Li’s people up in orbit had fired the last four of their geological probes into the canyon. Completely automated, the probes shed their atmospheric heat shields as they neared the ground and then drifted to soft touchdowns on billowing white parachutes. Only one of them had actually sunk its instrument-bearing anchor into the rubble of the landslide itself. The other three had missed it by ranges of a few dozen meters to a full kilometer.
That one probe’s instruments reported that the landslide was firm enough for the rover to traverse. But it was only one spot on the slide. What if there were pockets of loose powdery soil? What if they got stuck halfway down? To come this close and then have to turn back would be sickening….
He realized that Connors had finished his story and gone back to the cockpit for his final check-in with the dome before retiring for the night. Ilona had gone up there with him, sitting in the chair Jamie had occupied most of the day.
Joanna was sliding the table into its slot below the lower bunk, opposite Jamie.
“Are you all right?” she asked.
“Hmm? Yes, sure. I’m okay.”
“You seemed to drift away from us.”
“I was thinking.”
She smiled slightly. “Not a bad thing for a scientist to do-on occasion.”
“How do you feel?” he asked.
“Oh… tired. Worried, I suppose.”
“Worried? About what?”
Sitting on the edge of the folded bunk beside Jamie, she said in her whispery voice, “Suppose we go all this way, suppose we get to the bottom of the canyon-and there is nothing there? No life.”
Jamie shrugged. “That’s why we’re going all this way: to find out if there’s life down there or not.”
“But suppose we find none?” There was something in her eyes that Jamie could not fathom, something more than anxiety, deeper than a scientist’s concern over the outcome of an investigation.
“If there isn’t any life to be found down there,” Jamie answered slowly, “that in itself is an important discovery. We’ll just have to search elsewhere.”
Joanna shook her head. “If there is no life beneath the mists, what can we expect from the rest of this frozen desert? We will have failed, Jamie. There will never be another expedition to Mars.”
“Hey, don’t get so down,” he said, reaching out to grasp her shoulder gently. “It won’t be your fault if Mars is lifeless.”
“But we will have come all this way for nothing.”
“No. Not for nothing. We’re here to learn whatever it is that Mars has to teach us. That’s what science is all about, Joanna. It’s not a game, where you keep score. It’s about building up knowledge. The negative results are just as important as the positives. More so, maybe.”
The expression on her face was close to misery.
“We’re here to seek the truth,” Jamie said in an urgent whisper, “and not to be afraid of what we find, whatever it is.”
Joanna did not reply.
“There’s nothing to be afraid of,” he repeated. “No matter what we find-or fail to find.”
She turned away, got up from the half-folded bunk, and hurried toward the lavatory. Jamie realized she was crying. He felt sorry for her. And puzzled.
As he lay on his back in the darkened rover, listening to the soft wind of Mars just outside the metal skin, Jamie wondered why Joanna was so worried about what they would find in the canyon.
She’s a biologist, he told himself. If she finds life on Mars her name will go into the history books. But if she doesn’t she’ll always wonder if she missed it. The whole world will wonder if there’s really life here but she just didn’t make the right tests or didn’t go to the right place.
I’ve made her come here to the canyon. Maybe we should have tried to reach the edge of the polar cap. Plenty of water vapor there, that’s for sure. But we landed too damned far from the cap. That’ll have to wait for a follow-on mission.
Connors was snoring, six inches away on his bunk. Above him by only a few more inches was Joanna’s bunk. He could sense that she was awake, tense and worried and frightened.