"A true spear carrier."
Jamie turned to see Joanna standing beside him, a lovely butterfly trapped inside a glaring orange cocoon. Both her hands were filled with bulky silvered cases.
"You look like an encyclopedia salesman," he said.
She blinked, puzzled.
"Okay, listen up," Connors called to them. "We go through the airlock in Noah’s ark fashion: two by two. Visors down, everybody."
Joanna had to put her instrument cases on the floor before she could deal with her helmet visor.
"Check seals and air flow." Connors’s melodious voice now came humming through the helmet earphones.
The astronaut personally checked each of the scientists before starting them through the airlock. He and Monique Bonnet went through together, clean white and tricolor blue. Then Patel in his butter-yellow suit with Naguib, kelly green. Ilona and Toshima were next, the green of her suit a shade or two darker than the Egyptian’s, while the Japanese meteorologist’s softly peach-colored suit bristled with instruments and equipment that dangled from every conceivable type of belt and harness. Jamie thought that Toshima barely was able to raise his booted feet over the lip of the airlock hatch. If he ever trips and falls it’ll take two of us to haul him back up to his feet.
Finally it was Jamie’s turn, with Joanna. The two Russians, Abell, and Tony Reed remained inside. Mironov and Reed were assigned to monitor the scientists on the surface; the hard suits had instrumentation built into them that automatically reported on body temperature, heart and breathing rate, and oxygen/carbon dioxide ratio inside the suit. Astronaut Abell ran the comm console, maintaining contact with the expedition command in orbit while Vosnesensky watched everybody and everything with the eye of a Russian eagle.
With its visor down Jamie’s hard suit served as a shell that protected him from the gaze of others. He was glad of it. He had been embarrassed minutes earlier, and now he felt his stomach fluttering and his palms getting damp. It was not fear so much as anticipation. He was about to step out onto the surface of Mars and begin the work that he had dreamed about for so many years.
Let me go in beauty, he found himself thinking. Let me find harmony and beauty out there.
The noise of the airlock pumps dwindled down until Jamie could only feel their vibration through his boots. The telltale light on the tiny control panel turned red, indicating that the chamber had been pumped down to the ambient pressure outside. He leaned on the control button and the outer hatch sighed open a crack.
Pushing it all the way open, Jamie waited until Joanna went through before he stepped out onto the sandy red, rock-strewn desert to begin his morning’s work.
Like almost everything else about the mission, the selection of their landing site had been a political compromise.
The biologists had wanted to land near the polar cap, where beneath the layers of ice and frozen carbon dioxide there might be hidden pools of liquid water — and some form of life. Experiments conducted by unmanned landing probes, starting with the original Viking I and II back in 1976, had shown that there was unusual chemical activity in the Martian soil. Could life exist in that soil, if there was liquid water available?
The geologists could not make up their minds where they wanted to land, with an entire strange new world to sink their picks into. There were massive volcanoes to study, a rift valley longer than the distance from New York to San Francisco, regions where meteoric craters studded the landscape and made it appear as battered as the moon. There were areas that looked as if the ground were underlaid by layers of permafrost, oceans of water frozen underground. There were cliffs and highlands that undoubtedly bore the testimony of billions of years of weathering, and the huge Hellas Basin, a hole nearly a thousand miles wide and three miles deep.
The physicists wanted to study how energetic radiation and subatomic particles streaming in from the sun and stars interacted with the thin Martian atmosphere. They also wanted to probe the planet’s interior, to determine why Mars had no planetwide magnetic field, as Earth does.
The Russians especially wanted to examine the two tiny moons of Mars and test techniques for extracting rocket propellants from their rocky bodies. The Americans wanted to visit the old Viking I lander and place a plaque on it honoring a dead scientist.
The resolution of these conflicting desires was a compromise that pleased no one. The landing site picked was just north of the equator at one hundred degrees west latitude, on the edge of the massive upland rise called the Tharsis Bulge. To the south was the badlands of Noctis Labyrinthus; to the west the mammoth Tharsis shield volcanoes. But their actual landing site was an undistinguished, gently sloping flatland that was considered relatively safe for the landings, about equally distant from the western end of the monumental rift valley known as Valles Marineris and the chain of volcanoes that crowned the Tharsis highlands.
A special team in the orbiting spacecraft would visit Deimos and Phobos, the two moons of Mars, so that the Russians could test their ideas. One of the American astronauts could fly the soarplane to the Viking I site, if conditions permitted. The ground team commander, cosmonaut Mikhail Andreivitch Vosnesensky, would decide if the conditions were right. And the flight would take place only if the expedition commander, Dr. Li Chengdu, granted his approval.
The explorers had two sizable ground vehicles for cross-country travel and two gossamer-winged soarplanes for covering longer distances.
Mission plans were specific and detailed. There would be brief excursions to the Noctis Labyrinthus badlands and to one of the Tharsis volcanoes. There would be extensive chemical tests of the Martian soil. There would be drilling to look for underground water. And of course, there would be the ongoing search for any sign that life might have once existed on Mars.
Of all the landing sites in all the regions of all the planet Mars, they had to pick this, Jamie grumbled to himself. Probably the dullest place they could find. A moderately cratered plain on an upland bulge, too far from the interesting line of volcanoes to even glimpse their sixteen-mile-high peaks above the horizon. Some sand dunes off to the west and the same old rocks that lay all across the surface everywhere you looked. The most interesting thing in this region would be the fracture ridges in the wild badlands to the south, but that’s nearly three hundred kilometers away.
Ah well, he sighed inwardly. They picked this spot for a safe landing, not for its geological interest. Get to work.
Jamie began by collecting rock samples. The broad open plain on which they had landed was covered with rocks ranging from pebble-sized to boulders as big as a man. Probably thrown up when a good-sized meteoroid hit the ground. Or maybe an eruption of one of the Tharsis volcanoes, although they didn’t look as if they had erupted so violently. Jamie’s equipment back in the dome would tell him which it was, he felt sure.
"Please be sure to look for any odd color," Joanna’s voice came to him through his earphones.
Jamie turned his head and saw only the inside of his helmet. He turned his entire body ninety degrees and there she was in her dayglo suit, a dozen meters away, with Monique Bonnet still close beside her.
"Any color in particular?" he half joked. "We’ve got a great assortment of reds and pinks here."
"Green would be nice," chirped Monique’s lightly pleasant voice.
"Any color at all that seems out of the ordinary," Joanna said. "We are not particular. Not yet."
Just outside the dome’s airlock Connors was setting up one of the TV cameras for his educational show. He had a little box of props at his feet. The others were stooped over as far as the suits would allow, intently searching the sandy soil like a squad of groundkeepers looking for litter. Or that famous painting, Jamie said to himself. The Gleaners. That’s what we’re doing, gleaning, trying to find scraps of food for our minds in this frozen desert.