Red Thunder

29

THE NEXT MORNING, judging by the expressions on Dak’s and Alicia’s faces, we weren’t the first Mars Club members by much. Suiting up, Travis looked at us one at a time, and shook his head.

“You guys are disgusting,” he groused. “Don’t you know we’re making history here? Don’t you have any-”

“Who says you can’t make history in bed?” Alicia wanted to know.

“We made some history last night,” Kelly agreed. Suiting up had to wait a few minutes until we all stopped laughing.

ONE OF OUR hard and fast rules was that Red Thunder was never to be left empty. Another was that Dak was the official driver of Blue Thunder, unless he chose to delegate it, and none of us figured he would. Only fair, I guess. It was his truck. Since we planned to use the truck every time we went out, it meant that the other four of us had to share the ship duty. We tossed a coin-slowly, in the low gravity-and Alicia drew watch duty the second day. She was disappointed, as we all would have been, since it was to be a big, big day, but she submitted gracefully.

[344] Once outside we removed the heat blankets from the tires and inspected them all very closely. They seemed to have come through the incredible cold of the night without any trouble. All systems checks were nominal, as they say at NASA, all six fuel cells humming-or gurgling?-along most satisfactorily. We boarded, Kelly and I in the back again, and took off in search of the Chinese pathfinder landers.

They weren’t hard to find. Our map was spot on, and we had marked the valley where we needed to be, a bit over four miles to the east of us. Dak got us there in no time, dodging around all Buick-sized rocks, as he had promised. We retired to a spot a few gullies back, parked, and waited.

We knew when the Chinese landing was to be, just about an hour from the time we parked. We hadn’t been in contact, so we couldn’t be 100 percent sure they’d be on time. That they would land here was a total certainty; that they would land at the appointed time about 98 percent certain, according to Travis. I had no reason to doubt him. But it was a nervous hour.

Actually, fifty minutes, because we spotted the ship with ten minutes of retro-fire still to go, way, way up there in the beautiful sky. It was leaving a faint contrail in the icy air, and it was an awesome sight. I choked up, thinking about four frail human beings in that little ship, descending into this awful vastness.

We had a surprise prepared for them. I almost felt sorry for them… I did feel sorry for them as fellow humans, but I had no sympathy at all for the cynical old men who had sent them here and who had arranged a riot that had killed a fellow American. May they all choke on their moo shoo pork.

“Come on, come on, baby.” I don’t think Travis was aware he was coaxing the descending rocket to a soft landing. Politics are forgotten at a time like that.

The ship was a simple cylinder, wider than any of our seven tank cars, but not much taller. The rocket drive would take up a lot of the bottom part. Those guys expected to be staying a long time in a habitat smaller than some jail cells.

It came down frighteningly fast for a long time, then put on a burst [345] of energy that must have subjected the crew to a lot of gees, hovered at about fifty feet, then started easing down at about three feet per second. Another pause at the five-foot level, then it was bouncing on its big springs. We all looked at each other, and let out a cheer.

“I gotta hand it to him, that was one sweet landing,” Travis said. “Yessir, whoever wrote that landing program was really good.” And he laughed.

We set up a television camera with a long lens, so that it was just peeking over the slight rise we had hidden behind. We moved back to Blue Thunder and waited again, this time watching the image on the television screen, which showed the lower part of the Chinese ship. We figured they had orders to get out and onto the planet soon, just in case those lousy Americans actually existed and had not blown up halfway into their journey.

It took them a little over an hour. Then the lock door opened, a ramp was deployed, and a single cosmonaut came down it and, with no ceremony at all, stepped onto the Martian soil and set up a television camera on a tripod.

“I think we’re witnessing a little white lie,” Kelly said.

“How you figure?” Travis asked.

“That camera, they’re going to send the picture from that as they all come out at once, and say that is the first human steps on Mars.”

“I think you’re right. Well, it worked for Douglas MacArthur.” He saw our blank looks, and shook his head, as much as you can in a space suit.

“We know who Douglas MacArthur is,” Kelly said-and she could speak for herself, as far as I was concerned, I had only a vague idea he was a general. “What’s the story, that’s what I don’t know.” So Travis told us how the general reenacted his “first steps” wading onto Philippine soil during the Second World War. He’d apparently made a promise, something like, “I’ll be back.”

Sure enough, five minutes later the door opened again and all four Chinese cosmonauts got together on the ramp… and just as we had done, kicked off in step so their feet touched the ground at the same time.

[346] “Time to saddle up and go,” Travis said. “Dak, you got a good idea where their camera is aimed?”

“No sweat, Captain.”

So we boarded and Dak drove down the gully to a spot that ought to be right in the center of the Chinese camera’s field of vision. Then he gunned it.

Blue Thunder was a little friskier than he’d counted on. We left the ground with all four wheels as we topped the rise, then settled back easily in the low gravity, and the Chinese cameras caught it perfectly. “Sorry, Captain,” Dak said.

“What the heck. Go for it.”

The terrain was almost free of rocks, so Dak moved at a speed he hadn’t attempted before. He drove to within a hundred feet of the assembled Chinese and skidded to a stop. Old Glory, the Stars and Stripes, slashed back and forth from its mount on the end of our fifteen-foot radio antenna.

Their backs were to us, they were lining up to salute the flag they had just erected, when something told one of them we were behind them, maybe a reflection in his ship’s shiny metal skin. He turned, jumped right into the air in surprise, and almost fell over coming down. He must have shouted, because the others turned, too, in time to see us clambering down from Blue Thunder.

Travis was in the lead, holding up a sign he had made that said channel 4 in English, Russian, and Chinese. The first guy-who turned out to be the leader of the expedition, Captain Xu Tong-switched channels. Almost at once I could hear excited chatter in Chinese, then Travis’s voice booming over it…

“Welcome to Mars!” he said, extending his hand. Xu was still suffering from shell shock. He let Travis shake his hand, and then took my hand when I offered it.

It was at that point that the live television feed was cut, back on Earth… cut in China, anyway. But all of the television networks in the rest of the world were still sending out the signal for all to see. We lost a billion viewers at one stroke. That left only three billion watching…

[347] And that’s what Travis meant when he said we were going to hijack their expedition.

AFTER THAT, RELATIONS between the two crews were surprisingly cordial.

The Heavenly Harmony crew had not been informed about the launch of Red Thunder, and they were furious about that. Not that they could do anything about it, or even dare mention it when they got home, but with us they could express their frustration.

After introductions were made we got down to the serious business of taking pictures of each other. Kelly used four rolls of film and Kuang Mei-Ling, the exobiologist who spoke a little English, shot at least that many. Then we were invited in for lunch.

The decks of the Heavenly Harmony were a bit wider than ours, but there weren’t as many of them. Basically, it was command and control on top, common room one floor below, and sleeping quarters below that. They did have a tiny shower, which Kelly eyed hungrily as we were given the tour, but their toilets were chemical like our own, if a bit fancier.

So we sat down together and we were treated to some sort of noodle soup with chunks of pork and vegetables in it, along with bowls of rice. Luckily, there was no bird-nest soup or thousand-year-old eggs or sauteed ducks heads, or anything gross like that. We all cleaned our plates.

Travis then asked Captain Xu if we could send some short messages to our families back on Earth, since our own long-range radios were no longer working. Xu said he’d be happy to, but as we approached the television transmission desk one of the crew, Chun Wang, seemed to object. A few intense words were exchanged as we Americans busied ourselves looking around, not wanting to witness a family squabble. Xu won, though we weren’t exactly sure what it was he won, and we all broadcast simple messages; we’re safe, we’re happy except we miss you… and we were the first!

Then we all boarded our separate chariots and headed south in search of the Grand Canyon of Mars.

[348] The Chinese were awed by Blue Thunder, as who wouldn’t be? It dwarfed the Chinese rover, which looked a lot like the Apollo lunar rovers, but with bigger wire-weave tires. There were four seats, all occupied. They trusted their automatic systems to handle things while they were away, and I couldn’t argue with them. After all, the computer had landed their ship.

But we did have to pause a few times as the Chinese driver had to find a way around big rocks. Dak waited patiently for them, a smug smile on his face.

When we got there the Chinese geologist, Li Chong, leaped from the rover like an excited puppy and started banging on rocks with a hammer. He tried to be five places at once, dropping samples he was trying to stuff into plastic bags, picking up new ones. It must be incredible, I realized, to have an entire planet to study… and in this case, he was the first. The first rockhound on Mars.

As for the rest of us…

Never having been to the Grand Canyon in Arizona, or to any canyon, for that matter, I had nothing to compare it to. I saw incredible desolation. Incredible colors. Incredible immensity. I picked up a rock and hurled it out into space, and we all watched as it fell, and bounced, and fell some more, and bounced, until we lost it.

I noticed Chun Wang didn’t seem to have much to do. Kuang Mei-Ling and Li hopped about like excited sparrows, and even Captain Xu seemed to have some geological training, helping gather samples. I didn’t say anything about it, since we were all on the same suit channel. But later I mentioned it to Travis.

“Political officer,” he said. “Commissar, or whatever the Chinese call it. He’s a Party member, here to keep the others in line. Standard operating procedure on a Chinese vessel. Did you see how nobody talked to him much, at lunch?”

Now that he mentioned it, I had noticed that. Chun seemed to sit off to himself somehow, even at the crowded table. The other three had virtually ignored him.

“Some sort of social dynamic going on there. Mei-Ling is married to Captain Xu, and I figure that’s put a lot of strain on Chun and Li. And [349] Chun seems to be largely frozen out by the others. People problems, Manny. It was always in the cards that people problems would be at least as big a hurdle as engineering problems on a trip as long and as cramped as they’re on.”

GOOD MANNERS DICTATED that we invite the Chinese aboard for a meal, so Travis did. We arranged it for Day M3, our third day on Mars, the second day for the Chinese. I drew the short straw that day and watched through the ports of the cockpit deck as the two vehicles headed off for the Valles again a few hours after sunrise, feeling a bit lost and abandoned. They would be back around midafternoon, a time dictated by the capacity of the suit oxygen tanks, and our stamina.

“Let’s face it, friends,” Travis had told us. “The five of us are not going to be contributing a hell of a lot to our knowledge of Mars, unless we stumble over a dinosaur bone or an abandoned city or a giant face, or something. There’s no point in working sunup to sundown.”

I hadn’t given a lot of thought to what we’d do when we got to Mars. None of us had, we’d all been far too absorbed in the task of getting here at all.

But what the heck was I doing here, really? Why me, and not some infinitely more qualified scientist? I could walk right over some geological formation or group of rocks… or even cleverly camouflaged lichen or moss or some more alien form of life, blissfully unaware of its importance.

I had no business here. None of us did, except maybe Travis. Sure, we had worked our butts off, labored all summer to build the ship to get here, but the Chinese all held doctorates. Even Chun, the chief Commie, was an M.D. How bitterly ironic it must be to them for a group of barely educated kids to get here first.

Before long I’d worked myself into a blue funk. I prowled the kitchen, looking at the food we’d brought. Frozen pizza. Infantile! Would the Chinese eat pizza? That’s the kind of thought I occupied myself with as I waited eight hours until the tiny caravan reappeared from the south. I helped people out of their suits and we all gathered [350] in the common room, quite crowded with nine people in it, four of them on folding chairs.

It turned out pizza was okay.

“We have many Western rapid-food places in China now,” Xu explained. “Most of us have eaten at them at one time or another.”

Chun didn’t care for pizza, but smiled broadly when we showed him a Hungry Man Mexican dinner, with enchilada, tamale, and retried beans.

But the real hit of the day was Alicia’s food.

That’s what we’d been calling it, to bug her, but we’d all eaten our salads and fruit along with our frozen dinners. But the Chinese… you’d have thought they’d been stranded on a desert island for a year with nothing to eat but thistles and rats. Well, maybe that’s not a good example. For all I know Chinese may like thistles and rats, they seem to eat just about anything. But they almost drooled when they saw the fresh Florida oranges Alicia had brought by the bushel basket. And grapefruit, and tomatoes, lettuce, fresh broccoli, tons of other stuff.

Mai-Ling, Li, and Xu each ate a slice of pizza, I suspect just to be polite, and Chun ate half his dinner, then they attacked the fruits and vegetables. Their own supplies had been used up months ago and they were down to the basic rations for the rest of the trip: rice, noodles, canned or frozen vegetables and meats.

“They lost a lot of face yesterday, over dinner,” Travis told us later. He and Xu had developed a rapport quickly. Somehow Commissar Chun’s suit radio had developed a slight glitch, it wouldn’t receive channel four anymore… tsk, tsk, how unfortunate… so Travis and Xu had spent a lot of the day talking about things Chun shouldn’t hear.

“Of course, the whole nation lost face big-time when we beat them here, but the Harmony’s crew doesn’t feel too upset by that because it wasn’t their fault. But setting such a poor table… of that they were very ashamed.”

“I didn’t think it was so bad,” I said.

“I didn’t either,” Travis said. “Space rations, what did they think we expected, Peking duck? Go figure, huh? Anyway, Chinese culture is different.”

[351] “Must have lost heap big face today, eating them oranges,” Dak said.

“Yeah, but they didn’t mind it so much. Good work, Alicia.”

We were gathered in the common room at the end of the day. The others were all pleasantly exhausted from the day’s work. Me, I was wired as a two-dollar junkie, having done nothing all day but worry and fret. But it was good to sit with everyone and talk about the day’s events. The one we talked about the most concerned Commissar Chun.

After dinner, when it came time to reciprocate on the tour we’d been given of the Heavenly Harmony, Travis caused an international incident, of sorts.

“Captain Xu, are you a member of the Chinese armed forces?” Travis asked, knowing Xu wasn’t. He then turned to Chun. “Doctor Chun, you being the political officer of the Heavenly Harmony, I must respectfully decline to show you my ship above the level of this common room. There are things up there I must not allow the representative of a foreign power to see. I’m sure you understand.”

Xu started to smile, quickly concealed it, and translated for Chun.

Chun snapped off some choice comments which Xu did not translate, then told us he would wait for us outside. Travis also declined to let Chun off Red Thunder until we all went, pointing out that he didn’t want Chun getting a close look at the Squeezer drive, either. Chun nearly exploded. Again Xu didn’t translate, he didn’t really need to.

“Manny, would you keep Doctor Chun company for a while?” Travis asked.

“Sure.” Damn Travis. What was I supposed to do if Chun objected? Wrestle with him? Hit him over the head? I was ready for anything as the others went up the ladder to the control deck, but Chun just sat down in his chair. He looked at me, smiled vaguely, then began moving bits of orange peel around on the table in front of him. I’d never seen a man so tired, so depressed, in my life.

I almost felt sorry for him. I mean, I’d been getting the shivers a few hours ago just being alone on good old, homey Red Thunder, with my friends only a few miles away, and Alicia said she’d felt the same way on her first watch. Chun’s nearest friend, assuming commissars have friends, was over one hundred million miles away.

[352] And it was all baloney, anyway. Secrets? Rubbish. There were no big secrets in the controls of Red Thunder.

“I couldn’t resist needling him,” Travis admitted that evening. “Did you see how he tried to walk under the ship, get a close look at the drive? Oh so casually, like strolling in the park… well, I casually just happened to get in his way.”

“Might have been crueler, you let him see the drive,” Dak said. “What’s he gonna make of it, anyway?”

“You’ve got a devious mind, Dak,” Travis laughed.

Later I bought up what I’d spent part of the day thinking about, our lack of qualifications for exploring Mars.

“What can I say, Manny?” Travis asked. “You’re right. None of us can say we ‘earned’ the right to be here, to be the first. But that’s just the luck of the draw. If we were going to be the only ones here, I’d say this was nothing but a publicity stunt. It is a publicity stunt, remember. But it’s in a good cause, and believe this: In a year, hundreds of geologists are going to be crawling all over this big ball of rock, and we led the way. Jubal made it all possible, and we did it. If you’re worried about what they’re going say about you in the history books, just remember that.”

THE NEXT DAY, Day M4 for us, we rendezvoused at the canyon edge and then took off to the east, stopping every quarter mile or so for Dr. Li Chong to take more samples. This time I got to ride shotgun, it being Kelly’s turn to mind the shop while the rest of us were out joyriding. Alicia and I both warned her of the loneliness, and how it could sneak up on you and make you feel panicky.

“Don’t worry, I’ll just smoke a little more weed,” she said, and for a moment I thought she was serious. Then she shoved us both toward the air lock, swearing she’d be just fine, she could take care of herself.

We came to a part of the Valles that didn’t look that different from any other part, at least to me, and Li had Captain Xu stop. Dak pulled up next to them, and we watched Li go to the edge and stand there, hands on hips, looking down.

[353] “What’s he want?” Dak asked.

“The… the striations, the layering,” Xu told us. “He was looking for a formation like this, but it is too far down, too steep. He is frustrated because of this.”

We all got out and looked down to where Xu was pointing.

The previous night I couldn’t sleep, so I went to the commons and cranked up the DVD reader. We’d brought along a pretty respectable reference library. I found some encyclopedia articles about the Grand Canyon in Arizona, and read and looked at pictures until I finally began to yawn.

It was easy to see that the Grand Canyon and the Valles Marineris didn’t have a lot in common other than both being deep and wide. The book said the rocks near the bottom of the Grand Canyon were about two billion years old. You could see the layering, like a million-layer birthday cake, from different stuff that settled out during different epochs. Then the land got shoved upward by the movements of the crustal plates, and erosion had begun.

Had Valles Marineris been formed like that? Nobody knew for sure. If it did, where did all the water go? Boiled off into space? Sunk into the ground? How much water? Enough to be useful if humans decided to come here in large numbers?

Most geologists-or areologists, as some preferred to be called-believed the Valles had been eroded by running water, just like the Grand Canyon.

That was about as far as I got. So I knew what Dr. Li was talking about, in general terms. The layering here was different. But it all boiled down to… or more probably, froze down to… water. So far Li had not found moisture-bearing rocks or soils, which was what he wanted to find.

“Down there at the bottom, you see it?” Li said, translated by Xu. “Layering, which was caused by a very ancient sea of water. Then… farther up, several more areas of layering, suggesting that seas once again covered this area, at very long… intervals. The water returned. The water must still be here… somewhere.”

[354] We could see the layering he was talking about a long way down the slope, which was about sixty degrees.

“One theory… which Li likes very much, is that water is still present about two hundred meters down. Pressure might keep it from freezing at that depth. As the pressure builds up, water might be forced… what is the word?… laterally along rock strata. Then, at a place like this, that layer has been eroded away. The water is forced into the air, where it freezes. A plug forms. When the pressure is sufficient, the plug blows out, and a slurry of rock, ice, and some water sprays outward, forming an apron of debris much like what we see spreading away from that layer below us, about two hundred meters down. Li wishes he could take samples from that area.”

“Well, heck,” Dak said. “Let’s just lower him down and let him chip some off.”

When Li understood that Blue Thunder was equipped with a powered winch and a thousand meters of heavy-duty poly rope, I thought he would hurt himself dancing around. Travis was dubious, but I think he was interested in helping the Chinese regain some lost face, so he agreed.

We secured Li to the rope and he went over the side, walking backward. In fifteen minutes he was down. He chipped for a while, and then our radios were filled with his excited chatter. Xu smiled hugely at us.

“He has found ice!” he said. “Just where he expected to find it.”

So, in the end, the crew of Red Thunder did get to do its little bit of discovery. Short of finding actual Martian life, it was as exciting a result as anyone could ask for.

WHEN WE GOT back, Kelly was in tears. I just held her for a while, until she could stop shaking and get herself back together.

“I feel so dumb,” she said. “Acting like I’m six years old or something.”

“That’s just how I felt,” Alicia said.

“With me, it was more depression,” I said.

[355] “Why didn’t you call us on the radio?” Travis asked her. “We’d have come back and got you, made some other arrangement.”

“That’s why. You would have come back. I kept telling myself I’d be okay, then I’d start shivering again. Couldn’t stop.” She blew her nose. “I almost decided to come looking for y’all. Follow the tire tracks.”

“That’s crazy, Kelly,” Travis said, not unkindly.

“That’s what I’m telling you, Travis. I was out of my mind. I’ve never been so scared in my whole life.”

Travis told us that, starting tomorrow, we’d operate on the buddy system all the time. No one would be left alone. Since he was adamant about having someone aboard ship at all times, that meant that only three of us at a time could go exploring.

“What the heck,” Dak said. “I’ll take my turn, too. Any of y’all can drive Blue Thunder … well, about half as good as me, and since I’m twice the driver I need to be, that ought to be all right.”

Alicia hit him with an apple core.