Zach Hughes - Pressure Man

During the days in which he watched the planet grow from a bright star into a disc and then into a huge, dominating sphere hanging over the Kennedy , he talked with Doris about his feelings. Mars policy was made on Earth, and it was contradictory and confused.

“Take the Kennedy ,” he said. “For what she cost we could have supplied plenty of water for the entire planet for all time.”

He pointed out the ice deposits at the north pole.

“There’s enough water there to change the face of the planet,” he said. “If all the water in the ice deposits could be released, the planet would be covered in water to a depth of ten meters, about thirty feet. That’s a theoretical figure, and it would be accurate only if the planet were a smooth globe. The point is, we’ve spent billions building this ship to carry water out here and all the time there’s plenty of water already here if we had the money and the manpower to develop it.”

Mars was anything but a smooth planet. The huge shield volcano, Olympus Mons, showed on the horizon. Even from height and distance Olympus Mons was impressive.

“Two and a half times as high as Everest,” Dora said. “Fifteen miles high.”

“Quite a mountain,” Doris said. “I don’t think I’d want to try to climb it.”

“It’s not all that tough,” Dom said. “Remember, it’s less than half Earth gravity. The only tough part of the climb is in lower altitudes, because of the winds. I’ve seen winds of two hundred miles per hour on the lower slopes. But no one climbs the thing. It’s too easy to take a jumper and set it down on the peak. If we find the time I’ll take you up. I think you’d enjoy it.”

From space, Mars looked like a planet stripped down to its skeleton. An ancient riverbed, with tributaries branching out like small veins from an artery, lanced across a flat plain pimpled by meteorite craters. The effects of the Martian wind could be seen in the dark tails extending outward from the craters, marking the deposit of bright dust particles. As the rotation of the planet brought the canyon area into view, Doris was, again, impressed. The giant rift covered an area as long as the distance from New York to San Francisco. The main chasm, Tithonius Chasma, would have made the Grand Canyon of the Colorado look like a small creekbed. The stark and terrible beauty of the planet misted Doris’ eyes. She leaned against Dom, her hand on his arm.

“I once hated her,” Doris said.

“Why?” he asked, not thinking.

“Because she took you away from me.”

“That was a long time ago,” he said.

“I can understand why she draws men,” Doris said. “I can see why, once you’ve seen her, you have to come back.”

“There are ten thousand people down there,” Dom said, pointing out the high volcanic plains in the Elysium area. “They live in quarters which would give most Earthlings claustrophobia. They breathe reconstituted air which they’ve made themselves by breaking down the oxygen from rocks and what little water can be pumped from the ground. They’re dependent on Earth for most of their food and manufactured materials. There are marvelous things on Mars, minerals, jewels, metals. She’ll never have to worry about overpopulation, because she wasn’t meant for man. But she can give to man. There’s enough raw material there to ease a lot of shortages back on Earth. And what do we carry when we send a ship back? Fertilizer.”

“I’ve always thought Mars policy was penny-wise and pound-foolish,” Doris said.

“We have the technology right now to change the entire Martian environment,” Dom said. “We could use the hydro engine to shift the two moons just a little, just enough to change the motion of the planet to give more sun heat at the poles. The caps would melt and the planet would be wetter, warmer, and that would make her almost self-sustaining.”

“Can you imagine the screams from the nature worshipers?” Doris asked, with a laugh. “Can you imagine the lawsuits which would be filed if the department announced that it was going to change the sacred ecology of an entire planet?”

“The battle cry would be, ‘Lichens Have Rights,’ ” Dom said.

The Kennedy’s huge powerplant was thrusting against her motion, slowing her. Mars hung over the ship, huge, red, beautiful. Landing preparations went smoothly. Although the ship was huge, she had the power to go in and come up on her own in the light gravity of Mars. Neil put her down as if he were handling a scout ship a fraction of her size. Men began to offload the water, which would strain the storage capacity of the tanks. It would be a long job, since existing pumping facilities had been designed for much smaller quantities of water.

Dom introduced Doris to old friends, guided her through the museum to see the scanty remains of the primitive extinct animal and plant life. The museum always made him feel sad. It told its story only too well. Mars had once been a living planet, both geologically and biologically. Scientists were still discussing the cause of her death. Currently, the most favored theory pointed to a varying sun. That school of theorists said that tens or hundreds of millions of years in the past, the sun had radiated more energy. At that far-distant time, the water now encased in the polar icecaps had been free, the atmosphere more dense, the whole planet wetter, allowing the development of both plant and animal life.

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.