"But otherwise…"
"Waterman was the last holdout."
"And now he’s fallen."
"What about you? How successful have you been?"
"Actually, Katrin and I had a little workout in the gymnasium again."
"But what about Joanna?"
A long silence.
"Well?"
"One has to be very circumspect with Joanna, you know. I believe she’s still a virgin."
"Only three women on the ship and you’ve failed with one of them."
"I’m working on it."
"I’ve succeeded with every one of the men now."
"Except the Russians."
"Pah! You fuck the Russians if you’re so worried about them."
"Hardly! It’s little Joanna I want."
"Then you’re going to have to try harder, aren’t you?"
"You mean this isn’t hard enough to suit you?"
"Hmm… well… I suppose it will do for now."
Hours later, alone and still sleepless, Tony Reed told himself that it was all a game, a pleasant way to pass the boring weeks while they were all packed together inside the spacecraft. We’re harming no one. Except perhaps the Russians, but that’s not my doing. Perhaps Katrin is accommodating them, a little Russo-German friendship pact.
He turned in the bunk, trying to find a more comfortable position. It’s only a game, a delightful game. Yet a deeper voice in his mind reminded him that soldiers on their way to battle play a similar game. Fear is the spur, the voice said to Tony. You go through the motions of creating life because you are so terrified of impending death.
Nonsense, Tony replied to his inner voice. We’re perfectly safe inside this spacecraft. We’re protected by the work of the best minds in the world. There is a certain element of risk, of course. That’s what makes it all so interesting.
The voice was not placated. Death is waiting a mere few centimeters from you, on the other side of this spacecraft’s thin metal skin. Play your game, try to get the fear out of your mind or expiate it with bursts of lovemaking. But death is waiting for us all, and we are flying toward it.
SOL 6: MORNING
Strangely, Jamie felt more relaxed and free cooped up in the cramped rover with Vosnesensky than he had at their base camp’s dome.
The rover was a segmented trio of aluminum cylindrical canisters, each of them mounted on spindly, springy wheels that trundled across the sandy, rock-strewn surface of Mars. One of the cylindrical segments held a fuel tank big enough to allow the rover to remain out in the field for a week or more. The middle segment held equipment and supplies. Up front, the largest of the three cylindrical canisters was pressurized like a spacecraft so that humans could live inside it in shirtsleeves. There was a bulbous plastiglass cockpit at its front end and an airlock at its rear, where it linked with the second segment.
The rover was designed to carry four comfortably, and could squeeze in twice that many in an emergency. Jamie had expected to feel tense, alone with Vosnesensky; two men from very different backgrounds, almost entirely different worlds. Yet their first day in the rover went smoothly enough, even though they hardly spoke to one another.
The Russian did most of the driving; Jamie did most of the outside work. They covered little more than a hundred kilometers the first day out, driving only during the daylight hours. The dull upland plain of their landing site quickly gave way to the rougher terrain of Noctis Fossae, crisscrossed with cracks and faults like the battlefield of two entrenched armies.
The badlands grew much more rugged, until they were threading through a jagged stony forest of rock spires that loomed high above them; rock pillars carved into eerie sculptures that reminded Jamie of wildly abstract totem poles. The wind’s eroded away the soft stone and left these pillars of granitic stuff standing, he told himself. Then he realized that the gentle winds of Mars had to work for hundreds of millions of years to carve their magic this way.
For hours they drove through the towering spires of stone. Jamie sat fascinated, staring, waiting to see symbols of eagles or bears scratched into the rock.
The crevasses ran generally north-south, which made their southward journeying easier, but with the rocks that seemed to cover the ground everywhere, and the craters and spires and sand dunes, they seldom reached a speed of even thirty kilometers per hour.
Like driving a pickup on reservation land, Jamie said to himself as they rode jouncing through the desolate country. Except there are no roads at all. Not even a trail or an animal track.
They stopped virtually every hour. Jamie would go outside in his sky-blue hard suit to take rock and soil samples and plant an automated meteorology/geology beacon that would measure air temperature and pressure, humidity, wind velocity, and record heat flow coming up from underground, as well as any seismic activity. The beacon sent its signal to the pair of spacecraft hovering in synchronous orbit some twenty thousand kilometers above the equator. The communications equipment aboard the spacecraft automatically relayed the signals both to their base camp and back to Earth.
Despite the rover’s pressurized interior both Jamie and Vosnesensky found themselves living inside their hard suits. The Russian went strictly by the mission rules that said he had to be suited up whenever Jamie went outside, in case an emergency arose. More often than not, the cosmonaut came out with Jamie. At first he busied himself with inspecting the rover’s exterior: the wheels, the antennas, the way the iron-rich Martian sand powdered the finish of the rover’s skin.
By the second morning, though, it seemed to Jamie that Vosnesensky came outside merely to have some human company and to enjoy the scenery.
"You say your New Mexico looks like this?" the Russian asked.
Jamie heard his voice in his helmet earphones. Bent stiffly over a waist-deep gully that exposed a seam of basaltic rock, he said, "Yep. Cliffs and arroyos-canyons. Clear skies. Not much rain."
"It must be very barren, then."
Smiling to himself, Jamie replied, "Compared to this it’s the Garden of Eden."
The Russian fell silent.
Jamie straightened up and took the video camera from his belt. The gully ran all the way out to the horizon, almost as straight as train tracks except for some slumping here and there where the ground had slid down to partially fill it in. A fault line, Jamie recognized. The area’s crisscrossed with them. But this one’s been eroded by running water. Had to be. Or mass wasting, permafrost melting beneath the surface and undermining everything. But when? There’s been no liquid water around here for hundreds of millions of years, most likely. Could a rill remain unchanged all that time?
He returned the camcorder to its clip on his belt and went to work chipping at the exposed rock ledge. Then he put the samples into a pouch and picked up the drill. As usual, the drill bit into the ground easily for the first meter or so, then hit resistance. Permafrost, thought Jamie. This whole region is sitting on top of a frozen ocean just a few feet below the surface. Once he had pulled the core sample from the drill bit and carefully deposited it in a sample case, he started back toward the rover.
Vosnesensky was standing there watching in his fire-engine red hard suit.
"Okay," Jamie said. "I’m finished here. All I’ve got to do is…"
He realized that the Russian had already taken one of his sensor beacons from the equipment bay in the rover’s middle section. Jamie took it from him.
"Thanks, Mikhail."
He could sense the man’s shrug. "I had nothing better to do."
"Thanks," Jamie repeated.
Minutes later they were back in the rover’s cockpit, Vosnesensky in the left seat. They had both removed their helmets and gloves; their hard suits bulked in the cockpit’s bucket seats like a pair of brightly colored armor-plated polar bears.