Doug picked up one of the VR helmets.
“Can’t I watch Surfer Morphs?” their son whined.
It wasn’t until Mr. Ricardo handed him the VR helmet that Luis realized his teacher had sacrificed his own chance to experience the Mars team’s first excursion.
There were only ten VR rigs in the whole planetarium theater. The nine others were already taken by adults. Maybe they were college students, Luis thought; they looked young enough to be, even though almost everybody else in the big circular room was his teacher’s age or older.
“Don’t you want it?” Luis asked Ricardo.
His teacher made a strange smile. “It’s for you, Luis. Put it on.”
He thinks he’s doin’ me a big favor, Luis thought. He don’ know that Jorge’s gonna beat the crap outta me for this. Or maybe he knows an’ don’ care.
With trembling hands, Luis slipped the helmet over his head, then worked the bristly gloves onto his hands. Ricardo still had that strange, almost sickly smile as he slid the helmet’s visor down, shutting out Luis’s view.
As he sat there in utter darkness he heard Ricardo’s voice, muffled by the helmet, say, “Enjoy yourself, Luis.”
Yeah, Luis thought. Might as well enjoy myself. I’m sure gonna pay for this later on.
Senator O’Hara held his breath. All he could hear from inside the darkness of the helmet was the faint chugging of his heart pump. It was beating fast, for some reason.
He didn’t want to seem cowardly in front of his entire staff, but the darkness and the closeness of the visor over his lace was stifling him, choking him. He wanted to cry out, to yank the damned helmet off and be done with it.
With the abruptness of an eyeblink he was suddenly looking out at a flat plain of rust red. Rocks and boulders were littered everywhere like toys scattered by an army of thoughtless children. The sky was deep blue, almost black. A soft hushing sound filled his ears, like a distant whisper.
“That’s the wind,” said a disembodied voice. “It’s blowing a stiff ninety knots, according to our instruments, but the air here is so thin that I can’t feel it at all.”
I’m on Mars! the Senator said to himself. It’s almost like actually being there in person.
It’s just like we expected it to be, Jerome Zacharias thought. We could have saved a lot of money by just sending automated probes.
“Over that horizon, several hundred kilometers,” Valerii Mikoyan was saying in flat midwestern American English, “lies the Tharsis bulge and the giant shield volcanoes, which we will explore by remote-controlled gliders and balloons later in this mission. And in this direction…”
Zack’s view shifted across the landscape quickly enough to make him feel a moment of giddiness.
“…Just over that line of low hills, is the Valles Marineris. We are going to ride the rover there as soon as the vehicle is checked out.”
Why don’t I feel excited? Zack asked himself. I’m like a kid on Christmas morning, after all the presents have been unwrapped.
For a moment Debbie was startled when Doug solemnly picked up one of the VR helmets and put it on her, like a high priest crowning a new queen.
She was sitting in the springy little metal jumpseat of the cross-country rover, her hands running along the control board, checking out all its systems. Solar panels OK. Transformers. Backup fuel cells. Sensors on and running. Communications gear in the green.
“OK,” said the astronaut driving the buggy. “We are ready to roll.” It might as well have been her own voice, Debbie thought.
“Clear for canyon excursion,” came the mission controller’s voice in her earphones. The mission controller was up in the command spacecraft, hanging high above the Plain of Sinai in a synchronous orbit.
With transmission delays of ten to twenty minutes, mission control of the Mars expedition could not be on Earth; it had to be right there, on the scene.
“Go for sightseeing tour,” Debbie acknowledged. “The bus is leaving.”
Luis watched the buggy depart the base area. But only for a moment. He had work to do. He was a geologist, he heard in his earphones, and his job was to take as wide a sampling of rocks as he could and pack them away in one of the return craft.
“First we photograph the field we’re going to work in.” Luis felt a square object in his left hand, then saw a Polaroid camera. He held it up to the visor of his helmet, sighted and clicked.
“What we’re going to be doing is to collect what’s called contingency samples,” the geologist was saying. “We want to get them aboard a return vehicle right away, the first few hours on the surface, so that if anything happens to force us to make an unscheduled departure, we’ll have a decent sampling of surface materials to take back with us.”
At first Luis had found it confusing to hear the guy’s voice in his head when it looked like he himself was walking around on Mars and picking up the rocks. He could feel them in his hands! Feel their heft, the grittiness of their surfaces. It was like the first time he had tried acid; he’d been inside his own head and outside, looking back at himself, both at the same time. That shook him up so much he had never dropped acid again.
But this was kind of different. Fun. He was the frigging geologist. He was there on Mars. He was doing something. Something worthwhile.
Collecting rocks, Senator O’Hara growled inwardly. We’ve spent a hundred billion dollars so some pointy-headed scientists can add to their rock collection. Oh, am I going to crucify them as soon as the committee reconvenes!
Zack felt as if he were jouncing and banging inside the surface rover as it trundled across the Martian landscape. He knew he was sitting in a comfortable rocking chair in his big library/bar/entertainment room. Yet he was looking out at Mars through the windshield of the rover. His hands were on its controls and he could feel every shudder and bounce of the sixwheeled vehicle.
But there’s nothing out there that we haven’t already seen with the unmanned landers, Zack told himself, with mounting despair. We’ve even brought back samples, under remote control. What are the humans on this expedition going to be able to accomplish that will be worth the cost of sending them?
Easy now, Debbie told herself. Don’t let yourself get carried away. You’re not on Mars. You’re sitting in your own living room.
Luis could feel the weight of the rock. It was much lighter than a rock that size would be on Earth. And red, like rust. Holding it in his left hand, he chipped at it with the hammer in his right.
“Just want to check the interior,” he heard the geologist say, as if he were saying it himself.
The rock cracked in two. Luis saw a tracery of fine lines honeycombing the rock’s insides.
“Huh. Never saw anything like that before.” And the geologist/Luis carefully put both halves of the split rock into a container, sealed it, then marked with a pen its location in the Polaroid photograph of the area he had taken when he had started collecting.
This is fun, Luis realized. I wish I could do it for real. Like, be a real astronaut or scientist. But reality was something very different. Jorge was reality. Yeah, Luis said to himself, I could be on Mars myself some day. If Jorge don’ kill me first.