Red Thunder

“I see a line, a little darker, maybe,” Kelly said.

[341] “Maybe,” I said. “But the horizon here is confusing. Too close. We know it’s there, the valley, but I wouldn’t swear we’re seeing it.”

“Me either,” Kelly agreed.

“Tomorrow is another day,” Dak said, and brought Blue Thunder smartly around. We followed her outward-bound tracks for a short distance, then Dak went down through the next gully, up the crater wall, down to the inside, then up and out. We made about a quarter of a circle of Red Thunder, and came back home from the west.

We got out except for Dak, and we laid electric blankets on the ground in front of each of the wheels. Dak drove onto them, and in another thirty minutes we had the blankets laced around the wheels and plugged into ship’s power. It was exhausting work, a lot harder than I’d expected, just like assembling the vehicle had been. Travis laughed when I mentioned it.

“Now are you glad I had your lazy asses out ru

“I’d be even happier if you’d worked off that beer gut, Travis,” Alicia said.

BACK INSIDE. WE all gathered in the cockpit to watch our first Martian sunset… the first Martian sunset ever seen by human eyes. We were the first!

The stars came out, much brighter than I’d ever seen them on Earth… well, from Florida, anyway. Hundreds of years of industrial revolution had filled Earth’s skies with a lot of smoke and chemicals, the ozone layer seemed to be in trouble, and maybe the whole planet was warming up…

It was impossible to worry about things like that while we watched the stars come out. But you had to wonder, would Jubal’s miracle drive make it possible for humans to live on more than just one, vulnerable planet? If we could lift things on a large scale, it would be possible to have a self-sustaining outpost on Mars in only a few years… and then there were those wild-eyed dreamers who spoke of “terraforming,” of [342] changing the very nature of Mars to make it more Earth-like, to fill its basins with water and its air with oxygen. But even the most optimistic of those dreamers said it would be a project for centuries, not years. I’d not live to see it. I wasn’t even sure if it was a good idea. Because… there were the stars, waiting out there. Some of those stars would have planets that were already Earth-like. Some of those Earth-like planets might already have intelligent life forms on them, but some may not.

I might live to see that. I really might.

Now the faint light of the sun from under the horizon faded out completely, and I realized what I’d been seeing before was nothing. Nothing at all. More stars in all their glory, endless thousands of them, and splashed across the sky like… well, like spilled milk, was the incredible immensity of the Milky Way, our galaxy, a hundred billion stars so thick you couldn’t pick out a single one.

My arm was around Kelly, and I hugged her tighter.

I don’t know how long we stayed there like that, but eventually Travis suggested we all get some sack time.

“Big day tomorrow,” he said. “Luckily, we get an extra thirty-seven minutes.” That was because it takes Mars twenty-four hours and thirty-seven minutes to turn once on its axis. We had decided to stick to Greenwich Mean Time for the ship’s log, and to simply tailor our working days as morning, noon, and evening. There was little to be done at night; with the temperature just outside that clear plastic porthole already down to one hundred degrees below zero.

Of course, there were other things two people could do during off hours. Kelly and I retired to our room and did most of them.

Mile High Club, Million Mile High Club, and now the Mars Club…

We were the first!

29

THE NEXT MORNING, judging by the expressions on Dak’s and Alicia’s faces, we weren’t the first Mars Club members by much. Suiting up, Travis looked at us one at a time, and shook his head.

“You guys are disgusting,” he groused. “Don’t you know we’re making history here? Don’t you have any-”

“Who says you can’t make history in bed?” Alicia wanted to know.

“We made some history last night,” Kelly agreed. Suiting up had to wait a few minutes until we all stopped laughing.

ONE OF OUR hard and fast rules was that Red Thunder was never to be left empty. Another was that Dak was the official driver of Blue Thunder, unless he chose to delegate it, and none of us figured he would. Only fair, I guess. It was his truck. Since we pla

[344] Once outside we removed the heat blankets from the tires and inspected them all very closely. They seemed to have come through the incredible cold of the night without any trouble. All systems checks were nominal, as they say at NASA, all six fuel cells humming-or gurgling?-along most satisfactorily. We boarded, Kelly and I in the back again, and took off in search of the Chinese pathfinder landers.

They weren’t hard to find. Our map was spot on, and we had marked the valley where we needed to be, a bit over four miles to the east of us. Dak got us there in no time, dodging around all Buick-sized rocks, as he had promised. We retired to a spot a few gullies back, parked, and waited.

We knew when the Chinese landing was to be, just about an hour from the time we parked. We hadn’t been in contact, so we couldn’t be 100 percent sure they’d be on time. That they would land here was a total certainty; that they would land at the appointed time about 98 percent certain, according to Travis. I had no reason to doubt him. But it was a nervous hour.

Actually, fifty minutes, because we spotted the ship with ten minutes of retro-fire still to go, way, way up there in the beautiful sky. It was leaving a faint contrail in the icy air, and it was an awesome sight. I choked up, thinking about four frail human beings in that little ship, descending into this awful vastness.

We had a surprise prepared for them. I almost felt sorry for them… I did feel sorry for them as fellow humans, but I had no sympathy at all for the cynical old men who had sent them here and who had arranged a riot that had killed a fellow American. May they all choke on their moo shoo pork.

“Come on, come on, baby.” I don’t think Travis was aware he was coaxing the descending rocket to a soft landing. Politics are forgotten at a time like that.

The ship was a simple cylinder, wider than any of our seven tank cars, but not much taller. The rocket drive would take up a lot of the bottom part. Those guys expected to be staying a long time in a habitat smaller than some jail cells.

It came down frighteningly fast for a long time, then put on a burst [345] of energy that must have subjected the crew to a lot of gees, hovered at about fifty feet, then started easing down at about three feet per second. Another pause at the five-foot level, then it was bouncing on its big springs. We all looked at each other, and let out a cheer.

“I gotta hand it to him, that was one sweet landing,” Travis said. “Yessir, whoever wrote that landing program was really good.” And he laughed.

We set up a television camera with a long lens, so that it was just peeking over the slight rise we had hidden behind. We moved back to Blue Thunder and waited again, this time watching the image on the television screen, which showed the lower part of the Chinese ship. We figured they had orders to get out and onto the planet soon, just in case those lousy Americans actually existed and had not blown up halfway into their journey.