Girl on Mars

by Jack McDonald Burnett

  “Sorry to just show up,” he said, after introducing himself. “We heard you’d moved to the area.”

  Conn wanted to ask how “we” had heard that, but then remembered local feeds had covered her return to town. She invited him in.

  “Stanford alum?” she asked, gesturing to the hoodie.

  “I got my bachelors there. Masters in engineering physics from RPI, in New York.”

  “Get down to New York City much?”

  “I was pretty much stuck in Albany,” Ryan said, with a lopsided grin.

  “I understand,” Conn said. “I majored in aerospace engineering in Chicago, and I was pretty much stuck in the library. Have a seat,” she said, moving boxes to clear some spots. “Something to drink? I have water, possibly some orange juice . . .”

  “No thanks, I’m good,” he said. “I like your place, it’s nice.”

  She smiled and glanced around. For the first time, all her stuff was new. “Thanks. I figured it was about time to stop living like a college student.”

  “Did you ever think of going back to school? Maybe get your Masters or Doctorate?” Ryan asked.

  “I’ve given that some thought, but it all seems so daunting right now,” she said.

  She prompted him after a brief silence. “What brings you here, Ryan?”

  He took a deep breath before starting. “Marcus tells me he’s spoken to you already about the Mars mission.” Conn thought it was curious, Ryan calling his father Marcus. “Don’t worry, I’m not here to try to talk you into going to Mars. I promise.”

  She smiled again, but part of her was disappointed. “Then what can I do for you?”

  “What we would like is you consulting on the mission. Evaluate our training regimen, give us pointers, be in charge of the simulator. Kill us as many times as you can,” he said with another of those lopsided grins. His eyes lit up when he talked about the mission.

  Conn sat back. “And your father sent you?”

  “No, I volunteered.” His face reddened. “I’ve followed your career. I admire how much you’ve accomplished, especially so quickly. Your experience, it would be so invaluable. That’s why I’d like to get you consulting for us.”

  “In all honesty, Ryan, I’m not sure I can commit to anything like that. I mean, mentally, I don’t know if I’m in the right place to do it. I know that sounds lame.”

  “No.”

  “Sure it does. Look, I’m not trying to brag, but the last two times I went to space, I just went. No months of training or thousand turns in the simulator. I just decided to go, and went. Mentally, just thinking about all that training, and inflicting it all on you …” she trailed off. “I think I might be burned out. I wouldn’t be of much use.”

  Ryan didn’t seem to know what to say. Conn imagined that he had pictured talking her into consulting for the mission, and hadn’t prepared for anything else. Right-Stuff guys like him didn’t often imagine failure.

  “I’d really like to change your mind,” he said.

  “Let me ask you this. Dyna-Tech has a spaceship that can travel almost anywhere. They’re sending it to Sirius soon. Sometime after that they’ll have the tech to build portals—you know, ‘stargates.’ Instantaneous travel.” Ryan’s brow furrowed. “Doesn’t that make going through all this trouble to finance, train for, and go on a more traditional mission kind of a waste?”

  Ryan shifted in his seat. “Sure, they’re going to do portals, and they’ve got that Pelorian ship. And once they figure out how all of it works, people will be able to go anywhere, anytime. Does that make what we’re doing obsolete? I think it depends on how you look at it.

  “Marcus wants this to be the last great space expedition. He wants to do it this way for the same reason that people climb mountains when they could just take a helicopter.”

  Conn knew she wouldn’t have wanted to go to the moon any way but how the Apollo astronauts did it, at least the first time. “I get it,” she said.

  “And he wants to hurry up and do it so I—so we can be the first ones on Mars. Get there before Dyna-Tech, or anyone else.”

  “When do you leave?”

  “We’re scheduled for early 2039,” Ryan said. “that’s when we’ll have an optimal window for Mars. But Marcus wants to accelerate the timetable. We’re working on shaving that down as much as we can. If it all checks out, we may be able to leave next October.”

  “How long is the trip, if you leave in October?”

  “Seven and a half months,” Ryan said.

  “So, that’s a year—plus seven and a half months. You’re taking a pretty big chance that Dyna-Tech won’t go to Mars before that.”

  “Right,” Ryan conceded. “It’s a long ways out. But we’re literally going as fast as we can.”

  Conn surprised herself with her reply. “I can’t commit right now,” she said carefully, “but this actually sounds like something I could possibly get into. Consulting. Don’t go back to your dad and tell him I said yes,” she warned, as Ryan grinned.

  “Great! I mean, I won’t tell him you said yes. But this is still good news.”

  “Just temper his expectations for me,” Conn said.

  Ryan promised he would.

  He left shortly after that and, when Conn told him she hoped to see him soon, she meant it.

  # # #

  Conn had a hard time believing Dyna-Tech wouldn’t go to Mars. Mars was unique, like Marcus Stoll said, and history would remember the first to conquer it. But history wanted someone to walk on the red planet, not just circle it, and all Dyna-Tech’s Pelorian spacecraft could do was orbit—it was built to travel in space, not to land on a world with an atmosphere. It would still take an unprecedented feat of engineering for Dyna-Tech astronauts to actually set foot on Mars.

  Anyway, Dyna-Tech could go anywhere it wanted to. Sirius, the Aphelials’ system, Arcturus, Deneb, any star in the sky. Did anybody really care about Mars anymore?

  Marcus Stoll did. And so did his son.

  Maybe this was just what she needed, something to throw her heart and soul into. Maybe that’s what she missed about Dyna-Tech.

  Or maybe she really, really wanted to stick it to Laura Haskell-Lefebvre and Skylar Reece, and beat Dyna-Tech to the surface of Mars.

  NINE

  In Charge

  November - December, 2037

  Conn’s second visitor was a mousy young lady, around Conn’s age, who worked for Janus Gordon at the NSA. Conn had a pressing question for her. “Does Gordon ever get teased because of his name? Maybe behind his back?”

  “Why would he?” the young lady asked. She had an eye-contact problem.

  “Janus, you know. I thought he said Janice, until I looked him up in my Wear after he tried to kidnap me.”

  “Oh.” She pushed her glasses back up her nose. “No.” Conn wasn't sure if she was saying no he didn't get teased, or no he hadn’t tried to kidnap her. Working for the NSA in 2037, seeing what it did and how it did it, had to be surreal at times. Then again, this girl probably tortured terrorism suspects nine-to-five.

  “Anyhow, I imagine you’re here because I didn’t get the job with Dyna-Tech.”

  “I’m supposed to find out why,” the girl said, a little sourly, like she didn’t think the answer was worth her time. “And then I have a message for you.”

  “What’s the message?”

  “I’m supposed to find out why first.”

  “OK, but by message you don’t mean you’re going to kill me, right?”

  The girl looked at her with narrow eyes and a slightly open mouth, like Conn was dumb far beyond what she’d expected, which was pretty dumb. “No, I’m not going to kill you.”

  “I have reason to be a little on edge around you people. You’ve tried to kill me three other times.”

  “I haven’t,” the girl said, as though Conn had accused her, specifically.

  “No, you weren’t there. Well, I know you weren’t there two of the times. Can’t say for sure about
the third. So. Why I’m not working at Dyna-Tech?”

  “If it wouldn’t be too much trouble. If it helps, the message is really nice.”

  “Well, in that case.” They stood, despite Conn’s gesturing twice for the girl to have a seat. She flopped down on the love seat while the girl remained standing. “Dyna-Tech turned me down for the job. They paid me off instead. The owner and the Chief Operating Officer don’t like me.”

  “You want me to tell him that part, specifically?”

  Conn blinked. “Whatever you’d like. What was your name?”

  “I didn’t say.”

  Conn blinked again. “I see. Well, whoever you are, that’s why I’m not working for Dyna-Tech, which I’m going to guess your boss already knows, because he said he would quit spying on me, though he probably didn’t, but even if he did, he didn’t say he’d stop spying on Dyna-Tech, so he probably heard the whole meeting.”

  It was the girl’s turn to blink. “I don’t know anything about that,” she said.

  “What’s my message?”

  “Oh. Um. Just that there are no hard feelings, let us know if you do ever catch on at Dyna-Tech or EMSpace or someplace like that, here’s my contact information—oh. Um.” She swiped at her Wear, and Conn’s had an incoming sync request. After assuring herself it was only one-way, she flicked her wrist to accept the equivalent of a business card. “And that’s it. Oh! Except, good luck on Mars.”

  There was no way they could already know about Mars. Well, there was one way. Conn ran the girl out of her apartment.

  # # #

  Dyna-Tech’s Pelorian-style spacecraft, the one Conn and Yongpo had used on their journey to the Aphelials’ home system, had a route to Sirius calculated that would take them four and a half months. After two dozen retries they settled for a route twice as long as they’d hoped. Still, nineteen weeks to travel 8.6 light years—it was almost inconceivable.

  The public wasn’t that excited about the expedition. For one thing, it did seem inconceivable—no one could wrap their heads around the idea that human beings could travel to a distant star in months only. For another thing, paradoxically, the public thought the expedition too easy. Nothing and no one to root for. And the public would only hear about the voyage when they returned—because they couldn’t watch in nearly-real time, like with a mission to the moon. Conn couldn’t help but imagine what could have been done—what she would have done, if she’d been in charge at Dyna-Tech—to generate public interest.

  Dyna-Tech had high hopes. They had four other Pelorian computers that could control the spacecraft and allow it to travel alongside the fifth dimension. Yongpo knew how to make them work correctly. The company was building spacecraft around two of the computers, to the specifications of their first Pelorian-style craft. They would be ready early the next year. Dyna-Tech didn’t have unlimited funds, but the flexibility to send three craft three different places paying customers wanted to go would be huge for its business side.

  The expedition to Sirius departed Gasoline Alley on December eighth. By the evening of the ninth they were shallow enough in the gravity well of the Earth to commence fifth-dimensional travel.

  Conn watched CNN’s space feed to see them go fifth dimension in real time, her Wear casting to a wall-mounted monitor. Pictures came from three cameras aboard the spacecraft and a Dyna-Tech satellite that showed a somewhat blurry exterior. Conn made herself a Wild Turkey sour and curled up on her couch. There were five crew aboard the spacecraft, including commander Aiden Yarborough. Conn felt a pang of longing and perhaps jealousy to see the crew readying themselves and the vessel for fifth-dimensional travel. At the same time, seeing on her monitor the place in which she had spent seventy weeks brought back some powerful memories of tedium.

  Conn had met Yarborough, and knew three of the other four astronauts: Matthew Morgan and Julie Revell had done work for Peo when Conn was Peo’s assistant, and Arnab Kotal had done work for Conn when Conn was in charge. Conn didn’t know the fifth crew member, which troubled her, but she realized she’d been gone for a year and four months and many things had no doubt changed.

  Yarborough wasn’t having any mugging for the cameras or cute asides to the viewers back home. Julie Revell nonetheless managed to stage-whisper “Eighty trillion kilometers!” to one of the cameras without the commander noticing. Yarborough ran an efficient and professional operation, and at the appointed time everything and everyone was ready. Yarborough swiped and tapped on a screen, then counted down three . . . two . . . one . . . and tapped it again.

  The monitor went blank. Conn had never watched from the outside when a vessel went fifth dimension, so she assumed it looked like that. Sort of anticlimactic. Then CNN cut to the Dyna-Tech satellite. It showed a receding fireball around scraps of wreckage. A clear picture was frustratingly impossible, but it was obvious that the spacecraft had suffered a catastrophic explosion. Conn’s hands covered her mouth. The spacecraft and all aboard were lost.

  # # #

  “You can’t skimp on the simulator, of all things,” Conn said. It was a week later. “They’ve got to practice, practice, practice, practice, practice. If they haven’t done what they’re doing on the actual mission a hundred times in the simulator, you’re risking their lives.” Marcus Stoll nodded grimly, or as close as his face ever got to grim. But he still waffled on paying more for a more accurate simulator.

  So Conn pitched in a couple hundred thousand dollars to get it done right. And that was how she first got skin in the game, as the saying went.

  When they said they wanted her to consult, they appeared to have meant be in charge of almost everything. They hadn’t hired so much as a high school gym teacher to plan and run the astronauts’ physical fitness regimen. Conn ended up doing it herself. They hadn’t planned a training expedition to Devon Island, whose landscape so resembled another planet that it offered the closest thing to Mars on the planet Earth. Conn sent them there. She had them practice water survival, a skill they would need if anything went awry with the launch.

  Ryan and his comrades, Harold Barnes (who would land with Ryan) and Ginny Jones (who would pilot the command module) were bright, able people in good shape mentally and physically. Conn had no doubt that with the right training, they would make terrific ambassadors for the human race to a new planet. Better than she and Yongpo had been to the Aphelials.

  Conn and Barnes locked horns from the day Conn arrived. Barnes questioned the value of Devon Island and water survival training. Conn learned he couldn’t swim. He had a snotty answer for almost everything Conn told the astronauts to do. Conn wasn’t innocent: taking her cue from Barnes, she dished it out to him, too. It introduced poison into what was otherwise turning out to be a good working relationship among Conn and her charges.

  The one thing Marcus Stoll spared no expense on was the spacecraft. Contractors were building it up at Gasoline Alley, and Stoll demanded progress reports three times a day. He himself had a phobia of high places and flying, so he couldn’t go to the space station himself—so he sent Conn. It was supposed to be once a month, but she went twice in her first month on the job.

  Conn shuddered to think about how the mission might have gone without her. And on the other side of the coin, she felt valuable and necessary. She was leaving fingerprints all over what she hoped would be the first successful expedition to Mars. It dragged her out of her doldrums. Other than having to contend with Barnes, she looked forward to each day.

  An increase in her dose of anti-depressant may have had something to do with that, too.

  The simulator would, of course, be custom-built. Because it had to match the interior of both the command module and the lander exactly, they'd hired two of the men who were building the actual spacecraft. They did most of their work (very) remotely, directing contractors from space.

  Stoll still worried that they were spending money on a simulation that ought to have been spent on the real thing. Conn assured him that adequate attention would be
paid to the spacecraft.

  It had already cost a fortune to launch the materials to build the spacecraft into space. They had saved some trips, and money, by buying and retrofitting the Indian spacecraft that had gone to Mars and aborted. India’s space program was impressive in the twenties, but then India fell on hard economic times, and it had other, more Earthbound things to worry about. For the lander Stoll cannibalized an old, reusable capsule that used to be the way off the space station and back to Earth before the advent of SSEVs. Still, even starting with those shells, each needed considerable modification. Their engines were useless—and Conn was impressed: the command module engines Stoll would use were in every important respect like the engines Grant used to go to Saturn. Since the tech for that was proprietary to Dyna-Tech, it took some very smart people to almost exactly replicate them.

  “Once you see a thing being done, it becomes exponentially easier to do it yourself,” Stoll explained. “There is no part of your brain telling you what you’re doing is impossible. The one thing your brain doesn’t want is to look foolish.” Conn suspected there may have been some corporate espionage involved, too, or under-the-table Pelorian technology, but that wasn’t her problem.

  An October launch wasn’t feasible, his logistics people insisted, which made Stoll angry indeed. Marcus Stoll got his way. Period. The logistics team had a plan to slingshot around Venus to shave a couple months off the trip, but they couldn’t make it work. Each set of numbers they tried had the spacecraft skipping off the Mars atmosphere and hurtling deeper into the solar system.

  The launch moved up, but to December. Stoll accepted that because he had to. It was a lousy idea. It added almost a month to the trip, which itself added to the weight on the spacecraft and the fuel it would use. They would go slower, and travel longer, and arrive only two months earlier than if they left in March.