Encounter With Tiber

by Buzz Aldrin

  For the next hour and a half, Olga, Mark, and I, assisted by everyone else, read and reread every output the Yankee Clipper could produce. Now, while we were still in low Earth orbit, and before we attempted rendezvous and docking with the MarsHab, was the time to make sure that absolutely everything was perfect with our craft, because if it wasn’t, this would be our easiest time to abort. The human race had struggled mightily to produce the seven brilliant minds for this expedition; we weren’t going to risk them on a faulty three-dollar part, if there was one.

  There wasn’t. Everything was absolutely, perfectly right. As we finished the checkout, I looked back at Olga and found her looking forward at me, holding her thumb up, grinning. She brushed her short black hair from her face. “Well,” she said, “apparently we are perfect.”

  Gander looked at me and raised an eyebrow. “The most thorough checkout in history has found no bugs, sir,” I said. I felt like whooping myself; it had been hammered at all of us, constantly, that if anything was even slightly wrong, we were to do the safest possible thing, whatever that might be. Too much could be lost too easily, and what we were doing, and would be doing later, was more than dangerous enough. No unnecessary risks was supposed to be our motto.

  But difficult as that might be to achieve, it was our way to Mars—and we all wanted, desperately, to go to Mars now. If passing the safety check was the way to do it, we would pass it—and now we had, with flying colors.

  Gander lifted his headset and slipped it back on. “Houston, this is Mars Five, on the Yankee Clipper. We are showing a completely clear set of readings and we are on our assigned orbit. Request permission to proceed to rendezvous and transfer.”

  “Roger, Mars Five, you are cleared. Good luck.”

  Without another word, we strapped in, glanced at everything one last time, and prepared to fire the engine again. The curved edge of Earth, white smeared on blue and immense, took up the whole top half of my window (if you define top as the direction your head points), stars showing below it. I thought a personal good-bye to it. We were only going a little farther up in this next burn, but the long far road we were taking was always in my mind, and I wanted to get going.

  We counted down and fired the engine, our acceleration instantly providing us with the feeling of gravity, as if the Yankee Clipper were standing on the ground on her tail. There was vibration through the floor at my feet, but with no air to carry the sound, nothing like the roar of takeoff.

  I kept my eyes on the trajectory guides, keeping us right in the middle of everything, as we ascended to a higher orbit. It’s a tricky process that goes against your intuition, and I’m certainly glad I’ve never had to try to do it without plenty of electronic helpers. But everything again stayed normal, and a few minutes later, still exactly on course, we shut off the burn and let ourselves coast upward toward apogee, where we would find our MarsHab.

  3

  WE CAUGHT UP WITH the MarsHab an hour later. At first glance it was simply a squat, thick cylinder with a long thin cylinder sticking out of one end and a big shiny dome on the other. As we drew closer you could see that central thick cylinder was a Big Can.

  A lot of the success of the space effort since the Mars Project had gotten into high gear had been due to the combination of bold mission choices with extremely conservative engineering—trying always to do things at the edge of our capabilities by the safest means possible. And that in turn meant a principle of never inventing more than needed inventing. The first Big Can habitat had saved the ISS and even enhanced it; therefore, when we needed to add more parts to Star Cluster, and eventually additional space stations in LEO and at L1, we used the mature Big Can, and as a result the LEO Ports Glenn and Shepherd, and L1 Port Armstrong went up virtually without a hitch. Improved and more elaborate versions of the Big Can now served as the habitats on the Moon at Tranquillity, South Pole Station, and Tsiolkovsky, on Phobos (though not currently occupied), and on Mars at Crater Korolev.

  Yet another incrementally improved version of it had been used for the cyclers, Aldrin and Collins, two MERCs (Mars-Earth Return Cycles, our basic long-distance ship, which shuttled back and forth between Mars and Earth) named after the pilots of the Apollo 11 mission. A LEO or L1 port was a Big Can with extra docking ports; a MERC was a Big Can with a fuel tank and engine; and a MarsHab, once it landed, was a Big Can with feet.

  The Big Can assembly line in New Orleans just kept running, dribbling out a new Big Can every eight months or so, the same way that south California assembled Pigeons, Seattle built Starboosters (and later Starlifters), and Phoenix turned out Yankee Clippers—with only the necessary changes and improvements, neither rushing nor delaying.

  It was hard to believe that people in the 1990s had consciously decided to go through with the vast amount of assembly in orbit needed for the ISS. The experience was valuable and had been used in any number of operations since, but nowadays we’d have realized that it was cheaper and safer to build on the ground and heave the whole thing up in one piece. This MarsHab, like other MarsHabs, had come up in one piece, heat shield, booster, and all on a single tank assembly thrown up by a Mars HLV-SL (Heavy Lift Vehicle-Starlifter) combination.

  As we closed in on the MarsHab, I had that feeling of reassurance you get when you see an absolutely reliable tool in your kit. For this mission the propulsion system was a simple set of rocket engines and tanks, with a set of landing gear sticking out below the nozzle so that it could stand upright on the Martian soil. It was about the simplest spaceship possible.

  As we drew close enough, I used the maneuvering jets to kill our velocity relative to the MarsHab until we were a few meters away from it, the airlock on our left side drifting slowly toward one of the Big Can’s docking ports. An occasional squeeze of thrust kept us lined up, the short sharp accelerations pushing us one way and another. Finally, when the separation was less than a meter, we were drifting in at a few centimeters per second, and I fed power to the electromagnets in the coupling. We lurched slightly, and then, with a soft, shuddering thud, the airlock fit over the coupling and the ships mated, hatch to hatch.

  “It’s holding pressure just fine,” Gander said. “All right, let’s go over.”

  Vassily and Tsen rotated the twin dials that unlocked it, then pulled the release bar. Our air mixed with the strange metallic tang of the MarsHab’s air. Tsen, Vassily, Kireiko, Dong, and Gander shifted their belongings into the MarsHab in a neat relay, passing each item through the open airlock and putting it into the locker or bin it was addressed to.

  They went to arrange their personal compartments, and the rest of us carried out the same drill with our things. Shortly, all the compartments assigned to our personal possessions were empty, all the compartments for return-to-ground had what belonged in them and nothing else, and the captain’s group had verified that the MarsHab’s life-support systems were running well within tolerances.

  Mark and I rechecked the bins once more, made sure that there were no strayed items in the Clipper, and finally went to the airlock. I stepped through the door to the MarsHab for the last time, extended my hand, and shook his. “Your ship,” I said.

  “Thank you, sir. And hey, good luck out there.”

  “Thanks. Have a safe ride down.” We each reached forward, closed the hatch on our own side, and dogged it down by turning the dials. I took half a step back into the hab proper, closed the airlock’s inner door, and spun the dials to dog that down. The pressure lights were showing green; neither door was leaking. I cycled the airlock to vacuum; a small pump removed the air from the little closet and put it into our crew compartment. It still held pressure.

  On headset, I said to Mark, “All right, we’re under correct pressure. No problems. You may release at will.”

  “Roger, Mars Five. Releasing.”

  There was a thud on the hull, and the Yankee Clipper fell away from us. Still wearing the headset, I floated to the pilot’s station, checked my screen, and said, “All right, Ma
rk, you’re clear enough. Have a beer and a pizza for me down there.”

  “Sure, Jason. See you in a few years.”

  I switched to the appropriate camera and watched his engines flare to life; relative to the station he seemed to shoot violently away and dive out of sight. Relative to the ground, he had fired his rocket engine against his own direction of motion, so that instead of orbiting at the same speed as he had been, he had moved into a lower and faster orbit.

  Somewhere far below he would ride down on the heat shield on the bottom of that Yankee Clipper, slowing still further from the Mach 25 of orbit down to about Mach 12 in the upper stratosphere; then the wings would deploy, and at his enormous velocity in the thin air, he could glide halfway around the world if he wanted to before descending into the troposphere and down to the landing field. That was another beauty of the Yankee Clipper over previous systems: reenter anywhere, land anywhere else. Of course you also needed to know, in a matter of a couple of minutes after you picked your reentry point, the pathway between where you came back into the air and where you touched the ground, but by using the Global Positioning System, the fast ground-based computers could generally tell you that in about ten seconds. I thought, with a faint twinge of envy, that shortly Mark would be gliding thirty miles above the Earth, at just under ten thousand miles an hour, back to Canaveral with nothing to think about except where he wanted to eat dinner.

  We were to continue in this orbit for a three-hour final shakedown to look for all the possible trouble there could be while we still had an easy abort to Earth. Once we fired the booster, we would be on our way to Mars no matter what happened, and we’d get there whether or not we were alive (though we wouldn’t make much of a landing if we weren’t).

  At the pilot’s station, I checked through everything slowly and carefully; whenever my attention wandered, I went back to whatever I was sure I had gotten right, and then proceeded forward from there. Propulsion was fine, and Olga concurred. Astrogation was fine, and Captain Gander concurred. All maneuvering and control jets were fine, fired properly, gave the right calibrated thrust. I sent the camera pod, a small maneuverable robot craft, outside to look for ice forming anywhere—a sure sign of an internal leak—and to scan the heat shield for cracks. I found nothing. The camera pod returned to its place and I confirmed that it was locked down. The landing rocket checked out fine.

  Each of those steps was made up of many smaller steps. I was glad I’d spent so much time drilling on them in the last few months, because it was bewilderingly complex. It had only been on the twentieth practice that I had been able to get done within three hours, and I had been past a hundred practices before I had begun to have any slack. This time, I didn’t beat my record (zero gravity sort of threw me off—I had only had one training mission where I got to practice that), but I still had a good twenty minutes left over.

  So did Olga, so she and I strapped into the pilot’s and commander’s chairs and each ate a quick sandwich, admiring the Earth by naked eye for the last time through the window. We floated in the quiet of space—or the almost quiet, for the mission specialist team and the captain were talking softly in the common room down the corridor—and watched the brilliant Moon rise over the huge blue Earth in front of us.

  “They’re missing quite a show,” I said, indicating the people down the corridor, none of whom was bothering to look out a window, even though they too had finished their checkouts.

  “It’s kind of sad, don’t you think, that this could be routine to anyone?” Olga asked, never moving her eyes from the window.

  I hadn’t thought of it that way, but I agreed. “I guess it’s the price of success; we expect things to behave themselves. The scenery is probably more meaningful if you’re really afraid it’s the last you’ll ever see.”

  “Perhaps. Or it may just be that no matter how wonderful something is, if we see it often enough we don’t see it at all.” She sighed. “Have you ever been over to our Tsiolkovsky Observatory, on the far side of the Moon?”

  “I’ve never actually been farther than Tranquillity,” I said. “I thought your country only had a regular crew of seven or eight there. I didn’t think you had any foreigners as a regular thing.”

  “Yes, but we quite often got supply drops from your Pigeons, and usually the pilot would have time to come in for a meal. So any American pilot might have been there now and then. I was station engineer there for a few months. It’s an astonishing place, because you can’t see the Earth from there—the Moon at your feet blocks it forever. So Tsiolkovsky is the closest inhabited place where the only trace of home is what you brought with you. I used to sit and gaze out the window for hours, and when I had to go outside I would stop and look around, at the mountains and up at the sky, as often as I had a moment. But in their off time, the astronomers mostly played chess or watched recorded movies from home.”

  I nodded. “I know what you mean. Still, I bet after eight months of nothing bigger than a star except the Sun, we’ll be happy enough to see Mars up close in the sky.”

  “Of course,” she said. “Variety is the only way we ever notice what’s beautiful.”

  We watched the Earth roll by for a while longer, and I said, “I hear you’re slated to stay over on Mars for a while.”

  She nodded, her face very serious. “I’m needed, of course—there aren’t very many general engineers, there are fewer in space, and still fewer who are as good as I am—you don’t mind my being honest, do you?”

  “Go right ahead.”

  “And also I like to see a place thoroughly; I really enjoyed spending enough time on the Moon to know what the Moon is like. And … well.” She sighed. I looked at her closely. Naturally for space everyone’s hair has to be short—longer hair is a great way to accidentally bring all sorts of bugs, parasites, and pathogens aboard—but hers was just at the edge of regulation, falling most of the way over her forehead, going a little way down into her collar, hanging over her ears. It was jet black and looked thick and clean. Her eyes were almost as dark; her skin was pale and freckled, her chin small and delicate.

  I had completely forgotten the subject of the conversation, and was putting all of my concentration into raising my estimate of how attractive she was, when she finally said, “And, you know, as Earth is getting wealthy, it’s becoming a better place, but it’s getting dull; the new affluence is smoothing out all the differences between places. I don’t regret that we don’t have starvation or epidemics on the scale we once did, or that more people are safe and comfortable, but I do regret that the Earth used to have a lot of differences. Nowadays, to go somewhere different, you have to go—” she gestured toward the Moon, now well into the viewport as our orbit took us around “—you have to go beyond that.”

  I was trying hard to think of something intelligent to say when Captain Gander, who had come quietly up behind us, said, “Well, I quite agree. Are we ready to validate the decision?”

  “Sure,” I said, as Olga said, “Yes.”

  He smiled. “All right, let’s do one last thing by the book.” He lifted the headset from his chair; Olga grabbed the spare, and I took mine and put it on. “Nari, are you there?” Gander asked.

  “Right here.”

  “All right, then.” There was a click as he opened the channel to the ground and said, “Houston, this is Mars Five.”

  The voice crackled back “Go ahead, Mars Five.”

  “Houston, this is Walter Gander. We’re ready for TMI.”

  TMI was TransMartian Injection: burning the booster to put us on course for Mars. After a couple of serious incidents the Russians had had through carelessness—including the horrible one of leaving a cosmonaut outside and boosting away during an EVA—the spacefaring nations had adopted a set of procedures to be used whenever you did a major burn in space, to make the officers more accountable for certifying that the ship was ready to go. TMI was definitely a major burn.

  “Mars Five, we need concurrence of the first an
d second officer, plus the science team head.”

  “First officer concurs,” Olga said.

  “Second officer concurs,” I added.

  “Science team head concurs,” Nari said.

  There was a moment’s pause, and then Houston said, “All verified. Mars Five, you are go for TMI. You are on your own authority for any of the precalculated burns.”

  “Roger, Houston. We will proceed with the next available scheduled burn. Out.” Gander hung up his headset, consulted his screen, and said, “All right, people, that’s just eighteen minutes forty-three seconds away. Everyone go to your compartments and eliminate, or whatever else you need to do to get comfortable, and then everyone, except the officers, get onto your bunks. We’ve got places to go. Olga, get out of my chair.”

  “Yes, sir,” she said, smiling but moving quickly. “Back in a moment.”

  I popped out of my chair as well and swam to my compartment; I had seen it only briefly as I had been stuffing my possessions into my personal storage spaces. I closed the door and looked around; as many times as I had been in space, I had never seen a personal compartment before.

  These things had been suggested by NASA’s shrinks as a way of alleviating some of the stress of space voyages; they probably didn’t take up much more space than a regular bunk and a large locker might have, but they gave you the feeling of a room of your own, even if you did have to enter it through a small hatch and half its floor area was your bunk. Half the remaining floor area was taken up with your personal effects locker, which was where you kept toiletries, the uniform you weren’t wearing at the time, and whatever possessions you had brought from Earth. By coming up exactly as high as the bunk, the personal effects locker was also your night table, or if you wanted you could put a pad on it and make your bed a little wider for your shoulders. The whole compartment was just one and two-thirds meters tall and wide, and two meters long; not much more than a coffin, but it had its own light switch, its own door, and it was all yours.