The Season Of Passage Part 15

Jennifer nodded. 'I'm using the typewriter you got me. It's the best present I've ever received. What have you been doing?'

Terry felt disappointed. 'Don't you know Lauren has landed on Mars? Haven't you had the TV on?'

'I know she's there.'

'Aren't you excited? Aren't you proud of her?'

'I've always been proud of Lauren,' she said softly.

'She's been asking about you.'

'I know. I'll turn on the TV.'

'Good. I wish you were here.'

She shook her head sadly. 'I can't come.'

'Have you been having any nightmares?'

Her eyes strayed to the fire. 'They're gone. But I stay up at night and write my story. I have to finish it. There's a way to go.'

'Is Daniel there?' Terry asked.

'He was here. But I sent him off to do things.'

I sent him off.

'Professor Ranoth was asking for you, too,' Terry said.

Jennifer brightened. 'Jim's with them?'

'Of course. You knew he was going.'

'He's with Lauren?'

'They're together on the same planet.'

Jennifer seemed to lose interest. 'It doesn't matter. Tell him h.e.l.lo for me. Tell him I'm still wearing the ring.'

Kathy knocked on the booth. She gestured back toward the TV. Terry understood Lauren was about to climb out of the Hawk.

'Jenny,' he said, 'I've got to go. Lauren's about to walk on the surface of Mars. It's on TV if you want to watch, on almost every channel. I'll call you later tonight, OK?'

'Fine,' Jennifer said, her voice forlorn. 'Tell Lauren I love her, and that I think about her all the time.'

'I'll do that,' he said.

FIFTEEN.

The Hawk had three levels. The top level was the control room. That was where they had sat during the landing. It was the heart of the lander. Besides containing the propulsion controls, it also housed Friend's brain and their communication system. On the second level were the personal quarters: two small bedrooms attached to a central living area. The second level was also used for storage. The bottom level they called the bas.e.m.e.nt. It contained a kitchen, a bathroom, a laboratory, the airlock and the garage. The garage housed two extraordinary vehicles. One was a lightweight jeep with six-foot-tall wheels that could waltz over boulders. The other was more jet than car, a missile with four seats and a winds.h.i.+eld attached. It had earned the nickname Hummingbird. Hummingbird floated and accelerated on an invisible jet cus.h.i.+on, and would be especially valuable when they explored around Olympus Mons, in the mountainous Tharsis region.

For all its three levels, the Hawk was a tight squeeze. Lauren was anxious to get outside and stretch. At present she was in the bas.e.m.e.nt, checking her pressure suit for the third time. Jessica worked an arm's reach away, preparing a soil sample for incubation to see if it contained organic compounds. Gary was in the bas.e.m.e.nt, too, lying under a ma.s.sive insulated coil and repairing a generator that had been damaged in the landing. He was fuming to go outside, and was mad at Bill for making him repair the generator first. Lauren stepped on his toes as she climbed into the airlock.

'Watch out for the natives, Doc,' he called.

'Gotcha,' Lauren said. A door rifled shut behind her. Fans sucked the atmosphere away. When she returned inside she would be blasted with scalding steam and rinsed with disinfectant. They were infinitely cautious of an infection. An alien breed of germs, totally foreign to their bodies' defenses, could wipe them out as surely as giant insect monsters. Such an infection could wipe out the entire world if they brought it home with them.

The external door of the airlock finally opened, and Lauren was face to face with Mars. She could have been on a Hollywood set. There were cameras pointed at her, and the rusty landscape and pink sky looked like one giant prop. There were rocks everywhere.

Lauren remembered that billions on Earth were watching. She started down the ladder, praying she didn't look like a klutz, and worrying what her first words should be. Bill had stepped onto Mars and walked around for two minutes before saying a word. Jim had made a remark about opening a real estate office. Lauren paused on the last rung of the ladder, still thinking.

G.o.d. Destiny. The stars. The future. Evolution.

Finally she gave up and hopped off the ladder and said the first thing that came to her 'This place is better than Disneyland!'

Gary snickered inside her helmet. Because the Martian atmosphere was extremely thin, normal conversation was impossible. However, scientists had devised acoustical sensors that could pick up faint sound waves and boost them a hundredfold. With these instruments attached to the outside of their helmets - they were called vocals - they could talk to each other without the aid of radio. They could even hear the wind rising, and rocks falling, and monsters approaching. Lauren opened her vocals now and grabbed the cellophane-wrapped American flag that stood at the foot of the ladder. Bill had put it there and it was a stupid place; they would fry the flag when they fired their rockets at take off. Flag in hand, she bounced towards Jim, enjoying the gentle gravity. Jim had half buried himself in a hole he was digging.

'Are you off line?' Lauren asked.

'Yes,' Jim said.

'Seen any monsters?'

'No.'

'Tired?' she asked.

'A bit.' He killed his pneumatic drill and tried to wipe the perspiration from his brow. Then he laughed. 'Is there no way to get the sweat out of your eyes?'

'There is. Take a break. Doctor's orders. Here, I'll give you a hand.' She pulled him out of the hole without effort. 'Find anything interesting?'

'A couple of humanoid skeletons. The usual.'

'Want to help me replant the flag?' Lauren asked.

'Where?'

Lauren pointed. 'On that rise. The camera is facing that way.'

As they scaled the shallow hill, Lauren noted how hard and brittle the ground was beneath the thin layer of covering dust, as if the surface had been baked in an enormous oven. Jim had a hammer with him, but pounding the flagpole into the ground took them several minutes.

'Stay there,' Jim said. He backed away and raised his camera.

'Should I salute?' Lauren asked.

Jim crouched down. 'Only if you're feeling patriotic'

Lauren gave an exaggerated salute and said, 'I claim this world for all the future generations of mankind.'

The flag toppled the instant Jim snapped the picture. Brus.h.i.+ng the red sand from the stars and stripes, Lauren wondered if she had said the wrong thing.

In the corner of the bas.e.m.e.nt that was their kitchen, Jessica helped Lauren fix hot chocolate for the men. Six hours had pa.s.sed since Lauren's excursion, and the sun was two hours below the horizon. Outside the weather was lousy - seventy below - but that was the trouble with showing up during a million-year ice age. Bill was in the control room reporting to Houston on the progress of their mission. Jim and Gary were just up the ladder, in the living area. Gary was reading The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury and trying to defend himself against Friend's emotionless criticism of the repair job he had done on the generator. Jim was studying soil samples. Now he asked if he could have a cup of coffee instead of hot chocolate.

'But Lauren,' he said, from the level above. 'I've been awake a week. The caffeine won't shock my system. Oreos don't taste good without coffee. Plus I hate hot chocolate.'

'NASA wouldn't have given us the coffee,' Gary added, 'if we weren't supposed to drink it.'

'Jim smuggled it aboard,' Lauren called.

'G.o.d wouldn't have given us coffee,' Jim said, 'if it wasn't good for us.'

'What about Oreo cookies?' Lauren asked. 'G.o.d didn't give us Oreo cookies. All that junk is just junk. I won't have you getting sick.'

'It satisfies the soul,' Jim said. 'Man does not live by vitamin complexes and protein powders alone. I can't work without my cup of coffee.'

Lauren looked at Jessica, saying, 'All he eats is sweets. I should never have let him bring those cookies aboard the Hawk. We have strict menus that we're supposed to follow.'

'What about the chocolate in the hot chocolate?' Jessica asked. 'Doesn't it have caffeine in it?'

Lauren lowered her voice. 'It's really carob.'

Jessica laughed. 'My grandpapa used to drink twenty cups of coffee every day. He took it scalding hot, with a tablespoon of sugar. He lived to be ninety-seven.'

'A great and wise man, no doubt,' Jim said.

'You are not helping me,' Lauren complained to Jessica.

Jessica leaned over and whispered in her ear. 'Make Jim his coffee. He'll just sneak down here in the middle of the night and drink it, anyway. Then he won't be able to sleep.'

'I heard cookies dilute the effect of caffeine,' Jim said.

Lauren snorted. 'Now we know what killed the Russians. They landed on Mars and ate all their desserts at once in celebration and died of hypoglycemia.' She opened the lid on Jim's instant coffee jar. She'd had it out anyway. She put one - just one - teaspoon into a cup and added boiling water.

'Make it strong,' Jim called.

Lauren put in another teaspoon.

'I want some, too,' Gary said. 'I hate hot chocolate. It gives me pimples.'

Lauren scowled and tossed Gary's hot chocolate down the disposal chute. While she fixed another cup of coffee, Jessica began to sniff the air like a bloodhound.

'My, that smells good,' Jessica said, and sighed. 'When I was a little girl, my mom used to make a fresh pot of coffee every morning. It would take the chill right out of your bones.'

'Jesus Mars Christ,' Lauren muttered.

Later, they gathered in the living area, each with a cup of strong coffee in hand, including Lauren. She sat next to a porthole, searching the bleak western horizon for signs of Phobos, the larger of Mars's two moons. It was supposed to rise shortly.

Gary had reached over on the couch and poked her in the side with his big toe.

'Don't do that!' she snapped.

He set his book face down on his chest and asked, 'Is it up yet?'

'You should know,' she said.

'What?' Gary asked.

'I haven't seen it,' Lauren said. She turned away from the window and removed the foot Gary had generously dropped in her lap. 'I must be looking in the wrong part of the sky.'

'Watch southwest,' Jim said, bent over a picture of a rock he'd photographed earlier under a microscope. 'Phobos comes up fast.'

'Have you made any discoveries with the samples we collected today, Professor?' Bill asked Jim. Jessica sat beside her husband on the other couch, brus.h.i.+ng her hair.

Jim put an Oreo cookie in his mouth and took a sip of his coffee. 'No discoveries,' he said, chewing. 'Just greater confirmation and refinement of the theories we have been forming about Mars since the Viking series. There was water here once. Not too recently, but not that long ago, either. I'd say between one and two million years ago.'

'Explain,' Bill said.

'The planet's river beds were carved by water,' Jim said. 'Mars may be a volcanic planet, but no lava, no matter how thin and runny, could have cut the ravines we have here. Of course, that's not news. Since the Vikings everybody's figured that Mars possessed surface water at one time. When that time was has always been the question. After studying these rocks and this soil, I feel the effects of erosion on Mars have been severely underestimated. The air here is thin, but we've already recorded winds as high as fifty miles an hour, far higher than we antic.i.p.ated, and plenty high enough to make dust airborne. Do you all see my point? The ravines I studied today are relatively sharp edged. They couldn't have been subject to erosion for too long. That means the water that dug the ravines must have been here as recently as a couple of million years ago. I'd say there was still water here when the human race was getting started.'

'You're saying there were ca.n.a.ls here, then?' Lauren asked, poking fun at him.

Jim smiled. 'If you want to call them that.'

Lauren reminded herself why water could not exist in the liquid phase on Mars. In the thin atmosphere, it would immediately vaporize or freeze. It snowed on Mars, but it never rained.

'But Jim,' Lauren said, 'that means the atmosphere was at least ten times thicker then. What could have blown it away?'

Jim pulled the two halves of another Oreo apart and began to lick the icing. 'I wonder,' he said.

'What if Mars came into conjunction with the Sun?' Bill said. 'When the axis of the planet was tilted at such an angle that both poles were facing the sun at a relatively similar angle. In such a case, the layer of frozen carbon dioxide that covers the ice water at the poles could evaporate. That would cause the atmosphere to undergo a considerable rise in density. Is that not possible, Professor?'

Jim nodded. 'Possible. However, I've always favored intense volcanic activity filling the atmosphere with dust and causing the greenhouse effect, and in turn raising the temperature. No conjunction to the sun would melt the ice water at the poles. Only the carbon dioxide would melt.'

'But those are theories on how the atmosphere could become dense,' Lauren said. 'How did Mars lose its air in the first place?'

Jim shrugged. 'Some cosmic catastrophe perhaps.'

[Message from Houston.]

'What cla.s.sification?' Bill asked.

[Cla.s.s F, Bill.]