by Ben Bova
“It’s going to be a long night,” Bernstein muttered.
“Yeah.”
Once they were sealed into the cockpit and had removed their helmets, Faiyum said, “A biologist, a geologist, and Glory Hallelujah were locked in a hotel room in Bangkok.”
Bernstein moaned. O’Connor said, “You know that everything we say is being recorded for the mission log.”
Faiyum said, “Hell, we’re going to be dead by the time they get to us. What difference does it make?”
“No disrespect for the mission commander.”
Faiyum shrugged. “Okay. How about this one: a physicist, a mathematician, and a lawyer are each asked, ‘How much is two and two?’ ”
“I heard this one,” Bernstein said.
Without paying his teammate the slightest attention, Faiyum plowed ahead. “The mathematician says, ‘Two and two are four. Always four. Four point zero.’ The physicist thinks a minute and says, ‘It’s somewhere between three point eight and four point two.’ ”
O’Connor smiled. Yeah, a physicist probably would put it that way, he thought.
“So what does the lawyer answer?”
With a big grin, Faiyum replied, “The lawyer says, ‘How much is two and two? How much do you want it to be?’ ”
Bernstein groaned, but O’Connor laughed. “Lawyers,” he said.
“We could use a lawyer here,” Bernstein said. “Sue the bastards.”
“Which bastards?”
Bernstein shrugged elaborately. “All of them,” he finally said.
The night was long. And dark. And cold. O’Connor set the cockpit’s thermostat to barely above freezing and ordered the two geologists to switch off their suit heaters.
“We’ve got to preserve every watt of electrical power we can. Stretch out the battery life as much as possible,” he said firmly.
The two geologists nodded glumly.
“Better put our helmets back on,” said Bernstein.
Faiyum nodded. “Better piss now, before it gets frozen.”
The suits were well insulated, O’Connor knew. They’ll hold our body heat better than blankets, he told himself. He remembered camping in New England, when he’d been a kid. Got pretty cold there. Then a mocking voice in his mind answered, but not a hundred below.
They made it through the first night and woke up stiff and shuddering and miserable. The sun was up, as usual, and the solar panels were feeding electrical power to the cockpit’s heaters.
“That wasn’t too bad,” O’Connor said, as they munched on ration bars for breakfast.
Faiyum made a face. “Other than that, how did you like the play, Mrs. Lincoln?”
Bernstein pointed to the control panel’s displays. “Batteries damned near died overnight,” he said.
“The solar panels are recharging them,” O’Connor replied.
“They won’t come back a hundred percent,” said Bernstein. “You know that.”
O’Connor bit back the reply he wanted to make. He merely nodded and murmured, “I know.”
Faiyum peered at the display from the laser they had set up outside. “I’ll be damned.”
The other two hunched up closer to him.
“Look at that,” said Faiyum, pointing. “The spectrometer’s showing there actually is methane seeping out of our bore hole.”
“Methanogens?” mused Bernstein.
“Can’t be anything else,” Faiyum said. With a wide smile, he said, “We’ve discovered life on Mars! We could win the Nobel Prize for this!”
“Posthumously,” said Bernstein.
“We’ve got to get this data back to Tithonium,” said O’Connor. “Let the biologists take a look at it.”
“It’s being telemetered to Tithonium automatically,” Bernstein reminded him.
“Yeah, but I want to see what the biologists have to say.”
The biologists were disappointingly cautious. Yes, it was methane gas seeping up from the bore hole. Yes, it very well might be coming from methanogenic bacteria living deep underground. But they needed more conclusive evidence.
“Could you get samples from the bottom of your bore hole?” asked the lead biologist, a Hispanic American from California. In the video screen on the control panel, he looked as if he were trying hard not to get excited.
“We’ve got the ice core,” Faiyum replied immediately. “I’ll bet we’ve got samples of the bugs in the bottom layers.”
“Keep it well protected,” the biologist urged.
“It’s protected,” O’Connor assured him.
“We’ll examine it when you bring it in,” the biologist said, putting on a serious face.
Once the video link was disconnected, Bernstein said morosely, “They’ll be more interested in the damned ice core than in our frozen bodies.”
All day long they watched the spikes of the spectrometer’s flickering display. The gas issuing from their bore hole was mostly methane, and it was coming up continuously, a thin, invisible breath issuing from deep below the surface.
“Those bugs are farting away down there,” Faiyum said happily. “Busy little bastards.”
“Sun’s going down,” said Bernstein.
O’Connor checked the status of the batteries. Even with the solar panels recharging them all day, they were barely up to seventy-five percent of their nominal capacity. He did some quick arithmetic in his head. If it takes Tithonium five days to get us, we’ll have frozen to death on the fourth night.
Like Shackleton at the South Pole, he thought. Froze to death, all of ’em.
They made it through the second night, but O’Connor barely slept. He finally dozed off, listening to the soft breeze wafting by outside. When he awoke every joint in his body ached and it took nearly an hour for him to stop his uncontrollable trembling.
As they chewed on their nearly-frozen breakfast bars, Bernstein said, “We’re not going to make it.”
“I can put in a call to Tithonium, tell ‘em we’re in a bad way.”
“They can see our telemetry,” Faiyum said, unusually morose. “They know the batteries are draining away.”
“We can ask them for help.”
“Yeah,” said Bernstein. “When’s the last time Glory Hallelujah changed her mind about anything?”
O’Connor called anyway. In the video screen, Gloria Hazeltine’s chunky blond face looked like an implacable goddess.
“We’re doing everything we can,” she said, her voice flat and final. “We’ll get to you as soon as we can. Conserve your power. Turn off everything you don’t need to keep yourselves alive.”
Once O’Connor broke the comm link, Bernstein grumbled, “Maybe we could hold our breaths for three or four days.”
But Faiyum was staring at the spectrometer readout. Methane gas was still coming out of the bore hole, a thin waft, but steady.
“Or maybe we could breathe bug farts,” he said.
“What?”
Looking out the windshield toward their bore hole, Faiyum said, “Methane contains hydrogen. If we can capture the methane those bug are emitting . . .”
“How do we get the hydrogen out of it?” O’Connor asked.
“Lase it. That’ll break it up into hydrogen and carbon. The carbon precipitates out, leaving the hydrogen for us to feed to the fuel cell.
Bernstein shook his head. “How’re we going to capture the methane in the first place? And how are we going to repair the fuel cell’s damage?”
“We can weld a patch on the cell,” O’Connor said. “We’ve got the tools for that.”
“And we can attach a weather balloon to the bore hole. That’ll hold the methane coming out.”
“Yeah, but will it be enough to power up the fuel cell?”
“We’ll see.”
With Bernstein clearly d
oubtful, they broke into the equipment locker and pulled out the small, almost delicate, welding rod and supplies. Faiyum opened the bin that contained the weather balloons.
“The meteorologists aren’t going to like our using their stuff,” Bernstein said. “We’re supposed to be releasing these balloons twice a day.”
Before O’Connor could reply with a choice, Fuck the meteorologists, Faiyum snapped, “Let ’em eat cake.”
They got to work. As team leader, O’Connor was glad of the excuse to be doing something. Even if this is a big flop, he thought, it’s better to be busy than to just lay around and wait to die.
As he stretched one of the weather balloons over the bore hole and fastened it in place, Faiyum kept up a steady stream of timeworn jokes. Bernstein groaned in the proper places, and O’Connor sweated inside his suit while he laboriously welded the bullet-hole sized puncture of the fuel cell’s hydrogen tank.
By midafternoon the weather balloon was swelling nicely.
“How much hydrogen do you think we’ve got there?” Bernstein wondered.
“Not enough,” said Faiyum, serious for once. “We’ll need three, four balloons full. Maybe more.”
O’Connor looked westward, out across the bleak, frozen plain. The sun would be setting in another couple of hours.
When they finished their day’s work and clambered back into the cockpit, O’Connor saw that the batteries were barely up to half their standard power level, even with the solar panels recharging them all day.
We’re not going to make it, he thought. But he said nothing. He could see that the other two stared at the battery readout. No one said a word, though.
The night was worse than ever. O’Connor couldn’t sleep. The cold hurt. He had turned off his suit radio, so he couldn’t tell if the other two had drifted off to sleep. He couldn’t. He knew that when a man froze to death, he fell asleep first. Not a bad way to die, he said to himself. As if there’s a good way.
He was surprised when the first rays of sunlight woke him. I fell asleep anyway. I didn’t die. Not yet.
Faiyum wasn’t in the cockpit, he saw. Looking blearily through the windshield, he spotted the geologist in the early morning sun fixing a fresh balloon to the bore hole, with a big, round, yellow balloon bobbing from a rock he’d tied it to.
O’Connor saw Faiyum waving to him and gesturing to his left wrist, then remembered that he had turned his suit radio off. He clicked the control stud on his wrist.
“. . . damned near ready to burst,” Faiyum was saying. “Good thing I came out here in time.”
Bernstein was lying back in his cranked-down seat, either asleep or . . . O’Connor nudged his shoulder. No reaction. He shook the man harder.
“Wha . . . what’s going on?”
O’Connor let out a breath that he hadn’t realized he’d been holding.
“You okay?” he asked softly.
“I gotta take a crap.”
O’Connor giggled. He’s all right. We made it through the night. But then he turned to the control panel and saw that the batteries were down to zero.
Faiyum and Bernstein spent the day building a system of pipes that led from the balloon’s neck to the input valve of the repaired fuel cell’s hydrogen tank. As long as the sun was shining, they had plenty of electricity to power the laser. Faiyum fastened the balloon’s neck to one of the hopper’s spidery little landing legs and connected it to the rickety-looking pipework. Damned contraption’s going to leak like a sieve, O’Connor thought. Hydrogen’s sneaky stuff.
As he worked, he kept up his patter of inane jokes. “A Catholic, a Muslim, and a Jew—”
“How come the Jew is always last on your list?” Bernstein asked, from his post at the fuel cell. O’Connor saw that the hydrogen tank was starting to fill.
Faiyum launched into an elaborate joke from the ancient days of the old Soviet Union, in which Jews were turned away from everything from butcher’s shops to clothing stores.
“They weren’t even allowed to stand in line,” he explained as he held the bobbing balloon by its neck. “So when the guys who’ve been waiting in line at the butcher’s shop since sunrise are told that there’s no meat today, one of them turns to another and says, ‘See, the Jews get the best of everything!’ ”
“I don’t get it,” Bernstein complained.
“They didn’t have to stand in line all day.”
“Because they were discriminated against.”
Faiyum shook his head. “I thought you people were supposed to have a great sense of humor.”
“When we hear something funny.”
O’Connor suppressed a giggle. Bernstein understood the joke perfectly well, he thought, but he wasn’t going to let Faiyum know it.
By the time the sun touched the horizon again, the fuel cell’s hydrogen tank was half full and the hopper’s batteries were totally dead.
O’Connor called Tithonium. “We’re going to run on the fuel cell tonight.”
For the first time since he’d known her, Gloria Hazeltine looked surprised. “But I thought your fuel cell was dead.”
“We’ve resurrected it,” O’Connor said happily. “We’ve got enough hydrogen to run the heaters most of the night.”
“Where’d you get the hydrogen?” Glory Hallelujah was wide-eyed with curiosity.
“Bug farts,” shouted Faiyum, from over O’Connor’s shoulder.
They made it through the night almost comfortably and spent the next day filling balloons with methane, then breaking down the gas into its components and filling the fuel cell’s tank with hydrogen.
By the time the relief ship from Tithonium landed beside their hopper, O’Connor was almost ready to wave them off and return to the base on their own power.
Instead, though, he spent the day helping his teammates and the two-man crew of the relief ship to attach the storage racks with their previous ice core onto the bigger vehicle.
As they took off for Tithonium, five men jammed into the ship’s command deck, O’Connor felt almost sad to be leaving their little hopper alone on the frigid plain. Almost. We’ll be back, he told himself. And we’ll salvage the Viking 2 lander when we return.
Faiyum showed no remorse about leaving at all. “A Jew, a Catholic, and a Muslim walk into a bar.”
“Not another one,” Bernstein groused.
Undeterred, Faiyum plowed ahead. “The bartender takes one look at them and says, ‘What is this, a joke?’ ”
Even Bernstein laughed.
Introduction to
“The Man Who
Hated Gravity”
Beginning writers are often told to “write about what you know.”
I have never been to the moon, although I still harbor some hope of making that trip someday. I have never been a circus acrobat; I have enough of a challenge getting through my everyday routine.
But I know what it’s like to have gravity play its sly tricks on me. Many years ago, I injured my knee while playing tennis. For weeks I walked with a brace on my leg. Then I needed a cane to walk with.
My injury finally healed, but the experience led me to write the story of the Great Rolando, circus aerialist extraordinaire.
I suppose Rolando’s character could be categorized as “the man who learns better.” What do you think?
THE MAN WHO
HATED GRAVITY
The Great Rolando had not always hated gravity. As a child growing up in the traveling circus that had been his only home, he often frightened his parents by climbing too high, swinging too far, daring more than they could bear to watch.
The son of a clown and a cook, Rolando had yearned for true greatness and could not rest until he became the most renowned aerialist of them all.
Slim and handsome in his spangled tights, Rolando soared through the empty air thirty feet above the circus’s
flimsy safety net. Then fifty feet above it. Then a full hundred feet high, with no net at all.
“See the Great Rolando Defy Gravity!” shouted the posters and TV advertisements. And the people came to crane their necks and hold their breaths as he performed a split-second ballet in midair high above them. Literally flying from one trapeze to another, triple somersaults were workaday chores for the Great Rolando.
His father feared to watch his son’s performances. With all the superstition born of generations of circus life, he cringed outside the big top while the crowds roared deliriously. Behind his clown’s painted grin, Rolando’s father trembled. His mother prayed through every performance until the day she died, slumped over a bare wooden pew in a tiny, austere church far out in the midwestern prairie.
For no matter how far he flew, no matter how wildly he gyrated in midair, no matter how the crowds below gasped and screamed their delight, the Great Rolando pushed himself farther, higher, more recklessly.
Once, when the circus was playing New York City’s huge convention center, the management pulled a public relations coup. They got a brilliant young physicist from Columbia University to pose with Rolando for the media cameras and congratulate him on defying gravity.
Once the camera crews had departed, the physicist said to Rolando, “I’ve always had a secret yearning to be in the circus. I admire what you do very much.”
Rolando accepted the compliment with a condescending smile.
“But no one can really defy gravity,” the physicist warned. “It’s a universal force, you know.”
The Great Rolando’s smile vanished. “I can defy gravity. And I do. Every day.”
Several years later Rolando’s father died (of a heart seizure, during one of his son’s performances) and Rolando married the brilliant young lion tamer who had joined the circus slightly earlier. She was a petite, little thing with golden hair, the loveliest of blue eyes, and so sweet a disposition that no one could say anything about her that was less than praise. Even the great cats purred for her.
She too feared Rolando’s ever-bolder daring, his wilder and wilder reachings on the high trapeze.