"But Mars has no magnetic field," Vosnesensky said, sounding more puzzled than impressed.
"That’s just it," Jamie heard himself reply. "Particles from the solar wind must hit the upper atmosphere all across the planet. The gases up there glow when the particles excite them. This must be going on everywhere, every night. We’ve just never stayed out long enough to see it."
"Wouldn’t it be observable from orbit?" Mikhail was being more of a hardheaded scientist than Jamie.
"Must be pretty faint, looking down against the background of the planet itself. But if they know what to look for I’m sure Katrin Diels and Ulanov will be able to observe it."
The colors faded away. The lights died slowly, leaving the sky calm and dark. Jamie felt a shudder race through him, though whether it was fear or ecstasy he could not tell. Probably some of both. His pulse was still thundering in his ears. As far as the eye could see in any direction, there was nothing but utter darkness now. As if the world had vanished, as if he were standing alone in a universe all his own, unpopulated, unoccupied except for himself.
And the stars. Even through the tinted visor of his helmet Jamie saw the bright eternal stars looking down at him like faithful old friends, telling him that even on this strange empty world they were up there in their places, the guardians of universal order.
One of the stars was visibly moving across the sky. "Is that our ships in orbit?" Jamie wondered aloud.
Vosnesensky chuckled. "It is Phobos, so close it looks like a space station, going from west to east. Deimos is too faint to see unless you know exactly where to look for it."
Jamie recognized Orion and Taurus, with the cluster of the Pleiades in the bull’s neck. Turning, he saw both the Dippers. The North Star isn’t over the north pole of Mars, he remembered.
"Look there." Vosnesensky must have been pointing, but with nothing except starlight Jamie could not make out his form.
The Russian took him by the shoulder and turned him slightly. "Just above the horizon. The bright blue one."
Jamie saw it. An incredibly beautiful blue star shimmering low on the horizon.
"Is it Earth?" he asked, in a reverent whisper.
"Earth," replied Vosnesensky. "And the moon."
Jamie could not make out the fainter whitish star nearly touching the blue one. Vosnesensky insisted he could, but Jamie thought it might have been more the Russian’s imagination than superior eyesight.
"We must get back inside the rover," Vosnesensky said at last. "No sense freezing to death while admiring the sky."
He turned on his helmet lamp, immediately destroying their night-adapted vision, and then touched the controls on his wrist to remotely turn on the lights in the rover. Reluctantly, almost angry at the cosmonaut, Jamie followed Vosnesensky back to the vehicle.
It took a surprisingly long time to get out of their hard suits in the confined space inside the rover’s airlock. The excitement of discovering the aurora gradually dimmed away. By the time they were down to their tubed skivvies, sitting on folded-up bunks facing each other with a pair of microwaved meals on the narrow table between them, Jamie’s pulse had returned almost too normal.
Vosnesensky hoisted his water glass. "A very good day," he said. "We accomplished much."
Jamie touched his plastic glass to the Russian’s. "You’ll have a good report to make to Dr. Li."
"Yes, after we eat."
"I’ll feed the data tapes into the computer."
"Good. Then we call the base and see what they have been doing."
Jamie leaned forward over the narrow table. "Mikhail, I have a suggestion about tomorrow."
The Russian also hunched slightly forward, until their noses were almost touching.
"No more than a day or so to the east of here, if we drive steadily, is Tithonium Chasma, part of the Valles Marineris complex — much deeper and wider than…"
Vosnesensky was already shaking his head. "It is not on the excursion plan. It is too far for us to travel."
"It’s less than six hundred kilometers from here," Jamie argued. "We could do it in twenty hours if we didn’t stop."
"Drive at night? Are you insane?" There was no fear in the cosmonaut’s sky-blue eyes, merely the unshakable firmness of a man who had already decided how many risks he was prepared to take.
Jamie said, "Let me explain the geological necessity."
Strangely the Russian broke into a lopsided grin. "Fine. You explain geology. I will clear the table."
As Vosnesensky got up and took their dinner trays to the storage rack where they would remain until the rover returned to the main base, Jamie folded the table and slid it back into its place beneath the bunk.
"The canyon walls here are undifferentiated," Jamie began to explain. "Just one big slab of iron-rich rock that’s been worn away and exposed. That’s unheard-of, Mikhail. There’s nothing on Earth like that."
"So you have made a great discovery. Good."
"We’ve got to find out if the bigger canyons are like that! Is the whole canyon system that way? Three thousand kilometers of pure mantle rock? It can’t be! It just can’t be."
Vosnesensky was already sliding into the driver’s chair and checking to see that their communications antenna was locked onto the spacecraft up in synchronous orbit.
"What do the satellite photographs show?" he asked.
The sloping transparent roof of the cockpit was so low that Jamie had to bend over as he stood behind the driver’s chair. He could feel the cold of the Martian night seeping through the plastiglass even though Vosnesensky had drawn the thermal shroud for the night.
He answered, "Not enough detail, Mikhail. We’ve got to be there firsthand and see the rock formations close up. Take samples for analysis."
"It would take us at least two days out of our way. A full day or more to get there and the same to return to where we should be. We don’t have enough food on board, and it would be an unnecessary strain on the air recycling system. And it would wreck the mission schedule."
"Come on, Mikhail! We can stretch the food. The fuel cells produce clean water and the air recyclers are good for months. You know that. And there’s a full week between this excursion and the next one."
"Twenty hours of driving, even without stops."
"I’ll help you with the driving," Jamie said, grinning. "I’ve driven pickup trucks over worse terrain than this."
The Russian turned in his seat and fixed Jamie with those clear blue eyes. "This is not New Mexico."
"That’s right," Jamie replied. "This is Mars. And we’re here to explore this new world. There’s important scientific work to be done here, Mikhail…"
"You scientists always want to break the rules."
"Damned right!" Jamie snapped. "We’re here for the sake of science. To explore. To learn. To seek out the truth wherever it leads us."
"Pretty words," grumbled Vosnesensky.
"Men have died for those ideas!"
"Yes. That is exactly my point."
"We’ve come a hundred million kilometers—" Jamie was almost shouting — "What the hell is another day or two of travel?"
"It is not authorized. It is not on the excursion plan. The mission controllers back on Earth would disapprove."
"Fuck ’em! We’re here, Mikhail. The reason we’re here is to learn. We can’t do that by sticking to plans written a year ago. They might as well have sent unmanned machines if they’re going to make us behave like goddammed robots."
Vosnesensky took a deep breath, then exhaled slowly, like a man trying to control his temper. "We are not robots, but we are responsible to higher authority. The purpose of this mission is to start the exploration of Mars. If we displease those in charge, there will be no more missions and the exploration will end."