by Ben Bova
He turned back to the window and looked at the five hydroponic gardens they’d built. The plants were doing well in their stout oblong boxes. They didn’t seem to mind that the Sun was farther away than on Earth, or that they were growing in a water solution instead of dirt. They wouldn’t like Martian dirt: it was loaded with perchlorates and other chemicals, more like bleach than farming soil.
Water, Connover thought. They’d still not found water and they were nearing the point where the problem would be critical. They might even have to raid one of the hydroponics gardens. He hoped it wouldn’t come to that.
He and McPherson had spent the morning on another fruitless water search, this time to a rock formation about three kilometers to the west. After studying and restudying the data from the satellites, and with the help of data-processing algorithms developed just for this purpose by some of the brightest scientists back on Earth, they had decided this site was a likely spot for having subsurface ice.
So Ted and Hi had gone out there this morning and found . . . nothing. The core samples were nothing but rock and dirt. No trace of ice.
And when they’d returned to the habitat, Ted found a message from Houston that a dust storm was heading their way. The Mars meteorologists said it would be a big one, perhaps global.
“Just what we need,” he muttered.
“What is just what we need?” Catherine asked.
Startled, Connover spun around to see the French geologist eyeing him with a curious smile on her face.
“Hi, Catherine. I didn’t hear you come in.”
“I was in the biology lab, talking with Amanda.”
With a sigh, Ted jabbed a finger toward the communications console. “Latest weather forecast predicts a dust storm. A big one.”
“But that is not terribly dangerous, is it?”
“No, not really.” Despite his mood, he produced a little grin. “It won’t be like big dust storms in the American Midwest, with a wall of opaque dust obliterating the horizon and gale-force winds.”
“Mars is much more gentle, non?”
“Oui,” he said, exhausting his French vocabulary. “We won’t see Dorothy and Toto lifted off to Oz.”
More seriously, Catherine asked, “How bad will it be, Ted?”
“A drop in barometric pressure,” he replied. “Some haze. If you go outside, you might notice a stronger breeze than usual. Nothing scary.”
“Nothing to worry about, then.”
“We’ll have to clean the dust off the gardens and the all the solar panels,” Connover said. “After the storm’s over.”
“The reactor?” she asked. “The dust shouldn’t affect it, right?”
McPherson ducked through the hatch. Ted thought that he’d just set a record for being separated from his wife. The two of them always seemed to be within arm’s reach of one another.
“Dust? You mean a dust storm? The reactor could be damaged?” Hi asked, his brow furrowing.
“It should be okay,” Ted answered. “It’s been designed to operate autonomously in just about any weather the planet can throw at us.”
McPherson nodded, satisfied.
But Connover worried about that just about. Dust storms blow very fine particles of iron-rich sand. With the storm covering all the solar panels with dust, the reactor’s going to be the only source of electrical power we’ll have for several hours, maybe a day or more. He hoped they hadn’t gone with the lowest bidder when they built the reactor.
The four of them had dinner together while the usual soft whisper of the Martian wind outside the habitat rose to a low moaning wail. Connover kept glancing at the window. The Sun was getting low on the horizon, but it was still visible through the thickening haze. It’s going to be a noisy night, he told himself.
But he remembered tornados back home, and a hurricane he’d been through while training in Florida. This is kid stuff, compared to that, he told himself.
Then the lights dimmed and the hum of the air circulation fans dropped a notch. Before anyone could say a word, the power system alarm began to ring.
“Shit!” Ted snapped.
“Something’s wrong with the power system!” Amanda blurted the obvious.
Ted bolted from the table and dashed to the command center, McPherson a step behind him, Amanda and Catherine not far back.
“What’s going on?” Hi asked.
Connover slipped into the command chair and focused on the power readouts as he banged the button that turned off the screeching alarm.
The lights brightened momentarily and then dimmed again. The pitch of the air circulation fans changed as well, as if they were being strained by the variation in power feeding them.
“What is it?” Catherine asked.
“I don’t know yet,” Connover said. “Give me a minute to check the status readouts.”
“It makes me think of the way the power goes off and then back on during a Houston thunderstorm,” Amanda said, her voice just the tiniest bit shaky.
Connover quickly went through the checklists that had been pounded into his head during the months of mission rehearsals they’d gone through prior to launch. Like the drills that had saved their lives when the meteoroid struck the Arrow, training now took over Ted’s reaction to this crisis. He scanned the status board, followed a few data trails, brought up screen after screen of readouts, almost faster than they eye could follow.
He finally stopped and stared at the schematic diagram showing the primary power connection in the habitat with the nuclear reactor outside. The lower right sector of the reactor was highlighted in a very scary red.
“That’s where the problem is,” he said, pointing.
“What is it?” Amanda asked.
“I don’t know, exactly, but whatever the problem is, that’s where it’s located.”
McPherson leaned over Ted’s shoulder. “How serious is it?”
With a shake of his head, Connover replied, “There’s an anomaly in the reactor’s cooling system, so the reactor automatically reduced its power output to a safe level. That’s what’s causing our brownout.”
“An anomaly?” Catherine asked. “What does that mean?”
“Something’s caused there to be less coolant pumping through the reactor core than normal. To avoid having the core run hot, maybe dangerously hot, the computer reduced its power output to a level where the coolant flowing through it can remove the waste heat and not melt down the core.”
“Are we in danger of losing power entirely?” Catherine asked.
“Maybe,” Connover said tightly. “Right now there’s no way of telling what the root cause of the problem might be. There’s a chance that we could lose the reactor completely.”
“Lose all our power?” Amanda yelped. “We wouldn’t last a day without power! We’ll freeze to death!”
“If we don’t suffocate first,” McPherson added.
Raising his hands placatingly, Ted said, “It won’t come to that . . . most likely. The data is on its way back to Houston, automatically. Once they’ve had a chance to review it they’ll let us know what we can do to fix the problem.”
“Peut-ètre,” Catherine murmured.
“In the meantime,” Ted went on, “I’m going to power down all but the most essential systems to reduce the load on the reactor. Hopefully that will drop its power output below the level that set off the anomaly. That should buy us some time.”
“What do we need to do?” asked Amanda.
Connover shot her a grateful glance, glad that she had so quickly turned from gloom to productive problem-solving.
“Let’s drop the thermal curtains over the entrances to the two wings so I can reduce the heat in them. Move anything temperature-sensitive into the central section, here. We’ll keep it warm with us.”
Amanda and Catherine headed for the left wing.
“I’m going to turn down the heat here in the core by a few degrees. Put on your thermals, this is going to be a night to wear them.�
��
McPherson scratched at his beard. “Guess Catherine and I sleep in here with you tonight.”
Nodding, Connover said, “Body heat. It’s going to be a four-dog night.”
December 18, 2035
21:37 Universal Time
Mars Landing Plus 43 Days
Fermi Habitat
The team reacted quickly, moving several items from each wing into the central module. Then they released the drawstrings holding the insulating curtains above the two hatches to allow them to drop into place and be zipped shut. The whole process took less than an hour, which was about the same time it took for data about their problem to reach Earth, then for Houston to summon whatever experts they had on hand to study the situation and send a reply back to Mars.
In that hour Ted could already feel the temperature in the habitat’s central area dropping. It was not a happy sensation.
The beep denoting receipt of an incoming message sent a spasm of energy through Ted’s tense nervous system. He hit the receiver button and Nathan Brice’s face appeared on the central display screen.
“Ted, we’ve started looking at the data you sent, and we’ve called in the entire power team to make recommendations. It’ll take some time, though, for us to go through the information and come up with possible courses of action.”
“Okay, thanks,” Connover replied, knowing it would be almost half an hour before his words reached Houston. Silently he added, Thanks for nothing, Nate.
Turning to his three teammates, who were standing anxiously behind his chair, Connover said, “Well, there’s not much we can do until they have a chance to evaluate the data and give us our options. Better sling up the hammocks and get some rest.”
They nodded glumly, looking apprehensive, almost frightened. He wished there was something more he could tell them to ease their fears, but there wasn’t.
Hi and Catherine unhooked two hammocks and spread their sleeping bags on them before crawling in. Ted got into his hammock and reached out to switch off the lights. Amanda went to the dining table and tapped away on her tablet in the dim light from its screen.
“You going to stay up all night?” Ted asked her.
“For a while,” she said. “I . . . I’m not really sleepy.”
“Go to bed,” he ordered. “We all need some rest.”
With a sigh that was nearly a huff, Amanda got up from the table and, using her tablet as a flashlight, went to her hammock and curled up in it. Once she closed the tablet, the compartment was totally dark.
In spite of his own advice, Ted was too keyed up to sleep. He hung in his hammock, which swayed back and forth each time he shifted position. He could hear the keening of the wind outside, and the room temperature seemed to be getting lower by the minute.
It’s not that bad, he insisted silently. Back home you’d call this good camping weather. He remembered camping with Vicki and Thad in one of their favorite national parks, he and his wife in their double sleeping bag, looking up at the stars and watching for satellites or shooting stars.
Then there was the night when teen-aged Thad wandered off from the campfire and disappeared for two hours. They’d searched frantically for him and were just about to report the boy missing to the park ranger when he came through the trees, grinning arm in arm with the Camp Host’s daughter, as if nothing was wrong at all.
The memories brought tears to his eyes. Whispering so low he barely heard his own words, Ted said, “Vicki, if you can hear me, please know that I love you—and Thad—and that one day I’ll join you. But I can’t let that happen just yet. These people are here because of me and I’ve got to help them survive until a rescue ship can get here and take us all home.
“I miss you, honey, and I’ll be with you sooner or later. But not now. Not this night.”
Then he closed his eyes and finally fell asleep.
Ted awakened with a start. The air was cold, far colder than the temperature to which he’d set the thermometer when they went to bed. He exhaled and could see his breath. That meant it was at least forty-five degrees Fahrenheit, about ten degrees colder than he’d planned.
Not good, he thought as he swung his legs out of the hammock. The damned thing swung around and nearly tipped him onto the floor. Steadying himself, Ted saw that Hi was also awake and on his feet.
“It’s too damned cold,” McPherson complained.
Nodding tightly, Ted replied, “We must have lost more power during the night. I wonder why the alarm didn’t go off?”
Catherine sat up in her hammock and clutched her arms around herself. “C’est froid.”
Amanda swung easily to the floor. “Not that bad,” she said cheerily. “You ought to try overnighting in a tent in Antarctica. Now that’s cold!”
Ted padded in his stocking feet to the control panel and checked out the status boards. Sure enough, the reactor had reduced its power output to less than fifty percent overnight. Whatever was wrong was getting worse.
As he scanned the panel he saw that he’d inadvertently set the alarm to “silent” mode when he was powering down systems the night before.
Stupid mistake, he berated himself. That’s the kind of mistake that could kill us all.
He’d also turned off the “new message” signal and saw that they had several new messages from Earth waiting. Angry with himself, he reset the system to make sure that any changes in any of the habitat’s systems would not be silent but, instead, would wail out a standard, very audible alarm.
Hiram, Catherine and Amanda finished dressing as Ted went carefully through all the system’s readouts. He activated the outdoor camera and saw that the dust storm had ended. It was a sunny morning on Elysium Planitia: the temperature outside had already climbed above fifty below.
He angled the camera to look at their vegetable gardens. Covered with a thin sheen of dust. Above them, the solar panels looked dusty, but apparently they were turning out some power. The water inside the garden boxes was still liquid. Thank God, Ted thought.
“Can’t we make it any warmer in here?” McPherson asked.
Ted shook his head. “The reactor started running hot again overnight and the system powered it down to compensate. It’s now running on less than half power and the decline is likely to continue unless we can find out what’s wrong and fix it.”
Amanda looked askance. “Does anyone here know anything about nuclear engineering? I’m a biologist and Catherine and Hi are geologists. Ted, you’re a chemist, right? In addition to being a pilot. Did you study reactors in chemistry?”
“Just enough to know that I don’t have a clue as to what’s wrong with the reactor, other than what the system’s already told us about the problem with the cooling system. I know that the reactor uses a liquid coolant, a liquid mixture of sodium and potassium.”
“NaK,” said McPherson. “You don’t want to mess around with that stuff. It explodes if it’s put in contact with water.”
Ted nodded. “And catches fire if it’s in contact with air.”
“Sweet,” Amanda said.
For a moment, the four of them stood wordlessly, staring at each other.
“At least the storm has ended,” Catherine said.
“We’ll have to go outside and clean off the dust,” said McPherson.
Ted told them, “After breakfast. But before breakfast, let’s see what Houston has to tell us.”
He tapped the communications console’s keyboard and Nathan Brice’s face appeared on the central screen, his thinning hair in harried disarray, his normally unruffled expression decidedly ruffled.
“Fermi, your lack of response is very troubling. We see from the telemetry that the reactor has powered down to less than fifty percent. Why haven’t you answered our previous messages?”
“We slept through them,” McPherson murmured.
Two more messages asking why they hadn’t replied, then finally the display showed Houston’s original message: the power specialists’ analysis of their reactor
problem.
Holding up one finger, Connover said, “Let me squirt them a message telling them we’re alive.”
Into the comm microphone he said, “Houston: Fermi here. We’ve received your messages and are going through the analysis. Will call again once we’ve digested it. Thanks.”
Grinning up at his three teammates, Ted said, “That ought to bring Brice’s blood pressure back to normal.”
December 19, 2035
06:53 Hours
Mars Landing Plus 44 Days
Habitat Fermi
During breakfast, the message alarm beeped and they all scrambled from their dining table to the command center. Ted slipped into the chair and tapped the comm console while the other three clustered behind him.
Nathan Brice’s face appeared on the central screen, looking more composed than he had earlier.
“Good morning, Fermi,” he said, trying to smile and almost making it. “I hope you had a good night’s rest.”
Connover winced inwardly.
Without waiting for a response that would take most of an hour to reach him, Brice continued, “You’ve got some work to do before we can figure out exactly how we can fix your power problem. The telemetry from the reactor doesn’t look good. Something happened yesterday to the coolant flow, the reactor started to run hot and the automatic feedback loop powered the system down to seventy percent of normal, which it calculated would keep the heat levels to something the cooling system could handle. That’s when you had the brownout.”
McPherson muttered, “Tell us something we don’t already know.”
The Flight Director held up a schematic of the reactor and its cooling system.
“The coolant is liquid metal, sodium-potassium. It’s a standard reactor coolant and very safe to use. Unless, of course, you expose it to air or water, then it catches fire or explodes. But there’s very little air or water where you are.”
“Especially water,” Amanda grumbled.
