Mars Read Online Free PDF Page B

“All of physics boils down to reading a goddam dial on a goddam gauge.”
    Vosnesensky turned to Connors, the second-in-command. “Pete, the mission plan calls for you to test the air first.”
    The American chuckled nervously from inside his helmet. “Yeah, I’m the guinea pig, I know.”
    He took an exaggeratedly sighing breath that they could all hear in their earphones. Then, “Here goes.”
    Connors opened his helmet visor a crack, took a sniff, then slid the visor all the way up and pulled in a deeper breath. He broke into a toothy grin. “Helluva lot better than what’s outside.”
    They all laughed and the tension cracked. Each of them pushed up their visors, then unlocked the neck seals of their suits and lifted their helmets off altogether. Jamie’s ears popped, but nothing worse happened.
    Ilona shook her short-clipped blonde curls and inhaled slowly, her slim nostrils flaring slightly. “Huh! It smells just like the training module. Too dry. Bad for the skin.”
    Jamie took a long look around their new home, now that his vision was no longer restricted by the helmet.
    He saw the dome rising into shadowed gloom over his head, ribbed with curving metal struts. It reminded him ofthe first time he had gone into a planetarium, back when he’d been a kid in Santa Fe. The same hushed, awed feeling. The same soft coolness to the air. To Ilona the air felt too dry; to him it felt delicious.
    The dome’s smooth plastic skin had been darkened by a polarizing electric current to keep the heat inside. In daylight the dome’s lower section would be made transparent to take advantage of solar heating, but at night it was like an oversized igloo sitting on the frozen Martian plain, darkened to retain heat and not allow it to radiate away into the thin, frigid Martian air. Strips of sunlight-equivalent fluorescent lamps lit the floor area softly, but the upper reaches of the dome were barely visible in the darkness gathering there.
    The plastic skin of the dome was double walled, like insulating windows, to keep out the cold. The topmost section was opaque, filled in with a special dense plastic that would absorb harmful radiation and even stop small meteorites, according to the engineers. The thought of the dome getting punctured was scary. Patches and sealing compounds were placed along its perimeter, but would they have time to repair a puncture before all the air gushed out? Jamie remembered the hoary old joke of the parachute packers: “Don’t worry about it. If this chute doesn’t work, bring it back and we’ll give you a new one.”
    The electric power that heated the dome came from the compact nuclear generator inside one of the cargo vehicles. Tomorrow, after the second team’s landing, the construction robot was scheduled to extract the generator and bury it in the Martian soil half a kilometer from the dome.
    Mustn’t call it soil, Jamie reminded himself. Soil is alive with microorganisms and earthworms and other living creatures. Here on Mars it’s called regolith, just like the totally dead surface of the totally dead moon.
    Is Mars really dead? Jamie asked himself. He remembered the stories he had read as a youngster, wild tales of Martians battling along their planet-girdling canals, beautiful fantasies of cities built like chess pieces and houses that turned to follow the sun like flowers. There were no canals on Mars, Jamie knew. No cities. But is the planet entirely lifeless? Are there fossils to be dug out of that red sand?

IN TRAINING: KAZAKHSTAN
    As they drove along the river, Yuri Zavgorodny gestured with his free hand.
    “Like your New Mexico, no?” he asked in his hesitant English.
    Jamie Waterman unconsciously rubbed his side. They had taken the stitches out only yesterday and the incision still felt sore.
    “New Mexico,” Zavgorodny repeated. “Like this? Yes?”
    Jamie almost answered, “No.” But the mission administrators had warned them all to be as diplomatic as possible