by Allen Steele
In the midst of all the hysteria and saber-rattling, the investigation quietly continued, even if it had reached something of an impasse. By then, the bodies of the Dolan-Owlsleys and the Connor-Owlsleys had been recovered, and it was clear that they’d died when an explosion had ripped through the command center and hurled them into space. And although no one was yet certain what caused that explosion, it strongly appeared that the rig’s laser drill had ignited some volatile gas deep within the asteroid. So the only questions that remained unanswered were why no one in the command center had acted to prevent the accident in the first place, and also the whereabouts of other two crewmen.
Unfortunately, the ships which had responded to the mayday—the Gold Dust Woman, the Martian Pride, and the Ulysses—had to leave before the matter was resolved. All had missions that needed to be completed, and their original destinations were getting farther away with every passing day. So the bodies of the four dead crewmen were loaded aboard the Woman, the only one of the three vessels that was headed for Earth, and the recovery teams sealed the rig as best as they could. And then the TBSA and Pax ships made their departures from Eros.
Yet one person would eventually return to solve the mystery.
“I never believed in the Great Galactic Ghoul,” Quon Ko says. “Maybe it was fun for people to think some invisible space monster was responsible, but I couldn’t accept that. I have to work out there, y’know. There had to be another explanation.”
Over the next six months, while the Gold Dust Woman made the long trip home, its chief engineer continued to study the problem, putting together everything he and the others had learned while trying to supply the missing pieces. He studied the photos he’d shot, read the Explorer’s logbooks, poured over schematics of the rig. Nothing new came to him, but Ko admits that it became something of an obsession, and Captain Zimmerman eventually noticed that it was distracting him from his duties.
“Ko and I had a talk,” Henry says, “and I suggested that something might shake loose if he put it aside for awhile. It was sort of a roundabout way of telling him to get back to work, but he seemed to take my advice, because Lesley and I finally stopped hearing his theories over the dinner table…which, I gotta tell you, was a relief.”
Yet Ko only stopped discussing the Ritchie Explorer with the Zimmermans; he didn’t stop thinking about it. And the more he worked at the problem, the more he came to suspect that the two unsolved mysteries—the apparent negligence of the bridge crew, and disappearance of Keith and Jane Wetherill-Owlsley—were somehow linked. It couldn’t be a coincidence that the two surface-operations technicians were both on EVA when the blast occurred. Not only that, but Pax regulations mandated that anyone working outside a spacecraft—even in the low-gravity environment of an asteroid—should use a safety line. So why was only one line tethered to the outside hatch?
Yet Ko didn’t come up with answers to any of these questions until after the Gold Dust Woman came home. And even then, it was only by accident.
Three days after the freighter parked at the L2 port on the lunar farside, Quon Ko was strolling through Descartes City’s crater floor arboretum when he happened to glance at a bulletin board next to a snack bar. His gaze passed over the various items tacked on the board; along with political ads and notices of lost pets, there were also posters for various clubs and social groups…and suddenly, Ko found himself looking again at one in particular, featuring a picture of a skinsuited figure hanging precariously by his hands from the edge of a lunar cliff, with only a thin nylon rope between him and death.
The poster was for the Descartes City Mountaineering Club, and offered instruction in both tethered and free climbing…and that was when Ko remembered something he’d seen when he was making his way through the Explorer’s crew quarters. A book on the floor, titled Basics of Rock Climbing.
“Just like that, I had the answer.” Ko snaps his fingers. “I knew why Keith and Jane were out on the surface while an emergency was going on, and why there was only one tether and not two.”
Quon Ko immediately pulled out his phone and scanned the number on the poster. A few seconds later, he was speaking with Jody Suarez, the club president. After Ko explained who he was and why he was calling, Suarez agreed to check the club’s membership records. Although he reported a few minutes later that the Wetherill-Owlsleys were not on its rolls, that didn’t necessarily mean they weren’t climbers. Port Armstrong and Tycho City had their own mountain-climbing clubs, as did Arsia Station on Mars, and even then it was possible that the missing couple hadn’t belonged to any of those societies.
“I asked him if he’d ever heard of anyone free-climbing on asteroids,” Ko says, “and for a second or two I didn’t hear anything. And then he came back and told me that, yeah, he’d heard about this sort of thing, and it was possible that this might have been what they were doing.”
Free-climbing—the art of rock climbing without safety gear—has been practiced on Earth for over a hundred years, but only lately has it made its way to the Moon and Mars, where ropes and tethers are mandated for all anyone not on planetary surfaces or spacewalking with EVA maneuvering packs. In recent years, a new sport had been devised by enthusiasts: asteroid free-climbing, where one went EVA without lines or tethers, relying only on their hands, feet, and the asteroid’s minimal gravity to keep them from floating away.
“Both of the Wetherill-Owlsleys were surface techs,” Ko says, “which meant that they had plenty of opportunity to take up free-climbing. So that made me wonder…maybe one of them had left the rig to go climbing, and somehow got into trouble. That might have forced the other to go to the rescue, but in order to do so, he or she might have had to detach themselves from their own line.”
Even though he’s describing how he successfully deduced the solution of the mystery, there’s no smile on his face, but rather a wary skepticism that persists to this day. “If that were true,” Ko continues, “then maybe the rest of the crew was in the command center, watching the whole thing and not paying any attention to what the drill was doing. So when the laser hit the gas pocket, they’d already lost any chance they might have had to save themselves.”
His theory made sense to the Pax board of inquiry when they summoned him to testify. The TBSA had agreed to let Ko continue to cooperate with the investigation, which is what he wanted to do more than anything else. So when the Pax Astra dispatched a military vessel, the PASS Archangel Gideon, to Eros to finish the official investigation, Quon Ko went along as a consultant. Although this forfeited any chance of landing another chief engineer job for the next eighteen months, Ko was willing to return to the Ritchie Explorer.
“I wanted to find out what happened out there, once and for all,” he says. “I felt like I owed it to everyone who’d died that day.”
Another person participating in the Pax investigation was Lauren Moore, an astrophysicist from the University of Edinburgh. Dr. Moore had spent months studying old NASA data about Eros, and she had discovered an interesting anomaly that had been overlooked until then. When she described it to Ko while en route to Eros, he responded with his own conjecture, and the two of them realized that it might provide an explanation for Keith and Jane Wetherill-Owlsley’s disappearance, however far-fetched as it may seem. But they didn’t reveal their theory to anyone else; they wouldn’t be able to test it until they reached Eros and went out on the surface for themselves, and they didn’t want to appear foolish if they turned out to be wrong.
Almost five months later, the Gideon rendezvoused with Eros and its lander was sent down to the Ritchie Explorer. Shortly after it docked with the crippled rig, Ko and Lauren put on hardsuits and, along with Gideon’s chief petty officer, Elijah Koons, ventured out on the surface, using the same airlock through which Ko had entered the first time he’d been there. The handful of footprints Ko had spotted were still there, undisturbed in the year that had passed since the Gold Dust Woman had responded to the automated distress signal, and so was the s
afety line, which the trio followed across Himeros’s basin.
The discarded rope came to an end a hundred yards from the hatch. The footprints continued from there; they were sporadic, an average of six feet apart from one another, and although they were plainly visible now that Himeros was facing the Sun, they would have been easy to miss a year earlier, when that side of Eros had been in the middle of its long night. As both Ko and Lauren anticipated, the footprints led in to the direction of Himeros’s western wall, a little more than a mile away.
Quon, Dr. Moore, and Chief Petty Officer Koons carried extra loops of safety line, which they attached to each other as they made their way across the basin. It soon became clear that there were two sets of footprints, one set less distinct and on a slightly different track, as if one person had run after the other. The trails led to the bottom of the wall, where they suddenly came to a halt at the edge of an oval-shaped area where the regolith appeared to have been recently disturbed (“It looked like where kids had been horsing around in a sandbox,” Lauren would say later). There were a few hand-prints on the steep wall above the area of disturbance, but the searchers didn’t notice them until later; it was what they saw at the base of the wall that grabbed their attention.
“Sticking up from the ground was a boot,” Ko says. “It was upside-down, and we could see it from the bottom of its sole all the way down to its ankle. It looked like someone had thrown it there, until we got closer and saw another boot beside it, this one buried a bit more deeply. And then we saw that there were legs attached to them.”
This was the surface anomaly that Lauren Moore had learned about from studying old NASA data. As Eros slowly tumbled end-over-end, landslides frequently occurred within its larger craters and depressions. Over time, these landslides would create sand traps that appeared at first glance to be solid ground, but instead were little more than deep pits filled with powdery grey regolith.
“They’re like quicksand, only dry,” Lauren says. “Fall into one of them, and unless you’re attached to a safety line, you’re in a lot of trouble.” A grim smile. “Which is exactly what happened here.”
The legs belonged to Jane Wetherill-Owlsley. She lay upside-down above her husband Keith, who was buried more deeply than she was. Her right hand was grasped within his left hand, and their helmets were less than three feet apart from each other’s, but they were stuck fast, like two insects caught within dusty grey amber. Their suit batteries were dead and the oxygen supplies were depleted; both of them had suffocated, neither of them able to extricate themselves from the death trap into which they’d fallen.
Now it all came together. Keith Wetherill-Owlsley had unwisely decided to go free-climbing while a drilling operation was in progress. Perhaps he was bored with the monotony of his work; it may have even been possible that no one on the rig, other than his wife, knew what he was doing. Whatever the reason, he’d attempted to make an ascent of Himeros’s western wall, only to lose his grip and slide downhill to the crater floor…where, unknown to him, the sand pit lay waiting.
Hearing his call for help, Jane Wetherill-Owlsley had rushed to rescue her husband. Apparently she’d been on EVA at the same time, probably working on the rig while her husband was goofing off. Since the western wall was beyond reach of her safety rope, she’d released the tether. This decision ultimately doomed both of them, because when she tried to pull her husband out of the pit, there was nothing to prevent him from pulling her in as well…and once both of them were trapped in the pit, they couldn’t get out by themselves.
The crisis hadn’t gone unnoticed in the command center. The rest of the crew had dropped what they were doing to see what was going on. Perhaps they were on the verge of suiting up and going to the rescue. In any case, this was the third and final mistake the crew made, because while all this was taking place, no one was paying attention to the drill. So any warning that they might have had that the laser was about to hit a gas pocket came too late, and the explosion probably killed everyone in the rig almost instantly. The two surviving crew members only lived a little while longer; their suits’ air supplies finally ran out, though, and they died together, only a few feet from safety.
Everything could have been avoided. No one had to die that day. But six people lost their lives because stupid things were done in place where stupidity isn’t easily forgiven.
Quon Ko was one of the co-authors of the final report that revealed the circumstances of the disaster. He continued to serve as a TBSA spacecraft engineer for four more years before taking early retirement. Since then, he has made something of living from the Ritchie Explorer disaster; he has written articles, delivered lectures, and even worked as a consultant on a vid about the tragedy.
To this day, he’s surprised to hear how many people continue to believe that the disaster was the work of a mythical creature. What’s far more incredible, he points out, is the realization that the Explorer’s crew committed three separate errors that, on their own, might have been trivial, but when combined killed everyone on the rig. Nonetheless, some people feel it necessary to believe that an invisible space monster was responsible; he suspects that, for those people, a supernatural cause for the disaster is preferable to one that anyone could commit.
“We spend a lot of time worrying about stuff like the Great Galactic Ghoul,” he says, “but the thing we really should be afraid of is what we do to ourselves. Space monsters don’t exist, really. But careless mistakes will kill you just as quickly.”
The Emperor of Mars
Out here, there’s a lot of ways to go crazy. Get cooped up in a passenger module not much larger than a trailer, and by the time you reach your destination you may have come to believe that the universe exists only within your own mind: it’s called solipsism syndrome, and I’ve seen it happen a couple of times. Share that same module with five or six guys who don’t get along very well, and after three months you’ll be sleeping with a knife taped to your thigh. Pull double-shifts during that time, with little chance to relax, and you’ll probably suffer from depression; couple this with vitamin deficiency due to a lousy diet, and you’re a candidate for chronic fatigue syndrome.
Folks who’ve never left Earth often think that Titan Plague is the main reason people go mad in space. They’re wrong. Titan Plague may rot your brain and turn you into a homicidal maniac, but instances of it are rare, and there’s a dozen other ways to go bonzo that are much more subtle. I’ve seen guys adopt imaginary friends with whom they have long and meaningless conversations, compulsively clean their hardsuits regardless of whether or not they’ve recently worn them, or go for a routine spacewalk and have to be begged to come back into the airlock. Some people just aren’t cut out for life away from Earth, but there’s no way to predict who’s going to lose their mind.
When something like that happens, I have a set of standard procedures: ask the doctor to prescribe antidepressants, keep an eye on them to make sure they don’t do anything that might put themselves or others at risk, relieve them of duty if I can, and see what I can do about getting them back home as soon as possible. Sometimes I don’t have to do any of this. A guy goes crazy for a little while, and then he gradually works out whatever it was that got in his head; the next time I see him, he’s in the commissary, eating Cheerios like nothing ever happened. Most of the time, though, a mental breakdown is a serious matter. I think I’ve shipped back about one out of every twenty people because of one issue or another.
But one time, I saw someone go mad, and it was the best thing that could have happened to him. That was Jeff Halbert. Let me tell about him…
Back in ’48, I was General Manager of Arsia Station, the first and largest of the Mars colonies. This was a year before the formation of the Pax Astra, about five years before the colonies declared independence. So the six major Martian settlements were still under control of one Earth-based corporation or another, with Arsia Station owned and operated by ConSpace. We had about a hundred people living there by t
hen, the majority short-timers on short-term contracts; only a dozen or so, like myself, were permanent residents who left Earth for good.
Jeff wasn’t one of them. Like most people, he’d come to Mars to make a lot of money in a relatively short amount of time. Six months from Earth to Mars aboard a cycleship, two years on the planet, then six more months back to Earth aboard the next ship to make the crossing during the bi-annual launch window. In three years, a young buck like him could earn enough dough to buy a house, start a business, invest in the stock market, or maybe just loaf for a good long while. In previous times, they would’ve worked on off-shore oil rigs, joined the merchant marine, or built powersats; by mid-century, this kind of high-risk, high-paying work was on Mars, and there was no shortage of guys willing and ready to do it.
Jeff Halbert was what we called a “Mars monkey.” We had about a lot of people like him at Arsia Station, and they took care of the dirty jobs that the scientists, engineers, and other specialists could not or would not handle themselves. One day they might be operating a bulldozer or a crane at a habitat construction site. The next day, they’d be unloading freight from a cargo lander that had just touched down. The day after that, they’d be cleaning out the air vents or repairing a solar array or unplugging a toilet. It wasn’t romantic or particularly interesting work, but it was the sort of stuff that needed to be done in order to keep the base going, and because of that, kids like Jeff were invaluable.
And Jeff was definitely a kid. In his early twenties, wiry and almost too tall to wear a hardsuit, he looked like he’d started shaving only last week. Before he dropped out of school to get a job with ConSpace, I don’t think he’d traveled more than a few hundred miles from the small town in New Hampshire where he’d grown up. I didn’t know him well, but I knew his type: restless, looking for adventure, hoping to score a small pile of loot so that he could do something else with the rest of his life besides hang out in a pool hall. He probably hadn’t even thought much about Mars before he spotted a ConSpace recruitment ad on some web site; he had two years of college, though, and met all the fitness requirements, and that was enough to get him into the training program and, eventually, a berth aboard a cycleship.