The crew quarters and food could then be dropped like the early rovers in balloon-filled bags. The design of the Mariner module was the next big question mark. Even without the return fuel and kit, there’d be a ‘shed load’ to drop on the surface, as Patrick put it.
The last crewed lander NASA designed was the space shuttle, which glided home using the drag of the atmosphere to slow it.
‘If we glide it,’ Dolores chipped in, ‘there’s not enough lift in the atmosphere. We’d hit the surface long before it slowed and with no runway, the last stage will have to be rockets, just like the lunar module.’
‘I know a big brake,’ offered Ford. ‘You know the planet’s a pain to leave.’
Patrick nodded.
‘But it’s pulling us in when landing?’ Dolores pointed out.
Ford thought of his recent plane ride and how he’d pulled up into a stall turn. ‘Perhaps we don’t try to land it at first,’ he thought. ‘Could we get any lift?’
Dolores didn’t have to do much maths. ‘Sure, we’re so fast coming in there’s a lot of pressure and lift.’
Following the train of thought, Ford continued, ‘What if we don’t try to land? We go in and then up, like a stall turn?’
Now Imran did the sums. ‘Quite a few times, like skimming a pebble on the sea.’
The vision of the Pembrokeshire coast came to Ford’s mind. Carefree days with Jane, skimming rocks into the foam. They would jump in diminishing hops until they stopped and dropped.
‘What about a flying saucer?’
‘You’ve been watching too many movies,’ joked Dolores.
Ford left them. There’d be a whole lot of hammering out to do before they got there. He had to make two calls.
Sharon picked up. ‘Hi, Ford. We’re fine. Hectic, but making progress. Even Mr Health and Safety’s been helpful… Yes, Edward! He doesn’t do people, but he does do process.’ Sharon checked her lists. ‘The astronauts are going strong. Hey, the kids are cool, they’re lovin’ it… No, Ford, I can’t tell you about Buzz, they are all still numbers.’ She chatted for a while longer then continued, ‘It’s a big day tomorrow: specialist tests – that’ll push them out of their comfort zones!’
The team-room sofas were so old that Neil Armstrong might have graced them. The leather creaked as he called Jane.
‘Well, hello, cariad!’ Her tuneful voice lifted Ford’s heart. ‘It’s been very quiet. Any news of Buzz?’ She shuffled to get more comfortable. ‘I suppose no news is good news? I won’t fix him dinner. He must be hanging in there!’
She was keen to be helpful on the project. ‘I’ve been looking at the images. The detail, it’s amazing! There’s a whole world out there!’
Seeing the awesome variety of the landscapes from the thousands of photographs taken from Mars Express, she’d even seen dark streaks of what could be running water. These ‘Dark Streaks’ are areas of Mars, often on the rims of old craters, where salty water appears to rush out. The intense saltiness allows it to remain liquid for a while, in the thin air and freezing temperatures. ‘My Uncle Chedwyn was a coal miner, you know. “Hot and sweaty down there” – I can hear his voice now. If you can get water running on the surface, it’s bound to be liquid beneath.’
‘How deep was Chedwyn’s mine?’
‘Oh, 1,000 feet… Yes, too far for this mission, but we don’t need it that hot.’
He told her that they’d set up a working party and maybe she could liaise with them. She was full of ideas. ‘Yes, but there’s too much for a small team. Crowdsource it on Alumni. It’d be a real hit, especially after the advert!’
Back at her desk Jane closed her eyes and opened her mind, imagining the scene from the bottom of an incline on the crater’s bottom. She had seen the salt lakes of Tunisia with its crusty white salt, baked over hundreds of years. In her mind’s eye, those dazzling white or rose-coloured salts were transformed into a translucent green-blue perchlorate skin with a sprinkling of red dust. A salt ridge had built up at her feet, and the undulating and smooth, pore-marked deposits draped the crater’s escarpments like fallen sheets from a line. The crater base extended like a frying pan bottom until it met the encircling wall many miles behind. Towards the summit, the salt crusts gave way in a series of horizontal gashes with perhaps a glint of water. On high an orange and white wispy sky glowed with the Martian summer sun. Around midday, a faint ooze of a dark solution ran, bubbled and fizzed down the fissures and gullies, until collecting into long pools trapped by the sinuous dams formed in previous years. For a few days this would repeat itself, leaving the mark of each year like the rings on a tree.
With a tinge of sadness she recalled how Uncle Chedwyn had shown her the springs breaking out on the banks of the brooding slag heaps near his home and spoke softly of the terrible tragedy of Aberfan. A hillside of slag had engulfed the children of the local school, due to the leaching of the waters within.
Jane would sketch her ideas. It helped her see the task ahead of where to find something extraordinary to explore. She examined the annual methane maps where plumes of the gas emanated from within the planet. It doesn’t hang around for long, quickly broken down in the harsh environment. It’s either biological or geological in origin, either cause of great interest. She overlaid the ice deposits from the other maps. Then the volcanic areas that had sink holes and vents. Many of the circular depressions on Mars may look like impact craters, but are volcanic in origin and hold the key to accessing the interior.
Then the doorbell rang. There was a man standing clutching a black tool case. He was dressed in blue overalls sporting the name ‘LEMON’, the telecoms company. He flashed an ID card. ‘Come to fix the phone, ma’am.’ Without ceremony, he barged inside.
‘Excuse me! Where do you think you’re going? I’ve just been on it.’
He stood bag in hand and with a condescending smile. ‘It’s a silent fault. We traced it from the exchange – it could go at any time!’ He turned again to go phone hunting.
‘You just stop there, boyo!’
‘Boyo, ma’am?’
Jane the biologist knew a rat when she smelled one. ‘Show me that card!’
He flashed it at her again.
‘I said show it to me, not waft it.’
He held it just long enough for Jane to see it was fake. To take the man off guard she gave him a smile and asked very sweetly, ‘May I look in the bag, please?’
He felt he had nothing to hide, as this was only a woman.
‘Thank you, so much.’ She took the bag and examined it. There was a sad collection of tools, a notepad and some suspicious-looking electronic components. It certainly didn’t look like the neat professional array that the broadband guy had brought. Jane closed it with a snap, turned and marched down the hall. There was a flash of coloured light as she opened the stained-glass door and flung it vigorously across the yard.
‘Follow that! We got rid of our landline last year. All digital now, you see.’
He looked confused and didn’t immediately leave. ‘You don’t understand the technology, ma’am, must be a crossed line.’
Suddenly Jane was in a fury. ‘Yes I bloody do. I’ll give you flaming crossed lines.’ She held the door wide open, pointing determinedly as he reluctantly skulked out. She couldn’t resist but to give him a shove across the threshold and he cartwheeled down the weather-worn veranda steps.
‘I’ve not seen that kind of rejection since Christian Barnard’s early patients!’ laughed the driver as the dusty ‘engineer’ climbed into the waiting van. ‘Sussed you out, did she?’
‘They don’t have a goddamn phone line to bug!’ ‘Mr Lemon’ explained as he wearily took off his hat and asked. ‘What about you?’
The driver smiled and held up his telephoto. ‘I got some great action shots.’ He flicked through the stills. ‘Mad woman assaults humble telecom man! I can see the headlines.’
‘Mr Lemon’ gave a sheepish smile. ‘At least we won’t be going home empty-h
anded. I didn’t know she dropped her freakin’ landline last year.’
The driver bashed the steering wheel, screaming with laughter. ‘Ha, ha, no wonder she rumbled you.’
‘Yeah, she won’t next time, though!’
The final forty-eight candidates entered the hall, where a series of squares were marked on the ground like a giant chequers board. This was to organise the candidates according to their aptitude. They needed at least two skills. The ‘y’ co-ordinates were the prime skills and the ‘x’ co-ordinates the secondary skills.
Each wandered over the grid to where their skills intersected until they had taken their spaces. They looked like a scene from The Prisoner. They were then summonsed to the testing labs.
Buzz was in the Pilot/Computing square which he shared with a fit-looking man dressed in red astronaut’s overalls. He felt dwarfed by this latter day Trojan. An avuncular hand reached down to ruffle his hair. ‘I wish they wouldn’t do that!’ he screamed internally.
He fiddled with his Xbox controller, his chosen personal item.
Skills: pilot – exploration – medicine – biology – mechanics – construction – communications – navigation – computing – recording geology – palaeontology – welfare and nutrition
The idea was to have something that mattered to them as a point of discussion. Little use without the games centre, except Buzz could play for hours as prop for his imagination as he piloted spaceships, planes and cars behind closed eyes.
There were four of them in the pilots’ row and Buzz felt very stupid, as all the others were adults and had thousands of hours’ experience. Save for the few occasions with Ford he’d only done it ‘virtually’.
They were first called through and the butterflies jumped in his stomach as they filed down echoing corridors then up the skeletal steel stairs to a door with a stencilled sign, ‘FLIGHT SIMULATOR’, in bold, friendly letters.
The others were called first while Buzz nervously passed the time, fiddling with his Xbox controls. The simulator would bump into action, heaving to the constant whoosh of compressed air. In each session at least two catastrophic events must have happened as the machine lurched violently and died.
Then a dark-haired woman beckoned him to the capsule and explained they were to simulate Neil Armstrong’s landing and docking on the first moon landing. To their horror, they discovered that he was too small to look out of the triangular window and reach the controls at the same time. Luckily Buzz could see that although the controls resembled Eagle, they were connected with a simple USB plug. He dropped out of sight and plugged in his Xbox controller.
The assistant smiled apologetically. ‘I’m sorry, it will need reprogramming.’
Buzz smiled back. ‘No problem, I can.’ He could see the screen and keyboard just behind the seats. He fiddled with the settings and his handset to match them up to the levers and thrusters until they were working at his fingertips.
‘Something to stand on!’ Henrietta scooted out and returned with a box of Coca Cola cans waiting for a nearby vending machine. As they set it up they gave him a tip. ‘Just miss the boulder field, and watch the fuel.’
Henrietta had a heart for the boy as he teetered on his makeshift platform, peering through the window, twiddling with his toy controls.
As he emerged from the ‘flight’, he was met with the sound of clapping. ‘You did just great, kid!’ Hen and the technicians welcomed him out.
‘I hit the ground a bit hard,’ he apologised modestly.
‘Listen, kid, those guys practised it a thousand times and you did it first time and no one died. So… really cool.’
Sometimes it’s best not to say too much; Buzz had done this a thousand times in ‘The Eagle has Landed’ game.
Bheki and Zulu shared the same square, the mechanic – welfare and nutrition combination. There were another four on the mechanics’ line and they were called together. The room had five work benches. On each bench was a collection of junk and a number of non-matching filters and an old space suit.
Sharon addressed the room. ‘You have three hours to resolve a life or death problem from fifty years ago. You’re going to die unless you work out how to adapt these square CO2 filters to fit the round holes of the fans. What’s available on the table is all they had on Apollo 13.’
Zulu wildly signed to Bheki, ‘Remember the film club?’
At the end of three hours only the boys’ effort was happily chugging away, the square filters adapted with cardboard, plastic bags and duct tape with the hose and pump from the space suit all lashed together. The boys had three advantages.
One: There were two of them.
Two: It was second nature for them.
Three: There were only five films in their library and Herman’s favourite was Apollo 13. They had seen it 65 times.
Sometimes you just get a lucky break.
Three candidates excelled in welfare and nutrition, and Enza was taken through with two fat ladies. They were subjected to a short interview. Yasmin smiled at her.
‘You have two distinct skills: nutrition and recording. Why did you put cooking first?’
To Enza it seemed obvious, but she struggled for the words until she remembered her father.
‘La scoperta di un piatto nuovo è più preziosa per il genere umano che la scoperta di una nuova stella.’
– Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin
‘My papa always say “The discovery of a new dish is more precious to mankind than the discovery of a new star.” Good food makes us happy and healthy.’
‘OK, we use many freeze-dried ingredients in space trips, but we hope to grow some crops. What would you want?’
‘I would grow garlic and herbs and tomatoes… I have to have olive oil and parmigiano for certain!’
They then entered a mock up of the space station galley.
‘This is not a kitchen, it’s an assembly line!’ Enza exclaimed. ‘I need a chopping board and a knife.’
She cleared a small space.
‘Remember you can’t make dust or bits to float around in a spaceship,’ reminded Yasmin.
‘I’m very, erm… tidy.’ Enza smiled. Already on the table were her requested ingredients, and stored on the wall units were all the basics. She organised everything on the tiny space available and then took a bag and added some dried potato, flour, eggs, salt, pepper and a little olive oil and water, which she mixed into a paste and when it was firm she took it out.
She then smeared the knife with olive oil, which she also sprinkled over the herbs. She chopped the sage, basil and broad-leaved parsley finely and it all stuck together so she could add it easily to the rest of the olive oil she had put in the bag. She then took the dough and kneaded it, deftly turning it into small nuggets of gnocchi. She stood back for a moment and studied the scene. She filled the original bag with hot water and boiled the gnocchi in the microwave so they didn’t stick. Then she added the cup of oil, crushed garlic and herbs to warm through. The parmesan was grated to coat the gnocchi. She cut the tomatoes into a fine salad and mixed the herby liquid with the gnocchi.
Enza’s bright eyes gleamed as she served it in the special bowls, shaped to nestle in the hand in zero gravity.
‘Buon Appetito! Gnocchi alla Spazio,’ she announced with a flourish.
They descended on the food. In the frenzied silence there was only one comment. ‘Best test yet!’
The examinations took the best part of the day before the candidates gathered once again in the hall. They waited apprehensively as the results were analysed. Henrietta had set up a table between two doors on the opposite side.
An expectant hush fell as she announced they’d made their selection, and when she called out their numbers they were to step forward and go through the door indicated.
No one knew which meant success or failure, except when a seasoned astronaut was called to the right door and Alim was called to the left it seemed pretty obvious. Except to Alim, who jogged to the right.
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‘Left, number 42,’ she called after him.
‘But it’s to your left, my dear!’
She gave him a withering look as he scuttled back over.
The children saw little more as they were next and also called to the left. They were whisked into a changing room and then outside.
Bursting into the cool of the evening and free from the laboratories, tests and pods, they were glad to be back in their own clothes and letting off steam as they gambolled through a tree-lined campus. They were taken to a comfortable common room, with its plush leather settees and dark-painted walls plastered with jaunty comic posters. At the far end there was a roaring wood fire, where the kids sat down looking lost and subdued, like the failed candidates on a reality show.
Breaking their reflection, the door opened and peeping nervously from behind the architrave was a familiar face: Elisabetta.
‘Mama!’ Enza screamed and flew across the room to her. ‘Have you come to take me home?’
There was a long pause as she accustomed herself to the lighting. ‘No, I’ve come to join you!’
Following her were Alim, Kristin, Zulu and Su-lin.
By the flicker of the fire, Sharon explained that no one was going home. This was the time to see how they worked together.
She turned to Alim and Zulu. ‘I’m very sorry, you were really chosen to support your youngsters. Zulu, you’re now too big and, Alim, you’d run out of cigarettes before we got to the moon!’
Then to Su-lin and Kristin she said, ‘You’re still in the running, but if we did pick the kids, you’ll be supporting them.’
Buzz looked around. Where was Ford?
‘Don’t worry, Buzz, he’s too busy but we have someone here for you. She’s called… Soraya.’
‘You and me, Buzzy boy!’ Soraya bustled in and ruffled his hair.
Dong Dong sniffed. This country was so different. It wasn’t just the faces and language. Even the air and light were different. Only the soil here felt familiar. He fiddled nervously with his phone as he waited.
His first long haul flight had awakened him to the true planet. There was so much water. China felt like an endless land, but when he left its coastline and flew for hour upon hour over the vast stretches of ocean towards California, he understood why this was a blue planet.
The Other Things Page 22