The area looked like a showcase for an electronics shop. Where the other scientists’ workbenches were cluttered with glassware and instruments, Toshima had a row of computers humming quietly, their display screens showing graphs and curves. At the far end of the row, where it bent in an ell shape at the corner of the partitions, was a scanner that could take videotape and digitize the images for computer storage.
Toshima sat in the other corner on a rickety-looking stool. He had given Jamie his best stool, the only one with a back.
Since the death of Isoruku Konoye, Toshima felt an unexpected weight of responsibility on his shoulders; the responsibility of honor, of upholding the proud name of Japan even here, on this strange world. He knew that most of the others belittled everything Japanese; he could see it in their eyes when they spoke to him, in the barely tolerant smugness of men like Antony Reed and the overly solicitous politeness of the Americans and the Russians.
Back on Earth, Japan was a power to he reckoned with. Without Japan’s contributions of funding and technology the Mars Project would have died in bickering and cost-accounting among the Europeans, the Russians, and the Americans. Yet no Japanese was among the first group to land on Mars. And the only man to have been killed on this expedition had been the brilliant Japanese geochemist Konoye.
Seiji Toshima was the son of a factory worker, but within him beat the heart of a samurai. I will uphold the honor of the Japanese people. I will make these aliens respect Japan. I will make the entire world recognize the contributions of Japan to the exploration of Mars.
Suddenly he realized where his thoughts were leading. This is unworthy, he told himself. We are scientists. Knowledge knows no nationality. I am part of a team, not a medieval egomaniac.
“We can use the central processor,” he was saying to Jamie Waterman, unconsciously bending over to pat the minicomputer that stood slightly more than knee-high in that corner of the lab. Waterman was a curious one; as withdrawn and inward as a Japanese, almost. A man who understands correct behavior, Toshima thought, yet is willing to do battle for his beliefs.
“Can you access the geological file from here or should I go to the geology computer and copy it onto a floppy?” Jamie asked.
“I should be able to access it,” Toshima replied, his round flat face intently serious. Then he smiled slightly. “Unless you have put a special restrictive code on the file to keep it secret.”
Jamie shook his head. “No. Not at all.”
The meteorologist pulled a keyboard to his lap and flicked his stubby fingers over it. Jamie saw the display screen of the computer in front of him go blank for a moment, then show a full-color map of Mars made from a montage of photos taken from orbit.
Toshima muttered something in Japanese and the screen suddenly sprouted a weather map superimposed on the photo montage. Jamie recognized the symbols for a cold front, high and low pressure systems, and the irregular lopsided loops of isobars.
“That is the situation at this moment,” Toshima said. “And here is the computer’s forecast for tonight”- the symbols shifted slightly; the numbers representing temperatures plummeted by a hundred or more-“and tomorrow at noon, our time.” Again the front advanced slightly. The temperatures shot upward. At their latitude they even rose above freezing.
A hint of pride crept into Toshima’s voice as he added, “I can even show the wind speeds and directions for much of the planet.”
“How?” Jamie asked, as vector arrows speckled the map. They showed the direction of the winds; the number of flags on their tails denoted the wind speed.
“The network of remote observation stations that has been placed around the planet,” Toshima replied. “And, of course, the balloons.”
The meteorology balloons were brilliantly simple, little more than long narrow tubes of exquisitely thin, tough Mylar filled with hydrogen. They were released as needed from the orbiting spacecraft, dropped into the Martian atmosphere in their tiny capsules, and inflated automatically when they reached the proper altitude. They floated across the landscape like improbable giant white cigarettes.