Voyage. Stephen Baxter
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TV screens, all filled with grainy, obscure black and white images. Hard copies littered tables, and ribbons of computer printout trailed across the tables and floor and along the walls. The workers here – mostly men, mostly shirt-sleeved, uniformly hairy – pored over the images and print-outs, their security badges dangling from their top pockets. There were cups of stale coffee all over the tables, some perched close to precious print-out, and in one corner she spotted a half-eaten doughnut, the jelly still oozing from its center.
There was a smell, faint but distinctive, of body odor.
Priest shrugged, looking a little sheepish. ‘It’s always pretty much like this, Natalie. Kind of slow chaos. This is the heart of the SFOF, what they call the Space Flight Operations Facility. The results from Mariner are coming in all the time; the guys work in shifts here. And it’s adaptive; the results from one orbit may be used to influence what they do on the next. There isn’t a lot of time for housekeeping.’
‘You don’t need to apologize. You ought to see the average geology field site after a couple of days.’
There was a model of the Mariner 9 spacecraft itself, a couple of feet across, hanging in one corner of the room. She slowed, looking up at it. Four silvery solar panels unfolded like sails from a central octagonal box. A rocket engine with propellant tanks was mounted on top of the box, and underneath sprouted a cluster of instruments. York could recognize the tiny lenses of TV cameras, glinting in the fluorescent light. The craft was comparatively crude, compared to the heavy Viking landers which were already under development for the 1975 launch opportunity. But still, Mariner 9 was quite beautiful, like a fine watch.
York retained lingering suspicions about the value of spaceflight in terms of its science. As a kid she’d been intrigued, even startled by the Mariner 4 pictures. But that had worn off, and she hadn’t followed the progress of later probes closely. But still, this beautiful, delicate thing had been assembled by humans – made by hands like hers – and then thrown across interplanetary distances, to orbit Mars itself: it had become the first man-made object to orbit another planet.
It was quite a thought.
Priest was talking about the dust storm. ‘It covered the whole damn planet, Natalie. When we arrived we couldn’t see a thing. They did some measurements at the limb of the planet, and found the dust reaching an altitude of fifty miles. It seems impossible, but it’s true. Anyhow, the storm did us one favor.’
‘How’s that?’
‘All of a sudden, funnily enough, everybody got very excited about looking at the moons. Listen, you want me to get you a coffee? A doughnut, maybe?’
‘No thanks, Ben.’
He led her through more corridors, to a smaller laboratory. More shirt-sleeves, working at terminals and screens.
‘Image Processing,’ Priest said. He took her to an unoccupied monitor, and they sat on rickety fold-up chairs. He began tapping at the key-pad. ‘They got the first reasonably clear image of Phobos on revolution thirty-one – just last night. I stayed up until the small hours watching them process the data …’ An image began to build up on the video monitor now, line by line, working from top to bottom. ‘Mariner records its pictures on magnetic tape, and sends them back to Earth in pretty much the way a newsprint wire-photo is transmitted. This is exactly how the first image emerged, for the team last night.’
She smiled. ‘What’s this, Ben? Why not just show me the finished picture? More NASA showmanship?’
He raised his eyebrows. ‘You’re too cynical. Or would be, if I thought you meant it.’
Impulsively she touched his hand. ‘I’m sorry, Ben.’ His skin was warm and leathery.
He grinned at her easily.
Today she was finding Ben, with his intelligence and enthusiasm for this wonderful Mars project, unreasonably attractive. Damn it. I’m not supposed to feel like this.
She concentrated on the pictures.
The upper few lines of the image had been black – just empty space. But now she saw some detail, a curve of gray and white, building up line by line. At first she thought she was seeing the limb of a sphere, but the shape soon looked much too irregular for that.
Phobos turned out to be a rough ellipse, half in shadow, with a battered, irregular edge. It looked much more like York’s preconception of an asteroid than any moon. There were craters everywhere, huge and ancient, some so deep that the impacts that caused them must have come close to splitting the battered little moon in half.
‘Natalie, this is more or less the face of Phobos, about half the size of our full Moon, that you would see if you were standing on Mars right now.’
Phobos looked like a diseased potato. Priest was staring at the picture, and its gray and black reflected in his eyes. ‘This is history, Natalie. Think about it: mine were among the first human eyes ever to see Phobos and Deimos, the moons of Mars. I wanted to show you this, kind of share it with you, the way I saw it.’
She was moved to touch him again, but she resisted the impulse.
‘Show me Mars, Ben.’
‘Sure.’
After a few more minutes Priest had retrieved images of the surface of the planet itself. But the dust storm was still continuing. There was only one place away from the poles where any detail was visible: an area called Tharsis, close to the Martian equator. Here the pictures showed four dark, irregular spots, roughly circular, three in a line running at an angle to the equator, and the fourth a little way away to the west.
She asked, ‘What the hell can these be?’
‘Who knows? I guess we’ll figure it out when the storm clears. The lab staffers are calling them “Carl’s Marks.” After Sagan, see –’
The shapes in the images intrigued her; they were familiar, somehow. If only she could see just a little more … ‘You say this region’s called Tharsis. Do we know anything else about it?’
‘Actually, yes. You’re the geologist, Natalie. You ought to know.’
‘Just tell me, asshole.’
‘There have been radar studies of Mars since the mid-sixties. This Tharsis region – which is just a bright splotch seen from Earth – looks as if it’s the highest plateau on the planet.’
‘Really? How high?’
He shrugged. ‘Ten or twenty miles above the mean datum. We can’t say for sure. Mean datum – you understand there’s no ocean on Mars, so no convenient sea level to –’
‘You must have some better resolution images than these. It’s the only visible spot on the planet, for Christ’s sake. Somebody must have pointed the cameras again.’
Priest began to work the keyboard. He found a couple of images which showed her some more detail. She stared at the screen, pressing close to the glass.
‘You’re telling me these features are stable? That they aren’t, uh, whirlwinds in the dust storm or somesuch?’
‘No way. They’ve lasted since Mariner got to Mars, a couple of weeks ago. We’re undoubtedly looking at some kind of surface feature, here.’
She could see circular markings within each spot. And there was some kind of scalloping. They almost look like volcanic caldera. The mouths of volcanoes.
But why should these features, of all of Mars, be showing up at all? Because they’re in Tharsis. And Tharsis is the highest region on Mars. And why these particular features? Because they are the highest points in Tharsis – therefore the highest points on the planet …
‘My God,’ she whispered.
‘Natalie? What is it?’
These spots had