The Other Things

by Jonathan Dransfield

  Unlike her mother, Elin was desperate to visit the world-famous museum. ‘When can we go?’ she implored. Kirsten did not approve of the MHB. It didn’t show Iceland as a serious place for the arts. Gunnar asked if it was true the museum was closed due to flooding, like the opera house.

  ‘Of course not, Daddy, they are on the hill. If they say they are open, they are closed and if they say they are closed, they are open. It’s a joke!’

  Gunnar took another mouthful of stew. ‘Not a very good one!’

  ‘Well, to go I want, anyway,’ reminded Elin.

  Kirsten watched Elin continue with her meal, starting with the least favourite bits as if following some obsessive food routine. Her concentration was only broken when Kirsten told her parents about their prospective trip to the volcano.

  Later in the evening Elin was snuggled in bed and Kirsten retold her the fable of the evil Katla and the volcano. Little Elin then closed her eyes and lay as still as she possibly could. The less she moved, the more she could imagine. Her mind could leave the darkened room and fly like Katla, or be invisible like an elf, or just walk in the wilderness, hand in hand with her mother.

  ‘That child’s obsessed. Volcano, volcano, volcano! It’s lucky she lives in Iceland!’ Gunnar had a very dry sense of humour.

  Much of Kirsten’s determination came from her father. He had tracked down Elin’s father in Germany and persuaded him to support the child financially; not that he ever told her how he had done it. He interrogated Kirsten about her proposed trip. He might have wanted to join them, but the farm was getting busy.

  ‘Stay away from the glacier!’ he warned her.

  The main calderas were covered by 850 metres of ice, and enormous bodies of meltwater could burst out. These could be far more dangerous than a normal volcano, and there were dramatic scars on the landscape to testify to the power of a subglacial eruption.

  The danger didn’t seem to worry Oddny. ‘Just make sure Elin takes her watercolours,’ was her only concern. It was nice to have a mother who didn’t worry about anything.

  So, four days later, setting off on the expedition was Elin’s idea of heaven. They drove through snowscapes, forded frozen rivers and sheltered in emergency huts. They also had hours and hours to talk.

  It was exacting driving, and although Elin started with her childish news, the longer they drove, the wider the topics became. Kirsten, losing all worries apart from keeping on the road, relaxed and revealed so much more of her life and thoughts than she ever would if they baked cakes together.

  Then in the gloomy distance they could see a flash of red and the rising smoke. As melting snowfields gave way to blackened shingle, they finally pulled up onto a barren ridge.

  Elin’s heart was fit to burst. Laid out before her was a world split apart – its molten core spewing out with unimaginable force and beauty.

  It was then she knew that understanding her planet would be her life, her quest, her future.

  Kirsten and Elin by Eruption

  Chapter 7

  The Quest to Find Solutions

  The teams got busy immediately, each working out their own agenda. Rocky and Dolores had decided to split their efforts. Rocky would do the rockets, as he had to get the project off the ground, and Dolores was to work on the landers, living quarters and scientific payloads.

  Being a rocket engineer, Rocky knew exactly what he needed. His problem was NASA didn’t have any suitable rockets at this time.

  Dolores, the scientist, had to break new ground. She was to provide safe and adequate living quarters for the journey and on Mars itself. Most importantly, she had to deliver the precious cargo to the planet and get it back. The earlier landers had used disposable heat shields, parachutes, protective balloons or ‘sky cranes’ to slow the craft from 13,000mph to zero in a matter of minutes. For this mission, the sheer weight would make all this redundant. They needed some radical thinking and designs to succeed. For Dolores it would start with pure science and a drawing board. Rocky would start with a calling card and a Yellow Pages.

  International Space Station (ISS)

  Orbit height: 408km

  Speed of orbit:

  7.66km/s

  Length: 72.8m (239ft)

  Width: 108.5m (356ft)

  There was a strange alliance between Rocky and Yasmin from HR and PR. Their lack of heavy-duty rockets meant they would have to beg, borrow or steal one and a great deal of negotiations might be needed with other nations’ space agencies. Yasmin’s charm was a perfect counter for the bluff Rocky.

  In all the years since the Apollo programme, nobody had built anything to match the Saturn V. And since the retirement of the shuttle, NASA had been more or less dependent on Russian technology. In fact, only the Russian and the European space agencies had the large rockets that could take the mission into space, and even then the mission would need to be laboriously assembled in orbit, like the components of the International Space Station.

  There were other possibilities. Maybe the burgeoning space industries of India or China could fill the gap? Or even the private sector? The Pure Corporation, who had already been launching their own satellites, had great ambitions for space tourism and even aspirations to get to Mars – a one-way ticket concept that took out all the difficult bits and condemned the participants to never being able to return to Earth.

  Yasmin and Rocky were deep in their deliberations when Ford joined them. Yasmin had sat Rocky down in front of her beloved whiteboard, where she delivered conceptual buzz words in the hope that that they would yield some profound answers.

  She had written ‘What do we need?’ in bold letters on the board.

  ‘A rocket – a BFR,’ answered Rocky.

  ‘How’s it going?’ enquired Ford.

  ‘Apparently we need something called a BFR,’ chimed in Yasmin.

  Ford smirked. ‘How many Big F***ing Rockets are out there?’

  Rocky took up the marker pen and wrote a list of large rockets past and present, where they were made and how many rockets they might need to put the mission together in orbit.

  1 or 2no Saturn V (USA – out of production)

  2no Space Launch System (USA – in development)

  2no Pure Proton (USA – in development)

  4no Ariane (Europe – French)

  6no Angara (Russia)

  8no Long March (China)

  9no GSLV D5s (India)

  Yasmin immediately saw the prospect for foreign travel, and in her vision of the Ariane it was not a rocket but the Eiffel Tower.

  ‘Brilliant!’ Yasmin clapped. ‘Our first port of call must be Paris, then Moscow, then Beijing.’

  Ford chipped in. ‘We will definitely need the European Space Agency’s help! But skip Moscow. We have a trade embargo with Russia, so any approach would have to be very high level.’

  ‘Hey, we also need to talk to my good buddy Milton.’ Rocky’s friend Milton was the original ‘rocket man’, an obsessive genius who knew everything there was to know about every rocket ever produced. He was now curator of rockets at the Samsonian Institute. He’d have some ideas, for sure.

  Ford got a call to ‘discuss’ things with Stephen. According to the president, he was there to help, Ford told himself again and again.

  Stephen had invited Ford ‘for tea’ at an address just up the hill from the Pasadena headquarters.

  In the late afternoon Ford made his way there, the dust trailing behind him as he turned around a bend and there, perched on a small outcrop, was a small but beautiful house. The steps to the main entrance bridged a bubbling stream via granite stepping stones. From the terrace above, Stephen waved and gestured Ford to join him.

  The aloof man of that first day had disappeared. Stephen was all smiles. Dressed in a black tracksuit, he wafted around the glamorous shack, explaining how he had rented it for the quarter.

  They settled on the terrace. The view between the two Scots Pines was magnificent, framing the wooded suburbs and the hazy cit
y beyond. This was a house for enjoying sunsets.

  ‘I rented it for the run. It’s three miles, a perfect commute. I couldn’t survive at the dreadful “Gulag”.’ This was where Ford stayed with the rest of the team who had to fly in for their meetings. He brought out the résumé that Stephen had given him.

  Stephen looked away to the downtown horizon. The city of Los Angeles was spread before them. ‘There are 4 million Americans out there and another 312 million we can’t see. My job was to protect them against the bad guys. A talk abandoned because the president wants to get the glory of a “grand project” and wash his hands of his guilty feelings… That city only functions because there are people who pick up the rubbish, unblock the sewers and police the streets. It can’t all be opera houses and gleaming spires. Give me one good reason why we should waste our resources looking at rocks on a dead planet when there’s a war going on and our very values are under attack?’

  Ford ran his fingers through his hair as he considered this. ‘Nothing positive comes out of war. We have to learn to live with each other – we are all mere humans after all.’

  Stephen looked scornful, but Ford ignored him and took a deep breath. ‘In my view, we have a unique status on this earth. We are able to understand it. We give it more relevance by witnessing it. Each piece of knowledge we gain opens up new possibilities and it endorses our own existence here. It’s what gives us meaning and makes us worth defending. You have been fighting people who want to turn the clock back to an age of ignorance. We should combat that by striving for knowledge.’

  There was a long silence. The trees rustled, and the brook babbled. Finally, Stephen broke the silence. ‘Bullshit!’

  Ford smiled. ‘That’s just cool, Stephen. We don’t have to fight about it. We need a sceptic – you can set deadlines and judge our efforts. There’s a big world out there that will be testing us too. In any case, you’re a military man. If you’ve signed up for it, you just need to get on with the job and be professional.’

  Henrietta, Patrick and Dolores sat sipping coffee. They were comparing weights. Patrick was about 90kg; Dolores’s trim figure weighed in at 50kg. Henrietta announced, dunking a biscuit, she was ‘about the same’.

  ‘Ford reckoned 180kg for all the crew. How does that work out?’

  ‘Well… two of me or… Maybe three of you ladies allowing for the biscuits.’

  ‘Women?’ corrected Henrietta.

  Dolores wrote down ‘stores and supplies’, and listed space suits, clothes, bedding, scientific equipment, vehicles, food, water and personal items. With an estimate of the weights required, it soon multiplied into several tons.

  On a separate piece of paper, in her neat handwriting, Dolores put the heading ‘skills’, underlined, with three bullet points:

  Technical

  Welfare

  Science

  Under ‘Technical’ she wrote pilot.

  ‘Do we need them nowadays? We land the rovers automatically,’ questioned Henrietta.

  ‘Do we crash them automatically as well?’ replied Dolores bluntly.

  The need for a pilot was demonstrated in the stark light of a lunar morning half a century ago. It was Neil Armstrong, not the on-board computer, who landed the lunar module on the Sea of Tranquillity. A quarter of a million miles from home, he steered it to a safe landing ground with Buzz Aldrin by his side, calling out essential data. The computer had overloaded and the designated spot was a field of boulders.

  In the small, cramped confinement of the Eagle, shrouded in the deep pin-lit blackness of space, the two of them had stared down intently at the stark, bright, alien landscape of the surface below.

  Still in view of the orbiting command module, Armstrong pirouetted Eagle for a final visual inspection.

  When he felt the braking and the sudden weight of his body returning as the engine fired to start the descent, Armstrong’s heart was in his mouth. Leaning forward, the surface loomed through the triangular window. It was forbidding and frightening and – like being over the ocean – all sense of scale was lost.

  The larger craters simply gave way to smaller ones.

  Ignoring the frantic bleeping of the computers and the pessimistic fuel gauges, an unfazed Armstrong deftly worked the thrusters to avoid the menacing boulders before landing Eagle perfectly in a spray of dust.

  Eagle Landing

  Mars would be far more difficult, which is why the pilot was first on the list, plus a co-pilot – like Aldrin – in case of illness.

  Pilots are at the top of a pyramid of support, with engineers and mechanics making things work. In space this applies not only to the hardware, but also the software and systems that run the show. The further away from Earth, the more difficult it would become; engineering and computer skills would be essential.

  If going to the moon was like the ferry across the Mersey, this mission was like a round-the-world cruise – except in a container.

  Skills required

  Technical – pilot – co-pilot – engineer – computer programmer

  Welfare – medic – dietitian – sanititian

  Science – palaeontologist – geologist – biologist

  General – explorer – leader

  Most of the time would be spent just keeping alive. Who would prepare the food? Who would deal with the toilet, cleaning, recycling? Who was going to fix cuts, deal with illness and maintain the life-support systems? They needed a welfare team on this heroic mission.

  And this was before they did any science and discovery.

  ‘To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.’

  To seek? Evidence of life, be it alive or dead. It would be triumph enough to prove that those ‘fossils’ were real and abundant. But what if life had survived?

  Earth would suddenly have a family. And if life could exist in a place like Mars, think of all the water worlds that could exist in and beyond our solar system. It needed someone who knew about fossils, someone who knew about the terrain and someone who knew about life – a palaeontologist, a geologist and a biologist. Like Shackleton’s mission a century before, they would need a leader and explorer.

  When they finished their list, with far more roles than the possible size of the crew, it was clear they’d need to find some remarkably talented people.

  Ford had returned with Stephen to NASA’s jet propulsion laboratory – JPL – and was doing the rounds.

  As he made his way to the budget group, the afternoon sunshine raised his spirits. Brushing his hair back, Ford smiled to himself.

  The president had chosen him because he was trusted to ‘think different’. OK! The budget would be tight. It cost $2.5 billion for the last rover and he had allowed for three times that budget. ‘It must be possible,’ he thought.

  On entering their room, he found the glum faces of Elton, Floyd and Stephen looking at the estimates he had originally prepared. It was like joining a coven of the undead. Elton and Floyd greeted him with gloomy protests.

  The Jet Propulsion Laboratory

  La Canada Flintridge, California, USA

  34.1N 118.1W

  Altitude: 1,188ft

  Geology: Forest mountain range and canyon and seismic area

  Stephen was sitting opposite them with arms crossed behind his head. He had obviously made his presence felt already and was uncharacteristically buoyant. ‘I’m sorry, Ford, but I’ve told these two to sharpen their goddamn pencils or we’ll get someone else on the job. The less money we pour into this thing, the better.’

  A sense of gratitude flooded over Ford. ‘Thank you, Stephen!’

  Then addressing the affronted faces of Elton and Floyd, he said, ‘It’s quite simple: the budget is the budget. We’ll have to cut our suit to match the cloth until we find someone else to join in.’

  ‘But… But…’ responded Floyd.

  ‘No buts,’ stepped in Stephen. ‘We’ll tell the teams that’s all they have got for now and if we need more, we’ll have to take on other partne
rs.’

  The week went by in a blur. By Friday afternoon they had all covered a great deal of ground. Ford felt both elated and exhausted by the time the cab picked him up to take him to the airstrip. Most of all he was looking forward to getting home and seeing Jane.

  Chapter 8

  Buzz and the Trailer

  Ford Mending the Camper

  Although Ford could have simply jumped into his plane once it was fuelled, he still had to wait for a slot to take off.

  He sat in the club room for private pilots. His phone rang; it was Buzz.

  ‘Hi, Granf, wanna play “AirAce”?’ Buzz had never been one for words.

  ‘Sure, Buzz. How’s your mom?’

  ‘She’s OK. You ready?’

  Ford put on his earphones and stared at the glowing screen of his phone. Suddenly in this micro world he was on a digital runway, with Buzz’s plane on his wing. ‘AirAce’ was one of Buzz’s favourite games, and one where Ford, being a real pilot, had a natural advantage. At first Ford would let Buzz win, but as the boy got better, it got competitive. As their planes crossed the start lines, Ford took the lead.

  Engrossed in the game, Ford unconsciously traced the sweeps and dives of his plane with his upper body as it careered around. It caught the attention of the couple opposite. The upwards sweeps got them smiling, when a sudden ‘Yes, yes, yes!’ as Ford edged Buzz on the line set them off in stifled giggles. He realised he had an audience.

  Removing the earphones with one tug and avoiding eye contact, he was relieved to hear the tannoy calling his name. As he got up he heard them say with a snigger, ‘Dr Harris.’

  Buzz sat in his room with the games controller and a big screen. Buzz would play for hours, perfecting his techniques against ‘AirAces’ all around the world. His youthful reactions were quicker than Ford’s, but not yet a match for his grandfather’s real experience.

  Aldrin, or ‘Buzz’, lived with his mother in Baton Rouge. His father, Armstrong, Ford’s only son, was bumming around some far corner of the world and lost to all those who still loved him. Down the chaotic corridor, Buzz could hear his mother in the kitchen, clanking pots and plates as she prepared supper. Buzz was furious as he surveyed the ham sandwich on the desk; clearly he wasn’t invited.