Analog SFF, July-August 2008

by Dell Magazine Authors

  What happened, powerful vibrations in the skein reinforced each other, building into a force that tore it from the anchor at Toehold. Wildly flailing, it then broke free of Mars Synch. Like the crack of a whip, this sent the Synch station tumbling with its orbit disastrously changed. Tumbling, its solar panels faced the Sun for only moments at a time, so they delivered almost no useful energy. Some also broke free. Days passed before the crew aboard was able to restabilize with power from the depleted charge storage units. Their decaying orbit they could do nothing about. As for Toehold, its people were left on their own.

  Predictable? In hindsight, yes. The fact remained it was not, though after the commission made its report a junior member of the planning team claimed that, with known failure rates for both charge units and solar energy panels, he had recommended contingency factors be entered into the specifications; overruled, he'd been told that quality control in component selection would deal with those problems. That may or may not have been done.

  For the people at Toehold, what counted was that, yes, a new Synch could be built and its programs and design could be made to work under real conditions. Regardless, it would take many years.

  * * * *

  XI

  The kitchen ran out of flour. Such a simple, dumb thing. Well, the corn meal might be made to last until the growing maize matured, and then, tightly rationed, it might tide them over until the ships came again. Also, a sort of powdery stuff for baking could be made from potatoes or freeze-dried soybeans. Meals became a monotonous business of taking on enough to make it through the day, but there was never quite enough. Doc Hilliard reported signs of malnutrition; almost everyone had bleeding gums and a pinched look to the face and limbs. Don talked with the kitchen staff and let them serve the barbecued chicken that had turned up in the last pod retrieved of the Burroughs' delivery. He'd been holding it back. Then, at last, the rice began to produce, and the sugar cane. Not enough, but enough to retard the decline.

  He'd figured the size of greenhouse needed according to average terrestrial crop yields. Dumb. Production was nowhere near that mark. More greenhouses had to be built. That, though, meant men had to work outside, first to quarry stone and gather the other materials needed for glass and caulk, then for the actual construction. It meant also more energy needed, or the greenhouse couldn't be kept warm enough for anything to grow. Homemade photoelectric panels couldn't do the job, so try metallic mirrors to concentrate sunlight; but to be effective they had to be kept turned toward the Sun as it crossed the sky, same as the photopanels. That meant manual control, mechanical systems, and consumption of energy. Efficient? Depends what you mean by efficiency. Do it regardless. Pressure suits were wearing out, and a man couldn't survive outside without one. Looking ahead, enough pressure suits still had to be serviceable when the supply ships came again or the recovery teams would not be able to go out to retrieve the—as it were—manna from heaven. Don had to decide what gambles were worth the prize. Everything had to be kept in balance.

  Tom Wilbur's suit popped a blister. He taped it tight quick enough, but then the rupture propagated and he had to stop and add more tape before he got back inside. It made a huge, ugly bruise on his thigh. Don ordered all suits inspected and a physical inventory of all suit segment spares. Sure enough, the true numbers came out not good, with left leg components totaling out to only four full replacements. One look at the suit failure rate told Don the spares wouldn't last until the ships came again.

  It was a bad moment. He talked to the machine shop people; they came up with a plastic patch that, heat-sealed to the inner surface of a suit, worked. But the patches chafed the suit's wearer and wore out something like every twenty hours of logbook time. The plastic, though, could be made from the semisolid product of the mine, of which huge piles had been dug out before the synch station came down. No shortage there, but a work detail—wearing suits, of course—had to be sent out to bring the stuff in. Five hours of logbook time per suit, minimum, and at least three suits per work detail. Do the math.

  Outside workers developed sores, but the sores healed in a few days most of the time. Some ulcers, though, persisted. Malnutrition was a factor, Doc Hilliard said. Well, all right. Outside task assignments had to be juggled. After a man had gone out for a few days, he stayed inside for a few and got preferential call on the nutritional supplement supply. Protective bandages at friction points helped also, but Doc Hilliard reported they adversely affected blood circulation.

  And the twenty-hour number was an average, not an absolute. Some patches failed at ten or less. Some suits became crazy quilts of repair.

  As always, engineering was the art of the possible.

  Time passed. On a starkly clear, almost warm day Jake Lingon and Ellen Watanabe went for The Walk Outside. Together. A work detail coming back from cleaning dust off the solar panels found them, seated on the portal abutment, still holding hands. Doc Hilliard said Jake had a bone cancer; medicine had stabilized it, but the medicine stock was running low. Why Ellen had chosen to go with him ... well, either you understood or you didn't ask questions like that. Don assigned people to doorkeeper posts at each of Toehold's three portals. That kept more walkers in check until, one night, a doorkeeper went. After that people signing up for the doorkeeper job had to be looked at carefully. Don got Helga Orbison aside. Morale needed a boost. After evening mess and after announcements, could she...?

  With a voice that carried and a striking sense of presence, she could have been a professional singer. Instead, after vacillating in college, she'd opted for a degree in climate science and, as a graduate student, somehow had wound up at Toehold as a one-year science guest. At the wrong time, just her luck. She was out of practice and she'd need an accompanist, but John Dempster had a keyboard and so did Vlad Vysotski. And both Cornell Wang and Leon Crozier had guitars. Might take her a few days.

  One last point, Don added. It would be her idea. Understood?

  For a moment she didn't. Then she grinned. “Gotcha.” If people thought it was her idea, it would brighten their lives; if his, it'd be Don Tenbrook tweaking them.

  It went over good and got things rolling. Gruff Mel Farley became a passable standup comedian, gallows humor a specialty. Quiet George Howard sang duets with Helga in a surprisingly excellent baritone. Several groups began contriving skits, dance routines, and scenes from Shakespeare or Aristophanes. There were even some attempts at Kabuki, though only Ken Mishikawa and John Ishiguru could claim any links to Japanese culture. Hank Fulton did poetry readings, both his own—awful—and classic, some of which he did very expressively. Anything to take minds off of where they were and what their prospect looked like. Even hunger and teeth coming loose could be lost sight of for a while.

  Somehow—Don had nothing to do with it—a committee came into being to take charge of who performed when and to procure or create props and stage sets.

  Though communications equipment never built for the task meant not much personal news came from down home, bits and pieces did arrive. Births, marriages, deaths, and all the other milestones marked by close kin. Thus Don learned that Ma's contrametastic medication was holding and the primary tumor—encysted—was turning necrotic. More serious, though, Pops had gone in for a ventricle patch and, to meet the cost, they'd dipped into his—Don's—retirement fund. Larry said it had cleared legal and he hoped it was all right; if beef prices held, they should be able to pay it back before he got home.

  Least of Don's worries, just then. Unsure he'd ever see Nebraska again and knowing the prices were unlikely to hold, he messaged back that he'd settle for a side of that beef.

  * * * *

  Finally, the ships set forth again. All four, refitted and the targeting of their deliveries much improved. At least, so the engineers down home assured. The electronics shop cobbled together a radio beacon that the entry vehicles could target on. Don took a cold sober look at the projected accuracy data—dangerously theoretical—and had the beacon set out fifteen
klicks south of Toehold. Too far, some said. It meant some of the pods would come down too far to be retrieved; he explained that to have several tons of vital supplies impact directly on Toehold had to be guarded against in spite of all other needs.

  Some of the retrieval men huddled. Fred Canning had bossed in the Antarctic coalfields, so he had a sense of what could be done under frigid and otherwise hard conditions. If some way could be developed for a team to stay out in the overnight cold...

  It would require an insulated, portable habitat and the retrieval vehicle would have to be rigged to go much farther at a sitting than its power system was built for. Already it was modified from one of the mine's big ore haulers, but it shouldn't be too hard to hang a few extra charge racks and some extra panels.

  It tempted, but think real hard, Don said. It would mean going out beyond radio range. What was the chance of a breakdown? Breakdown would mean an impossibly long walk home and probably loss of the vehicle. That meant two vehicles, minimum, had to be fitted to go, each complete with vehicle recovery ability. Ideally three or more. How good was the navigation? How well would the location of the pods be known? Sure, they'd have homing transponders, which would be nice if they came workable through atmosphere entry, and if the shop could build a receiver to sniff out the signals. Sure, also, the magnet ships could track their fall, but how big would the error factor be? This wasn't like down home, where you had GPS and all those other bells and whistles.

  He talked to a few of the science guests. The planetary studies people understood how celestial navigation was done, even though they'd never had to do it. Already in terrible pain from the sores erupting everywhere on her body—Doc Hilliard could do nothing about them—Gwen Suskind worked out the methods for finding one's way on Mars before she died.

  And the geology people; could their seismograph array be tweaked up to locate an impact point if it wasn't too far away? Maybe, they said, but because the impact assembly would bounce somewhat randomly several times before it came to rest, the signal would be muddled. Might narrow the search zone, though.

  And it would mean spending energy. How much, and could that much be safely spent? What else would it be needed for?

  Consider, too, the anti-rad medication requirement. That meant Doc Hilliard had to be brought into the circle. Men outside for that long at a sitting meant cumulative cosmic ray exposure. Solar wind particles, also. How did that measure against the medication supply? Could we count on finding a fresh and usable supply in the pod brought back? Let's see some numbers.

  When the portable habitat—an awkward assemblage of metal and plastic that they called the pup tent—was completed, Don had them test it just outside the portal for ten days. It turned up a lot of problems they hadn't thought of. Just putting it together took hours; that wasn't acceptable. It had to be simplified without sacrifice of essential qualities.

  So the project took almost three quarters of an Earth year. Worth it, though. The second cargo pod brought in, from something like a hundred klicks out, they found packed end to end with sides of beef from the Nebraska Cattle Raiser's Association. Larry's doing? Don never heard. People came from every corner of Toehold to see with their own eyes. More than a few broke down and cried.

  How about a three-day excursion, Fred suggested. How about four?

  Go for the easy ones first, Don told him. Then, well, we'll think about the ones farther away. How much cosmic ray exposure are the men getting? Should we wait until a solar flare reduces the density of the rays, or would the rise in solar wind particles make the total exposure worse? What do the numbers tell us?

  He kept on like that, balancing risk against prize. Rivalries emerged. He was taking it too careful, some said. Others said not enough. They complained he didn't listen and his priorities were wrong. He hadn't considered this or that. What if...? And so forth.

  Actually, he listened a lot and consulted a lot. As a journeyman engineer, he knew too well that he did not know everything, could not anticipate everything, and that the things he was most sure about were the ones most likely to turn and bite. He sat through long meetings, made sure everyone, especially the most reticent, had their say. He got people aside and probed for their afterthoughts. He ruminated for his own.

  Still, unavoidably, the resentments surfaced. Department chiefs accustomed to running a shop their own way chafed at having their way overruled and their view of what mattered not recognized. Endless one-on-one discussions did not always result in a changed mind, either his or theirs, and sometimes action was needed at once, regardless how misguided or shrewd. Tempers flared. These were anxious people, desperately aware that a slow, incremental doom prowled just outside.

  By necessity, he learned ways to smooth a ruffled feather and the diplomatic wisdom of not winning a game of chess. Along with everyone else rated for such work, he took his turn at outside tasks and often contrived to be near the end of the chow line; most times that meant lean pickings but, well, very unwise to put himself first among equals.

  All that helped. Now and then someone would walk away in rage, then come back hours later to apologize—not for being wrong, you understand. For getting mad.

  He was putting too much electrical charge into storage, Rick Selby complained. They needed the energy now. Maybe, Don admitted, but was the need utterly desperate? Then a perihelion dust storm erupted. Output from the solar panels dropped to ten percent or so. After the storm subsided, it took weeks before dust could be cleaned from all the panels and the field brought back to something near full power. In the greenhouses, crops died and oxygen output faltered. A near thing, that was.

  And what about the suicide policy, someone asked. If a person saw death as an escape from a situation they could no longer endure, wasn't that a matter of personal choice? Under normal conditions, Don admitted, personal choice it was. But here, he said, and now, Toehold was an organism larger than the individuals it contained. In that situation, suicide by any individual was the ultimate of selfishness. Like cells in a body, each person had talents, knowledge, and skills that others did not. What might be needed at some future moment, neither he nor anyone could predict. Each person's death would weaken the community. Better to have and not need than to need and not have.

  At the time, his only thought was their immediate situation. He never imagined that, answering as he did would enlarge the sense of personal worth of every man and woman in Toehold. Maybe it saved a few lives. Years later, when the first few strands of the new cable skein had come down with a pod full of bottled champagne for ballast, a half drunk Hank Fulton got him aside, thanked him, and told him why.

  * * * *

  XII

  “Where did you learn your management skills?” Scarborough asked.

  Skills? It took Don a long moment to find a reply. In the external view displays all he could see was open water and patterns of cloud. They could be anywhere in the world.

  “Some of it was just bumping around till I found what worked,” he said at last. “Otherwise, well, I'd worked under some good people and some bad people, and I guess that gave me a sense of things. Try to be like the good ones, that is. Then I bossed a few jobs myself, so I had some idea of what to keep in mind. Think at least a little way down the line, take a deep breath before doing anything, and not act any bigger than my boots; that sort of thing.”

  Not, in truth, a full answer, but he hoped it would do. Before everything else, though, it had been Jeni; he didn't want to talk about her. Never had. Never would.

  Governance, she'd called it, and it should be about responsibility, not personal power. Presidents, prime ministers, tyrants of every stripe—never mind the fancy titles—for them, too many times, it was an ego thing, more appropriate to a troop of baboons. Personal glory? Napoleon grabbing an imperial crown and putting it on his own head? That sort of thing? Utterly stupid! Service was what it should be about, she'd said, and the public good. Not personal gain.

  And another thing, she'd said, but ma
ybe that was another time. Machiavelli—whoever he was—telling his prince he should make himself feared instead of liked. Dumb, she'd said. Sure, maybe in a dog-eat-dog time like his it had been halfway smart, but you'd have everyone sharpening a knife and looking for your back. True leadership called for respect and true acceptance; you only got that if they saw—and wanted—the goal you were leading them toward.

  Remembering that, Don permitted himself a tiny smile. There on Mars, survival, for however long life lasted, had been a goal few could argue with.

  “So you took charge,” Scarborough said. “You never put it to a vote?”

  “Depends what you mean,” Don said. “People that didn't like how I was doing things, I explained what else I had to think about. All they had was one piece of the elephant; I had hold of the whole critter. If they wanted the job, they could have it. Most times, about there they'd back down. Nobody wants to be captain of the Titanic."

  “Uh?” Scarborough asked.

  “Sorry. Something Pops used to say. Big ocean ship nobody thought could sink, but sank anyhow. Long time ago.”

  “Oh.”

  “And when a lot of them took to yelling, one thing or another—and I don't say I figured right all the time; I didn't—I'd go for a confidence vote. Lost a lot of times, but then there'd be nobody think he could do it better. Same story. I was stuck.” Don paused. “Most of the time, people aren't much different from a herd of cows. Somebody takes the lead, they'll go along. Not as hard as go your own way. Besides which, the situation we had, everyone taking his own direction wouldn't have worked. We had to stay structured, and all of us thinking ahead. That meant somebody running the shop.”

  “It meant you had to be right more times than wrong,” Scarborough said.

  “Or not so wrong as not to get by. Or—” Second thought. “—see I was wrong and change my mind quick enough.” Pause. “I did a lot of that. Later, when we had things settled better and the cargo pods came on target, they got the funny idea I'd been smart all along.”