Mars Crossing

by Geoffrey A. Landis

  And, as a bonus, the two previous expeditions to Mars had both landed in the northern hemisphere, so while the crew of Don Quijote could not claim to be the first humans to the red planet, as a consolation, they could claim a new hemisphere.

  The crew, however, had a goal of achieving a different first. They planned to be the first crew to return from Mars alive.

  The American expedition to Mars had been planned for decades.

  Going to Mars is easy. The difficult part is getting back. If you want to come back, you have to send to Mars an interplanetary ship capable, and with enough fuel, to launch from Mars to Earth. Getting that ship to Mars, fully fueled, is a herculean task.

  It is far simpler to land a vehicle unfueled.

  The expedition was planned to launch nearly a decade ago, in 2018. The first ship of the expedition, Ulysses, would have no crew. Ulysses would carry with her a robotic fuel manufacturing plant and a payload of liquid hydrogen. While the hydrogen was bulky, over the course of a Martian year it could be used to manufacture twenty times its weight in rocket fuel from the thin Martian atmosphere. When, two years later, the Agamemnon came with the exploration crew, seven astronauts handpicked for their scientific training, Ulysses would be fully fueled for its return, and waiting for them.

  It was a plan that had been invented in the 1990s by two Mars enthusiasts, Robert Zubrin and David Baker, and refined over decades to distill out the maximum possible amount of exploration for the smallest investment from Earth.

  As a backup, a second return vehicle, with its own fuel-manufacturing plant, was launched to follow behind them on a slower trajectory to Mars. It would be ready if the Ulysses should fail. If the Ulysses worked as planned, the second ship, Dulcinea, would be targeted to a second spot, to wait for a future expedition.

  That was the plan. Painstakingly, piece by piece, the building blocks of the expedition were put together by the exigencies of politics and engineering.

  Nobody paid attention to the Brazilians.

  With the new millennium, chaos had come to the nation once known as the Soviet Union. During the height of the ferocious Russian civil war, rather than let their factories be destroyed and their knowledge lost, a team of rocket engineers had come up with a plan. They had stolen an entire factory, the main Khrunichev engine manufacturing plant, from the digitally controlled milling machines right down to the paper clips in the supervisors’ desks. They got out just days ahead of the tanks of the retreating Russian People’s National Liberation Front, pounding across the steppe toward Moscow under orders to leave no building, no tree, no bridge or lamp post or telephone pole standing.

  They had fled to Brazil.

  Brazil welcomed the refugees, and, in turn, the refugees had absorbed the Brazilian spirit. Over the decades, Brazil had gradually grown into the economic giant of South America. It was, as ever, a nation of contrasts, where abysmal poverty shared the same street with ostentatious wealth and corporations combined businesslike cool with wild Latin exuberance. Over the first decades of the millennium, Brazil built up its space program. At first, Brazil was no more than a junior partner in the American-led space station. Partly with its own growing engineering force, and partly with the engineering skills of the Brazilo-Russians, they developed an offshore launch platform at Alcântara, just south of the equator, to launch commercial satellites on Brazilian-designed and Brazilian-built launch vehicles.

  But nobody—or, nobody outside of Brazil—expected that they would go to Mars. And nobody in the world would have guessed that they would get there first.

  The Brazilian expedition was audacious. Rather than choosing a conservative landing site on sandy plains near the Martian equator, they chose to land at the north pole of Mars. This was a calculated move. The northern polar cap of Mars consists of a two-mile-thick glacier of ice, covered in the winter with a blanket of carbon-dioxide snow. To the engineers of the Brazilian space program, ice was more valuable than gold. Ice—ordinary water ice, hydrogen and oxygen—is rocket-fuel ore. During the Martian summer, when the pole received twenty-four hours and forty minutes of sunshine each day, they would mine ice out of the polar cap, electrolyze it into hydrogen and oxygen, and then chemically convert that into methane and hydrogen peroxide, fuels that could be stored at the polar cap without the use of refrigeration.

  By their bold choice of landing site, they had simplified the mission, eliminating the requirement to haul hydrogen from Earth and the need to use cryogenic coolers for the propellant they manufactured. They simplified their mission in another way as well. Instead of having a separate vehicle land first to manufacture the propellant, they used a single landing. One vehicle with a two-man crew would land on Mars, manufacture their return fuel, and take off. They bet the mission on the ability to make fuel, with no mistakes, the first time. There was no margin for error.

  They launched in 2020. Two years before the American expedition.

  Even if they had wanted to, there was no way to hurry the Agamemnon; it had to wait for the Ulysses to make its fuel and for the planets to return to the alignment needed for the launch. The American expedition watched, envious and impotent, as two astronauts planted the Brazilian flag on the snows of Mars. They watched, by video broadcast, as the Brazilian astronauts filled their fuel tanks for their return and used hydrogen peroxide-fueled snowmobiles to explore the polar regions surrounding their spacecraft’s landing site.

  As the world watched on live television from Mars, the two Brazilian astronauts played in the polar snows, drilled core samples, and analyzed the embedded soil and dust for information about the climate and biology of Mars. The worldwide audience cheered. They had no hint that anything was going wrong.

  One moment, João Conselheiro, the expedition leader, said calmly, “Puxa, estou muito cansado.” I am very tired. He sat down on the snow.

  The second astronaut walked toward him. “Acho que tem alguma coisa errada com o João.” I think something’s wrong with João. Then, a moment later, he fell over.

  Neither astronaut moved again.

  After two months—the camera broadcasting all that time—the Martian winter blanketed their bodies with snow.

  The Brazilian commander João Conselheiro had left behind a young and beautiful wife who was also a pilot, a geologist, and a mountain climber. Her name was Estrela Carolina Conselheiro.

  7

  TANA

  The way I figure it,” Radkowski had once told Tanisha Jackson, “I’m the one who’s actually black. You’re just another nice white girl from the ’burbs.” Between the two of them it had been a joke, how he had grown up in a ghetto, raised by a welfare mother with a brother in jail and a father he’d never met, while she had been raised in Pennsylvania suburbs, with both parents doctors, and gone to an expensive private school.

  Tana never complained, but nevertheless it stung her when people called her white. Just because she hadn’t been raised in a ghetto and didn’t talk like a gangsta, that didn’t mean she wasn’t black. She still had to deal with all of the crap that people brought her because of her skin color.

  Nevertheless, she got along fine with Radkowski. She’d even slept with him a few times. Once had been in the space station, but that hardly counted, since sex was one of the very first things that everybody did when they got into space, once they got over throwing up. It was a rite of passage, and Radkowski, who had been a veteran, was a good person to initiate her. But she’d done it a few times afterward, too, and although she was by no means in love with him, it had meant more to her than just a pleasant way to kill an hour or two.

  She’d thought about it a few times on the voyage out, but even when they were alone together—something that didn’t happen very often in the crowded ship—he had given no indication of interest. It would be bad for the crew morale if they had paired off, Tana had realized, and Radkowski knew it, and was keeping it cool for the sake of crew unity. Although that didn’t seem to be any barrier to Estrela.

  Th
ere was, as far as Tana could see, no actual written requirement that a female astronaut from Brazil had to be a sultry spitfire who flirted with every single male she met—but Estrela was, and did.

  Tana was compact and muscular and wore her hair in a practical style, barely longer than a crewcut. Estrela, on the other hand, was tall, slender, and curved in all the places that Tana wasn’t. And to top it off, she had kept her thick hair. Tana advised her that it was impractical, possibly even dangerous, for her to wear it long, but Estrela had ignored her, and in freefall, when her hair floated around her face like a dark halo, even Tana had to admit—if only to herself—that it looked glorious.

  The rest of the crew—even Trevor—had gone back inside. Only Tana and Estrela stayed on the surface to watch the sunset.

  Even in training, back on Earth, they had often watched the sunset together. “When I can, I always watch the sunset,” Estrela had told her. “It is so romantic.” Sometimes Estrela brought her boyfriend of the moment. Sometimes she was alone.

  The Brazilian Mars expedition had taken no video of the sunset; at their landing site, the sun had never set. By now she knew it would be unwise to remind Estrela of that. The first international expedition had taken videos of the sunset, plenty of them, and she had seen them, of course, but the real thing was surprisingly different. The colors were subtler. The sky was a luminous hue closer to a golden bronze than the washed-out pink of the videos, and shaded imperceptibly to almost pale blue as she looked toward the sunset, a ball of light hovering above the yellow sun. The sun was smaller than the sunsets she was used to, and in the deep shadows the ridges of Felis Dorsa were a dark brick, almost brown.

  They watched the sunset in a companionable silence.

  It was cold. Through the day Tana’s suit cooler had been rejecting heat nearly at full capacity, as her body produced more waste heat than she lost by conduction through the well-insulated material. Now, though, in the cool of the Martian evening, even at their landing site near the equator the temperature dropped to forty degrees below zero, and the microcontroller monitoring the suit’s environment was sending electrical currents through thin-film heaters pressed against the thin inner lining of the suit. The soles of her feet, in thermal contact with the cold Martian soil, were cold; so were her hands.

  The sun had set. Behind them, the external lights of Don Quijote beckoned. Tana checked the time. “Yikes!” she said. “I think it’s time to come in now.”

  In the dark, she couldn’t see Estrela’s face behind her visor, only the reflection of the afterglow. It could have been anybody with her. For a moment Tana allowed herself the indulgence of imagining it was John. She reached out and impulsively touched Estrela’s hand.

  She wondered what Estrela was seeing.

  8

  THE SECOND EXPEDITION TO MARS

  When the news came that the two astronauts of the Brazilian expedition to Mars had died, John Radkowski should have already been on the way to Mars. He had been picked to be the copilot of the Agamemnon.

  Eleven days before launch, Jason, the nine-year-old son of the woman who lived in the duplex next door to Radkowski, had been doing his house chores. Radkowski had a lot of sympathy for Jason; he knew how hard it was to grow up without a father. When Jason went outside to empty the garbage, he had found a skunk in the garbage can. Apparently the skunk was foraging through the garbage, slipped into the can, and had been unable to get out.

  The skunk had been sleeping on top of the garbage. Little Jason was old enough to have known that he should leave a wild animal strictly alone—let alone never to mess with a skunk—but the skunk had been so cute, and seemed so harmless, so pettable.

  So he petted it.

  Jason’s shrieks from next door fetched John immediately from his study, and with his first whiff, it was obvious that he had encountered a skunk. John told him to take all his clothes off, right there in the backyard, and when Jason had done that, he sprayed the screaming child with the hose. He followed that up with two gallons of tomato juice. It was only after he washed the tomato juice off with another spray of the hose that John discovered that not all of the color was juice; a part of it was blood. The boy had been bitten as well as sprayed.

  John cleaned the wound as well as he could with soap and water and taped gauze over it, telling Jason over and over that everything would be okay. Then he doused him one more time with more tomato juice, and, ignoring the stink, took him to the hospital to have the bite sutured. Meanwhile, another neighbor called the animal control. The skunk that had bitten Jason had scrambled away when Jason knocked over the can after being sprayed. The animal-control officers shot three skunks in the area, and it was impossible to tell which one had bitten him.

  One of the three had been rabid.

  Even though it had been the child next door that had been bitten, not him, John Radkowski was taken off the crew roster for Agamemnon because of possible secondary exposure. The three-year trip to Mars was too long to take even the slightest chance, and there wasn’t enough time before the launch window to wait to see if he had actually been exposed to the disease.

  Agamemnon, the ship that John Radkowski should have been on, had launched perfectly. It had flown the interplanetary traverse to Mars with no problems, except for one event so trivial and embarrassing that it wasn’t even mentioned in any of the videocasts with the Earth, but only on the private medical channels.

  Shortly after launch, one of the crewmen complained of athlete’s foot.

  It spread among the crew, and by the time Agamemnon was approaching Mars, everybody had it. Normally, natural skin bacteria keep fungus in check, but zealous biological contamination protocols had killed the natural bacteria, leaving the fungus to multiply unchecked.

  A spacecraft provides an ideal environment for fungus to grow: crowded with people in close contact, and warm, and with the crew able to take only sponge baths.

  Once they found that the fungus was beginning to eat their clothes, they took to placing their clothing in the airlocks to expose them to vacuum for an hour every day.

  Agamemnon made a flawless landing on Mars, only a few hundred feet from the return ship Ulysses, waiting for them on the eastern edge of the Martian plain known as Acidalia. By this time, the fungus had spread to the air filters. One of the crewmen opened up a panel behind one of the navigation computers and found rot growing on the circuit boards. A quick inspection showed the entire electronic system of the ship cultivating slime.

  On some of the crewmen, the fungus infection moved to the sinuses. They were treated with antihistamines to dry out the sinuses and make the nasal environment less hospitable, but it was almost impossible to combat the infection.

  It was never declared on the public channels, but the Agamemnon expedition was rapidly turning from a triumph into a disaster.

  They launched from the surface of Mars early, using up their safety margin of extra fuel to fly Ulysses on a faster trajectory that swung by Venus on its way back to Earth. The revised trajectory would shorten their return time by nearly a year but required an additional rocket burn at Venus to correct the orbital inclination. But by this time they were beginning to be desperate.

  As Ulysses passed Venus, telemetry relayed to Earth from Ulysses sent down the data that the fuel valves were opening in preparation for the burn, and then Ulysses fell silent. After an hour, telescopes from Earth revealed an expanding cloud of lightly ionized gas, primarily oxygen, in the position where the spacecraft should have been.

  A faint, miniature comet glowing in the sunlight marked all that was left of the Ulysses and her crew.

  Much later, the accident investigation hoard determined that the fungus must have entered the fuel-controller electronics. Nothing had happened until the command was given for the engines to fire, and then far too much had happened. Instead of a smooth, controlled burn, the short circuit in the electronics had resulted in both fuel lines opening, but no ignition. The computer should have sensed this a
nd shut down the engines, but the same short circuit had rebooted the computer, and fuel and oxidizer continued to pour into the combustion chamber. When the mixture of fuel and oxidizer finally did ignite, the result was not a rocket, but a bomb. Ulysses had been doomed.

  John Radkowski should have been on that expedition. A rabid skunk had saved his life.

  And now he was on the third expedition to Mars.

  9

  TRANSMISSION

  This is station Trevor Whitman, broadcasting live, live, live to Earth from the red planet. Hello, Earth! I want to tell you, Mars is great! I really love it here, and I have to say that, you know all those months of training that I was complaining about, you know, well, just the thrill of being here has made it all worthwhile. It’s so great! Did I say that already? I think I said that. Anyway, it’s great.

  “Today we landed, I guess you saw the descent pictures? From the lander camera? Okay, after we got down, we went outside, and I went out bouncing around. The colors, I guess you know that Mars is red, you know? But it’s really more than that. I can’t describe it, it’s more like a, well, yellowish reddish brown kind of color, sort of a caramel color, but there are so many shades, and it seems like the longer I look, you know, the more colors I can see, more shades of yellow and orange than you could ever name, and pinks and yellows and even some kinda purple colors, too.

  “These space suits are great; you hardly know you’re wearing them, and the gravity’s so light it feels like you could jump up forever. I climbed up one of the sand dunes today. We haven’t seen any dust storms or anything yet, I mean, we just got here, you know? But it’s great. I think I said that. I can’t think of what else to tell you. There are mountains in the distance, sort of ridges. They aren’t really that far away, and doesn’t look like they will be so hard to climb, so maybe we’ll go climbing them after we check out the return spaceship tomorrow. I can’t wait.