The Project Manager

by Terry Connolly

  The Commander frowned, “What if there is a breach of military protocol, or worse, state secrets? I understand that this ship will be for civilian use eventually, but on this mission, even though it too is ultimately a civilian mission, for the duration of the trip the colonists are under military command.”

  John nodded, “you’re quite right, this could be an issue. Of course, we will make sure all footage will be passed through to you for approval.”

  Commander Sharapova frowned, “This sounds like extra effort that is of no benefit to the mission.”

  Hong had her hand up and spoke, “If I may suggest something. I am sure the trainees wouldn’t intentionally breech protocol, it would however be a shame to have this footage locked up. I understand there is no presenter or narrator?”

  “That’s correct,” replied John

  “In that case, if Commander Sharapova would agree to it, maybe she could present the video, be the narrator, then you could be sure it contains no sensitive material as you will have been there all along.”

  All eyes turned to the Commander. She sat up straighter, though no one thought that possible, “I will have to think on that, it is indeed a workable solution Dr. Alverez, in principle it could work, yes.”

  John could have run down the table and kissed Hong right then and there, instead he just said “right, that sounds positive. Next point on the agenda is allocation of the shop space.”

  By the end of the week some Russian and Chinese Martian colonists were installed in shops on the Market Square selling a limited amount of produce from supplies, and adding some life to the ship. The colonists chose their own business’ and straight away there were several Chinese restaurants, a bakery, a bicycle repair shop, a café, an Italian restaurant, an estate agent where people could swap apartments, a laundrette, a tailoring service, and of course three bars: “The Captain Morrison” (the captain secretly was quite proud of this), “The Moscow,” and “O’Sheas” (because even in the vacuum of space you can find an Irish pub). During opening week, there was the ever-present figure of Commander Sharapova with a microphone and a group of trainees; it turned out she was a natural at it. According to the trainees she was very precise in what she wanted, but the footage was great. During the second week, mainly due to the presence of one of the bars brewing their own spirits, there was an addition to the shop fronts in the form of a police station equipped with holding cells. Again, Commander Sharapova was there to film it and to interview the police officers, and by now, the importance of the social infrastructure experiment was obvious. The Commander appointed one of her lieutenants as head of the police force, and instantly an argument began as to whether the police force should be controlled by the military or by civilians. The Commander, through sheer force of will, got her way, but only after the Zheng He had seen its first peaceful protest, and an agreement was reached on basic rules governing the new police force.

  By the end of the month, a quarter of the way through the voyage, the experiment was no longer just an addendum at the staff meeting. The presence of the market had opened up another can of worms that John had expected much later. In the first few days of the experiment people were using variations of their Earth currencies, but the council, sticking to the guidelines of the experiment, pointed out that while the Martian colonists could still rely on Earth banks to guarantee their currencies, the Amrita colonists would be outside the Earth’s sphere of influence, and so the participants in the experiment had to come up with an alternative. It was very quickly realised that this was unworkable, any currencies they came up with could be easily forged and bartering goods was too cumbersome. While this turmoil was going on, the shops kept trading, trying to muddle along as best they could. It was the Italian restaurant that came up with the solution, or rather one of their customers did. While bartering was going on elsewhere using goods, one evening a resourceful trainee offered instead to spend twenty minutes the next morning cleaning the restaurant. Following some negotiation and some rough calculations about overheads they reached agreement at twenty six minutes of washing up that evening.

  Commander Sharapova documented the whole evolution of this financial system. The Amrita colonists might use this system or develop one of their own but at least they would have all the information available to them. This system of labour bartering very quickly required price setting, exchanges and following soon after; lawyers, or at people who could resolve disputes reasonably. There was very little a bartender could do with more labour-hours than needed and drinks that cost five minutes labour meant there was no guarantee anyone would ever pay it back. In the end, the total amount of free time of everyone aboard was added together and formed the gross national product of the Zheng He, and as a result an electronic currency was developed and integrated into people’s ID cards. It wasn’t perfect, but it functioned.

  There were many other things aboard that weren’t functioning at optimal efficiency. In the garden, Borislav noticed from his soil tests that it was losing nutrients too quickly, particularly in areas planted with crops from temperate zones on Earth. It was not an immediate problem but after about twenty years it would become too difficult to grow root vegetables. Hong grew more and more impressed with her assistant as the voyage progressed. Together they worked out that the loss in soil nutrients was accompanied by impressive crop yields. While they already turned off the artificial sun to simulate night, there was nothing to simulate cloud cover or temperature change. The garden was so efficient at producing crops that it would exhaust itself. This was a hugely important discovery not just for the Zheng He but for the Martian colony too, and it caused a lot of excitement back on Earth, where rather than being seen as a problem, this finding was seen as a solution for food production, fusion powered farms were becoming reality on earth, with the potential to grow tropical fruit in Siberia, all year round. Hong and her team began replanting and rezoning so they could create microclimates for different crop types, when you can’t import artificial fertilizer, sustainability trumps production.

  One thing that worked perfectly was the magnetic shield. From the outset, solar radiation was deflected away, and internally the only radiation detectable was the low level natural from the rock. Even the surface sensors, once they had gotten past the Van Allen belts, showed radiation levels that would be quite safe for long duration spacewalks, not that it would be possible over the entire surface while the ship rotated to maintain artificial gravity. Engineering should have been delighted with this result, but instead it raised a more serious problem; according to their models, even at the relatively low speed at which they were currently travelling, the ship should have been collecting more ice than it was. If these models were wrong then what would happen in deep space, light years from any star, were it was impossible to predict how much there would be? Because of John’s past fusion experience, he was invited along to the meeting between Captain Morrison and the Chief Engineer; Ali Bishara. Engineering was a strange place. There was the constant low whirring from the fusion generators with occasional electronic beeps from various panels. The generators were really quite loud, but they had been vibrationally isolated and were separated from the main engine room for this very reason, resulting in more workable decibel level. Since engineering was on the main axis of the ship, gravity was very low, less than a quarter that of Earth, so the room was doughnut shaped to maximise the surface they could work with. All three of them, and their assistants, had copies of the measurements taken over the past forty five days since departure.

  “As you can see,” said Chief Engineer Ali, “the readings are all over the place, probably due to the recent solar activity, but there is only half the ice collection predicted, which means we are not getting the hydrogen we would need to maintain fusion in an interstellar situation.”

  “How were the figures arrived at for the initial models?” asked the Captain

  “Well, there have been years of measurements from probes not to mention all the ships we h
ave been sending to Mars over the past few years, so we know that we have a problem.”

  John interrupted; “So the fuel is out there? We are just not harvesting it?”

  “I don’t know,” replied Ali, “It should be there; maybe it’s not as evenly dispersed as we thought, but more than likely it’s an engineering problem.”

  The Captain nodded. “Ok, so we have tried reducing the strength of the magnetic field, then increasing it, and falling short of turning it off altogether we have exhausted options there?”

  “Yes,” replied Ali, “all with negligible results. Increasing the shield strength did increase the amount collected, but minimally. I know we didn’t expect everything to work first time, but this is a big one.”

  “You don’t need to remind me,” replied the Captain, “we can’t send her to Amrita when we know she doesn’t have enough fuel to reach it. John, can you think of an alternative?”

  “Well, she’ll have enough fuel to get to Mars,” said John, “the engines are efficient enough not to require much, but for the maiden voyage we can only store enough to get to the edge of the solar system, perhaps topping up with ice from the Oort cloud will do it, but with levels like this our built-in redundancy will be needed, that’s unacceptable.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, since the beginning, we have designed everything around worst-case scenarios. If there’s a breakdown in deep space, or if the engines lose efficiency, then the extra hydrogen collected was supposed to supplement any losses in stored fuel. She can get there by topping up, in an emergency, with water ice from comets, but that means she will have to start and stop, accelerate and decelerate, it will add decades to the voyage. If this is an engineering problem, I’m not worried, we can fix it…but if the quantities of fuel we need are not out there in the interstellar medium, we have a big problem.”

  Ali agreed; “these engines are a dream to work with, they will last the duration of the colonists’ journey and there are enough spare parts to keep them going, but I won’t go as far as saying that they will never wear out. After the first hundred years of operation it is likely their efficiency will be much less than we have predicted.”

  “What do you need then?” asked Captain Morrison.

  “A spacewalk,” replied Ali, “it must be the collectors at the base of the cone cut into the front of the ship, perhaps there are some sort of induction currents effecting it or something, but I’ll need to change them.”

  John agreed; “We have spare units in storage so that shouldn’t be a problem, I’ll get Stores to bring one up for you to test.”

  “Thanks,” replied Ali. “So Captain, can I have your permission to space-walk?”

  “Do your analysis of the spare collector unit first, you can go outside when we reach Mars and we can test your changes on the way back.”

  “Aye-Aye sir.”

  John shook his head from side to side; “I would rather we did it now, it would give extra time to the teams back on Earth to design a solution…though I have no idea what that would be.”

  Captain Morrison replied in the negative, “ideally we would John, but I think the risk in stopping rotation and then restarting when there is full complement on board is too great. Once we have reduced to a skeleton crew then yes. In the meantime, I’ll consult with Houston.”

  Ali added, “and I’ll ask the engineering teams on Earth to come up with solutions to possible other causes. I’d like to keep the time needed for repairs to a minimum.”

  As John walked away from Main Engineering, a familiar knot formed in his stomach, a worry that it was all really impossible, and in his mind an image formed, of a day long after his death, as people who are not yet born, lie gasping for breath inside a dead rock in the depths of space, his own grandchildren among them. He brought himself back from the nightmare. No, Ali was a top engineer, the teams back on Earth were the best people in their fields. This problem, like all the other seemingly insurmountable problems before it, would be solved.

  Chapter 20: 2057

  The Zheng He made it to Mars on schedule, after nearly four months in interplanetary space, ready to begin its three year stint as a small extra moon around the Red Planet. The billions of people back on Earth already missed seeing it overhead, while for the handful of miners and engineers on Mars who had been preparing for the colonists arrival, it was a welcome piece of home come to visit them.

  The Mars base, like the Zheng He, was dug into rock to protect the occupants from outside radiation, but also from the Martian atmosphere, or rather lack of it, and the Martian sunlight. All the colonists aboard the Zheng He did not descend to the surface upon arrival, there were still a lot of things to finish off, including the bio-domes, the components of which the Zheng He had carried there. This frustrated John no end, every delay meant rotation could not yet be halted, and the hydrogen collectors replaced. This just fed his background worries. Like the Zheng He, the Martian colony would grow their own food for sustenance and their own trees for air. The first and most important task was transporting it all down there. To move the situation along, John and his assistant Sally got to work overseeing the loading of the shuttles with the first components to be transported. These shipments would be routine enough, the weight limits for landing on Mars were well known and teams back on Earth had planned each loading accordingly.

  Finally, after 4 months of disembarking, Captain Morrison, in consultation with Earth Command, decided the conditions were right to stop rotation. Most areas of the ship would not be adversely affected, except one, the garden. Hong and her team sealed the fish farm, and sedated the animals, they placed mesh over the soil to fix it in place, and tethered what they could to pins sunk into the rock below the soil. When the thrusters were reversed, everyone was strapped into their emergency positions, just in case, but it went without a hitch, they kept the deceleration painstakingly slow.

  Ali’s tests on the spare collectors had not shown any problems, there were no induced currents, no way there could have been cracks or blockages that they could see. The bridge crew floated over their monitors as they observed Ali and his team walking down the internal slope of the cone which was supposed to scoop up fuel as the ship travelled forwards. The collectors were located at the base of this funnel and were supposed to vaporize the ice as it entered the ship. Ali’s voice came over the intercom: “great view captain, Olympus Mons is just coming over the horizon,”

  “ETA to destination?” asked communications.

  “About two minutes,” replied Ali, “the surface is in pristine condition, no visible wear from the voyage here.”

  “Affirmative, that’s good to hear Ali.”

  “Approaching, the collectors now…they’re…I don’t believe it..”

  “What is it? Can you already see the problem?”

  Ali and his team began laughing.

  “Ali, Captain speaking, is that a good laugh or a bad one?”

  “Captain, tell Hong her fish won’t be locked up for long. The collectors still have their covers in place, it is human error 101.”

  John’s shoulders relaxed, all that tension for nothing, well, hopefully for nothing, the collectors would need to be tested on the way back home, and that was still some time away.

  #

  John himself didn’t go straight down to the surface; he didn’t fancy the shuttle trip, the lack of a thick atmosphere to cushion the fall created an important psychological barrier for him. Even though it didn’t make much sense, logically he knew that even if there was a more substantial atmosphere like the Earth’s, it wouldn’t save him in the event of engine failure. As it was, a crew had died in the early days of landing on Mars, the thrusters designed to slow their decent were not aligned properly and as a result they had landed hard enough to crack the fuel tanks and blow sky high. Besides, he had convinced himself of the necessity of staying on the ship to rush things along so that rotation could be stopped. Once John did finally run out of excuses, and go
t up the courage to go, coaxed along by his wife and daughter, he didn’t regret it. He hadn’t relaxed properly since launch and was in need of a few days of mental recuperation. Since the Martian colonists would need holidays too, a number of recreation areas had been constructed within the caves below the surface that they would call home. John, Hong, and Abby would spend time meditating, watching movies, and suiting up for surface walks with a guide. When he had first set foot on Mars, because of the gravitational change and lack of a sense of his world spinning, John took some time to find his “Mars-legs.” He had almost thrown up when he alighted from the shuttle. But now, after a week, he was practically a native and ready to step outside for his first walk.

  Over the past fourteen years he had walked across the surface of the Zheng He and seen his home city over his head and had felt insignificant; he had floated in the centre of the station, looking down at what was now the garden, and felt wonder at what could be built; but now he stood with Hong and felt the raw beauty of an untouched landscape. Growing up in Belgium, a country whose soil had been ploughed up by centuries of agriculture, war, and industry, he felt strangely sad. He was sad that once the Earth was untouched, yet now so much of it was groomed to feed and house the human race, he was sad that now this process was to begin again on Mars, but at least, he thought, the first generations would take pleasure from the pristine environment he now enjoyed. Mars at least would be a hard beast to tame, hostile to these foreign invaders; she would not be conquered quickly.

  Walking in Martian gravity had some similarities to being on the lower decks of the Zheng He, but with a sense of solidity, firmness, an embrace by the planet itself. Juxtaposed to this was the wide open space. One did not so much walk on Mars, but rather stride, with each step returning more power than first invested in it. For all the colonists this was a new sensation that gave them a sense of confidence. John wondered if the second generation who would be born here would feel that confidence without having the baby steps of Earth to compare with. Indeed, could they even adapt to this new reality, or would these children be crippled and weakened by three and a half billion-year-old genes evolved millions of kilometres away. Of course there were plans in place, so many plans, but the doubt was always there. It had taken a cosmic shift in perception for the cheque to be signed to make all this happen, and civilisations always turned inwards again after a period of progress. Someday, maybe twenty, a hundred, perhaps in two hundred years from now, Martians would be on their own to forge their own future.