Mars, Inc.: The Billionaire's Club

by Ben Bova

  “I have a few slides to show y’all,” he said.

  Thrasher groaned inwardly. Every NASA presentation always begins with, “The first slide, please.”

  Linda went to the nearest window and touched the control panel. Storm shutters slid slowly down, darkening the room.

  The wall above the buffet table lit up and showed: MARS, INC. PRELIMINARY PLAN.

  Margulis fiddled with his smartpad and a chart appeared on the wall.

  I hope he doesn’t bore them to death, Thrasher thought.

  “We’re going to use the Earth-orbital assembly technique,” Margulis said, aiming a laser pointer at one of the boxes. “Instead of building a rocket booster big enough to lift the whole spacecraft and send it to Mars, we’ll use existing commercial boosters such as Boeing’s Delta IV to lift the craft in segments and assemble the segments in low Earth orbit.”

  “Won’t that be expensive?” Uta Gerson asked.

  “Not as expensive as developing a whole new booster,” said Margulis.

  “How many launches will you need?” Sampson asked.

  “I’m figuring on a minimum of six. That includes lifting the propulsion system and its propellant, plus all the life-support supplies.”

  Will Portal, the only other engineer at the table, asked, “Do you plan to send supplies and fuel for the return flight on ahead, separately?”

  In the darkened room, Thrasher could see Margulis relax into a grin. A fellow geek boy to talk to.

  “You’re thinking of the old Mars Express idea,” he said to Portal.

  “Zubrin’s plan, yes.”

  “We’ll be looking into that, of course,” Margulis said. “We’ll have to do a cost analysis and weigh the consequences of a possible failure somewhere along the mission profile.”

  “Failure?” piped Charlie Kahn.

  Spreading his hands, Margulis said, “Rockets blow up sometimes. Spacecraft go dead. It’s a long way to Mars. We’ve got to factor in the effects of possible failures.”

  “You mean somebody might get killed?”

  Before Margulis could reply, Thrasher said flatly, “It’s a possibility. We’ll be doing everything we can to make that possibility as small as we can, of course.”

  “Zero defects,” Margulis said.

  “What does that mean?”

  “It’s a program NASA instituted during the Apollo program. Every piece that goes into the spacecraft is examined and tested. Every single weld, every component of every vehicle, every shoelace, even.”

  “Instead of just taking samples at random and testing them,” Portal said.

  “Yessir,” said Margulis. “Zero defects is our goal. No piece goes uninspected or untested.”

  “That will be expensive,” Gelson murmured.

  “Not as expensive as a failure,” snapped Thrasher.

  17

  NEWS RELEASE

  Fortunately, Margulis only had a half-dozen slides to show the board of directors, and the last one was an artist’s painting of a team of spacesuited people standing on the surface of Mars, bearing two flags: the Red, White and Blue, and a rust-red pennon that bore the logo of Mars, Inc.

  Even more fortunately, Thrasher thought, most of the directors didn’t have a deep enough technical understanding to ask meaningful questions. They sat there and let Margulis tell them how everything was going to work. All except Will Portal, but he seemed more fascinated with what Margulis was showing than combative.

  They even swallowed Margulis’ fleeting reference to the main propulsion system without comment. The slide clearly showed the standard symbol for a nuclear facility, but none of them seemed to notice it. It helps to get their eyes glazed over before you flash the zinger at them, Thrasher thought.

  Of course, some of the directors around the table had to vent their egos. Both the Kahn brothers asked about specifics of budgeting. Margulis looked at Thrasher.

  “Much too early for that kind of detail, fellas. We’ve just started out, after all. All this is conceptual, not concrete yet.”

  Sampson stroked his shaggy white beard as he asked, “How do you propose to pick the people who’ll go to Mars?”

  “They’ll all be professional astronauts,” Thrasher said.

  “Or scientists,” Margulis added. “Geologists, planetary scientists, biologists. They’ll get astronaut training, like the scientists who flew on the old space shuttle.”

  “Biologists?” Nels Bartlett asked.

  “Yessir,” said Margulis. “There’s an excellent chance that Mars harbored life, eons ago.”

  “There might even be life still existing there now,” Thrasher added.

  “Martians? Little green men?”

  “Microbes,” said Margulis. “Living underground, perhaps.”

  “That means you’ll have to take precautions not to contaminate them with terrestrial bugs,” said Portal.

  “That’s right.”

  “Could Martian bugs infect our people?”

  “No,” said Thrasher.

  “We don’t know,” Margulis countered. “Contamination precautions work both ways, of course.”

  “Of course,” Sampson said dryly.

  Thrasher let them prattle on until they seemed to run out of questions. Then he got to his feet, thanked Margulis, and asked, “Do I hear a motion to adjourn?”

  The meeting broke up after Thrasher reminded the directors that they were invited to dinner at Gatlin’s, a Houston favorite.

  “Seven o’clock,” he told them. “Authentic Texas barbecue.”

  Sampson groaned.

  As the group filed out of the conference room, Thrasher crooked a finger at Francine Timons. “We need to talk, Francie.”

  She nodded. “We surely do.”

  Linda was waiting at the door. Everyone else had left the conference room.

  “You go on back to the office,” Thrasher called to her. “Then send Carlo back here to pick up Francie and me.”

  Once Linda departed and closed the door, Thrasher took a seat in the middle of the conference table and gestured Timons to sit beside him.

  Francine Timons was a dark-skinned woman who worked very hard to maintain her figure. Not that she was a beauty, by any means, but in the struggle upward from an affirmative action “two-fer” black woman she quickly realized that she needed every asset she could attain. She learned to dress stylishy, and to make the most of her looks. Thrasher had hired her away from Global News to be the PR head of Thrasher Digital.

  “You’re going to have to do double duty, Francie: I want you to head the public relations teams for Mars, Incorporated.”

  Flashing a bright smile, she asked, “Do I get a raise?”

  “Not just yet. We have to operate lean and mean.”

  “Can I hire a couple of people? I mean, I’ve only got a three-person staff as it is.”

  Thrasher pursed his lips. “Will you really need extra help?”

  “To handle PR for Mars? What do you think?”

  “Lean and mean,” Thrasher repeated.

  “Two new hires,” Francine said, her long face settling into a determined scowl.

  “Two? Can’t you—”

  “Two,” she insisted. “I already know who I want.”

  “You do?”

  “I knew you’d want me to do the Mars operation. You’re too cheap to go out and hire somebody else when you can dump the job on me.”

  Thrasher scowled back at her. “I want you to do the job because you’re the best person for the assignment.”

  “And I work cheap.”

  “Well, that’s a point in your favor,” he admitted.

  They laughed together.

  “Okay,” Thrasher said. “Two new hires.”

  Francine nodded happily. “And we’re off to Mars.”

  “Indeed we are,” Thrasher said fervently.

  YEAR

  TWO

  1

  PORTALES, NEW MEXICO

  Thrasher had wanted to keep the h
eadquarters of Mars, Inc., as close to his own Houston offices as possible. But Sampson and the Kahn brothers insisted it should be near the New Mexico spaceport, where most of their launches would take place.

  Sid Ornsteen broke the deadlock by suggesting Portales. It was more or less halfway between Houston and Las Cruces, had an excellent university, and to clinch the argument, he pointed out that office leases in Portales were less than half the going rate in Houston.

  Thrasher reluctantly agreed, although he worried about being too close to Vicki Zane. He thought the distance between Albuquerque and Houston was just about right: close enough for them to get together for romantic weekends, far enough to allow him to keep from getting entangled.

  When Linda suggested he rent a condo in Portales rather than taking a hotel room every time he traveled there, Thrasher vetoed the idea. “No condo. I don’t want anybody thinking I’m setting up house.”

  Standing in front of his desk, with the panoramic view of downtown Houston’s skyscrapers behind her, Linda shook her head knowingly. “’Anybody’ meaning a certain redheaded newswoman from Albuquerque?”

  Thrasher grinned. “You know me too well, kid.”

  Quite seriously, Linda said, “You’re what my grandmother would call a reprobate.”

  “Maybe so,” he admitted. “But after two marriages and two divorces you can’t blame a guy for being gun shy.”

  “You need a woman in your life,” Linda insisted.

  “More than one,” said Thrasher. “More than one.”

  Linda threw up her hands and stamped out of the office.

  Thrasher chuckled and muttered to himself, “Women.”

  The Portales headquarters was hardly imposing or impressive. It was an old warehouse, abandoned by its former owner, an automobile tire retailer who had gone bankrupt—because of gambling debts in Las Vegas, according to the local rumor.

  Thrasher had the place cleaned up, and set up movable partitions for offices and work spaces. Best of all, he had converted part of the parking lot into a helicopter pad. The city council had balked at the idea, but Thrasher personally appealed to the zoning board, dropping incredibly broad hints about the job opportunities that Mars, Inc., would create. Several members of the zoning board had teenaged children or kids in college; Thrasher’s appeal passed by a one-vote majority.

  Now, as he looked out the window of the helicopter as it approached the parking lot at a steep angle, he thought that the zoning board had made a decent decision. The former warehouse was on the fringe of the city, a district of small factories and warehouses; there were no residential areas within several blocks to be bothered by the noise or the danger of a crash.

  We could even offer helicopter transportation to the other companies in the neighborhood, he thought as the chopper landed in a swirl of gritty dust. Make a couple of bucks; maybe the chopper can pay for itself.

  It felt chilly as he strode through the bright afternoon sunshine to the door that stood beneath a bold red mars, inc. sign. April in New Mexico, he thought. Still winter, almost. There’s still enough snow in the mountains for the die-hard skiers to get another shot at breaking their necks.

  The offices inside the former warehouse looked temporary. The bare girders of the ceiling made the place feel like an empty, echoing airplane hangar. And it still smelled vaguely of old tires, Thrasher thought. The partitions of the cubicles were only shoulder high, and most of them were bare, the cubicles unoccupied. That’ll change, he told himself.

  Jessie Margulis’ cubicle was bigger than most of the others, because he had an oblong conference table butted against his desk like the long leg of a T. When Thrasher breezed in, Jessie was sitting at the desk, staring admiringly at a model that looked distinctly ungainly to Thrasher.

  It was perched on a wooden base, a bulbous cylinder with a fat wheel attached to one end of it by four spokes.

  “That’s it?” Thrasher asked, without preamble.

  Margulis looked up from the model. “This is it,” he said, smiling like a kid who’d just unwrapped his birthday present. “This is the vehicle that’ll take us to Mars.”

  Thrasher pulled a chair out from the conference table and plopped into it.

  “Jessie, I’ve got to tell you, it doesn’t look very sexy. In fact, it looks kind of ugly.”

  Margulis’ smile widened. “It’s going to be assembled in space. It’ll go into orbit around Mars. Never touch the ground, never fly through an atmosphere. It doesn’t have to be sleek and sexy.”

  “It’s not going to look good on TV.”

  “So what? It’s going to be home to seven people for just about two years. They’re going to love it. And so will you.”

  “What’s this wheel thing?”

  “Living quarters. That’s where the crew will live during the six-month flight to Mars. It spins to give the crew a feeling of weight.”

  “Oh?”

  Slipping into his lecture mode, Margulis explained, “The biggest problem we faced was the fact that the trip takes a minimum of six months. The crew would be in microgravity all that time.”

  “Zero gee,” said Thrasher.

  “The science people call it microgravity.”

  “They’re weightless, like up in the space station.”

  “Right. But after six months of microgravity, they won’t be in any physical shape to go down to the surface of Mars and work there. Their muscles will be deconditioned.”

  “How bad—”

  “People coming back from six months on the space station need a week or more to get back to normal on Earth.”

  “But Mars’ gravity is lighter than Earth’s, isn’t it?”

  “About one-third.”

  “So is there really a problem here?”

  “According to the medical people, the physiologists, yes there is.”

  “And this wheel thingee will solve it.”

  “Damned right,” said Margulis, fervently. “The wheel rotates at a rate that produces a feeling of Earthly gravity.”

  “So there’s no problem with weightlessness.”

  “Better than that, Art. Better than that.” Margulis was almost gleeful. “As the ship proceeds to Mars, we gradually despin the wheel—slow down its spin rate—so that by the time they arrive at Mars they’ve been living under Martian-level gravity for weeks.”

  “You can do that?”

  “Damned right we can! The crew can go right down to the surface and start working as soon as they get there. Isn’t that neat?”

  Thrasher nodded in admiration.

  “And on the way home,” Margulis went on, “we reverse the procedure. By the time they get back to Earth they’re fully re-adapted to terrestrial gravity!”

  Thrasher saw that Margulis was as happy as only an engineer can be when he’s hit on an elegant solution to a difficult problem.

  He nodded graciously. “I’ve got to hand it to you, Jessie. It may not look like much, but it’ll get the job done.”

  Margulis’ face grew more serious. “One problem, though, Art.”

  “What?”

  “We’re going to need more than six Delta IV launches to get all the components into orbit.”

  “More than six? How many more?”

  “I’m figuring on nine.”

  Thrasher winced. “That’s fifty percent more than we’re budgeted for.”

  “Plus one, maybe two as backups. In case of launch failure.”

  “Double the budget, just about.”

  “The budget was preliminary, you know.”

  Thrasher sighed. “I know, but still . . . doubling the heavy lift budget. That’s a tough proposition.”

  The engineer asked softly, “You want me to see if we can squeeze by with less? Cut corners?”

  “No,” Thrasher said. “I’ll break the news to Jenghis Kahn.” To himself he added, I’d better wear a bulletproof vest when I do.

  2

  SAN FRANCISCO

  Vince Egan rode with Thrasher t
o San Francisco. Thrasher Digital’s chief engineer was on his way to a consumer electronics conference; Thrasher himself had an appointment with Bart Rutherford, the retired genius who had designed the rocketplanes that carried tourists on suborbital flights up to the fringes of space.

  “So how’s Jessie Margulis working out for you?” Egan asked.

  Egan was a wiry, intense forty-something whom Thrasher had met when he’d been a student at MIT. In a school full of the brightest kids in the land, Egan had stood out among his MIT classmates. Thrasher had hired him on the spot for his fledgling Thrasher Digital Corporation and never regretted his impulsive decision.

  “Fine,” Thrasher answered absently, gazing out the plane’s oval window.

  Sitting in the plush leather-covered swivel chair facing Thrasher, Egan stared at his boss for a moment.

  Then, “Art, when you say ‘fine’ I worry. Is Jessie giving you problems? Does he need help?”

  Forcing a smile, Thrasher said, “No problems. Not really. Nothing that money can’t fix.”

  One of Vince Egan’s best traits, Thrasher thought, was that he knew when to shut up. “Okay,” he said. “I was just wondering. I could help him out, if he’s not working out for you.”

  Changing the subject, Thrasher asked, “You know Bart Rutherford, don’t you?”

  For an instant a flash of irritation crossed Egan’s face. But it passed before Thrasher could react to it. Egan said, “I’ve met Rutherford a few times, yes. He’s retired now, I’ve heard.”

  “I want to talk him out of retirement.”

  “Hire him for Mars?”

  “Take him on as a consultant.”

  “To look over Jessie’s shoulder?”

  “No, no. Something else entirely. Nothing to do with Mars.”

  Egan looked puzzled. “Gee, boss, I didn’t think you had time for anything except Mars.”

  Thrasher grinned back at him. “I’m deeper than you think, pal.”