MORNING: SOL 11
DESPITE ALL THE VACUUMING, JAMIE SAW, THE SUITS WERE starting to look soiled, used. The once-gleaming white boots and leggings now had a faintly reddish tinge. The hand vacs don’t take off all the dust, he realized. He remembered how stained and used the suits had looked on the first expedition, after only a couple of weeks.
“Here’s the rig,” Dex Trumball said, handing Jamie his helmet. Its visor was already closed; the VR cameras attached just above eye level. Stacy Dezhurova had plugged the virtual reality electronics module into Jamie’s suit backpack.
“Okay,” Jamie said, sliding the helmet carefully over his head. As he sealed the neck ring, he said, “Once I get the VR gloves on I’m ready for my big chance at show biz.”
Trumball was all business. “Just take it slow and easy. No sudden moves. You don’t want to make the viewers back home dizzy.”
Dezhurova was in her suit, visor raised, ready to check out Jamie before he went through the airlock. Jamie heard their voices muffled through his padded helmet. Then Dezhurova came through his earphones: “Radio check.”
“Loud and clear, Stacy.”
“Then you are go for the excursion.”
Jamie trudged awkwardly into the airlock and started its pump-down cycle. We could bring a couple of samples inside, he thought. As long as they’re sealed in sample cases they’ll be okay. The cases are insulated and the UV lights can’t get through them. But then he thought, Why take a chance? Leave them outside; they’ll be better off in their natural environment.
The light on the indicator panel flicked to red. Jamie touched a gloved thumb on the stud that opened the outer hatch. Then he stepped out onto the red sand of Mars once again.
The ground was covered with bootprints. Jamie walked a dozen paces away from the rover, then looked up the face of the gigantic cliff that ran out to the horizon in either direction. His vision blocked by the hard suit’s helmet, he could not see the top of the cliff even when he bent back as far as he could.
His breath caught in his chest as he realized all over again that he was on another world, a magnificent, bold, fresh planet that held an entire world of surprises and mysteries for them to discover and decipher. He could feel the warmth of the morning sun soaking into the rocks strewn across the ground and the massive cliff that rose beyond his vision.
A river ran through here, Jamie told himself. A tremendous torrent that carried boulders as big as houses along with it. But when? How long ago? What happened to it?
The cliff dwelling’s less than fifty klicks from here, Jamie told himself. We could drive out there for a quick look at it and be back before sunset.
Turning, he stared out across the Canyon floor. The cliffs on its other side were over the horizon, out of sight. The horizon itself seemed too close, disturbingly close, and as sharp as a razor cut across the edge of the world. A whole planet to explore. A whole world. If there really is one cliff dwelling out there, how many others will we find?
But the voice of his responsibilities answered, Not today. You can’t go searching for your cliff dwelling. Not on this mission. You’d be cutting into the rover’s fuel reserve, taking an unnecessary risk.
Be patient, he counselled himself. Get the soarplane to make a recon of the area. Then you can plan a specific excursion out there.
If the soarplane’s cameras show anything worth looking at.
“Are you ready for your fifteen minutes of fame?” Stacy Dezhurova’s voice in his earphones startled Jamie out of his musings.
Turning back toward the rover, Jamie saw her standing. by the airlock hatch, the boots and legs of her hard suit stained faintly pink, the yellow stripes on her sleeves still as bright and pristine as buttercups.
“I guess,” he said.
“Tarawa is ready for your transmission,” she said. “Pete Connors is running the comm console.”
“Which frequency is he on?”
“Two.”
Jamie took a deep breath as he tapped the keyboard on the wrist of his suit. It’d be good to talk with Pete, he thought. Have a nice, long, friendly chat. But Jamie knew that distance defeated that hope. It would take almost fifteen minutes for his words to reach Earth, an equal span of time for Connors’ reply. We could spend the whole morning just saying hello, how are you, Jamie knew.
Reluctantly, Jamie spoke into his microphone, “Welcome again to Mars, from the floor of the Grand Canyon. Today we’re going to show you real Martians …”
Fulvio A. DiNardo, S.J., sat in his one-room apartment on the top floor of what had once been a Renaissance palazzo. The stately old building overlooked the ornate fountain in the center of the Piazza Navona. Centuries ago it served as the Roman home for the boisterous family of a prosperous dealer in precious metals; for the past two centuries it housed a dozen marble-lined apartments that generated lucrative rents for that family’s distant descendants.
Fr. DiNardo had been born to considerable wealth, although to his credit he took his Jesuit vows seriously enough to live modestly. Geology was his passion, his one vice. He burned to understand how God had built this Earth and the other worlds He had been pleased to create.
A brilliant student, marked early for success, he had become a world-class geologist, the obvious choice for a berth on the first mission to Mars. He tried to be as humble as possible about it, but inwardly he glowed with pride at the thought of leading the way to another world.
The sin of pride brought him a punishment: a gall bladder attack that required surgery and removed him from the First Mars Expedition.
Now he sat in his small but well-appointed apartment, a virtual reality helmet over his head and data gloves on his thick-fingered hands, experiencing Mars through an electronic illusion.
He saw the rocks that Jamie Waterman saw, hefted them and inspected their pitted, coarse surfaces closely. He examined the yellowish patches where the Martian lichen lived a few millimeters below the surface of some of those rocks. He felt the solidity of the compact electronically boosted microscope Waterman gripped in one hand as he knelt to peer closely at the alien lichen.
“Those dark patches along the lichen’s surface,” he heard Waterman’s voice explaining, “are actually windows that allow light to penetrate through the outer skin of the organism.”
DiNardo nodded with understanding.
“At night, they close, like eyes,” Waterman continued, “so that the organism’s internal heat doesn’t leak through the windows back into the atmosphere.”
Of course, thought DiNardo. A wonderful adaptation.
Through the senses of Jamie Waterman the Jesuit walked along the cliff face, examined rocks, scuffed boot marks in the rusty sand.
To his surprise, Jamie found himself enjoying his stint as a tour conductor. Maybe I was cut out to be a teacher, after all, he thought as he walked slowly along the cliff face, pointing out the layers of different colored stone: iron-dark red, ocher, bleached tan, even a few extrusions of pale yellowish rock.
“These layers give every indication of being laid down over a long period of time, billions of years, most likely. They’re probably telling us that there was an ocean here, or at least a very large sea, that deposited this material, layer by layer.”
He came to a house-sized boulder that had obviously tumbled to the Canyon floor from some height.
“Problem: What are the ages of these rocks?” Jamie asked rhetorically as he ran his gloved fingers over the boulder’s strangely smooth surface. “Before we learned how to date rocks by radioactive decay, geologists determined age by how deep a stratum was from the surface. Now …”
As he explained how radioactive dating works, how geologists estimate me age of a rock from the ratio of radioactive elements in it, Jamie climbed up to the boulder’s top, scrambling up clefts in its side until he was standing atop the big rock.
“As you can see …” he said, panting. Then stopped. His visor had erupted into a cascade of blinking red lights. The data gloves, the eye-slaved cameras, the entire VR rig was down, no longer functioning.
Jamie muttered a string of curses.
Across the world, people raptly exploring Tithonium Chasma with Jamie suddenly were cut off. Their visual displays went dark.
Before they could remove their helmets, the somber dark face of former astronaut Pete Connors appeared before them.
“We’ve lost VR contact with Dr. Waterman,” Connors said, his voice serious but not anxious. “All our data links here tell us that Dr. Waterman’s life-support equipment is still functioning; he’s in no danger. But the virtual reality link is down because of some technical malfunction.”
Fr. DiNardo slowly removed his helmet.
I was on Mars, DiNardo told himself. God granted me that much, at least. I should be thankful.
I hope Waterman is all right and that he is in no danger. I will offer a prayer for his safety.
Still, as he ran a tired hand over his shaved head, Fr. DiNardo’s eyes were filled with sad, bitter tears. It should have been me on Mars. It should have been me.
My God, my God, why did you abandon me?