Beneath the odors of rot and decay had been a dry, alkaline smell like moldy bread.As he coughed the last of the foul air out of his lungs, he saw that it was mold, thick and bluish gray, growing up to shoulder height on the foam walls. Oily water dripped from the ceiling and pooled on the floor, which felt spongy under Kane’s feet.
He slogged through the tunnel and crossed a bulkhead into the Control Center.At first glance the damage didn’t seem so bad, but Kane found rust on the chrome surfaces and greenish corrosion on the solder points. He brought up the drives on the main computer and tried booting an operating system, but nothing came up on the lead crt. It could have been anything from rom failure to bad cabling, and Kane didn’t see the value of trying to pinpoint it.
The astrometry processor, attached to a wire grid telescope on the far side of the moon, was still running, its red map lights still winking into new patterns as Kane watched.The gauges on the little fusion pile were stable as well, and with a little work the place could be used again. But it would be a long time before the smell was gone.
Kane turned back to the astrometry unit. It was one of Pulsystems’s most sophisticated computers, designed to measure the universe with a combination of light, radio, and neutrino detectors, so sensitive that it could calculate the motion of planets around nearby stars.
As a teenager he’d seen it being tested in the basement of the company’s downtown Houston office, encased in glittering black aluminum and plastic, promising answers to questions that no one had even thought of asking. Now it lay in the ruins of a deserted outpost, part of another era. Kane felt like a Goth at the sack of Rome, watching his stream of piss wash the delicate paints from a piece of Grecian marble.
No, he thought, not as bad as that.The fact that he was standing there at all proved that it hadn’t been completely forgotten, that the riots and hunger and brutality of the last ten years might be no more than a temporary setback. Now that the worst of it was over, the human race had a genuine chance to start fresh, to make a blind, quantum leap into an unimaginable future.
Maybe it was already happening; maybe this expedition of Morgan’s would be the first step. For once Morgan might have seen past his anachronistic squabbling over the division of the world’s spoils, but Kane found it hard to believe. For Morgan, self-interest was everything, and sooner or later Kane expected to find the short-term payoff that Morgan was counting on.
A shame, Kane thought. Once he’d seen himself as the answer to Morgan’s greed, a new program for a new age, but now he wondered if he had the conviction to bring it off.
He was pulling a clogged filter from the ventilator when Reese broke in on the radio.“I’m in the airlock. How bad is it?”
“Not good. Leave your helmet on.”
A few seconds later, Reese came through the bulkhead. Kane noticed the gray stains on his suit where surface dust had turned to mud in the hallway. Reese clicked his radio off and waited for Kane to do the same. Then he crouched in front of the astrometry unit and pulled a diskette out of the drive.
Kane stood next to him so they could touch helmets.“What the hell are you doing?”
“I need this.”
“That’s the map, isn’t it?” Kane asked.
“Yeah,” Reese said.“It’s the map.” For twelve years the processor had been updating and refining the state vectors of every object it could perceive, storing not only position but direction and speed of relative motion.
“What for?”
“I can’t tell you that. Maybe later, but I can’t tell you right now.”
“Okay, Reese. If that’s how you want it.”
“I didn’t take this, okay? We looked around and then went back outside.”
“Sure, Reese.Whatever you say, man.” He pulled away and turned his radio back on.“The place needs some work.”
Reese switched on.“Too much to do anything about it now. Let’s get back to the ship.” Reese slipped the diskette into a zip pocket on his thigh.“The lander looks tight.The computer came right up, and it seems to think it’s okay.There’s nothing it can’t check out better than we can anyway.”
“A piece of luck, then,” Kane said.“We were about due for some.”
“Not luck,” Reese said.“It’s a good piece of hardware.Takahashi’s gassing it up right now, and we’re going to go ahead and get out of here.”
“Suits me,” Kane said, grateful not to have to spend another night in the Mission Module. It’s happening, he thought. In a few hours he would be on Mars.
“Get your stuff together,” Reese told him,“and take it on over to the lander. Bring Lena with you.We should be ready to lift inside an hour.”
He nodded, not caring that Reese couldn’t see it, and stayed behind to shut off the lights. Before he left, he put a fresh diskette into the astrometry processor and reloaded its program.
Just in case, he thought, shutting the outer hatch of the base. In case we’re back this way some time.
Back inside the ship, he hung his helmet on the wall outside the airlock and wore the rest of his suit into his quarters. Dirty clothes were slotted into neoprene knobs along the wall, and he wadded them into his fist, wondering what he should bother to bring. Somewhere in his overhead locker was a duffel bag that he’d unloaded when he first came aboard and hadn’t looked at since. He pulled it out and tore open the Velcro fasteners.
A Colt .38 Police Positive, huge, steel-blue, and menacing, tumbled out of the bag.
It spun end over end as it drifted toward the gridded floor, bounced once and hung there, the hammer snagged in a metal hexa-gon.The barrel of the gun slowly wobbled in a parabola and then stopped, the muzzle pointed accusingly at Kane’s chest. He jammed his palms into his temples and held on as a yellow beam of pain arced through his skull.
“No,” he said out loud. It had to be a hallucination. It was the same gun he’d found in Houston, hidden underneath his cot in the Project Management Building. But he’d gotten rid of it then, put it in a dumpster or something...hadn’t he?
Tiny hemispheres of sweat clung to his forehead. He bent over and touched the steel, its hardness palpable even through his thick gloves.
Not an illusion, then. But he had no memory of packing it, would in fact have been insane to bring a gun into this fragile tin can of a ship.
“Kane?” Takahashi’s voice came from just outside the cubicle.We’re closing the ship,” he said in Japanese.“Hurry up. Isoide kudasai!” The polite form, Kane noticed, but his use of Japanese instead of English was uncharacteristically rude.
Kane’s hand closed over the pistol barrel, shoved it into the duffel bag, and pushed a layer of clothes in over it.“Yeah, okay, for Christ’s sake. Kite! I’m coming.”
His hands shook. He felt an eerie, disembodied compulsion urging him to bring the gun along; at the same time he was terrified of bringing it, wanted somehow to break the chain of events already forming around it.
He had no time left to decide.Takahashi, already suspicious and irritable, might take it on himself to search Kane’s quarters. Nearly frantic, Kane stuffed the rest of his clothes into the bag and ducked into the hallway to put on his helmet. He could see Takahashi’s feet through the open gridlock of the floor above him, making a last pass through the ship.
He cycled through the airlock and followed Lena’s retreating suit toward the mem.
Without conscious intent, his eyes moved upward for another look at Mars.The sunrise had reached Pavonis Mons, to the north and east of the colony. Frontera.
It had been ten years since the last ship had left there for Earth. Fifty-seven colonists ignored the recall order from the collapsing US government. For two years messages trickled out sporadically: grim stories of nitrogen shortfalls, radiation-induced cancers, famine, and suicide. One of the last told of the failure of the Russian settlement at Marsgrad, on Candor Mesa in the Valles Marineris.The survivors had arrived at Frontera over a period of weeks, starving, crippled, irradiated, and no one knew how long they’d last.