Her blue boots came to rest on the white metal of the descent stage’s three-foot-wide footpad. It was still so dark in the shadow of Challenger, that it was actually quite difficult to see.
She held on to the ladder with her fat-gloved hands, and tried to step back up to the ladder’s bottom rung. She had to make sure she could get back home. But the suit was too stiff, and she couldn’t lift her feet that high.
“Fucking dumb design.”
“Hot mike at this time, EV1,” Gershon said blandly.
She gave up trying to make the step. She bent down a little and jumped. Her knees were stiff, inside the suit, and all her mobility came from her toes and ankles. The Martian gravity pulled her back, but feebly, and she overshot the bottom rung. She fell against the ladder with a clatter, but she managed to get her feet hooked over the rung.
Breathless, she dropped back to the footpad again.
She looked past the pad to the Martian surface.
“Okay. I’m at the foot of the ladder. The MEM’s footpads are depressed in the surface a couple of inches, maybe three; the sides of the depressions they’ve made are quite distinct, sharp and clear. There’s little water here, of course, and I guess the soil’s cohesion is electrostatic…” Don’t analyze, York; tell them what it looks like. “The surface soil looks a little like beach sand. Wet sand. But as you get close to it it’s actually much finer-grained than sand, and it’s evident that it bonds well together. Here and there it’s very fine, powdery.” She reached out her leg and kicked gently at the regolith, leaving furrows in the soil. “It’s easy for me to dig little trenches with my toe. I have the impression that the surface material is a duricrust. That is, dust particles cemented together by the upward seepage of water in the soil, with salts being precipitated out on evaporation.”
There had been a little Martian dust on the footpad, she saw, and when she lifted up her boot, she could see that a little of that had already transferred itself to her. “The dust is clinging in fine layers to the sole and sides of my boot. So it’s both cohesive and adhesive. It looks as if it will take a slope of around seventy degrees…”
Now Ralph Gershon said, “Natalie, I need you to get back facing the TV camera for a minute please.”
“Say again, Ralph.”
“Rager. I need you facing the field of view of the camera. Natalie, Phil, the President of the United States is in his office now and would like to say a few words to you.”
Stone replied for her. “That would be an honor, Ralph.”
She checked her cuff checklist. Reagan was right on cue. Trust an old actor.
She turned toward the MESA.
She imagined the TV pictures of herself on their way to Earth: she would be a stiff, angular figure, posed on the footpad, her outline fuzzed by false colors against the crimson of Mars.
She took a still Hasselblad camera from the MESA platform. After some fumbling, she fitted the camera to a mount above her chest panel.
She turned around slowly, letting the camera snap a panoramic mosaic. Then she picked up a small TV camera, and fixed that in place on her chest, beside the Hasselblad.
The quality of the radio link changed; a Houston capcom came on the line. “Go ahead, Mr. President. Out.”
Natalie and Phil, I’m talking to you by a radio linkup from the Oval Office at the White House.
Reagan’s gravelly voice was lively, interested. He sure plays the part well. She found herself drawing a little more upright, as if coming to attention.
Now, the NASA technical people tell me that it will take four minutes for my words to reach you, and four more before I get to hear your reply. So I figure we can’t have much of a conversation. I just want to say this, as you talk to us from the Valley of Mangala. Our progress in space — continuing to take giant steps for all mankind — is a tribute to American teamwork and excellence. And we can be proud to say: We are first; we are the best; and we are so because we’re free.
America has always been greatest when we dared to be great. We have reached for greatness again. We can follow our dreams to the planets and to distant stars, living and working in space for peaceful, economic, and scientific gain…
York — standing on the pad in the reality of the glowing landscape, and with the weight of her pack heavy on her back — endured the remote, distorted voice.
…Now I’m going to shut up, Natalie and Phil, but I want you to indulge us with just a couple of minutes of your time. Please tell us how it feels to be, at last, on the surface of Mars.
Reagan fell silent, and the radio link hissed.
Stone said: “Thank you, Mr. President. It’s an honor and a privilege for us to be here, representing not only the United States, but all of mankind. Natalie…”
Natalie, tell them how it feels.
The oldest question in the world, the most difficult to answer — and, maybe, the most important, she thought.
The one question the Apollo astronauts could never answer.
Now I must try.
In the pink sky, the sun was continuing to strengthen, and the world was a bowl of shades of red and brown, of light scattering from the dust on the ground and suspended in the air. The light from the hatchway shone as brilliantly white as before, incongruous.
“Okay, sir. The MEM is standing here on the flats north of Mangala Vallis. It’s a late-fall morning — we’re only about eighty days away from the winter solstice, here in the northern hemisphere of Mars. The sky is uniformly ocher. The dust suffuses everything with a pale, salmon hue. The red planet isn’t really so red: the dominant color is a moderate yellow-brown, reflected from the land. There’s no green, or blue, anywhere. If humans ever colonize Mars for good — no, make that when — we’ll have to invent a lot of new words for shades of brown.
“I’m almost on the Martian equator. To give you some reference, the great Tharsis Bulge, with its three huge shield volcanoes, is a couple of thousand miles to the east of me; and Olympus Mons, the greatest volcano in the Solar System, is about the same distance to the north. But I can’t see the volcanoes, or the Bulge, from here; although this is a small world, Martian features are too huge, overwhelming on a human scale.
“We’re close enough to Tharsis for this region to have been affected by the uplift of the Bulge. So, although the surface here looks as flat as a beach at low tide, I know that when I look away from the MEM I’m probably looking down a slope of a few tenths of a degree.”
She took a long, slow look around at the panorama of Mangala Vallis.
“The MEM is standing on a surface which is littered with rocks. The rocks, I would say, range in size from maybe half a yard up to two yards. The rocks show vesicles. That is, there are small bubbles in the surface of the rocks; it means the rocks are probably bits of frozen lava, and the bubbles were caused by the escape of gases from within the molten rocks. Gases lost maybe a billion years ago. The rocks are uniformly pitted and fluted, I would guess by wind erosion. I can see smaller formations that look like pebbles, but I’m pretty sure they are duricrust aggregate. Just bits of the surface stuck together. The surface is not like sand; it’s evidently much finer-grained. The grains are no more than a micron or so wide. I’m sure that the dust is the result of the slow weathering of the rocks, with much oxidation having occurred; the rocks have the characteristic deep red-brown coloration of smectite clays…
“I can see how geological processes are continuing to shape this landscape. The surface has clearly been scoured by wind: the landscape is eroded, and the dust under my feet has surely been transported from around the planet. From a geological point of view, there is clearly a sequence of events represented here: impact, wind, volcanic activity, possibly flooding, probably ground ice.