Fourteen

Missionary to Mars

            Not more than six times a day Don Kayman allowed himself to pray. He prayed for various things—sometimes for relief from the sound of Titus Hesburgh sucking his teeth, sometimes to be spared the smell of stale farts that smogged the interior of the spacecraft—but there were always three petitions in each prayer: the success of the mission, the fulfillment of God's plan for Man and, most particularly, the health and well-being of his friend Roger Torraway.

            Roger had the distinction of a private stateroom of his own. It was not much of a room, and the privacy was only an elastic curtain, gossamer thin and not wholly opaque; but it was all his. The other three shared the crew cabin. Sometimes Roger shared it, too, or at least parts of Roger did. He was all over the place, Roger was.

            Kayman looked in on him often. The trip was a long, dull time for him. His own specialty, which was of course not operative until they actually set foot on the surface of Mars, needed no touch-up or practice. Areology was a static science, and would remain so until he himself, hopefully, added something to it after landing. So he had let Titus Hesburgh teach him the instrument board, and a little later had let Brad teach him something about fieldstripping a cyborg. The grotesque form that slowly writhed and postured in its foam cocoon was no longer unfamiliar. Kayman knew every inch of it, inside and out. As the weeks wore on he lost the abhorrence that had deterred him from wrenching an eye from its socket or opening a panel into a plastic-lined gut.

            It was not all he had to do. He had his music tapes to listen to, an occasional microfiche to read, games to play. At chess he and Titus Hesburgh were pretty evenly matched. They played interminable tournaments, best 38 games out of 75, and used their personal comm allotments to have chess texts radioed up to them from Earth. It would have been relaxing for Father Kayman to pray more, but after the first week it had occurred to him that even prayer could be carried to excess. He rationed it out: on awakening, before meals, in midevening and before retiring. That was all. That was not, of course, to count the quick lift from a Paternoster or from telling His Holiness's rosary. And then he would go back to the endless refurbishing of Roger. He had always had a queasy stomach, but obviously Roger was oblivious to these invasions of his person and took no harm from them. Kayman gradually began to appreciate the inner beauty of Roger's anatomy, both that part which was Man's handiwork and that part which was God's; he gave thanks for both.

            He could not quite give thanks for what God and man had done to the interior of Roger's mind. It troubled him that seven months were being stolen out of his friend's life. It drew forth compassion that Roger's love went to a woman who held it cheap.

            But, everything considered, Kayman was happy.

            He had never been on a Mars mission before, but this was where he belonged. Twice he had been in space: a shuttle run to an orbiter, when he was still a graduate student seeking his doctorate in planetology; then a ninety-day tour in Space Station Betty. Both were acknowledged to be mere practice for the mission that would complete his study of Mars.

            All that he knew of Mars he had learned telescopically or deductively or from the observations of others. He knew a lot of that. He had played and replayed the synoptic tapes of all the Orbiters and Mariners and Surveyors. He had analyzed returned bits of soil and rock. He had interviewed every one of the Americans, French and British who had landed in their various Mars expeditions, and most of the Russians, Japanese and Chinese as well.

            He knew all about Mars. He always had.

            As a child he had grown up on the Edgar Rice Burroughs Mars, the colorful Barsoom of the ocher dead sea bottoms and hurtling tiny moons. As he grew older he distinguished fact from fiction. There was no reality in the four-armed green warriors and the red-skinned, egg-laying, beautiful Martian princesses, to the extent that science was in touch with "reality." But he knew that scientists' estimates of "reality" changed from year to year. Burroughs had not invented Barsoom out of airy imaginings. He had taken it almost verbatim from the most authoritative scientific "reality" of his day. It was Percival Lowell's Mars, not Burroughs's, that was finally denied by bigger telescopes and by space probes. In the "reality" of scientific opinion, life on Mars had been born and died a dozen times.

            But even that had never been settled, really. It depended on a philosophical question. What was "life"? Did it have to mean a creature that resembled an ape or an oak tree? Did it necessarily mean a creature which dissolved its nutrients in a water-based biology, took part in an oxidation-reduction cycle of energy transfer, reproduced itself and grew thereby from the environment? Don Kayman did not think so. He considered it arrogance to limit "life" so parochially, and he was humble in the face of his Creator's all-potentiating majesty.

            In any case, the case for life genetically related to Earth life was still open. Well, ajar. True, no ape or oak tree had been found. Not even a lichen. Not even a growing cell. Not even (he had to confess with rue, because Dejah Thoris died hard in his bosom) such prerequisites as free oxygen or water.

            But Kayman did not accept that the fact that because no one had slipped on a bed of Martian moss, there was none anywhere on Mars to slip on. Less than a hundred human beings had ever set foot on Mars. The combined area of their explorations was only a matter of a few hundred square miles. On Mars! Where there were no oceans, so the land surface to explore was greater than the Earth's! It was almost like pretending to know the Earth by making four quick trips to the Sahara, the top of the Himalayas, Antarctica and the Greenland icecap . . .

            Well, no, Kayman conceded to himself. That wasn't strictly fair. There had been innumerable fly-bys and orbiters, surveyors that landed and snatched up samples of soil.

            Nevertheless, the principle was sound. There was too much of Mars. No one could pretend that it did not possess secrets still. Water might yet be found. Some of the rifts looked hopeful. Some of the valleys had shapes that could hardly be understood unless you assumed they were carved out by streams. Even if they were dry there still might be water, vast oceans of water even, locked under the surface. Oxygen one knew was present. Not a great deal on the average, but averages were not important. Locally there could be plenty. And so there might be . . .

            Life.

            Kayman sighed. It was one of his great regrets that he had not been able to deflect the decision on a landing place to one of his personal favorites for suspicion of life, the Solis Lacus area. The decision had gone against him. It had been taken on very high authority—in fact, it was Dash himself who said, "I don't give a leaping shit where something may be alive now. I want to put this bird down where our boy can expect to stay alive the easiest."

            So they had picked a spot nearer the equator and in the northern hemisphere; the main features were called Isidius Regio and Nepenthes, and at their interface was a gentle crater that Don Kayman had privately christened Home.

            Also privately, he regretted the loss of Solis Lacus and its seasonally changing shape (growing plants? Probably not—but one could hope!), the bright W-shaped cloud around the canals of Ulysses and Fortunae that had formed and reformed every afternoon through one long conjunction, the brilliant flash (reflected sunlight? a hydrogen-fusion blast?) that Saheki saw in Tithonius Lacus on the first of December 1951, as bright as a sixth-magnitude star. Somebody else would have to investigate these things. He would not.

            But apart from such regrets, he was content enough. The northern hemisphere was a wise choice. Its seasons were better arranged because, just as on Earth, the northern hemisphere had its winter when it was closest to the sun and so kept marginally warmer all year around. Winter there was twenty days shorter than summer; in the south, of course, it was the other way around. And although Home had never been observed to change shape or emit flashes of light, it had in fact been identified with a fair number of recent cloud formations. Kayman had not given up hope that some of the clouds were of water ice, if not water itself! He fantasized afternoon thundershowers on the Martian plain, and more soberly thought about the large stretches of limonite that had been identified nearby. Limonite contained bound water in quantity; it would be a resource for Roger, even if no Martian plant or animal had evolved to exploit it.

            On the whole, he was content about everything.

            He was en route to Mars! That was a source of great joy to him, for which he rendered thanks six times each day. Also he had a hope.

            Don Kayman was too good a scientist to confuse his hopes with observations. He would report what he found. But he knew what he wanted to find. He wanted to find life.

            To the extent that the mission's purposes permitted, in the ninety-one Martian days he would be able to stay on the planet's surface, he would keep his eyes open. Everyone knew he would do this. It was in fact part of his contingent, time-permitting briefing instructions.

            What not everyone knew was why Kayman was so interested. Dejah Thoris was not quite dead for him. He still had hope that there would be life; not only life but intelligent life; not only intelligent life, but life with a soul to save and bring to his God.

            Everything that happened on the spacecraft was under constant surveillance, and synoptic transmissions took place to Earth regularly. So we kept tabs on them. We watched the chess games and the arguments. We monitored Brad's currycombing of Roger's bodily functions, both meat and metal. We saw the night when Titus Hesburgh wept for five hours, gently and dreamily, rebuffing all of Kayman's offers to sympathize with a smile through tears. In some ways Hesburgh had the lousiest job aboard; seven months coming, seven months going and in between three months of nothing. He would be all alone in orbit while Kayman, Brad and Roger were disporting themselves on the surface. He would be lonely, and he would be bored.

            He would be worse than that. Seventeen months in space was a practical guarantee that for the last few decades of his life he would be plagued by a hundred different muscle, bone and circulatory disorders. They exercised faithfully, wrestling each other and struggling against springs, flailing their arms and pumping their legs; that would not be enough. There was inevitably calcium resorption from the bone, and there was loss of muscle tone. For those who landed, the three months on Mars would make a great difference. In that time they would repair much of the damage and be in better shape for the return. For Hesburgh there was no such break. His seventeen months in zero-G would be uninterrupted, and the experience of previous spacefarers had made the consequences clear. It meant lowering his life expectancy by a decade or more. And if he wept once in a while, there was no one who had better reason.

            Time passed, time passed. A month, two months, six months. Beyond them in the skies the capsule with the 3070 was climbing after them; behind it, the magnetohydrodynamic power plant with its crew of two. When they were two weeks out they ceremoniously switched watches, changing to new quartz-crystal timepieces set to the Martian day. From then on they lived by the Martian clock. It made little enough practical difference; the day for Mars is just a bit more than thirty-seven minutes longer than Earth's; but the difference was significant in their minds.

            One week before arrival, they began to speed Roger up.

            For Roger the seven months had felt like thirty hours, subjective time. It had been time enough. He had eaten a few meals, exchanged several dozen communications with the rest of the crew. He had received messages from Earth and returned a few of them. He had asked for his guitar, been refused it on the grounds that he couldn't play it, asked for it anyway out of curiosity and found that that was quite true: he could pluck a string, but he could not hear the note that resulted from it. In fact, apart from the specially slowed-down tapes, he could hear nothing at all most of the time, and only a sort of high-pitched scurrying sound ever. Air did not conduct the sort of vibrations he could perceive. When the tape recorder was out of contact with the metal frame to which he was bound, he could not hear even it, nor could his own voice be made to record.

            They warned him they were beginning to accelerate his perceptions. They left the curtain to his cubicle open, and he began to notice flickers of motion. He caught a glimpse of Hesburgh dozing nearby, then saw figures actually moving; after a time he even recognized who they were. Then they put him to sleep, to make final adjustments on his backpack, and when he woke up he was alone, the curtain was drawn—and he heard voices.

            He pushed the curtain aside and looked out, and there was the smiling face of his wife's lover greeting him. "Good morning, Roger! Nice to have you with us again."

            . . . And eighteen minutes later, twelve travel time and the rest decoding and relaying, the President watched it happen from more than a hundred million miles away, on the screen in the Oval Office.

            He was not the only one. The TV nets put the scene on the air, and the satellites rebroadcast it all over the world. They were watching in the Under Palace in Peking, and, inside the Kremlin; on Downing Street and the Champs Elysées and Ginza.

            "Son of a bitch," said Dash historically, "they've made it."

            Vern Scanyon was with him. "Son of a bitch," he echoed. Then he said, "Well, almost made it. They've still got to land."

            "Any problem about that?"

            Cautiously: "Not as far as I know—"

            "God," said the President positively, "would not be so unfair. I think you and I are going to taste some bourbon right now; it's about that time."

            They stayed and watched for half an hour, and a quarter of a bottle. On and off over the next few days they watched more, they and the rest of the world. The whole world saw Hesburgh making final checks and preparing the Mars-lander for separation. Watched Don Kayman go through a dry run under the pilot's microscopic observation, since he would be at the controls for the trip down out of orbit. Watched Brad make a final, ultimate recheck on Roger's telemetry, find it all functioning in the green, and then do it over one more time. Watched Roger himself moving about the crew cabin and squeezing into the lander.

            And watched the lander separate and Hesburgh look wistfully out at its minus-delta flare as it began to drop out of orbit.

            We figured that three and a quarter billion people watched the landing. It was not much to watch; if you have seen one landing you have seen them all. But it was important.

            It began at a quarter to four in the morning, Washington time, and the President had himself awakened to see it. "That priest," he said, frowning, "what kind of a pilot is he? If anything goes wrong—"

            "He's checked out, sir," soothed his NASA aide. "Anyway, he's actually only about a third-place back-up. The automatic sequencing is in primary control. If anything goes wrong, General Hesburgh is monitoring it from the orbiter and he can override. Father Kayrnan doesn't have anything to do unless everything goes wrong at once."

            Dash shrugged, and the aide noticed that the President's fingers were crossed. "What about the follow-up flights?" he asked, staring at the screen.

            "No sweat at all, sir. The computer will inject into Mars orbit in thirty-two days, and the generator twenty-seven days later. As soon as the lander is down General Hesburgh is going to perform a course correction and overtake the moon Deirnos. We expect to land both the computer and the generator there, probably in the crater Voltaire; Hesburgh will make that determination for us."

            "Um," said the President. "Has Roger been told who's on the generator spacecraft?"

            "No, sir."

            "Um." The President abandoned the television screen and got up. At the window, staring out at the pretty White House lawn, June-green and blossoming, he said, "There's a man coming over from the computer center in Alexandria. I'd like you to be here when he arrives."

            "Yes, sir."

            "Commander Chiaroso. Supposed to be pretty good. Used to be a professor at M.I.T. He says there's something strange about our projections about this whole project. Have you heard any gossip?"

            "No, sir," said the NASA aide, alarmed. "Strange, sir?"

            Dash shrugged. "That's all I need," he said, "getting this whole son-of-a-bitching thing going and then finding out— Hey! What the hell's happening?"

            On the TV screen the image was jumping and breaking up; it went out entirely, restored itself and disappeared again, leaving only the tracery of raster.

            "That's all right, sir," said the aide quickly. "It's reentry buffeting. When they hit the atmosphere they lose video contact. Even the telemetry's affected, but we've got ample margins all around; it'll be all right."

            The President demanded, "Why the hell is that? I thought the whole point was that Mars didn't have any atmosphere?"

            "Not a lot, sir. But it does have some, and because it's smaller it's got a shallower, flatter gravity well. In the upper atmosphere it's just about as dense as the Earth's is, at the same altitude, and that's where the buffeting happens."

            "God damn it," snarled the President, "I don't like surprises! Why didn't somebody tell me this?"

            "Well, sir—"

            "Never mind! I'll take it up later. I hope surprising Torraway isn't going to be a mistake— Well, forget it. What's happening now?"

            The aide looked not at the screen but at his watch. "Parachute deployment, sir. They've completed retrofire. Now it's just a matter of coming down. In a few seconds—" The aide pointed to the screen, which obediently built itself into a picture again. "There! They're in controlled descent mode now."

            And they sat and waited while the lander slid down through the thin Martian air under its immense canopy, quintuple the size of a parachute built for air.

            When it hit the sound came a hundred million miles, and then sounded like trash cans falling off a roof. But the lander had been built for it; and the crew were long since in their protective cocoons.

            There was a hissing sound from the screen and the clicking of cooling metal.

            And then Brad's voice. "We're on Mars," he said prayerfully, and Father Kayman began to whisper the words from the Ordinary of the Mass, "Laudamas te, benedicirnus te, adoramus te, glorificamus te. Gloria in excelsis Deo, et in terra pax hominibus bonae voluntatis."

            And to the familiar words he added, "Et in Martis."