Return to Mars by Ben Bova Page A

oversight.
    He pulled on the rod, extending it out to its full two meters, then planted it firmly in the red, dusty soil. Not soil, he reminded himself. Regolith. Soil is honeycombed with living things: worms, bugs, bacteria This rusty iron sand of Mars was devoid of any trace of life. The stuff was loaded with superoxides, like powdered bleach. When the earliest automated landing vehicles first sampled the surface and could not find even traces of organic molecules in it, hopes for discovering life on Mars plummeted.
    Jamie smiled to himself inside his helmet as he worked the pointed end of the beacon deeper into the ground. Mars surprised them all, he thought. We found life. What new surprises will we find this time?
    Below the superoxide level there might be colonies of bacteria that never saw sunlight, bacteria that digested rock with water from the permafrost. Geologists had been stunned to find such bacteria deep underground on Earth. Possum Craig was drilling for similar Martian organisms.
    Jamie was sweating by the time he got the pole set firmly enough into the ground to satisfy himself. Reaching up, he unfolded the solar panels, then clicked on the beacon’s radio transmitter.
    Sing your song, Jamie said silently to the beacon. A totem for the scientists, he realized. The instrumentation built into the slim pole would continuously measure ground tremors, heat flow from the planet’s interior, air temperature, wind velocity and humidity. Of the hundred-some beacons they had planted during the first expedition, more than thirty were still functioning after six years. Jamie wanted to find those that had failed and see what had happened to them.
    But not now, he told himself. Not today. He went back to the rover and stepped up to the open airlock hatch.
    He turned around and gazed out at the rock-strewn landscape once more before closing the hatch. That fresh-looking crater beckoned to him, but he knew they had no time for it. Not yet.
    Jamie gazed out at Mars. Barren, almost airless, colder than Siberia or Greenland or even the South Pole. Yet it still looked like home to him.

    DIARY ENTRY

    None of the others seem to understand what danger we are in. This is an alien world, and all we have to protect us is a thin shell of plastic or metal. If that shell is ruptured, even a tiny pinprick, we will all die in agony. I was a fool to come here, but the rest of them are even bigger fools. They are a fingernail’s width away from death, and they act as if they don’t know it. Or don’t care. The fools!

OVERNIGHT: SOL 6/7

    “ACTUALLY,” SAID TRUDY HALL, “MOST SCIENTIFIC WORK is crushingly boring.”
    The four of them were sitting on the lower bunks in the module’s midsection, with the narrow foldout table between them and the remains of their dinners on the plastic trays before them. The two women sat on one side of the table, Trumball and Jamie on the other.
    “Most of any kind of work is a bore,” said Trumball, reaching for his glass of water. “I worked in my old man’s office when I was a kid. Talk about boring!”
    “That’s what they say about flying for the air force,” Stacy Dezhurova added, straight-faced. “Long hours of boredom punctuated by moments of sheer terror.”
    They all laughed.
    “I know we could move a lot faster if we didn’t have to plant the beacons,” Jamie said, “but they’re important to—”
    “Oh, don’t be so serious!” Hall said, looking surprised. “I wasn’t complaining. I was merely making a philosophical point.”
    “The English are very deep,” Trumball said, grinning across the (able at her. “Really into philosophy and all that.”
    “Rather,” agreed Hall.
    Jamie made a smile for them.
    “We have made good progress,” Dezhurova said. “We will get to within striking distance of the Canyon’s edge by sundown tomorrow.”
    “We could make it to the edge itself if we spaced out the beacons u little more,” Trumball suggested. “Say, fifty