She didn’t feel any pleasure, or pride, in his startling offer. All she felt was irritation. That damn roller coaster again. “This doesn’t make sense, Phil. You’re passing up the chance to become the first human to walk on Mars, for God’s sake. What kind of asshole does that?”
“This kind,” he said, annoyed. “This is important, Natalie. I discussed it with Joe Muldoon before the launch. We have to get this right — this first EVA most of all — for the sake of the future. The next few minutes are maybe the point of the whole damn mission. Even more than the science — though I don’t expect you to agree with that. Natalie, it’s going to be a long time before anyone comes this way again. But we’re changing history here; even if we fall back, now, people will be able to look up at Mars and say, yes, it’s possible, we can get there, live up there. We know, because somebody did it.
“Look, I know I’m no Neil Armstrong. You’re more — articulate. And this is your place; your valley. Your planet, damn it. You know your way around here better than anyone alive. I think you’d do a better job of communicating this than me. And besides…”
“What?”
He smiled. “I have this feeling. I might be remembered longer for being the man who passed up the chance to be first.”
“I hope she’s obeying orders,” Gershon called.
“About as much as she ever does.”
They’ve plotted this. I’ve been set up.
“And take this,” Stone said.
She held out her hand; Stone dropped into her palm a small disk, like a coin, less than an inch across. It was the diamond marker. “I think it’s more appropriate for you to place it. For Ben. And the others.”
He reached out with two hands, and closed her fist over the marker. He was looking into her eyes.
He knows, she realized suddenly. About Ben and me. He knows. They all knew, all the time.
She dropped the marker into a sample pocket on her suit. Then, numbed, she pushed the red bands over her arms and legs, and dropped her gold visor down over her face.
Stone held the hatch aside. York got down, clumsily, to her knees, and backed up ass-first to the hatch. She started to crawl backwards, out onto the porch.
“Here we go. You’re lined up nicely, Natalie. Come toward me a little bit. Okay, down. Roll to the left. Put your left foot to the right — no, the other way. You’re doing fine.”
She could feel where her sides scraped against the hatchway. Coolant tubes dug into her knees.
Blood hammered in her ears.
“Okay, I’m on the porch.” She reached out and grabbed the handrails, to either side of the porch.
She looked up. The white paint of the outer hull was stained with landing dust, and tinged yellow by the quickening Martian morning. She had gotten so far out that could see the whole of the hatchway before her; it was a rectangle of brilliant fluorescent light, set within the skin of Challenger. Inside the rectangle Phil Stone had crouched down, peering out at her, nodding inside his helmet.
She continued to move backwards, still crawling over the porch, feeling out with her right leg; eventually, her toe hit the top rung of the ladder.
Holding on to the handrails, she straightened up.
She was emerging into the shadow of Challenger, the rising sun was hidden by the bulk of the craft, and the sky above her was still black, though the stars were washing out. She turned, stiffly. To left and right she could see a flat, sharp, close horizon, delimiting a plain of dust and rocks. Everything was stained rust brown, like dried blood, the shadows long and sharp.
The change of scale was startling. She’d spent months inside the confines of the Mission Module, where everything in the universe had been either a few feet away — enclosed by the tight, curving walls — or at infinity. The sense of height and depth, of scales opening out around her, was profound, disorienting; nothing in her training had prepared her for this. For a moment she felt as if she would fall backwards, and she hooked her hands around the handrails of the porch.
“Natalie?”
“I’m okay, Phil. It’s just—”
“I know,” Stone said. “A big moment, right?”
“Yeah.”
Gershon asked, “Natalie, have you gotten out the MESA yet?”
The MESA, the Modularized Equipment Storage Assembly, was a panel on the descent stage, to the left of the ladder. York reached out and opened a latch; the panel swung down like a drawbridge, bearing a TV camera.
“Ralph, the MESA came down all right.”
“I copy that, Natalie. I’m turning the TV on now.”
The lens of the camera was dark, clean, watchful; she saw the camera swivel as Ralph worked its servomotors, focusing on her. She felt absurdly self-conscious.
Gershon said, “I’m waiting for the TV. Man, I’m getting a picture. There’s a great deal of contrast in it — it’s just splashes of color — and currently the damn thing’s upside-down. But I can see a fair amount of detail and — I’ve got it, it’s corrected itself. Natalie, I can see you at the top of the ladder.”
York nodded to the camera. But they can’t see my face behind this visor. She waved.
She made her way down the ladder, rung by rung. They were big steps, and in the stiff suit she found the best way to go was to let herself drop from step to step.
The last rung was three feet from the ground, and she pushed herself away from the ladder and let herself fall. Her descent was distinctly slow-motion; it took nearly a second, she guessed, to cover that last yard. On Earth, it would have taken half that.
Her blue boots came to rest on the white metal of the descent stage’s three-foot-wide footpad. It was still so dark in the shadow of Challenger, that it was actually quite difficult to see.
She held on to the ladder with her fat-gloved hands, and tried to step back up to the ladder’s bottom rung. She had to make sure she could get back home. But the suit was too stiff, and she couldn’t lift her feet that high.
“Fucking dumb design.”
“Hot mike at this time, EV1,” Gershon said blandly.
She gave up trying to make the step. She bent down a little and jumped. Her knees were stiff, inside the suit, and all her mobility came from her toes and ankles. The Martian gravity pulled her back, but feebly, and she overshot the bottom rung. She fell against the ladder with a clatter, but she managed to get her feet hooked over the rung.
Breathless, she dropped back to the footpad again.
She looked past the pad to the Martian surface.
“Okay. I’m at the foot of the ladder. The MEM’s footpads are depressed in the surface a couple of inches, maybe three; the sides of the depressions they’ve made are quite distinct, sharp and clear. There’s little water here, of course, and I guess the soil’s cohesion is electrostatic…” Don’t analyze, York; tell them what it looks like. “The surface soil looks a little like beach sand. Wet sand. But as you get close to it it’s actually much finer-grained than sand, and it’s evident that it bonds well together. Here and there it’s very fine, powdery.” She reached out her leg and kicked gently at the regolith, leaving furrows in the soil. “It’s easy for me to dig little trenches with my toe. I have the impression that the surface material is a duricrust. That is, dust particles cemented together by the upward seepage of water in the soil, with salts being precipitated out on evaporation.”
There had been a little Martian dust on the footpad, she saw, and when she lifted up her boot, she could see that a little of that had already transferred itself to her. “The dust is clinging in fine layers to the sole and sides of my boot. So it’s both cohesive and adhesive. It looks as if it will take a slope of around seventy degrees…”
Now Ralph Gershon said, “Natalie, I need you to get back facing the TV camera for a minute please.”
“Say again, Ralph.”
“Rager. I need you facing the field of view of the camera. Natalie, Phil, the President of the United States is in his office now and would like to say a few words to you.”