The Martian Race, Page 2

  “Want to feel like man I was.”

  “C'mon, get up.”

  “Why not pull me up on the line? I lie down—”

  “Don't think I could.”

  “Pull with rover.”

  “Hey, I'm in charge.”

  “Aieee!”

  With her help he heaved himself up onto his right leg, leaning heavily on her. Together they struggled for balance, threatened to go over the edge, then steadied. She had long ago stopped counting how many times the 0.38 g of Mars had helped them through crucial moments. It had proved the only useful aspect of the planet.

  “Whew. Made it, lover.” Keep the patter going, don't alarm him. “Ready? I'll walk, you hop as best you can.”

  Like a drunken three-legged race team, they managed to stagger slowly up the crater slope with the judicious assist of the winch. You will work as a team, the instructor at mission training had said constantly, but she hadn't anticipated this. Over her comm came deep, ragged gasps. Hopping through drifts of gritty dust, even in the low gravity, was exhausting Victor. Luckily the rover was just a dozen meters away.

  Slow and steady got them there. He leaned against the rover as she struggled off first her harness, then his. She rolled him into the lock and set the cycle sequence. No time to brush off the dust, but she got off the coverall they used over suits to keep the dust at a minimum. She hooked it with her own to the clamps beside the lock. Skip the usual shower on entry, too. She climbed into the lock with him, sealed it. She hit the pump switch and oxygen whistled into the lock from half a dozen recessed ports.

  With a wheeze, the cycler finished. She was jammed in and couldn't turn around to see him. She felt the rover's carriage shift. Good; he had rolled out of the lock and was lying on the floor.

  The chime sounded; full pressure, 90 percent Earth normal. She turned off her suit oxygen, released the clamps on her helmet and as quickly as possible shucked her parka, leggings, and finally, her suit. She shivered as she stepped out into the chilly cabin: she had actually been sweating on Mars—a novel experience.

  A prickly itch washed over her face and neck and already she regretted their dusty entry. The usual routine was to brush the suits down outside with a soft brush. Some genius from mission prep with a lot of camping experience had thoughtfully stowed it aboard, and it quickly became one of their prized possessions. The Martian surface was thick with fine, rusty dust heavily laden with irritating peroxides. Her skin had felt like it was being gently sandpapered all during the long months here—especially when she was tired, as now.

  Fluffing her short black hair, she donned a red Boeing cap and went over to help Viktor. She upped the rover pressure to get him more oxygen, and together they gingerly peeled off his insulating layers and his suit. A look at his leg confirmed her guess: sprained ankle, swelling fast.

  From there it was straight safety manual stuff: bind, medicate, worry.

  “I love you, even zonked on painkillers,” she murmured to his sleeping face when she had checked everything five times.

  He had dropped off disturbingly fast. He kept up a front of invincibility, they all did somewhat or they wouldn't be here; it went with astronaut psychology. But he had the bone-deep fatigue that came from a hard mission relentlessly pursued. He didn't talk about it much, but the launch coming up was troubling him.

  She was suddenly very tired. Emotional reaction, she diagnosed wryly. Still, better tend to it.

  On Mars, you learn to pace yourself. Time for a cup of tea.

  She looked around first for her tea cosy, carefully brought from Earth as part of her personal mass allowance. Nothing could've induced her to leave it behind—home was where the cosy was. She retrieved it from a corner of the cooking area. Originally light blue and cream colored, it was now permanently stained with maroon dust. When things got tough she sought the comfort of a proper cup of tea made in a teapot. There were precious few emergencies that couldn't wait until after a cuppa.

  As the water heated she got on the emergency band and tried to reach the other two back at the hab. No answer. They were probably deep in the guts of the Return Vehicle, starting the final checks for the approaching test fire. She left a heads-up on the ship's message system, saying that they were coming back pronto, hurt. No way could she get any more done out here on her own. Anyway, Viktor came first, and any solo work was forbidden by their safety protocols.

  With the robot arm on the front she unhooked the last solar-powered electromagnetic hailer from the outside rack and placed it in what she hoped was a good spot. It was always a judgment call. The winds were fickle, and the constantly shifting dunes had buried more than one.

  She stared out of the forward viewport at the pale pink hills, trying to assess what this accident meant to the mission. Maybe just a mishap, no more. But Viktor still had plenty to do preparing for their return launch. No, this would screw up the schedule for sure. Her own work would get shoved aside.

  And the vent—when would she get back? For about a microsecond she considered going down the hole herself. No, contrary to all mission procedures. Worse, stupid.

  Face it, she thought—biology was not the imperative here anymore. She had made her big discovery. To the world, their expedition was already a big success—they'd found fossil life. But she wanted more than long-dead microbes.

  And now they had one more accident to complicate things. Plan all you want, Mars will hand you surprises.

  Like the accident that had gotten them all here.

  2

  MARCH 2015

  “DAMN, STUCK AGAIN!”

  She had been driving the Rover Boy, as they called it.

  Rover was the telepresence explorer on Mars which had scouted the landing site. It was still operating after five years, thanks to the Mars Outpost program. There was a chem factory to feed Rover and backup electronics packages sitting in the Outpost base. Plus a microwave dish to keep in constant Earth contact through the three communication satellites above. She had trained with Rover from Johnson Space Center for years. Right now Julia was coaxing it across the tricky landscape, like a mother tending a toddling, balky child.

  She was taking it around the edge of Thyra Crater, letting the autopilot on board negotiate the slope and rocks. There was no choice, given the time delay of over half an hour. Rover Boy was the most advanced model ever developed, but it had problems. Big, insurmountable ones.

  “Where is it?” Viktor asked beside her.

  “Stalled on a sand dune, looks like.”

  She thumbed through close-up processing commands, fingers drumming on the driver's console. Nearby hummed the station-keeping labors of the Jet Propulsion Lab.

  At thirty-two, she had lost none of her impatience with life. What was more, she did not intend to. Piloting Rover Boy with infuriating delays was more trying than she could ever let on, or else risk being scrubbed from the Mars mission. So her fingers danced uselessly, rather than slamming on the gas in Red Rover and trying to back out of the clogging sand fifty-three million miles away.

  “Yah, the dune to the left, last time.”

  “Its onboards must've chosen to go that way.”

  “Looks maybe to turn wheels left, reverse out,” Viktor said in what he probably thought was a helpful tone.

  “It's a day's work getting out of a chuckhole,” she said uselessly, sending the Reverse order and cutting the wheels to the right. Before they got free her watch would be over.

  She glanced at her framed picture of the little Sojourner rover, one she had saved from her first brush with space excitement at age fourteen, way back in 1997. Sojourner had suffered from the same time delay problem—no way around the speed of light!—but its plucky nosing around had got Julia started on her Mars fixation. She brought it on her watches here, for luck. Today it didn't seem to be working.

  Rover Boy was hugely bigger, better, but—“We're never going to get far from Thyra in slow-mo.”

  Viktor pointed to a smudge on the horizon.
“Cloud?”

  “Ummm.” She thumbed up the last view in that direction, north-west. “Wasn't there last time.”

  “Unusual to have cloud at midday. Evaporate at dawn.”

  “Could be transmission error.” It would take over an hour to get another look that way. She sent the order to swivel the TV cameras.

  Julia sighed. She had still not come to terms with the simple fact that she and Viktor and the rest, fine folk all, were not in the six-person crew going to Mars in one year. Sure, they had known that half of the astronauts in training would form a backup crew. Sure, they might be in the second expedition. If there was a second. Unless the first crew found something damned interesting, that seemed improbable. NASA was already far over budget on this one.

  Nothing to do but wait for the return signal, probably Rover barking back that it was still stuck. Viktor flicked the console view controls. “Let's catch news.”

  With a touch of pensive sadness she watched the TV feed from Cape Canaveral. There it stood, only moments from launch: the Big Boy Booster, as the media gang called it. She thought fleetingly of how everything on this mission was Rover Boy or Big Boy or some other closed-club name. How had that happened?

  Atop its cigar-shaped bulk was the seemingly tiny Mars Transit Vehicle, ready to be flung into orbit for its first space trials. She thought of her friends in there, waiting to ride into the black sky and deploy the silvery cylinder, spin it up with the last stage booster as a counter-weight, try out the 0.38 g for a month in gravity physiological trials— and felt another sour jolt of pure envy.

  Into the last twenty seconds now. She reached out and clasped Viktor's hand. She could get away with that, tense moment and all—if anybody noticed. (Or had they noticed long ago, even before she and Viktor got together, and cut them both to the second team?)

  “We have a burn,” came the flat, factual incantation, used now for over half a century at the Cape.

  The huge white booster, bigger than the Saturn V, lifted gracefully upward—and a spurt of virulent yellow leaped sideways from it. The explosion ripped apart the feeds just above the nozzles. Angry yellow climbed up the sides and, before she could gasp, engulfed the payload. Already the booster had begun to topple to the side.

  It was the worst sort of accident.

  Always feared, impossible to completely eliminate. A failed wall buffer at the high-pressure point. Fuel blockage. A pressure-driven chemical excursion.

  The enormous, ripping convulsion destroyed the gantry, support structures—the whole launch area. The six crew tried to eject but the whole event was far too fast for even astronaut reflexes. They all died, mercifully fast. So did an electrician, standing half a mile away, struck by flying steel.

  Julia went through the days of uproar in a glassy daze. Mourning for friends. Avoiding TV crews. Watching as the disaster undermined NASA's support in Congress. Letting the days creep by as the gray pall over her life slowly lifted.

  Soon enough the strident voices from the House floor claimed an even larger victim than the booster. The entire Mars campaign was “halted for the duration,” as one craggy-faced pol put it. The duration of what? Apparently, of the minimum-energy launch window that beckoned in 2016. After that, it would be 2018 before the next launch window. But once stopped, would the Mars program ever restart?

  Slowly Julia sank into depression. She had been buoyed up for so long by the taste of opportunity. To have it snatched away so abruptly left a big hole in her life.

  She had been riding on hope ever since, six years before, the United States had negotiated the Mars Accords. At the time it had seemed brilliant. The true trick of getting to Mars was how to do it without squandering anybody's entire Gross National Product. When President George Bush called in 1989 for a manned mission to Mars on the fiftieth anniversary of the 1969 Apollo landing, he got the estimated bill from NASA: $450 billion. The sticker shock killed Bush's initiatives in Congress. The price was high because everyone in NASA and their parasite companies tacked every conceivable extra onto the mission. An expanded space station. A moon base. Redundancy.

  Multiple backup systems are the key to safety—but the more backups, the higher the cost. NASA's $450 billion program was an enormous government pork farm.

  So a radical idea arose: the advanced nations could get this adventure on the cheap by simply offering a prize of $30 billion to the first manned expedition to return successfully from Mars.

  European governments had long used this mechanism for risky explorations, going back to the Portuguese in the 1400s. In 1911, William Randolph Hearst offered a $50,000 prize to the first person to fly across America in less than thirty days. Human-powered flight got a boost from a $200,000 award claimed in 1978 by the Gossamer Albatross. The method worked.

  The advantages were many, and political: governments would put out not a dime until the job was done, and only reward success; only private investors would lose if their schemes failed. Politicians could be proud, prophetic patrons of exploration and, simultaneously, enemies of make-work bureaucratic programs. And if astronauts died, it was on somebody else's head, not an embarrassment to a whole government.

  To win the Mars Prize, it would not be enough to fly a flags-and-footprints expedition. More like a treasure hunt, the Accords specified a series of scientific explorations—geologic mapping, seismic testing, studying atmospheric phenomena, taking core samples, looking for water and, of course, fossils or life. Samples returned from Mars would be immensely valuable: a full range of specimens weighing three hundred kilograms would be turned over to the Accords Board in exchange for the $30 billion. Anything over and above that was for the investors.

  On the surface, the Mars Accords were international treaty obligations to open Mars for a global effort. Actually it was grudging support for NASA, whom everyone expected to eventually claim the prize. Julia and the other astronauts had been in training under this initiative.

  But not now. Nobody else had taken up the challenge, and NASA had been slowly assembling an effort to fly at the minimum-energy planetary orbital window in 2016.

  A week after the blowup, a day after the big state funeral, President Feinstein announced that the U.S. would “redirect its energies to near-Earth projects.” Like building another wing on the space station, a notorious pork barrel beloved of Congress.

  Mars seemed dead. All the astronauts were dejected, their years of training wasted. A few took sudden leaves. One went skydiving. Some started hanging out in bars, not part of the approved health regimen.

  Julia tried to wear her Doris Day mask through the whole thing, but it kept slipping. She consoled Marc and Raoul, men who ditched good careers to train for Mars. Even then, she kept quiet about being romantically involved with Viktor. In the tight little world of astronaut politics, nobody knew what would happen next. Conceivably, just having kept it secret might knock them out of space station missions—the only game left.

  Then a slim, beautifully dressed man walked in on the Mars astronaut team at Johnson Space Center.

  He came with a trailing wedge of suited, alert men and women who formed a bow shock wave for him, enabling a dramatic entrance. He shook a few hands, traded short sallies, and worked the room almost like a politician. Julia knew she had seen him somewhere before. His gaze swept the NASA staff like a searching though affable spotlight. The whole room seemed to focus around him as people talking to the side stopped to watch.

  His swift gaze found the dozen astronauts. He paused for effect, then asked, “Who still wants to go to Mars—on the cheap?”

  John Axelrod. Ready smile, tanned good looks, darting blue eyes that gleamed with wary assessment. She had felt an uneasy fascination with him from the first moment.

  His money originally came from Genesmart, a biotech firm he helped start, that brought to market Tourex, an antibacterial to combat Montezuma's revenge. It had become the indispensable traveling companion for tourists and business travelers worldwide. When he took Genesmart
public, he was an overnight multibillionaire. But from his early years he had been the kind of man who would bet on whose bag came off the baggage claim carousel first. His interest in Mars ran back to childhood. He had been a washout in early astronaut training, but had kept a keen interest and had some insider, good ol’ boy contacts at NASA.

  He knew NASA's unmanned return ship, the ERV, had launched for Mars over a year ago. It had landed in Gusev Crater and refueled, using the Martian atmosphere, and was ready even now to fly a crew back to Earth. And he didn't want to see the Mars mission die.

  “Plus,” he had said to the astronauts, “there's money to be made.”

  In just a few wheeler-dealer days, Axelrod had put together a consortium of big corporations to win the $30 billion Mars Prize.

  “But we estimated sixty billion dollars to go,” one astronaut interrupted.

  “That's with bureaucrats and paperwork.” Axelrod grinned, white teeth against tanned skin. He looked to be in his forties, fit and bristling with peppery energy. “That, I'll cut.”

  He had a risky but inexpensive method for a red planet mission first suggested in the early 1990s. Instead of using NASA's costly orbiting return module, the Consortium crew would return to Earth directly in the NASA return ship.

  “But the ERV is government property!” an astronaut called.

  “It's an abandoned ship. My lawyers will argue that the Law of the Sea applies here. With no crew, it belongs to whoever gets to it.”

  “That's not fair!”

  “Life ain't.”

  “NASA will need it when they go.”

  “It'll be a junker by then.”

  Cutting the crew to four also allowed the Consortium to launch a smaller manned habitat vehicle. The crew of four would land near the ERV.

  “That's dangerous, outside our design protocols.”

  “Mars is already dangerous, and outside your control. I'm gonna minimize costs.”

  “But with four people, there's not enough backup.”