Dom wasn’t too happy with that theory. It could neither be proved nor disproved. The nature of a star is such that in a body the size of old Sol, energy released at the sun’s core requires some eight million years to work its way to the surface, where it is then radiated to the planets within minutes. Activity at the suns surface, the light falling on Mars that day, represented what had happened inside the sun millions of years ago and provided no clue as to the activity at the core at the given moment. However, if Mars had been affected by a change in the sun’s energies, the Earth would have felt the same effects. Of course, there was plenty of evidence of changing conditions on Earth, but the evidence was subject to a variety of interpretations.
Depending on one’s personal choice, fossil ferns and corals in arctic areas could be explained in several different ways, solar variation and continental drift being the two most favored theories. Solar variation was in current favor, since that theory also served to explain the change in Mars from a living planet to a desert of waste with lichens the only form of life to be found when Trelawny first landed on the red sands.
Dom was not fully convinced of either theory to explain some things on Earth. The presence of mammoths in the ice of both Siberia and Alaska, some frozen so rapidly that their flesh was, after millions of years, used as food for sled dogs, had never been explained by advocates of either theory. In fact, most scientists simply choose to ignore the puzzle of the frozen mammoths.
Perhaps, Dom felt, the true explanation could involve a combination of both factors, plus some things not yet theorized. He, himself, could not guess at additional factors, but he believed that continental drift had a definite part. The evidence cited by those who studied plate tectonics was very convincing.
It was one thing to study the past on Earth, and another to see it in skeleton form on Mars, to see the pathetic remains of life as evidence that something, some terrible force, had turned a living planet into a dead one. The old, romantic notions of dead civilizations on Mars were long since discredited, but there had been life, life very similar to that of the Earth, and all that life, except for some hardy lichens, had been wasted.
Doris seemed to sense Dom’s mood of melancholy. She suggested a meal and coffee in the main cafeteria. It was good to be with people again, to hear the talk, to smell their presence.
The meal was cultured protein, the coffee hot and strong. They chatted with two phosphate miners seated at the next table, lingered over cigarettes, and then made their way topside for a jumper ride back to the Kennedy. The twenty-four-hour Martian day was ending as they boarded. Ellen and J.J. were on watch. They were eager to take their turn at going into the domes. It was merely changing one closed environment for another, but it was a change from shipboard life.
Alone on the ship, they sat in the control room, the view being better there, had a glass of their own personal alcohol ration, watched the small moons grow brighter in the swift darkness as the planet swung them into nightside. In the darkness, neither of them having activated the lighting system, Dom felt a growing awareness of Doris’ nearness.
She came into his arms without protest. Her lips were sweet. He felt a new sense of possessiveness, a sense of wonder. She was his, his girl, his woman. The hostile world in front of the viewport seemed to emphasize their aliveness. They were alone, only their lives, their two separate entities, belying the dead world outside, the cold, airless surface. Far way, their own world was being torn apart, once again, in strife between men. Still farther away was a bloated gas giant with a killing, crushing gravity field and monstrous pressures. Strife and uncertainty behind them, danger ahead of them. The kiss reaffirmed the fact that they were, for the moment at least, alive. But there was an agreement between them.
He pushed her away, his breath rapid, his pulse pounding. “Girl, you’d better run for your life,” he whispered.
“No fair,” she said. “Don’t try to force me to have enough willpower for two.”
“Women are scarce on Mars,” Dom said. “So they make things as simple as possible. There’s no waiting period for marriage. We don’t believe in wasting a single moment.”
“Wonderful,” she said.
“Huh?”
“All right, I’ll make it perfectly clear,” she said. “So that even a man can understand. Yes.”
“Yes?” he asked.
“Y-e-s,” she spelled. “Yes.”
“You’re sure?”
“Now you’re sounding as though you’re not sure,” she said, hitting him lightly with her fist. “Look, I feel very, very small and very, very insignificant. I want reassurance. I guess I’m all female, because what I need is the safety and the security of your arms around me.”
He held her happily for a few moments. Then he contacted ground control and stated his needs. The minister was aboard Kennedy within the hour, scarcely giving Doris time to put on her best uniform. The brief ceremony was witnessed, in the absence of the rest of Kennedy’s crew, by two men from the landing-pad staff. The bride was toasted in clear, cold water.
Once again they were alone. There was, at first, a shyness between them. They were in Dom’s quarters, since it was, as the captain’s cabin, the larger. He helped her move her few personal possessions into the room, they used another bit of their wine ration, and came together to give mutual assurances against the long and lonely night outside. She was more than he remembered and all that he’d ever dreamed.
In the early morning Dom lay awake listening to her soft breathing. Now and then she made a tiny little purring sound. He felt a great welling up in his chest, and he smiled as he looked at her face. His eyes misted in sheer gladness.
The ship muttered and whispered around them. A servo cut in somewhere deep down, and he could feel the sense of well-being which comes from being on a living ship. The ship did have a sort of life. She functioned, giving herself orders through the complicated circuits, the miles of wiring. She lived and she allowed the crew to live. But only so long as man-made machinery did the job of purifying air.
He felt a fear. Doris, beside him, stirred in her sleep and one of her long, soft legs came over his, so smooth, so warm, so terribly vulnerable to the harsh and uncaring emptiness of space. Doris lived, but she lived only because the ship which he’d designed provided her with a suitable environment. As long as his hull held out cold and vacuum, as long as his hull resisted the crushing pressures of the Jovian atmosphere, she would continue to live.
It was not a prophecy. It was not an omen. He didn’t believe in premonitions. The ship would take them there and it would bring them back. But had he made a mistake? Should they have waited? Having known the little hot slicknesses of her, the cling of her, the hunger of her lips and body, would he err on the side of overcaution, thinking of her?
So it must have been, he thought, in the first days, when the first man looked at his woman and desired her to the point of fear of losing her. So it was in the dawn-age civilizations, when the first cities offered some protection against the fierce and warring savages. Throughout history, and in prehistory, a man looked at his sleeping woman and knew the same fears, dreamed the same dreams, facing death but dreading its coming before the appointed time. Dawn-age man protected his woman from the beasts, from the desires of other men, and Dominic Gordon, lying awake in a huge spaceship on Mars, vowed to protect his woman from the hostile environment and from other men. He would protect her with fang and claw and with his skills, and he would take her into the high pressure of the Jovian clouds and expose her to great danger, and then if they lived they would face the renewed savagery of the barbarians of Earth. How he would protect her he was not sure, but he would. He would make a safe place for his woman, and for all women.