“Yes. Quite. That is precisely correct. Let him alone; it is good for all if he is so engaged.” Gorteau nodded. "I am off to rest. Please wake me in four hours."
"Of course, six hours," Peter replied with a wink at Francis. Then he lightly scratched his chin, deep in thought. He felt it was probably true that Lipton could keep himself occupied by analyzing large amounts of geology data, but whether or not he could hurt anyone with it was not at all so readily apparent.
he dispassionate evidence was convincing that the earth had suffered a nuclear disaster. They all knew without a single spoken word that if the civilized world had disappeared in such madness that they would probably not hear from their home planet again in decades, perhaps never again in their lifetimes. More urgently to all of them, now even the definition of a lifetime itself was up for reconsideration.
The word of the probe findings spread throughout BC1 quickly. In less than an hour, the dismal report from the deep space satellites had filtered through to everyone: all discernible communications from the earth had ceased, including American and Soviet sources and the probes verified electronic nuclear weapon signatures relayed by the CERTS.
The empty silence of space was eerie. It was the first radio silence the colonists had ever experienced, and the first from earth since the early 20th century.
There were still mysteries aplenty. Why had there been no warning, even over civil or government channels? Why was the U.S. manned space station with the attached Marsship Singleton also silent? Had it been attacked, too? Why was the Reunified Soviet Empire base silent in the face of this unprecedented threat?
There were many different, good, logically consistent answers to those questions and it seemed like everyone had a favorite. From these discussions, there emerged a solitary, deplorable certainty: all the theories were equally dispiriting. Out of them emerged a single irrefutable fact: no one had any hard evidence for anything except for the existence of the electromagnetic pulses. Not a scientist in the group could come up with a single good theory for their origin other than a nuclear exchange.
The colonists and administrative personnel began to mingle as they never had before. Those who before the crisis had made a point of sitting at separate tables were suddenly crowding together as though such camaraderie would somehow ease their plight. If the earth had destroyed itself, it could well take them all with it by default. Their artificial social stratifications had suddenly been rendered meaningless.
On this evening before the launch of the lander, Ashley, who had never openly displayed physical affection toward Peter in public before, walked arm and arm with him down the passageway by the dining hall. Few noticed. Even fewer were surprised or took the time to care. The problems that faced them all were far and away more significant than two “illegally” married colonists who no longer gave a tinkers damn about professional etiquette anymore.
They peeked into the door of the dining hall and saw that the rumors were true. Although dinner was long over, the room was filled nearly to capacity. Rat had given up trying to chase them all away and was now personally serving coffee. Rat himself, like the rest of them, was afraid. Although he held the least of positions among the group, he was still a part of them; a little piece of humanity that now sat facing death on an alien world. Their company and the extra work load were far better than retreating to his empty room and the silence which could offer him only more fear.
Peter waved to several groups, many of whom invited them to join in their animated and lively discussions, but he declined them all. He knew what he wanted and needed, and it was not in the dining hall.
Ashley began to lead him toward his room which he had not even peeked into for the last four sols. "No way. Let's go to your place," Peter said, tugging her back toward her quarters.
"Face it, Peter. You’re going to have to return to your quarters eventually," Ashley said with her motherly tone.
"Yeah, and how are we even going to get to the bed, much less in it? If you'll remember, I did a number on the place."
"And who do you think is going to clean it up, wise guy?"
"How about Lipton? He seemed like he was in a good humor."
"He would cut your tongue out if he even knew you were thinking such things," Ashley replied, the laughter mirrored in her eyes.
"And serve it in tomorrow's soup," Peter countered. "No. Your place."
"Then have a nice evening," Ashley answered, turning lose of his hand and walking toward his quarters.
"Okay. You win!" he quipped knowing that the sedative he needed would not be found in an empty room.
Minutes later, Ashley walked to his door, keyed in his personal security code on the lock and opened the door for him. The room was spotless. His mouth opened with surprise. "Ashley! Thank you, sweetheart. It's beautiful." He had never seen his room so orderly. Not only was everything put away and in its place, but it was spotless, dustless and ordered. He grasped her shoulders and embraced her gently.
"Before you get carried away, I didn't do it," she admitted.
He stepped away from her. "Who then?"
"Rat. Rat did it," she said sincerely but with a smile.
"Right," he said skeptically.
"I'm not joking, Peter. He asked me for your lock number today and said he had heard your quarters needed some attention. So I let him in."
"Are you serious?" Peter asked. Rat was the cook. Of course, BC1 had no custodial help. Sixteen domestic robots kept the dust off of passageways. The residents were responsible for their own quarters.
"Yes, Peter. I’m serious. Rat did it."
"Why, that wonderful old coot," Peter said with honesty. "You think maybe he would want to sleep with me tonight?"
"Go right ahead and ask him, Peter. Be my guest. But unless he decides to shave, you're going to get whisker burn."
"Better that than a six inch pile of junk on the floor," Peter said, embracing her again and ending the banter. There was a long moment of silence as the reality of their circumstance flooded back to them.
"Peter, I need you tonight. Please hold me; always hold me," Ashley said tenderly. Then she took a deep breath and admitted, "I'm afraid."
"Of what?" he whispered softly into her ear, not so much to illicit the response, but as a caring, compassionate presence.
"Of the end of the world. Of never seeing family and friends again. Of our own deaths, Peter. Oh, God, I'm so afraid!" she said, her fingers clutching him tightly.
"I love you, Ashley. Don't be afraid."
"Peter, I read a passage from Yeats today, terrible, and fitting. I read it so many times, I memorized it. He said,
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
“Peter, who are we in this anarchy? Are we the best who lack all conviction? Or are we, as I fear most, the worst full of passionate intensity? He said, ‘The blood dimmed tide is loosed...the ceremony of innocence is drowned.’ Are we... were we... that ceremony of innocence, Peter?"
"Ashley, please..." he said, holding her at arms length from him. Her face was clouded with worry and deeply cast with trouble. "If it’s real, isn’t it better to think of it as a transition; a passage into another epoch of humankind? As a high school student I memorized a phrase from Thomas Wolfe. I always think back on it when things change in my life. But I don't remember a more fitting occasion than now. He said,
Man's youth is a wonderful thing:
It is so full of anguish and of magic
And he never comes to know it as it is,
Until it has gone from him forever.
“If there’s a time of man's innocence, Ashle
y, let it begin now. If there was a blood dimmed tide, then we’ve survived it. The youth of mankind may have passed, and if it has, then it’s gone from us forever. If we look back, we may lose everything. If it turns out that the earth is really gone, and all we have is ourselves, then we owe it to our species, we owe it to one another, to survive. We must be the best and, whatever else, we must, at best, have the passionate intensity just to survive – just to make it to tomorrow and to the next tomorrow."
She laid her head on his shoulder curling her fingers through his hair, thought of her family, and sobbed quietly. Though she had wept for them before, left them forever on another occasion long ago and far away, this was a parting more final and bitter than any she could ever have imagined.
ieutenant Commander Robert Kerry had been orbiting Mars for seven sols. Seven sols were counted as a single week both on Earth and on Mars. Just to enforce the point, Kerry counted off the sols and tried to remember what he had accomplished on each of them as he floated upside down in reference to the control console.
"... seven sols."
He was bored. Better yet, he was drastically bored. For two hours the sol before, he had scanned every dictionary, encyclopedia, reference work and thesaurus the Goddard had in its memory. He decided that drastically bored was the best adjective he could possibly find in the English language to describe his condition, and he had painstakingly considered all the choices. He certainly had the time.
But, in a little over 12 hours, the lander would be docking and they would immediately leave for solar orbit to dock with the Von Braun II, now some three weeks from rendezvous, accelerating away from them faster each sol. He had calculated and recalculated the orbital parameters. He had the time. After that, he had prepared the ship once more for docking and for passengers. But, then again, he had the time.
As Kerry floated in space, looking out the round port over the plains and mountains of Mars rolling by beneath him, he toweled his hair dry from the pathetically inadequate space bath he had just given himself. His heart still raced from the intense hour of physical training and aerobics he had just engaged in. Kerry spent at least two hours of each sol engaged in the most rigorous physical activity possible in such a space – one in the morning and one hour just before sleep. He doubled the space doc’s recommended time and effort, and was still concerned that this additional, unscheduled time in orbit was going to be too physiologically costly. Not only was he spending extra time in orbital microgravity, their catch-up time to the MTSO ships was increasing dramatically each passing sol, which would mean even more time in a weightless state.
The MTSO ships, however, were spun and thereby created artificial gravity for the passengers and crew. This little engineering countermeasure helped to undo the drastic effects of microgravity on the human body over extended periods of time. It was discovered early in manned spaceflight that the human body was not designed to live in a state of perpetual microgravity and further, long periods in the condition resulted in changes to the human body that were manifestly difficult to correct, and some of them could never be corrected when the human returned to a gravitational field. Such permanent changes included loss of bone density, the tone and density of major skeletal muscles and even loss of cardiac muscle and tone.
As Kerry floated and looked out his windows, the loss of communications with earth troubled him, yet apparently not nearly as much as it troubled the people on the ground. He had heard of bizarre events in his professional life as an astronaut, but never like the convulsions happening just a few hundred kilometers below him. Commander Cartwright had kept him informed, and now he and Siggy were sleeping in the lander... to protect it; unheard of in the history of United States space flight.
As far as Kerry and the rest of the flight crew were concerned, the loss of communications was best explained as a rare simultaneous loss of two satellites, most likely an event planned and enacted by the Soviets. The commies were not about to come clean about their data links, and were probably using a new satellite with secret coordinates. Big deal, Cartwright had told him. We can launch with our own software. It was all written by the same twidgets anyway. The Soviets were going to laugh loud and hard when the Americans woke up and saw what fools they had been.
Kerry had attempted to contact the Soviets anyway, continuously, on every over-flight just to satisfy the desk jockeys back home that they had tried in good faith. Such planning was to performance as premonition was to promotion in the astronaut ranks. With each failure to raise Shturmovoi, Kerry was convinced more than ever that they were involved.
In one of his frequent "flashes of genius," Kerry had decided he could prove the flight crew's theory and communicate directly with the earth through the gravitational lens of the sun. For eight hours he conducted an in depth analysis of the sun-earth occultation parameters, integrated the principals of General Relativity and looked for the fine edge of the lens. While he fine tuned the servo motors of the deep space antenna, he imagined himself at Stockholm accepting the Nobel Prize in physics while his personal entertainment system integrated the music of Prokofiev in his mind. He never found the effect and the fantasy faded away; another flurry of active genius that came to naught, blending again with the quiet monotony and hiss of the cabin ventilators.
The ruddy disk of Mars unreeled below him, orbit after orbit. Conditions on the planet were calm, so that the surface appeared crystal clear to him, even though he flew hundreds of kilometers above it.
The panorama of Mars from orbit was different than viewing earth from orbit. The atmosphere of earth was so dense that it tended to diffuse the landscape. The thin atmosphere of Mars, in stark contrast, lent sharpness to the Marsscape that allowed the red, yellow and brown colors to vibrate together in distinct and penetrating hues.
The vast Mariner Canyon, cutting across over 3,000 kilometers of the Martian crust, stretched the length of the United States across her surface. It was distinct; absolutely three dimensional from space. The huge eye of the largest volcano in the solar system, Olympus Mons, rose three times higher than Mount Everest over the Martian Amazon Plain and seemed to stare malevolently into space, as would the empty socket on the skull of a Cyclops.
There were quiet, diffuse fogs of frozen carbon dioxide, colored a light pink from the desert sands below, that nestled and flowed gently along ancient riverbeds of mysterious origin. These formations represented the greatest enigma of the planet, recalling antediluvian mornings and a time of wild activity on Mars; of huge floods that swept across a hundred thousand square kilometers at once, gouging deep channels and delicate runoff branches before disappearing without a trace.
These geological dilemmas seemed to be frozen in time, traced across shifting fields and deserts of enormous size that defined the planet as a vast and desiccated wasteland. Yet Mars also bore the scars of crater fields, so obviously saturated, that it was clear that some very large areas had been little disturbed over the entire course of its history. It remained a puzzling mystery how just adjacent to these vast crater fields there could exist such clear evidences of enormous geologic and meteorological scarring and upheaval that implied often violent and rapid change. Mars seemed to have painted a spectacularly colorful facade, and then retreated below the surface with her secrets to lie in a dreadfully cold slumber. There she appeared to lie dreamless, awaiting the tiny organisms from earth to awaken her and finally reveal an astonishing past.
Kerry chose another music program and spun around to watch the next sunset: upside down. For the last sol and a half he had given up Gregorian chant and Prokofiev for the timeless Dark Side of the Moon and the classic rock of The Green Goblyn Project featuring Travis T. Goblyn’s extraordinary guitar. On a previous orbit, the composition "Time" and an upside down Martian sunset nearly made him nauseated. Never having been space-sick a single time in his life, he wanted to see if he could repeat the effect, and then dutifully, painstakingly and thoroughly describe its every nuance in his lengthy journal.
eter sat half asleep on a small sofa he had managed to build out of packing crates and squeeze into his quarters. Ashley lay in his arms, sleeping fitfully. The strains of soft, wordless music drifted quietly around them in the dim light. As Peter was drifting into and out of a fitful sleep, the beeper on his C2 cut through the silence.
"...go ahead," he replied, touching the response button.
"Peter, this is Francis," the voice on the speaker announced. "Better get down here to the Control Center. Lipton just filed the flight manifest for tomorrow morning and it doesn't agree with any previous conversations. He's got all the seats full including one of Brinker's Marines and Brinker is about ready to strangle him..."
"Okay, okay, I got the message. I'm on my way," Peter replied.
"What's up?" Ashley asked in a husky, sleepy voice.
"I can take care of it, babe. You need to get some sleep," Peter said, picking her up and gently placing her in his bed. He covered her with a thick blanket and kissed her gently on her cheek. She snuggled into it to return to her comfortable sleep, flashing a sweet, sleepy smile at Peter as he left his quarters.
Peter entered the Launch Control Center, its door sliding quietly closed behind him. He could hear the raised voice of Brinker over a row of consoles. As Peter had feared, Lipton had made an entrance into the LCC and Brinker had him backed up against a wall.
"You can take your rocket ship, your launch pad and your Courts Martial and stick ‘em in your bureaucratic backside!" Brinker screamed at Lipton in a textbook-perfect rendition of everyone's idea of a drill instructor on a really bad day.
Francis was standing within inches of the two, letting Brinker have a good piece of Lipton but ready to pull them apart if it came to blows. The other console operators were standing quietly by their consoles, watching the show.
"Okay, Brinker, back off," Peter ordered.
"He ain't getting my best Marine. No way!" Brinker said loudly to Peter, walking over to him, pointing with his cigar.
Mars Wars - Abyss of Elysium Page 16
