Mars gt-4

by Ben Bova

  “I think it does, Grandfather.”

  Al clasped his grandson’s shoulder. “Then go in beauty, son.” Jamie smiled back at him. He knew his grandfather would understand. Now he had to break the news to his parents, back in Berkeley.

  * * *

  Vosnesensky personally checked each scientist’s hard suit and backpack. Only when he was satisfied did he slide the transparent visor of his own helmet down and lock it in place.

  “At last the time has come,” he said in almost accentless English, like a computer’s voice synthesis.

  All the others locked their visors down. Connors, standing by the heavy metal hatch, leaned a gloved finger against the stud that activated the air pumps. Through the thick soles of his boots Jamie felt them start chugging, saw the light on the airlock control panel turn from green to amber.

  Time seemed to stand still. For eternity the pumps labored while the six explorers stood motionless and silent inside their brightly colored hard suits. With their visors down Jamie could not see their faces, but he knew each of his fellow explorers by the color of their suits: Joanna was dayglo orange; Ilona vivid green; Tony Reed canary yellow.

  The clattering of the pumps dwindled as the air was sucked out of the compartment until Jamie could hear nothing, not even his own breathing, because he was holding his breath in anticipation.

  The pumps stopped. The indicator light on the panel next to the hatch went to red. Connors pulled the lever and the hatch popped open a crack. Vosnesensky pushed it all the way open.

  Jamie felt light-headed. As if he had climbed to the top of a mesa too fast, or jogged a couple of miles in the thin air of the mountains. He let out his breath and took a deep gulp of his suit’s air. It tasted old and metal dry. Mars lay framed in the oval hatchway, glowing pink and red and auburn like the arid highlands where he had spent his childhood summers.

  Vosnesensky was starting down the ladder, Jamie realized. Connors went down next, followed by Joanna, then Tony, Ilona, and finally himself. As if in a dream Jamie went slowly down the ladder, one booted foot at a time, gloved hands sliding along the gleaming metal rails that ran between two of the unfolded petals of the aero-brake. Its ceramic-coated alloy had absorbed the blazing heat of their fiery entry into the Martian atmosphere. The metal mesh seemed dead cold now.

  Jamie stepped off the last rung of the flimsy ladder. He stood on the sandy surface of Mars.

  He felt totally alone. The five human figures beside him could not truly be people; they looked like strange alien totems. Then he realized that they were aliens, and he was too. Here on Mars we are the alien invaders, Jamie told himself.

  He wondered if there were Martians hidden among the rocks, invisible to their eyes, watching them the way red men had watched the first whites step ashore onto their land centuries ago. He wondered what they would do about this alien invasion, and what the invaders would do if they found native life forms.

  In his helmet earphones Jamie could hear the Russian team leader conversing with the expedition commander up in the orbiting spacecraft, his deep voice more excited than Jamie had ever heard before. Connors was checking the TV camera perched up at the front of the stilled robot construction vehicle.

  Finally Vosnesensky spoke to his five charges as they arranged themselves in a semicircle around him. “All is ready. The words we speak next will be heard by everyone on Earth.”

  As planned, they stood with their backs to the landing vehicle while the robot’s camera focused on them. Later they would pan the vidcam around to show the newly erected dome and the desolate Martian plain on which they had set foot.

  Holding up one gloved hand almost like a symphony conductor, Vosnesensky took a self-conscious half step forward and pronounced: “In the name of Konstantin Eduardovich Tsiolkovsky, of Sergei Pavlovich Korolev, of Yuri Alexeyevich Gagarin, and of all the other pioneers and heroes of space, we come to Mars in peace for the advancement of all human peoples.”

  He said it in Russian first and then in English. Only afterward were the others invited to recite their little prewritten speeches.

  Pete Connors, with the hint of Texan drawl he had picked up during his years at Houston, recited, “This is the greatest day in the history of human exploration, a proud day for all the people of the United States, the Soviet Union, and the whole world.”

  Joanna Brumado spoke in Brazilian Portuguese and then in English. “May all the peoples of the Earth gain in wisdom from what we learn here on Mars.”

  Ilona Malater, in Hebrew and then English, “We come to Mars to expand and exalt the human spirit.”

  Antony Reed, in his calm, almost bored Oxfordian best, “To His Majesty the King, to the people of the United Kingdom and the British Commonwealth, to the people of the European Community and the entire world—today is your triumph. We deeply feel that we are merely your representatives on this distant world.”

  Finally it was Jamie’s turn. He felt suddenly weary, tired of the posturings and pomposities, exhausted by the years of stress and sacrifice. The excitement he had felt only minutes ago had drained away, evaporated. A hundred million kilometers from Earth and they were still playing their games of nations and allegiances. He felt as if someone had draped an enormous weight around his shoulders.

  The others all turned toward him, five faceless figures in hard suits and gold-tinted visors. Jamie saw his own faceless helmet reflected five times. He had already forgotten the lines that had been written for him a hundred million kilometers ago.

  He said simply, “Ya’aa’tey.”

  EARTH

  RIO DE JANEIRO: It was bigger even than Carnival. Despite the scorching midafternoon sun the crowds thronged downtown, from the Municipal Theater all the way up the mosaic sidewalks of the Avenida Rio Branco, past Praca Pio X and the magnificent old Candelaria Church, out along Avenida Presidente Vargas. Not a car or even a bicycle could get through. The streets were literally wall-to-wall with cariocas, dancing the samba, sweating, laughing, staggering in the heat, celebrating in the biggest spontaneous outpouring of joy that the city had ever seen.

  They jammed into the tree-shaded residential square where gigantic television screens had been set up in front of high-rise glass-walled apartment buildings. They stood on the benches in the square and clambered up the trees for a better view of the screens. They cheered and cried and shouted as they watched the space-suited explorers, one by one, climb down the ladder and stand on that barren rocky desert beneath the strange pink sky.

  When Joanna Brumado spoke her brief words they cheered all the louder, drowning out the little speeches of those who followed her.

  Then they took up the chant: “Brumado-Brumado-Bru-ma-do! Bru-ma-do! Bru-ma-do!”

  Inside the apartment that had been lent to him for the occasion, Alberto Brumado smiled ruefully at his friends and associates. He had watched his daughter step onto the surface of Mars with a mixture of fatherly pride and anxiety that had brought tears to the corners of his eyes.

  “You must go out, Alberto,” said the mayor of Rio. “They will not stop until you do.”

  Large TV consoles had been wheeled into the four corners of the spacious, high-ceilinged parlor. Only a dozen people had been invited to share this moment of triumph with their famous countryman, but more than forty others had squeezed into the room. Many of the men were in evening clothes; the women wore their finest frocks and jewels. Later Brumado and the select dozen would be whisked by helicopter to the airport and then on to Brasilia, to be received by the president of the republic.

  Outside, the people of Rio thundered, “Bru-ma-do! Bru-ma-do!”

  Alberto Brumado was a small, slight man. Well into his sixties, his dark round face was framed by a neatly clipped grizzled beard and short gray hair that seemed always tousled, as if he had just been engaged in some strenuous action. It was a kindly face, smiling, looking slightly nonplussed at the sudden insistence of the crowd outside. He was more accustomed to the quiet calm of the university
classroom or the hushed intensity of the offices of the great and powerful.

  If the governments of the world’s industrial nations were the brain directing the Mars Project, and the multinational corporations were the muscle, then Alberto Brumado was the heart of the mission to explore Mars. No, more still: Brumado was its soul.

  For more than thirty years he had traveled the world, pleading with those in power to send human explorers to Mars. For most of those years he had faced cold indifference or outright hostility. He had been told that an expedition to Mars would cost too much, that there was nothing humans could do on Mars that could not be done by automated robotic machinery, that Mars could wait for another decade or another generation or another century. There were problems to be solved on Earth, they said. People were starving. Disease and ignorance and poverty held more than half the world in their mercilessly tenacious grip.

  Alberto Brumado persevered. A child of poverty and hunger himself, born in a cardboard shack on a muddy, rainswept hill overlooking the posh residencias of Rio de Janeiro, Alberto Brumado had fought his way through public school, through college, and into a brilliant career as an astronomer and teacher. He was no stranger to struggle.

  Mars became his obsession. “My one vice,” he would modestly say of himself.

  When the first unmanned landers set down on Mars and found no evidence of life, Brumado insisted that their automated equipment was too simple to make meaningful tests. When a series of probes from the Soviet Union and, later, the United States returned rocks and soil samples that bore nothing more complex than simple organic chemicals, Brumado pointed out that they had barely scratched a billionth of that planet’s surface.

  He hounded the world’s scientific congresses and industrial conferences, pointing out the photos of Mars that showed huge volcanoes, enormous rift valleys, and canyons that looked as if they had been gouged out by massive flood waters.

  “There must be water on Mars,” he said again and again. “Where there is water there must be life.”

  It took him nearly twenty years to realize that he was speaking to the wrong people. It mattered not what scientists thought or what they wanted. It was the politicians who counted, the men and women who controlled national treasuries. And the people, the voters who filled those treasuries with their tax money.

  He began to haunt their halls of power—and the corporate boardrooms where the politicians bowed to the money that elected them. He made himself into a media celebrity, using talented, bright-eyed students to help create television shows that filled the world’s people with the wonder and awe of the majestic universe waiting to be explored by men and women of faith and vision.

  And he listened. Instead of telling the world’s leaders and decision makers what they should do, he listened to what they wanted, what they hoped for, what they feared. He listened and planned and gradually, shrewdly, he shaped a scheme that would please them all.

  He found that each pressure group, each organization of government or industry or ordinary citizens, had its own aims and ambitions and anxieties.

  The scientists wanted to go to Mars for curiosity’s sake. To them, exploration of the universe was a goal in itself.

  The visionaries wanted to go to Mars because it is there. They viewed the human race’s expansion into space with religious fervor.

  The military said there was no point in going to Mars; the planet was so far away that it served no conceivable military function.

  The industrialists realized that sending humans to Mars would serve as a stimulus to develop new technology—on risk-free money provided by government.

  The representatives of the poor complained that the billions spent on going to Mars should be spent instead on food production and housing and education.

  Brumado listened to them all and then softly, quietly, he began speaking to them in terms they could understand and appreciate. He played their dreams and dreads back to them in an exquisitely manipulative feedback that focused their attention on his goal. He orchestrated their desires until they themselves began to believe that Mars was the logical objective of their own plans and ambitions.

  In time, the world’s power brokers began to predict that Mars would be the new century’s first test of a nation’s vigor, determination, and strength. Media pundits began to warn gravely that it might be more costly to a nation’s competitive position in the global marketplace not to go to Mars than to go there.

  Statesmen began to realize that Mars could serve as the symbol of a new era of global cooperation in peaceful endeavors that could capture the hearts and minds of all the world.

  The politicians in Moscow and Washington, Tokyo and Paris, Rio and Beijing, listened carefully to their advisors and then made up their minds. Their advisors had fallen under Brumado’s spell.

  “We go to Mars,” said the American President to the Congress, “not for pride or prestige or power. We go to Mars in the spirit of the new pragmatic cooperation among the nations of the world. We go to Mars not as Americans or Russians or Japanese. We go to Mars us human beings, representatives of the planet Earth.”

  The president of the Soviet Federation told his people, “Mars is not only the symbol of our unquenchable will to expand and explore the universe, it is the symbol of the cooperation that is possible between East and West. Mars is the emblem of the inexorable progress of the human mind.”

  Mars would be the crowning achievement of a new era of international cooperation. After a century of war and terrorism and mass murder, a cosmic irony turned the blood-red planet named after the god of war into the new century’s blessed symbol of peaceful cooperation.

  For the people of the rich nations, Mars was a source of awe, a goal grander than anything on Earth, the challenge of a new frontier that could inspire the young and stimulate their passions in a healthy, productive way.

  For the people of the poor nations—well, Alberto Brumado told them that he himself was a child of poverty, and if the thought of Mars filled him with exhilaration why shouldn’t they be able to raise their eyes beyond the squalor of their day-to-day existence and dream great dreams?

  There was a price to be paid, of course. Brumado’s successful wooing of the politicians meant that his cherished goal of Mars was the child of their marriage. Thus the first expedition to Mars was undertaken not as the scientists wanted it, not even as the engineers and planners of the various national space agencies wanted it. The first humans to go to Mars wont as the politicians wanted them to go: as quickly and cheaply as possible.

  The unspoken rationale of the first expedition was: politics first, science second—a distant second. This was to be a “flags and footprints” mission, no matter how much the scientists wanted to explore.

  Efficiency was an even more distant third, as it usually is when political considerations are uppermost. The politicians found it easier to rationalize the necessary expenditures if the project were completed quickly, before an opposition party got the chance to gain power and take credit for its ultimate success. Haste did not automatically make waste, but it forced the administrators to plan a mission that was far from efficient.

  Hundreds of scientists were recruited for the Mars Project. Scores of cosmonauts and astronauts. Thousands of engineers, technicians, flight controllers, and administrators. They spent ten years in planning and three more in training for the two-year-long mission. All so that twenty-five men and women could spend sixty days on Mars. Eight paltry weeks on Mars, and then back home again. That was the mission plan. That was the goal for which thousands devoted thirteen years of their lives.

  To the world at large, however, the excitement of the Mars Project grew with each passing month as the chosen personnel went through their training and the spacecraft took shape at launching centers in the Soviet Union, the United States, South America, and Japan. The world made itself ready to reach out to the red planet. Alberto Brumado was the acknowledged spiritual leader of the Mars mission, although he was not ent
rusted with anything more concrete than moral support. But moral support was desperately needed more than once during these years, as one government or another would want to opt out of the decade-long financial burden. But none did.

  Too old to fly into space himself, Brumado instead watched his daughter board the spacecraft that would take her to Mars.

  Now he had watched her step out onto the surface of that distant world, while the crowd outside chanted their name.

  Wondering if he had done the right thing, Alberto Brumado went to the long, sunlit windows. The crowd cheered wildly at the sight of him.

  * * *

  KALININGRAD: Mission control for the Mars expedition had more redundancy than the spacecraft the explorers flew in. While redundancy in the spacecraft was required for safety, at mission control it was required by politics. Each position in mission control was shared by two people at identical side-by-side consoles. Usually one was a Russian and the other an American, although at a few of the desks sat Japanese, British, French, and even an Argentine—with a Russian by the side of each one of them.

  The men and women of the mission control center were just starting to celebrate. Up to the moment of touchdown they had been rigidly intent on their display screens, but now at last they could lean back, slip off their headsets, laugh together, sip champagne, and light up victory cigars. Even some of the women took cigars. Behind the rows of consoles, in the glassed-in media section, reporters and photographers toasted one another and the mission controllers with vodka in paper cups.

  Only the chief of the American team, a burly balding man in his shirtsleeves, sweat stains at his armpits, unlit cigar clamped between his teeth, looked unhappy. He leaned over the chair of the American woman who bore the archaic title of CapCom.