Alicia pulled herself into the shotgun seat, and that was all the seats there were, except a backward-facing bench in the bed. Kelly and I climbed up there and secured our safety lines to a pipe that ran just below the roll bar. Standing up was by far the best way to ride, and Dak had promised to take it slow.
Dak deliberately picked out some fair-sized rocks to climb and Blue Thunder performed perfectly… all in an eerie silence that was partly because of the thin air and partly because of the most important modification that had been made. Under the hood, where you’d expect to find an engine, there was now only two big tanks, one for oxygen and the other for hydrogen. The engine was sitting on the floor of Sam’s garage, and Blue Thunder was now powered by four electric motors, one for each wheel. Beneath my feet, under the truck bed, were six fuel cells. Blue Thunder could operate with only two of them online, but today, as the Martian evening progressed, I could see a line of six green lights on Dak’s dashboard.
“One mile, tops,” Travis said over our radios.
“Gotcha, Captain,” Dak said.
There was a computer screen on the dash in front of Alicia. It showed a map of our landing area, part of the extremely detailed map we had [340] downloaded, free, from NASA. Alicia’s job was to try to match the terrain with the real-time map Blue Thunder’s navigational computer was generating. That information was being fed constantly by our inertial tracker, which was accurate down to about one inch.
The shallow gully we had landed in was curving off to the west as Dak drove down it, and we tried several gullies on the map, sort of like moving a transparent overlay map over a more detailed topographic map. Alicia moved the cursor into a place that might be right, but the computer didn’t like it. Again, same result. But on the third try the computer signaled we’d hit the jackpot.
“I’ve got our position now, Travis,” Alicia said. “Uh… Dak, why don’t you turn right here… I mean, west. Go up that slope, and there should be a crater, about forty feet wide, on the other side.
“West it is, hon,” Dak said, and Kelly and I held on, though the safety lines held us securely, as Dak powered up a slope of about 20 percent.
“Just like four-wheelin’ in the hills!” Dak chortled. He was having the time of his life. How many NASCAR drivers got to hot-rod around on another planet?
We got to the top of the ridge, a bit higher than the one we’d walked up, earlier, and down there at the bottom was exactly the crater Alicia had described.
“We’ll call it Alicia Crater,” Dak suggested.
“The hell we will,” she said. “We get to name stuff? If we do, you better name something a lot more impressive than that after me.”
“Okay, baby.” Dak sounded so contrite that we all laughed, Travis, too.
He drove us along the ridge for a while, but Travis’s voice came again, like a leash on a frisky dog. “I make you one point one miles from the ship right now, Dak. Time to turn around.”
“Yassuh, boss,” Dak said. “Manny, Kelly, can you see anything from up there?”
We’d been headed toward the Valles Marineris; the map showed it only 3.4 miles ahead…
“I see a line, a little darker, maybe,” Kelly said.
[341] “Maybe,” I said. “But the horizon here is confusing. Too close. We know it’s there, the valley, but I wouldn’t swear we’re seeing it.”
“Me either,” Kelly agreed.
“Tomorrow is another day,” Dak said, and brought Blue Thunder smartly around. We followed her outward-bound tracks for a short distance, then Dak went down through the next gully, up the crater wall, down to the inside, then up and out. We made about a quarter of a circle of Red Thunder, and came back home from the west.
We got out except for Dak, and we laid electric blankets on the ground in front of each of the wheels. Dak drove onto them, and in another thirty minutes we had the blankets laced around the wheels and plugged into ship’s power. It was exhausting work, a lot harder than I’d expected, just like assembling the vehicle had been. Travis laughed when I mentioned it.
“Now are you glad I had your lazy asses out running every lousy morning?”
“I’d be even happier if you’d worked off that beer gut, Travis,” Alicia said.
BACK INSIDE. WE all gathered in the cockpit to watch our first Martian sunset… the first Martian sunset ever seen by human eyes. We were the first!
The stars came out, much brighter than I’d ever seen them on Earth… well, from Florida, anyway. Hundreds of years of industrial revolution had filled Earth’s skies with a lot of smoke and chemicals, the ozone layer seemed to be in trouble, and maybe the whole planet was warming up…
It was impossible to worry about things like that while we watched the stars come out. But you had to wonder, would Jubal’s miracle drive make it possible for humans to live on more than just one, vulnerable planet? If we could lift things on a large scale, it would be possible to have a self-sustaining outpost on Mars in only a few years… and then there were those wild-eyed dreamers who spoke of “terraforming,” of [342] changing the very nature of Mars to make it more Earth-like, to fill its basins with water and its air with oxygen. But even the most optimistic of those dreamers said it would be a project for centuries, not years. I’d not live to see it. I wasn’t even sure if it was a good idea. Because… there were the stars, waiting out there. Some of those stars would have planets that were already Earth-like. Some of those Earth-like planets might already have intelligent life forms on them, but some may not.
I might live to see that. I really might.
Now the faint light of the sun from under the horizon faded out completely, and I realized what I’d been seeing before was nothing. Nothing at all. More stars in all their glory, endless thousands of them, and splashed across the sky like… well, like spilled milk, was the incredible immensity of the Milky Way, our galaxy, a hundred billion stars so thick you couldn’t pick out a single one.
My arm was around Kelly, and I hugged her tighter.
I don’t know how long we stayed there like that, but eventually Travis suggested we all get some sack time.
“Big day tomorrow,” he said. “Luckily, we get an extra thirty-seven minutes.” That was because it takes Mars twenty-four hours and thirty-seven minutes to turn once on its axis. We had decided to stick to Greenwich Mean Time for the ship’s log, and to simply tailor our working days as morning, noon, and evening. There was little to be done at night; with the temperature just outside that clear plastic porthole already down to one hundred degrees below zero.
Of course, there were other things two people could do during off hours. Kelly and I retired to our room and did most of them.
Mile High Club, Million Mile High Club, and now the Mars Club…
We were the first!
29
THE NEXT MORNING, judging by the expressions on Dak’s and Alicia’s faces, we weren’t the first Mars Club members by much. Suiting up, Travis looked at us one at a time, and shook his head.
“You guys are disgusting,” he groused. “Don’t you know we’re making history here? Don’t you have any-”
“Who says you can’t make history in bed?” Alicia wanted to know.
“We made some history last night,” Kelly agreed. Suiting up had to wait a few minutes until we all stopped laughing.
ONE OF OUR hard and fast rules was that Red Thunder was never to be left empty. Another was that Dak was the official driver of Blue Thunder, unless he chose to delegate it, and none of us figured he would. Only fair, I guess. It was his truck. Since we planned to use the truck every time we went out, it meant that the other four of us had to share the ship duty. We tossed a coin-slowly, in the low gravity-and Alicia drew watch duty the second day. She was disappointed, as we all would have been, since it was to be a big, big day, but she submitted gracefully.