The crater was slightly less than two hundred meters across, oval in shape, about thirty meters deep. Its rim of rubble was new and fresh looking. There were no smaller craters inside it, an indication that it was quite young. Two dozen metal boxes and pole-like instruments were arrayed along its slopes and bottom: seismometers, heat-flow probes, digital cameras, even miniaturized spectrometers in case the geyser actually blew and there was some erupting gas to analyze. A half-dozen shallow trenches showed where they had scooped up soil samples to analyze back at the base for the dim chance of finding microbial life.
“Everything’s right,” Sal Hasdrubal said, to no one in particular. “It’s a young crater. The heat flow measurements peak at its bottom. The permafrost layer is only a dozen meters down from the surface. Why doesn’t it blow?”
“It will, sooner or later,” said Rosenberg.
“Later might be a thousand years from now.”
“Or this afternoon.”
Hasdrubal shook his head inside his transparent helmet. “Nah. The fucker’s gonna blow soon’s as we pack up and leave.”
“Which will be tomorrow,” said Izzy. “We’ll have to lift the rover into the cargo bay, if we can.”
Sal shifted his gaze to the inert rover, sitting squat and silent alongside their camper. Dumb little fucker, he said to himself. Then he shrugged inwardly. Shouldn’t complain. I guess after ten years of work you’re entitled to a breakdown.
“We’ll get it in,” he said to Izzy. “Only weighs one-third of what it would on Earth.”
Rosenberg gave him a doubtful look. “We’ll have to use the winch.”
“Yeah,” Hasdrubal agreed. Then, drawing in a deep breath, he said, “Come on, let’s get back into the camper. This friggin’ suit’s startin’ to smell like a garbage can.”
“You have a lovely way with words, Sal.”
They began trudging back to the waiting camper, two nanosuited figures completely alone as far as the eye could see.
“How come they don’t name craters after Muslims?” Hasdrubal abruptly asked.
“They’re named after scientists, mostly,” said Rosenberg. “Newton, Kuiper, Agassiz…”
“Plenty named after Jews. Why not Muslims?”
Rosenberg sighed heavily. “Perhaps it’s because there are so few Muslim scientists?”
They had reached the camper’s airlock hatch. As he pecked at the keypad to open it, Sal countered, “Oh yeah? What about Abdus Salam? He won the Nobel Prize, for chrissake. What about Alhazen or Avicenna or Omar Khayyam? He was a great astronomer, you know.”
“Oh, spare me,” Rosenberg muttered.
“It’s anti-Islamic prejudice,” Sal said as he climbed up into the coffin-sized airlock and sealed the hatch, leaving Rosenberg standing outside by the silent robotic rover.
“By the well-known Jewish cabal,” Rosenberg retorted, his voice sounding close to exasperation in Sal’s clip-on earphone.
“You said that, I didn’t.”
Once they had wormed out of their suits and vacuumed most of the dust off them, they went up to the camper’s front end and sat at the padded seats. The faint pungent tang of ozone penetrated even up to the cockpit, baked out of the superoxides in the dust by the heat of the camper’s interior.
Hasdrubal sat in the driver’s seat, Rosenberg beside him. Through the curving windshield they could see the crater, as inert and uncooperative as ever. Both men were unshaven: Rosenberg’s once-neat little goatee looked decidedly ragged, Hasdrubal’s jaw was covered in dark fuzz.
As they checked the instruments, Sal muttered, “The heat flow’s there, goddammit. Why don’t she blow?”
“Not enough heat to melt the permafrost, obviously,” said Rosenberg.
“Oughtta be. Look at the numbers.”
Rosenberg sighed again. “Science, my friend, is the difference between what you think ought to be and what actually is.”
Sal nodded reluctant agreement. “It’s a perverse universe.”
“It is indeed.” Rosenberg started out of his seat. “Let’s get some lunch. I’m famished.”
Hasdrubal watched him head back to the minuscule galley built into the camper’s curving bulkhead, then turned back to stare out the windshield again. Come on, goddammit, he urged silently. I know you’re gonna blow, why not do it while I’m watchin’? Why not let me see what you can do?
But the crater remained silent, inactive.
Sonofabitch, Sal cursed fervently.
Suddenly a bright streak arched across the sky. A sonic boom pinged weakly in the thin Martian air.
“Hey, there’s a ship comin’ in,” Hasdrubal called back to the galley.
Rosenberg barely looked up from the sandwiches he was making. “It must be the flight that’s bringing Waterman in,” he said.
Tithonium Base: Arrival
Vijay could see Jamie’s spirits rising as the landing craft screeched through the cloudless atmosphere of Mars toward the Tithonium Base site.
“There’s the domes,” he said, pointing at the display screen set into the bulkhead of the windowless passenger compartment. She saw three pinkish white circular structures huddled close together, connected by short hump-topped passageways.
He’s happier here, she thought. He’s in his element. He’s home.
The flight from Earth orbit to an orbit around Mars had taken only four days in the new-smelling torch ship. Powered by nuclear fusion, the vessel accelerated at almost one full g halfway to its destination, then decelerated at a slightly lower rate until it was orbiting around the red planet. Vijay remembered her first flight to Mars, nearly twenty years earlier, in an old-style ballistic rocket. It had taken more than six months, on a graceful, gradual elliptical trajectory that arced between the two worlds. With the fusion torch, their trajectory was almost a straight line.
Tithonium Base had sent the spindly-legged L/AV, a landing/ascent vehicle, to mate with the torch ship and take them aboard, together with several tons of supplies. Now the fragile-looking lander was descending to the surface of Mars like a spider gliding down an invisible silken thread to the ground.
His hand clutching hers, Jamie stared at the screen that displayed the outside camera views, eager as a little boy watching for Santa’s sleigh. Leaning close to him, Vijay couldn’t help feeling a tremble of trepidation as she watched the craggy cliffs of the valley sliding past. They seemed terribly near.
The lander’s retro rockets screeched once, twice in the thin air and kicked up a cloud of rust-colored dust that blotted out their view. They felt a gentle bump as the noise died away.
“We’re down,” Jamie whispered, still staring at the screen, still gripping Vijay’s hand.
“We’re on the ground,” announced the pilot astronaut, from up in the cockpit. “You can unbuckle your safety harnesses now.”
But the two of them still peered at the screen as the reddish dust wafted away on the gentle breeze. Vijay realized that the domes were much larger than the one she and Jamie had lived in, some twenty years ago. This close, she saw that their white tops were rusty looking, caked with years of Martian dust, although closer to the ground they were transparent. She could see vague figures of people moving around inside the dome closest to them. The farther dome’s insides looked lushly green: the hydroponics greenhouse, she knew. On the other side of the main dome stood the maintenance center and its garage where the big camper vehicles were housed.
Slowly they got to their feet, a little cautious in the light gravity. Jamie’s hair almost brushed the low overhead of the cramped compartment. The cockpit hatch opened and the pilot ducked through, smiling.