The Martian Race Page 15

  Raoul went outside first. They had to use the surface suits not really equipped for this kind of repair—the downside of going lean and mean. It was worse than a zero-g excursion—the only kind any of them had ever performed—because they could not de-spin the habitat. The hydrazine was gone. Their mission profile provided for losing their angular momentum as they approached Mars by simply blowing the cable, setting the upper stage and cable into a long orbit into the solar system. There was no propellant to adjust their centrifugal gravity up or down after they had reached the 0.38 level.

  Raoul had to go out the main lock with Viktor. They rigged a line around the lock lever and stepped out into the 0.38 g pull. Julia had watched it all on the video, her heart thumping. This was an utterly untried exercise, something nobody had ever done, not even in the station trials.

  They worked their way around to the handholds thoughtfully set in the habitat skin. Progress was slow. Raoul gave a yell when he saw the thin plume of water foaming into a white fountain from the jacket.

  Julia could barely see him on the forward vid screen, around the curve of the habitat. Nobody had thought of this problem, of course, and nobody had thought of how crazily the stars veered when you were wheeling around in a big circle every minute. The sun's glare swept like a spotlight across the hab's skin, followed by a thirty-second night. The swift change in the light levels alone was disorienting. Add to that the pinwheeling stars … It was hard enough watching it from inside.

  Raoul got to the spot while Viktor played the line out. “Some of the debris from the manifold bolts is stuck in here. I'm pulling it out.”

  She could see more water billow out, turning to vapor, making it hard to work. He worked for ten minutes on the job and then said over comm, “I can't make a patch hold against the pressure. These weren't made for positive pressure at all, y'know.”

  “Got to be can block it,” Viktor insisted.

  “You come up here and try.”

  This was not a jibe, but a legitimate request. EVA operations were legendary in zero g. Done in a suit not optimum for the task, clinging to a wall in 0.38 g's—as they all agreed, it was an astro-nightmare. Viktor tried and failed, too.

  They were running out of suit time. The Earth link was full of non-advice, the sort of hand-wringing that was Mission Control's first reaction to the unexpected.

  “I don't think we've got anything aboard that can take positive pressure in a vacuum for long,” Marc said.

  A long silence. Julia could hear Viktor's labored breathing over her suit comm.

  Julia said slowly, “I can think of a trick. Let me look into it, guys. Hold on.”

  “Is what we are doing.”

  “I've got to check some things.”

  “Make it fast,” Raoul sent, voice filled with knotted frustration.

  She found a circular sealant layer in the maintenance kit. The hardest part of the operation proved to be climbing up to the hatch opening, near the habitat ceiling. There she opened the emergency access to the water system. The entire habitat was sheltered by a layer of water a hand's length deep. Water's hydrogens give, ounce for ounce, the best shielding against the solar wind and cosmic rays that lance through the inner solar system. Not that their water blocked all of the speeding particles. But since water is also the great essential in the life-cycling system, Axelrod had sprung for an ample supply. Every kilogram of the stuff had cost more than a normal astronaut's annual salary to launch to Mars, and every minute one of those kilograms was fizzing off into the vacuum outside.

  She felt tight apprehension as she dropped the brilliant blue patch into their water supply. It sank.

  “We can live with the taste,” she said airily. It came out brittle and high-pitched.

  Her idea was that the suction of the leak would draw the patch to the inner part of the puncture. Long moments ticked by. The digits on the internal monitor showed steady loss. Raoul and Viktor clung to the hull, watching their vital supply vent into pearly fog, then nothing. Julia waited with them.

  “Hey! Is stopped.”

  The fog thinned.

  “Here, slap this on again,” Raoul said.

  With Raoul's external patch, the blockage from inside held.

  She learned later that the entire drama had taken nearly two hours. It seemed like longer in memory. Nobody had noticed that the video cameras were following their motions, overridden by Earthside and slaved to Mission Control. The entire planet had anxiously watched Raoul and Viktor, or at least the portion of their helmets visible over the curve of the hull. And they had seen her scale the wall and drop the patch in. In an ordinary vid show this would have been boring stuff. In real time, it was high drama, living history.

  Julia was upset at the vid coverage, at first. It was too much to ask that they star in a home movie that might have ended in their deaths.

  Never mind that their losses meant that it was going to be a dry voyage. To keep adequate shielding water in the walls meant using less in the life cycle. Short showers, very careful cooking and cleaning. Finish all drinks. No wastage. Like living in a desert.

  But their quick, efficient teamwork had enthralled the globe. It was the first time they'd confronted a real crisis together, not a training simulation.

  Raoul emerged as an instant media hero, mostly because he was in camera range more of the time than the others.

  When it was over they all slept most of the first week, not wholly from fatigue, but from the need to escape the sense of a closing vise around their lives. Recovery was slow. Each spent time talking to their Personal counselors.

  Axelrod loved it. “The worst trips make the best stories,” he said, and meant it.

  Stories—they realized that they were now immersed in what was, for everyone on Earth, an ongoing serial story. And in the long dull days following, they relaxed in the tiny social room of the circular hab and began to invent their own versions. They began writing their memoirs. There would be four solid best-sellers out of this, no problem, already under contract with fat advances paid.

  Amateur writers all, they started out with titles which they tried out on each other.

  “I think I'll call mine Mars or Bust,” said Marc.

  That got a laugh from Raoul. “More like Mars and Busted, don't you think?”

  “I know—Mars or and Busted.” They howled with laughter, delayed release from earlier terrors.

  “Together on Mars,” suggested Viktor, grinning at Julia.

  Axelrod had a surer sense of drama. Faster than the crew, he had long ago realized that folly was acceptable to the public if it was his money at stake. If the taxpayers were paying, they demanded certainty, safety—and then got bored if it was dull, dull, dull. Apollo 11 had been a perfect technical masterpiece. Apollo 13 the movie grossed hundreds of millions.

  Some thought all this undignified. NASA had trained many to think that only emotionally repressed pilots spouting acronyms were The Real Stuff. Largely without planning, the Mars crew had become media icons, each standing for some faction of the metapopulation. Raoul was the Minority, Marc the Good Guy, Viktor the Lovable Foreigner.

  Of course Julia had to play Stalwart Heroine, Feminist Pioneer. Of course; only she couldn't remember her lines.

  Long before the famous water crisis, they had gotten used to being celebs: the Bright Stuff. By the time they launched there were Mesh betting parlors on chances for a booster blowup just like the last one. (Not great odds, either: 23 percent for failure, Viktor reported.)

  The analogy that seemed to frame it all was Antarctica. Scott, Amundsen, and Shackleton had made their classic races across frozen wastes, high drama in a place distant, hostile and worthless. Mars was a comparable canvas for the twenty-first century.

  For Shackleton, self-promotion had been essential all the way. He had paid all his expenses with media tie-ins, one way or another: auctioning off news and picture rights before he left, taking special postage stamps along to be franked at the south pole. Af
ter he made it, his bestseller had nine translations. He spruced up his expedition ship into a museum and charged admission. With a lecture tour and a phonograph record, a first film of the Antarctic and countless newspaper interviews, he made his way into history—and prosperity. Even when he could not reach the pole, he returned to Europe with a sound bite: Death lay ahead and food behind, so I had to return.

  By the time they actually reached Mars, the world had gotten used to this modern manifestation of the same phenomenon.

  Name That Peak! Again, Shackleton had done it first, sticking the names of his patrons on spots in the Antarctic. Beardmore Glacier, its name bought for $34,000—big bucks, in those days. How about selling rights to name the Valles Marinaris, a 2,800-mile-long trench? Axelrod asked the question and there were plenty of takers lined up. In principle the lucky “donor” could then title the chasm for anything, but it seemed unlikely that the sort of hard driver who became a media tycoon or retailing genius would go for anything except his own place on the Martian map—price suitably adjusted to the size of the geographical object, of course.

  The International Astronomical Union stiffly disputed him in court, since they had rights to name astronomical objects. But Axelrod claimed “explorers’ rights,” his lawyers basing their opinions on early eighteenth-century legal precedent. The case got bogged down in several courts. Axelrod kept selling anyway. He even published a map showing prominent craters, plains, and mounts with their proud new names. Olympus Mons became Gates Mountain.

  Once on Mars, the beat went on.

  Live from Mars, It's Saturday Night!—she and Viktor had made millions by exchanging scripted lines before the camera, all to be duly synchronized with straight lines from Earthside pop stars. It was fun, in a way. There certainly wasn't much to do on a Saturday night on the real Mars, a dead blackness a hundred degrees Centigrade below zero outside.

  So in a way, the media frenzy that leaked through to them, as they labored on ERV repairs and rested in silence, had a familiar old-shoe flavor.

  To Julia, it was a lifeline. They all needed one.

  14

  JANUARY 15,2018

  AS IT TURNED OUT, AXELROD ANTICIPATED JULIA'S SCENARIO. AFTER the ERV engine test failure, his NASAnaut detractors were quick to point out that their mission profile wouldn't have left the crew without a backup.

  “Your mission never left the ground,” was his widely reported response. This was a heavily edited version of his real retort, according to Janet, in a private correspondence to Marc. She had been in the comm center with Axelrod when the exchange took place.

  In public, Axelrod defended his mission plan as conservative and downplayed the danger. Nevertheless, he told the crew, he was “feeling out” Airbus about “a possible cooperative strategy.”

  For the first time in months, Julia saw glimpses of the old Axelrod in the vids he recorded. The rambling, overly familiar discourses to the crew were replaced by controlled, almost formal squirts. Delivered in measured tones and intended to be reassuring and supportive, these almost certainly had been heavily massaged by the psych advisors. And probably face-filtered for warm and fuzzy expressions, too.

  Despite the crew's dislike of having to rely on Airbus, even Raoul had to grudgingly admit that it was “good to know the bastard is working on getting us back.”

  Axelrod's actions seemed to Julia to be a glimmer at the end of the tunnel. Maybe candle-sized, and flickering in a high wind. For most of the day she thought about the negotiations taking place on Earth for their return, while she played gofer for Raoul and Viktor. She decided to try again.

  After dinner she turned to Marc. “Okay, suppose we can get off at the launch window. With our ERV or with Airbus. What do you think we could do now with the highest impact?”

  Marc looked surprised. Nobody answered for a very long time. In their weary faces she read a vast reluctance to face this issue. She realized with a start that the three men were already finished with the exploration part of the trip. They were completely focused on packing up and going home.

  But she was not.

  Finally Marc said slowly, “Geology, maybe.”

  Viktor laughed sourly. “Scratch scientist, find fanatic.”

  Marc bristled. “This vent thing is making me rethink—”

  “Geology, we have plenty,” Viktor rumbled on. “A cold, dry desert with red rocks and ancient water erosion. Not much better than the Viking pictures.”

  Raoul said reasonably, “Julia, this is an old argument. Of course the Viking landing spots were purposely picked to be flat and boring and dry. Not the best places to look for life, but the safest to land. Now we know Viking could never, anywhere on Mars, have found microbes that retreated below ground when the seas and lakes dried up.”

  “Over a billion years ago, I estimate,” Marc put in. “Maybe two.”

  “We don't know that those fossils are the whole story,” she said. “Stromatolites on Earth were the beginning, not the end, of evolution.”

  Viktor called, “Ah, your new version of the old Sagan argument. While Viking was licking dust into the biology experiments, an undetected Martian giraffe walked by on the other side of the lander.”

  Julia bristled but did not show it. Sometimes she wondered if Viktor had to occasionally show that he was not an automatic ally just because he was her husband. “You know I'm not really expecting Earth-type animals, but I'm keeping an open mind about other possibilities.”

  Marc blinked. “You really think we'll find something alive in that vent?”

  “I certainly think we should look. We're probably never going to be here again, any of us.” She looked around at them. “Right?”

  This they had never discussed. In some ways the surface mission was the safest part of the expedition. Their coming launch was risky, and the aerobraking into Earth's atmosphere would be more tricky than their rattling deceleration in the comparatively soft Martian atmosphere. Still, the sheer wearing-down of laboring in the harsh, cold dryness of Mars had sobered them all somewhat. When they returned home—or if—they would be wealthy, famous. Would they do this again?

  “I might come back,” Marc said.

  “I, too,” Raoul said, though without the conviction he had before.

  “I am honest enough to say that I will not.” Viktor grinned at them. “I will have a wealthy wife, remember.”

  They all laughed, maybe more than the joke deserved. Warm chuckles, after a filling meal, served to remind them that they were a team, closer than any contracts could bring them. This was a highly public, commercial enterprise, of course, but none of it would work without a high degree of cooperation and intuitive synchronization.

  Julia looked at the others, their clothes emblazoned with the logos of mission sponsors, all quite soiled. Through the Consortium's endless marketing they had endorsed a staggering array of products. But this grand adventure was not itself a product. They were destined to be a team forever, no matter what happened in the future.

  Marc said, “The metals, that's why I'm here. They'll be more important than fossil life, in the long run.”

  “Not so,” said Viktor. “Asteroid belt is where we will go for metals. Mars is where we build base to mine the asteroids. Going to be much cheaper to boost from here than anyplace else.”

  Raoul emerged from the pint-sized galley toting his coffee. It was in a large mug, incongruously solid ceramic, in sharp contrast to the rest of their lightweight plastic dishes. Katherine had hand painted it with flowers for him early in their courtship, and he had toted it with him as part of his personal mass allowance. Only he ever used it, of course. He sipped and scowled. “So we've just wasted our time looking for metals on Mars? Suits me. If we jettisoned all of the damned ore samples there'd even be room to breathe on the return.”

  Julia said, “We shouldn't be limited by what we think we know. Or what we think we're going to find. A biologist named Lovelock pointed out, well before the Viking landings, that there w
as probably no life because the atmosphere was in chemical equilibrium with the surface. Spectroscopy from Earth showed plainly that there was nothing in it but boring CO2 and nitrogen.”

  “Good argument, you have to admit,” Marc said.

  “But it assumed life would use the atmosphere as its buffering chemical medium. Unlikely, because it's so thin … so, what about life that has long abandoned the atmosphere?”

  “How could it do that?” Marc looked puzzled.

  “Life may be holding on deep underground. Using emissions of, say, hydrogen sulfide, as an energy source. That's just a guess, of course, but we'll never know if we don't look. And we can't do that except through the vents.”

  “Good theory, but until we get the ERV fixed, there's no use talking about what else we could be doing.” Raoul had his set look, jaw solid and eyes narrowed, announcing his position.

  They had been through all of this before, of course. In the course of two years you get to know each other's views pretty damn well.

  Life at Zubrin Base—their unofficial name, in honor of the hot-eyed founder of the Mars Society—settled into a dull routine of ERV repair, machine shop work, and normal maintenance. Through the long hours Julia dreamed of the vent, heard the clock ticking in her head, and seethed inwardly.

  After a frustrating morning of hanging around doing trivial gofer tasks for the repair effort, she headed for the greenhouse. The task of trying to grow food on Mars was hers. A colony would need to produce much of its own calories to avoid the kinds of supply problems faced by Napoleon's army in Russia.

  One of the best-kept secrets of the space station age was that the astronauts had not been living in a closed system. Far from being self-sufficient, Mir, Skylab, and the International Space Station had been just end points of Earth's delivery system. Oxygen, food, and water were ferried up, depleted tanks were returned to Earth, and garbage was just dumped, to eventually burn up on reentry into the atmosphere.

  It fell to private, Earth-based experiments to start work on the problems of recycling within closed systems. The Biosphere II project in the Arizona desert had become a legendary cautionary tale by the time Julia joined the NASA astronaut corps. That two-year experiment in the 1990s had hardly been a success—everyone lost weight, medical emergencies led two people to be evacuated, and there was a mysterious loss of oxygen from the system.