“I think it was the first time any of us confronted the fact that we’d given up, we’d all decided there wasn’t going to be a twenty years from now. Curtis changed that. He said we didn’t need Earth, that we could make our own Earth, only better. It sounds trite and stupid when I say it, but Curtis painted it, he sold it, until we could all feel it and smell it and taste it. Just the idea, just the hope that you could look at the sky without having a sheet of plastic between you and it.”
“Terraforming,” Kane said.
“Then you’ve heard all this.”
“Just the word, is all.”
“Curtis believed in the ‘pressure point’ approach, that you can change a few little things and get big results. Like if you dumped some dust on the poles, the heat absorption would melt the ice and increase the atmospheric pressure which would start a greenhouse effect which would melt more ice.There’s supposed to be enough frozen junk at the poles and around here on the Tharsis ridge to bring us up to a full bar of pressure, same as Earth.”
“That’s a lot to happen in twenty or thirty years.”
“Sure, but in the meantime you’ve got oases. Drop some ring ice from Jupiter or Saturn, say, into a nice low area and blow out a crater ten kilometers deep.You’ve got heat and gasses from the impact, and the crater will hold the higher air pressure.”
Kane stopped, put his hands in his trouser pockets.“What are you, crazy? ‘Drop some ring ice.’ How the hell are you going to go get this ice? With a leftover mem and some ice water for propellant?”
He really doesn’t know, she thought.About the physics, the transporter, the antimatter, none of it.
“It’s not impossible,” she said.“We have to make everything here. The air you’re breathing out of that tank is manufactured.We can make rocket fuel, we can make stages, we can fix the ships still in orbit.We could do it.”
“So why didn’t you?”
“It...I don’t know. It was just too hard, I guess. It would take sacrifices.There’d be less booze,less energy for Curtis and his pals to go riding around in the jeeps. By the time we’d sacrificed long enough that we could actually talk about building the ships, everybody was tired of sacrifices.”
“Even you?”
“Maybe even me, a little. But I could stand it, if it would give us ships. And if we had ships I wouldn’t just go to Saturn and turn back.You
know? I mean, sure, build the oases, but don’t stop there. Not with the
rest of the universe out there waiting.”
“You sound like Reese.”
With good reason, she thought. She said,“Yeah, I suppose I do.” She looked back and saw Blok hurrying toward them. She had a moment of panic—Blok would be able to tell at a glance that she and Kane had been to bed, he would tell Curtis—but it passed as quickly as it came. It was the same as with the Russians. If Curtis wanted to know he probably already knew. She didn’t doubt for a nanosecond that he had his own bedroom as thoroughly wired as the rest of the dome.
She started walking again, pulling Kane along with her voice.“I suppose Curtis is as bad as any of them. He could have pushed harder, but I think it would have lost him his popularity. He’s smart enough to know that. But I think he really bought the dream. He wouldn’t want to admit it, but I think it’s really been eating at him the last five or six years, knowing that we could be trying for something better and we aren’t.”
She opened the hatch to the suit room and started down the line of Rigid Experimental suits, looking for her favorite. From the corner of her eye she saw Kane peel off his hipari and clumsily stuff it into one of the lockers. She’d seen the same awkwardness when he’d undressed in her bedroom, and she suddenly understood that he was hiding something in the jacket.A weapon? she wondered.What in God’s name for, if he had no idea of what was happening?
To hell with it, she thought. Let Curtis sort it out.
But the idea terrified her nonetheless. If it was a handgun, it was a threat to all of them, a lighted match in a room flooded with oxygen, where even steel would burn. Only a fool, or a lunatic, would have one. She was afraid Kane might be a little of both.
Blok came in while she was helping Kane into his suit. He stared at them for a second or two, his eyes half closed in what Molly thought of as his “inscrutable Russian” look.Then he introduced himself to Kane.
“So,” he said.“What should I expect from my former countrymen?” he asked.“Rumor has it the Supreme Soviet is no more.”
Molly felt protective toward Kane, responsible, at least, for her attraction to him. She tried to will him into politeness, if only for her sake.
“To be honest,” Kane said affably,“we don’t hear much.The government went under, some kind of Army coup.And then the Army just kind of went to pieces.The Kazakhs against the Uzbeks against the Byelorussians and so on.”
“Tipichno,” Blok said.“Typical. Naturally the Army had to get rid of the kgb, so when the Army went there was nothing.”
“Just the obshchestvi, like Aeroflot, and a few of the stronger labor unions, the steelworkers and the miners.And they ended up incorporating.”
“Ah,” Blok said.“How Russians love a purge. Chistka, they call it.The cleaning. Out with socialism, the God that failed! In with western corporations! Bluejeans! Rock and roll!” He seemed genuinely happy, his irony buried so deeply that it, or any of his other true political feelings, would never betray him.
She twisted the clumsy, oblong helmet of her suit into place and switched on the plss.The suit had an external microphone and speaker that allowed her a direct link to the outside world; she used the speaker to tell Blok and Kane to hurry.
As she stood outside, watching the growing point of brightness in the sky, she found herself impatient to get the spacecraft on the ground, to get the last of the waiting over with. Once I know it all, she thought, once all the bad news is in, then we can decide what to do about it.
The Russian ship, visible only as a shadowy sphere-and-cylinder through the dust, hovered longer than it had to, touching down as gently as a pebble on a river bottom.And why not? Molly thought.They’d been perfecting their soft landings while the US was still dropping their Geminis and Apollos in the ocean—even if some of those landings had been blatant fiascos, like the Voskhod-2 mission where Leonov and Belyayev sat all night in their dead spacecraft, two thousand miles off course, fighting wolves and snow.
As the dust settled, Molly could make out the hideous pale green of the ship’s hull—“landlord green” Blok had once called it—and see where the cccp arid red rectangle had been clumsily painted out and replaced with the Aeroflot logo.The paint had blistered and flaked so badly in the heat of reentry that most of the lettering was gone.
Kane, beside her, was visibly unsteady. His ragged breathing hissed through the comm channel like a distant waterfall. He should be in sickbay, she thought, but there was no time to do anything for him now.
The hatch of the lander swung open.
Blok and two of the others ran forward to help. Molly watched as the first of the white-suited figures climbed down the ladder, and Blok reached a hand to help.The figure rested its weight on Blok’s shoulder, nodded, and walked away without help.
A second cosmonaut came out of the hatch and started down the ladder,then did something that Molly found odd.The Russian shut the hatch and punched a series of numbers into a ten-key pad in a recessed panel.
Locking it? Molly thought.What were they afraid of, thieves? She didn’t like the implied mistrust and secrecy.Was there some kind of weapon on the ship that they needed to protect?