Mars

by Ben Bova

  Li shook himself when he realized where such thoughts were leading him. My task, he said sternly to himself, is to direct the exploration of Mars and allow the scientists to conduct that exploration with as little interference as possible. Waterman wants to go farther and faster than we have planned. The politicians will be angry if anything goes wrong.

  It took him a moment to realize that Waterman had finished speaking and was gazing expectantly at him from the display screen. Like a child asking his father for permission to take a new step toward adulthood, Li thought.

  He blinked his eyes twice, then heard himself reply, as if from some great distance, “Go ahead with your plan. I will expect you, Commander Vosnesensky, to call an immediate halt the instant you reach the critical point in your fuel supplies.”

  The camera down below swiveled back to Vosnesensky. “I have calculated the fuel reserves we need to get safely back to base and added a twenty percent emergency factor.”

  “When you reach that point you must return, no matter where you are or what you are doing. Is that clearly understood?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Dr. Waterman?”

  He heard Waterman’s voice reply, “Clearly.”

  “Very well then, proceed.” Li reached for the keyboard, to end the transmission. He hesitated, though, long enough to add, “And good luck.”

  “Thank you!” The two men’s voices rang back in unison.

  EARTH

  KALININGRAD: In the early days of the Soviet space program, when secrecy born of Cold War fears dominated everything, the locations of space facilities were kept as concealed as possible. The major Soviet launching base, for example, was said to be at Baikonur, a city in the middle of the Kazakh SSR, a land where Mongol hordes and the fierce horsemen of Tamerlane once rode.

  Actually the launch center is near the town of Tyuratam, more than three hundred kilometers southwest of Baikonur, on the main rail line from Moscow to Tashkent.

  In those days of suspicion there was no public mention of Kaliningrad, the mission control center from which the earliest manned space flights were directed. Gagarin’s pioneering orbit of the Earth, the thousands of man-hours of flight aboard a dozen space stations, and finally the first expedition to Mars—all were directed from the center at Kaliningrad, about six kilometers northeast of the outermost circular motorway ringing metropolitan Moscow.

  The protocol for directing the Mars mission had been decided upon long before the various spacecraft had even begun to be assembled in Earth orbit. Knowing that there would be a communications lag of ten minutes or more between Mars and Earth, the mission planners placed full authority in the hands of the expedition commander, Dr. Li Chengdu.

  There was no need for Dr. Li to check with mission command at Kaliningrad before making a decision. The day-today operations of the teams in orbit around Mars and on the planet’s surface were his responsibility.

  That did not mean, however, that he could not be overruled.

  Having given his assent to Vosnesensky and Waterman’s unscheduled dash to Tithonium Chasma, Dr. Li routinely reported the change in the excursion plan back to Kaliningrad. Routinely, in this case, meant that he waited until the end of his day, as usual, before filing his report. The rover team’s diversion to Tithonium was given as item number seventeen of his customary daily report. Seventeen of twenty-two.

  So it was slightly after four in the morning in Russia when his report arrived. The mission controllers worked three shifts, of course, but their directors—the men and women who made the real decisions—were soundly sleeping when Li’s report began scrolling on the display screen of the chief controller for this shift.

  He was a Russian who took his duties seriously. Sitting beside him at the console was his American counterpart, a perky redheaded engineer on loan from CalTech’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Shoulder to shoulder, they read the report from the expedition commander on the display screen, the American woman slightly impatient with her colleague’s slower pace at reading English. The mission control center was quiet and still at this hour. Even though all the stations were manned, there was little activity and less talk.

  Until the American controller suddenly exclaimed, “He okayed it! Without checking with us?”

  Eyes snapped wide and heads turned toward her.

  The Russian chief controller said, “Dr. Li is within his authority …”

  “The hell he is,” said the American. Her green eyes were blazing fury. “The protocol specifically states that any major change in the schedule must be cleared with mission control first!”

  “Major change,” the Russian said mildly.

  “You don’t think a six-hundred-kilometer diversion of that rover team is a major change?” She yanked the telephone from its receptacle on the console and began pecking out a number. “How much fuel does that buggy hold, anyway? Aren’t they putting themselves in danger of getting stranded?”

  The Russian tapped the console keyboard, and the specifications for the Mars rover displaced Dr. Li’s report on their display screen.

  “It has a cruising radius of one thousand kilometers,” he said. “More than half its mass is fuel An enormous safety factor.”

  “Not if they’re throwing in an unscheduled twelve hundred kilometers, it isn’t.”

  “You are calling the chief mission director at this hour?”

  “Hell no, I’m not that crazy,” the American answered, a slight grin breaking through her anger. “I’m calling Houston.”

  The Russian smiled back at her. “Ah—and they will wake up the chief.”

  “Right. I may be quick-tempered but I’m not stupid.”

  HOUSTON: The chain of command on Earth was split, like everything else about the Mars mission, into two strands. While mission control was in Kaliningrad, there was a “shadow” mission control team at the old NASA center at Clear Lake, near Houston.

  The center had been created in the early nineteen-sixties as a political plum for Texas. Originally designated the Manned Space Center and built nearly an hour’s drive from downtown Houston, the center became the home of the astronauts, the place where all manned space activities were planned and directed. Eventually it was named after Lyndon B. Johnson. As Vice-President, Johnson had chaired John F. Kennedy’s space council and pushed vigorously for the daring program to land Americans on the moon within the decade of the sixties.

  But no matter how swiftly the engineers moved, the tides of history swirled faster. By the time the first astronauts set foot on the moon, Kennedy was dead and his successor, Johnson, out of office. The American space program, seemingly at the peak of success, was being gutted and virtually, murdered, a victim of the Vietnam War that Johnson had escalated.

  Yet the Johnson Space Center remained and even grew. As the hub of all manned space activities, it became headquarters for the hundreds of astronauts recruited to fry the space shuttle and its successors. Men and women trained there before they were allowed to ride up to the American space station Freedom or any of the foreign (or even private) space stations that orbited the Earth.

  At first glance the Johnson Space Center looked rather like a university campus. Modernistic glass-walled buildings and green lawns, a relaxed atmosphere, young men and women strolling from one building to another or driving their cars along the wide tree-lined streets. At the main entrance, though, there rested a mammoth Saturn V rocket, a relic of the old Apollo era, lying on its side like a beached whale. And behind the tall towers of glass and steel were smaller windowless buildings that hummed with electrical power and the throbbing of pumps and motors.

  In one of those windowless buildings the “shadow” mission control center was located. It was slightly after eight P.M. on a quiet, warm Texas evening when the inquiry came from Kaliningrad.

  Here too, the top decision makers had left for the day and scattered to their suburban homes. The desks and consoles were thinly staffed by only a handful of men and women, most of them yo
ung and new to their responsibilities.

  The man in charge, a middle-aged systems analyst, was munching on a bag of cheese-flavored tortilla chips when his “red” phone buzzed. With a mixture of pique and puzzlement clouding his fleshy face, he picked up the phone.

  It was pure chance that the American controller in Kaliningrad was someone he knew personally. They had gone through several semesters together at CalTech.

  “Josie, how are ya?” he said to the tense face that appeared on his display screen. “Those Russkies treating you okay?”

  Almost a heartbeat’s delay, as the electronic signal bounced off a communications satellite, before her answer came to him.

  “Sam, we’ve got a problem here.”

  He lurched forward in his chair. “Whatsamatter?”

  “Dr. Li has okayed an extension of the rover excursion without checking with mission control first.”

  “Jesus Christ!” He placed a chubby hand over his heaving chest. “I thought there was real trouble. Don’t scare me like that, Jo!”

  “This is trouble—it’s a violation of the command decision-tree protocol.”

  “Aw, crap. If the goddam rover broke down or somebody got stranded out there, that’s trouble. This is just paperwork.”

  She would not be put off. “You’ve got to get Maxwell and Goldschmitt on the phone. They’ve got to know about this right away.”

  “The hell they do.”

  “The hell they don’t! Either you call them or I’m calling their Russian counterparts here in Kaliningrad.”

  Glancing at the clock displays on the far wall, “Christ, it’s four in the morning over there.”

  “This is important, Roscoe.”

  “Don’t call me Roscoe!”

  “Call Maxwell and Goldschmitt. Do it now, before they get too far.”

  “They’re probably having their dinners.”

  “Which would you prefer: interrupting their dinners or having them find out tomorrow that two of our ground team are off on an unauthorized toot because you didn’t inform them in time to stop them?”

  WASHINGTON: It was no coincidence that Alberto Brumado was attending the formal dinner where the Vice-President was the guest of honor. Brumado knew that this woman was in an excellent position to become the next president of the United States, and her views could very well determine when—or even if—the second expedition to Mars would be launched.

  Brumado had met her many times before, and although they had drastically different opinions about the importance of space exploration they had become friendly in the polite, grudging way that political opponents often find necessary. Washington’s social circle, after all, was too small to fight battles at cocktail parties and dinners. Better to smile and agree to disagree—in social settings.

  So Brumado had no intention whatever of even mentioning Mars to the Vice-President. This was a social evening, a time to be charming and witty and build the amity that might smooth personal differences in the daylight hours of political business.

  The Vice-President’s after-dinner speech was a clear signal that she was seeking her party’s nomination. She spoke of America’s greatness, of the growth of the nation’s economy, of how her efforts as leader of the urban revitalization task force were changing the face of cities from coast to coast.

  “And the key to all this,” she told her audience of dinner-jacketed men and gowned, bejeweled women, “the key is synergy, the way we have brought together people from many different walks of life and gotten them to work together, to add their energies to each other until the totality of their achievement is far greater than the mere sum of their individual efforts. Synergy works! And this administration intends to use synergy to solve the problems that still plague US. …”

  Brumado listened carefully as he sat at one of the five dozen round dinner tables with nine strangers. She speaks about the economic contribution of high technology, she even mentions the success of orbital manufacturing, but she does not mention Mars or space science at all. Yet when the explorers return from Mars, he knew, she will be there to greet them in full view of the world’s media.

  It was a surprise to him, then, when one of the Vice-President’s aides appeared at his side and bent over to whisper, “The Vice-President would like to speak with you privately after her speech is finished. Would you follow me, please?”

  Brumado folded his napkin neatly and placed it beside his half-empty coffee cup. Excusing himself in an inaudible whisper to the nine others at the table, he got up and tiptoed swiftly past the other tables in the darkened hotel dining room, following the dark-suited aide out into the kitchen.

  Power is visible in small ways, Brumado understood. The kitchen staff usually would be busy cleaning up the six hundred sets of dinner dishes, clashing silverware and clattering pots while the speaker on the other side of the swinging doors tried to talk over their clamor. For the Vice-President, though, they sat and waited until her speech was finished. Brumado smiled at them as they whispered among themselves and glanced at their wristwatches. Overtime pay. Does it compensate them enough for spending an extra hour away from home?

  At last the Vice-President finished and her audience applauded thunderously. Just enough time for the media crews to get tape on the eleven o’clock news.

  She swept through the swinging doors, Secret Service guards in front and in back of her, so commanding a presence that the tired, bored kitchen help rose to their feet automatically.

  Yet she was tiny, not much over five feet tall, a petite woman who worked hard to avoid gaining weight. Even so she dominated any room she entered. Her face glowed with energy, her eyes so deeply blue they seemed almost violet; their twin laser-beam glances could peel the hide off a rhinoceros. Her hair was a light ashy blonde, a shade that hid gray well, rich and thick yet cropped short enough to tell any woman who looked at her that she had no time for frivolities such as curlers and sets.

  “There you are,” she said as she spied Brumado standing in front of the long counter piled high with dirty dishes.

  He fell in beside her as they paced toward the back of the kitchen and the doors that opened onto the loading docks and delivery access road.

  “Right in the middle of my dinner,” the Vice-President said, waving a flimsy sheet of paper, “this came in from Houston.”

  Brumado took the sheet from her without breaking stride and scanned it swiftly.

  Looking back at the Vice-President he said, “Dr. Li apparently has no qualms about extending the rover excursion …”

  “It’s that damned Indian!” The Vice-President stopped at the doors and her whole entourage, Brumado included, stopped with her. Except for three of the Secret Service agents, who slipped through like wraiths to check the area outside.

  “You mean Dr. Waterman.”

  “He’s been a troublemaker from the first minute they landed! Why’s he want to change the mission plan? What’s he after?”

  Brumado answered softly, “I’m sure he had valid scientific reasons. If …”

  But the Vice-President was already shaking her head vehemently. “He’s trying to upstage everybody else. He wants all the glory for himself. Thinks he’ll come back here a hero.”

  “I have seen the tape you refused to release to the media,” Brumado said, putting a little iron into his voice. “He does not seem to be interested in politics in any way.”

  “Not much! By the time he gets back home they’ll be running him for the Senate. It’s happened before. In New Mexico, too.”

  “You are worried that he might become politically active—against you?”

  “I’m worried that my enemies will latch onto him and use him against me, just the way the liberal Republicans used Eisenhower against Taft.”

  Brumado bowed his head slightly, thinking furiously. If this woman becomes the next president she will certainly be against funding further expeditions to Mars. Especially if she believes that one of our scientists is being used by her oppositi
on.

  “You’ve got no idea how much pressure is building up around this Indian,” the Vice-President was saying, her angry voice like fingernails on a chalkboard. “It’s not only the Indian rights activists. It’s the high-tech gang, too. They’re forming alliances with the Hispanics and the ghetto blacks. It’s the old Rainbow Coalition again, plus the techies, with a real honest-to-god Indian scientist hero to be their figurehead!”

  Slowly, with an enormous weight inside him that made his words hesitant, Brumado asked, “Suppose … suppose … I could get Waterman to make a statement that would … support your candidacy?”

  Her eyes flashed, then became calculating. “Why would he support me?”

  “Because,” Brumado had to struggle to get the words out, “because you will go on record as favoring further missions to Mars.”

  “I couldn’t do that,” she snapped.

  “When the first expedition returns they will all be heroes. The public acclaim will be enormous. And there is no Vietnam War to take the public’s mind off their success.”

  The Vice-President muttered, “They’ll be coming back just in time for the primaries.”

  “You could capitalize, on their success.”

  “You can get Waterman to make a statement supporting me?”

  “Once you go on record as supporting further Mars missions.”

  The Vice-President had spent enough years in politics to understand that getting elected was the most important thing, and the way to get elected was to clear enemies away from your path. Sometimes this meant adopting their coloration—at least for a while.

  She also understood that it was foolish to give a definite commitment right away. “I’ll have to think about that. It sounds as if it might be workable.”

  “It will remove Mars as an issue during your campaign,” Brumado said.

  She nodded briskly. “I’ll get back to you.”

  Then she stepped toward the doors, which a Secret Service agent pushed open for her. The entourage swept out onto the loading dock. Before the doors swung shut Brumado got a glimpse of a phalanx of limousines waiting where delivery trucks usually parked.