Pressure Man

Chapter Ten

The approach to Mars was always an exciting experience for Dom. The negligible atmosphere of the planet allowed a clear view of the surface. A dust storm was blowing in a cyclonic pattern west of the Hellas plains in the southern hemisphere. The film of ice deposits in the northern polar area gleamed, a white jewel atop the globe. Doris was by his side, keeping an avid eye on the viewers, since it was her first trip to Mars.

Although she was arid, cruel, deadly to an unprotected man, Mars was Dom’s second home. In recent years he’d spent as much time there as he had on Earth. He was proud to be a part of a service which made human presence on Mars possible, and he was bitter because events on Earth now threatened, more than ever, the developments which had been scratched and dug out of the planet at the cost of much labor and some human life.

During the days in which he watched the planet grow from a bright star into a disc and then into a huge, dominating sphere hanging over the Kennedy, he talked with Doris about his feelings. Mars policy was made on Earth, and it was contradictory and confused.

“Take the Kennedy,” he said. “For what she cost we could have supplied plenty of water for the entire planet for all time.”

He pointed out the ice deposits at the north pole.

“There’s enough water there to change the face of the planet,” he said. “If all the water in the ice deposits could be released, the planet would be covered in water to a depth of ten meters, about thirty feet. That’s a theoretical figure, and it would be accurate only if the planet were a smooth globe. The point is, we’ve spent billions building this ship to carry water out here and all the time there’s plenty of water already here if we had the money and the manpower to develop it.”

Mars was anything but a smooth planet. The huge shield volcano, Olympus Mons, showed on the horizon. Even from height and distance Olympus Mons was impressive.

“Two and a half times as high as Everest,” Dora said. “Fifteen miles high.”

“Quite a mountain,” Doris said. “I don’t think I’d want to try to climb it.”

“It’s not all that tough,” Dom said. “Remember, it’s less than half Earth gravity. The only tough part of the climb is in lower altitudes, because of the winds. I’ve seen winds of two hundred miles per hour on the lower slopes. But no one climbs the thing. It’s too easy to take a jumper and set it down on the peak. If we find the time I’ll take you up. I think you’d enjoy it.”

From space, Mars looked like a planet stripped down to its skeleton. An ancient riverbed, with tributaries branching out like small veins from an artery, lanced across a flat plain pimpled by meteorite craters. The effects of the Martian wind could be seen in the dark tails extending outward from the craters, marking the deposit of bright dust particles. As the rotation of the planet brought the canyon area into view, Doris was, again, impressed. The giant rift covered an area as long as the distance from New York to San Francisco. The main chasm, Tithonius Chasma, would have made the Grand Canyon of the Colorado look like a small creekbed. The stark and terrible beauty of the planet misted Doris’ eyes. She leaned against Dom, her hand on his arm.

“I once hated her,” Doris said.

“Why?” he asked, not thinking.

“Because she took you away from me.”

“That was a long time ago,” he said.

“I can understand why she draws men,” Doris said. “I can see why, once you’ve seen her, you have to come back.”

“There are ten thousand people down there,” Dom said, pointing out the high volcanic plains in the Elysium area. “They live in quarters which would give most Earthlings claustrophobia. They breathe reconstituted air which they’ve made themselves by breaking down the oxygen from rocks and what little water can be pumped from the ground. They’re dependent on Earth for most of their food and manufactured materials. There are marvelous things on Mars, minerals, jewels, metals. She’ll never have to worry about overpopulation, because she wasn’t meant for man. But she can give to man. There’s enough raw material there to ease a lot of shortages back on Earth. And what do we carry when we send a ship back? Fertilizer.”

“I’ve always thought Mars policy was penny-wise and pound-foolish,” Doris said.

“We have the technology right now to change the entire Martian environment,” Dom said. “We could use the hydro engine to shift the two moons just a little, just enough to change the motion of the planet to give more sun heat at the poles. The caps would melt and the planet would be wetter, warmer, and that would make her almost self-sustaining.”

“Can you imagine the screams from the nature worshipers?” Doris asked, with a laugh. “Can you imagine the lawsuits which would be filed if the department announced that it was going to change the sacred ecology of an entire planet?”

“The battle cry would be, ‘Lichens Have Rights,’ ” Dom said.

The Kennedy’s huge powerplant was thrusting against her motion, slowing her. Mars hung over the ship, huge, red, beautiful. Landing preparations went smoothly. Although the ship was huge, she had the power to go in and come up on her own in the light gravity of Mars. Neil put her down as if he were handling a scout ship a fraction of her size. Men began to offload the water, which would strain the storage capacity of the tanks. It would be a long job, since existing pumping facilities had been designed for much smaller quantities of water.

Dom introduced Doris to old friends, guided her through the museum to see the scanty remains of the primitive extinct animal and plant life. The museum always made him feel sad. It told its story only too well. Mars had once been a living planet, both geologically and biologically. Scientists were still discussing the cause of her death. Currently, the most favored theory pointed to a varying sun. That school of theorists said that tens or hundreds of millions of years in the past, the sun had radiated more energy. At that far-distant time, the water now encased in the polar icecaps had been free, the atmosphere more dense, the whole planet wetter, allowing the development of both plant and animal life.

Dom wasn’t too happy with that theory. It could neither be proved nor disproved. The nature of a star is such that in a body the size of old Sol, energy released at the sun’s core requires some eight million years to work its way to the surface, where it is then radiated to the planets within minutes. Activity at the suns surface, the light falling on Mars that day, represented what had happened inside the sun millions of years ago and provided no clue as to the activity at the core at the given moment. However, if Mars had been affected by a change in the sun’s energies, the Earth would have felt the same effects. Of course, there was plenty of evidence of changing conditions on Earth, but the evidence was subject to a variety of interpretations.

Depending on one’s personal choice, fossil ferns and corals in arctic areas could be explained in several different ways, solar variation and continental drift being the two most favored theories. Solar variation was in current favor, since that theory also served to explain the change in Mars from a living planet to a desert of waste with lichens the only form of life to be found when Trelawny first landed on the red sands.

Dom was not fully convinced of either theory to explain some things on Earth. The presence of mammoths in the ice of both Siberia and Alaska, some frozen so rapidly that their flesh was, after millions of years, used as food for sled dogs, had never been explained by advocates of either theory. In fact, most scientists simply choose to ignore the puzzle of the frozen mammoths.

Perhaps, Dom felt, the true explanation could involve a combination of both factors, plus some things not yet theorized. He, himself, could not guess at additional factors, but he believed that continental drift had a definite part. The evidence cited by those who studied plate tectonics was very convincing.

It was one thing to study the past on Earth, and another to see it in skeleton form on Mars, to see the pathetic remains of life as evidence that something, some terrible force, had turned a living planet into a dead one. The old, romantic notions of dead civilizations on Mars were long since discredited, but there had been life, life very similar to that of the Earth, and all that life, except for some hardy lichens, had been wasted.

Doris seemed to sense Dom’s mood of melancholy. She suggested a meal and coffee in the main cafeteria. It was good to be with people again, to hear the talk, to smell their presence.

The meal was cultured protein, the coffee hot and strong. They chatted with two phosphate miners seated at the next table, lingered over cigarettes, and then made their way topside for a jumper ride back to the Kennedy. The twenty-four-hour Martian day was ending as they boarded. Ellen and J.J. were on watch. They were eager to take their turn at going into the domes. It was merely changing one closed environment for another, but it was a change from shipboard life.

Alone on the ship, they sat in the control room, the view being better there, had a glass of their own personal alcohol ration, watched the small moons grow brighter in the swift darkness as the planet swung them into nightside. In the darkness, neither of them having activated the lighting system, Dom felt a growing awareness of Doris’ nearness.

She came into his arms without protest. Her lips were sweet. He felt a new sense of possessiveness, a sense of wonder. She was his, his girl, his woman. The hostile world in front of the viewport seemed to emphasize their aliveness. They were alone, only their lives, their two separate entities, belying the dead world outside, the cold, airless surface. Far way, their own world was being torn apart, once again, in strife between men. Still farther away was a bloated gas giant with a killing, crushing gravity field and monstrous pressures. Strife and uncertainty behind them, danger ahead of them. The kiss reaffirmed the fact that they were, for the moment at least, alive. But there was an agreement between them.

He pushed her away, his breath rapid, his pulse pounding. “Girl, you’d better run for your life,” he whispered.

“No fair,” she said. “Don’t try to force me to have enough willpower for two.”

“Women are scarce on Mars,” Dom said. “So they make things as simple as possible. There’s no waiting period for marriage. We don’t believe in wasting a single moment.”

“Wonderful,” she said.

“Huh?”

“All right, I’ll make it perfectly clear,” she said. “So that even a man can understand. Yes.”

“Yes?” he asked.

“Y-e-s,” she spelled. “Yes.”

“You’re sure?”

“Now you’re sounding as though you’re not sure,” she said, hitting him lightly with her fist. “Look, I feel very, very small and very, very insignificant. I want reassurance. I guess I’m all female, because what I need is the safety and the security of your arms around me.”

He held her happily for a few moments. Then he contacted ground control and stated his needs. The minister was aboard Kennedy within the hour, scarcely giving Doris time to put on her best uniform. The brief ceremony was witnessed, in the absence of the rest of Kennedy’s crew, by two men from the landing-pad staff. The bride was toasted in clear, cold water.

Once again they were alone. There was, at first, a shyness between them. They were in Dom’s quarters, since it was, as the captain’s cabin, the larger. He helped her move her few personal possessions into the room, they used another bit of their wine ration, and came together to give mutual assurances against the long and lonely night outside. She was more than he remembered and all that he’d ever dreamed.

In the early morning Dom lay awake listening to her soft breathing. Now and then she made a tiny little purring sound. He felt a great welling up in his chest, and he smiled as he looked at her face. His eyes misted in sheer gladness.

The ship muttered and whispered around them. A servo cut in somewhere deep down, and he could feel the sense of well-being which comes from being on a living ship. The ship did have a sort of life. She functioned, giving herself orders through the complicated circuits, the miles of wiring. She lived and she allowed the crew to live. But only so long as man-made machinery did the job of purifying air.

He felt a fear. Doris, beside him, stirred in her sleep and one of her long, soft legs came over his, so smooth, so warm, so terribly vulnerable to the harsh and uncaring emptiness of space. Doris lived, but she lived only because the ship which he’d designed provided her with a suitable environment. As long as his hull held out cold and vacuum, as long as his hull resisted the crushing pressures of the Jovian atmosphere, she would continue to live.

It was not a prophecy. It was not an omen. He didn’t believe in premonitions. The ship would take them there and it would bring them back. But had he made a mistake? Should they have waited? Having known the little hot slicknesses of her, the cling of her, the hunger of her lips and body, would he err on the side of overcaution, thinking of her?

So it must have been, he thought, in the first days, when the first man looked at his woman and desired her to the point of fear of losing her. So it was in the dawn-age civilizations, when the first cities offered some protection against the fierce and warring savages. Throughout history, and in prehistory, a man looked at his sleeping woman and knew the same fears, dreamed the same dreams, facing death but dreading its coming before the appointed time. Dawn-age man protected his woman from the beasts, from the desires of other men, and Dominic Gordon, lying awake in a huge spaceship on Mars, vowed to protect his woman from the hostile environment and from other men. He would protect her with fang and claw and with his skills, and he would take her into the high pressure of the Jovian clouds and expose her to great danger, and then if they lived they would face the renewed savagery of the barbarians of Earth. How he would protect her he was not sure, but he would. He would make a safe place for his woman, and for all women.

He went to sleep with fierce half-dreams of blood and killing, mentally devastating Firsters and Savers and all others who insisted on turning his planet into a bloody arena, fierce man dreaming of wrecking havoc on other fierce men.

As light grew on the eastern horizon the servos of the Kennedy compensated for temperature changes in the hull. The sun, shrunken by distance, was still a powerful force as it rose above the harsh and eroded mountains.