Geoffrey A.Landis - Mars Crossing

VIP免费

2024-12-23 0 0 415.78KB 157 页 5.9玖币

侵权投诉

MARS

CROSSING

GEOFFREY A. LANDIS

A TOM DOHERTY Associates book

NEW YORK

TOR®

This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this

novel are either fictitious or are used fictitiously.

MARS CROSSING

thereof, in any form.

This book is printed on acid-free paper. Edited by Patrick Nielsen Hayden

Design by Lisa Pifher

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Landis, Geoffrey.

Mars crossing /Geoffrey A. Landis.—1st ed. p. cm.

"A Tom Doherty Associates book." ISBN 0-312-87201-1

I. Title.

PS3562.A4766 M3 2000 813'.54—dc21 00-056764

A Tor Book Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC

175 Fifth Avenue

New York, NY 10010 www.tor.com Tor® is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty

Associates, LLC.

First Edition: December 2000

Printed in the United States of America

0987654321

FOR THE CAJUN SUSHI HAMSTERS

THANKS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book owes a clear debt to Robert Zubrin and David Baker, from whose

Mars mission concepts I have liberally borrowed. Thanks.

Thanks are also due to Mary, Levin, Toby, Julie, Malcolm, Ben, Becky, John,

Bonnie, Astrid, Charlie, Steve, Marta, and Paula, for reading, comments, and

general support.

All great and honourable actions are accomplished with great difficulties,

and must be both enterprised and overcome with answerable courages.

—William Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation (1621)

Mars tugs at the human imagination like no other planet. With a force

mightier than gravity, it attracts the eye to its shimmering red presence in

the clear night sky. It is like a glowing ember in a field of ethereal lights,

projecting energy and promise.

John Noble Wilford, Mars Beckons (1990)

MARS

CROSSING

PROLOGUE

LANDING

Don Quijote approached Mars in perfect silence.

At one end of the spacecraft was the habitat, a squat, rounded cylinder

sitting on a heat shield. It was separated from the main rocket engine and

now-empty fuel tanks by two kilometers of tightly stretched rope, a

super-fiber tether so thin as to be nearly invisible. The spacecraft and the

fuel tanks slowly rotated around the center of the tether.

"Arm tether separation."

"Tether separation armed."

"Navigation?"

"Nav is go."

"System status?"

"Systems are go."

Mars loomed, crescent in the sky, a mottled brick of craters and wispy

shreds of cloud.

"Check terminal descent engine preheat."

"TDE preheat on."

"Check parachute deploy preheaters."

"PD preheat on."

"Fire pyros for tether sep on my mark. Three, two, one, now."

The spacecraft jerked, and the tether, suddenly cut free, recoiled away from

the spacecraft, writhing and twisting like an angry snake. The engines, solar

arrays, and fuel tanks sailed slowly off into the distance. They would miss

Mars and sail outbound on an endless trajectory into interplanetary space.

"Tether separation confirmed. We're committed."

"How's the trajectory?"

"We're on the numbers. Looking good."

"Instrument check."

"Instruments green."

"Everything green. We're sliding right down the groove."

"Then buckle up, everybody. We're going in."

The spacecraft burned through the Martian atmosphere, leaving a trail of

fire across a pink sky.

A parachute bloomed, another, and a third; bright yellow flowers blossoming

in a lifeless sky. A moment before it hit the ground, the heat shield fell

away from the back of the vehicle, and a landing cushion mushroomed out of the

bottom. At the instant of contact, a cloud of orange dust billowed up into the

air, painting the bottom part of the spacecraft with yellow-brown dirt. The

spacecraft tilted, swayed at the edge of falling over, and then rocked back

toward vertical as the airbag deflated.

"Engines off, tank pressurization off, APU status green, all systems looking

good. We're down. Navigation, you got a position?"

"Working on it ... Looks like we hit the kewpie. Should we say something for

the history books?"

"Nah. I don't think anybody is going to write down what gets said by the

third expedition to Mars."

"Tell me it ain't so. You saying that we're not going to get a parade when

we get back?"

"You got it. Welcome to Mars."

PART ONE

JOHN RADKOWSKI

Having an adventure shows that someone is incompetent, that something has

gone wrong. An adventure is interesting enough—in retrospect. Especially to

the person who didn't have it.

—Vilhjalmur Stefansson, My Life with the Eskimo

There is no easy way into another world.

—James Salter, Solo Faces

WELCOME TO MARS

Through the viewport there was nothing but a yellow-pink fog. Then, slowly,

the fog faded, and the ridged plains of Felis Dorsa emerged out of the haze,

at first misty and colorless, and then, as the dust raised by the landing

thinned out, sharply delineated.

John Radkowski looked across the landscape at plains of sand gently

undulating beneath a pale butterscotch sky.

Mars.

It was hard for him to contain his fierce joy. Mars!

He wanted simultaneously to cry, to laugh, and to shout out a loud cry of

exaltation. He did none of these. As mission commander, it was his duty to

keep the mission businesslike. Decades in the astronaut corps had taught him

that showing his emotions, even for such an event as landing on Mars, was a

move that would, down the line, give him a reputation for being emotional, and

hence unreliable. He stayed silent.

At fifty, John Radkowski was the oldest member of the crew, and the one most

experienced in space. He was short, wiry rather than overtly muscular, with

gray hair cropped closely to his head. His eyes had the slow, restless motion

of long years of training; he focused on the task at hand, but always part of

his attention was glancing around the cabin, looking up, down, checking for

that small forgotten out-of-place something that might spell trouble for the

mission. One hand, his left, was missing three fingers. His crew knew better

than to offer him help.

Mars! After all the decades of work, he had finally made it!

There was work to do. As commander, the other five crewmembers depended on

him to get the mission done safely and bring them back home. He had better get

working.

The crew was occupied with their landing tasks, shutting the flight systems

down and bringing the surface operation systems up, then verifying that they

were running according to spec. He knew that all of them wanted to stop their

work and crowd to the viewport, but for the moment they were all too busy,

even Trevor, and so he had the viewport to himself.

Off to the southeast, close enough to be easily visible through the residual

pink haze, was the squat form of Dulcinea.

The field glasses consisted of a flat rectangle, about the size of a

paperback book. They had been designed to function equally well with or

without a space-suit helmet. He raised them to his eyes. The computer adjusted

the focus to match his eyesight, and the result was as if he were looking

through a window at a magnified view of the landscape.

Like Chamlong said, they had hit their landing site right on the nail, with

Dulcinea no more than half a mile away. That was of critical importance to

them: Dulcinea was their way home, a fully fueled return vehicle that had

landed on Mars six and a half years earlier. He examined her minutely, then

examined the ground between the landing site of Quijote and the return

vehicle. It was sand, sculpted by a million years of intermittent wind into

hillocks and waves. There was an assortment of randomly scattered rocks, some

boulder-sized, half-buried beneath the sand, but he saw no obstacles to their

easy travel. Good.

The viewport forgotten, he turned to the copilot's console. The floor was

tilted at an odd angle; the lander must have set down on a slope, and he had

to move carefully to avoid falling. He studied the sequence of images taken

during landing. Both visual and radar images had been taken, and he plotted

them as a topographical map of the terrain. Again, he saw no obstacles. Good.

When he got up, he saw that Trevor, Estrela, and Chamlong were all crowded

around the viewport, pushing each other out of the way to jockey for a view of

Mars. He smiled. They must have been watching for the very instant he had

vacated the position.

"Why look out the window when we can go out and see for ourselves?" he said.

"Get your suits ready, gang, it's time to go outside and play. Get a move on;

in six weeks we'll have to go home, and we've got a full schedule before we

go."

With the lander resting at a pronounced tilt, the ladder splayed out at a

cockeyed angle. Climbing down was not really difficult, but it was a challenge

to descend gracefully. To hell with it, Radkowski thought, and jumped, landing

off balance in a puff of dust.

As mission commander, it was his task to say some immortal words for the

watching cameras. He had his lines memorized, extemporaneous words to be

remembered forever, written for him by a team of public relations experts:

I take this step for all humankind. In the name of all the peoples of

Earth, we return to Mars in the spirit of scientific endeavor, with the

eternal courage of human adventure and bringing with us the voice of peace

among all men.

Stumbling up onto his feet to stand on the red sands of Mars, with Ryan

Martin shooting him on high-definition television out the window of the

lander, John Radkowski uttered the immortal words of the third expedition to

Mars. He said, "Holy shit, I just can't believe I'm really here."

The sand had a hard, crunchy surface, and crackled underfoot as if he were

walking on a thin crust of frost. Beneath the crust, the surface under his

feet had the consistency of packed flour. Tiny puffs of rusty dust billowed

away from his feet every time he raised a foot, and within a minute, his boots

and the bottom half of his suit had been lightly spraypainted in ochre. He

felt light. They had maintained half of Earths gravity by the tether during

the seven-month journey on the Quijote; the Mars gravity was noticeably

lighter, and despite the eighteen months of training in Mars-simulation tanks

on Earth, he felt as if he were buoyed up by invisible floats.

As he'd figured, Don Quijote had landed on the slope of one of the small

ridges, and sat at a precarious tilt. Fortunately the ship had never been

intended to take off from Mars, and in a day they would move their living

quarters out of the cramped Quijote and into the inflatable habitat that had

been landed on Mars with Dulcinea.

Behind him, his Brazilian colleague Estrela Conselheiro hopped down the

ladder. She bounced on the ground, bounded into the air, and stretched her

arms overhead as if worshiping the sun. "Oh, it is magnificent, is it not?

Magnificent!"

Much better words than his own, Radkowski reluctantly admitted to himself.

Behind Estrela, Tana Jackson came down. "Yikes!" she said. "That's one

bodacious step." She looked around, and caught her breath. "My god, it's

magnificent," she said.

Finally Chamlong Limpigomolchai jumped down, negotiating the jump without

any comment. Once on the surface, he pivoted slowly around to look in all

directions in silence. The other two crew members, Ryan Martin and Trevor

Whitman, stayed behind in the lander; they would only leave Quijote and come

down to the surface when Estrela, Tana, and Chamlong rotated back to the ship.

It was everything he had wanted, what he had struggled and worked and lived

for. The rust-encrusted, ridged terrain, the distant buttes barely visible

through the cinnamon haze on the horizon, and Dulcinea, their ticket back to

Earth, sitting ready for them, no more than a fifteen-minute walk away—he had

seen it a hundred times in his dreams.

So why was he suddenly depressed?

John Radkowski had no tools for analyzing his mood. Self-inspection had

never been encouraged in the astronaut corps; the main purpose of the many

counselors and psychologists, according to the gossip, was to weed out the

weak sisters from the active duty roster. Focus on the task, get the job done,

don't complain; that had been the motto of the people that Radkowski had

worked and trained with for years. Now, suddenly, his entire future seemed to

be an anticlimax; even the remainder of the six-week stay on Mars and the

flight back TO Earth, featuring a swingby and gravity boost from the planet

Venus, seemed to him like nothing but tedium. He had been focused on reaching

Mars for so long, he had never set personal goals for beyond the moment. His

life, as he knew it, was over, and he had not even the faintest inkling of

what would lie beyond.

A man's reach should exceed his grasp, he thought. I've grasped my dreams.

What do I do now?

TREVOR

The kid who called himself Trevor Whitman stood pressed to the viewport,

looking eagerly out at the surface of Mars. With half of his attention he was

scanning the landscape for signs of ... He had no idea, really: an alien

artifact, maybe, or footprints of dinosaurs or the imprint of fossilized ferns

in an overlooked rock. None of these, of course, were things they had any

expectation of finding on Mars, but if nobody looked for such things, they

could be right on top of them, and nobody would notice.

But with most of his attention he was not looking at anything in particular,

just drinking in the sight of Mars. After seven months crammed into the tiny

crew cabin, it felt good to focus his eyes on something in the distance. In

the background he could hear the radio communications from the astronauts on

the surface. The surface fines are more cohesive than we'd expected. Sounded

like Captain Radkowski's voice. Looks like there is some amount of salt

cementing the panicles together. It is clogging up the treads on my boots, but

so far no problems with traction. Definitely Radkowski; nobody else would be

so concerned with the picky details like that. He tuned it out. Ryan Martin

was communications officer, if anything happened—not that anything was likely

to—Ryan could cope with it.

Mars, finally Mars. He watched Estrela bound across the surface, leaping and

pirouetting with the grace of a dancer, and he felt a gnawing jealousy. He

itched to get out on the surface, and it seemed unfair that he had to wait

before it would be his turn down.

At eighteen, Trevor had yet to learn patience.

It was simply not fair.

After what had to be an hour, Chamlong Limpigomolchai came back up the

hatch, and Trevor waited impatiently as the airlock cycled with the

painstaking chug, chug, gurgle of the roughing pumps. The lock opened, and

Chamlong's helmeted face appeared. His suit was dusted with a light powder of

orhre dust. The dust tickled Trevor's nose like bursting bubbles of some

metallic champagne.

Chamlong pulled off his helmet. He had a grin the size of Texas. He had

brought with him a halt dozen rocks.

"I figured you'd be in a hurry to get outside, not so?" Chamlong said. "So I

came back in to let you get a chance to go."

"Thanks, Cham," Trevor said. "I really appreciate it. How was it?" For the

whole journey, the Thai astronaut had been his favorite friend among the

adults, and his simple friendliness counted for a big reason why. The rest of

the adults too often just ignored him, or gave him orders.

"Oh, kid, you will not believe how much excellent it is to get outside

again, and just stretch," Chamlong said. "I tell you, get out there, see for

yourself."

"You got it," Trevor said. "Give me a suit inspection, okay?" The suit

inspection had been drilled into them by Captain Radkowski in every one of the

hundreds of practice runs for surface operations during the mission. Never

leave the spacecraft until you have had somebody else go through the checklist

on your suit. Never. It had seemed like overcaution to Trevor—nobody would

skip a vital step on a suit. That would not just be stupid, it would be

suicide. But when he'd said that, Radkowski had only given him a look like he

was a child, and started out with another of his rambling astronaut stories,

this one about some buddy of his who had skipped the checklist, went through a

hatch with a purge valve that had been clipped open for an inspection and

almost got himself killed. Actually, Trevor liked to hear Radkowski's

astronaut stories—and he made himself a mental note never to clip open a purge

valve—but when they were just a way to pound home some simpleminded moral like

"always take care," they sometimes got a bit tiring. While Chamlong gave him

his inspection, he thought only, Mars, I'm finally going out. Mars, I'm

finally going out. Mars, I'm finally...

He hesitated on the ladder, looking across the surface. He'd seen Mars a

thousand times in virtual reality simulations, of course, but this was

different. The sunlight was brighter than he'd expected. This far from the

sun, he'd expected the surface of Mars to be dim, but the light was as bright

as any afternoon on Earth. The helmet had a visor, and he slid it around to

give him some shade.

He had to do something. He jumped, a six-foot drop to the ground, and almost

lost his balance when he landed. Then he tried a handstand. It was a little

awkward in the suit, but after one false try he managed to balance. After

thirty seconds he started to lose his balance, tucked in and rolled in a cloud

of dust, then stood up.

Everybody was looking at him. It wasn't as if he had done something actually

dangerous; the transparent silicon carbide of the helmets was for all

practical purposes unbreakable.

"Shit, kid," was the voice on his radio. "You sprain an ankle, we're not

going to carry you sightseeing, you know." It was Tana's voice. She didn't

sound like she was mad, so he decided he could ignore her. Everybody else went

back to what they were doing; examining the soil, chipping at rocks with

hammers, digging little trenches. Boring.

"Mars, I love you," he shouted, ran up to the top of the nearest dune, and

then slid down to the bottom on his butt.

Mars was great.

MEMORIAL

Tana Jackson wanted to run, to skip over the surface, to hop like a bunny.

Adrenaline sang in her blood: I'm here, I'm here.

The Mars landscape was just uncanny. It looked hyperreal, the horizons too

close, the mountains too small, the sky looking like dirty paint. She could

run to the horizon in a few minutes.

She sat down on the surface and tried to scoop up a handful of the sand. It

was surprisingly hard to scoop. There was a crusty layer on the surface, and

when she scraped through that, the soil underneath was fine powder, like

rouge, sticking together into clods that broke apart into nothing in her

fingers.

Commander Radkowski stood watching them all patiently. When he had given

them all time to stretch out their legs and adapt to the surface, he went back

to the lander and retrieved a small chest. Then he called them to gather

around a boulder. The rock he had chosen was about chest high, dark in color,

carved by the wind into almost a cubical shape. "Ryan, are you getting this?"

From inside the lander, Ryan's voice said, "I'm taping, Captain. Go ahead."

Radkowski opened the chest and removed a plaque. The plaque was a small

rectangle of black-anodized aluminum, inscribed with seven names in gold. He

turned to Estrela Conselheiro.

She reached into the chest and took out a second plaque, identical in size

and color to the first, but with only two names on it.

Together they bent over and laid the plaques against the rock. This time

Radkowski did not hesitate over his lines. "In honor and in memory of the

explorers from the first and second expeditions to Mars, we place these

memorials on the surface of Mars. As long as humankind dream of exploration,

you will never be forgotten."

Estrela repeated the words in Portuguese, and then added, in English. "Mars

is for heroes."

Commander Radkowski took a step back. "A moment of silence, please."

Tana bowed her head and looked at the ground.

"All right. As you were," Captain Radkowski said.

Mars was just as beautiful, the colors still as intense, but after the

memorial it seemed a little more sinister. If anything went wrong, they were a

hundred million miles away from any help.

Two expeditions had been to Mars before them. Neither one had returned to

Earth.

Tana suddenly shivered, although there was nothing wrong with her suit

heater. She had known for a year that, if there was a failure on this mission,

there would be no rescue.

Mars was for heroes. But she was suddenly not so certain that she liked

being a hero.

RADKOWSKI

Commander Radkowski returned to the ship with the cloud of aimless

disappointment still hanging over him.

Ryan Martin and Chamlong Limpigomolchai were in the cabin. Out of habit, the

first thing he did was to check the viewport, to see how his outside crew was

doing. Tana and Estrela were working together on rock studies, Estrela

chipping the outer surfaces off of rocks and Tana pressing the portable X-ray

crystallography unit onto the freshly exposed surface to map the

microcrystalline structure. He was glad to see them collaborating; during the

voyage they had been at each other with their claws bared almost every week,

and he had worried that they would be unable to work together. Chalk it up to

confinement syndrome; now that there was some space to breathe, they were

apparently getting along fine.

Tana Jackson was a biologist, not a geologist, but they had all

cross-trained at each other's specialties. Radkowski could see that they had

taken the SIMS unit—the secondary ion mass spectroscope—out of its storage

bin, but they had not yet set it up. He tuned to the general frequency, but

they were apparently communicating on a private band. As commander, he could

listen in, of course, but from long experience he had learned that it was best

to give a crew its illusion of privacy unless there was a definite emergency.

Trevor Martin was somewhere out of sight, possibly behind the dune-form.

Radkowski worried about the kid; sometimes he acted as if he were younger than

his twenty-one years. Still, the enthusiasm and sheer joy of living that the

kid exuded—when he was caught unguarded and forgot to be sullen and

uncommunicative—was almost contagious, a drug that lifted the spirits of the

whole crew. Radkowski had opposed the whole idea of bringing a crew member as

young as Trevor along, but he seemed to be working out, and his presence

definitely gave the crew a lift in morale. Although they pretended not to, and

possibly didn't even realize it themselves, everybody liked the kid and wanted

the best for him. As long as he didn't manage to kill himself by being

impatient, impetuous, ignorant, aggravating, and generally clumsy—in short,

acting like an adolescent instead of an adult—he'd be fine.

John Radkowski could hardly blame the kid for acting like a kid. When he was

young, he had been a lot worse. It was only by a miracle of God that he had

straightened out. Certainly none of his acquaintances, not even his own

mother, would ever have guessed he would one day be the commander of the third

expedition to Mars.

There are good neighborhoods in Queens, but the one John Radkowski grew up

in was not one of them. The Harry S. Truman public-assistance housing unit was

an incubator for raising junior criminals, not young scientists. By the time

he had reached age six, Johnny had already learned that you never show

weakness, and you stay alive by being just as mean as the other guy.

One time, when he was fourteen, he had been hanging around the apartment

with his gang. It wasn't a real gang with colors, just the bunch of kids he

hung around the neighborhood with. They kind of watched out for each other.

Stinky and Fishface had been there, he remembered. His mother was gone,

probably at work at one of a series of interchangeable jobs she held at

fast-food restaurants. They were bored. They were usually bored.

John and his older brother, Karl, shared a small bedroom. Karl was gone,

probably hanging out with his gang—he was a member of the Skins, a real gang,

the local white-boys' gang. Karl was way cool, but he never wanted Johnny to

meet his gang buddies; said he wanted Johnny to have something better out of

life.

Stinky was smoking a cigarette he'd found in Johnny's mother's cupboard, and

Fishface was sitting on Karl's bunk bed. Karl would have gone ballistic if

he'd seen one of Johnny's friends on his bed, but Karl wasn't there, so fuck

him. Fishface was picking at the wall, the cheap plasterboard coming loose

from the studs. One end was already free, and Fishface, bored, wiggled and

pried at it until he worked it loose enough to pull out and look at the ragged

insulation underneath.

"Shit, boy," Stinky said, "what the fuck you got there?"

Fishface didn't bother to look up. "Nothing."

"Nothing? Shit." Stinky dropped the cigarette on the floor, walked over, and

reached down inside the hole. "You dogfucker, you call this nothing?"

Stinky held up what he had found: a nine-millimeter automatic, gleaming dull

gray and malignant in the feeble sunlight filtering through the dirty window.

Johnny hadn't realized that his brother had it. "Hey, Stinky, I think you'd

better put that back," he said, nervous.

"What, are you a pussy? Afraid your badass brother gonna see?" Stinky held

out the pistol, pointed it at Johnny's head, and squeezed the trigger.

"Bang," he said.

Johnny had flinched when he saw Stinky's finger whiten on the trigger. The

trigger hadn't moved. "You faggot," he said.

Stinky laughed and popped the safety. "Thought you bought it there, didn't

you?" He turned the gun over, ejected the magazine, and looked at it. "Full

load, too. Man, your brother is packing." His voice held a tone of envy.

"Look, this isn't funny," Johnny said. "You'd better—"

Stinky held the magazine in one hand and the automatic in the other. He

pointed it at the window. "Bang," he said, and pulled the trigger again.

The gun firing in the tiny room was louder than anything Johnny had heard in

his entire life. It jumped in Stinky's hand, and all four of the boys jumped.

"Holy shit! You asshole!"

There was a huge hole in the ceiling above the window. Plaster dust and

gunpowder smoke swirled in the air.

"Hey, how the fuck was I to know it was loaded?" Stinky shouted. "I took the

clip out." As if to show it, he rammed the magazine back into the gun. "It was

empty."

"Put the safety back on, you asshole," Johnny said.

The door kicked open, slamming against the wall. Johnny's brother was

silhouetted in the doorway. "The hell you assholes are doing?"

"Oh, shit," Johnny said. He stood up. "Hey, Karl, we was—"

"Shut up," Karl said. He was looking at Stinky. "Asshole, give me my gun."

Stinky pointed it at him. "Hey, man, be cool. We were—"

Karl slapped the gun out of Stinky's hand with a move almost too fast for

Johnny to see, and in the next instant he had Stinky by the throat. "You point

that gun at me again, fat boy, and after I rip your balls off I'm going to

shove them up your ass. Got it?" He didn't give Stinky a chance to answer, but

reached down with the other hand, grabbed the crotch of Stinky's pants and

picked him up and tossed him toward the door. Stinky staggered, bounced off

the doorframe, and then caught his balance and ran.

"I ever see you around here, they won't scrape up enough of you to fill a

jockstrap," Karl shouted after him. Then he turned around and looked at

Fishface. "You got some business here?"

"No, sir," Fishface said.

"Then get the fuck out."

"Yes, sir!" Fishface said, and ran out of there so fast that Johnny wondered

whether his feet even touched the ground.

Karl didn't bother to look at Johnny, just reached down, picked up his gun,

put the safety on and jammed it into his pants. Then he walked over and looked

down on Johnny.

"Hey, Karl," Johnny said, tentatively. He knew that he was going to get a

pounding, but it was best to see if he could defuse his brother as much as he

could. The sharp smell of powder and the dust from the ceiling seemed to choke

all of the atmosphere out of the room. His ears were still ringing. "We didn't

mean nothing."

"I know that, kid." Karl sighed. "What are we doing to you, kiddo? Just what

are we doing?"

"It was an accident," Johnny said. "We just sort of found it by accident—"

Karl slapped him. Johnny saw it coming and tried to dodge, but he wasn't

near fast enough.

"What was that for?" Karl said.

Johnny's ears were ringing from the blow. He tried to frame his words. "For

taking your gun—"

Karl slapped him again, this time with no warning. "Asshole. I don't care

about the gun." Karl raised his hand again, and Johnny cringed.

"That's for having stupid friends," Karl said. "Your friends are stupid, and

you're stupid, for having stupid friends. What the hell were you morons

thinking about?"

"I dunno. We weren't thinking about anything."

"That's right, you weren't thinking. You've got a brain, but nobody would

ever know, since you never bother to use it." Karl sat down on the bed, hard,

and put his head in his hands. "Oh, shit, kid, what the hell are we doing to

you? We've got to get you out of here."

That had been a long time ago. John hardly ever thought about his brother

Karl anymore, except sometimes when he got drunk, and he almost never got

drunk. By the time he had gotten into high school, Karl had dropped out of

school and had spent time in jail twice.

Nobody else in the projects seemed to have noticed the shot, or if they had,

they paid attention to their own business. The hole Stinky blew in the ceiling

had seemed huge to Johnny, but nobody from the housing authority had ever

noticed it, even when they came around once a year to do the inspection.

Yeah, John Radkowski thought, Trevor can get a little annoying sometimes.

But on the whole, he was okay. Not half the trouble that I'd been.

Now that both he and Chamlong were back in the cabin, it was Ryan Martin's

turn to go out on the surface. Ryan was deeply engrossed with the computer.

Radkowski walked over and put his hand on Ryan's shoulder. "Hey, how's it

going?" he said. "You ready to take a look around outside?"

"I've been checking out the Dulcinea's systems," Ryan said.

"So?" Radkowski said. "We checked her systems a dozen times during cruise. I

can't think that anything's likely to have changed in the last four hours."

"Well, sure, but now that we're on the surface, I have a higher bandwidth

connection," Ryan said. "I can command sensors in real time now, get more than

just the health check signal."

"And?"

"These readings are screwy." Ryan shook his head. "Take a look at this," he

said. "Here. I'm looking at the fuel temperature. The tanks ought to be

holding steady at about 90K, but they're up over 200K, both of them. Tank

pressures are fine, both tanks are full, but I can't understand these thermal

readings."

Radkowski looked at the display. "Looks like a broken thermistor to me."

"Both sensors on both tanks? Seems unlikely."

"Shit," Radkowski said. "According to the mission plan, we're not supposed

to check her out until the morning. Look, why don't you go on outside and take

a walk around. If you think we need to check her out today, that's your call,

but think about it for a while first, okay? We're all running a little bit on

overload." The commander clapped him on the shoulder. "Anyway, it's clear to

me—you need a break. Go on. You deserve it."

"You got it, captain," Ryan said, and stood up. "I'm out of here."

RYAN

To Ryan Martin, the Don Quijote looked like nothing so much as a mushroom

pulled from the ground and sitting on its half-wilted cap. Getting to Mars was

a great accomplishment, and cramped and smelly as the Don Quijote had been,

Ryan Martin would regret abandoning the Don on Mars. Ugly it was, yeah, stinky

and cramped, but it had done the job, a dependable workhorse.

Getting back, though—getting back would be the real triumph. Dulcinea was

their ride home, and if there was a problem, the sooner they found out what it

was, the sooner they would be able to start fixing it.

The screwy readings from Dulcinea continued to worry Ryan. Even when he was

on the surface, while he was thrilled by the beauty of the landscape and

enjoyed the freedom of walking on a planetary surface after being cooped up in

a soup can for seven months, with a corner of his mind he could not leave

Dulcinea alone.

Anomalous readings are always a worry; they indicated something

malfunctioning. There were other readings that looked wrong to him as well,

readings that weren't obviously wrong, like the temperature reading, but still

they had a wrong feeling. He hoped that the commander was right and it was a

sensor failure. God knew that those happened often enough; sensors sometimes

seemed like the practical jokers of space, always choosing the middle of the

night or some equally inconvenient time to wake up a crew for what would

invariably turn out to be a false alarm—but he would be more comfortable if he

knew for sure.

文档加载中……请稍候！
如果长时间未打开，您也可以点击刷新试试。

下载文档到电脑，查找使用更方便

5.9 玖币 0人已下载

立即下载 VIP免费下载

摘要：

MARSCROSSINGGEOFFREYA.LANDISATOMDOHERTYAssociatesbookNEWYORKTOR®Thisisaworkoffiction.Allthecharactersandeventsportrayedinthisnovelareeitherfictitiousorareusedfictitiously.MARSCROSSINGCopyright©2000byGeoffreyA.LandisAllrightsreserved,includingtherighttoreproducethisbook,orportionsthereof,inanyform.Th...

展开>> 收起<<

Geoffrey A.Landis - Mars Crossing.pdf

共157页,预览32页

还剩页未读，继续阅读

声明：本站为文档C2C交易模式，即用户上传的文档直接被用户下载，本站只是中间服务平台，本站所有文档下载所得的收益归上传人(含作者)所有。玖贝云文库仅提供信息存储空间，仅对用户上传内容的表现方式做保护处理，对上载内容本身不做任何修改或编辑。若文档所含内容侵犯了您的版权或隐私，请立即通知玖贝云文库，我们立即给予删除！

Geoffrey A.Landis - Mars Crossing

相关推荐

开通VIP享超值会员特权

作者详情

相关内容

热门标签

举报选择: