The Eye With Which The Universe Beholds Itself (Apollo Quartet) Read Online Free PDF

away.
     
     
    1980
    Elliott has not moved since the MM landed. He is too busy staring out the window. He has landed due north of the D&M Pyramid and he is staring at an oval-shaped mesa about a mile and half long and half a mile wide, and the same colour as the surrounding landscape. Its side is a sandy slope that looks to have slid and slipped many times. About halfway up the mesa the sand becomes a rocky cliff, weathered and cracked and scoured by dust storms over millions, perhaps billions, of years. But the top of the mesa appears strangely smooth, and smoothly undulating, clear of any outcrops but for a set of sinuous ridges and, in the centre of the mesa’s top, a triangular promontory with a long ramp on one side to its peak…
    It looks like a face; even from three miles away it looks like a goddamned face.
    That pyramid with the ramp is a nose, and just south of that a pair of curved ridges like lips. North of it there’s a deep col like an eyesocket. The Viking 1 photos did not lie. The pencil-necks said it’s pareidolia, an accident of lighting and landscape. That isn’t really a face on image #35A72. It can’t be. There’s no intelligent life on Mars, it could never exist there. Mars is a dead world, like the Moon.
    Pariedolia or not, the Face was enough to pick Cydonia as the landing site for Ares 9.
    He can’t see the D&M Pyramid and its mysterious crater since they’re behind the MM. But north-west of him he can just make out the region of broken terrain they’ve nicknamed the “City”. It doesn’t much resemble ruins from this distance, it’s just fractured hills and tumbled rocks and a few dunes and craters.
    He may have nine days on Mars but every single moment has been plotted and planned and filled with tasks—though he suspects the view out the window has just made that schedule obsolete. He wants to tell someone what he can see, but there’s a protocol for just this contingency: use the code-word to alert Houston, don’t mention any of the weird shit, stick to the new mission plan as if it were the original plan and pretend everything is normal.
     
     
Sorry about that, Endeavour. You should see the scenery down here. Magnificent!
Great! I heard you all the way down. Going to be a while before Houston gets the message.
Yeah. Let’s get this thing safed. I’m going to be here a while, right?
You’re good to stay, Discovery.
Let me just find the page on the checklist… Okay, Master Arm on, DPS vent… fire. Master Arm off. Descent Reg 1 closed…
Next page is circuit breakers—
Yeah, I got it, Bob. Mission Timer open… MGC DSKY open… S-Band antenna open…
Okay, copy.
Verify cabin pressure… Yup. Cabin Repress on auto. And now I can get this goddamn goldfish bowl off my head.
[laughter] You got your first message from Houston scheduled at MET 3124:20:00. That gives you about ten minutes.
This thing’s safe as it’ll ever be. I think I’ll take a rest. Speak to you soon.
    The surface gravity here is just over a third of Earth’s, but after 130 days in weightlessness it feels like so much more. He unclips his restraint harness and steps back from the commander’s position. Just behind him is the box covering the MM’s APS. He carefully sits on this, puts his gloved hands on his knees. He wonders about his biosensor telemetry, it’s going to look bad to the docs in the MCC. Perhaps they’ll put the elevated heartbeat down to excitement, but he bets their consoles won’t show how bone-tired he feels. His legs ache, the soles of his feet hurt, he can barely lift his arms and he no longer has the strength to make a fist in his IV gloves. He lets out a long, slow breath and he knows he needs to find some energy from somewhere. He’s got to sound chipper, keen, a proper astronaut, when he speaks to Houston; he’s got to be confident, the living embodiment of the Right Stuff, for Judy. And he’s got his first scheduled EVA straight after that. At least with the delay, he’ll