Mars

'Not until she becomes a morning star. And we’ll be on our way home by then.'

Jamie stared out at the dark night sky. He could see only a sparse sprinkling of stars. The sky looked lonely, abandoned.

Connors reached up and pulled the thermal shroud over the plastic canopy. Then, 'Could you let me squeeze past, please?' he said to the women. 'I’ve got to get some aspirin.'

'Headache?' Ilona asked.

'Yeah. Too many hours driving. It’s a lot easier flying a plane.'

'Me too,' said Ilona. 'I’ll join you at the aspirin bottle.'

Jamie wondered if Ilona was going to make a play for the astronaut. Not here, he thought. It’s too crowded, there’s too much at stake. Then he realized that his own temples were throbbing. It had been a tense day, driving constantly.

By the time they finished dinner, though, they all seemed to feel better. Connors regaled them with stories about his days as the 'tail-end Charlie' with the U.S. Air Force’s acrobatic flying team, the Thunderbirds.

'…so we pull out of the loop, wingtip to wingtip, and my goddam canopy pops off, pow! just like that.

We’re pulling four g’s and battin’ along close to Mach 1 and all of a sudden I’m in the middle of a regular hurricane right there in my cockpit!'

His black face was alive with expression, his hands twisting to show the positions of the airplanes. Both women were listening raptly, their wide eyes riveted on Connors. Jamie listened with half an ear and let his mind wander to the task they would face in the morning: finding a safe slope down the landslide to the floor of the canyon. Would the ground be firm enough to hold them? Would it be too rocky for the rover’s wheels?

Li’s people up in orbit had fired the last four of their geological probes into the canyon. Completely automated, the probes shed their atmospheric heat shields as they neared the ground and then drifted to soft touchdowns on billowing white parachutes. Only one of them had actually sunk its instrument-bearing anchor into the rubble of the landslide itself. The other three had missed it by ranges of a few dozen meters to a full kilometer.

That one probe’s instruments reported that the landslide was firm enough for the rover to traverse. But it was only one spot on the slide. What if there were pockets of loose powdery soil? What if they got stuck halfway down? To come this close and then have to turn back would be sickening…

He realized that Connors had finished his story and gone back to the cockpit for his final check-in with the dome before retiring for the night. Ilona had gone up there with him, sitting in the chair Jamie had occupied most of the day.

Joanna was sliding the table into its slot below the lower bunk, opposite Jamie.

'Are you all right?' she asked.

'Hmm? Yes, sure. I’m okay.'

'You seemed to drift away from us.'

'I was thinking.'

She smiled slightly. 'Not a bad thing for a scientist to do — on occasion.'

'How do you feel?' he asked.

'Oh… tired. Worried, I suppose.'

'Worried? About what?'

Sitting on the edge of the folded bunk beside Jamie, she said in her whispery voice, 'Suppose we go all this way, suppose we get to the bottom of the canyon — and there is nothing there? No life.'

Jamie shrugged. 'That’s why we’re going all this way: to find out if there’s life down there or not.'

'But suppose we find none?' There was something in her eyes that Jamie could not fathom, something more than anxiety, deeper than a scientist’s concern over the outcome of an investigation.

'If there isn’t any life to be found down there,' Jamie answered slowly, 'that in itself is an important discovery. We’ll just have to search elsewhere.'

Joanna shook her head. 'If there is no life beneath the mists, what can we expect from the rest of this frozen desert? We will have failed, Jamie. There will never be another expedition to Mars.'

'Hey, don’t get so down,' he said, reaching out to grasp her shoulder gently. 'It won’t be your fault if Mars is lifeless.'

'But we will have come all this way for nothing.'

'No. Not for nothing. We’re here to learn whatever it is that Mars has to teach us. That’s what science is all about, Joanna. It’s not a game, where you keep score. It’s about building up knowledge. The negative results are just as important as the positives. More so, maybe.'

The expression on her face was close to misery.

'We’re here to seek the truth,' Jamie said in an urgent whisper, 'and not to be afraid of what we find, whatever it is.'

Joanna did not reply.

'There’s nothing to be afraid of,' he repeated. 'No matter what we find — or fail to find.'

She turned away, got up from the half-folded bunk, and hurried toward the lavatory. Jamie realized she was crying. He felt sorry for her. And puzzled.

As he lay on his back in the darkened rover, listening to the soft wind of Mars just outside the metal skin, Jamie wondered why Joanna was so worried about what they would find in the canyon.

She’s a biologist, he told himself. If she finds life on Mars her name will go into the history books. But if she doesn’t she’ll always wonder if she missed it. The whole world will wonder if there’s really life here but she just didn’t make the right tests or didn’t go to the right place.

I’ve made her come here to the canyon. Maybe we should have tried to reach the edge of the polar cap. Plenty of water vapor there, that’s for sure. But we landed too damned far from the cap. That’ll have to wait for a follow-on mission.

Connors was snoring, six inches away on his bunk. Above him by only a few more inches was Joanna’s bunk. He could sense that she was awake, tense and worried and frightened.

Frightened.

Jamie closed his eyes in the darkness and remembered the first time he had met Joanna Brumado. She had been frightened then, too.

All the trainees had been required to pass an ocean survival test. 'There’s a small but finite chance that your return to the Earth will end in an emergency landing at sea,' said the grizzled old chief petty officer they had borrowed from a U.S. Navy aquanaut team. Although their return flight was planned to terminate at the space station in low Earth orbit, if something went wrong the command module of their spacecraft could be detached and enter the Earth’s atmosphere to splash down in the ocean, much as the old Apollo spacecraft had done.

'You could be in a raft for several hours or even several days,' the chief had said cheerily. 'My job is to get you prepared for that contingency.'

So they spent three days in an open raft several miles off the coast of the main island of Hawaii. Eight men and women, including the leather-skinned chief. Joanna had been one of them.

Jamie recalled how she spent the whole time sick and scared, her face white, her fists clenched so hard that her fingernails cut into her palms.

He had felt seasick too for the first few hours, bobbing incessantly on the dark, towering swells. In the trough of the waves they could see nothing but deep blue water and the pale sky. When they rose to a crest, the horizon slanted and weaved nauseatingly.

They each wore personal life preservers, puffy inflated vests that were too hot in the sun but not warm at night. The chief would not let them roll up their coverall sleeves or pants. They also had to wear floppy-brimmed hats. 'Sunstroke,' the chief said knowingly. No one argued.

'Be a helluva thing to go all the way to Mars and then drown coming home,' said one of the trainees, a grinning tanned blond from California with the build of a weight lifter.

'Right now,' said one of the other women, 'I wouldn’t mind drowning. It would be a relief.'

The chief made each one of them slide over the raft’s round gunnel and into the water for an hour at a time. 'You won’t sink, not with your flotation gear inflated. Only thing you gotta worry about is sharks.'

Jamie spent his entire hour in the water worrying about sharks while the chief explained how to watch the water for their telltale dorsal fins. ' ’Course, if one comes up from deep we won’t see him until it’s prob’ly too late.