Geoffrey Landis - Mars Crossing

Carlsbad was only a hundred miles or so further on; they had all hoped that the unnamed cave they were exploring might have wonders to rival its vast chambers and arching pillars. But this one seemed to be a labyrinth of rough passages, branching and winding in all directions, only rarely opening into cramped, dome-ceilinged rooms. Sometimes they had to crawl on their bellies, and they never quite dared to stand fully upright. But when one passage came to a blind end, they always found a branch that went on, that might go on to open out into some large chamber just ahead.

After several hours, Kaipo admitted what they had all been thinking: That’s enough. Their flashlight beams were growing yellow, and by unspoken agreement they were already beginning to conserve, never shining more than one light at a time. They had better get back while they still had enough light in them to pick out the chalk marks. Rip quickly agreed, and the two of them turned and shone their flashlights back the way they’d come.

“Hey, why are you going that way?” Brandon had asked.

“The chalk marks, you dimwit,” Kaipo said.

“But—” He started to point, and then suddenly realized that it was senseless for him to point when none of them were shining their flashlights in his direction. “The entrance is just a little way over here,” he concluded.

“No way,” Kaipo said. “We’re miles away from the entrance by now.”

“You’re lost, Brandon,” Rip said.

“The hell I am.”

In the end, he convinced them to follow him a little way farther, probably for no other reason than that they wanted to gloat over him when he failed to get to the entrance. A hundred feet farther, they came into the chamber with the graffiti.

It had seemed no big deal to him. Over several hours, and several miles underground, through twisting passages, Brandon had always known unerringly where he was. On the surface of the Earth, for his entire seventeen years of life, Brandon’s sense of direction had never failed him, not even for a moment.

That was why Mars was such a shock.

In fact, it had taken longer than expected to climb the cliff. Once at the top, it was their task to raise the rockhopper up, but the winching operation was slow and painstaking, and the sun touched the horizon with the rock-hopper less than halfway up. Rather than risk damaging it against an unseen protuberance, Ryan called a halt.

“Can we just leave it there, dangling like that?” Brandon asked.

“Sure, it’ll be fine,” Ryan said.

Brandon was still dubious. “What if the wind picks up over the night?”

“At this atmospheric pressure? Don’t worry about it. It would take a hurricane just to get it to budge.”

“What about earthquakes?”

Ryan laughed. “It will be fine, Trevor. Don’t worry.”

“Brandon,” he said.

“Oh, yeah. Right. I forgot. It will be fine, Brandon. Just fine. Don’t worry.”

As usual, in the morning Brandon was the first one up, and started the day by suiting up and walking around the campsite while the others were still getting up. This time Ryan didn’t even bother to remind him not to forget the suit checklist, and so Brandon was the first one to look down. The rover was covered by a fine white fuzz. He looked down at it in horror, for a moment too startled to speak. Then he keyed on his radio. “Ryan, come quick,” he called. “The rockhopper—it’s covered with mold!”

Ryan was checking the winch.

The rockhopper was easy to spot; it gleamed brilliantly white, almost bloody in the red morning sunlight. Fine, fuzzy tendrils seemed to grow out of it and reach up the invisible line of the superfiber cable. Ryan walked cautiously to the cliff edge and looked down. For a moment Ryan seemed disconcerted. Then he laughed. He went back to the winch.

“Well?” Brandon said. “What is it?”

“Frost,” Ryan said. “Only frost. No big deal.”

“Frost?” Brandon sounded doubtful. “Frost on Mars?”

Ryan spoke us he continued checking the winch. “The rover cooled down more than the rocks. Lower heat capacity. Suspended in the air—I expect it reached minus one-fifty, easy. Water condensed out on it. That’s all.”

“But I thought Mars was dry.”

“Yep, it’s pretty dry,” Ryan agreed. “But there’s still a little water in the atmosphere. More at lower altitudes. No surprise that it would condense on the rover.”

By the time they had winched it to the top of the cliff, the frost had sublimed away from the rockhopper. The frost bath had failed to clean it, though; it was still coated with a layer of yellowish dust.

They headed north and west. The ground they drove across was rocky, with a fine soil packing all the cracks and packed into the angles between rocks. Brandon saw Tana, driving the dirt-rover ahead, fighting to keep the dirt-rover under control on the smooth rock.

In the cabin of the rockhopper they still wore the chest-carapaces of their suits, but they all had their helmets and gloves off. It was beginning to smell rank, like the inside of a gym locker; they spent too much time in their suits.

Brandon clutched his fossil, rubbing the tips of his fingers over the smooth stone. Back at the bottom of the cliffs, Estrela had given him her rock hammer. Commander Ryan had complained that they didn’t have time to collect specimens, but if Ryan had found it himself, Brandon expected that he would have found the time. So while they had worked on setting up the winch, Brandon had carefully chipped it out of the rock to bring with them.

With his bare fingers, he could feel a lot more. It had fine, almost invisible ripples on the surface, like the pebbly skin of a lizard. It was relaxing to rub it.

Estrela was being quiet. She hadn’t been talking much since the accident, Brandon realized. She held her left arm awkwardly, bracing it with her right. He wondered if her arm still hurt.

“Hey, Estrela,” Brandon said. “How you doing?”

She turned to him. Her eyes had red rims, he suddenly noticed. His own eyes hurt just looking at her.

“Lousy.” Estrela’s voice was no louder than a whisper. “Go away. Leave me alone.”

In the rover there was no place to go. He wanted to ask Commander Ryan whether he had thought about who he would put on the rocket back to Earth, but decided to wait until he was alone with the commander instead of asking in front of Estrela. He thought about trying to sing a song in his head, but the landscape was too cold, too discordant. There was no way he could reconcile it to music. So instead he just watched the ground disappear under them, mile after mile after mile of endless yellow desert stone.

Yellow stone desert, stretching endlessly away in all directions.

But after your eyes got used to the shades of rust and gold, Tana thought, the subtle differences in shade and the true complexity of the landscape emerged. On the ground they were now traversing, a thin plate of sandstone had been laid down over an immense flow of solidified lava. She could now readily distinguish the dark, almost magenta shades of the underlying lava in the places where the sandstone had been broken away, the lighter yellowish orange of the sandstone, and the lighter yet shade of the wind-deposited dust layer. Boulders were scattered across the landscape like children’s toys, spewed out by eruptions of immense volcanoes invisible far over the horizon. In places the sandstone had buckled up to stand in angled walls like the dorsal scales of a buried dragon.

It was tricky to drive the dirt-rover across, but interesting. The landscape was fantastic, always changing, always different. Tana suddenly regretted that she was not a geologist; she had a million questions about the landscape. She passed a column standing vertically in the desert, a black obelisk pointing a hundred feet into the sky. What was it, she wondered? The solidified core of a dead volcano, she guessed. Perhaps it had been buried, and the softer material on the outside eroded away by ten million years of sand-laced winds. She thought about calling back to the rockhopper on the radio and asking Estrela, but Estrela had not been very forthcoming, answering earlier questions only with uninformative monosyllables. Certainly she had spoken with none of the puppyish enthusiasm for rocks and landforms of the geologists that had briefed them.