Part 10 (1/2)

The group connected hoses from the Zubrin to the ferry. The refuelling process began.

As the group of six men sheltered in the buggy, waiting for the tanks to fill, an argument broke out between the Feneloni brothers, in which the other men became involved. Each man had a pack of food with him. The plan was that when they reached the interplanetary vessel orbiting overhead, all except Abel would climb into cryogenic lockers and sleep out the journey home. Abel would fly the craft for a week, lock it into an elliptical course for Earth, allow the automatics to take over, and then go cryogenic himself. He would be the first to awaken when the craft was a week's flight away from Earth, and would take over from the guidance systems.

Abel had shown great confidence during the planning stage, carrying the others with him. Now his younger brother asked, hesitantly, if Abel had taken into account the fact that methane had a lower propellant force than conventional fuel.

'We'll compute that once we're aboard the fridge wagon,' Abel said. 'You're not getting chicken, are you?'

That's not an answer, Abel,' said one of the other men, d.i.c.k Harrison. 'You've set yourself up as the man with the answers regarding the flight home. So why not answer your brother straight?'

'Don't start b.i.t.c.hing, d.i.c.k. We've got to be up in that fridge wagon before they come and get us. The on-board computer will do the necessary calculations.' He drummed his fingers on the dash, sighing heavily.

They sat there, glaring at each other, in the faint shadow of the ferry.

'You're getting jumpy, not me,' said Jarvis.

'Shut your face, kid.'

'I'll ask you another elementary question,' said d.i.c.k. 'Are Mars and Earth at present in opposition or conjunction? Best time to do the trip is when they're in conjunction, isn't it?'

'Will you please shut the f.u.c.k up and prepare to board the ferry?'

'You mean you don't b.l.o.o.d.y know?' Jarvis said. 'You told us the timing had to be right, and you don't b.l.o.o.d.y know?'

A quarrel developed. Abel invited his brother to stay bottled up on Mars if he was so jittery. Jarvis said he would not trust his brother to navigate a fridge wagon if he could not answer a simple question.

'You're a t.i.tox - always were!' Abel roared. 'Always were! Get out and stay out! We don't need you.'

Without another word, Jarvis climbed from the buggy and stood there helplessly, breathing heavily in his atmosphere suit. After a minute, d.i.c.k Harrison climbed down and joined him.

'It's all going wrong,' was all he said. The two men stood there. They watched as Abel and the others left the buggy and went towards the now refuelled ferry. As the men climbed aboard, Jarvis ran over and thrust his food pack into his brother's hands.

'You'll need this, Abel. Good luck! My love to our family!'

His brother scowled. 'You rotten little t.i.tox,' was all *he said. He swung the pack on to his free shoulder and disappeared into the ferry. The hatch closed behind him.

Jarvis Feneloni and d.i.c.k Harrison climbed into the shelter of the buggy. They waited until the ferry lifted off into the drab skies before starting the engine and heading back to the domes. Neither of them said a word.

Abel Feneloni's exploit and the departure of the fridge wagon from its parking orbit caused a stir for a day or two. Jarvis put the best gloss he could on the escape, claiming that his brother would present their case to the UN, and rescue for all of them would soon be at hand.

Time went by. Nothing more was heard of the rocket. No one knew if it reached Earth. The matter was eventually forgotten. As patients in hospital become so involved in the activities of their ward that they wish to hear no news of the outside world, so the new Martians were preoccupied with their own affairs. If that's a fair parallel!

Lotteries for this and that took place all the time. I was fortunate enough to win a trip out to the science unit. Ten of us travelled out in a buggybus. The sun was comparatively bright, and the PIRs shone like a diamond necklace in the throat of the sky.

Talk died away as we headed northwards and the settlement of domes was lost below the near horizon. We drove along a dried gulch that served as a road. There was something about the unyielding rock, something about the absence of the most meagre sign of any living thing, that was awesome. Nothing stirred, except the dust we churned up as we pa.s.sed. It was slow to settle, as if it too was under a spell.

This broken place lay defenceless under its thin atmosphere. It was cold and fragile, open to bombardment by meteors and any other s.p.a.ce debris. All about us, fragments of primordial exploded stars lay strewn.

'Mars resembles a tomb, a museum,' said the woman I was travelling next to. 'With every day that pa.s.ses, I long to get back to Earth, don't you?'

'Perhaps.' I didn't want to disappoint her. But I realised I had almost forgotten what living on Earth was like. I did remember what a struggle it had been.

I thought again, as I looked out of my window, that even this progerial areoscape held - in Tom's startling phrase - that 'divine aspect of things' which was like a secret little melody, perhaps heard differently by everyone susceptible to it.

I managed to terrify myself by wondering what it would be like to be deaf to that little tune. How bearable would Mars be then?

I was grateful to him for naming, and so bringing to my conscious mind, that powerful mediator of all experience. All the same, I disliked the drab pink of the low-ceilinged sky.

The tall antennae and the high-perching solar panels of the Smudge laboratory and offices showed ahead. It was only a five-minute drive from Mars City (as we sometimes laughingly called our congregation of domes). We drew nearer. The people in the front seats of the bus started to point excitedly.

At first I thought paper had been strewn near the unit. It crossed my mind that these white tongues were plants - something perhaps like the first snowdrops of a new spring. Then I remembered that Tom and I had seen these inexplicable things on our visit to Dreiser Hawkwood. As we drew close to them they slicked out of sight and disappeared into the parched crusts of regolith.

'Life? It must be a form of life...' So the buzz went round.

A garage door opened in the side of the building. We drove in. The door closed and atmosphere hissed into the place. When a gong chimed, it was safe to leave the buggy. The air tasted chill and metallic.

We pa.s.sed into a small reception hall, where we were briefly greeted by Arnold Poulsen. As chief computer technician, Poulsen was an important man, answerable only to Hawkwood and seldom appearing in public. I studied him, since Tom had spoken highly of him. He stood before us in a wispy way, uttering conventional words of greeting, looking pleasant enough, but forgetting to smile. Then he disappeared with evident relief, his social moment finished.

We were served a coffdrink while one of the particle physicists, a Scandinavian called Jon Thorgeson, youthful but with a deeply lined face, spoke to us. He was more communicative than Poulsen, whom he vaguely resembled, being ectomorphic and seemingly of no particular age.

Did he recognise me from my previous visit? Certainly he came over and said h.e.l.lo to me in the friendliest way.

Thorgeson briefed us on what we were going to see. In fact, he admitted, we could see very little. The science inst.i.tution comprised two sorts of people. One was a somewhat monastic unit, where male and female scientists thought about what they were doing or what they might do, free from pressures to produce - in particular the pressure to produce 'Big Science'. The other unit comprised people actually doing the science. This latter unit was still adjusting the equipment that, it was hoped, might eventually detect Rosewall's postulated Omega Smudge.

As we were being shown around, Thorgeson explained that their researches were aimed at tackling the mystery of ma.s.s in the universe. Rosewall had made an impressive case for the existence of something called a HIGMO, a hidden-symmetry gravitational monopole. The team was running a pilot project at present, on a relatively small ring, since the density of HIGMOs in the universe remained as yet unknown. The ring lay at the rear of the science unit, under a protective s.h.i.+eld, we were told.

One of the crowd asked the obvious question of why all this equipment and this team of scientists were s.h.i.+pped to Mars at such enormous expense.

Thorgeson looked offended. 'It was Rosewell's perception that you needed no expensive super-collider, just a large ring-shaped tube filled with appropriate superfluid. Whenever a HIGMO pa.s.ses through this ring, its pa.s.sage will be detected as a kind of glitch appearing in the superfluid. Any sort of violent activity outside the tube would ruin the experiment.'

I found myself asking how HIGMOs could manage to pa.s.s through the ring. He seemed to look hard at me before answering, so that I felt silly.

'Young lady, HIGMOs can pa.s.s clean through Mars without disturbing a thing, or anyone being any the worse for it.'

Someone else asked, 'Why not build this ring on the Moon?'

'The Moon - we're too late for that! Tourist activities, mining activity, the new transcore subway ... The whole satellite shakes like a vibrator in a wasps' nest.'

Turning his gaze on me, he asked, 'You understand this?'

I nodded. 'That's why you're out here. No wasps' nests.'

'Full marks.' He came and shook my hand, which made me very uncomfortable. 'That's why we're out here. It's fruitless to pursue the Smudge on Earth or on Luna. Far too much racket. The Omega Smudge is a shy beast.' He chuckled.

'And if you capture this Smudge, what then?' asked one of the group, Helen Panorios, the YEA woman with dyed purple hair and dark complexion.

'It holds the key to many things. In particular, it will tell us just how the microverse relates to the macroverse, giving us the precise parameters for the dividing line between the small-scale quantum world of atoms and fundamental particles, and the larger-scale cla.s.sical world of specks of dust upwards to galaxies and so on. I take the view of current 'hard science' that these parameters should also tell us how the exterior universe relates to human consciousness. The detailed properties of the universe seem to be deeply related to the very existence of conscious observers - observers maybe like humans, maybe a more effective species which will supersede us. If so, then consciousness is not accidental, but integral. At last we'll have a clear understanding of all existence.'

'So you hope,' ventured a sceptical voice.

'So we hope. When the s.h.i.+ps come back and we can obtain more material, we expect to build a superfluid ring right around the planet. Then we'll see.'