After that day they found that Abdul Qawi didn't need so much care. He was more active, which seemed to give Asya cause for concern. She would catch him examining some device or fixture around the Hab and would shoo him away, afraid that he would absent-mindedly break it. He wasn't capable of a Marswalk, and his movements were still clumsy. He slept a lot. But he had long lucid periods, and they found themselves gathering with him in the wardroom to unwind, laughing a lot and debating their priorities and solutions to everyday problems. But Asya was often outside, on her own, going for longer and longer Marswalks. Once she was gone for four hours, vanished over the horizon. She dodged their questions about what she was doing, and since her excursions seemed to have a temporary calming effect on her moods, they let her alone. SSI had questions, too, and apart from one drawn-out conversation with Nowal, Asya didn't seem to be communicating much with them beyond routine reports. Don and the others became surrogate commanders, depending on who was on watch that day. If they asked her for direction she would snap at them and vanish again.
They slogged onwards through their long lists of checks and procedures. Don frequently found himself inwardly cursing as Marco came up with solutions to seemingly intractable problems or thought up another maintenance check for them to carry out. Don had very little time left for anything remotely scientific, so he was reduced to little more than a helper, an apprentice, a novice in all things mechanical and electronic compared to Marco. It was absolutely no use telling himself that he was more skilled, educated and trained than more than 99.9% of the human race. Annika had a strong background in the chemical engineering of life support. Asya never needed anyone's help and she made sure they knew it.
He quietly brought up the subject of their commander's moods to Annika and she nodded dismally. "If nothing changes, I think we will have a crisis on our hands sooner or later. We can't do Fiesta Days every week and expect her to snap out of her gloom every time." This levered up the tension Don was now physically feeling, sometimes, in his shoulders and neck. Was the Hab actually a kind of time bomb, or was it all in their imaginations?
He constructed ways to escape and recoup his self-esteem. He would sit in the rover or in the wardroom, staring at the intriguing landscape which looked so barren to most of the others, and tell himself that this was why he was here. To go out there and discover. To study a whole planet. He noticed details of the terrain and wrote extensive notes on its geomorphology and probable origin. Or he would lock himself in his bunk room and watch immersive videos of wildlife on Earth, the tropics, the wetlands, the deep oceans.
But these break times were short, and he could rarely shake the feeling of being pursued by lists of endless chores. Always he came away knowing that he hated all this mechanical drudge work and that there was no escape – not yet.
Two days after the party Don, Annika and Marco sat in the rover and listened to a recording of the latest SSI media broadcast about the mission. The rover had wider windows than the wardroom, and its seats were no less comfortable. They had begun to neglect the regular news bulletins; world news only seemed to get worse, with nations and conflicts and crises winding themselves up as if for some cataclysmic finale. But the SSI mission seemed like one success story that everyone could take heart in. They grinned and shook their heads as they heard their lives filtered through the saccharine of SSI's media department. Everything appeared to be going so well, and there was no mention of any interpersonal problems. For footage, SSI had mainly spliced together Annika's video blogs from before and after the landing. It all sounded so easy to Don that he found himself resenting the announcer's glib tones. Abdul Qawi was said to be recovering well from 'the shock of his difficult experience during landing'. Nobody could have guessed that he had come within a few breaths of death or that he had lost a great deal of higher brain function.
As an ending, the announcer tacked on a few words: "From one planet to another, our prayers are with them."
"Amen, brother," Marco muttered, and clicked off the recording.
Don felt like he finally had a target for all his frustrations, a target distant enough that there was no fear of tearing the team apart if he expressed himself. "And just who does he think he is, whitewashing the whole dysfunction here, then foisting his prayers on us? Prayers? As if we didn't get here by a lot of hard work and planning! As if his prayers were going to fix the leak in the water recycler." He gestured towards Marco and Annika, as if they could decode this. "Personal religious beliefs shouldn't come into this. What were they thinking? Can you tell me what it's supposed to mean?"
Annika shrugged and looked away, not wanting to throw fuel onto the fire. Marco seemed to shrink into himself. "Well, I dunno, man."
Even though he knew that his rant was misdirected, it was better than going for the real issues that beset them. Besides, it felt so good to vent. "Does he think we got here by prayer? We didn't trust the laws of physics or do a little R 'n' D first? As if this God is going to rescue us if we mess up? And which God anyway?" He caught himself. "Never mind that debate."
They sat in silence for a minute. Marco's brow wrinkled. His mouth writhed. He was chewing something over, like a glob of tough meat he couldn't swallow. "I don't know, man… Prayer is just what people do when… when they're desperate, or lonely, or their friends are in trouble…"
"That's it," said Annika. "It's just another way of sending their best wishes. You know, like good luck."
"Yeah, you're right," conceded Don. "But when it's me that's in trouble, I get to work fixing the problem. Or trying to. Making my own luck. I think, way out here, we're outside the range of their prayers."
Annika looked at him as if this wasn't necessarily a good thing, or perhaps she just thought it wasn't the most encouraging thing to say.
- + - + - + -
Just the next day they began planning the trip that Annika dubbed 'Operation Lonely Mountain
Don looked forward to it mostly because it would mark a break in the daily grind of checking and fixing and wiping dust out of things. It was only on the day before their trip that he fully realised that they could finally discover an answer to the question that had nagged at him and at half of the human race for the past two years.
He and Annika were taking the rover for a gentle test drive in wider and wider circles around the Hab. He took his turn at driving and discovered that he was much better at the real thing than he had been in the simulator. The mere fact that the gradients and exposed rock surfaces he negotiated were real helped him to focus and to judge his speed and the traction of the wheels. Perhaps here was one area in which he could excel, if he could only avoid the distraction of all that geology out there waiting for him.
"Do you think about her much? Julia, I mean." Annika's question caught him off guard.
He focussed on a shallow shelf of dark sedimentary rock just ahead. "Look! Typical glacial action. Amazing, this far south. See the striations?" They descended barely a metre into a gully, one of several that cut across the terrain. The rock still bore the scars of its losing battle with retreating ice formations, so far back in the prehistory of Mars that he could never quite grasp it. "Then the subsurface ice started sublimating in places, leading to collapse. So these little pits and grooves everywhere."
She Mmm-hmm'd him, as if unconvinced.
He pushed the rover carefully up the far side of the little gully and glanced at her. She was still waiting for an answer. "No, not really. Not now. I mean, I've thought all there is to think. I've plumbed the depths. There's nothing left that I can fruitfully think about until we know for sure."
They skirted a low dune of pale ochre and the Hab came into view, about a kilometre away on their right. Annika pointed at the clumps of shattered black rock that lay scattered across the flat plain. "Ejecta, right?" she ventured. "From crater impacts?"
"Many of them, most likely. Could be bits of Mars from as far away as Pettit or even, who knows, Schiaparelli Crater. We know we landed just inside of an ancient crater, in fact. Those low hills are the remains of the rim. But I see a lot of local basaltic break-up too, where the tone of the material matches the local bedrock. You can see the bubbles in the boulders."
It was Annika's turn to drive now. Once she got the rover moving, she said, "You like rocks, don't you?"
"Oh, you noticed? Yeah, geology is the base for so much else. You can tell so much of what happened here by looking at the rocks. The past climate of the planet is written here, if only we take the time to read it."
"Tell me again why we need to know the past climate. It's the future I'm concerned about, because that's, uh…" She slowed and turned to avoid another hidden dip in the ground.
Don finished her sentence. "Because it's where we're going to spend the rest of our lives. Yeah. But a planet is a system. Whatever happened back then left its mark. I wouldn't go too far and say it's like a living being, but it's all linked up. It's a prospector's guide, for when we need to start a mining industry. And if we decide there used to be an ocean over the north of the planet, then we will go and look for underground water ice. But if we find evidence that, say, lava flows carved all those valleys and coastlines, then we won't."
"And you believe there was an ocean, despite what it looks like now? I mean, I think there was, but is that the consensus? Based on the evidence?"
"Almost everybody in the field says so, although 'ocean' sounds too grand. Yes, right here. The signs are obvious. This would have been the Arcadian Sea
Annika found a long, level patch of ground and revved the electric motors in each of the six wheels with the handgrip throttle. The hum of power came to them through their feet. Her face pulled back into a pleased smile. "Look at this thing go. We're nearly up to forty kay!" They laughed. "So… we were saying… things happen in the past, long ago, and they leave their mark. And that affects our future." She glanced at him.
"Oh, smart lady. I see what you did there." He shook his head and looked away, out of the window.
"You could say it's none of my business, Don, but it is, really. We're all in this together. We all depend on everyone not falling apart. So I just wanted to say… you know, we're all here for you when… if… anything happens. That's all."
"Uh… thanks, I guess."Read on: 'Closer Than Your Jugular Vein'
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