The Hard SF Renaissance

by David G. Hartwell

  The plane was designed to use its rocket engines for takeoffs, then once at altitude, it would run on the prop. Solar panels painted onto the wing’s upper surface would provide the electricity to power the electrical engine. There was too little oxygen in the Martian air to run a jet engine; the rockets were the plane’s main muscle, the solar cells its secondary energy source.

  Back in the dome, Jamie and the others crowded over Dezhurova’s shoulders to watch the takeoff on the comm center’s desktop display screen.

  As an airport, the base left much to be desired. The bulldozed runway ran just short of two kilometers in length. There was no taxiway; Rodriguez and a helper—often Jamie—simply turned the fragile plane around after a landing so it was pointed up the runway again. There was no windsock. The atmosphere was so rare that it made scant difference which way the wind was blowing when the plane took off. The rocket engines did most of the work of lifting the plane off the ground and providing the speed it needed for the broad, drooping wings to generate enough lift for flight.

  Jamie felt a dull throbbing in his jaw as he bent over Dezhurova, watching the final moments before takeoff. With a conscious effort he unclenched his teeth. There are two men in that plane, he told himself. If anything goes wrong, if they crash, they’ll both be killed.

  “Clear for takeoff,” Dezhurova said mechanically into her lip mike.

  “Copy clear,” Rodriguez’s voice came through the speakers.

  Stacy scanned the screens around her one final time, then said, “Clear for ignition.”

  “Ignition.”

  Suddenly the twin rocket engines beneath the wing roots shot out a bellowing flame and the plane jerked into motion. As the camera followed it jouncing down the runway, gathering speed, the long, drooping wings seemed to stiffen and stretch out.

  “Come on, baby,” Dezhurova muttered.

  Jamie saw it all as if it were happening in slow motion: the plane trundling down the runway, the rockets’ exhaust turning so hot the flame became invisible, clouds of dust and grit billowing behind the plane as it sped faster, faster along the runway, nose lifting now.

  “Looking good,” Dezhurova whispered.

  The plane hurtled up off the ground and arrowed into the pristine sky, leaving a roiling cloud of dust and vapor slowly dissipating along the length of the runway. To Jamie it looked as if the cloud was trying to reach for the plane and pull it back to the ground.

  But the plane was little more than a speck in the salmon-pink sky now.

  Rodriguez’s voice crackled through the speakers, “Next stop, Mount Olympus!”

  Rodriguez was a happy man. The plane was responding to his touch like a beautiful woman, gentle and sweet.

  They were purring along at—he glanced at the altimeter—twenty—eight thousand and six meters. Let’s see, he mused. Something like three point two feet in a meter, that makes it eighty-nine, almost ninety thousand feet. Not bad. Not bad at all.

  He knew the world altitude record for a solar-powered plane was above one hundred thousand feet. But that was a UAV, an unmanned aerial vehicle. No pilot’s flown this high in a solar-powered plane, he knew. Behind his helmet visor he smiled at the big six-bladed propeller as it spun lazily before his eyes.

  Beside him, Fuchida was absolutely silent and unmoving. He might as well be dead inside his suit, I’d never know the difference, Rodriguez thought. He’s scared, just plain scared. He doesn’t trust me. He’s scared of flying with me. Probably wanted Stacy to fly him, not me.

  Well, my silent Japanese buddy, I’m the guy you’re stuck with, whether you like it or not. So go ahead and sit there like a fuckin’ statue, I don’t give a damn.

  Mitsuo Fuchida felt an unaccustomed tendril of fear worming its way through his innards. This puzzled him, since he had known for almost two years now that he would be flying to the top of Olympus Mons. He had flown simulations hundreds of times. This whole excursion to Olympus Mons had been his idea, and he had worked hard to get the plan incorporated into the expedition schedule.

  He had first learned to fly while an undergraduate biology student, and had been elected president of the university’s flying club. With the single-minded intensity of a competitor who knew he had to beat the best of the best to win a berth on the Second Mars Expedition, Fuchida had taken the time to qualify as a pilot of ultralight aircraft over the inland mountains of his native Kyushu and then went on to pilot soarplanes across the jagged peaks of Sinkiang.

  He had never felt any fear of flying. Just the opposite: he had always felt relaxed and happy in the air, free of all the pressures and cares of life.

  Yet now, as the sun sank toward the rocky horizon, casting eerie red light across the barren rust-red landscape, Fuchida knew that he was afraid. What if the engine fails? What if Rodriguez cracks up the plane when we land on the mountain? One of the unmanned soarplanes had crashed while it was flying over the volcano on a reconnaissance flight; what if the same thing happens to us?

  Even in rugged Sinkiang there was a reasonable chance of surviving an emergency landing. You could breathe the air and walk to a village, even if the trek took many days. Not so here on Mars.

  What if Rodriguez gets hurt while we’re out there? I have only flown this plane in the simulator, I don’t know if I could fly it in reality.

  Rodriguez seemed perfectly at ease, happily excited to be flying. He shames me, Fuchida thought. Yet … is he truly capable? How will he react in an emergency? Fuchida hoped he would not have to find out.

  They passed Pavonis Mons on their left, one of the three giant shield volcanoes that lined up in a row on the eastern side of the Tharsis bulge. It was so big that it stretched out to the horizon and beyond, a massive hump of solid stone that had once oozed red-hot lava across an area the size of Japan. Quiet now. Cold and dead. For how long?

  There was a whole line of smaller volcanoes stretching off to the horizon and, beyond them, the hugely massive Olympus Mons. What happened here to create a thousand-kilometer-long chain of volcanoes? Fuchida tried to meditate on that question, but his mind kept coming back to the risks he was undertaking.

  And to Elizabeth.

  Their wedding had to be a secret. Married persons would not be allowed on the Mars expedition. Worse yet. Mitsuo Fuchida had fallen in love with a foreigner, a young Irish biologist with flame-red hair and skin like white porcelain.

  “Sleep with her,” Fuchida’s father advised him, “enjoy her all you want to. But father no children with her! Under no circumstances may you marry her.”

  Elizabeth Vernon seemed content with that. She loved Mitsuo.

  They had met at Tokyo University. Like him, she was a biologist. Unlike him, she had neither the talent nor the drive to get very far in the competition for tenure and a professorship.

  “I’ll be fine,” she told Mitsuo. “Don’t ruin your chance for Mars. I’ll wait for you.”

  That was neither good nor fair, in Fuchida’s eyes. How could he go to Mars, spend years away from her, expect her to store her emotions in suspended animation for so long?

  His father made other demands on him, as well.

  “The only man to die on the First Mars Expedition was your cousin, Konoye. He disgraced us all.”

  Isoruku Konoye suffered a fatal stroke while attempting to explore the smaller moon of Mars, Deimos. His Russian teammate, cosmonaut Leonid Tolbukhin, said that Konoye had panicked, frightened to be outside their spacecraft in nothing more than a spacesuit, disoriented by the looming menace of Deimos’s rocky bulk.

  “You must redeem the family’s honor,” Fuchida’s father insisted. “You must make the world respect Japan. Your namesake was a great warrior. You must add new honors to his name.”

  So Mitsuo knew that he could not marry Elizabeth openly, honestly, as he wanted to. Instead, he took her to a monastery in the remote mountains of Kyushu, where he had perfected his climbing skills.

  “It’s not necessary, Mitsuo,” Elizabeth protested, once sh
e understood what he wanted to do. “I love you. A ceremony won’t change that.”

  “Would you prefer a Catholic rite?” he asked.

  She threw her arms around his neck. He felt tears on her cheek.

  When the day came that he had to leave, Mitsuo promised Elizabeth that he would come back to her. “And when I do, we will be married again, openly, for all the world to see.”

  “Including your father?” she asked wryly.

  Mitsuo smiled. “Yes, including even my noble father.”

  Then he left for Mars, intent on honoring his family’s name and returning to the woman he loved.

  The excursion plan called for them to land late in the afternoon, almost at sunset, when the low sun cast its longest shadows. That allowed them to take off in daylight, while giving them the best view of their landing area. Every boulder and rock would show in bold relief, allowing them to find the smoothest spot for their landing.

  It also meant, Fuchida knew, that they would have to endure the dark frigid hours of night immediately after they landed. What if the batteries fail? The lithium-polymer batteries had been tested for years, Fuchida knew. They stored electricity generated in sunlight by the solar panels and powered the plane’s equipment through the long, cold hours of darkness. But what if they break down when the temperature drops to a hundred and fifty below zero?

  Rodriguez was making a strange, moaning sound, he realized. Turning sharply to look at the astronaut sitting beside him, Fuchida saw only the inside of his own helmet. He had to turn from the shoulders to see the space-suited pilot—who was humming tunelessly.

  “Are you all right?” Fuchida asked nervously.

  “Sure.”

  “Was that a Mexican song you were humming?”

  “Naw. The Beatles. ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.’”

  “Oh.”

  Rodriguez sighed happily. “There she is,” he said.

  “What?”

  “Mount Olympus.” He pointed straight ahead.

  Fuchida did not see a mountain, merely the horizon. It seemed rounded, now that he paid attention to it: a large gently rising hump.

  It grew as they approached it. And grew. And grew. Olympus Mons was an immense island unto itself, a continent rising up above the bleak red plain like some gigantic mythical beast. Its slopes were gentle, above the steep scarps of its base. A man could climb that grade easily, Fuchida thought. Then he realized that the mountain was so huge it would take a man weeks to walk from its base to its summit.

  Rodriguez was humming again, calm and relaxed as a man sitting in his favorite chair at home.

  “You enjoy flying, don’t you?” Fuchida commented.

  “You know what they say,” Rodriguez replied, a serene smile in his voice. “Flying a plane is the second most exciting thing a man can do.”

  Fuchida nodded inside his helmet. “And the most exciting must be sex, right?”

  “Nope. The first most exciting thing a man can do is landing a plane.”

  Fuchida sank into gloomy silence.

  As the senior of the expedition’s two astronauts, Anastasia Dezhurova was technically second-in-command to Jamie Waterman. She saw to it that her main duty was the communications center, where she could watch everyone and everything. As long as she was watching, Dezhurova felt, nothing very bad could happen to her fellow explorers.

  The dome was quiet, everyone busy at their appointed tasks. Dezhurova could see Waterman outside, doggedly chipping still more rock samples. Trudy Hall was in her lab working with the lichen from the Grand Canyon; the only other woman among them, Vijay Shektar, was in her infirmary, scrolling medical data on her computer.

  “Rodriguez to base,” the astronaut’s voice suddenly crackled in the speaker. “I’m making a dry run over the landing area. Sending my camera view.”

  “Base to Rodriguez,” Dezhurova snapped, all business. “Copy dry run.” Her fingers raced over the keyboard and the main display suddenly showed a pockmarked, boulder-strewn stretch of bare rock. “We have your imagery.”

  Dezhurova felt her mouth go dry. I’d better call Jamie back into the dome. If that’s the landing area, they’re never going to get down safely.

  Rodriguez banked the plane slightly so he could see the ground better. To Fuchida it seemed as if the plane was standing on its left wingtip while the hard, bare rock below turned in a slow circle.

  “Well,” Rodriguez said, “we’ve got a choice: boulders or craters.”

  “Where’s the clear area the soarplanes showed?” Fuchida asked.

  “‘Clear’ is a relative term,” Rodriguez muttered.

  Fuchida swallowed bile. It burned in his throat.

  “Rodriguez to base. I’m going to circle the landing area one more time. Tell me if you see anything I miss.”

  “Copy another circle.” Stacy Dezhurova’s tone was clipped, professional.

  Rodriguez peered hard at the ground below. The setting sun cast long shadows that emphasized every pebble down there. Between a fresh-looking crater and a scattering of rocks was a relatively clean area, more than a kilometer long. Room enough to land if the retros.fired on command.

  “Looks OK to me,” he said into his helmet mike.

  “Barely,” came Dezhurova’s voice.

  “The wheels can handle small rocks.”

  “Shock absorbers are no substitute for level ground, Tmas.”

  Rodriguez laughed. He and Dezhurova had gone through this discussion a few dozen times, ever since the first recon photos had come back from the UAVs.

  “Turning into final approach,” he reported.

  Dezhurova did not reply. As the flight controller she had the authority to forbid him to land.

  “Lining up for final.”

  “Your imagery is breaking up a little.”

  “Light level’s sinking fast.”

  “Yes.”

  Fuchida saw the ground rushing up toward him. It was covered with boulders and pitted with craters and looked as hard as concrete, harder. They were coming in too fast, he thought. He wanted to grab the control T-stick in front of him and pull up, cut in the rocket engines and get the hell away while they had a chance. Instead, he squeezed his eyes shut.

  Something hit the plane so hard that Fuchida thought he’d be driven through the canopy. His safety harness held, though, and within an eyeblink he heard the howling screech of the tiny retro rocket motors. The front of the plane seemed to be on fire. They were bouncing, jolting, rattling along like a tin can kicked across a field of rubble.

  Then a final lurch and all the noise and motion stopped.

  “We’re down,” Rodriguez sang out. “Piece of cake.”

  “Good,” came Dezhurova’s stolid voice.

  Fuchida urgently needed to urinate.

  “OK,” Rodriguez said to his partner. “Now we just sit tight until sunrise.”

  “Like a pair of tinned sardines,” said Fuchida.

  Rodriguez laughed. “Hey, man, we got all the creature comforts you could want—almost. Like tourist class in an overnight flight.”

  Fuchida nodded inside his helmet. He did not relish the idea of trying to sleep in the cockpit seats, sealed in their suits. But that was the price to be paid for the honor of being the first humans to set foot on the tallest mountain in the solar system.

  Almost, he smiled. I too will be in the Guinness Book of Records, he thought.

  “You OK?” Rodriguez asked.

  “Yes, certainly.”

  “Kinda quiet, Mitsuo.”

  “I’m admiring the view,” said Fuchida.

  Nothing but a barren expanse of bare rock, in every direction. The sky overhead was darkening swiftly. Already Fuchida could see a few stars staring down at them.

  “Well, look on the bright side,” Rodriguez quipped. “Now we get to test the FES.”

  The Fecal Elimination System. Fuchida dreaded the moment when he had to try to use it.

  Rodriguez chuckled happily, as if he hadn’
t a care in the world. In two worlds.

  “Never show fear.” Tòmas Rodriguez learned that as a scrawny asthmatic child, growing up amidst the crime and violence of an inner-city San Diego barrio.

  “Never let them see you’re scared,” his older brother Luis told him. “Never back down from a fight.”

  Tmas was not physically big, but he had his big brother to protect him. Most of the time. Then he found a refuge of sorts in the dilapidated neighborhood gym, where he traded hours of sweeping and cleaning for free use of the weight machines. As he gained muscle mass, he learned the rudiments of alley fighting from Luis. In middle school he was spotted and recruited by an elderly Korean who taught martial arts as a school volunteer.

  In high school he discovered that he was bright, smart enough not merely to understand algebra but to want to understand it and the other mysteries of mathematics and science. He made friends among the nerds as well as the jocks, often protecting the former against the hazing and casual cruelty of the latter.

  He grew into a solid, broad-shouldered youth with quick reflexes and the brains to talk his way out of most confrontations. He did not look for fights, but handled himself well enough when a fight became unavoidable. He worked, he learned, he had the kind of sunny disposition—and firm physical courage—that made even the nastiest punks in the school leave him alone. He never went out for any of the school teams and he never did drugs. He didn’t even smoke. He couldn’t afford such luxuries.

  He even avoided the trap that caught most of his buddies: fatherhood. Whether they got married or not, most of the guys quickly got tied down with a woman. Tmas had plenty of girls, and learned even before high school the pleasures of sex. But he never formed a lasting relationship. He didn’t want to. The neighborhood girls were attractive, yes, until they started talking. Tmas couldn’t stand even to imagine listening to one of them for more than a few hours. They had nothing to say. Their lives were empty. He ached for something more.