“I don’t know, Father.”
“Are you seeking absolution?”
“Yes.”
After a moment, the priest said, “I cannot absolve you if you do not confess.”
“I’m sorry, Father.” He paused, and when there was no reply, he said, “Am I damned?”
“That is not for me to judge, my son. But you must remember this, that there is one above us who loves you unconditionally, no matter how far you have fallen or what your sins are. If you cannot tell me how you have sinned, at least tell me, can you make reparations to the one you wronged?”
“It is too late for that, Father.”
“Ah.” A soft sigh. “It is God who will be your judge, not I. I will pray for you, and I have faith in His mercy. Go forth and do your best to sin no more. That is as much as any mortal human can ever ask.”
The next day, ROTC cadet John Radkowski was commissioned into the Air Force as a second lieutenant. Six months later, he was sent to Africa.
20
PLANS
I need to talk with you,” Ryan said.
Estrela was lying face down in her bunk. “Go away,” she said.
“This is serious. I need to talk with you before I go to the Captain.”
Without looking, she grabbed a sheaf of papers—technical manuals for the mass spectrometer—from the reading ledge and clasped them over her head. “I’m not listening.”
“Look, I think there might be a way back. For some of us. But I have to talk to you.”
Estrela rolled over, scattering the papers, and looked at him. “I’m listening.”
In the darkness, it seemed to Ryan that her eyes were glistening. He wondered if she had been crying. Estrela? No, not her. She was cool and beautiful and played with hearts like children played with marbles. She would no more cry than a statue.
“Here’s the way I see it,” Ryan said. “We need a return ship. Dulcinea is dorked big time. Forget her. There was the Ulysses, but she’s gone. But there is a third return ship on Mars, and it’s still there.”
“Jesus do Sul,” Estrela said.
“I’m serious here.”
“Jesus do Sul,” she repeated. “Our return ship. Santa Luzia, you’re right—it’s still there.” She sat up suddenly. “Martin, it’s at the north pole. That’s half the planet away. How could we possibly get to it?”
“I don’t know. If it’s still there, we’ll think of something. What I need to know is, is it still good? After seven years on the surface, will it still fly? Can we use it?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t know.”
21
Driving Lessons
Ryan spent two days examining maps and orbital photographs, trying and failing to plot a workable way to get them north. It would not be an easy journey. They had over six thousand kilometers to travel—four thousand miles—over territory that had never been viewed from the surface. The territory was rough, and it was unlikely that they could maintain a very high speed. His plan was that he and Estrela would set out first, at the dawn of their seventh day on Mars. They would drive north and east on the two dirt-rovers, checking the terrain and plotting courses around any major obstacles. The others would follow in the rockhopper.
The dirt-rovers were technically called single-person extravehicular mobility units, or SPEMUs. In the crew’s campaign to eliminate acronyms, the nickname “dirt-rover” had stuck, since they had oversized balloon tires designed for travel on a variety of hypothetical types of Martian soil.
They were two-wheeled vehicles, looking like a comic-book exaggeration of a steroid-enhanced motorcycle. They featured enormous tires with knobby protruding treads like polyps growing on a bagel, and a light aluminum-lithium alloy frame that allowed the Mars-suited rider to recline against the spherical tanks that held oxygen and consumables. Each was as brightly colored as a molded plastic toy, with colors carefully chosen to make them stand out against the landscape: Day-Glo shades of turquoise and green that fluoresced almost painfully bright in the ultraviolet-rich Martian sunlight.
No one had ever ridden one on Mars.
Ryan found it both easier and harder than his rides in the simulator on Earth had led him to expect. The traction on Mars was worse than he’d expected. The oversized tires bit into the surface, but tended to spin uselessly in the soil, digging down rather than giving traction. After some experimenting, he found that if he was very gentle on the throttle, careful not to accelerate faster than the wheels could bite, he could slowly build up speed. Stopping and turning was a similarly gentle process he made a note to make sure to leave plenty of stopping room in front of obstacles.
Ryan was meticulous and cautious in learning how the dirt-rover handled on Mars, checking each maneuver point by point. He found that it was far easier to keep the dirt-rover upright than it had been in the simulator. He could heel the dirt-rover way over, and in the lighter gravity, he would have several seconds before it would tall over.
After gaining a cautious familiarity with how the dirt-rover handled on Mars, he looked up and caught a glimpse of Estrela, practicing on the second dirt-rover.
“What the hell are you doing!?”
“Hey, Ryan! This is a blast!”
“Stop!”
Estrela stood up in the seat, leaned back, and popped the front wheel up off the dirt. The bike pivoted on its rear tire in a neat turn. Ryan noticed with dismay that, for all the apparent danger of the maneuver, she managed to do a turn in about a tenth of the radius of one of his carefully calculated, gently banked curves. The front tire came back down, and she leaned forward and throttled up, firing a roostertail of dirt behind her. She sped up to him. Just before he thought he would have to dive out of danger, she yawed the bike around ninety degrees and skidded to a stop, plowing up a hill of soil in front of her. Like the turn, he noted, it was a far faster way to stop than any he had managed.
Where had she learned to drive a dirt-rover like that? It certainly wasn’t in the manual.
“Loosen up,” she said. “You handle that bike like it’s made out of glass. My grandmother drives faster than that. Come on, I’ll give you some lessons.”
While they were practicing on the dirt-rovers, Radkowski and Tana were unloading the rockhopper from its stowage bin on Dulcinea.
The dirt-rovers had been designed to give extra mobility to astronauts on the surface of Mars, but had not been intended for long distances. They had no redundancy in the drive system, and the mission regulations forbid the crew from taking a SPEMU any farther from the habitat than the astronaut could walk back in case of a failure.
The rockhopper, the pressurized Mars buggy, was far larger and could carry more equipment. The official name was pressurized vehicle for extended extravehicular traverse—a PVEET—but nobody could even agree on how to pronounce that one, and people giggled every time the acronym was used. Unlike the SPEMU, the PVEET was designed with articulated wheels that could actually step over any rocks that might be in its path, so “rockhopper” became its name. It featured a pressurized cabin, so that the astronauts could remove their suits, although the manual noted that the cabin pressurization was not a redundant system, and they should always wear a pressure suit when the vehicle was in motion. It was built for a crew of two.
The rockhopper was an odd-looking vehicle. The crew pressure vessel was a decahedron of green-anodized aluminum-lithium alloy, with pentagonal viewports of transparent silicon carbide that gave the crew windows that looked ahead, ahead and down, and downward to the left and right. Mounted in front of the crew cabin was a jointed robotic arm that could be used to pick up samples, tip rocks out of the way, or even lift up one of the dirt-rovers and carry it over an obstacle. Behind the crew cabin was the drivetrain and the power plant, thermal radiator wings, pressure tanks for consumables, and a small omnidirectional antenna that could transmit either to the orbital relay satellite or back to the habitat module. Every spot of bare metal was either blanketed by layers of flimsy gold multilayer insulation, or else anodized in the distinctly un-Martian color of lime green.