Rescue Mode - eARC

by Ben Bova

  Frowning slightly, the President asked, “Your flight monitor, what’s his name?”

  “Brice. Nathan Brice.”

  “He let them get away with this?”

  The pain in Saxby’s chest flared again. “I don’t think he knew about it beforehand.”

  “Didn’t know?”

  “Benson and Connover presented him with a fait accompli, apparently.”

  “Apparently?”

  Saxby broke into a rueful grin. “If Nate knew about it beforehand, he’s too smart to admit to it.”

  The president did not smile back. “So let me get this straight. You’ve got four people stranded on Mars and four on their way home.”

  “They will be on their way home in a few days.”

  “And that includes the Russian, the one who has cancer.”

  “Yessir. They’re hoping to get him home soon enough for him to get proper treatment.”

  “And the four people on Mars?”

  “Both our geologists and our biologist, in addition to astronaut Connover. They’re eager to start exploring the planet.”

  “They have food, water, supplies?”

  “Enough food for a couple of years, if they’re careful. And they plan to mine water from the permafrost beneath the ground.”

  “How long can they last?”

  “Two years, maybe a little longer. My logistics people are working on the details.”

  “And when they run out of food?”

  Saxby hesitated. Speak truth to power, he heard in his head. “Before they run out of food, the follow-on mission will arrive at Mars.”

  “Follow-on mission?” the President snapped. “There isn’t any follow-on mission. It’s been scratched from your budget.”

  Sitting up straighter in his chair, Saxby said, “It’ll have to be reinstated, Mr. President. Otherwise, those four people will die on Mars.”

  President Robert Harper stared at Saxby for what seemed like an hour. Then his stern face eased into a smile.

  “Yes,” said the President of the United States, “we’ll have to get Congress to reinstate the funding for the follow-on mission.”

  “That won’t be easy,” Sarah Fleming objected.

  “Neither is exploring Mars,” said the president.

  And the pain in Saxby’s chest dwindled and disappeared.

  November 5, 2035

  16:59 Universal Time

  Mars Landing

  The Hercules

  “We’re down,” said Ted Connover, wiping sweat from his brow. “Everybody okay?”

  “I am good,” Catherine replied.

  “Shaken, but not stirred,” quipped McPherson.

  “My butt hurts but otherwise I’m okay,” Amanda said. “What about the ship?”

  “I’m running the diagnostics now.” Connover scanned his control panel. Three of the four landing legs showed amber, the fourth red. Yet the ship was standing erect and everything else was in the green. He smiled tightly. This bird might look fragile, but those guys in Huntsville built her right.

  Still strapped into their seats, the four of them were resting on their backs, legs in the air. For the first time in months they felt the force of gravity, but it was gentle, easy.

  Glancing through the window over his head Connover could see reddish dust billowing. We hit hard enough to raise a plume, he thought. But already the dust was wafting away.

  Ted’s piloting had put them down less than a hundred meters from where the Fermi habitat stood waiting.

  “Listen,” said Catherine Clermont.

  Connover heard creaks and groans from the base of the ship, where the rocket nozzle was cooling off. Somewhere a pump was gurgling softly.

  But there was something else. Something strange. A soft sighing sound, almost like a moan.

  “The wind,” Catherine whispered.

  “Yeah,” said McPherson.

  “The wind of Mars,” Amanda Lynn said, with awe in her voice.

  Benson’s voice, from the speaker grill on the control panel, broke their spell. “What’s your status, Ted?”

  “Looks like the landing legs are beat up, but everything else looks good. The ascent stage is in good shape and we’re all fine.”

  “We were holding our breaths up here,” Benson said. “I imagine some of the engineers in Houston passed out when the chute failed. You did a great job recovering.”

  “Hey, that was one of the failure modes we simulated, remember? I think I did a better job landing this bird for real than I did in the simulation. In the sim, the lander was damaged and venting atmosphere, wasn’t it?”

  “The TOAD will be proud of you,” said Benson.

  Ted broke into a fleeting smile. Thank God for the TOAD and all the disasters he’d thrown at them during training.

  “I’ll buy him a beer when we get back,” Ted said.

  Benson reverted to the business at hand. “Before too much time passes we need to get you on the PR feed with a status. You know, the whole ‘the Eagle has landed’ thing.”

  “Okay, I’m ready.”

  “Right. Three, two, one, go.”

  Connover looked at the red camera eye on his control board and put on a serious face. “Hercules Base here. Humanity’s first visitors to Mars have landed safely on the red planet. We four are going to make our home here on Mars until we can be rescued and returned to Earth. It is our sincere hope and prayer that our friends aboard the Arrow return safely to Earth and that this is just the first step in our exploration and settlement of Mars. We’re now going to prepare for our short walk across the Martian plain to the habitat where we’ll be living for many months—our home away from home. Thank you for your support and your good wishes.”

  The camera eye winked out.

  “Nice job,” said Amanda.

  “They’ll be hard pressed to cancel the follow-on after they hear that,” McPherson said.

  Maybe, Connover thought as he unbuckled his safety harness. But never underestimate the short-sidedness of politicians.

  “How soon do leave for the habitat?” Amanda asked.

  “We’ve got to complete the post-flight checklist and then start the prebreathing. We need to get there before sunset, so that gives us a few hours.”

  Three hours later, wearing their white surface suits and helmets, they were ready to leave the lander. The habitat was clearly visible in the distance, looking strangely out of place, a gleaming artifact of aluminum in the middle of the empty reddish rock-strewn sands.

  Instead of a ladder, the crew descended to the surface in an open-cage elevator that had been built into the side of their ship. Designed to carry no more than two astronauts at a time, the elevator was meant to prevent any falls that might occur while climbing down a ten-meter ladder from the ship’s airlock to the planet’s surface.

  Connover was to be the first person to actually set foot on the red Martian sand, followed by Catherine.

  Ted stepped out of the airlock and onto the elevator platform. He stopped and looked out at the scene. This is totally different from being on the Moon, he realized. On the Moon the sky was infinitely black and the ground a glaringly bright barren desert. “Magnificent desolation,” Buzz Aldrin had called it. And the Moon’s airless surface was completely quiet. The only sound Connover had heard on the Moon’s surface was his own breathing inside his spacesuit.

  Here on Mars, the sky was a soft beige color with a few wispy cirrus clouds high overhead. The ground was a burnt orange, deepening to rust red in the distance. They had landed in a flat, undulating plain, but there were mountains in the distance, or hills, at least. And while his own breathing was the loudest sound Ted heard, there was also a faint sighing whisper outside, the feathery sound of the Martian breeze brushing past his helmet.

  The elevator reached bottom and stopped. Ted unlatched the protective gate and stepped off onto the surface of Mars.

  “I’m on Mars!” he said aloud. I’m the first person to walk out onto the surface of
Mars.

  “Turn around!” Catherine called, sounding excited.

  He turned and saw that she held her camera up to eye level. He knew that this was part of the mission protocol but still he felt surprised, almost annoyed that he had to pose and make another speech at this incredibly intense moment.

  But he knew that a billion or more people back home would be watching this and hanging on his every word. Unfortunately, his mind went blank and at first all he could do was grin.

  Hoping that Catherine’s camera could pick up his smile even through his helmet visor, Ted Connover said:

  “The crew of the spacecraft Arrow, representing all the peoples of Earth, comes to Mars in peace and in the name of science and exploration.” Then he went farther than the script. “We are explorers turned refugees by circumstances beyond our control. May this, our temporary new home, keep us safe until we can return to Earth.”

  Catherine put the camera down and Ted switched to their private audio channel. “How’d I do?”

  “A prix d’or performance,” she said. “Your family would be proud of you. I am honored to be here with you.”

  Feeling a tear welling up, Ted replied in a lowered voice, “Thank you, Catherine. That means a lot to me. I just hope you and Hi can be as happy as we were. If you are, you’ll be among the most content, happiest people on Earth . . . er, Mars, that is.”

  He started walking around the upright lander, bending as far as he could in the stiff spacesuit to look at the landing legs. One of them was crumpled from the impact of hitting the ground, the other three were bent but holding firm. Good enough, he thought. She should stay erect on three legs, even when we load the ascent stage with the water.

  McPherson’s voice grated in his earphones. “How about sending the elevator back up here so we can get in on the fun?”

  Ted stepped back to the elevator and pressed the button that started it upward.

  “Come on down, you two,” he called. “Catherine and I can’t stand around here all day waiting for you.”

  “We’re ready to join our fellow Martians,” Amanda said.

  Catherine said, “Martians? I hadn’t thought of it that way before, but I suppose we are Martians now, at least for a while. If that is the case, I want my Martian husband down here with me right away.”

  Ted heard Hi’s reply. “Even on Mars, the women are impatient for the men to get things done.”

  Millions of men around the world will guffaw when they hear that remark, Ted thought. And quite a few women would undoubtedly send e-mails of reproof to NASA for Hi’s insensitivity. Ted thought it was funny, but he didn’t want to appear sexist by laughing at it. He was, he told himself, the first human being on Mars and the person responsible for keeping his fellow crew members safe on this exotic, alien world.

  But, as the elevator brought Amanda and Hi down to the ground, Ted couldn’t help thinking, I’m really here on Mars! Yahoo!

  November 5, 2035

  19:28 Universal Time

  Mars Landing

  Habitat Fermi

  It all seems surreal, Catherine Clermont thought as she trudged across the sandy surface of Mars from the lander to the habitat. Hi walked beside her, Ted and Amanda were slightly ahead of them. In their surface suits, Catherine thought of them as four white, helmeted strangers on a new world.

  The suits would not remain white for long, she knew. They were kicking up reddish orange dust as they walked. Already their boots and leggings were turning pink.

  The Sun looked strangely small, but it was shining brightly out of a nearly cloudless butterscotch sky. Unreal, Catherine repeated to herself. Like a dream.

  “It sure is different from walking on the Moon,” said Ted, his voice crackling in their helmet earphones.

  “Only you would compare it to the Moon, Ted,” McPherson said. “The rest of us are comparing it to that planet we came from: you know, it’s called Earth.”

  “You’re just jealous that you can’t compare it to more than one world,” Ted shot back.

  “Might be some truth in that,” Hi conceded.

  They could see their new home just ahead, its shining aluminum exterior looking odd compared to the rough orange landscape surrounding it. A big cylindrical shape, with a pair of inflated wings on either side of it. Catherine shook her head inside her helmet. It does not look as if it belongs here, she thought. It looks alien. Then she realized, We are the aliens here!

  Ted spoke up again. “Before we go inside we need to hook up the reactor.”

  He pointed off to their right. The reactor module was sitting about a hundred feet from the habitat, about the size of a minivan standing on its rear end, with four legs holding it upright. Atop it rose four large black square panels that looked like solar arrays; they were the radiators that would bleed away most of the waste heat generated by the nuclear reactor when it started operating at full power.

  “Ted, are you sure that the Russians provided the right cables to connect their reactor to our habitat?” McPherson asked.

  “Helluva time to think of that,” Amanda quipped.

  Ted replied, “I’m confident they got it right. Remember, they also made the reactor for the Arrow’s propulsion system and it worked right, didn’t it?”

  “How long will it take to power up?” asked Catherine.

  “A few hours. In the meantime we’ll go inside the habitat and start checking it out. She’s been running on standby mode: low power from her solar arrays since she landed here. Houston says everything is working, but I’ll believe it when we’ve checked it all out personally and we bring her up to full power.”

  It took the better part of an hour for them to power up the reactor and carry the power line to the connector plug on the base of the Fermi. It wasn’t as awkward to work in the surface suits as the EVA suits they’d used aboard the Arrow. They didn’t balloon as much, weren’t as stiff.

  Hi and Amanda were monitoring the performance of the reactor as it powered up, while Ted and Catherine lugged the power cable across the orange sand toward the habitat.

  Suddenly, Ted started laughing.

  “Ted, are you all right?” Catherine asked, alarmed. “What’s so funny?”

  “Catherine, did you know that Vicki and I were campers? We’d take our pop-up camper out several times a year and spend weekends among nature. Well, as close to nature as you can get in a state park campground, anyway.”

  “Thad, too?” she asked.

  “Thad, too. He got his first cactus stab before he was four years old,” Ted remembered. “Anyway, one of the setup routines with those campers is connecting the camper’s power cord to the outlets at the camp site. What we’re carrying here doesn’t look so different from what we carried back in those days, and the Fermi sort of looks like a big-assed camper to me. We’re camping on Mars!”

  Catherine began laughing too, she couldn’t help herself. And it felt good, a relief from the tension.

  They reached the habitat and Ted connected the cable, then carefully toggled the switch just above the connection that transferred the habitat from internal to external power.

  “Let’s go check out our camper,” Catherine said, still chuckling.

  November 6, 2035

  01:00 Universal Time

  Mars Landing Plus 1 Day

  New York City

  It was eight p.m. in Manhattan and a time when millions of viewers would be watching television, streaming their favorite 3D movie, or catching up with friends online.

  But like all the other media and content providers, Steven Treadway’s corporation was pre-empting their regular programming (a reality series set on the Moon) for a news special about the Mars landing.

  Treadway sat in a comfortable armchair on the set, flanked by Ilona Klein, the White House public affairs director, NASA’s Bart Saxby, and Senator William Donaldson.

  The floor-to-ceiling green screens surrounding them on three sides showed views of the Arrow in orbit around Mars, the Hercule
s lander on the surface, and the Fermi habitat.

  Treadway looked properly serious, Klein was visibly nervous, Saxby taut. Senator Donaldson resembled a thundercloud about to spit lightning.

  Treadway heard the traditional, “Four . . . three . . . two . . .” in his ear button, then the floor director pointed his forefinger like a pistol.

  “Good evening,” he began. “I’m Steven Treadway, reporting from our studios in New York and, thanks to the wonders of virtual reality, from the Fermi habitat on the surface of Mars, where four human explorers landed earlier today.”

  The first segment of the show was boringly predictable, Treadway thought as he solicited statements from the White House PR chief, then Saxby and finally Senator Donaldson. They all—even Donaldson—offered congratulations to the four men and women on Mars.

  Things became more interesting once they cut to the interviews that had been recorded earlier from the Mars habitat. The interview had already been spliced together by technicians so that it appeared that Treadway and the Mars landing team were conversing in real time.

  He appeared to be standing in the airlock section of the Fermi habitat, with the four explorers crowding around him in the cramped space.

  Catherine Clermont and Hi McPherson talked about how eager they were to go out and start studying Martian geology firsthand.

  “There are signs here that water once flowed across this plain,” Clermont said, while McPherson nodded vigorously behind her.

  “Water means life, doesn’t it?” Treadway prompted.

  “It might,” said Hi. “We know that on Earth all forms of life require water. That’s why it’s so important to see if there was once liquid water flowing on the surface of Mars.”

  Turning to Amanda Lynn, Treadway asked, “You’re the team biologist. Do you expect to find life on Mars?”

  Her dark face splitting into a gleaming smile, Amanda replied, “There is life on Mars. Us. We’re here now.”

  Treadway quickly covered his surprise. “Yes, of course. But I mean Martian life. Life-forms that are native to Mars.”