4

Meridiani

Helmut Langlais looked around his cubicle in conestoga 1, startled awake by the dawn light streaming in through his porthole on his left side. He could see, near his head, his bookshelf on his right side, on which he had five books and several photos of his father, brother and late mother. Down by his waist and feet were the drawers for his clothes; together they provided a bit of sound insulation from the next cubicle. He stared up at the domed ceiling less than a meter above him, which slanted down and became the wall on his left side; the cubicle, about the size of a telephone booth laying on its side, could be quite claustrophobic until one adjusted. But the expedition did not have the luxury of space; if one wanted to avoid cabin fever, one climbed into a pressure suit and went out.

Then Helmut looked out the porthole at Meridiani Planum, rolling terrain covered with a dark reddish dust to the horizon, with hills, crater rims, occasional rocks, and dunes—some large—scattered about. Typical Mars. The conestoga was rolling forward robotically at about twenty kilometers per hour because it still hadn’t reached the end of the trail after an all night trip. This sol he would be in the lead vehicle; they were switching from geological exploration to road construction.

It was time to get up. The sun had just cracked the horizon and was golden and bright. Helmut slid to the right side of the cubicle where the ceiling was at maximum, sat upright in bed—he was wearing pajamas—leaned over to open the cubicle’s door down by his feet, pushed his legs out until they dangled downward, and jumped down into the main area of the conestoga. Two of the three other inhabitants of the conestoga were already there; the four of them included two men and two women, but not, to Helmut’s disappointment, his friend Clara. Their faint conversation from the room below him had been another factor in awaking him.

Since the bathroom was occupied by Johnny Lind, their commander, he joined them at the table, drinking coffee and orange juice, eating freshly toasted bread driven in by robotic truck from Aurorae the sol before, smothering it with butter from Aurorae cows and jam from Aurorae strawberries, or spreading Aurorae tofu cheese on it. The bathroom door opened and out stepped Lind, showered and dressed; Helmut had to wait his turn as another went in to clean up.

They ate their breakfast and talked while they washed up and prepared for the sol. Just as Helmut got his twenty minutes in the tiny bathroom, they reached the end of Meridiani Trail. He was getting into the shower as he heard the rear airlock clank in place against another; they were docking with the other conestoga to talk with the construction team. When he came out of the shower, fully dressed, he was pleased to see Clara sitting in the main room with six others; he made number eight, which crowded the conestoga’s main space mightily.

“The assay was one hundred grams per tonne, but the deposit wasn’t very large,” Johnny Lind was saying, describing the gold deposit they had found the sol before twenty kilometers south of the trail. “It may be worth a month or two of extraction work, though. The potential deposit you’re checking this sol looks to be larger.”

“Scattered deposits are really not very useful,” exclaimed Lal Shankaraman, who was in charge of the other conestoga as well as the entire expedition. “I’m not confident it’ll provide the resources for another borough. Let’s hope conestoga 4’s hunt goes better; they have good results so far. There’s not much new to add about the trail. We cleared fifty klicks yesterday; straight, flat, gravely ground is always easy. But you guys have to thread the route between several large craters this sol, so good luck! I predict twenty five kilometers.”

“No, we’ll manage thirty,” replied Johnny. “Wait and see. It shouldn’t be that bad. We’ve got one arroyo to cross.”

“That one looks tricky, too,” added Lal.

“Nah,” scoffed Johnny, who was notorious for his excessive optimism.

“I want to make a crew change, too,” said Lal. “Clara will do better work at the road head than on an expedition, and her accounting setup is in the construction conestoga.”

“Okay.” Johnny looked around at the others. “Helmut has to be on construction because this is his chance, and because this sol’s the sol we reach the crash site. You can handle that, right?”

Helmut nodded, though he did wonder how it would feel to revisit the site of the sunwing crash two years ago that had killed Guillaume Van De Velde and injured him.

Johnny looked around. “Tanya?”

Tanya Leonov nodded eagerly. “Always glad to do geology instead of road clearing,” she said.

They laughed; geologists were never enthusiastic about road clearing, as necessary as it was. They exchanged small talk about the work, the crater they had built the road across three days earlier—complete with explosives to clear a section—and the upcoming Mars elections, about which Johnny was enthusiastic. Then it was time to switch vehicles. Helmut climbed back up into his cubicle—using the ladder—and in two minutes had pulled everything out of drawers and off of shelves. In fifteen minutes he was moved into the identical cubicle in conestoga 2.

“It’s good to see you again,” he said to Clara quickly, when they had a moment of privacy.

“Thanks; good to see you as well,” she replied with a smile. They were very attracted to each other, but the Meridiani Expedition was no place to court someone. They had managed a few short walks outside, but the resulting privacy came with a pressure-tight barrier between them. On the other hand, one certainly got a good idea of the other person’s character, living in tight quarters with them and two other people. Helmut had been in a conestoga with Clara for a week, two months earlier, and it had been very nice, though it had been very sexually frustrating.

“Let’s go,” said Johnny. Helmut nodded; he was the first driver. He sat in the driver’s seat, activated the fuel cells, and started the conestoga forward.

Johnny sat next to him and navigated. The entire route had been meticulously mapped out by a team on Earth, who had started with the dozens of routes proposed by amateurs and the crude first cuts made by computers. The entire route was photographed by sunwing to ten centimeters resolution and measured by radar to an altitude of a centimeter; all the data was available to the public on the web. Even so, the terrain did not match the data perfectly and the driver often found himself abandoning the recommended route.

They started off arrow-straight across the slightly rolling, gravely plain, the conestoga’s bulldozer blades clearing a 4.5 meter wide path free of rocks. Conestoga 3 followed behind, widening the route to eight meters and cleaning up rough spots; finally, a ranger pulling a very heavy roller went over the cleared “trail,” packing it down. Both conestogas often had to stop, back up, and work over an area a second time. Meridiani Trail was a fairly simple dirt track, but because it was straight, wide, and smooth, a driver could proceed along it at seventy kilometers per hour and robotic driving at sixty kilometers per hour was possible. Once finished, the five thousand kilometer drive to Dawes would be twenty percent shorter than on the old Circumferential Trail and twice as fast, requiring three sols only.

Soon they approached a cluster of three craters and aimed the trail carefully toward a gap between them. As expected, the road clearing became much slower and the route had to twist around more. Johnny was driving by then and Helmut was navigating, pointing out boulders and other landmarks marked on the photomosaics, guiding him left or right. Sometimes they stopped and made judgment calls because the computer projection showed two or even three alternate routes, color coded to indicate their rating. Most of the time the grade-A route proved fine, but once they turned around and followed the grade-B route for two hundred meters because of cluster of boulders blocking the A route that the viewing angle had hidden.

Helmut found it much easier to navigate as morning was succeeded by afternoon. He felt more and more uneasy about the crash site. It made him gloomy about life. He reflected on the inevitability of death, the possibility of disability, the long years stretching ahead of him—he was only 28—the question of how he would top the asteroid mission he was on last year and what great things he would manage to do in the upcoming decades, whether he should stay on Mars, whether he would marry and have children, whether he wanted to have children at all, whether he’d ever see Jupiter or even Saturn later in the century. . . and all the time he wondered about cancer or thought about the coma Guillaume was in after the crash had decompressed the sunwing and robbed his brain of oxygen for four crucial minutes. Sometimes life was macabre.

About four p.m. they entered into the lee of a large crater and the character of the terrain changed, from rolling gravel and stonescape to dunes and drifts. They had to steer around frequent dunes that would bog down the wheels. Finally they went around a large dune and Helmut was startled to see they had reached the crash site. “This is the place,” he said.

“It sure is,” replied Johnny. The plane’s skid marks across the drifts was still easy to see a Martian year later.

“Stop there,” said Helmut, pointing. Johnny nodded and drove the conestoga over to a long gouge in the ground where the fuselage had come to rest. There was almost nothing left to see, except for a few scraps of metal. The recovery team had picked up everything. Their footsteps still covered the ground and only occasionally had been partially filled with wind-blown dust.

Conestoga 3 rolled up, followed soon by the ranger. They began to suit up to go outside. By the time they were out, conestogas 2 and 4 arrived, having completed their geology and come quickly along the new road.

Sixteen men and women soon stood by the gouge in the ground. “There’s not much I remember, actually,” Helmut said to everyone. “We crashed in the middle of the night during a dust storm, so there was nothing to see, and we were evacuated within an hour of dawn by a shuttle. Strange as it is to say, I actually do not recognize this place. Maybe I’ve blocked it from my memory.

“There were five of us on board the sunwing, which lost part of one of its wings when it was hit by a very powerful updraft during a storm. Four of us survived. Guillaume van de Velde was a remarkable man; very funny, he had a good sense of humor, an excellent pilot, and he loved being on Mars.” Helmut felt his voice choke up, so he stopped speaking.

Lal moved closer, as if to be protective. “Let’s have a moment of silence,” he suggested.

They all bowed their heads. For two minutes all they could hear over the earphones was breathing. Helmut closed his eyes and the whole experience rushed back. Tears streamed down his cheeks, which he could not wipe away.

“Thank you,” Lal finally said. It seemed like an eternity. “Okay conestoga 1 and 2, you build the berm in front of the crash site. The rest of us will neaten it up and pile rocks along the top. Conestoga 1 can start by building a pile right here.” He pointed to a spot thirty meters from the gouge made by the crash.

“Acknowledged,” said several. But everyone turned to Helmut first. Lal, noting everyone’s concern, embraced him. Everyone else followed.

Then they turned to their work. Johnny and Helmut climbed into their conestoga, followed by Clara, who had to send out emails to everyone reminding them of their afternoon and evening tasks. Johnny let Helmut drive; he lowered the bulldozer blade and drove northward, across the trail, plowing the beginning of a big dirt plaza fifty meters wide. The dirt would form a berm or wall about a meter high, except for a special pile that would serve as a sort of overlook. Helmut began to build that pile while conestoga 2 started on the berm on the eastern end of the plaza. The spacesuited crowd, using shovels, helped to straighten and smooth out the piles, free up rocks loosened by the excavation, and construct a line of stones on top. Meanwhile, in the back of the conestoga, Clara did her best to send emails in spite of the bouncing, a task she had gotten good at.

Soon there was a mound of regolith and eolian drift about two and a half meters high and three meters around. Helmut then began to pile up a berm westward from it, widening the plaza. The berm was about thirty meters from the crash site and gave a good view of it; no one would walk past that point, thereby respecting the site.

A half hour before sunset, the oasis construction team—eight men and women—rolled up in their two mobilhabs, large two-story “mobile habs” that provided plenty of work and sleeping space. The eight of them had finished Margaritifer Oasis seven hundred kilometers to the west: a buried metal and plastic quonset hut of Martian manufacture ten meters long and wide, with its own simple life support system; a landing strip for sunwings; a small cache of frozen food; two wind turbines on a high local prominence able to make about forty kilowatt-hours of power per sol, two or three times that much in dust storms; a microwave power transmitter and matching receiver, so that the oasis could send excess power elsewhere via Phobos or receive power; a water well and water tank; liquid oxygen and methane tanks; and a fuel making system that could make oxygen and methane from water and carbon dioxide. Meridiani Trail would have six such oases, one about every seven hundred kilometers. Once the system was completed and extended from Dawes to Cassini, vehicles would be able to drive among Mars’s three outposts without hauling along a nuclear reactor or impossibly large fuel tanks. As traffic increased they’d beam more power to the oases and make more fuel at them. The system had disadvantages: it would require two people working almost full time to maintain, one maintaining the oases and one directing the power. But if it worked, seven thousand kilometers of trail would be open to potential settlement—indeed, residency at the oases might even be encouraged some day—and the system could be extended all the way around Mars.

Right behind the mobilhabs came a robotic truck pulling the materials for constructing Meridiani Oasis; the metal quonset hut filled the entire flatbed and stood ten meters into the air. A minute later the expedition’s second 75-kilowatt reactor rolled under on its own control as well. The entire Meridiani team and its equipment was now in one place for the first time in three weeks, which was exciting. The two mobilhabs immediately pulled up next to each other; in addition to their rear airlocks, mobilhabs and conestogas had doors in the front on the driver and passenger sides and pressure sleeves that could dock together. Conestoga 2 docked to the right of mobilhab 1 and conestoga 4 to the left of mobilhab 2 and in five minutes the four vehicles were connected together. As the sun waned, Helmut pulled conestoga 1 up to the left of conestoga 2 and someone outside connected the pressure sleeve, so that the three of them could enter the complex as well. Conestoga 3 headed to the other side of the line to be added there.

“Let’s go join the party,” said Johnny.

“I’ll be along in a second,” said Clara. “Where’s the ranger? They’re supposed to dock to our airlock.”

“He’s pulling around now,” said Helmut, pointing. “I can stay to verify the connection.”

“No, I’ll do it,” replied Clara.

“While you two fight about it, I’m heading to the party,” replied Johnny. He opened the right-hand pressure door, then pushed the other vehicle’s pressure door open and closed both behind him.

They both watched the television screen as the expedition’s sole ranger backed up to the airlock. A spacesuited figure was directing, then stopped it and began to latch the sleeve in place.

“How are you doing?” asked Clara.

Helmut shrugged. “I didn’t think this would bother me at all, then it hit me like a tonne of bricks. I was embarrassed.”

“Oh, don’t worry. It’s understandable.” She reached over and massaged his shoulder. He smiled, appreciative of the affectionate gesture. Then she leaned over and kissed him.

He was momentarily startled, but was quite pleased. He reached over to embrace her and they kissed passionately.

They separated and looked at each other. Helmut wasn’t sure he felt a rush from his pent-up longing for her or a release from the intensity of his grief; but looking at her, he felt a heat he’d never felt before. He kissed her again, even more passionately this time, and she reciprocated. Weeks of close contact in a never-private space were finding their result.

Clank! Clank! The latches began to fall in place, attaching the airlocks together. Startled, they both looked up. Their privacy was waning, bolt by bolt. Helmut had to monitor the work, too; he shrugged to her and turned to the computer screen. It showed half the latches in place, all properly.

“Thanks,” he said when the last one was done. “The connection is complete. Ranger 1, you are go to pressurize the connection.”

“Acknowledged,” replied Sandy Richardson, a construction worker who was driving the ranger. A moment later the short, half-meter long tunnel began to fill with air. It took only a minute and it was filled to normal pressure. They exchanged some words and she came across.

“There; the base is linked together for the night,” she said. Will and Clara nodded and watched her walk through the conestoga, then exit through the right door.

Helmut turned back to Clara and they kissed again. Then she pulled back slightly. “They’ll wonder where we are; we had better join the party.” She pointed to the airlock leading to the ranger. “There’s always tonight.”

“Isn’t someone sleeping there?”

Clara smiled. “No. And I’m sure, because I’m in charge of the assignments.”

“We’ll have to wait until everyone has gone to bed, and that may be late; I bet there will be a crowd in here watching television until midnight.”

“Or playing bridge. But we have an excuse to come down from our berths and open a door back there; the airlock and bathroom doors sound the same.”

“Lal won’t approve,” said Helmut. He looked at her, then shrugged. She giggled.

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