Jamie turned off the camera with the remote control box in his hand and made a wide, long, exaggerated yawn. The pure oxygen atmosphere seemed to be affecting his ears. They felt clogged, as if they needed to pop. The yawn helped, but not much.
Turning the camera on again, he continued, “The meteors were probably the last remains of an old, ancient comet. Just a bunch of stray pebbles floating around the solar system that happened to drift right into our spot on Mars. Couldn’t happen again in a million years.”
Jamie hesitated for an instant. There was hardly any more news to tell her.
“I sure appreciated the tape you sent. And I’m glad you’re moving up in the world. Going to New York must have taken a lot of guts. If there’s anything I can do, like an interview or some background information about our work here on the surface, just send a request through the mission directors and I’ll be happy to tell you whatever you need to know.”
Jamie stopped the vidcam again, thinking, How much can I really tell her? How much would the mission directors let me tell her? He decided for now to stick to science and stay away from politics and personalities.
“It turns out that there’s a lot more water beneath the ground than the earlier unmanned landers led us to believe. It’s frozen, of course. We’re sitting on top of an ocean of permafrost that probably extends all the way down to the Valles Marineris-the Grand Canyon of Mars, that is. Maybe farther, but we haven’t crossed the canyon and investigated the other side.”
Jamie described the brief traverse to the canyon and his hopes that he would be able to return there, skipping over the arguments and debates he had triggered. He carefully avoided mentioning the “village”; time enough for that when we’ve got definite evidence, one way or the other, he thought. Instead, he told Edith about the copper-green rock they had found. Then he ran out of things to say.
Fingering the remote control nervously, he finally flicked the camera on again. “I’m glad all that nonsense about my speaking Navaho has settled down. At least, I presume it has. We haven’t seen much in the way of news here-mostly BBC stuff.”
He clicked it off again, licked his lips while he thought of what else he could tell Edith.
“Well, I guess that’s about it for now. We haven’t found any signs of life yet, living or fossils, but maybe conditions down in the Grand Canyon will be more conducive. Monique Bonnet has a nice little garden growing out of Martian soil, using Martian water for it. I don’t know what a few days of pure oxygen is going to do for her plants, though. We all go over and breathe on them now and then, to give them some carbon dioxide. It was nice of you to call me, Edith. I’ll be talking with you some more, later on.”
He turned the vidcam off for good, thinking, I can edit this tape for Al and for my parents and have mission control send it to them. That’ll surprise them. Maybe my parents will even send me a message in return.
Seiji Toshima had listened to all the arguments raging between Waterman and the rest of the team without once opening his mouth. Their fight had nothing to do with him, and he had been trained from earliest childhood to refrain from interjecting his own opinions where they had not been specifically requested.
But now Waterman was asking, not for his opinion, but for knowledge. That was different. Toshima was happy to exchange knowledge with the American Indian. After all, that was the purpose of this expedition to Mars, was it not? To gain knowledge. And what good is knowledge if it is not exchanged with others?
Jamie Waterman sat on a spindly-legged plastic stool in the center of the Japanese meteorologist’s laboratory. Toshima’s area had been dubbed “weather central” by the team. It was the smallest of all the labs, as neat and gleamingly clean as if a squad of maintenance robots scrubbed and dusted the place every half hour.