Mars (8 page)

They had already scratched him from the Mars mission roster. He had been relegated to the status of an instructor. They had no intention of letting him go to Mars.

All the scientists under consideration for the Mars expedition had met one another, of course, and often more than once, as their training took them hopscotching around the world. But it had been many months since Jamie had seen Joanna Brumado. He had barely said a dozen words to the woman.

Jamie went to the entrance area of the snow-covered base, more to say good-bye to the men and women he had been training with than to welcome the new arrivals. His group members were already looking at him with pity in their eyes, sympathy for a man who was obviously not going to make it. Some of them almost shied away from him at that last moment, as if afraid to be contaminated by the touch of a loser.

Dr. Li took off one glove and shook Jamie’s hand solemnly, wordlessly, before departing. His hand felt dry and limp, like a dead lizard.

Jamie stood inside the doorway, just out of the cutting wind, wrapped in his bulky parka, and watched his ex-teammates trot out to the waiting bus that would take them to the airstrip scraped out of the ice shelf. The bus was towed by a huge earth mover with a snowplow attached to its front. Overkill, thought Jamie. The base’s streets had been plowed and there had been no snowfall for days.

Ten people, bundled up in hooded parkas so that you could not tell the women from the men, sprinted from the hut’s entrance to the bus, bent against the frigid wind. All of them carried silvered metal cases and floppy garment bags—their precious personal items of clothing and scientific equipment. All except the cadaverous Dr. Li, who carried only his laptop and a small duffel bag. The scarecrow travels light, Jamie thought.

Ten similarly clothed and burdened figures made their way through the snarling wind from the bus to the doorway where Jamie was standing. Jamie recognized tiny Joanna Brumado easily among the ten who trooped into the en-tranceway, stamping the snow off their boots after the brief run between the bus and the hut’s doorway. He also saw that Antony Reed was among the newcomers.

So was Franz Hoffman.

Without a word Jamie turned toward the wooden stairs that led down into the hut’s main floor and headed for his quarters.

It was not until the new group met in the dining hall, just before lunch, that Jamie worked up the strength to go out and greet them.

The dining hall was the largest room in the hut that had been donated to the Mars Project: big enough to seat fully thirty persons at its long Formica-topped tables. Joanna was sitting at the end of one of them with Tony Reed and Dorothy Loring, a Canadian biologist.

“Mind if I join you?” Jamie asked.

Reed looked up. “Waterman? What are you still doing here?”

Keeping his face impassive as he pulled up a chair, Jamie said, “I’ve been asked to hang around and help get you people acclimatized.”

Reed glanced at Joanna, then quickly returned his focus to Jamie. “I see.”

The word for Antony Reed was “suave.” He looked like the average American’s idea of an upper-class Englishman, which in fact he almost was. A trim, slight frame, the kind of spare figure that comes from tennis and handball and perhaps polo. Handsome face, with elegant cheekbones and a chiseled profile. Neat little moustache, sandy hair that flopped roguishly over his forehead. He wore precisely creased royal-blue coveralls over a white turtleneck and managed to look almost as if it were a jaunty yachting costume. Yet his eyes were too old for his face, Jamie thought. Ice-blue, coldly calculating eyes.

Reed was a physician who had refused to take over his father’s posh practice in London, preferring to join the British astronaut corps as a flight surgeon. When the European Community joined the international Mars Project, Reed immediately applied. He exuded the calm self-confidence of a man possessed of the certain knowledge that he would be picked as the team physician for the Mars explorers.

Jamie sat between the Englishman and Joanna Brumado, who smiled her welcome to him.

“I did not know that you were going to stay on here,” She
said. Her voice was a whisper, like a little girl who had been trained to stay as quiet as possible.

“It was Dr. Li’s idea,” Jamie replied tightly. “The base commander will explain everything at the briefing, right after lunch.”

“I wonder if our crafty Chinese has some sort of
mono a mono
up his sleeve,” Reed mused.

Jamie kept himself from glaring at him.

“Mano a mano?”
asked Dorothy Loring. “Like in a bullfight?” She was a big-boned blonde, completely at home in her thick sweater and heavy-duty jeans, a latter-day Valkyrie, a descendant of Vikings who had gone from her family’s farm in Manitoba to a doctorate at McGill and postdoc work at the Salk Institute in La Jolla.

Reed pointed with his eyes. At the other end of the table sat Franz Hoffman, alone, intently frowning into the display screen of a computer he had set up on the tabletop.

Jamie said nothing.

Neither did Joanna, but her eyes showed that she understood Reed’s implication. They were beautifully soft brown eyes, large and liquid, wide-spaced like a child’s. Joanna was small and round, almost hidden inside a bulky brown sweater. Her face was heart shaped, framed by a dark mass of hair that curled thickly even though it had been cropped short. To Jamie she looked like a waif, a lost child, with her small stature and those big brown eyes that seemed troubled, almost frightened.

“Our Viennese friend,” Reed said in a lower voice, “is not very well liked, I fear.”

“You should not say that,” Joanna whispered.

“Why not?” Reed asked. “Good lord, the man has all the charm of a Prussian drillmaster. And the eating habits to match.”

Loring broke into a giggle, then quickly put her hand to her mouth to stifle it. Jamie, sitting where he looked directly down the table at Hoffman, saw that the Austrian never glanced up from his computer, never acknowledged by so much as a flicker that anyone else was in the room.

“I do not understand,” said Franz Hoffman. “Does Dr. Li think that I need an assistant? A Sherpa guide to carry my baggage up the mountain?”

Jamie held onto his swooping temper, just barely. He had decided that there would be no way to avoid Hoffman in the crowded, snow-buried base so he would make a virtue of necessity by offering to help the Austrian to continue the meteorite search out on the glacier.

Hoffman had been unpacking his clothes when Jamie knocked on the half-ajar door to his quarters. It happened to be the same room that Dr. Li had just left. But already Hoffman had turned it into his personal domain. A five-foot-long photomosaic map of Mars was pinned up on the flat wall above the bunk bed. On the curving wall beside the desk the geologist had taped a smaller satellite photo of the Markham glacier, already marked with red circles where meteorites had been located. A framed color photograph sat on the government-issue three-drawer bureau, a round-cheeked young woman with twin babies in her arms smiling dubiously into the camera.

“Look,” Jamie said, leaning against the doorjamb, “Li asked me to help your group through your six weeks here. If you’re interested in continuing the search for meteorites I’m willing to help.”

Hoffman eyed Jamie silently, then went back to taking folded clothes out of a large suitcase on the bed and placing them in precise stacks in the bureau drawers.

“At the very least,” Jamie said, “I can show you which areas I’ve already covered. Save you going over areas where nothing’s been found.”

“That information is in the data bank, is it not?” Hoffman asked.

He was about Jamie’s own age and height, but thin and almost weak-looking where Jamie was solid and chunky. Hoffman was round-shouldered and round faced. His hair was already turning gray, and it was cropped close to his skull. His face was a picture of darkly brooding suspicion, eyes small and squinting, narrow lips pressed firmly
Jamie thought, Put a monocle in his eye and he’d look like an old-time Nazi general.

“Yes, the computer has a complete file of my treks on the glacier,” Jamie replied evenly. “But once you’re out there on the ice the computer data loses a lot of its meaning. Even the satellite pictures aren’t much help when you’re actually out there.”

“I have done field work,” Hoffman said stiffly. “I was born in the shadow of the Alps. None of this is new to me.”

“Suit yourself,” Jamie said. He turned to leave.

“Wait.”

“For what?”

Hoffman stood in the middle of the room, his fingers drumming unconsciously against the sides of his heavy wool slacks.

“Tell me,” he said, his voice a little less sharp, “why does Dr. Li think that I need an assistant?”

“It’s not …”

Hoffman did not let Jamie finish his sentence. “You did not have an assistant. None of the other geologists had assistants. Does Li think I’m incapable? Does he think I can’t make it on my own? Is this his subtle way of getting rid of me?”

Jamie felt his mouth drop open. Hoffman was just as worried and frightened as he was. Behind the brittle facade was a man who feared he would be left behind, just as Jamie feared.

Shit! Jamie snarled to himself. It would be so much easier to hate him.

After lunch and the base commander’s brief orientation lecture, Jamie spent the rest of the day saying hello to each of the newcomers, telling them that he was there to give them any help or advice they required. He felt awkward, more like an unwanted and unneeded accessory than a valued and trusted associate.

His insides were in turmoil over Hoffman. Walk a mile in
the other guy’s moccasins, he thought. Sure. Great. No wonder the Indians got swamped by the whites.

By the time he had spoken to the first three of the newcomers, Jamie had worked out a little speech that explained quickly, with a minimum of embarrassment, why he had remained at the base and what he was offering to do. The newcomers’ reactions varied from Hoffman’s fear of inadequacy to Tony Reed’s cynical smile of understanding.

“Does little Joanna know that you’re to be her personal chaperon?” Reed asked.

“I don’t think anybody’s spelled it out to her,” Jamie replied.

Reed’s lopsided grin turned almost into a sneer. “She’d be a fool if she didn’t figure it out for herself.”

“Maybe,” said Jamie.

He had left Joanna for last, and now, feeling as frustrated and exhausted as he had the winter he had tried to sell magazine subscriptions bicycling through his Berkeley neighborhood, he tapped at the door to Joanna’s room.

She opened the door, looked up at him, and smiled.

“Come in,” said Joanna Brumado in her little girl’s voice. “Sit down.”

She still wore the sweater and jeans she had arrived in. Her room was neatly arranged, emptied suitcases stacked in the far corner, garment bag hanging behind the door. Her laptop computer was open on the desktop but its screen was dark and silent. There were no pictures on the walls, no personal items in sight.

Jamie took the chair that stood by the bunk.

“I’ve told all the others,” Jamie began, “that Dr. Li asked me to stay here at McMurdo to help you and the rest of your group get through your six weeks here as easily and profitably as possible.”

Joanna went to the desk and sat at the chair behind it, turning the desk into a protective barrier.

Her face entirely serious, she said, “We can be honest with one another, James.”

“Jamie.”

Her lips did not curve up into a smile. Her luminous dark eyes were somber. “You are here to make certain that I get through this part of the training. You have stayed behind
because I am Alberto Brumado’s daughter and for no other reason.”

Well, she’s no fool, Jamie said to himself. She’s under no illusions. No pretensions.

“Dr. Li asked me to remain here,” he said:

“Because of me.”

“It was his first big decision as expedition commander.”

Her eyes would not leave his. “And what about your training? Your own group is going ahead with its regular schedule, is it not?”

“They’re going to Utah, yes.”

“And you?”

Jamie made himself shrug. “I’ve spent most of my summers in New Mexico. Maybe Dr. Li figures I don’t need any more time in the desert.”

Joanna shook her head. “He asked you to stay here? He himself? Personally?”

“Yes.”

“And you agreed to do it?”

“What choice did I have? Tell Li that I refuse to carry out his first major decision? How would that look on my record?”

She bit her lower lip. “Yes, he did not give you any real choice at all, did he?”

“Well, I’m here and you’re here, so we should try to make the best of it.”

“But you will be throwing away your chance for a position on the mission just for me.”

“I guess that’s already been decided,” Jamie said, surprised at the obvious bitterness in his voice.

“I could call my father,” said Joanna, tentatively, her eyes sliding away from his. “I could tell him what Dr. Li has done to you.”

Jamie tried to probe beneath her words, understand what was churning inside her. She was not angry, yet something was radiating from this elfin woman as she sat behind the desk. Was it fear? Bitterness? A sense of injustice?

“Are you afraid that the others will think you’re getting special treatment?” he asked.

“I am getting special treatment!”

“And you don’t like it?”

“It could cost you your chance to make the mission.”

“But it’s important to your father that you go to Mars.” Her eyes went even wider.

“Is that important to you?” Jamie asked.

“Important? That I go to Mars?”

“Right.”

“Of course it is important! Do you think I am here merely to satisfy my father’s vicarious desires?”

A part of Jamie’s mind was registering the fact that Joanna was beautiful. Her figure was certainly adult enough; not even the bulky sweater could hide that. It was her face that gave her the lost, defenseless look of a street urchin, vulnerable yet knowing. And that tiny, whispering voice. Her deep brown eyes were large and almost as dark as Jamie’s own.