Читать книгу Voyage - Stephen Baxter - Страница 24

Ben Priest swung through Glendale and then turned north on Linda Vista, heading past the Rose Bowl. His hired car was an antique Dodge, and its heating was malfunctioning; outside it was a cold December day, and York alternately baked and shivered.

‘This seems a long way out of Pasadena,’ she remarked.

He grinned. ‘Yeah. Well, they used to test rocket engines here. Everyone thought the place would be dangerous, so they built it way the hell out there, in the arroyo. And then they built a sprawling, expensive suburb all around it.’

York saw that office buildings filled the arroyo; some of them were drab boxes, but there was also an imposing tower of steel and glass.

There were cars parked for a quarter mile along the road leading to JPL, and the street outside the press center was nearly blocked by TV vans.

There was a guard at the JPL entrance; he waved them into a parking lot. It seemed to York that pretty much every space was taken.

They got inside quickly; the cold seemed to be deepening. Priest guided her through corridors littered with computer cards and print-outs. Close-up photographs of the Moon’s surface were casually framed and stuck on the walls. JPL seemed a strange hybrid; this might have been any office complex anywhere, York supposed, except that people were younger than the average – and not one of them wore a suit, or a tie – and there was a lot of hair about, bristling above yellow Smile buttons. Some of the women even wore hot pants. But at the same time the place didn’t have the ragged, laid-back feel of a college; there was too much urgency for that. There was a sense that things happened here.

She remarked on how full the car park had been.

Priest said, ‘You should have been here a week ago, when the first pictures began coming through from Mars. You couldn’t move for press guys, and VIPs, and politicos, and science fiction writers – anybody and everybody who could scrounge a pass.’ He laughed. ‘You should have seen their faces, when all we got back was a picture of the dust-storm.’

It was odd to be with Priest again. A blast from the past. She hadn’t seen him for more than a year, and she’d been surprised when he’d come through on his old promise to bring her here to see the results from Mars come in. He hadn’t changed, as far as she could see: slim, dedicated to his job, easy-going, intelligent.

Fun to be with. Comfortable. Married.

She felt vaguely restless.

Right now, she admitted, she was basically drifting, doing some post-doc work here and there. She was looking for a focus, a topic, trying to figure out what she wanted to do with her life.

And she was still in her mess of a relationship with Mike Conlig, who was so immersed in his NERVA work he barely seemed aware she was there, when she got any time out of him at all. NERVA was the center of Mike’s life; a kind of monomaniacal obsessive seemed to be emerging from inside the gentler, more intellectual outer shell that had first attracted her.

She got the impression that the space program was full of people like that.

The question for York was, did she really want to be a bit-part player in the story of someone else’s goals?

They reached the communications center. The walls were coated with TV screens, all filled with grainy, obscure black and white images. Hard copies littered tables, and ribbons of computer printout trailed across the tables and floor and along the walls. The workers here – mostly men, mostly shirt-sleeved, uniformly hairy – pored over the images and print-outs, their security badges dangling from their top pockets. There were cups of stale coffee all over the tables, some perched close to precious print-out, and in one corner she spotted a half-eaten doughnut, the jelly still oozing from its center.

There was a smell, faint but distinctive, of body odor.

Priest shrugged, looking a little sheepish. ‘It’s always pretty much like this, Natalie. Kind of slow chaos. This is the heart of the SFOF, what they call the Space Flight Operations Facility. The results from Mariner are coming in all the time; the guys work in shifts here. And it’s adaptive; the results from one orbit may be used to influence what they do on the next. There isn’t a lot of time for housekeeping.’

‘You don’t need to apologize. You ought to see the average geology field site after a couple of days.’

There was a model of the Mariner 9 spacecraft itself, a couple of feet across, hanging in one corner of the room. She slowed, looking up at it. Four silvery solar panels unfolded like sails from a central octagonal box. A rocket engine with propellant tanks was mounted on top of the box, and underneath sprouted a cluster of instruments. York could recognize the tiny lenses of TV cameras, glinting in the fluorescent light. The craft was comparatively crude, compared to the heavy Viking landers which were already under development for the 1975 launch opportunity. But still, Mariner 9 was quite beautiful, like a fine watch.

York retained lingering suspicions about the value of spaceflight in terms of its science. As a kid she’d been intrigued, even startled by the Mariner 4 pictures. But that had worn off, and she hadn’t followed the progress of later probes closely. But still, this beautiful, delicate thing had been assembled by humans – made by hands like hers – and then thrown across interplanetary distances, to orbit Mars itself: it had become the first man-made object to orbit another planet.

It was quite a thought.

Priest was talking about the dust storm. ‘It covered the whole damn planet, Natalie. When we arrived we couldn’t see a thing. They did some measurements at the limb of the planet, and found the dust reaching an altitude of fifty miles. It seems impossible, but it’s true. Anyhow, the storm did us one favor.’

‘How’s that?’

‘All of a sudden, funnily enough, everybody got very excited about looking at the moons. Listen, you want me to get you a coffee? A doughnut, maybe?’

‘No thanks, Ben.’

He led her through more corridors, to a smaller laboratory. More shirt-sleeves, working at terminals and screens.

‘Image Processing,’ Priest said. He took her to an unoccupied monitor, and they sat on rickety fold-up chairs. He began tapping at the key-pad. ‘They got the first reasonably clear image of Phobos on revolution thirty-one – just last night. I stayed up until the small hours watching them process the data …’ An image began to build up on the video monitor now, line by line, working from top to bottom. ‘Mariner records its pictures on magnetic tape, and sends them back to Earth in pretty much the way a newsprint wire-photo is transmitted. This is exactly how the first image emerged, for the team last night.’

She smiled. ‘What’s this, Ben? Why not just show me the finished picture? More NASA showmanship?’

He raised his eyebrows. ‘You’re too cynical. Or would be, if I thought you meant it.’

Impulsively she touched his hand. ‘I’m sorry, Ben.’ His skin was warm and leathery.

He grinned at her easily.

Today she was finding Ben, with his intelligence and enthusiasm for this wonderful Mars project, unreasonably attractive. Damn it. I’m not supposed to feel like this.

She concentrated on the pictures.

The upper few lines of the image had been black – just empty space. But now she saw some detail, a curve of gray and white, building up line by line. At first she thought she was seeing the limb of a sphere, but the shape soon looked much too irregular for that.

Phobos turned out to be a rough ellipse, half in shadow, with a battered, irregular edge. It looked much more like York’s preconception of an asteroid than any moon. There were craters everywhere, huge and ancient, some so deep that the impacts that caused them must have come close to splitting the battered little moon in half.

‘Natalie, this is more or less the face of Phobos, about half the size of our full Moon, that you would see if you were standing on Mars right now.’

Phobos looked like a diseased potato. Priest was staring at the picture, and its gray and black reflected in his eyes. ‘This is history, Natalie. Think about it: mine were among the first human eyes ever to see Phobos and Deimos, the moons of Mars. I wanted to show you this, kind of share it with you, the way I saw it.’

She was moved to touch him again, but she resisted the impulse.

‘Show me Mars, Ben.’

‘Sure.’

After a few more minutes Priest had retrieved images of the surface of the planet itself. But the dust storm was still continuing. There was only one place away from the poles where any detail was visible: an area called Tharsis, close to the Martian equator. Here the pictures showed four dark, irregular spots, roughly circular, three in a line running at an angle to the equator, and the fourth a little way away to the west.

She asked, ‘What the hell can these be?’

‘Who knows? I guess we’ll figure it out when the storm clears. The lab staffers are calling them “Carl’s Marks.” After Sagan, see –’

The shapes in the images intrigued her; they were familiar, somehow. If only she could see just a little more … ‘You say this region’s called Tharsis. Do we know anything else about it?’

‘Actually, yes. You’re the geologist, Natalie. You ought to know.’

‘Just tell me, asshole.’

‘There have been radar studies of Mars since the mid-sixties. This Tharsis region – which is just a bright splotch seen from Earth – looks as if it’s the highest plateau on the planet.’

‘Really? How high?’

He shrugged. ‘Ten or twenty miles above the mean datum. We can’t say for sure. Mean datum – you understand there’s no ocean on Mars, so no convenient sea level to –’

‘You must have some better resolution images than these. It’s the only visible spot on the planet, for Christ’s sake. Somebody must have pointed the cameras again.’

Priest began to work the keyboard. He found a couple of images which showed her some more detail. She stared at the screen, pressing close to the glass.

‘You’re telling me these features are stable? That they aren’t, uh, whirlwinds in the dust storm or somesuch?’

‘No way. They’ve lasted since Mariner got to Mars, a couple of weeks ago. We’re undoubtedly looking at some kind of surface feature, here.’

She could see circular markings within each spot. And there was some kind of scalloping. They almost look like volcanic caldera. The mouths of volcanoes.

But why should these features, of all of Mars, be showing up at all? Because they’re in Tharsis. And Tharsis is the highest region on Mars. And why these particular features? Because they are the highest points in Tharsis – therefore the highest points on the planet …

‘My God,’ she whispered.

‘Natalie? What is it?’

These spots had to be volcanoes, sitting on top of some kind of vast shield system. Big enough to dwarf anything on Earth. Everest was only five miles high; those babies must be fifteen miles at least. So high they were poking above the dust storms; so high they were above the bulk of the atmosphere itself.

‘Natalie? Are you okay?’

York couldn’t believe her eyes. She had Priest call up image after image.

At least, she reflected later, the mystery of the Martian geology had taken her mind off Priest.