The Man Who Loved Mars. Lin Carter
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he was right.
Once a safe planetfall was accomplished, the CA cops simply had no way of finding us, unless they had thirty times the manpower and flying strength they had had when I was last here. Because they could only locate the d’Eauville if they made an aerial search of the entire planetary surface, acre by acre. Which was a logistic impossibility.
The trouble with making planetfall in the westernmost Drylands was that we would have to do an awful lot of surface travel after landing. But that could not be helped: it would be like waving red flags and yelling “Look at me!” to go any closer to a major colony like Laestrygonum. And we needed a flat space with solid bedrock to set down on.
We didn’t dare risk running so much as a single orbit, since we wanted to come down with the least possible chance of being sighted en route. In mid-crossover Bolgov had carefully programed the d’Eauville’s piloting and navigational computer to match intrinsics with the planet upon approach, so that the craft could segue smoothly from its original flightpath directly into a landing pattern without a break. It was a masterly job, and it went off without a hitch.
We came down in a slow glide, at an elongated angle to make maximum use of the thin atmosphere as a cushion to slow us down, since we didn’t wish to run the risk of using the ordinary spiral braking orbit. A fast planetfall was of the essence, since every single second of time between the moment we broke out of deep space and the moment we hit topsoil we were in constant danger of being noticed on somebody’s radar.
So we came in high up in the northern hemisphere over Arcadia and rode her down across Orcus at a shallow angle that tightened into a fish-hook arc. The glide path took us curving across the midregions of the Mare Sirenum in the direction of Aonius Sinus, with our terminus calculated just west of central Phaethontis.
The fabric began heating up till the hull would soon be a dull cherry-red. The Sirenum went hissing by beneath us in a rusty-purplish blur, much too hazy for us to make out anything but the largest craters. It was a shame we were going too fast to see the landscape, because this was very historic country. The area we were passing over had been the first chunk of local real estate that we Earthmen had ever gotten a close-up look at, even if it had only been a passing glance. I refer to the history-making Mariner IV fly-by, way back in 1965. The tiny, unmanned craft had skimmed across this same part of the Sirenum with all cameras whirring.
The only major canal that traverses the western half of Phaethontis is called the Thermodon. The Doc had hoped to be able to set the d’Eauville down near the west bank of the Thermodon, because the craft had been spray-enameled a dark mottled pattern and would blend with the colors of the canal, reducing the risk of a visual sighting. Coming out of our glide path for a taildown was a tricky bit of maneuvering, but the gyros were up to it, and we sat down, shaken by racking shudders that made the fabric screech and the structure groan. But we made it. The jets died with a cough, the craft trembled, then sat still. And then we all began to breathe again…
We had made it and in one piece.
“My compliments to the museum staff, Doc,” I said in the unexpected silence. “Not many ships could live through a planetfall that tough.”
“Thank you, my boy, but I believe the credit belongs to the Rolls-Royce people. They built good craft in those days…”
We unstrapped, levered ourselves out of the pressure chairs, which deflated with a piercing whistle, and began taking off our emergency suits and putting on the lightweight thermal suits we would need for Mars itself.
It seemed that only the Doctor and I had ever been on Mars before. So we helped the other two accustom themselves to the use of their respirators. Of the four of us, only I had ever undergone the Mishubi-Yakamoto treatments and could do without the artificial breathing boosters.
We had come down just where the Doc had planned. All about us, but tapering off due west, the canal extended like a four-foot-high miniature jungle. Seen from above—it was to be hoped!—the Antoine d’Eauville ought to blend unobtrusively with the shrubbery. Of course, to anyone crossing Phaethontis either afoot, on slidar, or by sand-tractor, it would stand out somewhat more prominently than a dozen sore thumbs, and that we could not help. However, this was the edge of the Drylands, and nobody ever comes this far south, not even the People, for the very good reason that there is nothing here to attract them.
* * * *
Actors on the cube, stuck in a space-adventure epic, always make planetfall, crack the seal, and hit dirtside in no time flat. The conventions of stereovision drama aside, in real life it takes from two to three hours before you are ready to leave the spacecraft. You have to deprogram your computer, dampen the power pile, let the fabric cool, run triple checks for a burst seam, check out suits and respirators, and do a hundred other things. In our case, as we would not be coming back to the craft until this whole expedition was over, it took closer to five hours before we were ready to depart.
It was Bolgov’s task to unlimber the gig. He sprung the cargo port and lifted the gig out of its cradle next to the Lanzetti, using the cargo crane, and set it down gently in the dark mossy foliage.
The craft’s gig, in this case, was an atmospheric skimmer instead of the usual two-man space boat. Actually, they had chosen well in picking a skimmer, since it is the fastest and most practical mode of transport that can be used on Mars, certainly dozens of times faster and more comfortable than a sand-tractor. Bolgov and Keresny then began to stow our gear aboard the skimmer. I suppose I should have gone to lend them a hand, but I could not do it, somehow. I wanted to savor to the fullest my first moment on Mars after all these lonely, empty, bitter years.
So I came out of the airlock below the control blister, climbed down the extensible ladder, jumped down to the springy moss, and then just stood there for a long moment, tasting the dry, spicy tang of the cold, thin air of Mars, feeling the crispness of the rubbery-tendriled moss underfoot, and the exhilarating lightness of Martian gravity. How long, how long since I had tested that ozonous tang at the back of my mouth, how long since I had felt the skin of my face pucker and roughen to the biting chill in the air…?
I stood there silent and motionless for a long time, brooding on old, glorious dreams and the memory of comrades I had known and loved, all dead men now, with six feet of dry Martian dust their everlasting home. My eyes filled and ran over with tears. Tears that vanished and were gone almost in the same instant they were shed. Tears that the desiccated Martian air drank thirstily, grateful for the rare gift of moisture…
I looked about me, eyes blurring, remembering…
My memory drifted back to my first landing on Mars, years and years ago. When I was young and raw and green and idealistic. I recalled how we had ridden down in a little, crowded, rattletrap satellite shuttle from Deimos Terminal, flying east across the Tharsis region to make planetfall at the debarkation camp out in Isidis Regio. I remembered how I had felt then when I first came out of the lock with the other new arrivals, breathing hoarsely through the strange, ill-fitting respirators, waiting to pile on the long tractor train for an interminable, bumpy ride across the craterlets to Syrtis. Staring about me then, I had been struck dumb with awe at the utter strangeness of the scene—the dim, flat stretch of the Isidis dustlands; the grim, dark, shaggy bulk of Syrtis Major, thrusting like a wedge-shaped peninsula deep into the sea of fantastic yellow sands; and the glistening pile that was Syrtis Colony itself, rising on the oddly near horizon, a haze of dim foggy blue from the earth-density air trapped within its hemispherical MPB field.
As we had approached the colony itself, several of my fellow travelers were loudly exclaiming that they had thought the city was supposed to be domed. Did Colonial Administration expect them to wear these uncomfortable masks all the time?
I remember the offhand manner in which the tractor jockey, an old Mars hand, lean as a rail and mahogany brown from deep space radiation, explained laconically that the original colony had been set up under a collapsible plastic dome—”too damned easily collapsible,” was his joke. But that was back before they invented the molecular-potential barrier field, an energy plane whose surface-tension charge repelled air molecules and stabilized internal air pressure, which made it possible to build up and maintain an atmospheric