Note: This story finally continues the Cross-Currents series. Follows after Event Horizons.

Not Far From a Distant Sun

by Storm

Admiral Harriman Nelson leaned back in a comfortable chair on the observation deck of the starship Soese and thoughtfully sipped at the glass of golden colored liquor in his hand. The Dawimhlar cruiser was still sitting in a geostationary orbit over the backside of earth’s moon; he could see the faint outline of her sister ship Cu Belenus off to starboard. Earth was, for the moment, blocked from view.

Probably just as well, he mused to himself. If I could see it, I’m not sure I’d want to go through with this. He sighed out loud, drawing the attention of the other occupant of the observation deck to him.

“Problems, Admiral?” asked the tall blond haired, blue-eyed human captain of the cruiser.

Nelson answered with a wry smile. “More second thoughts, I suppose.”

“You don’t have to do this if you really don’t want to. We’re willing to do whatever you ask here.” The Captain had come over and hitched his hip onto the edge of the table beside Nelson’s chair, momentarily startling him with such a familiar gesture from a man so dissimilar in appearance from his own captain. He had to pause for a moment to collect his scattered thoughts.

“I know, Captain Hauer. And if it was just me, I believe would have preferred to stay and fight.” He sighed. “But there’s Seaview and her crew to think about. Lee’s good, but I don’t think he’s good enough to keep us hidden from the entire US Navy for the almost two months until President Carter is sworn in. I don’t think that I could do it. This was the only real option to keep them all safe.”

“There is that,” admitted the other. “Scathach told me a bit about what has been going on. I’d hate to have been put in the position you have, Admiral, especially by my own government.”

Nelson shifted uncomfortably and sought to change the subject. “How long will it take us to get where we’re going?”

Captain Hauer rubbed his chin thoughtfully. “Depends on the course we take. It’s twelve hours to go straight from here to Lar. But we could take the scenic route if you like.”

“The scenic route?”

“The Grand Tour of the Solar system, Admiral. However much of it you’d like to see.”

Nelson struggled to control his astonishment at the offer - and the sudden leap of desire. He’d always had a secondary interest in astronomy. As a mariner in the days before satellite navigation, he’d learned to find his way on the sea using a compass and sextant, using the stars to fix his position. Then there had been their previous encounter with an alien ship, something which had stirred an old yearning.

“How much longer would that take?” Nelson wanted - oh, how he wanted - to take Hauer up on his offer.

The starship’s captain grinned at him and answered, “That depends on how much we stop to see or if we just do a slow flyby. We‘re going to stop at Mars anyway, to pick up some of our own people that are evacuating. And since Venus and Mercury are both on the same side of the sun as Mars right now, those two really wouldn‘t be out of our way.”

Nelson considered for a long moment. Mars. How many youngsters across the years have dreamed of going to Mars? I certainly did. “Well, I think a flyby wouldn’t hurt. And if you‘re going to stop at Mars anyway…”

“Excellent.” Hauer made a motion with his left hand and a 3-D holographic chart of the solar system blinked into being in front of him. Nelson leaned forward in fascination. The planets were depicted pictorially, rather than as icons. Given their present locations, Nelson could see that Venus was the closest to their current position. As the captain brushed a finger through the image of the planet, it enlarged, showing detail that even the best telescopic photos available on Earth didn’t show; better even than the Mariner 10 spacecraft had produced just two years earlier.

“We don’t usually try to land anything on Venus…” Hauer cocked his head questioningly at Nelson.

“Too hot, atmosphere too dense and unbreathable. I’ve seen the data - and the pictures from Venera 7,” responded Nelson. “A flyby will do - I can pass landing on that one.”

“So can most people,” noted Hauer dryly, prompting Nelson to chuckle.

The captain moved his finger to the image of Mercury. As it enlarged, Nelson found his eyebrows arching at the subtle blue and pinkish to dark red colors displayed on the surface. This was not something that Mariner 10 had seen; those pictures had made Mercury seem to simply be a larger - if hotter - version of Earth’s monochromatic gray moon.

“Mercury,” said Nelson slowly, “looks interesting.”

Hauer nodded. “It is. But it‘s a challenging environment. The temperature swings are the most extreme of any of the planets or moons, from minus 300F nightside to 800F in daylight. Not to mention the weak magnetic field lets the solar wind strip the atmosphere away almost as soon as it’s formed. At times it can be strong enough to suppress the magnetic field all the way to the planetary surface and ionize the surface rocks.”

Nelson pursed his lips in thought and finally shook his head. “Mercury sounds like another one of those places that are best observed remotely.”

“Nightside isn’t so bad - the direct radiation is blocked and while it’s weak, the magnetic field is similar enough to Earth’s that the magnetosphere provides some protection from solar radiation. A shielded shuttle would be sufficient to land there.”

“But it’s not a place where you can get out and walk around without extensive protection,” noted Nelson.

“True enough,” admitted Hauer. “We do mostly use remotes for exploration in those types of environments.”

Nelson rubbed his chin and reluctantly decided that while Mercury would be a geologist’s dream - he wasn’t a geologist. “I’m thinking that Mars is the place I really would like to see.”

Soese’s captain grinned. “One of my favorites as well, Admiral. We‘ll be under way within the hour and we‘ll probably spend a couple of days there.”

********

Admiral Harriman Nelson stood on the south rim of an ancient volcanic caldera watching the sun rise and marveled. It seemed like a dream - he was standing on the top of Olympus Mons - he was on standing on Mars.

And it was a very impressive sight indeed.

He was standing nearly fifteen miles above what would be sea level if Mars still had an ocean; the overlapped craters within the massive main caldera were two miles below his feet. To the southeast towered three more huge volcanoes, while another loomed to the northeast. Another significant volcanic peak rose to the west, too far away to be seen from where he stood. All of them were larger than anything similar on Earth. There were others, but beside those five - six, if you counted the one he was standing on - the rest seemed insignificant. And beyond them to the east? Valles Marineris, discovered only five years earlier by Mariner 9. It was a crack on the surface of Mars that made the Grand Canyon of Earth look like a mere scratch. The shuttle from Soese had cruised leisurely down the six hundred mile length of it during the descent the evening before, giving him the opportunity to study the incredible walls towering miles above the bottom. The lowest portions of the canyon were three and a half miles below hypothetical sea level! This was geology that was impressive even on the scale that Earth’s oceans had to offer.

It was enough to dazzle even him.

He’d come to quickly realize that while in some ways Mars was hauntingly Earth-like, in others it was clearly an alien world. The need to wear an environmental suit at all times outdoors because of the thin atmosphere made the planet both tantalizingly close and yet untouchable. The gravity was probably the second most dissimilar feature as it was only one third of Earth’s. That made moving around awkward. Even though the lighter gravity reduced the weight of the suit, it didn’t change the mass. Simply walking took some practice.

The sky was another incongruent note – the pinkish tan color made it look as rusty as the planet. Clearly blue was a color nowhere to be found in nature on the surface of Mars.

He had to smile wryly as he compared the reality he’d found to what so many humans had believed for so long about this planet. There were no canals, no ancient cities - well, no cities built by native Martians anyway. The Dawimhlar had used Mars as a stepping stone to the stars, so there were settlements here that had been continuously occupied since the end of Earth’s Ice Ages. The largest and oldest of those settlements - and the location of the main spaceport - lay within the crater of a smaller volcano to the east. He had initially been surprised that the Dawimhlar hadn’t colonized Valles Marineris, but Captain Hauer had commented that the valley system had been formed by faulting - and despite it’s great age, was still geologically unstable. Rockslides from the rims, while not common, did still occur from time to time - and rocks the size of houses, even in Mars’ reduced gravity, tended to squash anything they landed on.

His thoughts strayed back to the city the Dawimhlar called Tholus. In some ways it was as alien as Mars was. Built mainly underground as protection from solar radiation, it was surprisingly open and airy, with wide streets and high ceilings. Having been built from native stone, Tholus looked almost like something from Medieval Europe, but lighter and cleaner. Vegetation grew everywhere and the sound of water was ever-present. The proportions and layout were slightly different from a purely human city, reflecting that its principle architects had been a species most people would not consider human.

But it was the people, the mingling of human and Dawimhlar, that was so intriguing. Many of the humans here could trace their lineages back as many as ten thousand years since they’d left Earth. They’d been living amongst the stars before the rest of humanity figured out how to make bronze, let alone iron. These humans had been separated so long from the civilizations he was familiar with that in many ways they had become as alien as the Dawimhlar - who, it turned out, weren’t aliens at all!

That was something of a shock, he admitted to himself, discovering that the Dawimhlar were hominids who originated on Earth - and achieved starflight while my own ancestors were still living in hide tents and caves.

Those two little facts were going to upset the apple carts of a great many religions, particularly in the Western countries - and the Middle East. He could see why the Dawimhlar were wary about contact with present day human society. Just the fact that they existed was going to turn anthropology - and a lot of other sciences - on their heads. And history! That was going to open a truly monumental can of worms, given that the Dawimhlar had never cut ties with Earth and had maintained a covert presence for all those millennia. He had to wonder just how much of human myth was based on things they’d done.

I’ll have to ask Captain Hauer if Atlantis was one of their cities. And what REALLY happened. He chuckled at the thought.

However, one thing that baffled him was the deliberately slow pace at which both the Dawimhlar and their human partners had advanced their technology in those millennia. They could have been - should have been - much farther advanced than they were. He’d asked Captain Hauer about it and had gotten the answer that the Dawimhlar philosophy was that technology should serve society and be shaped by it, not the other way around.

He was still puzzling his way through the ramifications of that, but he was beginning to realize the Dawimhlar had a great deal in common with the Amish when it came to their approach to technology. He wasn’t sure he would be comfortable in such a society, since it meant that change came slowly. On the other hand, it was becoming obvious to him that people here - both human and Dawimhlar - lived far longer than did people on Earth; he supposed that if one had centuries of life to look forward to, one could afford to take a longer view. Perhaps their pace only seemed slow to someone with a short lifespan.

Motion at the periphery of his vision brought him out of his introspection. He turned to see Captain Hauer approaching.

“Magnificent, is it not, Admiral,” said the Soese’s captain, waving a hand at the vast horizon spread out before them.

“Yes,” replied Nelson with a smile, “it is.”

Hauer chuckled. “I came to see if there is any other place in particular you would like to see. Perhaps the landing sites of your Viking spacecraft?”

Nelson felt his jaw drop. He’d completely forgotten about the two Viking Landers that had arrived just this past summer. Surely Hauer was joking about going there. He paused, suddenly uncertain. The Dawimhlar and those humans who were fully integrated into their civilization tended to have what was to him a peculiar sense of humor. Hauer might not be joking at all.

He could just imagine the collective apoplexy in JPL’s Mission Control if somebody in a planetary environmental suit were to casually stroll in front of one of the Landers’ cameras.

“Er….”

Hauer’s peal of laughter told Nelson that the other had in fact been joking. “It is only a thought, Admiral. Somehow I doubt NASA is ready for such a grand joke.”

Nelson grinned in response as a wave of relief washed through him. “True – but it would be interesting to be a bug on the wall in such an event.” The thought, however, left him wondering about the many Russian probes that had failed to achieve a landing – or had mysteriously ceased transmission after only a few seconds. As he recalled, there had been seven – seven! – attempts overall and only one out of the lot had succeeded – and it hadn’t tried to land. Every single effort to put a lander on the surface had failed. He had to ask.

“Captain, speaking of landers, do you know what happened to the Soviet craft that tried to land on Mars?”

Hauer shook his head as if in negation, but to Nelson’s surprise answered. “They tried to land in places that would have meant early discovery of our presence. There wasn’t much choice but to disable or destroy them. One of them actually landed on top of one of our outposts! We couldn’t open the landing bay doors until the lander was destroyed.”

“Then why let the Vikings land?”

“They landed in out of the way places. As long as we are careful, they will see nothing we do not wish them to.”

Nelson slowly nodded. That made sense. And by the time humanity was actually ready to send manned missions to Mars, the issue of official contact would be solved. He hoped. Meanwhile, if Captain Hauer was willing to be his personal tour guide, then he had a planet to explore. He rubbed his hands together in anticipation.

“I think I’d like to see the ice cap at the North Pole.”

Author’s Note: The first successful landing on Mars came on July 20, 1976, when NASA’s Viking 1 lander touched down in Chryse. The massive 1,270-lb (576-kg) lander dropped from an orbiting mothership to make a three-point landing using a parachute and rocket engine.

Fresh off the success with Viking 1, NASA landed on Mars again on Sept. 3, 1976 with Viking 2.

Sister ship to Viking 1, Viking 2 set down on the broad, flat plains of Utopia Planitia, where it snapped photos of morning frost and – like its predecessor – found a sterile soil that held no clear evidence of microbial life. The lander shut down in 1980.

The Soviet Union did indeed lose six out of seven Mars probes – four of them within a two year period between 1971 and 1973. Ouch.