A Step Beyond Read online

  Nelson took one last look at the Martian landscape, then hopped off the rock. He flew farther and fell more slowly than he would have on Earth. He was familiar with the feeling because his weight was very close to what it had been on the Liberty, where the spinning trusses had produced an artificial gravity of .4 g’s. The ground kicked up softly in a fine mist of reddish dust.

  Once again his eyes were drawn to Olympus Mons. The cliff at the base of the volcano towered five kilometers straight up. In the space suit it was difficult for Nelson to see the top of the cliff. It was composed of wide bands of red-layered rock. Because of its size the cliff appeared to be only a few hundred meters away. He felt as though he could walk over and touch it, but he knew better. It was actually twenty-seven kilometers away. In three weeks he would be scaling the cliff. He looked down at the rocks at his feet.

  His first official task was to collect samples and return them to the ship, so that there would be Martian rock aboard in the event they had to leave the planet unexpectedly. He pulled out the field sample bag and dropped to one knee. He picked up a few rocks and studied them. They didn’t look particularly interesting. Reddish black with porous holes. He was not a geologist, but he could tell that they were volcanic in origin. He sealed the bag and pulled out another. This one he filled with sand. He got up and moved to a spot farther away from the lander, where the ground appeared to be slightly darker, and filled another bag. He thought of Major Brunnet, whose responsibility it had been to collect the rocks. The thought tempered his elation. He wondered what rocks Brunnet would have selected. They all looked very much the same. His instructions were to select as many different types as possible. It did not take him long to fill the bags. He waved with boyish enthusiasm at the black rectangle in the side of the ship.

  “I’m coming in,” he said.

  “Roger,” Carter replied.

  He climbed up the ladder and deposited the sample-collection bags inside the pressure chamber. On the floor was a cylindrical tube. Once again he was reminded of Brunnet, but this time his spirits rose with pride for what they had done. It had been the right thing. The original flag was in orbit around the sun, wrapped around Brunnet’s body. The flag inside the tube had been patched together by Endicott. He did not tell anyone he was making it, and when he finally presented it they did not know what to say. Endicott spread the flag out on a table and stood back so they could see it better. It was not perfect. Some of the continents were misshapen. Nelson remembered thinking that from a distance no one would be able to tell the difference. He climbed down the ladder with the tube in hand.

  “There’s a good spot twenty meters southeast,” Carter said. “I see it.”

  Their primary concern was that the camera have a clear view of the flag. They had rehearsed the event several times back on Earth. He located a spot clear of rock and slightly elevated. He turned to look at the Shepard. The black rectangle was dead center of the ship.

  “Hold it right there,” Carter said. “Give me a second to get both cameras in focus.”

  “Roger.”

  “Proceed.”

  The seal had already been broken. His fingers were trembling. He unrolled the flag and held it out at arm’s length so that he could look at it. He thought the imperfections gave it character. He extended the pole and pushed it into the sand, adjusting it so it stood perfectly straight. He stepped beside the flag and turned toward the black rectangle. He was not to say anything, just salute, but when his glove touched his helmet he felt impelled to say something.

  “For Major Jean Paul Brunnet.”

  Carter repeated the words, then Endicott, whose voice cracked like that of an adolescent’s. Nelson held the salute for nearly a minute. He picked up the empty tube and the cap and headed back to the ship.

  Tatiana was beneath the Gagarin inspecting the undercarriage for structural damage and had been quiet for quite some time. Komarov asked what was wrong. She ignored him, and he knew better than to ask again. She had been in a foul mood the entire EVA.

  The inspection was exhausting work. They had to examine every inch of the outer hull, most of which was difficult to reach because of its sheer size. With the use of ropes and pulleys, Tatiana managed to scale the outside of the ship. She marked each section she had inspected with colored markers so that she would not inspect it twice. She would visually check the section, then rub her hand over it to feel for anomalies. It was the moving about that was the most demanding. Komarov was on the ground taking in or letting out rope while Tatiana pulled herself from one section to the next. It had taken nearly all day to finish the top half, and all she had found wrong were a few small chips in the heat shielding. The chips had been caused by particles striking the hull during atmospheric entry. They had not found any damage to the craft caused by the landing other than some minor buckling in the landing gear itself. She blamed Komarov for the inspections. It was his decision not to abort. A bead of sweat dropped into her eye, blurring her vision. She cursed out loud.

  “What is it now?” Komarov asked, regretting the question before he had even finished asking it.

  “Damn sweat,” she said. She was shaking her helmet back and forth. Silence, Komarov decided, was the safest course. She would find fault with whatever he said, that he was certain of. She was in one of those moods.

  “Damn,” she repeated. “We don’t even have the right equipment.” She turned to confront Komarov. “Enough is enough.”

  Komarov looked down inside his helmet to check the time. A neon green light indicated the portable life-support system had forty-five minutes of normal operations remaining. He wondered why with her he always seemed to be struggling to maintain his authority. He blamed it on the psychology of human relationships. There was something about intimacy that undermined respect. Forty-five minutes. It was hardly worth it. He looked up from the neon numbers and back into her eyes. They were bulging from their sockets, straining against the veinlike muscles that held them back.

  “A good time to break,” he said.

  “You are so right,” she said as she stormed past him. He watched the back of her suit as she climbed up the ladder. She could have been a man in that suit. Each step radiated defiance. He surveyed the sections of the hull that still had to be inspected. It would take at least another thirteen hours. There was no point in continuing by himself.

  “To hell with it,” he said.

  Tatiana was about to shut the exterior portal when he appeared. He smiled. She returned the smile with a triumphant look, then turned her back to him.

  “Locking exterior portal,” Komarov said, alerting Satomura, who was monitoring the entry programs. “Lock complete.”

  “Commencing pressurization,” Satomura said automatically. Komarov could hear the hiss of oxygen as it filled the airlock. Tatiana’s back was to him. Her hands were against the wall above her head. He pulled out the vacuum and removed the dust from the back of her suit. When she turned around, he saw that she looked tired. He did not say anything. He was careful not to linger too long in certain areas. She was studying him. He handed the vacuum to her and placed his hands against the wall. He was relieved that she took her time.

  Tatiana’s hair came tumbling out as she removed her helmet. She tucked the helmet under her arm and waited for the internal door to open. He decided to take a chance.

  “My quarters tonight?” he whispered into her ear. He thought he could actually see the hair rise on her neck.

  “You do realize there is no guarantee that this thing will take off,” she blurted. She charged through the portal without waiting for a reply.

  Satomura was standing at the edge of the mesa in the middle of Candor Chasma looking out upon what he felt certain to be the grandest sight any human had ever laid eyes upon. They had gone to the Grand Canyon to train in a similar environment, and he had been impressed by the Grand Canyon, overwhelmingly so, but the great canyon before him dwarfed anything he had ever seen. The enormous size and vastness of his s
urroundings filled him with awe. The mesa seemed to possess a mystical quality, the way its edges just fell away, as if it were a floating valley. He stepped a foot closer to the edge and looked down at the canyon floor. The 1.3-kilometer drop would have caused most men to step back with vertigo. But Satomura surveyed the chasm with the unrestrained delight of a child.

  He was to locate a suitable spot to scale. He noted that the strata were thicker at top, their coloring consistent with volcanic deposits. They could probably descend the first several hundred meters without their climbing gear. He scanned the wall for an area that contained tightly packed layers of rock. It did not take him long to find what he was looking for. Pleased, he took the binoculars and examined the canyon more closely. The walls did not look like they had been formed by water erosion. They were much too chaotic and irregular. The rocks were jagged, as if they had been ripped apart, not smooth like those of the Grand Canyon. They resembled the rocks they had found in the faults of Antarctica. Sharp and pointed. The Antarctic canyons had been formed by the rock collapsing under its own weight. But this looked slightly different. It looked almost as though the planet had started to split apart. They were at the very edge of a great mound known as the Tharsis Bulge, which stood nearly nine kilometers high. Three gigantic volcanoes lay at the center of the bulge. Whatever forces had created Tharsis were also responsible, at least in part, for the canyon. There were several theories, but the one Satomura favored was that it had been created by an asteroid that had struck the opposite side of the planet. He did not see anything that disproved the theory.

  In the distance there were several stretches where the canyon wall appeared to have collapsed. They were marked by vertical streaks that looked like long, flat brushstrokes. The strokes faded into the smooth features of a sand dune as they approached the base of the canyon. Piled at the base were layers of debris, remnants of the rocky avalanche that had tumbled down the sides. He knew that by measuring the layers he could calculate the rate at which the material had made its descent. Mentally comparing the debris with measurements he had made of similar phenomena from satellite mosaics, he estimated the rate to have been seventy-five meters per second. He closed his eyes to imagine the event. The rock collapsed like a great waterfall, annihilating everything in its path. The sound was horrendous. Tremors rippled through the ground for several thousand kilometers. A great mushroom cloud rose up and dust darkened the sky, turning day into night.

  He clapped his hands at the imagined spectacle. Opening his eyes, he looked down and saw the aftermath. He returned his attention to the matter at hand and took pictures of several possible descent routes. He would examine them more closely later. His time was running out. He was startled to discover that he was to have turned back several minutes before and that he had not noticed the numbers flashing red at the bottom of his visor. Old age must be catching up with me, he thought to himself, then wondered why no one had said anything. He decided that they must be at it again. He would know by the smell when he entered the lander. Smells had a tendency to linger in a closed-loop environment.

  He turned his back to the cliff and made for the lander. He wondered where they were doing it. The Gagarin was not that large. There were only a few places that lent themselves to love-making. He was certain that Tatiana and Dmitri had found them all. Satomura took a perverse pleasure in the smells and in sniffing out their exact spot. It was the closest he would come to having a woman for quite some time.

  It did not bother him that Tatiana was unfaithful to her husband. He had actually come to expect such behavior. His concern was how Vladimir might react. During his last communication with him, he noticed that he appeared tired and distant. He did not look healthy. He seemed unusually strained. That troubled Satomura because Vladimir was the sole occupant aboard the Druzhba. He feared how the emotions building inside Vladimir might be vented.

  He decided he would speak to Tatiana about her husband. She must do something to reassure him of her fidelity, at least while they were on the planet.

  Komarov was standing inside a hole that came to his shoulders. He planted his shovel squarely before him and leaned against it as he caught his breath. The shovel was dented from the frozen ground. He glanced at his heads-up display to check the time, and his spirits lifted when he saw that they would have to head back soon.

  “Half a meter more,” Satomura said. He was on his knees, looking down into the hole, and he was eager for Komarov to continue. His bulky suit was blocking much of the light.

  Komarov was growing annoyed with Satomura. He waved him back, then took his time as he readied the percussion drill. The vibrations started in his hands and quickly worked their way up his arms and into his shoulders. They felt good at first, but within a few short minutes his body began to tingle with pain. First his hands, then the muscles surrounding them. He gritted his teeth. He continued until the pain in the back of his neck became unbearable.

  “Damn,” he cursed, and turned the drill off.

  “Not much farther,” Satomura offered encouragingly. Komarov rubbed the back of his neck against his helmet. “A moment’s rest,” he said as he sat down. They were digging down to the ice they had located several days before with their sounding equipment. Its presence supported the hypothesis that the planet still housed much of the water that had cut the channels in its surface. It had been discovered during the robotic mission ten years earlier. A Japanese probe found the water ice under a thin coating of frozen carbon dioxide at the north pole. Satomura was to look for evidence of life in the ice. He could recall the block of ice they had cut from the Antarctic, and the swarm of microbes that came to life when they thawed the ice and placed a sample underneath the microscope. He was told that some of the microbes had been frozen for hundreds of years.

  It was Satomura who first noticed the change in the soil. Komarov was in the ditch, head deep, shoveling dirt out over his shoulder and thinking mostly of the effort required to bury and lift his shovel. With the last several shovelfuls white crystal-like particles began to appear.

  “Hold it,” Satomura shouted.

  “What is it?” Komarov replied, startled by the forcefulness of Satomura’s command. He sat down to gather his strength.

  “Permafrost,” Satomura announced.

  Komarov looked down between his knees and saw that the ground was spotted white and pink. He gathered some ice that had been broken loose by his shovel and studied it. There was a considerable amount of dirt mixed in with the ice.

  “It should turn to liquid farther down,” Satomura said. “A kilometer or so. Liquid water is not stable above the two-hundred-and-seventy-three-degree isotherm.”

  A cloud of vapors, similar to that which sublimes from dry ice on Earth, lifted from Komarov’s hand. He was watching the ice evaporate when he noticed the cloud that had formed around his feet. The sight made him anxious to climb out of the hole. He extended his hand for assistance.

  “We need to collect some samples first,” Satomura said as he handed him several collection bags. “Be sure to seal them tight or else all we’ll have to show for our day’s work will be a pile of dirt.”

  Komarov knew that the ice was important. But he was tired, and his thoughts had already turned to Tatiana several times in the past hour. He looked at the event timer on his heads-up display.

  “We have less than five minutes,” he said.

  “This should not take long.”

  As each bag was handed to him, Satomura held it up to the sun to scrutinize its contents. He wondered what he would find and grew anxious to return to the lander so that he could commence his examination of the samples.

  Satomura surfaced from the eyepiece of the microscope to glance at the time. In one hour he was to wake. There was little point, he rationalized, in going to sleep now. It would do more harm than good, so he might as well carry on. He half believed the logic. The truth of the matter was that he knew if he lay down, he would get back up within seconds. He did not feel
the least bit tired.

  The samples of ice sparkled behind the glass pane of the containment case. He wondered which one he should select. The rubber gloves that dangled against the inside of the case sprang to life as he slid his hands into them. He had already examined several samples and verified they were mostly water ice. Two molecules of hydrogen combined with one of oxygen, frozen. He had found traces of carbon dioxide and volcanic ash, but more importantly he had found hydrogen peroxide, a compound that destroyed organic material upon contact. Although he had given up hope of finding life among the samples, he had not given up on finding fossilized remains. He selected a sample the size of an acorn. It resembled a light ruby. He twirled the ice between his fingers as he examined the particles suspended inside.

  His hand froze. One of the particles was green. At first he thought that it might just be a trick of the light or that he was tired and that he was seeing things that were not there. But he took several deep breaths and shook his head to clear his thoughts. He closed his eyes. When he reopened them the particle was still there. He turned the ice slightly, and it disappeared. This did not surprise him. He turned the ice back, and it reappeared. “Well,” he said, “at least it is not a figment of my imagination.”

  It appeared to be translucent. Since it was so small he could not be sure. Chlorophyll came to mind. Chlorophyll meant photosynthesis. But he knew that was impossible. For the past several weeks he had spent much of his time examining the samples they had gathered, and not once had he found any evidence of organic compounds. Without the compounds there couldn’t be chlorophyll. Besides, chlorophyll could never form in the presence of hydrogen peroxide, nor could it form so far beneath the surface under such cold conditions. But the tiny speck still fascinated him. He sensed he was overreacting and attempted to contain his excitement. After several minutes of examining the particle, he entered his impressions into the computer.

  Before proceeding he stole a quick look at the clock. They would awake in forty-five minutes. That meant he had thirty-five minutes, at best, before he had to return to his sleeping bag and feign sleep. He had reprogrammed the computer to think he went to bed at the scheduled time. The deception was to keep the Russian Space Agency off his back.