The Martian Race Read online

  “I don't wanna back up. I want to go forward.”

  “If anybody gets sick—”

  “There'll be a qualified doctor. But he—or she—will pull other duties, too. Everybody works, all the time.” “Four is still too few!”

  “Hey, the fewer you send, the fewer we can lose.”

  This met only silence.

  But … orbital mechanics were clear and cruel. The whole round trip would take two and a half years. Due to the shifting alignment of the planets, launch windows for trajectories needing minimum fuel are spaced about twenty-six months apart. The trip each way takes about six months, leaving about one and a half years on the surface.

  When he finished, Axelrod stood back and hooked his thumbs in his belt and waited for more howls of protest. There was silence. His direct, no-BS manner had sobered the astronauts. NASA's big-bucks plan would have taken less than a year, round trip—expensive in fuel, but easy on the crew. The Consortium four would have to hold out on Mars, exploring and staying alive, for a grueling endurance test.

  But it would be cheap. And they'd all get rich … if they got back. The salaries would range well into millions. Axelrod tossed off, “For the survivors, that is. And the widows.”

  “You can do all that for thirty billion bucks?” someone asked.

  “Nope, twenty. Got to be a profit here, folks.”

  A long silence.

  “Any volunteers?” Axelrod asked. The dozen astronauts all looked at one another. One stormed out, calling Axelrod a maniac. Three others expressed reservations and drifted out the door.

  But eight were willing. Eager. Including Julia and Viktor, Raoul and Marc.

  Over the next few weeks the eight candidates threw themselves into planning for Axelrod's risky Mars Direct concept, much as the original Mercury astronauts took a hands-on role in developing the first spacecraft. The ideas had been around for a while, pushed by the Mars Society. Axelrod just knew what to purloin. They had a joyous visit from Bob Zubrin, the Tom Paine of Mars who had pushed the earliest ideas about going on the cheap. Graying but as hot-eyed as ever, Zubrin gave the staff meeting he attended an evangelical fervor.

  Axelrod believed in the vigor of private capital, sure, but with the inexorable workings of planetary orbits bringing the launch window ever closer, he knew how to save time. He leased the Johnson Space Center facility for training astronauts—the cheapest, easiest, and quickest way to continue their conditioning.

  Getting the private camel's nose under the NASA tent was not easy. But the Congressional timidity about going had a flip side: joy at a windfall of private money. The long-awaited crisis in Social Security, Medicare, and other overloaded social systems demanded fresh infusions of raw cash. Axelrod came to Congress with a delightful transfusion. Next year Congress would have to face painful cuts, but hell, that was next year.

  Soon enough Axelrod was selling camera crews the right to film at JSC the intensive crew training. Grav-stress tests for aerobraking. The glitches in integrating and servicing the food, water, and waste systems. Not least, the medical nightmares coming up due to the six-month-long free-fall flight to Mars. The doctors were sure the crew would be too weak to function once they arrived, one major reason NASA had opted for a more expensive but shorter route. Never before had network anchors worried on the nightly news about zero-g effects, radiation levels, and the subtleties of orbital mechanics.

  Even better, they debated a growing mystery. Axelrod's whole plan was based on buying, cheaply, the prototypes of hardware for NASA's doomed mission, then converting them into the actual flight modules. But certain key components were missing. No explanation, sorry.

  The gone gear was particularly centered around the life-support systems. Julia suspected some of the more remote provinces of NASA were hoarding these for some other venture, in the wake of the agency's retreat from Mars. Who else would want to hold on to it?

  This forced Axelrod to dig deeper into his own pockets to replace them. Grumbling, he did so. Julia got to see him grandly write a check for $2.3 billion. The cameras ate up the whole thing, of course.

  Costs mounted. Estimates of future expenses soared even faster.

  The whole world watched, and most betting was that Axelrod would fall flat on his underfinanced face well before liftoff.

  One day Julia and Viktor were at a swimming pool with the married astronauts, Raoul and Katherine Molina. Twenty feet down, in full pressure suits, they were simulating zero gravity conditions that would occur in the six-month flight. Axelrod came charging in with his usual corps of assistants straggling after. He shouted out orders—after all, he paid the rent—and had them hauled out of the pool.

  Dripping, irritated, weighed down by their heavy suits, the astronauts stood watching him. “Big announcement, guys. Had to tell you myself.”

  “Suit radios we have,” Viktor said.

  “This you don't wanna hear on those comms. Forget the pool work. You aren't going in zero at all.”

  Another money saver. He and his team had decided on a Russian space habitat prototype that was designed to create artificial gravity in flight. The crew compartment module was connected by a cable to the last stage of the big booster rocket they launched with. By making these two modules revolve about each other, the habitat would feel an artificial, centrifugal “gravity.”

  “See,” Axelrod said, “that cuts down on training and gear. Solves other problems, too—those medical worries, to start. Makes the plumbing work a whole lot easier, too.”

  So the Consortium mission was a go. But which four of the eight got to fly?

  Julia had not been able to sleep the night before Axelrod's selection announcement. Neither had Viktor. She knew—she was next to him, tossing and fretting.

  “You are more the favorite,” Viktor said suddenly. “You must face going without me.”

  “Me, the favorite?”

  “Better looking. Talk better, too.”

  She had never really considered the possibility that he wouldn't be with her on Mars. That only one of them would be chosen. She had never thought about their future, not in the terms he dryly outlined.

  “Each have maybe fifty-fifty shot. Probability we both go, twenty-five percent.”

  “You're the best pilot.”

  “You are best biologist and general backup. But without knowing more, those are the odds.”

  She held him close. “I don't like to think of our lives together in terms of probabilities.”

  “Agree. Is too much like our daily work.”

  People weren't best considered, she felt, as racehorses. They just were.

  Axelrod made his picks at a big press conference. Plenty of camera snouts, tons of tension. Feeding the eye-appetite of humanity. None of the astronauts wanted it that way, but Axelrod had licensed coverage of the event to a cable network on an exclusive.

  “Got to raise capital, y'know. Send you folks to Mars with steaks and champagne.”

  And the team of four were, the married couple, Raoul and Katherine. The very telegenic pilot, Marc Bryant. And Julia.

  But not Viktor.

  The four chosen astronauts sat at a long table on the dais behind Axelrod. She looked at the others. Raoul and Marc beamed, Katherine was smiling her careful astronaut's smile that could mean anything. And Julia?

  It was like a sudden lurch into zero g. Falling. No Viktor.

  They were not just probabilities. She remembered thinking, We're ourselves, not race horses.

  She sat beneath the glaring, searching lights and thought, No Viktor. For two and a half years. By the time I get back, it will be over between us.

  3

  JANUARY 2018

  THE CRACKLE OF THE RADIO STARTLED HER. “HOME TEAM HERE. GOT your heads-up, Julia. How is he?” Marc's crisp efficiency came over clearly, but she could hear the clipped tenor anxiety, too.

  “Stable.” She quickly elaborated on Viktor's symptoms, glancing at his sleeping face. She'd had a year of physici
an's assistant training and was the official medical officer, but Marc had more field experience, and a med school degree. She felt relieved when he approved of her treatment. “Got to think what this means,” he said laconically.

  “We'll be there for supper. Extra rations, I'd say.”

  A small, very small joke. They had celebrated each major finding with a slightly excessive food allotment. Extra beer, too. She was in charge of brewing and they always had plenty on tap from the keg in the bio lab.

  So far, they had not marked disasters this way. And they were having their share.

  “My night to cook, too,” Marc said, transparently trying to put a jovial lilt to it. “Take care, Jules. Watch the road.”

  Here came the heart-squeezing moment.

  She turned the start-up switch and in the sliver of time before the methane-oxygen burn started in the rover engine, all the possible terrors arose.

  If it failed, could she fix it? Raoul and Marc could come out in an unpressured rover and rescue them, sure, but that would chew up time … and be embarrassing. She wasn't much of a mechanic, but still, who likes to look helpless?

  Then the mixture caught and the rover chugged into action. Settling in, she peered out at the endless obstacles with the unresting concentration that had gotten her on this mission in the first place. To spend five hundred seventy days on Mars you wanted people who found sticking to the tracks a challenge, not boring. One of the job specs for astronauts was an obsessive-compulsive profile.

  She followed the autotracker map meticulously, down a narrow valley and across a flood plain, then over a boulder-strewn pass and down a narrow valley and across a flood plain, then over a pass …

  Here, a drive back to base that proved uneventful was even pleasant. Mars was always ready to thunk a wheel into an unseen hole or pitch the rover down a slope of shifting gravel, so she kept exactly to the tracks they had made on the way out, a proven safe return. She had seen enough of this red-hued terrain to last a lifetime, anyway. Nothing out there for a biologist.

  In the distance she caught sight of the formation she and Viktor had dubbed the Shiprock on the way out. It looked like a huge old sailing ship, red layers sculpted by eons of high winds. They'd talked about Ray Bradbury's sand ships, tried to imagine skimming over the undulating landscape. The motion of the rover always reminded her a little of being on the ocean. They were sailing over the Martian landscape on a voyage of discovery, a modern-day Columbus journey. But Columbus made three voyages to the New World without landing on the continent. He “discovered” America by finding islands in the Caribbean, nibbling on the edges of a continent. Still, he got a holiday named for him …

  A sudden thought struck her: was that what they were doing— finding only the fringes of the Mars biology? Many people had speculated that the subterranean vents were the most likely places for life on this planet. The frontier for her lay hundreds of meters below, out of reach. She sighed resignedly. But it had been great fun, at first.

  She slurped more tea, recalling the excitement of the first months. Some of it was pure fame rush, of course. Men on Mars! (Uh, and a woman, too.) They were household names now, the first Mars team, sure bets for all the history books. Hell, they might eventually eclipse Neil Armstrong.

  She was first author on a truly historic paper, the first submitted to Nature from another world. Barth, Bryant, Molina, & Nelyubov's “Fossil Life on Mars” described their preliminary findings: it would rank with Watson and Crick's 1952 paper nailing the structure of DNA. That paper had opened up cell biology and led to the Biological Century.

  What would their discovery lead to? There was already a fierce bidding war for her samples. Every major lab wanted to be the first to examine the fossils, maybe extract Martian DNA, if any, and determine the relationship between Martian and Terran life.

  With her small scanning electron microscope she'd gotten decent enough pictures to confirm that these were indeed fossils, and not just wavy compression features in the rock. They looked strikingly like stromatolite fossils, tough layer cakes of bacteria. Some of the bacteria in living stromatolites on Earth were photosynthetic cyanobacteria, and thus green, but the Martian rocks gave no color clues.

  She started on her favorite speculation: where did life start? Mars was smaller and so cooled first. Life could have arisen here while Earth was still a hot lava ball. Then it could have gone to Earth via the meteorite express.

  Organized life-forms from Mars seeding Earth's primitive soup of basic organic molecules would have quickly dominated. Martians invade, eat Earthly resources! H. G. Wells with a twist. We may yet turn out to be Martians. Pretty heady stuff for the scientific community, and it would change our essential worldview. Full employment for philosophers, too, and even religious theorists.

  The Martian meteorites with their enigmatic fossils had tantalized scientists for years. When first discovered, the big question had been whether the tiny shapes actually were fossils, because most people thought they knew that Mars was lifeless. Now we know about that part, at least, she thought.

  But deep down she realized she'd wanted to find life, not fossils, and even more than that, L*I*F*E.

  Marc was jazzed by the discovery of deeper deposits of fossils, separated by layers of sterile peroxide-laden sediments in the old ocean beds. That implied periodic episodes of a wetter and warmer climate.

  But so far she had not found anything alive. Even the first volcanic vent they had explored had no life, only peroxide soil blown into it from the surface, like a dusty old mine shaft.

  Before today, that is. And now they were about to leave, the subterranean reaches still unexplored. Damn!

  After five hours Viktor was doing well, had regained his energy and good spirits. They even managed a clumsy but satisfying slap and tickle when she stopped the rover for lunch. In the cramped, fishbowl world of the hab, they'd learned to use the privacy of the rover to great advantage. Today she felt nervous and skittish, but Viktor was a persistent sort and she finally realized that this just might do both of them more good than anything in the medicine chest back in the habitat.

  The route began to take them—or rather, her, since Viktor crashed again right after sex; this time she forgave him—through familiar territory. She had scoured the landscape within a few days of the hab. Coming down in the Gusev Crater, they got a full helping of Mars: chasms, flood runoff plains, wrinkled canyons, chaotic terrain once undermined by mud flows, dried beds of ancient rivers and lakes, even some mysterious big potholes that must have been minivolcanoes somehow hollowed out.

  Her pursuit of surface fossil evidence of life had been systematic, remorseless—and mostly a waste.

  Not a big surprise, really, in retrospect. Any hiker in the American west was tramping over lands where once tyrannosaurus and bison had wandered, but seldom did anybody notice a bone sticking out of the ground. Julia was more systematic and probed deeper in the obvious places, where water had once silted up and could have trapped recently dead organisms. Algal mats, perhaps, as with the first big life-forms on Earth. But she had no luck, even in a year and a half of snooping into myriad canyons and promising beds of truly ancient lakes. That didn't mean life wasn't somewhere on the planet. It had been warm and moist here for a billion years, enough for life to evolve, even if Mars had not supported surface life for perhaps three billion or more years.

  She stamped her feet to help the circulation. Space heaters in the rover ran off the methane-oxy burn, but as always, the floor was cold. Mars never let you forget where you were.

  She tried to envision how it must have been here, billions of years ago. This was her cliché daydream, trying to impose on the arid red wastes the romance of what they could have been, once upon a time.

  Did life give way with a grudging struggle, trying every possible avenue before retreating underground or disappearing?

  The planet did not die for want of heat or air, but of mass. With greater gravity it could have held on to the gas
es its volcanoes vented, prevented its water vapor from escaping into vacuum. Recycling of carbon didn't happen on Mars, the CO2 was lost to carbonate rocks. The atmosphere thinned, the planet cooled …

  Split from hydrogen by the sun's stinging ultraviolet, the energetic oxygen promptly mated with the waiting iron in the rocks. The shallow gravitational well failed. Light hydrogen blew away into the yawning vastness of empty space. The early carbon dioxide fused into the rocks, bound forever as carbonate. Had Mars been nearer the sun, the sunlight and warmth would simply have driven water away faster.

  So those early life-forms must have fought a slow, agonizing retreat. There were eras when lakes and even shallow, muddy seas had hosted simple life—Marc's cores had uncovered plenty of ancient silted plains, now compressed into sedimentary rock. But no fossil forests, nothing with a backbone, nothing with shells or hard body parts. If higher forms had basked in the ancient warmth here, they had left no trace.

  The squat hab came into view in the salmon sunset.

  They had landed in the ancient flat bottom of Gusev Crater, whose distant ramparts reared over a kilometer into the rosy sky. A hundred fifty klicks across, Gusev was a geologist's playground.

  One of astronomy's more arcane pleasures was eclectic naming. Gusev was a mini–United Nations. To the south lay the Ma'adim Vallis, “Martian Valley” in Arabic. Gusev himself had been a nineteenth-century Russian astronomer. Some French Planetary scientists working for the Americans had given the small crater near their base the Greek name Thyra.

  She could see the slumped peaks of Thyra as she headed south. One of the major reasons to land here had been a tantalizing dark spot on Thyra's southern rim. Under telepresence guidance from Earth, Rover Boy had found promising signs that the spot was a salt flat left by a thermal vent. True enough, but when they arrived they found that the site had not given off anything for maybe half a billion years. A crushing disappointment, that first month. But if there had been venting, maybe there was still, nearby. She had lived with that ebbing hope for a year and a half.