguely, from early childhood, he recalled seeing blurry television pictures of the Americans on the moon. All through the long years of growing up he nursed the secret ambition of being the first man to set foot on Mars.
He told no one of his dream. Except once, when he was still a child, one dark autumn night while the first snow of the year gently sifted out of the sky to cover grimy old Volgograd with a clean coating of white, he spoke of it to his brother, half asleep in the bed next to his.
'Mars,' his brother said dreamily, drowsily.
'I want to be the first man on Mars,' Mikhail whispered.
'The first, no less.' Nikolai turned in his bed. 'All right, little Mickey. You can be the first. I give you my permission. Now let me sleep.'
Mikhail smiled in the darkness, and when he dreamed he dreamed about Mars.
SOL 6: AFTERNOON
They arrived at the edge of the canyons in the middle of that afternoon, exactly where Jamie had wanted, at the juncture of three broad fissures in the ground that reminded him of arroyos carved out of the desert by wildly rushing waters.
But bigger. Gigantic. Like the Grand Canyon, except that there was no river down at their distant bottom. Jamie stood on the level ground where the three huge gullies joined together and he could barely see the other side. Peering down into their depths, Jamie guessed the canyon floors must be more than a kilometer below him, perhaps a full mile down, nothing but red-tinged rock cracked and seamed by eons of heating in the sun and freezing every night.
He felt suddenly small, insignificant, like an ant poised on the lip of a normal arroyo in New Mexico. For a dizzying moment he was afraid he would topple over and fall in.
The ground up here had fewer rocks strewn across it, as if it had been swept clean at one time and the rocks had only partially returned. Strange, Jamie thought. We’re closer to the heavily cratered territory to the south, yet there’s not as much impact debris here as farther north.
He returned his attention to the canyons, feeling an excitement trembling within him that he had never known before. The first man to look into a Martian canyon! There might be a billion years of the planet’s history written into those rocks down there. Two billion. Maybe four. It was scary.
The canyon wall was a nearly vertical drop. The thought of climbing down that rock wall thrilled him and frightened him at the same time. The bottom was so far down! Yet he could see it with absolute clarity. The thin air had not the faintest hint of haze in it.
To his geologist’s eye it seemed clear that this labyrinth of canyons had been caused by a splintering of the ground, a gridwork of faults in the underlying rock that had weakened the crust, cracked it. When water had flowed here, however long ago it was, it had followed along those cracks, widening and deepening them. Or more likely the permafrost beneath the crust melts from time to time and undermines the ground until it collapses.
'Is that the way it happened?' Jamie asked the silent arroyos in a barely vocalized whisper. 'How long ago was it?'
The twisted gullies remained mute.
The more Jamie stared into the deep ravines the more he realized that there had been no great rushing flood here. Mars is a gentle world, he told himself. The ground doesn’t quake. There are no storms. If there ever was a flood on this planet it didn’t happen here.
He straightened up and looked across the huge gulf toward the other side of the canyon. Our ignorance is even wider, he knew. Every geologist on Earth could spend a lifetime here and still it wouldn’t be enough to get all the information these tired old canyons have to yield. All I’ve got is the rest of today and tomorrow. Unless I can get Mikhail to change the excursion plan.
He turned to the Russian, who was standing between him and the rover, looking down into the canyon. The rover’s bright aluminum finish was coated with reddish dust now, especially around the wheels and fenders. It made the vehicle look as if it were rusting.
Fighting down a tiny irrational fear that nagged at the back of his mind, Jamie called, 'Mikhail, I’ve got to climb down to the bottom. I’ll need your help.'
The Russian, in his red hard suit, started walking toward Jamie. 'That is an unnecessary risk.'
Jamie made himself laugh. 'I’ve done a lot of rock climbing. And in full gravity, too.'
'It is an unnecessary risk,' Vosnesensky repeated.
'Then why did the mission planners allow us to stow climbing gear in the rover? Come on, Mikhail, with the winch and all it won’t be much of a risk at all. If you think I’m in danger you can haul me up whether I like it or not.'
'The sun is setting. It will be too cold to work. Tomorrow you can have the whole day.'
'I’m okay in the suit. We’ve got three-four hours before sunset,' Jamie said. 'Besides, the sun’s hitting this side of the canyon now. Tomorrow morning this side’ll be in shadow.'
It was impossible to see the Russian’s face behind the gold-tinted visor of his helmet. He was silent for a long time, obviously thinking, weighing the options. Finally he said, 'Very well. But when I say to come up, you do not argue.'
'Deal,' said Jamie.
Jamie spent the next hour inching slowly down the sheer rock face of the canyon wall, stopping every ten meters or so to chip out samples. He wore a climber’s harness over his hard suit, attached to the electrical winch at the canyon rim by a thin cable of composites stronger than steel. Jamie himself controlled the winch with a set of buttons built into the harness, although Vosnesensky could override him by using the controls on the winch itself or even hauling him up manually, if necessary.
The rock’s not stratified, Jamie saw. Seems to be all the same, all the way down to the bottom. That puzzled him. One thick slab of undifferentiated stone? How can that be? He remembered a novel he had read years ago, a scene where an infantry division had been assembled on a parade ground that was described as solid iron one mile thick. Had that scene been set on Mars? Jamie could not remember.
This is different from the area around the dome. There’s never been an ocean here to lay down silt deposits and have them turn into rock layers over the years. I’m looking at the actual mantle of the planet, the original material that made up the planet from its very beginning. One enormous slab of rock that must go down not just one lousy mile, it must be a hundred miles deep! Or even more!
Jamie dangled in midair, twisting slightly in the harness, staring at the reddish gray wall before his eyes. This stuff has been here since the planet was born, since it cooled off and solidified. It could be more than four billion years old! He was panting as if he had run a mile, as if he had just found the most precious diamond in the universe.
There was nothing like this on Earth. Mantle rock was always buried beneath miles of crust. Even the ocean beds were covered with sediments. You never saw exposed mantle rock on Earth. But Mars is different, Jamie said to himself. The old assumptions don’t apply here.
It’s not differentiated, he realized. That’s why there’s so much iron in the sand on the surface. The iron never sank into the core the way it did on Earth. It’s spread all over the surface. Why? How?
