Forty minutes passed. We waited uneasily.
‘What do you mean by this talk? Why are you going moral on us?’
After some discussion, we replied, ‘There has to be a better way forward.’
After forty minutes, a different voice from base. ‘What in hell are you going on about up there? Have you all gone crazy?’
‘We said you wouldn’t understand.’ And we closed the link and went to our bunks. Not a sound disturbed our sleep.
Our salaries, like our training, came from the EUPACUS combine. I knew and trusted their engineering skills. Of their intentions I was less sure. To win the Mars tender, the consortium had agreed merely to run all travel arrangements for ten years and to organise expeditions. I was well aware that they intended to begin the long process of terraforming by the back door, so to speak. Their hidden intentions were to turn Mars into saleable real estate; profitability depended on it. So I was told.
EUPACUS was contracted to run all ground operations on Mars, and could prevent unwanted curiosity there. Their investors would be eager to get their money back with interest, without being too concerned with how it was done. I woke with a firm determination to defy the stockholders.
Like everyone else, our crew had seen and been seduced by computer-generated pictures of EUPACUS-format Mars. Domes and greenhouses were laid out in neat array. Factories were set up for the task of extracting oxygen from the Martian rock. Nuclear suns blazed in the blue sky. In no time, bronzed men in T-shirts stepped forth among green fields, or climbed into bubble cars and drove furiously among Martian mountains already turning green.
Standing amid that magnificent desolation, the salesman’s dream fizzled out like a punctured balloon.
We had landed almost on the equator, in the south-western corner of Amazonis Planitia, to the west of the high Tharsis Shield. Our parent ship acted as communication relay satellite, so that we could travel and keep in touch with one another. Highly necessary on a world where the horizon – supposing the terrain to be flat, which it mostly was not – was only 25 miles away. In its areosynchronous orbit, travelling 17,065 kilometres above ground, the ship appeared stationary to us, a reassuring sight when so much was strange.
But before we began our surveying we had to erect our geodesic dome to support a one-millimetre-thick dome fabric. We had been weakened by the months of flight, despite on board exercise. This weakness turned the building of the dome into a major task, impeded as we were by our spacesuits. Night was upon us before we were half finished. We had to retreat back into the module, to wait for morning.
When morning came, out we went again, determined not to let the structure beat us. We needed the dome. It would afford protection against the deepest cold and dust storms. We could exercise here and offload into it some of the machinery that made life in the module maddeningly cramped. Of course, as yet we had no means of filling it with breathable air at a tolerable pressure, even after we made it airtight. Since the dome had to go up, up it eventually went. When the last girders were bolted together and the last tie of the plastic lining secured -why, we needed no more exercise …
Our brief was to explore a few kilometres of the planet. Its enormous land area was as great in extent as Earth’s, if not quite as various. It had plains, escarpments, riverbeds, vast canyons greater than anything terrestrial and extinct volcanoes – none of them traversed by human beings. We activated the TV cameras, and climbed aboard the two methane-powered buggies, to head eastward.
The intensity of that experience will always remain with me. While folks back home might see nothing on their screens but a kind of broken desert, that journey for us carried a strong emotional charge. It was as if we had travelled back in time, to a period before life had begun in the universe. Everything lay waiting, still, latent, piercing. None of us spoke. We were experiencing a different version of reality – a reality somehow menacing but calming. It was like being under the thunderous eye of God.