“Looks like a major dust storm blowing from northwest to southeast. Front’s at least three-four hundred klicks wide.” He checked his navigation screen, to his right on the control panel. “Location about longitude sixty, latitude thirty, thirty-one. Speed of advance must be fifty to a hundred kilometers per hour.” Then he grinned and added, “Tether the camels.”
In addition to its usual complement of sensing instruments, RPV-1 carried beneath its belly a special payload, a tiny oblong aluminum box. Inside was a stainless steel plaque, small enough to fit into the palm of a man’s hand. On it was inscribed:
DEDICATED TO THE MEMORY OF TIM MUTCH, WHOSE IMAGINATION, VERVE, AND RESOLVE
CONTRIBUTED GREATLY TO THE EXPLORATION
OF THE SOLAR SYSTEM.
Connors had never met Thomas A. Mutch. The NASA scientist had been killed in a mountain-climbing accident only a few years after the first automated lander had set down on the surface of Mars, in 1976. That primitive lander, known originally as Viking 1, had been renamed the Thomas A. Mutch Memorial Station shortly afterward. The plaque had been made then, when Connors was still a kid just starting to buzz the farms of Cheyenne County, Nebraska.
Now he guided the remotely piloted Little Beauty to longitude 47°97′, latitude 22°49′ north, the location where the faithful old Viking still stood on its spraddling legs after more than thirty years. Connors was to land the little plane there and detach the box with the plaque inside it, then wait until morning to take off and return to home base.
There was one further line etched into the stainless steel plaque. It read: “Emplaced,” with the space following it left blank. The date was to be filled in when human explorers finally reached the Viking lander, a feat that was not in the schedule for this first exploration mission.
Connors’s face clouded slightly. He wished he were truly flying this plane, actually on board at its controls, really there so he could land her and bolt that plaque to the old spacecraft and scratch in the date.
SOL 14: MORNING
There’s no such thing as a private communication here, Jamie thought as he sat at the comm console. Vosnesensky was at his side, Tony Reed, Patel, Naguib, and Monique Bonnet standing behind him.
On the display screen in the center of all the communications equipment was the neatly bearded face of Alberto Brumado, his hair slightly tousled as usual, his smile just a little desperate.
For most of the day they had reviewed the arguments for and against returning to Tithonium Chasma to investigate Jamie’s “village.” Like all the others, Brumado had been against it.
“All the available evidence,” he had said in his mild, fatherly way, “points toward its being a natural phenomenon. We cannot upset the mission schedule with another unplanned excursion.”
That word another rankled Jamie. If it hadn’t been for my insisting on going out to the canyon in the first place we would never have seen the village at all.
Then Brumado had surprised them all by saying, “I would like to speak with Dr. Waterman in private, if I may.”
Jamie felt the others stir behind him. He glanced at Vosnesensky, who pursed his lips, his face glowering with suspicion.
But he said, “Of course,” as if Brumado could hear him without waiting another dozen minutes. Turning to Jamie, the cosmonaut said, “You can speak with Dr. Brumado in your own quarters. I will see that no one else uses this frequency.”
“Thanks, Mikhail.” Jamie hurried back to his cubicle, thinking of how many hours of useful work had already been ruined in debate.
He pulled his laptop computer from the tiny desk and stretched out with it on his bunk. There was no way to scramble a conversation; if anyone wanted to eavesdrop all they had to do was turn on their own unit to the same frequency. But the other scientists were heading for their various duties, already behind schedule, and Vosnesensky would guard the main comm console with the single-minded fervor of a Cossack protecting his tsar.
So Jamie hoped.
Brumado’s face took form on the laptop’s small screen. For an instant Jamie felt almost ridiculous. Alone at last, he wanted to say.