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Chapter 46

They arrived in the vicinity of Target 37 right around the time Bruce predicted, but the next several days had to be devoted to unloading the rover and setting up a base camp before they could even think about searching for the alien ruins. The most pressing business was to bury the extra fuel tank they'd brought from Pirate in order to provide the container with insulation and keep leakage down. They'd probably lose some of the fuel to outgassing, no matter what they did, but this way the loss would be minimal.

Once the fuel was hooked up to Thoat's generators, they were assured of months of refrigeration and compression. Hopefully, they'd be rescued before they had to return to Pirate for more fuel.

Even more hopefully, the extra fuel they'd brought from Pirate would never be needed at all, much less a return trip to the lander. It would simply remain there as an emergency backup. As soon as the fuel tank was buried, they started setting up the most critical pieces of equipment they'd been carrying in the rover—the reactors initially developed by Ares Project which would use Martian raw materials to manufacture the water and oxygen they'd need, along with providing them with a self-sustaining fuel supply in the form of methane.

The reactors they'd brought with them, of course, were considerably more sophisticated—not to mention expensive—than the "Ruth, Ferris, Porky, and Ethyl" prototypes originally built by Project Ares. After NASA had more or less absorbed Ares into the drive to reach Mars as soon as possible, the powers that be at NASA had wisely decided to simply adopt Ares' designs rather than start from scratch. But, with the money NASA had available to throw at the problem, by the time Nike left orbit the reactors it carried on board were at least three generations more advanced than the originals.

Within two days, the reactors were up and running with no hitches—and all six of the humans on Mars heaved a collective sigh of relief. So, just as heartfelt, did the crew of the Nike. Whatever happened now, so long as Nike could figure out a way to provide them with food, the people stranded on Mars could survive indefinitely.

The next task was to set up the "bubbles." Those were the aerogel-insulated hemispherical tents that would provide them with far more living space than they'd had aboard the rover. They'd continue using Thoat's kitchen and sanitary facilities, of course, since the bubbles had no cooking provisions at all and "toilets" that were essentially just very high-tech chamber pots. But they'd have far more room and, even more importantly, personal privacy.

Finally, they removed the rest of the equipment and supplies and stored them in the bubbles. Only then, after working like beavers for five days after arrival, did they enjoy the little party they'd promised themselves.

By that time, Nike was relaying down what seemed to be a veritable avalanche of congratulatory messages from Earth. Most of them were not even from people and organizations directly connected to the space program.

After reading one message, sent by the faculty and student body of a university in a Chinese city that Helen had never even heard of, it dawned on her that they were famous. And not "famous" as in "tabloid meat."

Famous.

When she said as much to Ken Hathaway, in one of their conversations, the brigadier general just laughed.

"Are you kidding? Helen, I don't think you have any idea. The crash-landing of John Carter and your subsequent trek to safety at Target 37 has been the lead story in every media outlet on the planet since it happened. NASA tells me they think more people in the U.S. are watching the news about it every night than watched the Super Bowl."

"You're kidding." She stared at the screen, an empty feeling starting to come to her stomach.

Famous . . . Really famous . . .

"Nope, not kidding in the least. We're only sending down a smidgeon of the messages that are pouring in."

God help me. The tabloids were bad enough.

She had a sudden nightmare image of herself trying to conduct a dig somewhere in Montana—with a crowd of spectators surrounding the site.

"I'm a paleontologist," she half-wailed. "How will I be able to keep doing my work?"

"Um. Well, as to that . . . I can tell you, for sure, that at least you won't have to worry about collecting a salary any more. I haven't sent them down, since it seems pointless at the moment. But I can tell you that what looks to be every major garment manufacturer in the world is engaged in a bidding war to get you to be their spokesman. Last I saw, the top offer was fifteen million dollars."

He paused, momentarily. "Well, 'spokeswoman,' I guess I should say. Emphasis definitely on the gender. Seeing as how the main interest seems to be—"

"Nooo—"

She did wail, that time—and felt her stomach fly south for the winter.

"Yup. Their new projected lines of swimwear."

"I'm almost forty-three years old, for God's sake!"

"Yup," Ken's cheery voice continued, relentlessly. "I guess that explains why—near as I can tell—every cosmetics company in the world launched their equivalent of World War Three too. Women entering into middle age are apparently the biggest clientele for cosmetics, at least measured in terms of the money they spend—and you just became the poster girl for all half a billion of them. Last I heard, the cosmetic companies' bids were up to—hold on, I'll check with Jackie—"

He was back in seconds. "Eighteen and a half million, she says. She asks me to pass on that she recommends the offer that wants to market the stuff under the title 'Helen of Mars.' I do agree with her that they came up with the niftiest slogan: the face that launched the greatest ship of all."

"I'll kill her," Helen snarled. "And you're next!"

"Under the circumstances, that's a pretty idle threat," Ken pointed out, as cheerily as ever. "Jackie also wants to know what you'd like for your birthday coming up. She warns you she can't afford anything fancy, even if you are on the verge of becoming richer than Croesus."

"I want a cave in a desert somewhere!" Helen half-shouted. "Where I might get my privacy back!"

Ken laughed again. "Why bother? Just stay on Mars."

Helen's eyed widened.

And widened. Her stomach paused in its headlong flight.

She looked at A.J. He was sitting nearby in the rover, obviously doing his level best to keep from laughing himself.

His level best wasn't nearly good enough, so far as she was concerned. "One chuckle out of you," she hissed, "and you can look forward to a completely celibate stay on Mars."

That sobered him up, some. The threat wasn't idle, either. Not since they'd set up the bubbles and had some personal space again.

"Wouldn't think of it," he managed to get out.

"Good." After a moment, though, her glare started fading. "What do you think, A.J. Is it possible?"

He shrugged. "Maybe. It's certainly feasible, from a technical standpoint. The real question—what else is new?—will be the funding. At a guess, I'd say that depends mostly on what we find—or don't find—at Target 37. If there's a real dig to be done there . . . You know what I mean. A major one."

"A real dig," she mused. "A major dig. Major digs take years . . ."

Somewhere far to the south, Helen's stomach wheeled around and start flapping back.

Since A.J. managed to keep from chuckling—barely—Helen didn't carry out her threat that night. Rather the opposite, in fact.

"I love you," she murmured, contently exhausted and lying sprawled across him. "Would you stay here with me?"

"Don't ask silly questions. I came here looking for one dream, and found two. Of course I will."

She could feel a suspicious rumble, with her palm spread across his bare chest. "What's so funny?"

He was practically choking, now.

"What's so funny?"

"Well, I just got to thinking about funding. And it occurred to me—"

"You even finish that sentence, mister—!"

"Let's see what we can find," Helen said. "And stop whining, Joe. Paleontologists always start work at the crack of dawn, you know that. It's not my fault—"

She broke off abruptly, realizing she might be treading onto delicate ground.

Joe wouldn't be coming with them, naturally, with his leg broken. He and Bruce and Rich would stay behind in the camp and finish setting it up, while the other three started scouting for Target 37.

Helen had decided to leave Bruce and Rich behind also, because neither of them had any skills that would be of particular use in this initial scouting expedition. A.J. was coming along for his sensor expertise, which would almost certainly be needed to find ruins that were sixty-five-million years old. Helen, of course, was the only one except Joe with real experience at this work. Finally, she'd chosen Madeline because three would be safer, and Helen had a great deal of confidence in the security official's general competence.

So there was really no reason for Joe to be up this early. Helen assumed that Madeline had woken him up when she arose. Which wouldn't have been hard to do, since she'd been sleeping with him.

Madeline Fathom had apparently decided that their safe arrival here was an omen, or a signal—or whatever it was that mattered to her Inner Self, which Helen still found somewhat mysterious. As soon as they'd started erecting the bubbles, she'd quietly and matter-of-factly explained that she and Joe would share one, so they only needed to put up four instead of five for living quarters.

The look on Joe's face when she'd made that announcement had been . . . priceless. It was blindingly obvious that it had come as a surprise to him, too.

The look on his face this morning, on the other hand, was that subtle, hard-to-define-but-unmistakable expression that characterized civilized men trying to suppress their cruder impulses. A combination of smugness and exultation kept under tight restraint, so that the barbarian within didn't start leaping about the landscape and shouting "Boy, did I score last night!"

But he also looked inexpressibly happy, so Helen forgave him his male sins. When all was said and done, she approved of Joe Buckley. Very highly.

"It's not my fault," Madeline said, smiling that million-dollar smile. "He insisted I wake him up before we left. I felt bad about it, since I didn't let him sleep much in the first place. Broken leg be damned, he got no mercy from me last night."

Okay, then. Not delicate ground.

Putting on his helmet, A.J. glanced over at Joe in admiration. One of the things he'd always liked the most about his friend was his very solid ego. It just didn't seem to faze Joe at all that he'd gotten himself a woman who could probably outdo him in almost anything except engineering and cooking—and maybe not the cooking. At this point, A.J. wouldn't really be surprised to discover that Madeline Fathom was a Cordon Bleu graduate, on top of everything else. She seemed to pull out new skills the way a magician pulled rabbits out of a hat.

"A.J.?"

He suddenly became aware that Helen was speaking to him. "Huh?"

"I said, are you ready? What's up?"

"Just thinking, taking up too many processing cycles to detect your inquiry. Sorry, yes, I'm set. Got it all ready."

The three of them stepped into Thoat's airlock and cycled out onto the Martian soil. A.J. took a deep breath, as though he were stepping outside a mountain cabin and breathing in the air. The magnificent view called for some such gesture.

The orbital pictures had shown the area of Target 37 as being near, or even right below, a whitish chevron-shaped marking next to a small gully or canyon on the floor of the Melas Chasma area. Such images are deceptive, however. A.J. was struck again by just how deceptive they were as he glanced to his right.

There, about a quarter of a kilometer distant, was the edge of the so-called gully.

The term was a little ridiculous, he thought. The sheer scale of Valles Marineris warranted calling it a gully, perhaps, but on Earth it would be a canyon in its own right. More than three kilometers across at its widest, it ran a curved, slightly zigzag course for more than thirty klicks before petering out. Even here, where it narrowed drastically, it was several hundred meters wide and hundreds deep, red-pink-gray rock walls plunging down into a shadowed crease in the immensity of Mariner's Valley.

As they had been the first humans to reach the gully, they felt they had the right to name it. And since they'd done so through the services of the huge rover, they'd unanimously decided to name it "Thoat Canyon." Barring any official objections later, of course; but, under the circumstances, that was hardly likely.

The lighter soil, not so clearly whitish up close, had strong concentrations of salts in it. For reasons that were unclear to A.J., that news had been very exciting to the areologists on Nike and presumably on Earth. Small rises and cliffs surrounded the area to the north, where A.J. was facing, and to the left. Thoat had needed to round the southern part of its eponymous canyon and drive northwest to reach their current position, and he could see their tracks still visible in the sands to the south. The wind would undoubtedly erase them eventually, but for the moment he suspected that most of their course across Mars could be traced from orbit with a good enough telescope.

"Where are we going?" Madeline inquired. "You were running your sensors most of the night, right?"

A.J. sighed. "Much as I hate to admit it, I am at least partially defeated at the moment. You know how some of the weird alloys and composites the Bemmies had on Phobos kept messing with my sensors, from GPR on through just about everything else? Well, there's one big-ass chunk of this base that seems to be made out of that same stuff. I can't see anything past it—which means on the other side of the base, under it, and partly to the sides. And I can't drive Thoat around to check from different positions, obviously."

"So you got nothing?"

"I didn't say that. I just didn't get nearly as much as I hoped to get, and there's nothing that looks tremendously promising. We'll have to scout around the base perimeter—which is pretty darn big— for the next few days with portable units, if we want to get data on the rest of the area. I can say this much: if we're going to find entrances, that ridge"—he pointed to the fifty-meter-high cliff half a kilometer away—"is our best bet. Remember how we found the entrance to Phobos Base? Well, the same problem we faced on Phobos is here, only about a million times worse. Any opening that was standing on regular open ground will have filled in completely. I'm not sure if you can get solid rock out of just wind-blown stuff settling. But, if you can, after sixty-plus million years any openings that got filled in might be rock by now. Even if not, they'll have been completely buried eons ago. So, just like on Phobos, we have to look for caves or cracks that might have stayed open that long."

Helen nodded. "Makes sense. We do have one thing in our favor, too. Mars is geologically stable, compared to Earth. There's almost nowhere on Earth you could go which would have a chance of retaining any geological structures that old. Especially not things like caves and tunnels. But Mars has less gravity to collapse things, a lot fewer earthquakes, and—so far as we know, at least—no mechanism like plate tectonics to refurbish the surface every few hundred million years."

"Pretty much," Joe agreed, having been listening in. "It looks like it tried to go for that model around the time Olympus Mons got started. But without the ability to keep a liquid mantle, that was doomed to failure."

"The ridge it is, then." Madeline set off, the other two following. Close on A.J.'s heels came one of the two automated equipment and sensor rover carts they'd brought with them. Land-bound equivalents of the Faeries, essentially. It was loaded with portable GPS and other sensor equipment, plus rock-climbing gear.

"Back off a bit, Willis," he told it. Willis obediently fell back a meter or so farther, making A.J. feel less crowded.

Fifty meters was nothing compared to the main cliffs of Valles Marineris visible in the distance. But, up close, they were still formidable walls of red-gray stone, fissured and seamed, covered with the dust of years beyond count that sifted slowly down the rock face.

"Here's a hole big enough," A.J. said. He shone a light down. "Seems to go a fair distance, too."

After crawling into it for several meters, however, he learned the rough-floored tunnel narrowed to nothing. "Dry hole. Well, I didn't expect to find it right away."

"A.J., Madeline and I will keep looking for good possibilities in this rock face," Helen said. "You're wasting your skills doing that. Anyone can crawl into holes. See what you can get on GPR and your other gadgets."

"You got it."

A.J. began removing the equipment from Willis and setting it up. At least in this new location he'd have a different angle on the base and might get some shots at areas that had been completely obscured before.

Unfortunately, his repertoire was relatively limited here. The surface was heavily covered by drifting dust, so using acoustics would be basically useless. The Fairy Dust wouldn't help here, really. GPR and related RF approaches were pretty much all he could use without the ability to bore into bedrock. He could use a synthetic-aperture type approach to increase resolution and sensitivity, though, if he moved the GPR setup.

For the next several minutes he was busy reconfiguring Willis and setting the GPR unit firmly on the little rover. "There, that's got it. How are you people coming?"

"Lots of little holes and big holes," came Helen's slightly breathless voice. "But nothing promising, so far. You?"

"About to start getting us some more data." He started Willis and the GPR unit running. For the next hour he paced the sensor platform as it sent regular pulses into the Martian soil and bedrock, recorded the returns, and sent them to Thoat's main systems to analyze. He could, of course, have had Nike do the analysis—with the satellite network, they were never out of communication with the interplanetary vessel—but he liked doing things with what he had. And this analysis wasn't particularly difficult.

It was, however, increasingly disappointing. The more the returns came in and were processed, the more clearly the base on this side was delineated. And the less and less likely it became that there were, or ever had been, any entrances—natural or Bemmius-made—in this area.

Finally he shook his head. "Ladies, give it up. There's nothing to find here."

"Damn," said Madeline without rancor. "I was hoping we could find something fairly quickly—because I certainly don't like the idea of trying to dig our way down to the thing. Well, we still have more perimeter to check. Maybe tomorrow."

She started making her way down the backside of the ridge, which sloped much less steeply on that side.

It wasn't until a few moments later that it registered on A.J. that Helen hadn't responded. For a moment he almost panicked, until he saw that she was at the top of the ridge, looking outward. Maybe just admiring the view. It'd be a while—a long while—before any of them started taking that view for granted. Compared to Valles Marineris, the Grand Canyon in Arizona was a ditch.

"Helen, you okay?"

"Hmmm?" Her voice sounded distracted. He could almost see her expression; it was the one she wore when she almost had a problem solved. "A.J., what do your GPR scans say about the geology?"

"Geology? Well, I'm not an expert, but basically, um, we've got the top layer of crap, something that I guess might be sorta-sandstone under the dust and debris, then a bunch of denser stone, and something else under that. The sorta-sandstone isn't very thick, the denser stone is thicker—maybe fifty to a hundred meters total in this area, though I get vague indications it tends to be even thicker off to the west. The denser stone makes it real hard to see through past that, and I have to be honest that I wasn't using stuff that would look down past twenty to fifty meters anyway. Any tunnels we're looking for have to come nearer the surface than that. Why?"

She turned and gazed off towards the west, then back to the east. "Where were the close orbital photos of this area?" A moment later: "Yes, those are the ones. Thanks."

For a few more minutes there was silence. Then she said briskly, "We're looking in the wrong area. We want the east side."

"Over at Thoat Canyon, you mean?"

"Exactly. But it's not a canyon."

"Huh? Then what is it?"

Helen's voice was growing more excited and animated as she worked her way back down to his level. "I think it's the biggest damn sinkhole I've ever seen in my life. Look at the pictures again."

A.J. called up the images. The gash in the Martian landscape, now that he studied it more carefully, did have the folded, crumpled look of something that had collapsed from below. "But aren't most sinkholes round?"

"Generally, yes, but there are reasons it might not be. The way things sit in this region, and the shape of that collapsed area . . . What I think we have here is a collapse of a cavern which had a thin roof of volcanic basalt over it. The basalt is thicker in this area, but thinned drastically over there. That was at the edge of the flow, or some area that for some reason didn't get covered as well."

"A cavern . . . thirty kilometers long?”

“A network of them, maybe. Plus the gravity's so much less. Damn, I wish Ryu were still here. He'd know.”

“Well, we can bounce this up to Nike and see what the experts have to say."

It wasn't long before Chad Baird, one of the planetographers, was on the radio with them.

"Quite possible. What you may have there is an area that used to have fossil ice in it. The ice slowly—over a period of millions of years—sublimed away and percolated through the rock above. It would refreeze in the upper layers, weakening them, then evaporate away again when things warmed up. Eventually there would be a huge empty space and weakened rock to give way during one of the infrequent major Martian quakes."

"And if the cap stayed intact here, and was thicker . . . Is it possible there could be some ice left under this area?"

"There could be, Helen, yes. With a large deposit underground, and a relatively impermeable basalt cap on top . . . Yes, there could be."

A.J. saw where this was going. "Good call, Helen. That's real good."

"You get it, then? Our best chance for any entrance is obviously on the wall of Thoat Canyon near the base, and the base is here almost certainly because somewhere down here they found water— which they needed even more than we do."

"Joe was right, then," A.J. mused. "It was no coincidence at all that Pirate wound up so close. That's one of the things we in Ares were looking for, too—water. And we decided to look here because Valles Marineris gets you deeper into the surface of Mars than anywhere else on the planet."

He was getting excited, now. "And if there is such an opening, I might be able to find it the same way we found the one on Phobos."

"Exactly. If there's any connection to fossil ice, any opening will show a higher water concentration."

A.J. found himself grinning in anticipation. "Let me get back to Thoat and do some work. We just might find our way in after all!"

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