The Martian Race

by Gregory Benford

  “We go for it?” Viktor insisted.

  The others nodded.

  A warning call from Raoul made her crouch down.

  They had decided to limit this test at ten percent of max liftoff, enough to see if anything blew a pipe. Just in case, it would have only Raoul and Viktor aboard. Viktor could run the subsystems fine from his couch. Julia also suspected he and Raoul didn't want any distractions.

  She and Marc took shelter a few hundred meters away, ready to help if something horrible happened. The stubby Return Vehicle stood with its chem systems detached and gear dragged away, looking a bit naked against pink soil as thoroughly trod as Central Park in Manhattan, but with more litter.

  She and Marc had nothing to do but pace to discharge all their adrenaline. The damned cold came through her boots as always and she stamped them to keep the circulation going. Even the best of insulation and boot heaters couldn't keep the chill from penetrating through the soles. It was early morning, so they would have a full day of sunlight to make repairs. If necessary.

  She seldom came out this early into the biting hard cold left over from the night. Quickly enough they had learned the pains of even standing in shadow, much less of Martian night—skin stuck to boot tabs, frostbite straight through the insulation. Raoul's limp resulted from severely frostbitten toes after hours of making repairs in the shadow of the Return Vehicle.

  He had said he hadn't noticed the chill. That meant he got involved tinkering and shut off those alarms in his mind. They were all focused, semiobsessive types, big on getting details right, or else they would never have been chosen to come.

  She closed her eyes, trying to relax. They were about to land on Mars for the second and last time, after a trip of only a few meters or so, think of it that way.

  Such odd ways of taking each moment, relieving it of its obvious heart-thudding qualities, had sustained her through the launch from Earth and their aerobraking. Months of tedious mission protocols and psychological seminars had given her many oblique skills.

  “Ready,” she heard Raoul through the suit comm. “Starting the pumps.”

  Viktor responded with pressure readings, flow rates. She saw a thin fog form beneath the rocket nozzle, like the vapors that sometimes leaked from the soil as the sun first struck it.

  More cross talk between the pilots. Their close camaraderie had been so intensive the past few days that she and Marc felt like invisible nonentities, mere “field science” witnesses to the unblinking concentration of the “mission techs,” as the terminology went. Then Raoul said, almost in a whisper, “Let's lift.”

  A fog blossomed at the Return Vehicle base. No gantry here, nothing to restrain it: the conical ship teetered a bit, then rose.

  “Nice throttling!” Marc called.

  “Wheeeee!” Julia cheered.

  The ship rose twenty meters, hung—then started falling. A big plume rushed out the side of the ship.

  Crump! came to her through the thin atmosphere.

  A panel blew away, tumbling. The ship fell, caught itself, fell another few meters—and smacked down.

  “All off!” Raoul called.

  “Pressures down,” Viktor answered, voice as mild as ever.

  “My God, what—?”

  Then she started running. Not that there was anything she could do, really.

  PART II

  A MARTIAN ODYSSEY

  12

  JANUARY 14, 2018

  AT LEAST THE DAMAGE WAS CLEAR. BRUTALLY. THE PANEL HAD PEELED off about a meter above the reaction chamber. Inside they could see a mass of popped valves, ruptured pumps, and tangled lines.

  “Damn, I built those to take three times the demand load,” Raoul said.

  “Something surged,” Viktor said. “Readout shows that.”

  “Still, the system should have held,” Raoul insisted, face dark. “The seals must've leaked.”

  “Overpressure was probably from double line we made,” Viktor said mildly.

  “Ummm.” Raoul bit his lip. Julia could see his pale face through his helmet viewer and wondered if he felt defeated. He was looking intently at the ruined assembly. “There seems to be a stain inside … dust! There's dust inside the line!” He turned to Viktor, “It's the seals all right, and having two lines made it just that much worse—twice as many seals.” Then he nodded briskly. “That's it, all right. We should check with the desk guys, see if anything else showed up during their test fire, but I'll bet that's it.”

  “Double line was their idea.”

  “Right. We'll go back to the original design.”

  Somehow this buoyed them. It had to, she reflected. Either they got the system working or they wouldn't dare lift. The Airbus crew would have to rescue them—a huge maybe—getting the glory and the $30 billion.

  “Should I contact Ground Control now, or wait until we get back to the hab?” Marc asked.

  “They control nothing,” Raoul said. “We're in control.”

  “Is damned right,” Viktor said, laughing in a dry way.

  “Okay.” Julia grinned uncertainly and Marc followed suit.

  “I suppose we should wait, talk to Earthside before we pull anything out and start refitting,” Raoul said.

  Viktor's voice crackled in the suit radio, his accent more noticeable, “Nyet, nyet, no waiting. You go ahead. Can't sit here and wait for Airbus to take us home.”

  As they were cleaning up and preparing lunch, a chime announced that a priority vid had arrived. Julia knew it was from Axelrod, as usual catching them together at a mealtime. By consensus looks they agreed to wait until later to review it. Axelrod's messages were usually harangues—as Marc put it, “The latest bee up his ass.” And today was going to be epic because he had seen the failure, heard their reports.

  They ate slowly.

  Axelrod was livid. “NASA's repair blew out? What kinda shit instructions did they send you?” He was pacing around his office, vid feed clipped to his collar. “That's why they call them whiz boys, ya know. They can't find their whizzes without instructions. Detailed instructions.” He paused for breath. “First they sold us a defective ship, then they fuck up the repairs. Someone's on the take to Airbus, I promise you.”

  Viktor had been the first to notice that the monologues had slowly changed in tone, from the friendly go-get-’em team chats to daily rants.

  Axelrod was being worn down by constant media pressure, amidst the capital drain that the mission was costing him. In addition, relations between him and NASA, always edgy, had deteriorated. He no longer trusted their communications team.

  The problems dated to the very first days of Consortium mission planning, when Axelrod announced his plans to use the ERV to get his crew home. NASA had resisted, and the whole project teetered.

  “Who's gonna stop me?” Axelrod had said. “You want to send guards to Mars to keep the team out?”

  After two months of hassling, they had reached a settlement—the Consortium could buy the ERV for $1 billion. Up front. But elements in NASA never forgot Axelrod's original presumption.

  When Raoul discovered the damage to the ERV, Axelrod was furious. He lashed out at NASA in the press, described the ERV as “a derelict piece of government surplus equipment,” and demanded his money back. This proved unwise.

  Having already spent the money—after all, it was the government, and that is government's job—NASA refused. Instead it offered to help model the repairs with a duplicate ERV sitting in a hangar at Johnson Space Center.

  Axelrod became increasingly hostile, threatening to file suit to recover all costs for the mission unless the ERV could be repaired.

  NASA, in turn, hinted that smooth communication with the Mars crew could be a casualty of any open breach of contract. If he filed suit, they said with solemn sincerity, the government lawyers would almost certainly not allow them to deal with Axelrod anymore. Even worse things could happen …

  In fact, he had hinted darkly to his crew, NASA was already not transmit
ting his vids to them reliably.

  On screen, Axelrod continued to pace. “If we lose because their piece of shit equipment won't work—listen, Raoul, I want you, first thing, to—arrrrrrp.”

  The screen went blank.

  “That won't help his state of mind,” said Julia mildly. She was relieved not to have to listen to him any longer. “He's so paranoid about NASA.” She sent back a “Did not receive message” reply.

  Raoul shrugged. “Just another comm satellite glitch.”

  “Does seem to happen more with boss's vids,” said Viktor.

  “Well, he is on the horn more than anyone else. So it would happen more to his vids.”

  Julia knew what all four of them were thinking. That if he had followed the original mission plan, the one they had all signed on to, they wouldn't be in this fix.

  The original Mars Direct plan included a second ERV. This spacecraft would be launched about a month after the crew, on a slower trajectory. On arrival, it would land about 1,000 kilometers from the first mission, refuel itself, deploy its robot probes to recon the area, and await the second manned hab. Or, it could be used as a backup in case of trouble with the first ERV, and land at the first base.

  But there was no second ERV at Mars Base. Or even an awkward 1,000 klicks away.

  The nearest ERV was at a distance of 40 million miles, safely stowed in a NASA warehouse at Cape Canaveral.

  Viktor had been handling the comm that evening, about a month into their outward journey, when Axelrod's squirt came through.

  At a delay of about a minute and a half, it was more like verbal e-mail with both parties on-line than a conversation. This the psych team had not anticipated—these almost-conversations, surrealistic, displaced.

  So they worked it out by themselves. Only one of them responded to Axelrod at a time, although the others felt free to suggest things to say.

  “Hi up there, crew! How's the weather? Oh, yeah, that's right—no windows.”

  After this ritual joke, Axelrod was brisk, efficient, upbeat—sending along hails and tributes from various countries and luminaries. Somehow these fixtures of his messages never ebbed. Julia suspected the psych advisors of massaging them.

  They let him run down. “Hey, we can read the calendar, even a minute behind time,” Raoul said to the camera on their callback. “We're waiting to hear about the backup ERV launch. It's today, right?”

  Somehow the delay seemed to stretch unbearably. They had all picked up something in Axelrod's breezy manner. When he came on again his face was sober, studied, wary. “I been meaning to tell you, but things get in the way. Mostly, money. Or lack of it. Right, the lack of money is the real root of evil.” A sigh. Eyes veered away, then back. “I couldn't get it off the ground. Couldn't get the funding. I mean, I tried. Thing is, I'm down to nickels and dimes here. No reserves, running off income from the ads and promotions and all. I was never as rich as people said, y'know. Plenty of my holdings, they were mortgaged one way or another …”

  He paused, took a sip of what looked like water. Julia wondered if it could be gin. She had seen him drink it that way before. Champagne for public, gin off to the side.

  He freshened. “See, NASA kept pilin’ on more costs, and it was always up front, too, no cost deferment. I tried everythin’, bonds, floatin’ a dummy corporation for future proceeds, the whole damn game. It just wasn't there. I couldn't get the capital together. My backers wanted out, even. So to cut costs and hold it together here on the ground for you guys up there … well, we missed the launch window.”

  Very slowly, as Axelrod went on with his rambling confession, Raoul said, “Son … of… a … bitch.”

  It came out like an angry prayer.

  They took a week to work off their anger. Plenty of gym time.

  NASA had organized itself for decades around the implicit assumption that astronaut safety was not just the first rule, it was the only rule. But they weren't NASAnauts anymore.

  They all spent more time in the exercise circle. Marc ran for hours on the treadmill, so much that Raoul complained that he was going to wear out the bearings. Since the treadmill would turn into a conveyor belt for off-loading at the landing site, this was not an idle complaint. Julia used the stationary bicycle, but worked out a lot of her feelings in push-ups, isotonics, and chin-ups. They all liked to exercise alone— time spent away from the others was getting steadily more precious— and though none of them was a very verbal type, they had to talk it out, too.

  The second ERV was backup. It was to have come screaming in after they had settled in on the ground, providing perhaps a more distant base camp for far forays. The extra ERV wasn't necessary, in the day-to-day sense. Without it, nothing in their mission profile altered.

  But the reassurance of having another way to get off the planet— that would be gone, for the whole 1.5 years they spent on the ground.

  Not that they could do anything, of course.

  But talk they did. They had to arrive at a consensus statement about the “unfortunate shortfall” the Consortium had suffered, how they “fully understood the difficult choices that the corporation had to make,” and that they “would shoulder these new burdens with a sense of confidence in the long-term outcome of the mission.”

  It took a week more before they could all say such things to the camera.

  There was help, though. Before leaving they had each sat for hours of “template setting” for a hotshot new software. Facial Management could cover for you if you were agitated, naked, fresh from the shower, or just hungover. The media managers reassured the crew that their slips and errors would be smoothed over and made better by the software. All their errors would be morphed and toned long before it went into the lucrative media mix that was paying many of the Consortium's daily expenses.

  And they could review the results, if they wished, before release. They all did at first. Few did after a few months. It was eerie, watching yourself say things more confidently, with tones that carried the right accents and emphasis, complete with expressive and seemingly sincere lip movements, lifts of eyebrows, and utterly believable looks of complete candor.

  “Old joke about what prostitute says to customer,” Viktor observed. “Sincerity, it costs extra.”

  It got them through the roughest patch.

  But they never forgot.

  She brought up the unthinkable as a way of edging her way around to her own agenda.

  What the hell, they were all exhausted from laboring on the repairs, and it had been three days since she had last mentioned the vent. Long days. And then a grand failure. Time to think the unthinkable again and do some planning.

  As they were finishing lunch, Julia turned to face her three crewmates. “Okay, suppose we can't get this thing fixed. Then what?”

  Raoul's face darkened, but he said nothing.

  “Have to hitch ride home,” said Viktor.

  “But when are they getting here?”

  The Airbus mission had been well cloaked, Chinese style. Publicly, Airbus said only that their crew had launched more than a year after the Consortium, and would arrive at Mars “soon.” Some sketchy bio stuff about the crew of three, nothing more. A few “under wraps” leaks, but those proved to be planted.

  The Germans at Airbus let their Chinese partners play the inscrutable card. Secrecy only heightened suspense.

  Axelrod's moles had confirmed that it was indeed a nuclear rocket, put up on a Chinese three-stager, into a two-hundred-kilometer-high orbit. There, systems checkout took eight days—which meant they either had some minor trouble or were being very, very careful; maybe both.

  Then a trial burn, which the Chinese government denied had “a significant nuclear component,” doublespeak for We don't give a damn what all those European and American protesters think. NASA and the National Security Agency both analyzed the burn optical signatures, and sure enough, it was hydrogen exhaust warmed by a medium-hot nuclear pile, design unknown.

  Axelrod ha
d sent them close-up shots of the craft, imaged from the Keck telescope complex. “It is big, sleek,” Viktor had observed. “With specific impulse two and a half, maybe three times ours, they can use that much less fuel. Hydrogen—fine for getting speed up, best choice. But they are not bringing liquid hydrogen to surface of Mars?”

  The Consortium intelligence operation thought the fuel for the return part of the mission could not be hydrogen, though. “Keeping hydrogen at very low temperatures, landing it, then using it to return—no,” Viktor said decisively. “One heat leak and they scrub the mission. No, they have some other plan for later.”

  But what? Nobody knew. A day later, Airbus had laconically announced a decision for Go. Their big boosting burn into interplanetary space was a long, hot, silvery plume scratched across the night sky.

  It had been eight months since the Airbus launch. Because of the configuration of the two planets, the trajectory guys at Johnson assumed that they were doing a Venus flyby mission. In effect a planetary handoff, the nuke would slingshot around Venus halfway through the trip, picking up extra delta vee. The physics resembled bouncing a tennis ball off a moving freight train, so that the ball came off with the train's velocity added to what it had.

  That was the only way to get to Mars, launching when they did.

  “Venus flyby takes ten months,” said Viktor. “So they get here two months from now. Our launch window. They get here in time to see us leave.”

  If we leave, Julia thought but did not say.

  But Axelrod had sprung a surprise, right after the Airbus launch.

  “Been keeping this secret, didn't want the negative publicity,” he admitted on his next priority vid. “I laid a side bet for you guys. Cost me plenty, let me tell you, and I don't just mean money. I had to tip my hat and bow for this one.”

  Raoul whispered, “Which means he had to pay more than he bargained for.”