Voyage

by Stephen Baxter

  She glanced again at her polar blow-up. It was actually of much lower quality than the images taken by later generations of probes, which had concentrated on equatorial landing-site mapping. Because of the Mars landing program, paradoxically, much less was known about the plant as a whole than might otherwise be possible.

  And it was in the hands of these two guys to make it all worth while.

  Adam Bleeker said, ‘I’d guess the high-latitude problems would also rule out the site you’ve marked far to the south there, Natalie.’

  ‘I guess. But it’s another interesting site. That’s the Amphitrites Patera: an ancient volcano, much older than the volcanic plains in the northern hemisphere. We don’t fully understand how it was formed. Maybe the vulcanism there was sparked off by the huge impacts which created the massive impact craters in the south. You see these mustard-yellow spots in the center of the southern fields: that’s Argyre and Hellas – huge, ancient impact basins, more than three billion years old. Hellas is bigger than anything we’ve found on the Moon – bigger even than the Mare Imbrium, for example. Hellas is where the Soviets put down Mars 9.’

  Stone whistled. ‘That’s what you get for setting up shop next door to the asteroid belt, I guess.’

  Argyre held a Stars-and-Stripes.

  ‘You’re suggesting we should try for Argyre?’ Bleeker asked.

  ‘It’s a possible. Argyre is obviously very ancient, and very deep. But the basins are surrounded by concentric rings – mountain chains, actually – which would be hard to negotiate or land on.

  ‘Now,’ she went on, ‘you can see that the rest of the action is in the western hemisphere. This scarlet area, sprawling over into the north, is the Tharsis bulge: on average, more than five miles above the surrounding terrain. And these crimson spots are the great shield volcanoes.’ She pointed. ‘Ascraeus, Pavonis and Arsia Mons; and here, to the northwest, is Olympus Mons: three hundred seventy miles across its base, with a caldera fifty miles wide. Olympus is so big it pokes its way out of most of the atmosphere. So you get orographic clouds, formed when the air has to move up the slopes …’

  ‘Sure,’ Bleeker said, ‘but I hear Olympus wouldn’t be so spectacular from the ground.’

  She shrugged. ‘Maybe. Look at this.’ She hunted about on the pin board on one wall, until she found the image she wanted. She passed it to the astronauts. It was a perspective view of a huge volcano; a cliff, sharp and well delineated, marked out its nearer rim. ‘That’s a computer image, an oblique view, faked up from Mariner data.’

  Stone pointed to the cliff. ‘How high is that?’

  ‘The scarp? Oh, three miles.’

  ‘Jesus. A three-mile-high cliff?’

  ‘Give or take.’

  They were both staring at the cliff image. Bleeker held up his hands in mock surrender.

  She suppressed a grin. Astronauts were easy to impress if you pushed the right gosh-wow buttons.

  Stone said, ‘I see you have a couple of flags on top of those big volcanoes.’

  ‘Yeah. Olympus Mons is the youngest, and the tallest; and the youngest lava flows on Mars emanate from it. But Olympus is seventeen miles high –’

  ‘Too high for aerobraking,’ Bleeker said. ‘And I guess that would rule out the other Tharsis volcanoes also.’

  ‘Okay,’ Stone said. ‘To the east of Tharsis I see a ragged blue streak, stretching along the equator. I guess that’s the Mariner valley.’

  ‘Yes. Valles Marineris. The great canyons: two and a half thousand miles long, four miles deep, and over a hundred miles wide. We know that the Valles system wasn’t formed by water. A lot of the individual “canyons” are boxed in. So water couldn’t have got in or out of them; we’re looking at geological faulting here, like the Rift Valley in Africa.’

  ‘The whole valley looks as if it’s flowing out of your Tharsis bulge,’ Bleeker said.

  ‘Yeah. And we don’t think that can be a coincidence. Maybe when the bulge was uplifted, magma withdrew from around it, which would have cracked the surface. There would have been earthquakes and extensive faulting.’

  ‘I see we could maybe go for the Valles Marineris itself,’ Stone said.

  ‘Maybe,’ York said. ‘This flag is actually in a tributary called the Candor Chasma; we’ve seen layers in the canyon walls here, so we’d be able to get clues to the canyons’ origins.’

  ‘But I’ll bet the landscape isn’t too easy to negotiate.’

  ‘No. Some of the smaller canyons there are a couple of miles deep. If you had several months to survey the place, and some kind of flying machine –’

  ‘But we don’t,’ Stone said. ‘Okay, Natalie. That leaves two places. Both on the border between the old stuff in the southern hemisphere and the volcanic plains in the north.’

  ‘Yes. This one in the eastern hemisphere’ – on the opposite side of the world from Tharsis – ‘is called Nilosyrtis Mensa. It is what we call “fretted” terrain.’ She dug out a photograph, this one a mosaic in black and white. It showed a surface uniformly crumpled.

  ‘Christ,’ Stone said. ‘It looks like beaten copper.’

  ‘We think the older, southern terrain has been eroded, here on the border, leaving this irregular, grooved landscape.’

  ‘Looks bloody difficult to land on,’ Bleeker said.

  ‘Yes, and you’d need long traverses to achieve systematic surveys.’

  ‘All right. So that leaves one site.’

  The final flag was at the western fringe of the Tharsis Bulge, close to the border of the north and south terrains. It was in the middle of a green stripe that cut north to south across the Valles. The green, together with the blue ribbon of the Valles, made a rough upright cross, straddling the equator.

  ‘This is a region shaped by running water. Apparently. There are channels that seem to flow out of the Valles Marineris, and across the northern plains.’

  Stone smiled. ‘So these are the famous water-carved features you tell us about in the Singing Wheel.’

  ‘It’s an equatorial site,’ she said. ‘So you get a mix of young and old geological types. And that’s important to us. Most mixed terrain is complex, broken up. But here the landscape is pretty forgiving for a landing. And if you’re going to find water anywhere, it’s here. Maybe under the surface. And where there’s water –’

  ‘Maybe there’s life.’ Stone got out of his chair and walked across to the map; he leaned close so he could read the label by the little flag. ‘Mangala Vallis. What does it mean?’

  ‘All the major valleys have been named after words for Mars. Here, to the east of Marineris, we even have an Ares valley …’

  ‘And Mangala?’

  ‘Sanskrit. The oldest language of the Indo-European group.’ “So maybe Mangala is the oldest word for Mars in the western world.’ Stone smiled. ‘I kind of like that.’ Standing at the map, he turned to eye York. ‘So you’ve been pushing the site selection board toward Mangala Vallis. For good operational reasons, of course. A place on which you just happen to be the world’s leading expert. Right, York?’ He was grinning, and so was Bleeker.

  ‘Still wangling to get my seat, Natalie?’ Bleeker called, good-natured.

  She felt chilled. These guys see right through me.

  But maybe that’s not a bad thing. If Bleeker knows I’m right on his tail, maybe he will take his geology a little more seriously.

  And all he has to do is slip once …

  She started to roll up her maps. ‘What do you think? I’ll give you a preprint of my next Journal of Geophysical Research paper on Mangala; read it and weep, fly-boys.’

  ‘Now what?’ Stone asked. ‘Are we done?’

  ‘Like hell. We’re only just beginning; that was the fun stuff. Now we come to Martian climatology. Compare and contrast with Earth’s, and …’

  After some grumbling, the guys settled down again.

  The day wore on, and the little room grew progressively hotter.

  October, 1981
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  In the end, five lead companies submitted proposals to build the Mars Exploration Module: Rockwell, McDonnell, Martin, Boeing, and JK Lee’s company, Columbia.

  The post-presentation work of the MEM Evaluation Board was long and complicated. It was all a question of weighted scores; Ralph Gershon had never seen anything like it. There were subcommittees to evaluate the bidder’s ‘administrative capacity’ and ‘business approach’ and ‘technical qualification’ … Gershon was himself involved in three of the subcommittees. And each subcommittee assigned weighted scores to each bid, under hundreds of categories.

  It didn’t make sense to Gershon. Would all these numbers really determine the final outcome? If you could reduce decision-making to a mechanical process, the day would come when a computer could run an outfit like NASA.

  In this bidding war, for instance, it was pretty obvious to Gershon that Columbia had the most plausible strategy. NASA, with the bigger players, had pissed away the best part of a decade on studies and proposals and evaluations of ever more exotic Mars landers, without ever really getting to the point. Lee’s people had come in fresh and had cut through all that crap, and presented something that looked as if it could be up and flying in a couple of years.

  The trouble was, the scoring didn’t back up that intuition. Even though its technical pitch was well received – and the human factors stuff seemed particularly well thought through – Columbia was penalized by its status as a small experimental outfit. It just didn’t look as if Columbia was capable of delivering a complete spacecraft.

  When the first-cut summary sheets came in, the overall totals gave Rockwell first place, with Boeing and McDonnell tied for second, and Columbia a distant last.

  Gershon argued against the scoring in the final plenary sessions. ‘Damn it, you’ve got the results of the sims. I bust my balls trying to get a biconic to fly. We got to pick the bidder with the best chance of building something that will work …’

  He got some sympathy from Joe Muldoon. The scores went through a rethink which helped Columbia a little.

  But in the end Muldoon’s final report to Tim Josephson followed the scoring conclusions: ‘Rockwell International is considered the outstanding source as the Mars Excursion Module prime contractor …’

  His assignment completed, Gershon went off to work at the Cape on the first of the Ares A-class missions, an unmanned proving flight of the upgraded Saturn VB.

  In a couple of days he was called back to JSC to put his paw print to the final MEM report. Gershon turned up, pretty pissed with the whole thing.

  Muldoon caught him up.

  ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘It’s over, isn’t it? Oh, come on, Joe. You know as well as I do that Columbia were the only outfit with a real chance of building something in the timescale. And now we’re dumping them.’

  ‘Of course I know that. But it’s not over yet.’

  ‘Are you kidding me? We’ve just signed off the final report, for Christ’s sake. Columbia never had a chance.’

  ‘You’re learning fast, boy, but you’ve got a long way to go. In this game, a signed-off, final report is just the start of the negotiations.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I want you to do something for me.’

  A couple of days after that, a long telegram landed on JK Lee’s gun-metal desk.

  He called in Jack Morgan, and flipped the telegram across the desk at him.

  Morgan read through the thing carefully, but he kept one eye on Lee as he did so.

  The telegram had come from Ralph Gershon, one of the astronauts on the Evaluation Board. It was basically a list of questions about the Columbia bid. A lot of them were brutal, and the first was a doozie: translated from corporate speak it was, How can a piss-ant bunch of amateurs like Columbia handle the development of a major spacecraft like the MEM?

  ‘Well, I guess this is it,’ Morgan said, studying Lee. ‘We’re dead.’

  Morgan had never seen Lee so low as in the last couple of months, since the MEM presentation. The release of tension, the sleep deficit, and all the rest of it had dumped Lee into a deep, deep trough of depression. And Lee’s overspend on the proposal had finally come out into the open, and there was a lot of muttering against him within Columbia. During the MEM exercise Morgan had become genuinely worried about what Lee was doing to himself. Not to mention his family. Now the MEM thing was over Morgan knew he was going to have to broach the health thing with Lee, somehow. Maybe he’d try to work through Jennine.

  But right now Lee, sitting back in his chair, seemed bright, alert, and his eyes had that slightly glazed, almost high look in them that Morgan had come to associate with Lee’s major bursts of activity.

  ‘Hell, no,’ Lee said vehemently. ‘Don’t you get it? This damn note means we’re still in the running. They wouldn’t be asking us these questions otherwise.’

  ‘What are you going to do?’

  ‘Get the answers, of course.’ Lee stabbed at his intercom. ‘Bella. I want you to start putting out calls. Get the MEM team leaders in here, as soon as you can. And book a flight for us all, out to Houston, for – let me think – two days’ time.’

  ‘But that’s a Sunday, JK.’

  ‘Here you go again with your “but but but,”’ Lee said. ‘I’ve told you about that before.’

  ‘Yes, sir, JK.’

  Morgan was aghast. ‘You’re not serious. It’s unheard of for a bidder to make a personal visit during an evaluation process.’

  ‘What is that, a rule?’

  ‘An unwritten one, I guess.’

  Lee arched his eyebrows. ‘Imagine my concern.’

  After the visit of the Columbia people to JSC, the scoring was revised again, and the senior people on the Evaluation Board took the proposal to Tim Josephson in Washington.

  Muldoon’s people recommended Rockwell on the basis of the scoring system, with Columbia finally showing up at third.

  The Administrator listened carefully.

  Then Josephson thanked the Board, and he asked Joe Muldoon, Ralph Gershon and a couple of others to stay behind.

  ‘Tell me the truth.’ His tone sounded to Gershon typically dry and bureaucratic. ‘Are there any factors, other than those presented by the Evaluation Board, which I ought to take into account in this decision?’

  Joe Muldoon spoke up. ‘Hell, yes. You got to look again at the Columbia bid, Tim.’

  ‘Why so?’

  ‘Because in my opinion it’s the most technically plausible. It’s shallow in some areas, but overall it was the most coherent of the bids. With the support of good subcontractors, the small organizational weight of Columbia won’t be a handicap …’

  Gershon tried not to grin. As he’d watched Muldoon and Josephson and the rest work in the last few days, he’d come to believe that running an organization had a lot in common with flying a plane. You had to use your instruments, sure, but raw data, however well interpreted and analyzed, was only one input; in the end – when you had to make the decisions that could save you or kill you – there was no substitute for the mysterious internal processing that amalgamated data and experience and the feel of a ship in your hands.

  It was just what Tim Josephson and Joe Muldoon were doing now, he thought. The Columbia bid felt right, and that might swing it for JK Lee, even yet.

  Still, it was going to be difficult for Josephson to set aside the conclusions of his formal evaluation. Two decades earlier Jim Webb had done that, when he’d plumped for Rockwell to build Apollo. And there had been muttering about corruption and back-hand deals ever since.

  When Gershon left to take a plane to the Cape, the decision still hung in the balance.

  Lee was getting steadily more depressed. Even though his unorthodox visit to Houston had gone well, the rumors coming out of Washington were strong and consistent: that Rockwell had the MEM contract wrapped up. Hell, he thought, they always did. Who was I ever trying to kid?

  At ten a.m. on
the day after getting back from Houston he found himself staring out of his office window. He was thinking of going home. He could spend some rime with Jennine. And his son, Bert, was playing baseball that evening for his high school team. Maybe it would be good for Lee to show up, for once.

  Then Joe Muldoon called.

  ‘Can you come back over to Houston today?’

  Lee was nonplussed. ‘I don’t know. The flights –’

  ‘Tonight would be fine. I’d like to see you. Come to my office at JSC.’

  Maybe Muldoon thought it would be kinder to tell Lee in person, even if it meant dragging him all the way out to Houston.

  Lee thought of Bert and his ball game. That seemed a more attractive option.

  He called Bella to ask her to fix up a flight to Houston.

  He got to JSC in late afternoon. He’d spent the flight, and the ride from the airport, bracing himself for the axe.

  Muldoon took him into his office and closed the door. He stuck out his hand and grinned. ‘Congratulations. I wanted to tell you in person. You’ve won the MEM.’

  Lee, for once in his life, couldn’t think of a damn thing to say.

  ‘Can I tell my people?’

  Muldoon checked his watch, a heavy astronaut’s Rolex. ‘We can’t make a public announcement until the stock markets close … Well, what the hell.’

  He allowed Lee to make two phone calls.

  Lee used the phone in Muldoon’s office. He thought of calling Jennine.

  He called Art Cane.

  And then he called Gene Tyson, at Hughes, and he took a lot of pleasure over commiserating with him.

  Muldoon took Lee out that night, for a meal and a good few cold ones. Lee got thoroughly oiled, and had a hell of a time.

  But by five a.m. he was up, watching the early-morning news on the TV, and packing his overnight bag.

  He caught a glance of himself in the mirror on the wall of his motel room. ‘By God,’ he said aloud. ‘I’m going to build a spacecraft to take three Americans to Mars.’