by Ben Bova
Turning slightly, Jamie waved an arm in the general direction of the dome. “As you can see, the habitat is in excellent shape and we’re looking forward to spending the next year and a half here.
“Later,” he continued, “Dr. Trumball will conduct a virtual reality tour of the area. Right now, I’d like to thank the International Consortium of Universities, the Space Transportation Association, and the taxpayers of the United States, Australia, Japan, the European Community, and the island nation of Kiribati for providing the funds that have made this expedition possible.”
They had drawn lots weeks earlier to decide the order of appearances. Vijay Shektar stepped up to the camera next, anonymous in her bulbous hard suit, except for the bright green rings on its arms.
‘ ‘Hullo to everyone on Earth, and especially to the people of Australia,” she said, in her decidedly Aussie accent. Her voice belied her heritage: Shektar was of Hindu descent, dark skin and wide black onyx eyes. But she had been born and raised in Melbourne. She was a first-rate physician and psychologist who would also assist the biology team.
After Shektar’s little speech, Mitsuo Fuchida, one of the expedition’s two biologists, gave his greetings: first in Japanese, then in English.
Dex Trumball, with his royal blue armbands, followed.
“… and I want to thank the aerospace companies who donated so much of their equipment and personnel to us,” he said after the ritual salutations and compliments, “and the more than forty-five universities around the world who have contributed to this expedition. Without your financial and material and personal support, we wouldn’t be standing here on Mars now.”
Jamie felt his nose wrinkling slightly. 1 should’ve expected Dex to work a commercial in. He’s more interested in making money out of this expedition than doing science.
“And a very special thanks to my father, Darryl C. Trumball, whose energy, vision and generosity has been a primal force in creating this expedition and an inspiration to us all.”
Jamie and Dex had argued about the expedition’s goals for the whole five months of their flight to Mars. Politely, at first, like two mannerly academicians. But over the long months of their passage in space their ideological differences inevitably sharpened into shouting matches; real anger had developed between them.
I’m going to have to iron that out, Jamie told himself. We can’t go on snarling at each other. We’ve got to be able to work together, as a team.
Find the balance, the Navaho part of his mind whispered. Find the path that leads to harmony. Only harmony can bring you to beauty.
His rational mind agreed, but still he seethed at Trumball’s cavalier assumption that the expedition should be aimed at making a profit.
The last person to appear before the camera was Trudy Hall, the English cellular biologist.
“I’ve been rehearsing this speech for months,” she said, her voice high with excitement, “but now that we’re here—well, all I can say is: Crikey! This is a bit of all right! Let’s get on with it!”
Jamie laughed to himself inside the privacy of his helmet. So much for English aplomb, he thought.
The brief ceremonies over, Trumball started to move the cameras while most of the others headed for the cargo hatch of their spacecraft and the labor of unloading.
Nobody sees us at work, Jamie thought. The sweat of unloading our equipment and supplies isn’t glamorous enough for the media and the folks back home. They want drama and excitement; just hauling supplies from the L/AV to the dome isn’t thrilling enough for them.
He turned and gazed out across the Martian landscape. Once we thought it was dead. Dry and cold and barren. But now we know better. He blinked, and thought for a moment he was looking out at the Navaho land in New Mexico where his grandfather had taken him so many times. Many summers ago. A lifetime ago, on another world. That land looked dry and dead, too. Yet the People lived there. Thrived there, in a hard and bitter land.
The Martian landscape held an uncanny beauty. It stirred a chord within Jamie, this red world. It was a soft landscape, barren and empty, yet somehow gentle and beckoning to him. Jamie saw that the shaded sides of the rocks and dunes were coated with a light powdering of white that sparkled and winked and vanished where the new-risen sun touched them.
I’m home, he thought. Alter six years, I’ve come back to where I belong.
“What’s that white stuff?”
Jamie heard Vijay Shektar’s smoky feline voice in his earphones, softly curious. He turned his head, but the helmet blocked his view; he had to turn his whole body to see her standing beside him.
“Frost,” Jamie answered.
“Frost?”
“Water vapor in the atmosphere freezes out on the ground and the rocks.”
“But this is spring, isn’t it?” Her voice sounded slightly puzzled, unsure.
Nodding, Jamie answered, “That’s right. It won’t be summer for another four months.”
“But frosts should come in autumn, not in spring,” she said.
Jamie smiled. “On Earth. This is Mars.”
“Oh.” She seemed to consider that for a moment, then said with a gleeful lilt in her voice, “We can have a snowball fight, then?”
Jamie shook his head. “Afraid not. The ice here won’t compact. It’s not wet enough; not enough hydrogen bonding.”
“I don’t understand.”
“It’s like very dry, very powdery snow. Much drier and more powdery than anything on Earth.” Jamie wondered if she had ever gone skiing in Australia. Maybe New Zealand, he thought. They have good ski mountains there.
“Can’t make snowballs, then,” Shektar said. She sounded disappointed.
Raising his arm to point toward the horizon, Jamie answered, ‘ ‘You could once, long ago. There was an ocean here … or at least a sizeable sea. Like the Gulf of Mexico, most likely: fairly shallow, warmed by the sun.”
“Really?”
“Sure. See the terracing? The scallop-shaped indentations?”
“That was caused by an ocean?”
Jamie nodded inside his helmet. “It lapped up to the slope of the Tharsis bulge, off to the west there. Where we’re standing was probably seashore, once. There might be fossils of seashells beneath our feet.”
“And what would Martian seashells look like?” Dex Trumball asked sharply. “How would you recognize a fossil here? The forms would be completely different from Earth.”
Jamie turned and saw Dex’s hard suit with its royal blue armbands nearly a hundred meters away. He’d been eavesdropping on their suit-to-suit frequency.
There’s always bilateral symmetry,” Jamie said, trying to keep the resentment out of Ins voice.
Trumball laughed.
Vijay added, “Something with legs would help.”
Bounding across the iron-red sand toward them, clutching a plastic sample case in one gloved hand, Dex said, “But that stuff about the ocean is good. I could use that in my VR tour. Give me a couple hours with the computer and I could even show a visual simulation to the viewers back home!”
Dex was all youthful enthusiasm and vigor. Jamie felt distinctly annoyed.
The geophysicist hustled up the slight rocky incline in two-meter-long strides to where Jamie and Vijay stood.
“It’s really frost, all right. Look at it! Come on, I want to get some samples before the sun evaporates all of it.” He hoisted the insulated sample case.
Without waiting for Jamie, Trumball started down the slope toward the frost-rimed dunes.
Jamie clicked the keyboard on his left cuff to the suit radio’s base frequency. ‘ ‘Waterman to base. Shektar, Trumball and I are going down into the dune field.”
Stacy Dezhurova’s answering voice sounded slightly nettled. “You will be out of camera range, Jamie.”
“Understood,” Jamie said. “We should be no longer than thirty minutes and we won’t go beyond walk-back range.”
Dezhurova made a sound somewhere between a sigh
and a snort. “Copy thirty minutes max in walk-back range.”
As senior of the two astronauts, Dezhurova was responsible for enforcing the safety regulations. Her primary station was at the dome’s communications center, watching everyone working outside through the surveillance cameras spotted around the dome.
I can understand why she’s ticked off, Jamie thought. We ought to be at the dome, helping to stow the equipment and consumables instead of wandering off across the landscape. The others had both the small tractors trundling between their L/AV and the dome.
Still, he turned his back to the work and walked slowly beside Vijay, ready to offer his hand if she stumbled on the rocks scattered across the ground. His geologist’s eye took in the area. This must be a really old impact crater, he told himself. Weathering on Mars takes eons, and this rim is almost eroded down to the level of the sand floor. Must have been a big hit, from the size of the basin. What’s left of it.
Trumball was already down in the shadows, on his knees, carefully scraping the fragile, paper-thin coating of ice into an open sample container.
“It’s water ice, all right,” he was saying over the suit-to-suit frequency as they approached him. “Same isotopic composition as the ice at the north pole, I bet. Stuff sublimes into vapor up there and the atmosphere transports it down toward the equator.”
Vijay pointed with a gloved finger. “It’s melting where the sun is hitting it.”
“Subliming,” Trumball said without looking up from his work. “It doesn’t melt, it sublimes.”
“Goes from ice to vapor,” Jamie explained, “with no liquid phase in between.”
“I understand,” she replied.
“The atmosphere’s so thin, liquid water evaporates immediately.”
“Yes, I know,” she said, with a slight edge in her voice.
Trumball snapped the container shut and inserted it into his sample case. “This’ll help us nail down the global circulation of the atmosphere.”
“Will this water be carbonated, too?”
Closing the plastic box and climbing to his feet, Trumball said, “Sure. Just like the water from the permafrost underground. Martian Perrier, loaded with carbon dioxide.”
Jamie started them back toward the base, feeling left out of the conversation but not knowing how to jump in without making it seem obvious that he was competing with the younger man.
“Life has the same needs here as on Earth,” Vijay was saying.
“Why not?” Trumball replied, waving his free hand. “It’s all the same, basically: DNA, proteins—same on both planets.”
“But there are differences,” Jamie said. “Martian DNA has the same double-helix structure as ours, but the base pairs are different chemicals.”
”Yeah, sure. And Martian proteins have a few different amino acids in ‘em. But they still need water.”
They had reached the crest of the rim rock. Jamie could see the camera atop its high skinny pole peering at them.
Reluctantly, he said, “We’d better get back to the dome and help finish the unloading.”
She answered, “Yes, I suppose we should.”
Jamie couldn’t see Trumball’s face behind the heavily tinted visor of his helmet, but he heard the younger man laugh.
Hefting his container box, Trumball said, “Well, some of us have important work to do. Have fun playing stevedores.”
And he loped across the rock-strewn ground toward the base shelter, leaving Jamie and Shektar standing on the rim of the ancient crater.
VIRTUAL TOUR: SOL 1
LATER THAT AFTERNOON, C. DEXTER TRUMBALL WAS STILL EXCITED AS HE clicked the two miniaturized VR cameras into the slots just above his visor. They were slaved to the movements of his eyes, if the electronics rig worked right. Together with the molecular-thin data gloves he had already wormed over his spacesuit gloves, he would be able to show the millions of viewers on Earth whatever he himself saw or touched.
Briefly he looked back at the rest of the crew, now carrying crates and bulky canisters through the dome’s airlock. They would spend the rest of the day setting up equipment and making the dome livable. Trumball’s job was to entertain the people back home who were helping to pay for this expedition.
The first expedition to Mars had been run by national governments and had cost nearly a quarter-trillion dollar. This second expedition was financed mostly by private sources and cost less than a tenth as much.
Of course, the six years between the two missions had seen the advent of Clipperships, reusable spacecraft that brought down the cost of flying into orbit from thousands of dollars per pound to hundreds. Masterson Corporation and the other big aerospace firms had donated dozens of flights into Earth orbit to the Mars expedition; it was good public relations for them and their new Clipperships.
And Dex’s father had indeed spearheaded the drive that raised the money for the expedition. The elder Trumball had personally donated nearly half a billion dollars of his own wealth, then shivvied, cajoled, or shamed fellow billionaires into contributing to the cause.
But the real reason for the lower cost was that this second expedition was going to live off the land. Instead of carrying every gram of water, oxygen and fuel all the way from Earth, they had sent automated equipment ahead of them to land on Mars and start producing water, oxygen and fuel from the planet’s atmosphere and soil. Dex Trumball dubbed the procedure “Plan Z,” after the engineer who had pioneered the concept decades earlier, Robert Zubrin.
Still, even with Plan Z, the expedition ran into problems before its first module took off from Earth.
Nuclear rockets would cut the travel time between Earth and Mars almost in half. But there was still so much controversy in the United States and Europe over using nuclear propulsion that the expedition planners moved the main launch site to the island nation of Kiribati, out in the middle of the Pacific. There the nuclear engines were launched into orbit on Clipperships, to he mated with the living and equipment modules launched from the United States and Russia. Anti-nuclear demonstrators were not allowed within two hundred miles of the island launch site.
Kiribati’s price for being so obliging was to have the expedition’s mission control center established at their capital, Tarawa. Pete Connors, astronaut veteran of the first expedition, and the other controllers did not at all mind moving to the balmy atoll. And Kiribati got global attention for its fine hotels and tourist facilities. And security.
The biggest problem had been selection of the personnel to go to Mars. Two biologists and two geologists would be the entire scientific staff, and the competition among eager, intense young scientists was ferocious. Dex sometimes asked himself if he would have been selected as one of the geologists even if his father had not been so munificent. Doesn’t matter, he always answered himself. I’m on the team and the rest of them can torque themselves inside out for all I care.
Trumball grimaced as he checked out the VR electronics with his head-up display. The diagnostic display flickered across his visor. Everything operational except the damned gloves. Their icon blinked red at him.
The first law of engineering: when something doesn’t work, kick it. As he jiggered the hair-thin optical fiber wires that connected the gloves to the transmitter on his backpack, Trumball told himself once again that he was the only man on the team who understood the economics of this mission. And the economics determined what could or could not be accomplished.
Waterman and the rest of the scientists always have their heads in the clouds, he thought. They’re here to do science. They want to convert their curiosity into Nobel Prizes. Yeah, but unless somebody foots the frigging bills they’d still be back on some campus on Earth spending their nights chatting about Mars over the Internet.
Hell, I want to do good science, too. But the thing is, somebody’s got to pay for all this. They look down on me because I’m the only realist in the crowd.
The glove icon at last flicked to green in his HUD. He was ready to s
tart the virtual reality tour.
Trumball cleared the display from his visor, then tapped his wrist keypad for the radio frequency back to mission control at Tarawa. It would be twenty-eight minutes before his signal reached Earth and their confirmation and go-ahead returned to him. He spent the time plotting out the route he would follow through this little travelogue.
“Mission control to Trumball,” at last came Connors’ rich baritone voice across a hundred million kilometers. “You are go for the VR tour. We have sixteen point nine million subscribers on-line, with more logging in as we announce your start time.”
We’ll hit twenty million easy, Trumball thought happily. At ten bucks u head, that pays for almost half of our ground equipment. We’re going to make a profit out of this expedition!
The Zieman family—father, mother, nine-year-old son and five-year-old daughter—sat in the entertainment room of their suburban Kansas City house in front of the wall-to-wall video screen.
Only one corner of the screen was activated: a serious-looking black man was explaining that the transmission from Mars took fourteen minutes to cover the distance between the two planets, even with the signal traveling at the speed of light, “which is three hundred thousand kilometers per second,” he emphasized.
The nine-year-old shook his head emphatically. “It’s two hundred and ninety-nine point seven nine kilometers per second,” he corrected righteously.
His sister hissed, “Ssshh!”
“Put your helmets on,” their father said. “They’re going to start in a couple of seconds.”
All four of them donned plastic helmets that held padded earphones and slide-down visors. They worked their fingers into the wired data gloves—mother helping her daughter, the boy proudly doing it for himself—then pulled the visors down when the man on the screen told them the tour was about to start.
The black man’s voice counted down, “Three … two … one…”