Martian Rainbow

by Robert L. Forward

  "We're a pretty independent lot ... have to be out there ... We hate to ask favors ... don't like to be obligated ... But we need help," she finally blurted out. "We all had grubstake contracts with the big space processing firms. Except me—I got lucky a few years ago and could grubstake myself. But all the contracts have been voided. Even my Swiss bank accounts have been frozen. We can last a year, maybe two, without resupply, but after that, we either have to give in and become ground-pounders under a religious dictatorship—or literally starve to death. We have no farms like you do."

  "We've got plenty of food," Chris said. "You're welcome to take a cargo load back with you."

  "We want to pay our way," Red said proudly. "What do you want? Heavy metals, organics, or ice?"

  "We have plenty of ice at the poles and our own carbonaceous chondrite asteroids in orbit," Chris said. "But if we are to become truly independent of Earth, a few nickel-iron mountains to mine would be helpful."

  "They'll be on their way," Red said, perking up. "Normal delivery is five to ten years, but we'll just divert some that were scheduled for delivery on the canceled contracts. Make sure you return the nets with the sails, they'll be getting scarce."

  "Nets?" Gus asked.

  "The job of a belt prospector is to find a suitable asteroid, assay it with a few test borings, then wrap the asteroid in a net that ends in a long pull-tether with a radio beacon on the end," Red said. "That's why one person can do the job, if they're motivated enough.

  "The big space processing firms then send huge automated perforated lightsails speeding out to the belt, where they home in on a beacon, hook onto the pull-tether, and start the long slow haul back toward Earth. The outgoing sails usually carry food, antimatter, and other supplies for our grubstake. We collect our own propellant from the icy asteroids."

  "You'll be needing some antimatter then?" Chris asked.

  "Nope," Red said. "We decided we can't ask you for that. You need it more. We'll just use our auxiliary solar-powered ion drives and coast between asteroids instead of rushing to get there first. We're going to be cooperating now instead of competing. All we need is food."

  "It's a deal, Ambassador Storm," Chris said, rising to shake her hand. Red shook hands and smiled, pleased with the way things had gone, then turned and strode out the door, the muffled clink of polars coming from the deep thigh pocket above her right knee.

  THE MOST difficult messages to handle were the ones from the scientific bases on the Moon and the outer planets. The time delays ran from minutes to hours and relatively simple interchanges took hours to complete. Chris had discussions with the scientists from various nations who were in observation platforms in orbit around Jupiter; exploring the icy worlds of Europa, Callisto, and Ganymede; or buried under the murky skies of Titan. All of them were concerned about what had happened on Earth, but felt protected by the large distance and the infrequent visits by resupply and crew rotation ships.

  "We have a few who want to go home," Giovanni Ricci said from the EEC base on Titan. "But the rest have voted to defy the Dictator Armstrong. We will stay here, doing our scientific duty, for as long as possible. Then we will use our transport spacecraft, not to return to Earth, but to come to Mars to accept your kind offer of asylum."

  "THAT TAKES care of all the outer planet bases," Chris reported to Gus. "With the exception of the misguided loyalties of the Japanese contingent exploring Callisto, all the rest have taken us up on our offer. But we don't have to worry about them for a long time. Most of them have supplies for a year, if not a mear, and will continue their work as long as they can before we have to support them. How's the Moon coming?"

  "I'm afraid we're going to lose everyone on the Moon," Gus said. "They're too close to Earth and its spacecraft and missiles. I've talked with Charlie Forbes, head of the big U.S. base at the North Pole ice mines, and Carlo Vulpetti, head of the CERN circumlunar accelerator project, while Tanya and others have contacted some of the other national groups with bases on the Moon. The general feeling is the same. Only a few want to return. They were delaying, hoping something would happen, but Alexander is getting angry. He wants to see ships coming home now, and anyone left on the Moon after seven days is going to be visited by a nuclear warhead!"

  "Why don't they just fly off here to Mars? Surely we could accommodate them. How many are there, anyway?"

  "Over two thousand. But all their transport spacecraft are designed for going from the lunar surface to lunar orbit, or lunar orbit to Earth orbit. They don't have ships that can get here. They don't even have ships to hold two thousand people."

  "We have ships that can get there," Chris said. "The three Yorktown class ships the UN forces came in."

  "Yes ..." Gus said, thinking. "And being warships, they were designed to go fast. Given enough antimatter, they can hit two gees. But even one gee would be enough ... We could be at the Moon in a few days."

  "Well before Alex's deadline."

  "But those long, flimsy interplanetary spacecraft can't land on the Moon," Gus said. "How do we get the people off the Moon and onto the ship? We can't run a shuttle service using just the few ships they have. We'd have rescued only a few hundred before the Unies would figure out what was going on and launch their nuclear warheads, with everyone getting killed, including the rescue crew."

  "There must be some way," Chris said. "But I can't think of it."

  "Neither can I," Gus said. "But we're not the only brains on Mars. Let's call a planet-wide council of war."

  WITHIN an hour, the emergency meeting had been called, and even though people were still trickling into the Boston Commons, Gus started the meeting going by explaining the problem and asking for suggestions.

  The first speaker was Yitzhak Begin, former commander of the Israeli contingent during the invasion of Mars, speaking over the Sinai Springs hookup. "We Israelis would like to volunteer our ship, the Shalom, as the rescue ship, since many of its original crew are here on Mars. All it needs is some antimatter and propellant transferred from the two other ships."

  As Yitzhak stepped back from the camera, his place was taken by Ben Shamir. "I say we don't worry about the amount of antimatter we use up in the rescue. If we can bring back Carlo Vulpetti and his top-notch particle accelerator team, they can quickly build us an antimatter factory that will make us independent of Earth supply."

  There was a general murmur of agreement.

  "Okay," Chris said. "We won't worry about running the rescue ship at high gees to get there in a hurry. But how do we get the people off the Moon?"

  "Take lots of landers," someone suggested. "We have plenty of those trooper attack landers left over from the UN invasion."

  "That's a start," Gus said. "But the Shalom can carry only sixteen landing craft, and even if we crowded in thirty people instead of the twenty they were designed for, that's less than five hundred people, and we have two thousand to rescue—in a hurry."

  "If they won't fit inside, let 'em ride on the outside," someone yelled from the center of the commons. There was a short burst of laughter, which quickly died away because of the seriousness of the situation.

  "That's it!" Red Storm yelled, getting up from her seat at the Olye Olye Outs Inne bar and striding through the crowd, clanking slightly at every other step, until she reached a microphone.

  "We're going fishing," she said as she started to explain her plan. "With nets ..."

  THE SHALOM was ready to go in twenty-six hours. Lander pilots who had been converted into hopiter pilots were now retreaded back again into their old landers, which they flew up and docked into the berths at the base of the pointed head of the arrowlike interplanetary transport spacecraft. But instead of the troop-carrying attack landers, they flew the quartermaster ships. In each hold was one of Red Storm's asteroid-gathering nets, a large spool of high-strength cable stripped off the chair lifts on Mount Olympus, and four medevac jet-powered hoppers rescued from the junkyards of the base motor pools.

  One gee fo
r two days was enough to cover one AU, so it was less than two days before they reached the halfway point between Mars and Earth in their separate orbits around the Sun.

  The antimatter engines on the Shalom flickered into darkness and the two-kilometer-long interplanetary spacecraft started its long, slow, majestic turn, end over end. Then Colonel Yitzhak Begin began deceleration. The dull red liquid-droplet radiator "feathers" on the tail end of the long, narrow, arrowlike Shalom changed to bright yellow as the gamma-violet plasma in the antimatter engines turned back on again.

  "I've got the Moon between us and Earth, but they're bound to see us coming sooner or later. Then it's a race to the Moon, and the winner has two thousand souls."

  "Or dead bodies," Gus said gloomily.

  "We will win," Tanya said reassuringly. "We must win!"

  FOUR HOURS before arrival, the Moon was starting to loom large around the Shalom's, gamma ray shield in the rearward-pointing monitor. Gus gathered the lander pilots and their helpers in the briefing room and went over the details once again. There had been precious little time to practice, and none of it on real hardware, only crude computer simulations.

  "You all have your assignments," Gus said finally. "Good fishing!"

  Laughing, they went down to their ships. Gus and Tanya went with them.

  THE SIXTEEN landers pulled away from the large interplanetary transport, its antimatter engines temporarily silent during the maneuver. The landers spread out in all directions and soon pulled ahead as the Shalom started decelerating again, for they had to be down and back with their catch before it came to a stop. Some headed for the north pole of the Moon, others for the south pole, both sites of ice mines. Others aimed at points on the lunar limb, their real targets somewhere over on the dangerous, Earth-facing side.

  Gus was in the leading lander. He raised his contacts on the Moon and told them to spread the word.

  "We're coming to rescue you! Tell everybody by all means at your disposal. We'll be there and gone in less than two hours, so it doesn't matter who hears. If anyone wants to go to Mars, they are to get suited up immediately, go to a clear place outside, and form a group for pickup."

  "What are you going to do, Gus?" Charlie Forbes said from his North Pole site. "Beam us up?"

  "Almost," Gus said with a rare laugh. Then he added, "By the way ... only one piece of carry-on luggage will be allowed per passenger."

  THE CHINESE helium-three strip-mining facility in the Bay of Tranquility was coping with a number of problems that day. One was an air leak in the underground west dormitory that seemed to defy detection, the second was a major policy debate between the administrators, the engineers, and the scientists over the proper response to the recent return ultimatum they had received from the new regent of the state of China, and the third was how to cope with their very strange visitor.

  They had treated him most politely, had assigned him one of their best translators, Lap-Wai Wong, and had fed him well-pressed duck last night. But he still kept coming up with the most unusual requests instead of following the tour that the administrators had planned for him.

  "Tell them to do that triple somersault onto the ten-man pyramid again, Lap-Wai," Maury Pickford called, running around to the other side of the group of amateur Chinese acrobats. "I want to get a video of it from this angle."

  "These people really must get back to their helium harvesting work," Lap-Wai protested.

  "But think of all the publicity I can get!" Maury stopped and everyone stiffened as an emergency siren went off through loudspeakers in the dome of the exercise room and an excited voice speaking Chinese immediately followed.

  "What's going on?" Maury asked, grabbing Lap-Wai's arm. Lap-Wai flinched from the alcoholic breath.

  "The Americans have said that there is someone coming to rescue us from the Moon and take us to Mars," Lap-Wai replied. "Those that want to go must get into spacesuits and gather outside." Lap-Wai pulled away and started toward the dormitories.

  "Mars! Can I go, too?" Maury called after the retreating form.

  "I don't see why not. After all, you are an American," Lap-Wai said. "But you can take only one small bag," he warned.

  Maury looked down at the pile of video and photographic equipment he had been hauling around. There would be little need for that on Mars. People there would want information from their newspapers, not entertainment. How was he going to pay his way once he reached Mars?

  He reached into a bag and pulled out a plastic squeezer of Chinese beer and sucked thoughtfully at it. Suddenly he bent down, opened up a battered aluminum briefcase with a vacuseal rim, dumped the expensive zoom and wide-angle lenses from the padded interior onto the dusty floor, and ran down the corridor toward the farms he had been shown earlier.

  Ten minutes later he was standing in line at the exit airlock, waiting his turn in a line of patient Chinese. He carried his helmet in one hand and a battered aluminum briefcase in the other. A good-looking young Chinese woman was in front of him. She turned and, when she saw the American stranger, she greeted him politely.

  "I see you are joining us in our flight from the devil Alexander. I know a little English, so let me know if I may be of any assistance. My name is Sui-May."

  "Hi, Sui-May. I'm Maury Pickford, reporter for the New York Daily Mirror—the one with tits on page three. Thanks for letting me come along."

  "Anyone that wants to get away from what is happening on Earth is welcome. Why were you visiting the Moon, Mr. Pickford?"

  "I got myself sent here to do a series of articles on sports in space. I figured it was a good way to get as far away as possible from all those Unies, so I kept finding new sports and writing them up, like your acrobatics team. My best was on swimming—even got on the third page with that one." He pulled out his Filofax from his chestpack—it was the old kind with paper pages—and extracted a folded newspaper clipping from a pocket in the back. He unfolded it tenderly and proudly handed it over to Sui-May.

  "I call it 'Boobs in Space'." The clipping showed a well-endowed young woman shooting out from the surface of a spherical swimming bubble at the zero-gee pool on some large space station. She was wearing only her bikini bottoms.

  Sui-May's eyebrows raised.

  "It's lovely what zero gee does to a woman's figure," Maury said as he took the clipping back and tenderly returned it to his Filofax. He looked down at Sui-May.

  "Say!" he said, shifting back a little. "We haven't had a Chinese chick on page three in ages ... Pay's good ..."

  "Not interested," Sui-May said dryly and looked away.

  "I forgot ..." Maury said to himself, taking another sip of beer from his suit supply. "I'm not in that business any longer ..."

  THE MOST difficult rescue involved the people at the large Russian radio and optical astronomy observatory at the "quiet" spot on the Moon, right in the middle of the side of the Moon that always faced directly away from the Earth. It was at this same point that Colonel Begin was aiming his ship Shalom, although it would come to a halt many tens of thousands of kilometers up, then take off again toward Mars.

  For this pickup site, the rescue lander had to zoom out away from the Moon, then turn back to pass over the back side. Tanya was riding shotgun on one of the hoppers in the cargo bay of that lander.

  The large door on the quartermaster lander slid open with a rumble Tanya could feel through her thighs as she sat astride the jet-powered medevac hopper, now stripped of the dead weight of the clamshell stretchers.

  "Twenty-five minutes to target," the pilot, Michael Wolfe, said through the suit radio.

  "Time to go," said Tanya's driver, Roscoe Razinski, an ex-medic turned Mars farmer. He raised the hopper in the zero-gee environment and started hauling a corner of the net out the hatch door. They were followed by the three other hoppers attached to the other corners of the net. They soon pulled the net free and were floating in space, connected only by four shroud lines that ran from each corner of the net to the cable spooling sl
owly off a reel bolted to the floor of the cargo hatch.

  "Give us some slack, Donna," Roscoe said to a small, wiry figure standing next to the large reel of high-strength stranded fiber. The motorized reel started to turn, letting out cable, and the four hoppers started flying out in front of the large lander, gaining speed. As soon as they were well clear, the lander pilot fired reverse jets and moved rapidly back away from them, the cable reel humming as it shot out line to keep the cable slack.

  Five minutes passed as they continued their motion over the lunar surface, the lander just a tiny speck in back of them. Slowly the net started to change shape as the cable began to pull on it.

  "Must be at about two hundred kilometers," Roscoe said. "Donna is putting on the brakes."

  The pull of the cable slowed them down and they started to fall toward the lunar surface. It was only five kilometers down, but was zooming by at six hundred kilometers an hour. The pull of the cable increased and Tanya leaned forward in her seat harness to hug the control panel in front of her. She noticed Roscoe doing the same thing.

  "Hold on to your helmet," he called. "This is going to be one rough ride!"

  "I hope the cable holds," Tanya said.

  "It should," Roscoe said. "It was made in Russia."

  "Don't remind me," Tanya said, her voice strained as the deceleration level rose to three gees.

  The seconds passed as the deceleration force from the in-reeling cable slowed them from orbital velocity down nearly to zero.

  "... fifty-four, fifty-five, fifty-six," Roscoe was counting.

  Suddenly the deceleration stopped and they were in free-fall again. They were now only a few hundred meters above the lunar surface and drifting slowly over a crater that contained a huge parabolic dish built into it. Aliead, Tanya could see the large photon bucket. Off to one side were the observatory buildings and outside the buildings was a large clump of people.

  "Over to the left!" Tanya shouted.

  "I see them," Roscoe said. The four pilots activated the jets on their hoppers and started hauling the net toward the crowd. Far above them, where the four shroud lines from the net came together to attach onto the cable proper, was a yellow box containing a radar altimeter that radioed signals back to the take-up reel so that the box stayed roughly at constant altitude. That way they didn't have to cope with tangled shrouds and loops of cable all over the ground.