“The Moon is an old world; we think its story ended, essentially, a billion or more years ago. But it’s obvious to me, standing here, that Mars, like Earth, is still evolving. Still alive.”
There was a long silence on the radio link.
“Natalie,” Stone said gently. “Are you all right?”
“Yes. Yes, I’m fine, Phil.”
She thought of her words dispersing, radiating away to Earth and beyond; she wished she could call them back. It’s not enough. It could never be enough.
But, I guess, it was the best I could do.
It was time.
She said, “I’ll step off the footpad now.”
She held on to the ladder with her right hand and leaned out to the left. She raised her left boot over the lip of the footpad, pushed it out a little way, and — silently, carefully — lowered it to the dust.
Nobody spoke; Stone, Gershon, remote Earth. It was as if the whole of creation was focused on her, on this moment.
She tested her weight, bouncing on her left boot in the gentle gravity. The Martian regolith was firm enough to hold her. As she had known it would be.
She was standing with one foot on this clumsy artifact from Earth, the other on the virgin terrain of Mangala. She looked around, briefly, at the empty landscape, framed by the rounded rim of her faceplate, and she could see the play of soft ocher light over her nose and cheeks, the flesh of a human face, here on Mars.
Holding on to the ladder, she placed her right foot on the ground. Then, cautiously, she let go of the ladder. She was standing freely on Mars.
She took a step forward, then another.
Her boots left clear, firm prints, which showed the ridging of the soles. She wished she could take her shoes off, press her bare toes into the sand of this Martian beach, feel the fine, powdery stuff for herself.
Her suit was comfortable, warm. She could hear the whir of the 20,000-rpm fans in her backpack. She had 180-degree vision through her faceplate; she had no sense of enclosure, of confinement.
She took a few more steps.
She bounced across the surface. Moving on Mars was dreamlike, somewhere between walking and floating. She had no real difficulty in moving around. In fact it was easier than the sims she’d performed on the ground. But she was very aware of the mass of the equipment on her back, and she had to lean forward to maintain her balance. It was difficult to bend at the knees, so that her movement came mostly from her ankles and toes; she suspected her legs would tire quickly. But my monkey toes are strong, pawing through this Mars dust.
Oddly, she felt as if the shades of Armstrong and Muldoon were beside her, as if she was echoing their first, famous expedition. It was a thought that somehow diminished this moment.
She turned to face Challenger. The MEM was an angular pyramid, huge before her, silhouetted against the light of the shrunken sun, and propped up in an unlikely fashion on its six fold-down legs. She was still in the shadow of Challenger. The ambient light was like a late sunset, with Challenger drenched in a weak, deep pink color; against that, the rectangle of fluorescent light from the hatch, framing Stone, was a harsh pearl-gray, startlingly alien.
The dominant red tones came from dust suspended in the air. There was about ten times as much dust, she knew, as over Los Angeles on a smoggy day. And no rain, ever, to wash it out.
She walked away from Challenger then, working her way over into the sunlight, moving along the shadow of Challenger, toward the west. The MEM’s shadow was a long, sharp-edged cone on the rocky surface before her.
She passed beyond the edge of the shadow and into the light.
She turned. Sunlight shone into her face, casting reflections from the surfaces of her faceplate.
Sunrise on Mars: the sky here was different, the way the light was scattered by the dust…
The sun, rising above the silhouetted shoulders of Challenger, was surrounded by an elliptical patch of yellow light, suspended in a brown sky. It looked unreal.
The sun was small, feeble, only two-thirds of its size as seen from Earth.
She shivered, involuntarily, although she knew that her suit temperature couldn’t have varied; the shrunken sun, the lightless sky, made Mars seem a cold, remote place.
She turned around, letting her camera pan across the landscape. The Martian dust felt a little slippery under her boots.
She stepped farther away from Challenger, her line of footprints extending on into the virgin regolith. She felt as if the long, thin line of communications attaching her to Challenger and her home planet was growing more attenuated, perhaps fraying, leaving her stranded on this high, cool plain.
The land wasn’t completely flat, she saw now, as the light continued to increase; there was a subtle mottling in the shading. And she made out what looked like low sand dunes, off to the west. But the dunes were more irregular than terrestrial sand dunes, because, she guessed, of the small size of the surface particles; the dunes were actually more like drifts in the dust.
Away to the west, she saw a line, a soft shadow in the sand. It looked like a shallow ridge, facing away from her.
She walked forward, farther from the MEM.
After perhaps fifty yards she came to the ridge. It turned out to be the lip of a small crater, quite sharply defined, a few dozen yards across, embedded in the floor. But the crater walls were worn, and there was a teardrop-shaped mound behind it.
That mound had to be an erosional remnant, streamlined like the remnants found in terrestrial braided streams. And she thought she could see stratification in the sides of the remnant. It was just like the scablands, after all.
She began to step down into the crater, clumsily; her legs were stiff, and dust swirled up around her, sticking to her legs and her HUT.
Her faceplate was misted up, her breath rapid. She leaned forward.
In the lee of the crater rim, something sparkled, something that finally banished the lunar ghosts of Armstrong and Muldoon from this moment, something that made her feel that her life’s circle had closed, at last. I guess I got to step into the picture after all.
It was frost.
She leaned sideways, and stretched down to the crater’s floor, awkwardly. She scraped at the dust with her fingers. Her fingers cut easily into the surface, leaving sharp trench marks. I’m like a kid, digging on a beach. A planetwide beach. Everywhere she dug, she found the same soft, powdery surface, the same cohesiveness, what looked like pebbles.
She lifted her glove to her face, to get a closer look at the dirt. It was oddly frustrating. The bit of regolith was very light, so light she couldn’t even feel its weight. She couldn’t even feel its texture because of the thickness of her clumsy suit. And the glare of the rising sun in her glass faceplate made it difficult to see, and the whir of pumps, the hiss of the radio, cut her off from whatever thin sounds were carried by the Martian winds.
She had a sense of unreality, of isolation. She was here, but she was still cut off from Mars. It wasn’t like a field trip at all.
She closed her fingers over the sample; the little “pebbles” burst and shattered. They were just fragments of a calichelike duricrust.
She tipped her hand and let the crushed dust drift back to the surface; much of it clung to the palm of her glove, turning it a rust brown.
She took the diamond marker out from the sample pocket on her suit. She held the little coin in her hand; it caught the sunlight and refracted it, turning its glow to a bright scarlet, jewellike, against the ocher of Mars.
She felt a sudden, and unexpected, surge of pride. She distrusted patriotism intensely; and maybe this expedition, these few days of scrambling over Mars like rabbits, really was all a grand technocratic folly. But the fact was that her country had — in little more than two centuries of existence — sent its citizens to walk on the surfaces of two new worlds.