Читать книгу The Man Who Loved Mars - Lin Carter - Страница 6

3. Planetfall

There is no experience in life duller and more tedious than a space trip, particularly one of any real duration. By comparison, a strato flight from anywhere to anywhere is diverting, because at least you have clouds and a landscape below to look at; and an old-fashioned ocean voyage must have been heavenly, back in the days when they still used surface vessels.

But in space there simply is nothing at all to look at, which is why spacecraft are made without portholes or windows. Nothing lies beyond the hull fabric save dead black vacuum. There are lots of stars, but they all look alike and after your first glimpse of the “star-gemmed immensitudes” (as the poet calls them), you have seen everything there is. There is no variety in duplicating the experience.

The only parts of a space trip that afford the traveler anything at all in the way of scenic effects are departure and arrival. Generally, both are conducted in the vicinity of one moon or another, so you have the moonscape to look at and the more interesting planetscape beyond. But between the beginning and the end of your trip, there is nothing at all but dreary shipboard routine and absolute tedium. The drone and vibration of the drive itself are pleasurable in a way, but you only have them during acceleration and deceleration, and in between there is empty silence, punctuated by the whishing of the air ducts and the intermittent chime of the Meteor Proximity Alarm. God, you even begin to hunger for the minor excitement of the MPA after a while!

A Luna-Mars flight is tedium carried to the nth degree, especially when you make crossover in anything less luxurious than a Prometheus-class liner. The spacelines know how to cope with the boredom and provide everything from stereo views of Aristarchus at Earthrise, the Rings during a four-moon crossing, and other scenic spectaculars, to indoor sports, organized games, amateur theatricals, and a library of taped drama and variety shows.

Our four-man expedition, of course, had none of these diversions. We didn’t even talk much among ourselves, although the Doctor made a heroic try at maintaining Old World geniality during dinner and strove to win a reputation as a brilliant conversationalist. The girl, Ilsa, had nothing to say to me, and as for my friend Konstantin, he had nothing to say to anybody.

But all spacecraft keep a library by Mandate law, if only to prevent people from going crazy during a long crossover. The Antoine d’Eauville had one that was quite decent, considering its quite natural preponderance of scholarly journals and texts (it was, after all, a museum boat). I got the impression that the craft was named after either the museum’s founder or one of its more generous patrons, but no one ever enlightened me on the subject, so I never learned which.

I found enough to read to occupy most of my time, although outside of the voluminous scientific literature the general run of reading material was limited to turn-of-the-century European novelists and playwrights, with an unexpected sprinkling of midcentury writers from the South American states, mostly new to me. I had read no Borges at all since school and happening upon his inimitable genius was most enthralling. But the poets were almost entirely new discoveries. I had read, or looked into, a few of the Argentines—Ascasubi, Lugones, Almafuerte—but the others—such as a now-forgotten poet, once enormously popular, named Carriego—were all unknowns. Among them was Vazquez, the Nobel-prize winner, who became the most exciting of my new finds.

With nothing else to do in the endless monotony, I read virtually all day long. From time to time I would have to switch the machine off for no other reason than that it was overheating. Luckily, no one else aboard had my leisure, so I had the book tapes all to myself. The girl, I think, had a portable reader in her cabin; the Doctor was busy with a detailed redaction of the thought record; I don’t know what Bolgov did—perhaps just sprawled on his bunk all day, glaring at the ceiling and sweating greasily—and the ship, of course, navigated itself.

In this strange way we traversed the distance between Luna and Mars, hardly seeing or speaking to each other except at meals. And I passed the monotony of transit gaining a modest education in obsolete European novelists and obscure South American poets. And without the least trouble or contact with a Mandate scout.

* * * *

Mars became a big, mottled orange with spots of permafrost marking its poles. The Doctor expanded on his plans. It would have been begging for trouble, had he done the usual thing and moored the d’Eauville in a parking orbit and taken either the gig or the Lanzetti down. For surely the Earthside cops would have reconstructed what had happened and beamed an alert to their CA colleagues at Deimos Terminal. A quick scout would have spotted the d’Eauville without trouble and cut off the Doctor’s escape route by simply sitting him out.

So he planned on something a trifle more risky, and that was to set the spacecraft down on the surface. Now an Icarus is about as small and light a craft as can safely be used for a crossover, but it’s still cumbersome and tricky and fragile enough to make planetfall dangerous. The safety margin, however, got a boost from the fact that the gravity field of Mars is skimpy at best and the museum had already modified the d’Eauville’s design to take an outsized and high-powered drive engine for just such a purpose. Anyway, the Doctor was certain the computer could set her down on her tail in the flats west of the Drylands without blowing a venturi or springing a seam. I hoped he was right.

Once a safe planetfall was accomplished, the CA cops simply had no way of finding us, unless they had thirty times the manpower and flying strength they had had when I was last here. Because they could only locate the d’Eauville if they made an aerial search of the entire planetary surface, acre by acre. Which was a logistic impossibility.

The trouble with making planetfall in the westernmost Drylands was that we would have to do an awful lot of surface travel after landing. But that could not be helped: it would be like waving red flags and yelling “Look at me!” to go any closer to a major colony like Laestrygonum. And we needed a flat space with solid bedrock to set down on.

We didn’t dare risk running so much as a single orbit, since we wanted to come down with the least possible chance of being sighted en route. In mid-crossover Bolgov had carefully programed the d’Eauville’s piloting and navigational computer to match intrinsics with the planet upon approach, so that the craft could segue smoothly from its original flightpath directly into a landing pattern without a break. It was a masterly job, and it went off without a hitch.

We came down in a slow glide, at an elongated angle to make maximum use of the thin atmosphere as a cushion to slow us down, since we didn’t wish to run the risk of using the ordinary spiral braking orbit. A fast planetfall was of the essence, since every single second of time between the moment we broke out of deep space and the moment we hit topsoil we were in constant danger of being noticed on somebody’s radar.

So we came in high up in the northern hemisphere over Arcadia and rode her down across Orcus at a shallow angle that tightened into a fish-hook arc. The glide path took us curving across the midregions of the Mare Sirenum in the direction of Aonius Sinus, with our terminus calculated just west of central Phaethontis.

The fabric began heating up till the hull would soon be a dull cherry-red. The Sirenum went hissing by beneath us in a rusty-purplish blur, much too hazy for us to make out anything but the largest craters. It was a shame we were going too fast to see the landscape, because this was very historic country. The area we were passing over had been the first chunk of local real estate that we Earthmen had ever gotten a close-up look at, even if it had only been a passing glance. I refer to the history-making Mariner IV fly-by, way back in 1965. The tiny, unmanned craft had skimmed across this same part of the Sirenum with all cameras whirring.

The only major canal that traverses the western half of Phaethontis is called the Thermodon. The Doc had hoped to be able to set the d’Eauville down near the west bank of the Thermodon, because the craft had been spray-enameled a dark mottled pattern and would blend with the colors of the canal, reducing the risk of a visual sighting. Coming out of our glide path for a taildown was a tricky bit of maneuvering, but the gyros were up to it, and we sat down, shaken by racking shudders that made the fabric screech and the structure groan. But we made it. The jets died with a cough, the craft trembled, then sat still. And then we all began to breathe again…

We had made it and in one piece.

“My compliments to the museum staff, Doc,” I said in the unexpected silence. “Not many ships could live through a planetfall that tough.”

“Thank you, my boy, but I believe the credit belongs to the Rolls-Royce people. They built good craft in those days…”

We unstrapped, levered ourselves out of the pressure chairs, which deflated with a piercing whistle, and began taking off our emergency suits and putting on the lightweight thermal suits we would need for Mars itself.

It seemed that only the Doctor and I had ever been on Mars before. So we helped the other two accustom themselves to the use of their respirators. Of the four of us, only I had ever undergone the Mishubi-Yakamoto treatments and could do without the artificial breathing boosters.

We had come down just where the Doc had planned. All about us, but tapering off due west, the canal extended like a four-foot-high miniature jungle. Seen from above—it was to be hoped!—the Antoine d’Eauville ought to blend unobtrusively with the shrubbery. Of course, to anyone crossing Phaethontis either afoot, on slidar, or by sand-tractor, it would stand out somewhat more prominently than a dozen sore thumbs, and that we could not help. However, this was the edge of the Drylands, and nobody ever comes this far south, not even the People, for the very good reason that there is nothing here to attract them.

* * * *

Actors on the cube, stuck in a space-adventure epic, always make planetfall, crack the seal, and hit dirtside in no time flat. The conventions of stereovision drama aside, in real life it takes from two to three hours before you are ready to leave the spacecraft. You have to deprogram your computer, dampen the power pile, let the fabric cool, run triple checks for a burst seam, check out suits and respirators, and do a hundred other things. In our case, as we would not be coming back to the craft until this whole expedition was over, it took closer to five hours before we were ready to depart.

It was Bolgov’s task to unlimber the gig. He sprung the cargo port and lifted the gig out of its cradle next to the Lanzetti, using the cargo crane, and set it down gently in the dark mossy foliage.

The craft’s gig, in this case, was an atmospheric skimmer instead of the usual two-man space boat. Actually, they had chosen well in picking a skimmer, since it is the fastest and most practical mode of transport that can be used on Mars, certainly dozens of times faster and more comfortable than a sand-tractor. Bolgov and Keresny then began to stow our gear aboard the skimmer. I suppose I should have gone to lend them a hand, but I could not do it, somehow. I wanted to savor to the fullest my first moment on Mars after all these lonely, empty, bitter years.

So I came out of the airlock below the control blister, climbed down the extensible ladder, jumped down to the springy moss, and then just stood there for a long moment, tasting the dry, spicy tang of the cold, thin air of Mars, feeling the crispness of the rubbery-tendriled moss underfoot, and the exhilarating lightness of Martian gravity. How long, how long since I had tested that ozonous tang at the back of my mouth, how long since I had felt the skin of my face pucker and roughen to the biting chill in the air…?

I stood there silent and motionless for a long time, brooding on old, glorious dreams and the memory of comrades I had known and loved, all dead men now, with six feet of dry Martian dust their everlasting home. My eyes filled and ran over with tears. Tears that vanished and were gone almost in the same instant they were shed. Tears that the desiccated Martian air drank thirstily, grateful for the rare gift of moisture…

I looked about me, eyes blurring, remembering…

My memory drifted back to my first landing on Mars, years and years ago. When I was young and raw and green and idealistic. I recalled how we had ridden down in a little, crowded, rattletrap satellite shuttle from Deimos Terminal, flying east across the Tharsis region to make planetfall at the debarkation camp out in Isidis Regio. I remembered how I had felt then when I first came out of the lock with the other new arrivals, breathing hoarsely through the strange, ill-fitting respirators, waiting to pile on the long tractor train for an interminable, bumpy ride across the craterlets to Syrtis. Staring about me then, I had been struck dumb with awe at the utter strangeness of the scene—the dim, flat stretch of the Isidis dustlands; the grim, dark, shaggy bulk of Syrtis Major, thrusting like a wedge-shaped peninsula deep into the sea of fantastic yellow sands; and the glistening pile that was Syrtis Colony itself, rising on the oddly near horizon, a haze of dim foggy blue from the earth-density air trapped within its hemispherical MPB field.

As we had approached the colony itself, several of my fellow travelers were loudly exclaiming that they had thought the city was supposed to be domed. Did Colonial Administration expect them to wear these uncomfortable masks all the time?

I remember the offhand manner in which the tractor jockey, an old Mars hand, lean as a rail and mahogany brown from deep space radiation, explained laconically that the original colony had been set up under a collapsible plastic dome—”too damned easily collapsible,” was his joke. But that was back before they invented the molecular-potential barrier field, an energy plane whose surface-tension charge repelled air molecules and stabilized internal air pressure, which made it possible to build up and maintain an atmospheric pressure of Earth-norm density—

“Oh!”

The mood snapped at the unexpected sound. I turned. The girl, Ilsa, had followed me out of the lock and was taking her first look at the surface of Mars. I went over and stood beside her; her eyes were wide with amazement, and she sucked in her breath in a gasp and sank her fingers in my arm. I didn’t blame her: your first actual look at the Martian landscape can be an amazing experience.

The craters are the first surprise Mars has for you. There are so many of them, and they are everywhere. Some of them are just little pockmarks in the ground that you can barely put your fist into; and they range all the way up to the super-monster, in the southeastern corner of whose ringwall the entire colony of Sun Lake City is built.

Her fingers dug in. I glanced down, seeing her wide-eyed stare beneath the goggles, and grinned faintly, remembering my own astonishment. For the second big surprise is when you discover that the Red Planet is not red at all, but a patchwork crazy-quilt of yellow dustlands and blue moss growth, broken here and there by vivid patches of raw orange and brilliant, impossible purple.

The first settlers couldn’t get over their amazement at the color scheme. Which is absurd, but human enough. In hindsight it’s hard to understand how anybody ever made the mistake of thinking Mars was going to be red. After all, one of the Russian scientists, Tikhov or somebody like that, deduced that Martian vegetation, if there turned out to actually be any Martian vegetation, would have to be blue in order for the planet to look red from the viewpoint of Earthside visual astronomers. He realized that more than a century and a half ago, back around 1909. And it wasn’t even that clever a deduction in the first place. All it took was a fair grasp of the mechanics of light, which the old-time boys had figured out even earlier, starting with Newton.

We just stood there for a while, just staring around. The sky was dead, dull black, lightening a little toward dusty violet at the edges of the horizon where the air molecules got a chance to bunch up a bit and do some diffracting. The stars were piercingly sharp and clear, and they were weirdly different from the stars you see at night, Earthside. These did not twinkle, did not waver in the slightest, and they were the damndest colors. Earthside the stars mostly seem glittering, flashing white, sometimes with a touch of blue or red, but that is simply because the faint, colors of starlight have little chance of getting through Earth’s mulligan stew of an atmosphere. Here they blaze in the rarest of colors: half a dozen shades of green and blue, all tones from pale yellow through red, and even a few you simply wouldn’t believe, like Alpha Derceto, which is pure brown, and Delta Erigius, which is puce.

She was looking up, searching about. Grinning, I asked her if she was looking for the moons, and she nodded and asked where they were. I tried to tell her that they were simply too damn small to be visible to the unaided vision, except under certain rather rare circumstances, but she found that impossible to believe.

“But that’s simply insane!” she said, the thin air making her voice tinny and flat. “Why, back home you can even see a communications satellite on clear nights, if you know where to look. And they’re only ten or fifteen feet across, where here— Well, Deimos, the nearest moon, is supposed to have a diameter of ten miles. It’s just crazy to say you simply can’t see them at all!”

“I didn’t say you couldn’t see them at all, I said they were too small to be seen except under certain rare conditions,” I reminded her. “One of those conditions is knowing just where to look. In the first place, Deimos is the outer moon, not the nearest, and it’s the only one you can see without magnification, because it moves so very slowly—it takes two days, local time, to cross the sky. The trouble is that it has a lousy albedo, and it’s too high for its size to make any difference in its degree of visibility.”

She sounded dubious. “Is that really true? What about the other one?”

“Phobos you never can see at all,” I told her, “even though it’s bigger than Deimos, has a higher albedo—that means ‘reflecting power,’ by the way. It’s also very, very, very close to the surface of the planet.”

“Then why can’t you see it?”

“Because it moves too fast. It goes all around the planet three whole times in a single day, and if you don’t think that is fast, well, stop and think about it.”

“But I still don’t see—!”

“You simply can’t know where precisely to look for it. It’s a question of albedo, for the most part. You see, Mars is so much farther from the sun than Earth is that we don’t get more than a tiny fraction of the light Earth gets. Now back on Earth, a full moon is dazzlingly bright, because it has an awful lot of light to reflect. But here the moons have only a tiny fraction of that much light, and they have lower albedos too.

“But the main problem with Phobos is not that it is much too dim and dark to show up very well, but it whizzes by so rapidly that you never know just where in the sky to look for it at any given time. You have to search the sky from horizon to horizon, slowly and carefully, and even then, under the best of conditions you’d have to be mighty lucky to—”

I broke off as moss rustled and squeaked under heavy boots behind me.

“Your first lesson in Marsology, my dear?” Dr. Keresny broke in amiably. “Forgive me for interrupting, but the skimmer is all packed. Cn. Tengren, we are ready when you are.”