Voyage n-1

by Stephen Baxter

  Stone imagined York’s chagrin at that remark. Bleeker’s comparative backwardness at the geology wasn’t surprising. The guy was under real pressure; as well as field trips like this in support of the eventual landing mission, Bleeker was also working toward the D-prime Earth-orbit mission next month.

  But then, Stone reflected, Bleeker was supposed to be the landing mission surface specialist.

  “Anastomosis, asshole. It’s all in your Boy’s Coloring Book of Geology. Where a channel has been breached, and cut a branch through into another channel. Look. See the way the channels over there seem to diverge, then join up again. And you can see over there, where that bit of plateau has been left isolated. Cut off by the new channels.”

  The isolated upland was like a tabletop of rock, stuck in the middle of the plain.

  “Yeah. Okay, I see it. So what caused the breach?”

  “Phil—”

  “Okay, okay, Natalie. Don’t ask me questions like that, Adam. I won’t speculate.” It could be glaciation, though. Must be. What the hell else could have caused so much damage to the landscape? A lava flow, maybe?

  “What other macroforms?” York asked.

  Stone climbed on top of a rock, the heavy pack banging against his back, and peered around. “More uplands, carved out of the sedimentary stuff. They look—”

  “What?”

  “Smooth. Streamlined.” Like islands, their flanks smoothed out, left stranded by the drying out of a parent river. “And I can see what look like bars of gravel, some maybe twenty, thirty feet high. Kind of like sandbanks. They seem to have formed behind outcroppings, maybe of loess, or bedrock. Like tails. The rock has grooves scoured in it. Longitudinal. The grooves flow past the islands, and the gravel bars.”

  He came to a bed of loose clay and sand. “This is more loess, I think. I see—”

  “What?”

  “Ripples. Kind of frozen here, in the loess. Like small dunes, I guess. The dunes are stratified. It looks as if a river has dried out here.” He stalked on over the rock. “I have pits in the rock surface. Circular, a few inches deep, width from a foot wide upward. Scallop pits, I think.” Gouged out by pebbles, carried by turbulence… “The whole place is kind of like a river bottom,” he said. “Yeah. You basically have the topography of a dried-out river bottom — but magnified. Channels and bars and islands. All shaped by flowing water on a massive scale…”

  He looked around with a new excitement, seeing the geology with new eyes, with Natalie York’s eyes: the deep-carved, breached channels, the huge deposits of loess, the carved-out islands. “Christ. Is that it, Natalie? Is that what you’ve brought us out here to see? Was all of this region formed by a flood?”

  “You’re speculating again, Stone.”

  “Oh, come on, York.”

  “Okay. You’re right, Phil. At least, that’s the favored hypothesis.”

  Bleeker gave up on the half-assembled CELSS, and came to stand close to Stone. “What is?”

  York said, “In the Late Pleistocene — maybe twenty thousand years ago — much of Idaho and west Montana was covered by an immense lake. Called Missoula. Thousands of square miles of it. The lake was contained by an ice dam. The dam eventually burst, and released a catastrophic flood that swept over this area. Tens of millions of cubic yards per second, maybe a thousand times as much as the Amazon’s discharge rate—”

  “Jesus,” Stone said.

  “Yeah. The existing streamways couldn’t cope with the sudden volume, so they burst; the valleys were widened and deepened, and interconnecting channels were cut — all the way into the bedrock — in hundreds of places. Thousands of square miles were swept clean of the superficial structures, right down to the basalt bedrock, and another thousand square miles were buried in river-bottom debris.

  “We’re left with hundreds of cataract ledges, basins, and canyons eroded into the bedrock, isolated buttes and uplands, gravel bars thirty or forty yards high.

  “This is the scabland, Phil. There are only a handful of areas on Earth which show the effects of large-scale, catastrophic flooding so well.”

  Bleeker pushed back his Snoopy hat and scratched his blond head. “It’s fascinating, Natalie. But I don’t see what it has to do with us.”

  “Okay. Phil, I’ve given you another pack of photographs. In the left side-pocket of Adam’s pack.”

  Stone dug into Bleeker’s pocket and pulled out a plastic packet of black-and-white photographs. He leafed through them quickly, showing them to Bleeker.

  Cratered plains: the images were of Mars, clearly enough. But there was a channel cut deeply into what looked like the tough, ancient landscape of the southern hemisphere. There was a crater complex, overlaid by anastomosed channels. There was a crater with a teardrop-shaped, streamlined island, like a gravel bar, collected in its wake; and “downstream” of the crater, there were scour marks, running parallel to the island…

  Stone was having trouble making sense of what he saw and heard. “Are you saying that Mars has suffered catastrophic flooding — like the scabland here, in Washington State?”

  York hesitated. “I believe so. A lot of us have argued that, since the Mariner pictures came in. I’ve been studying the area you’re looking at, in those photos, since 1973. I guess I’m the leading expert on it, now. And it seems to me the analogy between the terrestrial scabland features and the Martian morphology is too striking to be a coincidence.”

  “But not everybody agrees,” Stone hazarded.

  “No,” she conceded. “Some say the Martian ‘scabland’ features are too big to have been formed by water. Schumm, for instance.”

  “Who?” Bleeker asked.

  “Schumm says the Martian channels must have been formed by tensional factors in the planet’s surface. Cracks, modified later, maybe, by vulcanism and the action of the wind.”

  “Sounds like an asshole to me,” Stone said, peering at the pictures. “I’m with you, Natalie.”

  “But if these Martian channels were formed by flooding,” Bleeker said, “where the hell did the water come from? And where did it go?”

  “I’ll bet she has a theory about that, too,” Stone muttered.

  “I didn’t copy, EV1.”

  “Go ahead, Natalie.”

  “Underground aquifers. Contained by tough bedrock below — maybe ten miles deep — and a cap of thick ice in the regolith above. Whatever lifted up Tharsis — a convection process in the mantle, maybe — must have caused the faulting that led to the flooding. The pressure of the water has to exceed the pressure of the rocks. All you’d need would be a breach on the subsurface ice cap for the water to gush to the surface, under high pressure.”

  “My God,” Stone said. “Oceans, buried in the Martian rocks. How can we find out if you’re right, Natalie?”

  “What we need is for three guys to land there in a MEM, and dig a few deep cores.”

  Stone started to see where all this was leading. He leafed through the photos again. “What area are these photos of?”

  “That’s one of the most striking outflow channels. It’s Mangala Vallis, Phil. Martian scabland: your landing area.”

  Stone grinned. She’s doing it again. Mangala Vallis. On which Natalie York, leading light of the site selection committee and would-be Mars voyager, just happens to be the world’s top expert.

  And Adam Bleeker still doesn’t know what anastomosis is. I hope the guy’s watching his back. Mission Elapsed Time [Day/Hr:Min:Sec] Plus 349/11:14:03

  Two months out, Mars had been the brightest object in the sky save the sun, but still a starlike point. Then — twenty days from orbit insertion — Mars had opened out into a disk. And where the line between light and dark crossed the planet, she could see, with her naked eye, wrinkles and bumps: craters and canyons, catching the light of the sun.

  Gradually, as the days had unfolded, she’d made out more and more recognizable detail on the surface. There was the huge gouge of the Valles Marineris — a wound visible ev
en from a million miles out — and the polar cap in the north, swelling with water ice in advance of the coming winter, and the great black calderas of the Tharsis volcanoes.

  It was remarkable how much she could recognize. Almost as if she had been here before.

  Mars was clearly a small world, she thought. Some of the features — Tharsis, the Marineris canyons, Syrtis, the great iced pit of Hellas in the south — sprawled around the globe, outsized, dominating the curvature.

  In some ways Mars was as she had expected. It looked a lot like the big photomosaic globes at JPL. But there were surprising differences, too. Mars wasn’t red so much as predominantly brown, a surface wrought out of subtle shadings of tan and ocher and rust. There was a sharp visible difference between northern and southern hemispheres, with the younger lands to the north of the equatorial line being brighter in color, almost yellow.

  Ares was approaching the planet at an angle to the sunlight, so Mars was gibbous, with a fat slice of the night hemisphere turned toward the spacecraft. And the ocher shading seemed to deepen at the planet’s limb, and at low sun angles. These features gave the little globe a three-dimensional effect, a marked roundness. Mars was a little round orange, the only object apart from the sun in all the 360-degree sky visible as other than a point of light.

  In the depths of the mission — suspended between planets, with nothing visible but sun and stars beyond the walls of the craft, and ground down by the stultifying routine of long-duration flight — York had suffered some deep depressions. She’d shrunk into herself, going through her assignments on autopilot, shunning the company of her crewmates. She suspected they’d suffered similarly, but they seemed to have found ways to cope: Gershon with his love of the machinery around them, Stone with his little pet pea plants.

  Already she was dreading the return journey; it loomed in her imagination, a huge black barrier.

  But that was for the future. Just then she was climbing out of the pit, up toward the warm ocher light of Mars.

  She spent as much time as she could just staring at the approaching globe, identifying sites no naked human eye had seen before, as if claiming more and more of Mars for herself.

  Monday, August 6, 1984

  MEM SPACECRAFT 009, LOW EARTH ORBIT

  As they prepared for the ignition, Bleeker had “Born in the USA” playing on the cabin’s little tape deck. It drowned out the clicks and whirs of the MEM’s equipment.

  Bleeker said, “Ascent propulsion system propellant tanks pressurized.”

  “Rager,” Gershon replied.

  “Ascent feeds are open, shutoffs are closed.”

  On the ground, Ted Curval was capcom today. “Iowa, this is Houston. Less than ten minutes here. Everything looks good. Just a reminder. We want the rendezvous radar mode switch in LGC just as it is on surface fifty-nine… We assume the steerable is in track mode auto.”

  Gershon said, “Stop, push-button reset, abort to abort stage reset.”

  Bleeker pushed his buttons. “Reset.”

  Curval said, “Our guidance recommendation is PGNS, and you’re cleared for ignition.”

  “Rog. We’re number one on the runway…”

  A hundred miles above the Earth, as Gershon and Bleeker worked through the litany of the preburn checklist, MEM and Apollo drifted in formation. The Apollo, containing Command Module Pilot Bob Crippen, was an exquisitely jeweled silver toy, drifting against the luminous carpet of Earth. And the MEM was a great shining cone, at thirty feet tall dwarfing Apollo, surrounded by discarded Mars heat-shield panels and rippling with foil.

  Its six squat landing legs were folded out and extended. But MEM 009 was destined to land nowhere.

  Gershon stood harnessed in place beside Bleeker in the cramped little cabin of the MEM’s ascent stage. He felt bulky, awkward in his orange pressure suit. In front of Gershon was a square instrument panel, packed with dials and switches and instruments. There were two sets of hand controllers, one for each man. More circuit breakers coated the walls, and there were uncovered bundles of wiring and plumbing along the floor.

  The cabin had two small triangular windows, one to either side of the main panel, calibrated with the spidery markings that would help guide a landing on Mars. Blue Earthlight shone through the windows, dappling the cabin’s panels.

  Behind Gershon there were three acceleration couches, two of them folded up. On a landing flight there would be a third crewman in here, the mission specialist, a passenger during the MEM’s single brief flight.

  The cabin’s surfaces were utilitarian, functional, mostly unpainted. The metal panels were just bolted together, the bundles of wires lashed in place by hand. You could see that the MEM was an experimental ship: the product of handcrafting, of thousands of man-hours of patient labor, and based on conservative designs, stuff that had worked before.

  The apparent coarseness of the construction, with everything riveted together as if in a home workshop, was the feature of space hardware that most surprised people used to sleek mass-produced technology. It was nothing like Star Trek.

  But to Gershon the MEM was real, almost earthy.

  To descend to Mars, in a ship assembled by the hands and muscles of humans: to Gershon, still elated to be in space at all, there was something wonderful about the thought.

  As long as the mother worked, of course.

  “Coming up on two minutes,” Curval called up. “Mark, T minus two minutes.”

  “Roger,” Bleeker said. He turned off the tape.

  Glancing at his panel, Gershon could see that the ascent stage was powered up, no longer drawing any juice from the lower stage’s batteries. It was preparing to become an independent spacecraft for the first time.

  In this test, simulating a launch from the Martian surface, the whole unlikely MEM assemblage was supposed to come apart, releasing the sticklike ascent stage with its ungainly, strap-on propellant tanks.

  Gershon knew this was the moment on the mission that was most feared by the engineers at Columbia and Marshall. There were too many ways for the fucking thing to go wrong. Like, the ascent-stage ignition would take place with the engine bell still buried within the guts of the MEM’s descent stage. What if there was a blowback, an overpressure of some kind, before the ascent stage got clear?…

  Well, they were soon going to find out.

  Bleeker said, “Guidance steering in the PGNS. Deadband minimum, ATT control, mode control auto.”

  “Auto,” Gershon responded.

  “One minute,” the capcom said.

  “Got the steering in the abort guidance.”

  Gershon armed the ignition. “Okay, master arm on.”

  “Rog.”

  “You’re go, Iowa,” said Curval.

  “Rager. Clear the runway.”

  Bleeker turned to him. “You ready?”

  “Sure.”

  “That mother may give us a kick.” Bleeker reminded him of the drill. “Okay, Ralph. At five seconds I’m going to hit ABORT STAGE and ENGINE ARM. And you’ll hit PROCEED.”

  “Rager.”

  “Here we go. Nine. Eight. Seven. Six. Five.”

  Beyond the small window in front of Gershon’s face, the shining blue horizon of Earth drifted by, a complex, clearly three-dimensional sculpture of cloud over sea.

  The computer display in front of Gershon flashed a “99,” a request to proceed. He glanced across at Bleeker.

  Bleeker closed the master firing arm. “Engine arm ascent.”

  Gershon pressed the PROCEED button.

  There was a loud bang, a rattle around the floor of the cabin. Pyrotechnic guillotines were blowing away the nuts, bolts, wires, and water hoses connecting the upper and lower stages of the MEM.

  A weight descended smoothly on Gershon’s shoulders.

  “First-stage engine on ascent,” Bleeker said. “Here we go.” He smiled. “Beautiful.”

  After his unexpected assignment to the prime Mars crew, Gershon had been happy to be bumped onto this D-
prime test mission. His first flight into space might not have been the most glamorous in the MEM test program — that would probably be the one remaining E mission, the attempt to bring a reinforced MEM in through the Earth’s atmosphere and land it on the salt flats around Edwards Air Force Base. That had been given to an experienced crew led by John Young. But the D-prime, an eleven-day Earth-orbit shakedown flight, was arguably the more important test. In an untried spacecraft, the crew would rehearse every phase of the Mars landing mission save only the atmospheric entry and final powered descent; and, as well, they would rehearse many contingency procedures which might save future missions.

  Already, in the MEM, Gershon and Bleeker had ventured as much as a hundred miles from Apollo. In a craft which nobody had tried to rendezvous with before. Which didn’t have a heat shield strong enough to get them back to the ground. And on top of that, the whole flight was in low Earth orbit, where communications and navigation challenges were even tougher than on, say, a flight to the Moon.

  If they got through this flight the MEM would be man-rated, with only the Mars heat shield remaining to be test-flown. It was a connoisseur’s spaceflight, a flight for true test pilots.

  And besides, Gershon had been happy to bury himself in the mission, to get away from the attention his assignment to the Mars crew had brought him. The first black man in space: the first brother on Mars. He was learning to deal with it, but it was relentless, distracting. And nothing to do with him.

  As far as he was concerned he was Ralph Gershon, complete and entire, and not a symbol of anyone else’s agenda.

  However, the mission had been snake-bit: nothing but problems from the beginning.

  It started even before the launch, in fact. Gershon had seen JK Lee’s people at Columbia tearing their hair out as they tried to coax Spacecraft 009 through its final prelaunch checkout in the Vehicle Assembly Building at the Cape. There had been times when Gershon had become convinced that it wouldn’t come together at all.

  Then, once they had reached orbit and opened up the docking tunnel between Apollo and MEM, Gershon found himself floating in a snowstorm of white fiberglass. It had blown out of an insulation blanket in the tunnel wall. Gershon and Bleeker had spent their first couple of hours in the MEM just vacuuming all that crap out of the air, and they had finished up with white stuff clinging to their hair, their eyelashes, their mouths, until they’d looked like nothing so much as a pair of plucked chickens.