Mars Crossing Read online

  MARS

  CROSSING

  GEOFFREY A. LANDIS

  A TOM DOHERTY Associates book

  NEW YORK

  TOR®

  This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this novel are either fictitious or are used fictitiously.

  MARS CROSSING

  Copyright © 2000 by Geoffrey A. Landis

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, or portions thereof, in any form.

  This book is printed on acid-free paper. Edited by Patrick Nielsen Hayden Design by Lisa Pifher

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Landis, Geoffrey.

  Mars crossing /Geoffrey A. Landis.—1st ed. p. cm.

  "A Tom Doherty Associates book." ISBN 0-312-87201-1

  I. Title.

  PS3562.A4766 M3 2000 813'.54—dc21 00-056764

  A Tor Book Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC

  175 Fifth Avenue

  New York, NY 10010 www.tor.com Tor® is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.

  First Edition: December 2000

  Printed in the United States of America

  0987654321

  FOR THE CAJUN SUSHI HAMSTERS

  THANKS

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  This book owes a clear debt to Robert Zubrin and David Baker, from whose Mars mission concepts I have liberally borrowed. Thanks.

  Thanks are also due to Mary, Levin, Toby, Julie, Malcolm, Ben, Becky, John, Bonnie, Astrid, Charlie, Steve, Marta, and Paula, for reading, comments, and general support.

  All great and honourable actions are accomplished with great difficulties, and must be both enterprised and overcome with answerable courages.

  —William Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation (1621)

  Mars tugs at the human imagination like no other planet. With a force mightier than gravity, it attracts the eye to its shimmering red presence in the clear night sky. It is like a glowing ember in a field of ethereal lights, projecting energy and promise.

  John Noble Wilford, Mars Beckons (1990)

  PROLOGUE

  LANDING

  Don Quijote approached Mars in perfect silence.

  At one end of the spacecraft was the habitat, a squat, rounded cylinder sitting on a heat shield. It was separated from the main rocket engine and now-empty fuel tanks by two kilometers of tightly stretched rope, a super-fiber tether so thin as to be nearly invisible. The spacecraft and the fuel tanks slowly rotated around the center of the tether.

  "Arm tether separation."

  "Tether separation armed."

  "Navigation?"

  "Nav is go."

  "System status?"

  "Systems are go."

  Mars loomed, crescent in the sky, a mottled brick of craters and wispy shreds of cloud.

  "Check terminal descent engine preheat."

  "TDE preheat on."

  "Check parachute deploy preheaters."

  "PD preheat on."

  "Fire pyros for tether sep on my mark. Three, two, one, now."

  The spacecraft jerked, and the tether, suddenly cut free, recoiled away from the spacecraft, writhing and twisting like an angry snake. The engines, solar arrays, and fuel tanks sailed slowly off into the distance. They would miss Mars and sail outbound on an endless trajectory into interplanetary space.

  "Tether separation confirmed. We're committed."

  "How's the trajectory?"

  "We're on the numbers. Looking good."

  "Instrument check."

  "Instruments green."

  "Everything green. We're sliding right down the groove."

  "Then buckle up, everybody. We're going in."

  The spacecraft burned through the Martian atmosphere, leaving a trail of fire across a pink sky.

  A parachute bloomed, another, and a third; bright yellow flowers blossoming in a lifeless sky. A moment before it hit the ground, the heat shield fell away from the back of the vehicle, and a landing cushion mushroomed out of the bottom. At the instant of contact, a cloud of orange dust billowed up into the air, painting the bottom part of the spacecraft with yellow-brown dirt. The spacecraft tilted, swayed at the edge of falling over, and then rocked back toward vertical as the airbag deflated.

  "Engines off, tank pressurization off, APU status green, all systems looking good. We're down. Navigation, you got a position?"

  "Working on it ... Looks like we hit the kewpie. Should we say something for the history books?"

  "Nah. I don't think anybody is going to write down what gets said by the third expedition to Mars."

  "Tell me it ain't so. You saying that we're not going to get a parade when we get back?"

  "You got it. Welcome to Mars."

  PART ONE

  JOHN RADKOWSKI

  Having an adventure shows that someone is incompetent, that something has gone wrong. An adventure is interesting enough—in retrospect. Especially to the person who didn't have it.

  —Vilhjalmur Stefansson, My Life with the Eskimo

  There is no easy way into another world.

  —James Salter, Solo Faces

  1

  WELCOME TO MARS

  Through the viewport there was nothing but a yellow-pink fog. Then, slowly, the fog faded, and the ridged plains of Felis Dorsa emerged out of the haze, at first misty and colorless, and then, as the dust raised by the landing thinned out, sharply delineated.

  John Radkowski looked across the landscape at plains of sand gently undulating beneath a pale butterscotch sky.

  Mars.

  It was hard for him to contain his fierce joy. Mars!

  He wanted simultaneously to cry, to laugh, and to shout out a loud cry of exaltation. He did none of these. As mission commander, it was his duty to keep the mission businesslike. Decades in the astronaut corps had taught him that showing his emotions, even for such an event as landing on Mars, was a move that would, down the line, give him a reputation for being emotional, and hence unreliable. He stayed silent.

  At fifty, John Radkowski was the oldest member of the crew, and the one most experienced in space. He was short, wiry rather than overtly muscular, with gray hair cropped closely to his head. His eyes had the slow, restless motion of long years of training; he focused on the task at hand, but always part of his attention was glancing around the cabin, looking up, down, checking for that small forgotten out-of-place something that might spell trouble for the mission. One hand, his left, was missing three fingers. His crew knew better than to offer him help.

  Mars! After all the decades of work, he had finally made it!

  There was work to do. As commander, the other five crewmembers depended on him to get the mission done safely and bring them back home. He had better get working.

  The crew was occupied with their landing tasks, shutting the flight systems down and bringing the surface operation systems up, then verifying that they were running according to spec. He knew that all of them wanted to stop their work and crowd to the viewport, but for the moment they were all too busy, even Trevor, and so he had the viewport to himself.

  Off to the southeast, close enough to be easily visible through the residual pink haze, was the squat form of Dulcinea.

  The field glasses consisted of a flat rectangle, about the size of a paperback book. They had been designed to function equally well with or without a space-suit helmet. He raised them to his eyes. The computer adjusted the focus to match his eyesight, and the result was as if he were looking through a window at a magnified view of the landscape.

  Like Chamlong said, they had hit their landing site right on the nail, with Dulcinea no more than half a mile away. That was of critical importance to them: Dulcinea was their way home, a f
ully fueled return vehicle that had landed on Mars six and a half years earlier. He examined her minutely, then examined the ground between the landing site of Quijote and the return vehicle. It was sand, sculpted by a million years of intermittent wind into hillocks and waves. There was an assortment of randomly scattered rocks, some boulder-sized, half-buried beneath the sand, but he saw no obstacles to their easy travel. Good.

  The viewport forgotten, he turned to the copilot's console. The floor was tilted at an odd angle; the lander must have set down on a slope, and he had to move carefully to avoid falling. He studied the sequence of images taken during landing. Both visual and radar images had been taken, and he plotted them as a topographical map of the terrain. Again, he saw no obstacles. Good.

  When he got up, he saw that Trevor, Estrela, and Chamlong were all crowded around the viewport, pushing each other out of the way to jockey for a view of Mars. He smiled. They must have been watching for the very instant he had vacated the position.

  "Why look out the window when we can go out and see for ourselves?" he said. "Get your suits ready, gang, it's time to go outside and play. Get a move on; in six weeks we'll have to go home, and we've got a full schedule before we go."

  With the lander resting at a pronounced tilt, the ladder splayed out at a cockeyed angle. Climbing down was not really difficult, but it was a challenge to descend gracefully. To hell with it, Radkowski thought, and jumped, landing off balance in a puff of dust.

  As mission commander, it was his task to say some immortal words for the watching cameras. He had his lines memorized, extemporaneous words to be remembered forever, written for him by a team of public relations experts:

  I take this step for all humankind. In the name of all the peoples of Earth, we return to Mars in the spirit of scientific endeavor, with the eternal courage of human adventure and bringing with us the voice of peace among all men.

  Stumbling up onto his feet to stand on the red sands of Mars, with Ryan Martin shooting him on high-definition television out the window of the lander, John Radkowski uttered the immortal words of the third expedition to Mars. He said, "Holy shit, I just can't believe I'm really here."

  The sand had a hard, crunchy surface, and crackled underfoot as if he were walking on a thin crust of frost. Beneath the crust, the surface under his feet had the consistency of packed flour. Tiny puffs of rusty dust billowed away from his feet every time he raised a foot, and within a minute, his boots and the bottom half of his suit had been lightly spraypainted in ochre. He felt light. They had maintained half of Earths gravity by the tether during the seven-month journey on the Quijote; the Mars gravity was noticeably lighter, and despite the eighteen months of training in Mars-simulation tanks on Earth, he felt as if he were buoyed up by invisible floats.

  As he'd figured, Don Quijote had landed on the slope of one of the small ridges, and sat at a precarious tilt. Fortunately the ship had never been intended to take off from Mars, and in a day they would move their living quarters out of the cramped Quijote and into the inflatable habitat that had been landed on Mars with Dulcinea.

  Behind him, his Brazilian colleague Estrela Conselheiro hopped down the ladder. She bounced on the ground, bounded into the air, and stretched her arms overhead as if worshiping the sun. "Oh, it is magnificent, is it not? Magnificent!"

  Much better words than his own, Radkowski reluctantly admitted to himself.

  Behind Estrela, Tana Jackson came down. "Yikes!" she said. "That's one bodacious step." She looked around, and caught her breath. "My god, it's magnificent," she said.

  Finally Chamlong Limpigomolchai jumped down, negotiating the jump without any comment. Once on the surface, he pivoted slowly around to look in all directions in silence. The other two crew members, Ryan Martin and Trevor Whitman, stayed behind in the lander; they would only leave Quijote and come down to the surface when Estrela, Tana, and Chamlong rotated back to the ship.

  It was everything he had wanted, what he had struggled and worked and lived for. The rust-encrusted, ridged terrain, the distant buttes barely visible through the cinnamon haze on the horizon, and Dulcinea, their ticket back to Earth, sitting ready for them, no more than a fifteen-minute walk away—he had seen it a hundred times in his dreams.

  So why was he suddenly depressed?

  John Radkowski had no tools for analyzing his mood. Self-inspection had never been encouraged in the astronaut corps; the main purpose of the many counselors and psychologists, according to the gossip, was to weed out the weak sisters from the active duty roster. Focus on the task, get the job done, don't complain; that had been the motto of the people that Radkowski had worked and trained with for years. Now, suddenly, his entire future seemed to be an anticlimax; even the remainder of the six-week stay on Mars and the flight back to Earth, featuring a swingby and gravity boost from the planet Venus, seemed to him like nothing but tedium. He had been focused on reaching Mars for so long, he had never set personal goals for beyond the moment. His life, as he knew it, was over, and he had not even the faintest inkling of what would lie beyond.

  A man's reach should exceed his grasp, he thought. I've grasped my dreams. What do I do now?

  2

  TREVOR

  The kid who called himself Trevor Whitman stood pressed to the viewport, looking eagerly out at the surface of Mars. With half of his attention he was scanning the landscape for signs of ... He had no idea, really: an alien artifact, maybe, or footprints of dinosaurs or the imprint of fossilized ferns in an overlooked rock. None of these, of course, were things they had any expectation of finding on Mars, but if nobody looked for such things, they could be right on top of them, and nobody would notice.

  But with most of his attention he was not looking at anything in particular, just drinking in the sight of Mars. After seven months crammed into the tiny crew cabin, it felt good to focus his eyes on something in the distance. In the background he could hear the radio communications from the astronauts on the surface. The surface fines are more cohesive than we'd expected. Sounded like Captain Radkowski's voice. Looks like there is some amount of salt cementing the panicles together. It is clogging up the treads on my boots, but so far no problems with traction. Definitely Radkowski; nobody else would be so concerned with the picky details like that. He tuned it out. Ryan Martin was communications officer, if anything happened—not that anything was likely to—Ryan could cope with it.

  Mars, finally Mars. He watched Estrela bound across the surface, leaping and pirouetting with the grace of a dancer, and he felt a gnawing jealousy. He itched to get out on the surface, and it seemed unfair that he had to wait before it would be his turn down.

  At eighteen, Trevor had yet to learn patience.

  It was simply not fair.

  After what had to be an hour, Chamlong Limpigomolchai came back up the hatch, and Trevor waited impatiently as the airlock cycled with the painstaking chug, chug, gurgle of the roughing pumps. The lock opened, and Chamlong's helmeted face appeared. His suit was dusted with a light powder of orhre dust. The dust tickled Trevor's nose like bursting bubbles of some metallic champagne.

  Chamlong pulled off his helmet. He had a grin the size of Texas. He had brought with him a halt dozen rocks.

  "I figured you'd be in a hurry to get outside, not so?" Chamlong said. "So I came back in to let you get a chance to go."

  "Thanks, Cham," Trevor said. "I really appreciate it. How was it?" For the whole journey, the Thai astronaut had been his favorite friend among the adults, and his simple friendliness counted for a big reason why. The rest of the adults too often just ignored him, or gave him orders.

  "Oh, kid, you will not believe how much excellent it is to get outside again, and just stretch," Chamlong said. "I tell you, get out there, see for yourself."

  "You got it," Trevor said. "Give me a suit inspection, okay?" The suit inspection had been drilled into them by Captain Radkowski in every one of the hundreds of practice runs for surface operations during the mission. Never leave
the spacecraft until you have had somebody else go through the checklist on your suit. Never. It had seemed like overcaution to Trevor—nobody would skip a vital step on a suit. That would not just be stupid, it would be suicide. But when he'd said that, Radkowski had only given him a look like he was a child, and started out with another of his rambling astronaut stories, this one about some buddy of his who had skipped the checklist, went through a hatch with a purge valve that had been clipped open for an inspection and almost got himself killed. Actually, Trevor liked to hear Radkowski's astronaut stories—and he made himself a mental note never to clip open a purge valve—but when they were just a way to pound home some simpleminded moral like "always take care," they sometimes got a bit tiring. While Chamlong gave him his inspection, he thought only, Mars, I'm finally going out. Mars, I'm finally going out. Mars, I'm finally...

  He hesitated on the ladder, looking across the surface. He'd seen Mars a thousand times in virtual reality simulations, of course, but this was different. The sunlight was brighter than he'd expected. This far from the sun, he'd expected the surface of Mars to be dim, but the light was as bright as any afternoon on Earth. The helmet had a visor, and he slid it around to give him some shade.

  He had to do something. He jumped, a six-foot drop to the ground, and almost lost his balance when he landed. Then he tried a handstand. It was a little awkward in the suit, but after one false try he managed to balance. After thirty seconds he started to lose his balance, tucked in and rolled in a cloud of dust, then stood up.

  Everybody was looking at him. It wasn't as if he had done something actually dangerous; the transparent silicon carbide of the helmets was for all practical purposes unbreakable.

  "Shit, kid," was the voice on his radio. "You sprain an ankle, we're not going to carry you sightseeing, you know." It was Tana's voice. She didn't sound like she was mad, so he decided he could ignore her. Everybody else went back to what they were doing; examining the soil, chipping at rocks with hammers, digging little trenches. Boring.