Dak deployed the ramp, made of metal mesh, impossible to slip on. We started down the ramp, suddenly shy about it.
We had talked about the famous “first words.” Everybody knows the pressure Neil Armstrong was under, how they had a camera set up just to capture that moment, that first step, and all America was asking, “What will his first words from the surface of the moon be?” Armstrong must have worried about it. And once there, he blew it, though he always maintained he really said, “One small step for a man…”
I had toyed with the idea of something like, “Holy crap! We’re on Mars.” But I knew I didn’t have the nerve for that, and it would have stunk to high heaven, anyway. But, gosh darn it… I don’t think any of us were up to saying something like, “What hath God wrought?”
So I had an idea, and while we were still standing on the ramp I told the others about it. It was agreed to with no objections. We all went to the foot of the ramp.
“On my signal, kick off with the left foot,” I said.
“Roger.”
“Will do.”
[336] “Weeee’re …” and we all stepped off.
“… off to see the Wizard! …” We skipped ahead a few feet-skipping’s not easy in a space suit, even at one-third gee-and then nearly collapsed laughing.
I swore a mighty oath the Chinese were not going to steal this moment from us. The truth was going to get out, no matter what.
We were the first!
WE HAD TALKED about running up a flag. All the Apollo astronauts did. We knew the Chinese planned to. But what flag?
We were all Americans, all proud to be Americans. But we were not, strictly speaking, an American mission. We had no connection to our government, and that’s the way we wanted to keep it.
The United Nations flag? But Travis didn’t have a very high opinion of the UN, and neither did Kelly. Dak and Alicia were like me, politically not very involved. We were willing to go along with Travis and Kelly.
“How about the state of Florida?” Dak had suggested, not very seriously.
“Looking at what Florida has done to the land,” Kelly said, “I wouldn’t trust those idiots in Tallahassee to run a mud puddle, much less a whole planet.”
“Besides, they wouldn’t be interested,” I pointed out. “There’s no beachfront land to screw up.”
Travis suggested they use the flag of his old alma mater, Tulane.
“Do they have a flag?” Alicia asked.
“I could find out. Better yet, how about the flag of MIT? That ought to get you guys a full scholarship, don’t you figure?”
In the end we decided to go flagless.
We set aside thirty minutes for just looking around, for getting used to the idea that we were really on Mars. “Gosh-wow!” time. Travis had put us down in a small valley. We walked up the gentle slope of the dune north of us and took a look around. Walking was easy in the.38 gravity, even with the pressurization that made space suits a bit hard to bend, even with the added weight of suit and backpack.
[337] I’d hoped the trio of volcanoes in a straight line, Arsia Mons, Pavonis Mons, and Ascraeus Mons, might be visible in the distance. The map scale had deceived me. We were over four hundred miles away from them, with Olympus Mons another five hundred beyond that. From the rise we saw more of the same terrain we had landed in. The spectacular views in these parts were down, not up, and we wouldn’t see it until we were standing on the edge of the Grand Canyon of Mars.
So we took a few pictures, or Kelly did, with her camera in a plastic box usually used for underwater photography. Then we went down to deploy our surface vehicle.
We had loaded it into Module Four. It was hard to believe that, a few months before, it had been Dak’s pride and joy, Blue Thunder. All that was left of it was the pickup bed and body. Sort of like those “stock cars” they drive at Daytona, called Fords or Chevys, actually nothing but car-shaped Fiberglas shells surrounding an engine and chassis, built from the ground up.
Module Four had been pressurized and heated during our flight. Now Dak climbed up a ladder and found a control that released the 15 psi atmosphere inside. When that was done the simple plug-type door was pulled in and up by an ordinary garage-door opener. He stepped inside and handed out six metal tracks, which me and Kelly and Alicia fitted together into two corrugated metal ramps. We lifted one end of each track so Dak could fit them into slots on the module, then carefully aligned them.
Dak operated an electric winch and slowly, slowly, Blue Thunder came down toward us. When it reached the ramp Dak shoved it until its wheels were in the tracks, then we lowered it the rest of the way.
Its undercarriage had been greatly modified. A framework of steel and giant shock absorbers supported the truck body a full three feet above its wheels. But those wheels were just for getting it down the ramp. When we’d rolled the vehicle away from the ramp Dak operated a second winch, and the real wheels came down, like four pink donuts on a spike. They were earthmover tires, a bit over seven feet high.
But… pink?
[338] “The only color they had in stock,” Dak had said. “They’ll do the job.”
The job they had to do was to protect the rubber of the gigantic tires from freezing and flaking away, like his experimental tire had done. It turned out sixteen was how many electric blankets they needed, modified with zippers around the edges, to cover the tires. Each nestled in its own pink cocoon, like weird, flattened Easter eggs.
We got the wheels down and unwrapped, then jacked Blue Thunder up to the proper height, removed the regular tires and replaced them with the big ones. Each wheel weighed eight hundred pounds on Earth, but just three hundred on Mars. We could horse them around without too much trouble.
They call it a Bigfoot, at monster truck rallies. They are all descendents of the original Big Foot, made by some maniac a long time ago. They have only one use: to bounce recklessly over lines of junk car bodies as quickly as possible, preferably without killing the driver by turning over on him.
Only one use, until we took one to Mars, that is.
“It’s perfect,” Dak had said, when Dak and Sam first revealed their creation to us, back at the warehouse. “You’ve seen the pictures, Mars is scattered with rocks, lots and lots of rocks, any size you want. This baby will crawl right over any rock smaller than a Buick. Bigger than a Buick, I figure we’ll drive around it.”
“Isn’t the center of gravity kind of high?” Travis had asked. “I’ve seen them turn over, on television.”
“That’s in a race,” Dak had said. “Fools be driving those rigs way too fast. Keep it down to five, ten miles an hour, it’ll climb over most anything.”
“Yeah, but who’ll be driving at five, ten miles an hour?”
“You’re lookin’ at him. I don’t always drive like I did that night I almost run you over. Right, Manny?”
“Dak can be an extremely careful driver, when he wants to be,” I said.
“And he damn sure will be, won’t you, son?” Sam had glared at his son.
[339] It took about two hours, Travis barking in our radios if he thought we weren’t being careful enough, to reassemble Blue Thunder. I was glad we’d put in all that suit time at the bottom of Travis’s pool. You don’t dare get careless in a suit, not when there’s nothing outside it but extremely cold, thin, poisonous gas.
Travis wanted us to come in for the night, but it was still several hours away so we talked him into allowing just a short jaunt. After all, we had to see if it worked as well on Mars as it had in the warehouse where we’d first seen it, didn’t we?
So Dak climbed up into the cab, which had been completely stripped of doors, windshield, seats, roof, and most of its instrument panel. Dak had new instruments to look at, and simple plastic seats. He still had a steering wheel, but because space-suit boots were not very flexible he and Sam had substituted a hand control for the foot pedals. Push it forward to go, pull back to stop.