Ben Bova - Mars Life

“There’s plenty of open land in other places,” the president said, “but they’re putting a lot of pressure on—”

The phone buzzed once more, interrupting her. Jamie touched the keypad and his wall screen split into two images. The new one showed C. Dexter Trumball, in his office high up in one of Boston’s financial district towers.

“Morning,” Dex said curtly.

Each time Jamie saw Dex he was struck all over again by how much the former geologist had grown to resemble his late father. Dex Trumball still had all his hair, but his handsome face had thinned over the years since he and Jamie had worked together on the Second Mars Expedition. And those blue green eyes of his seemed sharper, more penetrating, as if he knew things that no one else knew. His father’s eyes, scheming and demanding.

“How’s the weather in Boston?” Jamie could see a briskly clear blue sky through the window at Dex’s back.

“You haven’t seen the news?” Dex asked. “This morning’s news from Washington?”

“No,” said Jamie.

“The president’s zeroed out the Mars program.”

Jamie felt it like a sharp blow to his heart. “She zeroed out…?”

“What does that mean?” asked the Navaho president.

“It means the U.S. government will stop funding us when the new fiscal year starts.”

“She can’t do that!” Jamie protested.

“She’s done it.”

“Congress won’t let her get away with it,” he insisted, but he knew he was clutching at straws.

Dex’s expression was halfway between a sneer and a scowl of disgust.

The Navaho president said, “Other nations help to fund the program, too. Maybe—”

“America puts in the lion’s share,” Dex said. “Once Washington pulls out the others will do the same.”

“But—”

“We’re sunk,” Dex growled. “Screwed. Dead in the water.”

Not while I breathe, Jamie said to himself. Not while there’s a beat left in my heart.

Carleton would not allow Doreen to handle the explosives. Not that they were actually dangerous, but he would not take any chances. She might be just what she says she is, he told himself, a nanotech engineer with nothing better to do while she’s here on Mars. But she might be another plant by those psalm-singing sonsofbitches, he fumed inwardly as he planted the strips of plastique in a careful pattern across the bottom of his excavation. Who knows? She might be one of those fanatics who’d be willing to blow herself up just to destroy me. Like the old suicide bombers back in the Middle East, years ago.

Still, he was glad of her company. He talked to her as he put down the strips of plastic explosive, absently chatting away as if they were strolling along a campus path back on Earth.

“Everything we know in biology supports Darwin’s concept of evolution through natural selection,” he was saying. “Hell, biologists have even watched populations of fishes splitting into separate species, in lakes in Africa.”

“But so many people are against Darwin,” Doreen said, more to keep him talking than out of conviction, he thought. She was sitting up on the lip of the pit, her nanosuited legs dangling into the excavation.

“Know-nothing fundamentalists,” he grumbled as he worked. It was impossible to bend far enough inside the hard-shell suit to lay down the doughy strips. Carleton had to get down on his knees. As he worked he crawled along the rough base of the pit like an oversized infant encased inside a robot.

“I think they see Darwin as a challenge to their beliefs,” Doreen said.

“I think they don’t think at all,” he groused. “They just follow orders from their know-nothing ministers.”

“Now be fair,” Doreen countered. “If Darwin’s right and we humans are just another kind of animal, it destroys their belief that we’re special, that we were created by God separate and apart from all the animals.”

“Yeah, and given dominion over the Earth so we can slaughter all the other animals and chop down all the trees and just generally screw up the environment.”

“It destroys their belief that God sent his only son to redeem our souls,” Doreen said firmly. “It hits them where it hurts the most.”

“You don’t understand,” he said. “It’s not about religion. It’s about politics. It’s about power. Their leaders use religion to keep their followers in line. When you’re told you’re doing God’s work you’re willing to do just about anything they tell you to.”

“But they really believe their religion.”

“Of course they do. That’s what makes them so ruthless. They think they’re on God’s side.”

“Doesn’t everybody?”

He looked up at her, from his kneeling position. “Is that what you believe?”

“It’s what they believe, Professor.”

“And you? What about you?”

She hesitated a long moment before answering, “I’m not certain of what I believe. I know that I don’t have all the answers, that’s for sure.”

“But you’re a Christian.”

“A Quaker.”

Surprised, he blurted, “A Quaker?”

“Society of Friends,” Doreen said.

“I never met a Quaker before,” Carleton admitted.

“There aren’t that many of us. We’ve only got four regulars at Selene.”

A Quaker, Carleton mused silently. William Penn was a Quaker. Philadelphia was founded by the Quakers. The University of Pennsylvania, too, if I remember right. But the university isn’t run by Quakers anymore. Hasn’t been for a long time.

He felt the old anger simmering inside him again. Squatting on the floor of the excavation, he craned his neck to see Doreen up on the lip of the pit. A Quaker. Could a Quaker be a Mata Hari? he asked himself. Not very likely, he answered. Or are you just thinking with your testicles again?

Finally he finished laying out the explosive strips and planting the thumb-sized detonators in them. Carleton laboriously slipped the climbing rig’s harness over the shoulders of his hard suit, then pressed the button on it that activated the winch. Through the thin Martian air the winch’s motor sounded like the faint whine of a mosquito.

Once he reached the lip of the excavation Doreen came over to help him out of the harness. Then he took her gloved hand and led her fifty paces from the rim of the pit.

“You’re going to set it off?” she asked.

“Got to call control, back at the base,” he said, pecking at the suit radio’s keypad on his left wrist. “The geologists want to know when I blast, so they don’t get their seismometer records screwed up.”

She watched him as he called the base and told the excursion director he was ready to fire the explosives.

“Hold on while I check with the rock jocks,” the controller’s cheerful young voice came through his helmet earphones.

Doreen started to ask, “Do they ever stop you from—”

“Dr. Carleton? You’re cleared to detonate at 11:15 precisely. It’s now 11:06:33.”

“Eleven-oh-six-thirty-three,” Carleton repeated, his eyes on the digital clock set into the wrist pad. “Check. I’ll blow at 11:15, on the tick.”

The explosion, when it came, disappointed Doreen. It wasn’t a ground-shaking blast: just a little whump followed by a cloud of dust that slowly wafted away from the pit.

She walked beside Carleton to the edge of the excavation. Its floor was covered now with broken, shattered bits of rock.

“Now we start the day’s real work,” he said to her.

It took hours to spade up the rubble, pack it into containers, and hoist it up to the surface. Carleton was impressed with Doreen’s willingness to work. And the fact that she could move so much more easily in her nanosuit than he could in his unwieldy hard shell. The strangely small sun climbed higher in the saffron sky. Temperature’s getting up to twenty below, Carleton surmised as they hauled rock shards to the sifter.