“We’re left with hundreds of cataract ledges, basins, and canyons eroded into the bedrock, isolated buttes and uplands, gravel bars thirty or forty yards high.
“This is the scabland, Phil. There are only a handful of areas on Earth which show the effects of large-scale, catastrophic flooding so well.”
Bleeker pushed back his Snoopy hat and scratched his blond head. “It’s fascinating, Natalie. But I don’t see what it has to do with us.”
“Okay. Phil, I’ve given you another pack of photographs. In the left side-pocket of Adam’s pack.”
Stone dug into Bleeker’s pocket and pulled out a plastic packet of black-and-white photographs. He leafed through them quickly, showing them to Bleeker.
Cratered plains: the images were of Mars, clearly enough. But there was a channel cut deeply into what looked like the tough, ancient landscape of the southern hemisphere. There was a crater complex, overlaid by anastomosed channels. There was a crater with a teardrop-shaped, streamlined island, like a gravel bar, collected in its wake; and “downstream” of the crater, there were scour marks, running parallel to the island…
Stone was having trouble making sense of what he saw and heard. “Are you saying that Mars has suffered catastrophic flooding — like the scabland here, in Washington State?”
York hesitated. “I believe so. A lot of us have argued that, since the Mariner pictures came in. I’ve been studying the area you’re looking at, in those photos, since 1973. I guess I’m the leading expert on it, now. And it seems to me the analogy between the terrestrial scabland features and the Martian morphology is too striking to be a coincidence.”
“But not everybody agrees,” Stone hazarded.
“No,” she conceded. “Some say the Martian ‘scabland’ features are too big to have been formed by water. Schumm, for instance.”
“Who?” Bleeker asked.
“Schumm says the Martian channels must have been formed by tensional factors in the planet’s surface. Cracks, modified later, maybe, by vulcanism and the action of the wind.”
“Sounds like an asshole to me,” Stone said, peering at the pictures. “I’m with you, Natalie.”
“But if these Martian channels were formed by flooding,” Bleeker said, “where the hell did the water come from? And where did it go?”
“I’ll bet she has a theory about that, too,” Stone muttered.
“I didn’t copy, EV1.”
“Go ahead, Natalie.”
“Underground aquifers. Contained by tough bedrock below — maybe ten miles deep — and a cap of thick ice in the regolith above. Whatever lifted up Tharsis — a convection process in the mantle, maybe — must have caused the faulting that led to the flooding. The pressure of the water has to exceed the pressure of the rocks. All you’d need would be a breach on the subsurface ice cap for the water to gush to the surface, under high pressure.”
“My God,” Stone said. “Oceans, buried in the Martian rocks. How can we find out if you’re right, Natalie?”
“What we need is for three guys to land there in a MEM, and dig a few deep cores.”
Stone started to see where all this was leading. He leafed through the photos again. “What area are these photos of?”
“That’s one of the most striking outflow channels. It’s Mangala Vallis, Phil. Martian scabland: your landing area.”
Stone grinned. She’s doing it again. Mangala Vallis. On which Natalie York, leading light of the site selection committee and would-be Mars voyager, just happens to be the world’s top expert.
And Adam Bleeker still doesn’t know what anastomosis is. I hope the guy’s watching his back. Mission Elapsed Time [Day/Hr:Min:Sec] Plus 349/11:14:03
Two months out, Mars had been the brightest object in the sky save the sun, but still a starlike point. Then — twenty days from orbit insertion — Mars had opened out into a disk. And where the line between light and dark crossed the planet, she could see, with her naked eye, wrinkles and bumps: craters and canyons, catching the light of the sun.
Gradually, as the days had unfolded, she’d made out more and more recognizable detail on the surface. There was the huge gouge of the Valles Marineris — a wound visible even from a million miles out — and the polar cap in the north, swelling with water ice in advance of the coming winter, and the great black calderas of the Tharsis volcanoes.
It was remarkable how much she could recognize. Almost as if she had been here before.
Mars was clearly a small world, she thought. Some of the features — Tharsis, the Marineris canyons, Syrtis, the great iced pit of Hellas in the south — sprawled around the globe, outsized, dominating the curvature.
In some ways Mars was as she had expected. It looked a lot like the big photomosaic globes at JPL. But there were surprising differences, too. Mars wasn’t red so much as predominantly brown, a surface wrought out of subtle shadings of tan and ocher and rust. There was a sharp visible difference between northern and southern hemispheres, with the younger lands to the north of the equatorial line being brighter in color, almost yellow.
Ares was approaching the planet at an angle to the sunlight, so Mars was gibbous, with a fat slice of the night hemisphere turned toward the spacecraft. And the ocher shading seemed to deepen at the planet’s limb, and at low sun angles. These features gave the little globe a three-dimensional effect, a marked roundness. Mars was a little round orange, the only object apart from the sun in all the 360-degree sky visible as other than a point of light.
In the depths of the mission — suspended between planets, with nothing visible but sun and stars beyond the walls of the craft, and ground down by the stultifying routine of long-duration flight — York had suffered some deep depressions. She’d shrunk into herself, going through her assignments on autopilot, shunning the company of her crewmates. She suspected they’d suffered similarly, but they seemed to have found ways to cope: Gershon with his love of the machinery around them, Stone with his little pet pea plants.
Already she was dreading the return journey; it loomed in her imagination, a huge black barrier.
But that was for the future. Just then she was climbing out of the pit, up toward the warm ocher light of Mars.
She spent as much time as she could just staring at the approaching globe, identifying sites no naked human eye had seen before, as if claiming more and more of Mars for herself.
Monday, August 6, 1984
As they prepared for the ignition, Bleeker had “Born in the USA” playing on the cabin’s little tape deck. It drowned out the clicks and whirs of the MEM’s equipment.
Bleeker said, “Ascent propulsion system propellant tanks pressurized.”
“Rager,” Gershon replied.
“Ascent feeds are open, shutoffs are closed.”
On the ground, Ted Curval was capcom today. “Iowa, this is Houston. Less than ten minutes here. Everything looks good. Just a reminder. We want the rendezvous radar mode switch in LGC just as it is on surface fifty-nine… We assume the steerable is in track mode auto.”
Gershon said, “Stop, push-button reset, abort to abort stage reset.”
Bleeker pushed his buttons. “Reset.”
Curval said, “Our guidance recommendation is PGNS, and you’re cleared for ignition.”
“Rog. We’re number one on the runway…”
A hundred miles above the Earth, as Gershon and Bleeker worked through the litany of the preburn checklist, MEM and Apollo drifted in formation. The Apollo, containing Command Module Pilot Bob Crippen, was an exquisitely jeweled silver toy, drifting against the luminous carpet of Earth. And the MEM was a great shining cone, at thirty feet tall dwarfing Apollo, surrounded by discarded Mars heat-shield panels and rippling with foil.