The boomerang is nowhere to be seen, but its silver balloon lies deflated, stretched out on the rocky ground, following the contours of the craters, sand dunes and rocky outcrops on the plateau. It’s as though mercury has spilled out on the surface of Mars. There’s no danger of the balloon billowing and blowing away as there would be on Earth. Even though it’s thinner than silk, it’s too heavy relative to the Martian wind. The edges flap, but without heat, it isn’t going anywhere.
During our training, NASA drilled us on being circumspect in an emergency. The acronym DR ICE became second nature, highlighting the order in which to prioritize action.
Danger—It doesn’t matter how badly someone needs help, check for any continuing danger or there could be two astronauts down, not one. A collapsed crew member on the floor of a module could have been electrocuted and may still be holding a live wire.
Response—Get some kind of reaction out of them. That will reveal something unique about the nature of the emergency. Screaming isn’t as bad as someone lying on the ground unconscious. If they can scream then their lungs and respiration are working just fine. Deal with the unconscious person first. Telemetry from our life-support systems is considered a response of sorts. If those fail, the urgency is gone. No sense rushing for a corpse.
Isolate—Get them out of harm’s way and assess the best course of subsequent action.
Contain—Hull breach? Suit malfunction? Bleeding within a suit? Vomiting in a helmet? Stabilize any loss of electricity or heating. Buddy breathe if there’s been an atmospheric control failure.
Evacuate—Get them somewhere they can be treated properly, either back to the Shepard or into the ascent vehicle as a last resort. There’s not much that can be done for anyone while they’re cocooned inside a spacesuit.
Driving down here, I was mentally prepared to apply DR ICE to Scott, but Sue needs it as well. She’s in shock and not thinking clearly. I dismount, which in the low Martian gravity causes me to drift to the ground. On Earth, it would be as though I was suspended by Bungie cords or stunt wires, or perhaps bouncing on a trampoline. I glide rather than fall the half meter to the stoney ground. I want to rush, but Martian gravity doesn’t oblige, and I push toward Sue like someone wading through treacle.
Rocks kick up from behind my boots as I rush to her side.
“Hey.”
Bloodshot eyes stare back at me from behind a thin glass visor. She’s pale. The color has drained from her face. I want to tell her everything’s going to be fine, but that would be a lie. I take her by the shoulders, squeezing firmly, wanting to convey some physical assurance.
“What happened?”
She doesn’t respond, simply leading me to the edge of the cliff. With a trembling hand, she points.
“We—We were trying to retrieve a downed boomer. Scott hooked up to the winch and I lowered him, and…”
I wait for her to finish.
“He couldn’t reach the anchor point. He unclipped.”
Tears roll down her cheeks.
“He slipped. I—I think we can reach him. You can. You can reach him, right?”
DR ICE is thinking seriously about the evacuate phase. Sue shouldn’t be out here. She’s in such a fragile state, she’s not thinking clearly. Rather than helping the rescue effort, she’s a liability and likely to complicate things. If I could, I’d swap her for any one of the crew right about now.
I survey the fall in front of us.
The Eos Chaos opens out in the distance, falling through thousands of feet. Mounds lie scattered through the vast valley, eroded by a wall of water at least 500 feet in height rushing through various ravines hundreds of millions of years ago, probably as the result of a sub-glacial lake bursting. The vast wave washed out the valley, scarring the land. The hills have clearly defined, eroded layers in various shades of brown stacked on top of each other.
Buttes rise from the valley floor, dotting the horizon. The desert is stratified, with lines of different colored rock set on top of each other like woodgrain. Dark bands indicate volcanic activity in past epochs. Layers of sandstone and shale alternate, providing a glimpse into deep time, revealing the history of the planet as clearly as if I had a time machine and could venture back to watch them form.
The view before me would be like staring into the Grand Canyon if Earth’s greatest canyon wasn’t so small by comparison. The far side of the Chaos is hidden by dust hanging in the thin air and the curvature of the planet itself, disappearing over the horizon.
I’m standing on the edge of what amounts to a peak protruding from the canyon wall. Below me, the debris from a billion years worth of gradual erosion lies scattered as rubble. The cliff face is thousands of feet high, but it’s layered, broken into terraces crumbling below each other. The wing of the boomerang is visible near the edge of the next ledge. There are boot prints in the soft sand and loose rocks, along with freshly turned stones marking where Scott fell. The boomer has settled on a steep slope. From what Sue described, Scott fell down to the next ledge.
Jen’s voice provides welcome relief to the indecision I feel.
“Cory, Lisa’s got a boomer inbound. Eighteen hundred meters north by north east. You should have visual.”
I turn and look. Dangly wings flex hundreds of feet below a teardrop-shaped balloon barely visible through the haze. The boomerang swoops, slowly descending from several thousand feet, dropping into the valley. Hedy and Jen are bringing the boomer in low to ensure good visibility from the onboard cameras. Since its top speed is around forty kilometers an hour, it’ll take awhile before it settles overhead.
“Patching through video.”
I raise my arm, looking at my wrist pad screen and tracking the images I see with the position of the boomerang in the sky. From its vantage point, the downed balloon is easily visible, and looks like water running over the plain, cascading into the canyon. The crashed boomerang is on the slope beneath the edge of the cliff. I look for myself, wanting a reference point. As soon as I see two astronauts standing by a pair of idle rovers, I get a bearing I can use as a point of reference for Scott.
“I’m not seeing him.”
“Switching to infrared.”
“Oh, yeah. Okay. Got him. Second ledge. Buried in rubble. Can you zoom in on the section immediately below the broken wing—right under the first starboard engine? Roughly twenty meters down.”
“Copy that.”
The image on my wrist pad splits in two, with one half in true color and the other showing a false-color image highlighting temperature differences. The edge of a helmet is visible half buried in the rubble, as are a glove and one leg. The temperature difference is slight as the thermal insulation in his suit is designed to minimize heat loss, but anything above negative eighty shows up.
Hedy speaks, which is a welcome relief. Sue is silent, Jen is methodical, but like me, Hedy is thinking about the next steps.
“Cory, your winch won’t reach that far. Have you considered combining it with the cable from the other rover?”
In that instant, my respect for Hedy doubles. She’s in command. What she says is law. If she calls me off, I’d walk away regardless of my own misgivings. If she tells me to go down there and effect a rescue, I’ll go regardless of the risk—right up to the point I can’t continue because the danger becomes too great to ignore. But Hedy’s smart. She’s giving me some latitude. She’s offering a suggestion—asking if I’d thought of combining the cables to reach Scott. I hadn’t. She’s dancing a fine line, staying aloof from a decision either way, wanting my input as I’ve got the best vantage point.
“That’ll work.”
There’s silence on the radio, but I have no doubt Jen and Hedy are madly debating the risk. At a guess, Jen’s probably sitting in the airlock acclimatizing, getting ready to come out and help.
I unhook the winch on my rover. On Earth, it would weigh eighty pounds. On Mars, it’s barely thirty.
“How can I help?”
S
ue’s back.
“Bring in the cable on your rover. I’ll get this one unwound and we’ll use the hooks to link them together.”
Like the Vikings of old, rather than smelting iron from ore, the JAXA fabrication bots crafted simple pieces of equipment like chains and hooks from meteorites similar to our waypoint T1000. X-ray photographs were used to determine the purity and internal structure of the metal, but beyond that, the hook I’m holding in my gloved hand could have been fashioned by Ragnar himself. As I unravel the cable, I ask about Scott.
“Any updates?”
“Vitals are coming through, but he’s still unconscious. Suit integrity is stable. Internal pressure is low.”
“Copy that.”
“We’ve had inbound from Houston. Their recommendation is to proceed with caution.”
Predictable. But that advice is almost an hour old and based on what was happening back then. If they could see the imagery showing how far Scott has fallen, or how he’s buried in rubble, they might revise their assessment. He’s within a few feet of the next drop off. If he regains consciousness and moves around too much, or if he disturbs any of the loose rubble, he could fall to the next shelf, which is well over a hundred meters further down. Even in the low gravity we experience on Mars, that distance would be fatal.
I step into a climbing harness, working it up over my suit and tightening the straps. Loose carabiners dangle from the straps, bumping into each other, but in the thin atmosphere, the sound is hollow and distant, like someone jangling keys in the hallway.
I twist a couple of wing nuts on the side of the rover, releasing a panel hiding the batteries from the elements. NASA is nothing if not ingenious when it comes to planning. Everything is dual purpose and cross-compatible. The clips on the spare climbing harness match the anchor points on the panel, allowing me to use it as a back brace for Scott.
“What’s the plan?”
Hedy knows the plan. She’s watching through my helmet cam. She’s the one that suggested doubling the cable, so she knows precisely what I’m doing, but she wants to hear my thinking, and wants NASA to hear our approach verbalized. There’s safety in repetition as it ensures there aren’t any assumptions going unchecked.
“I’ll conduct a retrieval using a dual harness, running the winch via remote. I’ve got a sideboard I can use as a stretcher, and I’m carrying extra strapping and webbing, along with extra O2 and buddy breathing apparatus. Over.”
“Cory—” Hedy stops mid-sentence, so I reply, knowing what she’s thinking.
“I know. Under no circumstances—unclip.”
“I want you back.”
“Copy that.”
Lisa is a genius when it comes to engineering so it’s no surprise to hear her providing some additional insights.
“I’ve modeled your descent and expect you will lose direct comms with the rover after exiting the first ledge. At that point, there will be approximately twenty-nine meters of solid regolith between you and the rover. We’ll keep the boomer on station during your descent and provide video coverage. I’m trying to reroute comms through the boomer, but I expect Sue will need to take control of the winch during the last few meters. Over.”
“Understood.”
I take Sue by the thick padded shoulders of her spacesuit and touch my helmet against hers. I’m gentle, tender, but this is more than a show of emotion. I want Hedy to see what I see, even if it’s from the perspective of my helmet cam: a woman scared of death. Her eyes are bloodshot. She’s trying to be brave, but her face is pale, drained of blood. I need Hedy and Jen to see beyond Sue’s vital signs, to understand her mental state. If things go wrong down there, she’s all they have. They need to understand what she is and isn’t capable of doing to assist.
“It’s going to be okay. We’re going to get him back. Right? Tonight, we’ll sit around the lounge laughing about this. Okay?”
Sue looks deep into my eyes and tries to smile, but her lips quiver.
“Okay.”
There’s no chatter on the radio, which in itself sends a clear signal: they saw her.
I clip onto the cable and take up the slack on the winch.
“Cory Anderson. On belay. Tension is good. Quick-release in place and locked. Descending.”
Descent
I stand with my back to the canyon, looking at Sue and the rovers. Behind her, nestled somewhere at the base of the foothills, is our base camp.
I set the resistance on the line to eighty pounds. I should be using kilograms, but in the heat of the moment my mind is more comfortable with US units, so I modify my wrist pad accordingly. Eighty pounds on Mars is roughly a hundred and eighty pounds of human plus sixty pounds of spacesuit on Earth. I figure my combined weight is somewhere in that range, meaning I have to work at pulling out more cable, slowing my descent. Any sudden jerk beyond that and the electric brake will tighten on the line and bring me to a halt. There’s a slight delay in the feedback loop, but I’ll fall no more than six to eight feet at most—I hope.
I inch backwards, shuffling with my feet, feeling the fall of the land behind me and the grit shifting beneath my boots.
“Limited visibility.”
That I’m speaking in short bursts highlights the pressure I feel. My helmet is fixed to the collar of my suit and only turns with my shoulders, not my head, making it difficult to look down and behind me. The more I twist my neck, the more of the lining I see inside my helmet.
“At the edge.”
I pause.
Hedy says, “You are go for descent.”
“Copy that.”
Spacesuits are designed for survivability, not flexibility. They’re practical, but not at the expense of safety. No one seriously considered the prospect of mountain climbing on Mars—that’s what the boomers are for. Scott should have called in a second boomer to recover the first, but even then, he would have needed to go down there to hook up the lines. Retrieving it with a rover was crazy.
“Can’t see.”
I have both hands on the cable. I’m not prepared for the inevitable fall. As the slope increases, my boots slip and I land on my knees, twisting sideways and tumbling against a large rock. Loose stones cascade down the cliff face. I scramble with my gloved hands, righting myself.
“I’m okay. I’m okay.”
No one replies. No one believes me.
“I’m good to go.”
My fingers are shaking.
I give up on the cable, using my gloved hands to guide me as I edge backwards. It’s disconcerting not being able to see below the rim of my helmet, and I have to feel my way down the cliff, searching with my boots for footholds, testing them with a kick before putting weight on them.
“Climbing blind.”
Within a few feet, I’m breathing heavily. Slowly, I lose sight of the rovers and then Sue. With only the thin steel cable cutting through the Martian rocks and stones in front of me, I feel alone, isolated and vulnerable.
Although the aluminum panel beside me is attached to a second harness clipped onto the main cable, it knocks against me, getting in my way. In retrospect, I should have lowered it once I got down—but that would mean unclipping, which has already proven disastrous for Scott.
I dust the rocks with my gloves, ensuring I get a firm grip on solid regolith rather than ending up with a handful of fine grit and sand. My helmet bumps against the cliff. The sound of a sharp rap on the glass is disconcerting, but it’s just a sound There’s no crack. Besides, the visor is double-glazed to help with heat retention.
The tension on the cable is my only source of comfort. With the helmet restricting my vision, I’m unsure of my height above the ledge.
“Can you patch through the view from the boomer?”
I rest on a narrow outcrop, watching as an image comes through on my wrist pad screen. I’m still at the top of the climb. Computer overlays tell me I’m six meters from the first tier. As much as I’d like to hear Jen or Hedy talking on the channel, I unders
tand why they’re silent. The natural inclination is to make suggestions. Do this. Try that. Go there. Reach to your right. Left foot down. Advice is always offered with the best of intentions but it introduces uncertainty. They’re avoiding the temptation of talking over the top of me and telling me what to do. I’m the only one on the climb. I have to make this work for myself. I inch lower. Sweat beads on my forehead.
“Twenty feet. Half way.”
Lisa says, “I’ve double checked the rating on the winch and cable. You’re well within tolerance and should be able to use it to conduct a slow rappel without fear of burning out the motor.”
“Sounds good,” I reply, realizing that’s probably how Scott descended.
Against my natural desire for self-preservation, I take her advice and push off the narrow ledge, sitting back in the harness and letting the winch slowly lower me.
“Oh, yeah. That’s better.”
I push with my boots and gloves, keeping my suit away from the cliff as I descend the rocks.
“This is more like it.”
Within a minute, my boots sink into the loose debris gathered on the lower rim. Gravel shifts around me. Bits of slate slide over the frozen rocks, gliding over the next ledge.
“I’m down.”
They know. They can see me from the boomer.
I wave for the cameras on the boomerang, taking in the view for a moment. A long, slender, silver balloon towers hundreds of meters above me, looking entirely alien against the hazy backdrop of the Chaos. It’s a blob of molten silver hanging in the sky. Only two of the six propellers are turning, and they’re moving slowly, just idling, keeping the boomerang on station roughly fifty meters away and perhaps fifty meters above me. I turn and wade through the rubble, making my way over to the crashed boomerang. The winch cable is stiff and difficult to pull. The friction it’s picking up running over the top of the cliff makes it unresponsive.
Losing Mars Page 4