The President of the United States was the last to notice the change; he was too busy with the internal disasters of a nation that had overbred and overspent itself into tragedy. But the time came when he realized there had been a change, not only within the United States but world-wide, not only in a change in mood but in a change in tactics. The Asians withdrew their nuclear subs to the waters of the Western Pacific and the Indian Ocean, and when Dash got confirmation of that he picked up the phone and called Vern Scanyon.
“I think—” He paused, and reached out to touch the smooth wood of his desk top. “I think it’s working. Pat your staff on the back for me. Now, what else do you need?”
But there was nothing.
We were fully committed now. We had gone as far as we could go, and the rest was up to the expedition itself.
Fourteen
Missionary to Mars
Not more than six times a day Don Kayman allowed himself to pray. He prayed for various things — sometimes for relief from the sound of Titus Hesburgh sucking his teeth, sometimes to be spared the smell of stale farts that smogged the interior of the spacecraft — but there were always three petitions in each prayer: the success of the mission, the fulfillment of God’s plan for Man and, most particularly, the health and well-being of his friend Roger Torraway.
Roger had the distinction of a private stateroom of his own. It was not much of a room, and the privacy was only an elastic curtain, gossamer thin and not wholly opaque; but it was all his. The other three shared the crew cabin. Sometimes Roger shared it, too, or at least parts of Roger did. He was all over the place, Roger was.
Kayman looked in on him often. The trip was a long, dull time for him. His own specialty, which was of course not operative until they actually set foot on the surface of Mars, needed no touch-up or practice. Areology was a static science, and would remain so until he himself, hopefully, added something to it after landing. So he had let Titus Hesburgh teach him the instrument board, and a little later had let Brad teach him something about fieldstripping a cyborg. The grotesque form that slowly writhed and postured in its foam cocoon was no longer unfamiliar. Kayman knew every inch of it, inside and out. As the weeks wore on he lost the abhorrence that had deterred him from wrenching an eye from its socket or opening a panel into a plastic-lined gut.
It was not all he had to do. He had his music tapes to listen to, an occasional microfiche to read, games to play. At chess he and Titus Hesburgh were pretty evenly matched. They played interminable tournaments, best 38 games out of 75, and used their personal comm allotments to have chess texts radioed up to them from Earth. It would have been relaxing for Father Kayman to pray more, but after the first week it had occurred to him that even prayer could be carried to excess. He rationed it out: on awakening, before meals, in midevening and before retiring. That was all. That was not, of course, to count the quick lift from a Paternoster or from telling His Holiness’s rosary. And then he would go back to the endless refurbishing of Roger. He had always had a queasy stomach, but obviously Roger was oblivious to these invasions of his person and took no harm from them. Kayman gradually began to appreciate the inner beauty of Roger’s anatomy, both that part which was Man’s handiwork and that part which was God’s; he gave thanks for both.
He could not quite give thanks for what God and man had done to the interior of Roger’s mind. It troubled him that seven months were being stolen out of his friend’s life. It drew forth compassion that Roger’s love went to a woman who held it cheap.
But, everything considered, Kayman was happy.
He had never been on a Mars mission before, but this was where he belonged. Twice he had been in space: a shuttle run to an orbiter, when he was still a graduate student seeking his doctorate in planetology; then a ninety-day tour in Space Station Betty. Both were acknowledged to be mere practice for the mission that would complete his study of Mars.
All that he knew of Mars he had learned telescopically or deductively or from the observations of others. He knew a lot of that. He had played and replayed the synoptic tapes of all the Orbiters and Mariners and Surveyors. He had analyzed returned bits of soil and rock. He had interviewed every one of the Americans, French and British who had landed in their various Mars expeditions, and most of the Russians, Japanese and Chinese as well.
He knew all about Mars. He always had.
As a child he had grown up on the Edgar Rice Burroughs Mars, the colorful Barsoom of the ocher dead sea bottoms and hurtling tiny moons. As he grew older he distinguished fact from fiction. There was no reality in the four-armed green warriors and the red-skinned, egg-laying, beautiful Martian princesses, to the extent that science was in touch with “reality.” But he knew that scientists’ estimates of “reality” changed from year to year. Burroughs had not invented Barsoom out of airy imaginings. He had taken it almost verbatim from the most authoritative scientific “reality” of his day. It was Percival Lowell’s Mars, not Burroughs’s, that was finally denied by bigger telescopes and by space probes. In the “reality” of scientific opinion, life on Mars had been born and died a dozen times.
But even that had never been settled, really. It depended on a philosophical question. What was “life”? Did it have to mean a creature that resembled an ape or an oak tree? Did it necessarily mean a creature which dissolved its nutrients in a water-based biology, took part in an oxidation-reduction cycle of energy transfer, reproduced itself and grew thereby from the environment? Don Kayman did not think so. He considered it arrogance to limit “life” so parochially, and he was humble in the face of his Creator’s all-potentiating majesty.
In any case, the case for life genetically related to Earth life was still open. Well, ajar. True, no ape or oak tree had been found. Not even a lichen. Not even a growing cell. Not even (he had to confess with rue, because Dejah Thoris died hard in his bosom) such prerequisites as free oxygen or water.
But Kayman did not accept that the fact that because no one had slipped on a bed of Martian moss, there was none anywhere on Mars to slip on. Less than a hundred human beings had ever set foot on Mars. The combined area of their explorations was only a matter of a few hundred square miles. On Mars! Where there were no oceans, so the land surface to explore was greater than the Earth’s! It was almost like pretending to know the Earth by making four quick trips to the Sahara, the top of the Himalayas, Antarctica and the Greenland icecap…
Well, no, Kayman conceded to himself. That wasn’t strictly fair. There had been innumerable fly-bys and orbiters, surveyors that landed and snatched up samples of soil.
Nevertheless, the principle was sound. There was too much of Mars. No one could pretend that it did not possess secrets still. Water might yet be found. Some of the rifts looked hopeful. Some of the valleys had shapes that could hardly be understood unless you assumed they were carved out by streams. Even if they were dry there still might be water, vast oceans of water even, locked under the surface. Oxygen one knew was present. Not a great deal on the average, but averages were not important. Locally there could be plenty. And so there might be…
Life.
Kayman sighed. It was one of his great regrets that he had not been able to deflect the decision on a landing place to one of his personal favorites for suspicion of life, the Solis Lacus area. The decision had gone against him. It had been taken on very high authority — in fact, it was Dash himself who said, “I don’t give a leaping shit where something may be alive now. I want to put this bird down where our boy can expect to stay alive the easiest.”