Ben Bova - Return to Mars

BEN BOVA

RETURN TO MARS

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author's

imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons,

living or dead, is entirely coincidental and beyond the intent of either the author or the publisher.

AVON BOOKS, INC. 1350 Avenue of the Americas New York, New York 10019

Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html

ISBN: 0-380-97640-4 www.avonbooks.com/eos

whatsoever except as provided by the U.S. Copyright Law. For information address Avon Books, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data:

Bova, Ben, 1932- Return to Mars / Ben Bova. — 1st ed. p. cm.

I. Title.

PS3552.084R47 1999 99-216?$ 813'.54— dc21

First Avon Eos Printing: June 1999

AVON EOS TRADEMARK REG. U.S. PAT. OFF. AND IN OTHER COUNTRIES, MARCA

REGISTRADA, HECHO EN U.S.A.

Printed in the U.S.A.

Frist Edition

To Barbara:

... constant as the northern star, of whose true-fixed and resting quality there is no fellow in the

firmament.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I owe an enormous debt of gratitude to Lynn Harper and her colleagues at the NASA Ames Research

Center, who answered my myriad questions promptly and cheerfully and provided many of the technical

details in this story (for example, making glass bricks from in situ materials on Mars). I have taken a

novelist's liberties with their excellent information, of course, so any faults with the techniques and

technologies used y the characters in this tale are my own, not theirs.

The mission plan for the Second Mars Expedition was adapted from i he Mars Direct concept originated

by Robert Zubrin, as detailed in his book, The Case for Mars. Again, I have deviated from the specifics

of his concept, but the basic mission plan stems from his innovative and highly creative work.

Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html

Ed Carlson, South Florida Area Manager for the National Audubon society, kindly provided the

background information about the Living Machine, an organic technique for using solar energy, bacteria,

and green plants to produce potable water from waste water. This served as the basis for my Martian

explorers' garden, which provides them not only with the hulk of their food but recycles their water.

Living Machines, designed and built by Ocean Arks International, are at work in South Burlington,

Ver-mont; Sonoma, California; Henderson, Nevada; the Corkscrew Swamp Sanctuary in Collier

County, Florida; and elsewhere.

Dr. Janet Jeppson Asimov kindly granted permission to quote the late Isaac Asimov's "classic" limerick.

My good friend Philip Brennan patiently detailed the methods used by modern geologists to date rocks.

Alexander Besher graciously answered my questions about the Russian language.

The term bytelock was coined by another good friend, Jan Howard hinder, who defines it thusly: "When

the Information Superhighway slows to a crawl or stops, you are experiencing BYTELOCK!"

The quotation from Freeman J. Dyson is from "Warm-Blooded plants and Freeze-Dried Fish," by

Freeman J. Dyson, The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 280, No. 5, November 1997, p. 69.

The quotation from Malcolm Smith originally appeared in "Facing Mars Rationally," by Malcolm Smith,

in Spaceflight magazine, Vol. 40, No. 2, February 1998, p. 45.

We should not be surprised if we find that life, wherever it originated, spread rapidly from one planet to

another. Whatever creatures we may find on Mars will probably be either our ancestors or our cousins.

FREEMAN J. DYSON

Certain topics in science are deemed "unsuitable." A form of scientific censorship arises to prevent these

ideas getting out into wider circulation and challenging the current orthodoxy's accepted status quo. Yet

the history of science is littered with ideas, which were initially frowned upon, only to be accepted later,

sometimes long after the death of their proponents.

MALCOLM SMITH

Listen to the wisdom of the Old Ones. The red world and the blue world are brothers, born together out

of the same cold darkness, nourished by the same Father Sun. Separated at birth, for uncountable ages

they remained apart. But now, like true brothers, they are linked once more.

Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html

PROLOGUE: THE SKY DANCERS

THE RENTAL MINIVAN JOLTED AND LURCHED ALONG THE RUTS OF THE Unpaved road

as Jamie Waterman squinted briefly at the dying red sun touching the ragged skyline of the mountains.

Jamie was driving too fast mill he knew it. But he wanted to get there before his grandfather died.

Soon it would be dark and he'd have to slow down. The unmarked road twisting through the desert hills

would be unlit except for his headlamps—and the stars. Might as well be driving the rover on Mars, he

said to himself.

As the sun disappeared behind the distant mountains and the shad-ows reached across the desert to

overtake him, Jamie knew he would have to stop again to ask directions. He had passed a hogan several

miles back, but it had looked dark and empty.

Now he saw a mobile home, rusted metal sides and a slanted awning over the screen door. Lights

inside. A pair of battered pickup trucks in 11 "lit. As he pulled to a stop, spraying dust and pebbles, a

dog yapped from out of the shadows.

The screen door banged open and a young man appeared in the doorway; jeans, tee shirt, can of beer

clutched in one hand, long braided hair.

Jamie slid the driver's side window down and called, "I'm looking tin Al Waterman."

With the light from inside the mobile home behind him, the young man's face was impossible to see.

Jamie knew what it looked like, just the same: stolid, dark eyes, broad cheeks, emotions hidden behind

an impassive mask. Much like his own.

"Who?"

"Al Waterman."

The young Navaho shook his head. "He don't live here."

"I know. He's in a hogan up along this road, I think. That's what they told me down at the post."

"Not here," the young man repeated.

Jamie understood his reticence. "He's my grandfather. He's dying."

The young Navaho stepped down to the dusty ground and slowly walked over to Jamie's minivan, boots

crunching on the gritty soil.

He looked closely at Jamie. "You the guy who went to Mars?"

"Right. Al's my grandfather. I want to see him before he dies."

Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html

"Al Waterman. The old guy from Santa Fe."

Jamie nodded.

"I'll take you there. You can follow me." Without waiting for a reply he loped to the nearer of the two

pickups.

"Don't drive too fast," Jamie called. He had driven across the badlands of Mars, but he didn't want to

have to chase a pair of dim taillights at breakneck speed across the dark New Mexico desert.

Sure enough, the youngster took off in a roaring cloud of dust. Jamie shifted into four-wheel drive and

followed him grimly, sweating as he wrestled the wheel of the jouncing minivan with both clenched hands.

Al Waterman had been a shopkeeper in Santa Fe all his adult life, with a condo in town and a ski lodge

up in the mountains, but now that he was dying he had returned to the reservation where he had been

born.

Everyone seemed to know about Al and his famous grandson, the man who had traveled to the red

planet. Wherever Jamie stopped to ask directions, they knew exactly where Al's hogan was. Trouble

was, Jamie thought as the minivan jolted through the darkness, there aren't any direction signs along these

old roads. Nothing but darkness and the clear desert sky. Thousands of stars but not one sign to point his

way.

At last the pickup skidded to a stop near the low hump of a hogan. Jamie pulled up beside him, but the

young man was already backing his truck, heading home.

"Thanks!" Jamie yelled out his window.

" 'Kay," he heard from the truck as it spit gravel and roared off into the night.

Frightened of death, Jamie thought. The Navaho would not stay in a place where a death had occurred,

whether out of respect or fear of evil spirits, Jamie did not know. They would abandon this hogan after

Al died. I wonder what they do with mobile homes? Jamie asked him-self as he got out of the minivan.

The hogan seemed little more than a rounded hump of dried mud on the desert floor with a single light

shining through a curtained win-dow. The night was chilly but still; the dark sky so clear that the sparkling

stars seemed close enough almost to touch.

It was even colder, somehow, inside the hogan. Jamie kept his sky-blue windbreaker zippered; the

pitiful little blaze in the fireplace cast flickering light, but no heat. An old woman sat on the floor in a

corner near the fire, wrapped in a colorful blanket. She nodded once to Jamie but said nothing, silent and

sturdy as a rock.

Al was curled fetally on the bed in the far corner, nothing but a shell of the man he had been; a husk

whose insides had been devoured by cancers. Yet he opened his eyes and smiled when Jamie bent over

him.

"Ya'aa'tcy," he whispered. His breath smelled of decay and sun baked earth.

"Ya'aa'tey," Jamie replied. It is good. That was a lie, in this place at this time, but it was the ancient

Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html

greeting.

"That's what you said when you got to Mars," Al said, his voice already as faint as a ghost's.

"Remember?"

They were the words Jamie spoke to the television camera when the first expedition landed.

"I'm going back there," Jamie said, bending low so his grandfather could hear him.

"Back to Mars? You're going?"

Nodding tightly, Jamie said, "It's official. I'll be mission director."

"Good," breathed Al, with a wan smile. "Mars is your destiny, son. Your path leads to the red world."

"I guess it does."

"Go in beauty, son. Now I can die happy."

Jamie wanted to say no, you're not going to die, Grandfather. You're going to live for many years more.

But the words would not come to his lips.

Al heaved a sigh that racked his frail body. "The sky dancers are coming soon. They'll take me with

them."

"Sky dancers?"

"You'll see. Wait with me. It won't be long now."

Jamie pulled up the hogan's only chair and sat by his grandfather's bed. His parents had been killed in an

auto crash two years earlier. Al was the only close relative he had left. After him there would be noth-ing,

no one. The old man closed his eyes. Jamie could not tell if he were breathing or not. The only sound in

the chill little room was the crackling of the fire as the silent woman fed sticks to it.

The wooden chair was hard and stiff, its woven rope seat as unyield-ing as rock, yet Jamie dozed off

despite himself. He stepped off a high cliff, naked in the hot sun, and began to fall, slowly, as in a dream,

falling down the face of the blood-red mesa.

He awoke with a start. Al was clutching at his knee.

"The sky dancers!" Al croaked in his feeble voice. "They've come!"

He's delirious, Jamie thought. He turned to the woman, still sitting silently near the fire. She looked up at

him with dark, calm eyes but said nothing.

"Look!" Al pointed a quavering finger toward the curtained win-dow. "Go outside and look!"

Confused, Jamie pried himself out of the chair and went to the door. He hesitated, turned back toward

his grandfather.

"Go on!" Al urged, excited, trying to lift himself up on one emaci-ated arm. "You'll see!"

Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html

Jamie opened the door and stepped out into the cold dark desert night. His breath frosted in the air. He

looked up at the stars.

And saw shimmering curtains of delicate pinkish red, pale green, flickering white, pulsating across the

sky, dancing silently, glittering, rippling, covering the sky with their ghostly glow.

The northern lights, Jamie knew. The sun must have erupted a mon-ster flare. Then the Navaho side of

his mind said, The sky dancers. They've come for Al.

Jamie stood transfixed, watching the delicate, awesome display in the night sky. He remembered that

you could see auroras almost every night on Mars, even through the tinted visor of your spacesuit helmet.

But here on Earth the sky dancers were rare. Yet so beautiful that they made even death seem less

frightful.

At last he ducked back inside the hogan. His grandfather lay still, a final smile frozen on his face. The

woman had come over to his bed and was smoothing Al's blanket over him.

"Good-bye, Grandfather," Jamie said. He felt he should cry, but he had no tears.

He went outside again, walking slowly toward his rental minivan. There's no one left, Jamie said to

himself. No one and nothing left to keep me here.

Low on the rugged horizon the unblinking red eye of Mars stared at him, glowing, beckoning. Two

weeks later he lifted off from Kennedy Space Center on a Clippership rocket, the first leg of his journey

back to Mars.

DATA BANK

THE FIRST MARS EXPEDITION CONFIRMED MUCH OF WHAT EARLIER ROBOT

spacecraft had discovered about the red planet.

Mars is a cold world. It orbits roughly one and a half times farther from the Sun than the Earth does. Its

atmosphere is far too thin to retain solar heat. On a clear midsummer day along the Martian equator the

afternoon ground temperature might climb to seventy degrees Fahr-enheit; that same night, however, it

will plunge to a hundred below /cm or lower.

The atmosphere of Mars is too thin to breathe, even if it were pure oxygen, which it is not. More than

ninety-five percent of the Martian air is carbon dioxide; nearly three percent nitrogen. There is a tiny

amount of tree oxygen and even less water vapor. The rest of the atmosphere consists of inert gases such

as argon, neon and such, a whiff of carbon monoxide, and a trace of ozone.

The First Mars Expedition discovered, however, something that all the mechanical landers and orbiters

had failed to find: life.

Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html

Tucked down at the floor of the mammoth Valles Marineris—the Grand Canyon that stretches some

three thousand kilometers across the ruddy face of the planet—sparse colonies of lichenlike organisms

eke out a perilous existence, hiding a few millimeters below the surface of the rocks. They soak up

sunlight by day and absorb the water they need from the vanishingly tiny trace of water vapor in the air.

At night they become dormant, waiting for the sun's warmth to touch them once again. Their cells are

bathed in an alcohol-rich liquid that keeps them from freezing even when the temperature falls to a

hundred degrees below zero or more.

Fourth planet out from the Sun, Mars never gets closer to the Earth than fifty-six million kilometers, more

than a hundred times farther than the Moon. Mars is a small world, roughly half the size of the Earth, with

a surface gravity just a bit more than a third of Earth's. A hundred kilograms on Earth weighs only

thirty-eight kilos on Mars.

Mars is known as the red planet because its surface is mainly a bone-dry desert of sandy iron oxides:

rusty iron dust.

Yet there is water on Mars. The planet has bright polar caps com-posed at least partially of frozen

water—covered over most of the year by frozen carbon dioxide, dry ice. The First Mars Expedition

confirmed that vast areas of the planet are underlain by permafrost: an ocean of frozen water lies beneath

the red sands.

Mars is the most Earthlike of any world in the solar system. There are seasons on Mars—spring,

summer, autumn and winter. Because its orbit is farther from the Sun, the Martian year is nearly twice as

long as Earth's (a few minutes short of 689 Earth days) and its seasons are consequently much longer

than Earth's. Mars rotates about its axis in almost the same time that Earth does. A day on Earth is 23

hours, 56 minutes, and 4.09 seconds long. A day on Mars is only slightly longer: 24 hours, 37 minutes,

and 22.7 seconds.

To prevent confusion between Earth time and Martian, space explor-ers refer to the Martian day as a

sol. In one Martian year there are 669 sols, plus an untidy fourteen hours, forty-six minutes and twelve

seconds.

The discovery of the rock-dwelling Martian lichen raised new ques-tions among the scientists: Are the

lichen the only life form on the planet? Or is there an ecological web of various organisms? If so, why

have none been found except the lichen?

Are these lowly organisms the highest achievement that life has attained on Mars?

Or are they the rugged survivors of what was once a much richer and more complex ecology?

It they are the sole survivors, what destroyed all the other life-forms on Mars?

BOOK I

Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html

THE ARRIVAL

MARS HABITAT: SOL 1

"WE'RE BACK, GRANDFATHER," JAMIE WATERMAN MURMURED. "WE'VE come back to

Mars."

Standing by the row of empty equipment racks just inside the domed habitat's airlock, Jamie reached out

and picked up the small stone carv-ing from the shelf where it had waited for six years: a tiny piece of

jet-black obsidian in the totem shape of a crouching bear. A miniature turquoise arrowhead was tied to

its back with a rawhide thong, a wisp of a white eagle's feather tucked atop it. He held the Navaho fetish

in the palm of his gloved hand.

"What is that?" asked Stacy Dezhurova.

Jamie heard her strong bright voice in his helmet earphones. None of the eight members of the Second

Mars Expedition had removed their spacesuits yet, nor even lifted the visors of their helmets. They stood

in a rough semicircle just inside the airlock hatch, eight faceless men and women encased in their bulky

white hard suits.

"A Navaho fetish," Jamie replied. "Powerful magic."

Dex Trumball shuffled awkwardly toward Jamie, his thick boots clomping heavily on the habitat's plastic

flooring.

"You brought this all the way with you?" Trumball asked, al-most accusingly.

"On the first expedition," Jamie said. "I left it here to guard the place while we were gone."

Trumball's face was hidden behind the tinted visor of his helmet, but the tone of his voice left no doubt

about his opinion. "Heap big medicine, huh?"

Jamie suppressed a flash of anger. "That's right," he said, forcing his voice to stay calm, even. "The

dome's still here, isn't it? Six years, and it's still standing and ready for occupancy."

Possum Craig said in his flat Texas twang, "Let's pump us some breathable oxy in here before we start

clappin' ourselves on the back."

"Six years," Trumball muttered. "Left it waiting here all that time."

Six years.

Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html

Even the discovery of life clinging precariously to the rocks at the bottom of Mars' Grand Canyon had

not made this return to the red planet easy or simple. It had taken six years to put together the people,

the equipment—and most important of all, the money—to make this Second Mars Expedition a reality.

To his surprise and anger, Jamie Waterman had been forced to fight for a berth on the second

expedition, fight with every molecule of strength and skill he possessed. But his grandfather's fetish must

have truly been powerful: he had returned to Mars at last.

After five months in space between the two worlds, after a week in orbit around Mars, after the blazing

fury of their descent through the thin Martian atmosphere heated to incandescence by their fiery passage,

Jamie Waterman and the other seven members of the expedition had at last stepped out onto the rust-red

sandy surface of Mars.

Five men and three women, each encased in bulbous hard-shelled spacesuits that made them look like

lumbering tortoises rearing on their hind legs. All the suits were white, with color-coded stripes on their

sleeves for easy identification. Jamie's three stripes were fire-engine red.

The habitat that the first expedition had left looked unchanged. The dome was still inflated and appeared

unscarred from its six-year wait.

The first thing the explorers did was to troop to the dome's airlock and go inside. After a few moments

of just gazing around its empty domed interior, they fell to their assigned tasks and checked out the

life-support equipment. If the dome was unusable they would have to live for the entire year and a half of

their stay on Mars in the spacecraft module that had carried them to the red planet and landed them on its

surface. None of them wanted that. Five months cooped up in that tin can had been more than enough.

The dome was intact, its life-support equipment functioning ade-quately, its nuclear power generator still

providing enough electricity to run the habitat.

I knew it would be, Jamie said to himself. Mars is a gentle world. It doesn't want to harm us.

Possum Craig and Tomas Rodriguez, the NASA-provided astronaut, started the oxygen generator. It

was cranky after six years of being idle, but they got it running at last and it began extracting breathable

oxygen from the Martian atmosphere to mix with the nitrogen that had kept the dome inflated for the past

six years.

The rest of the explorers went outside and fell to their assigned tasks of setting up the video cameras and

virtual reality rigs to record their arrival on Mars and transmit the news back to Earth. With his stone

fetish tucked into the thigh pocket of his spacesuit, Jamie remem-bered the political flap he had caused

when the first expedition had set foot on Mars and he had spoken a few words of Navaho instead of the

stiffly formal speech the NASA public relations people had written for him.

And he remembered one thing more: the ancient cliff dwelling he had seen, built into a high niche in the

soaring cliff wall of the Grand Canyon. But he dared not mention that to the others.

Not yet.

Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html

Ben Bova - Return to Mars

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: