Martian Rainbow Page 5

  "You don't have anything to say about it," Gus said grimly. "As of right now, I am reassuming command of the expedition."

  Alexander stopped. His brother had won this one. It wouldn't look good on his record if he tried to violate the almost sacred principle of the United States that the military was controlled by civilian authority, even though this was nominally a UN mission. He wanted his four-star brevet rank for the expedition made permanent. Then, within a few years, he would be the top candidate for chief of staff of the whole U.S. defense force.

  "With your permission, sir," he said to his brother, "I intend to include in my summary report back to the president and Congress, the recommendation that all the Russians be removed and replaced with a pure U.S. contingent."

  "You may do that, Alex. But don't forget our allies—Japan, India, Canada, Brazil, Australia, Israel, and the Europeans. Some of them have excellent planetologists."

  "You know as well as I do that they were only along to make it look good in the history books—a UN force instead of a U.S. force. They only suffered one casualty. We did the fighting, we should get the spoils."

  "The war is over, Alex," Gus said soothingly. "Mars isn't booty that belongs to the United States, it belongs to the whole world. Maybe with this incident out of the way, the peoples of the world can stop bickering among themselves and work together to utilize the immense resources of the solar system."

  "I'll never trust those atheistic neocommies," Alexander said. He paused and looked around the room. "Well, I guess you'll want to take over this office, it being the biggest on Mars. All you'll have to do is scratch out the word General on the door and put in Doctor."

  "No. You keep it," Gus said. "I'm going to take an office over in the science wing. As soon as I can get my administrative assistant down here and set up, I'm going to take some time to do some science."

  FOUR DAYS later, Gus found enough free time to visit Tanya in her apartment. Her roommate had already been shipped out up to the Lexington for eventual transfer back to Earth. After a tense and perfunctory greeting, Gus slumped into a magnesium-frame hammock chair. Tanya stood behind him and ran her fingers through his short, dark hair, graying at the temples.

  "Alex won, Tanya," Gus said in a discouraged tone of voice. "I had hoped that we could limit the number of Russian people removed from Mars, so that we could all work together, explore the planet together, face common dangers together, and show both our nations that it is possible for us to cooperate. But when the Signals Group finally broke into the security files, it seemed like practically every person on Mars was a KGB agent. Even your roommate."

  "But Maria was a nuclear engineer," Tanya said, resting one hand on his shoulder. "She ran the second shift at the main power plant for the base."

  "Her grandmother was Jewish," Gus said. "And in return for letting her grandmother go to Israel to die, Maria became a KGB agent at sixteen. They didn't ask her to do very much. But one of the things she did was to file daily reports on your behavior. "

  "Maria!" Tanya exclaimed. "I can't believe it. Why were they interested in me?"

  "You had been under suspicion ever since you and I explored Aristarchus together," Gus said. "In fact, the way we finally decided on the list of those that could stay was to pick those that the KGB didn't trust. That only left some twelve scientists and thirty techs out of eight hundred people on Mars and the moons."

  "I guess I can understand their suspicions about me. We did get pretty friendly during that trip."

  "Yes," Gus agreed, looking uncomfortable and turning red.

  "You're blushing!" Tanya said, turning his chin with her hands so she could see his cheeks.

  "If you remember," Gus said, "that was a Russian-built crawler."

  "Why is that important?"

  "There were electronic bugs all through it. In your computer dossier is a complete transcript of everything we said during those weeks. Alex had a great laugh reading it. Especially your 'Gussie, dearest ... let's do it again' phrase."

  Now it was Tanya's turn to blush. He looked up at her, then they both laughed together. Tanya dropped her hands and walked to the small porthole in her room that looked out at the Martian surface through thick glass.

  "Do you remember how at the end of a long day out on the lunar surface, we would come inside, help each other out of our suits, and then after a wash-up with a damp rag and a hot-tray dinner, I would stare out of the porthole at the distant crater rims ..."

  "Then you would say that phrase, and I would come over." Gus got up, walked up behind her, and slowly placed his hands on her shoulders. She was tense, wondering if he would be like his brother or the tender Gus that she had loved so long ago. Technically, he was still her enemy.

  He softly rubbed her shoulders and the back of her neck until he felt her tenseness ease. He moved his hands down her arms, then put them on her waist, his lips kissing tenderly at the back of her neck. She melted back into his arms with a sigh.

  "This is a Russian base," Tanya warned. "My room is probably full of electronic pickups, since I am so untrustworthy."

  "I had them turned off."

  "Well, in that case ..." She paused, then her voice switched tone.

  "Gussie, dearest ..." she said, and turned to smile coyly at him. "Let's do it again!" She took his hand and led him across her room to her plastic water bed framed in thick slabs of diamond-sawed Martian volcanic rock.

  TWO WEEKS later, it was time for the invasion fleet to return home in triumph. Gus walked into Alexander's office to say good-bye to his twin brother. Alexander would be returning with the troopers and the captured Russian prisoners of war, while Gus would stay with the replacement group made up of technical people from the United States and their allies. In one hand Gus carried a sheet of fax-erase paper. It contained the condensed and reduced contents of the news portions of the New York Times. Even at reduced size, the headline was visible across the room.

  ARMSTRONG TAKES MARS! it proclaimed. Just below Gus' mangled thumb stub was a large picture of Alexander. The news article went on to describe the almost zero-casualty-loss capture of Mars, the recently released details of the battle, and the plans to return most of the Russians back to Earth.

  "Look at the caption under your picture," Gus said. "Alexander the Great!"

  "Fits me, don't you think?" Alexander preened.

  "You know, with your present popularity you'd be a shoo-in for president of the United States in forty."

  "You're probably right," said Alexander, with a thoughtful expression on his face. "But I think I'll stick with the military for a while. If you're a president and give an order, the civil servants say 'yes sir' and do what they've always done. In the military, when I say 'shit', people squat."

  He held up his collar tip and looked at the four gold stars with pride. "Once these four stars are permanent, I'll have more real power than any president." Alexander looked up from his collar at his brother.

  "Are you sure you don't want me to take the rest of the Russkies back, Gus? I know why you want to keep Tanya around, but Viktor Braginsky and the other neocommie scientists will give you nothing but trouble."

  Gus shifted uneasily in the inflated sofa in Alexander's office. "They may be Russians, Alex, but they are not neocommies. They're scientists. Good scientists. To them, discovering the truth is more important than petty politics."

  "Well, don't say I didn't warn you." He got up from behind the desk and came over to shake hands with his brother.

  "We part once again, Gus. I really didn't know whether I would be able to stand being subordinate to you after we'd been off doing our own things for so many years, but you weren't a bad boss—at least you didn't get in my way." Alexander pumped Gus' hand and slapped him once on the shoulder.

  "Good-bye, O old and wise one," he said.

  Gus watched his twin walk out the door.

  "You have been rebelling against that one-minute time difference your whole life," he mused.

&
nbsp; "I wonder ... Would you have been a different person if you had been the first born?"

  He paused and thought some more.

  "I wonder?

  "Would I have?"

  CHAPTER 4

  Independence Day

  AFTER the departure of General Alexander Armstrong and the main body of troopers, the crowding eased at the various bases on Mars. Not all the troops went home. Some of the original contingent had taken up the offer extended by Gus to stay on Mars and help rebuild the bases they had made so thoroughly unlivable when they had first arrived.

  Practically the whole Israeli contingent decided to stay, one of them remarking, "This place will be easier to reclaim than the Sinai desert—at least it has some water in it!" The Shalom stayed in orbit around Mars with two others of the original invasion fleet of transport spacecraft, while the remaining thirty-seven ships returned, carrying the victorious troops and their prisoners back to Earth.

  The attack trooper barracks that had been added to the original complexes were partitioned into individual quarters. The ripped dome at the main base at Olympia had been repaired and there was now a large domed commons plaza that could be used for group meetings and sports activities that needed lots of volume, especially altitude.

  Gus had punfully renamed the covered plaza the "Boston Commons", after an elderly planetologist back on Earth. She was still strong in spirit, but her body was now too frail for her to make the trip to Mars. The pressure inside the dome was kept at three-quarters of an Earth atmosphere, a compromise between engineering and comfort, although those from Denver, Los Alamos, and Mexico City found it perfectly normal. Around the base of the dome were exercise rooms with improvised weights, and handball courts made of thick slabs of diamond-sawed Tharsis Ridge lava.

  Gus had adopted the Russian calendar system for Mars, which divided the long Martian year into ninety-five weeks of seven sols each, then added holidays—holisols—outside the weekly calendar at the solstices and equinoxes to make up the 669 sols of the year. Today was the apsolstice, the solstice closest to the aphelion of Mars. It was the summer solstice and the longest sol of the year in the northern hemisphere. With Sunday, the first sol of summer, coming tomorrow, this was the start of a two-sol holiday weekend for the hardworking scientists and engineers who normally got only one sol off a week. They had endured the twenty-seven weeks of spring, the longest season of the year, since their last two-sol weekend at the spring or apequinox, and now the commons and the courts were full. Gus was playing handball with Jay Plantagenet, specialist in impact crater dynamics.

  "Your serve, Gus," Jay said, tossing him the ball. "Make it a good one, or I'm coming back!" They were both breathing hard in the rarified atmosphere and their breathing echoed loudly around the court. Gus stood at the serving line, bouncing the ball nervously on the floor and wiping the sweat from his forehead. He glanced back at his younger opponent. Jay was Gus' height, but thin and wiry, chocolate-brown, with a large head—to hold all those brains, Gus thought—and glasses held on with an elastic band. Jay let a boyish smile spread across his strong-jawed face as he pushed back a strand of straight black hair.

  "Getting tired, old man?" he chided.

  Gus bunched his massive, muscular frame and slapped the ball down the court. Jay dove to make the return, but was in no position to follow up as Gus sliced one into the corner to win.

  "Great game!" Jay said as Gus helped him up.

  "Better let the next pair have the court," Gus said. As they walked out he asked, "I understand you're off on an extended field trip?"

  "Yep. Now that summertime is coming to the northern polar regions, I and a few techs are going to make a traverse of Lomonosov and Kunowsky craters in a crawler."

  "That's a long one!" Gus said as they went into the shower. The showers had been one of the benefits of the invasion. The originally spartan Russian base now had an adequate closed-cycle sewage system incorporated with the gardens, pens, and ponds that provided their food.

  "Eight hundred kilometers from Boreal Base and a thousand-kilometer traverse," Jay said, peering nearsightedly for the cleansing lotion. "And there's lots of interesting impact structures, so we'll be taking cores along most of the traverse. I expect it to take all summer."

  "I'll see you around the perisolstice holisol, then," Gus said, heading for the dressing room.

  AS GUS left the dressing-room door leading into the commons, he was nearly knocked over by three men in shirts trying to run down a tall, shirtless man with a mass of curly, sandy hair carrying a volleyball negligently in one hand. It was Chris Stoker, playing goalie for the "Skins" in the game of air polo that he had invented. Chris had just run around behind his goal after making a save. Using his almost two-meter height to advantage, he leaped into the air and threw the ball down the field to another Skin, keeping it high.

  As the ball approached, the receiver jumped high, caught the ball, landed on one foot, hopped up easily in the low Martian gravity, and fired the ball to another Skin, who was in full running stride. This one made a high leap after the catch, but, surrounded by Shirts, he couldn't get a good pass off during his trajectory and finally had to touch down with a shoulder. He grounded the ball and took off back toward the Skins goal, along with the rest of the forward Skins.

  After a pause to regroup, three backfield Shirts started running toward the motionless ball sitting on the ground. Gus expected the lead shirt to make a flying kick, since the main rule of air polo was that you must make initial contact with the ball while in midair, and except for the goalie, you could only touch the ground once between a catch and a throw, and then with only one foot—or hand, or shoulder, or elbow, or head. Other than that, there seemed to be no rules.

  Instead of kicking, however, the lead Shirt made a leaping somersault over the ball, picking it up as he went over and flipping it sideways to one of the Shirts beside him. That Shirt took his allowed step, leaped, and fired it downfield to a Shirt running across in front of Chris, anxiously guarding the goal. The Shirt slipped a toss under Chris' lanky reach and scored. Chris called a timeout and went to the sidelines for a drink, where he was immediately surrounded by his teammates and admirers. Gus crossed the field to the center of the dome where the Icarbatics net had been set up.

  Icarbatics was only for the lean and wiry. It also helped if you had some experience with Icarbatics on the Moon. The one-sixth gravity on the Moon made it easy for practically anyone to glide down from the ceiling of the tall hangars there with large bat wings strapped to his—or her—arms. The smaller and leaner could even fly up and around for a short while before their muscles got too tired. Icarbatics on Mars was a combination of gliding, diving, gymnastics, and aerobatics, with an emphasis on perfection of technique and beauty of form.

  Practitioners of the sport dove from a platform up near the top of the dome. Then, using their custom-made, highly maneuverable arm and leg "wings", they did midair rolls, somersaults, twists, and all the maneuvers of divers on Earth and more as they fell, but in slow motion. In addition, by adding powerful beats from their arm wings, then locking the wings in a back brace at the right instant, they could pull out of a dive like a glider, then carry out different maneuvers on the way up, for all the world like an aerobatic airplane.

  Tanya was accomplished at Icarbatics, having practiced extensively when she was on the Moon, although she was a little too large and getting too old to carry out some of the newer routines. Gus watched as Tanya developed a new finale.

  "I call it the 'Wounded Phoenix'," she said, strapping on her wings. She wore a sky-blue skintight leotard that matched her eyes and contrasted nicely with her light blond hair. It also showed off her small but still firm breasts, narrow waist, and full hips. Strutting stiff-legged in the braces, she walked over to Gus, gave him a pat on the cheek, and headed for the hoist.

  Gus watched her approvingly as she grasped the bar on a rope hoist and a motor pulled her up to a narrow platform at the top of the dome. She poi
sed for a moment, spread her sky-blue wings, and dove headfirst toward the ground. After a fairly standard dive routine with a "Falling Leaf" thrown into the middle, she locked her wing struts for a high-speed pullout and went into a spiraling climb that went straight up. Near the peak of her trajectory, she stopped her spiral by stretching her wings and legs out to her side. Her momentum continued to carry her motionless, spread-eagled body straight up.

  Suddenly, she collapsed, as if pierced by a bullet, her arm wings and leg flaps flailing randomly, her body seemingly tumbling out of control. Gus felt his heart skip a beat. But just before she hit the safety net, her body was in the correct position to bring her fall to a halt with two strong down beats of her wings. She came to a proud, spread-eagled halt, standing motionless in the exact center of the landing pad at the center of the safety net.

  Gus and the others watching clapped appreciatively as Tanya bounded to the edge of the net, her flapping wings extending her bounds more than normally in the low Martian gravity. Gus reached up his arms to help her down, but she shook her head and, grinning, flapped over his outstretched arms and landed in back of him. As he came up, she turned her back to him, and he obediently held the titanium-lithium alloy tubing brace-frame while she pulled her arms free from the wings and unbuckled her chest and leg straps.

  "I'll take it now," she said, collapsing the wings and folding them up into a long cluster of tubing, wires, and blue fabric. She reached out to squeeze him on the arm.

  "You had better get the commons ready for the meeting."

  Gus then noticed that some of the bystanders were already loosening the ropes on the safety net. He looked down at his watch, then shook his head in disgust. He had forgotten to reset the watch the previous night to add in the forty minutes that was the difference between a Martian day and an Earth day. He had thought there was still an hour before his speech. Now it was only twenty minutes away, and people were already gathering.