by Buzz Aldrin
“Good again,” she said. “Because I don’t want anyone to take the job I’m about to offer you unless it’s what you want to do, not just to avoid something you don’t like or get out of a boring post.” Her smile was getting broader, and she said, “Now, I said the computer told us something. We have an important opening coming up, for an important mission, and when we asked it to come up with the optimal pilot in the astronaut corps, it spat out your name.”
I must have looked startled, because she held up a finger before I could speak and said, “Don’t be so surprised. You’re extremely well qualified, you’re having a brilliant career with us, and you should damn well know it. I want it firmly in your head that that’s why I’m about to suggest an opportunity. Furthermore, when we ran the top five suggestions by the mission commander, he specifically said that you were his favorite.” Her smile was downright impish; it was like she used to smile when she’d tease me back in high school, or when she dropped by to visit me at Colorado Springs.
“Uh, can I know who the mission commander is?”
“Sure,” she said. “It’s Walter Gander.”
It was like an electric shock. Walter Gander was the commanding officer of the Seventh Interplanetary, and had been the first American to set foot on Phobos, Mars’s inner moon, on the Phobos One mission. I hadn’t even thought about the possibility of joining the Seventh; it was a small, elite unit that flew manned missions to Mars, and operations in Martian orbit. “He’s going himself?” I asked.
“All our other squadron commanders do,” she pointed out. “And he’s been out there before, which is important, and most of all this is a vital mission. Besides, he remembers you from the class he taught when you were in training. He liked the way you weren’t afraid to try something you’d never done before. And he says you’ve got the most important quality—besides being a great pilot—that anyone can have for this one.”
I looked puzzled. She held up a finger and said emphatically, “I mean discretion. You can keep your own counsel, and he’ll be able to talk freely to you and not worry about where it gets repeated. Which is going to be vital because you two will be the only Americans on this mission.” Now she was really beaming. “I’m not only excited for you, Jason, I’m practically jealous. If I could figure out a way to take the job myself, I would. What I mean is that you’re to be the pilot for the next Mars surface hab delivery. I trust you understand that everything from here on out is absolutely secret?”
“Sure.” I was a little dazed. The crew and surface habitat deliveries were the basic missions to Crater Korolev on Mars. My job would be to fly myself, Gander, an engineer, and a team of scientists all the way to that crater, in the Martian arctic, where the larger Tiberian settlement—and hopefully the second copy of the Encyclopedia—lay frozen below meters of ice. “Why will we be the only Americans? I thought—”
“Politics, of course,” she said. “We’ve always reserved operating American equipment for Americans—which means the Mars Five mission commander and the chief pilot have to be Americans. And on this mission, nobody’s willing to take an unequal share of seats. We needed full support from the other four members of the International Mars Consortium, so since the MarsHab takes a crew of ten, it’s two per agency. The Japanese, the Chinese, the Russians, and ESA.”
“But—isn’t the engineer supposed to be an operating officer, too?”
She nodded. “That’s our biggest compromise. The mission’s engineer—which means the first officer, of course, so she’ll outrank you—will be Olga Trigorin, a cosmonaut with a lot of flights under her belt. And she’ll be staying over, along with the scientists, so two years later when you catch your return flight on the cycler Collins, it will be just Walter and you from your expedition. She’s been training for this for more than a year, actually, because there are all kinds of things they’re going to need her for and she had to absorb a lot of special information. It wasn’t easy getting her everything she needed, either, because we had to keep this mission secret up till now. In fact, the scientists are all being contacted today, too; only Olga and Walter knew this was coming.”
“Knew what was—” I started to ask, and then I put it all together. A flight that Walter Gander was going to make himself. Extreme political pressure, so much that NASA was allowing a Mars mission to leave with a Russian first officer. There was only one thing that could have created this situation. “My god,” I said. “So they must have located the Encyclopedia and are ready to dig it up.”
“Got it in one, Jason,” she said, smiling. “The permanent crew at Korolev has finished all the seismic and hydrographic work, and they know as much as can be known about where the objects in the settlement are and what they’re shaped like. And there happens to be one that’s the right size and shape, just about a kilometer away, two meters higher up in the ice—which really suggests that it arrived a while after the settlement was drowned, if that’s what happened to it. An unmanned cargo delivery is taking up the special tools, and then all we need is the archeology team itself before we start cutting into the ice.”
“So the permanent crew will just leave it in place till we get there?” I asked. “Seems kind of …”
“Oh, I’m sure it’s boring and frustrating for them,” Lori said with a shrug. “But that’s the way it is with archeology—if you don’t want to risk losing it the moment you find it. Plan before you dig, be ready to preserve what comes up, and always have an expert present so that if it crumbles or breaks there’s at least somebody who knew what they were looking at and might remember something important. That has been the basic principle for earth archeology since the early 1900s.” Her eyes got a little far away, and she added, “And if we’d stuck to that principle for Tiberian artifacts, you might have been having this conversation with your father, you know. It’s our last shot at the Encyclopedia, Jason, so we’re taking no chances. The scientists include some Mars veterans, and people with years of accumulated Moon time at the south pole dig, so you’re definitely going to feel like the junior guy on the crew. But you’re a first-rate pilot, Walter wants you, and you have my complete confidence.
“If you want the job, I should also tell you that after you get to Mars, although your orders give you the right to come back at the next opposition, NASA will hope you won’t come back—it costs a lot to get anyone there, and once you have some Mars experience they’d rather you stayed, because you’ll be valuable there. Now—I’m assuming you’ll accept?”
I could see that she was teasing, and for once I didn’t mind a bit. “Yes, ma’am,” I said. “I accept. Where do I report and when?”
“First you’ll need to get moved,” she said. “The Seventh is headquartered right here at JSC, and transfer orders are going out as soon as I give my secretary the go-ahead. In anticipation of your accepting, I’ve arranged for someone to show you some furnished apartments over in Nassau Bay, and then whenever you find something you can stand, you can go back, spend two days packing, and get back here. You’ll begin training with Olga and Walter about a week from now. And of course you depart Earth five months before the next opposition, which means you’ll be leaving Earth orbit in mid-April of 2033. As of right now, Jason, you’re a hundred forty-four days from leaving for Mars.”
She stood up, indicating that the interview was over, and grinned. “Jason, the rest of this conversation is with Aunt Lori, not Chief Kirsten. All I can say is, you lucky bastard. And that’s what a lot of people will say, you know. I hate to bring it up, but when the Public Affairs Officer for this found out that you headed the list, he was beside himself with glee.”
“I figured,” I said. “It’s all right. I certainly don’t mind being Chris Terence’s son, and I don’t think you’d give this job to an idiot based on his ancestry. The reporters are a little aggravating to deal with, though.”
“Another way you’re a lucky bastard,” she said. “In a hundred forty-four days, you’ll be going millions of miles away from the pr
ess.”
The third furnished apartment they showed me looked all right; it wasn’t a big problem because nobody lived with me and I had no pets, so I took the first clean and decent-looking furnished place that would let me rent month-to-month and was close enough to work. I gave my mother in D.C. a call to let her know that I had been transferred and would have a new address soon.
“You know, Jason, you’re really more like your father all the time. You don’t even complain about being yanked from one place to another. I think you even enjoy it.”
“I do like a change of scene,” I said, noncommittally. We had this conversation every time I was transferred.
“Well, you’re never anywhere long enough to meet anyone, or put down any roots,” she said. “I don’t think that can be good for you.”
I heard Sig in the background saying, “Amber, will you leave the poor kid alone, he’s grown up for god’s sake,” and stifled a laugh as I sat down on the windowsill and looked out over the town. I’d never quite figured out how a guy so different from me had always been able to understand what I needed, but as the years went by I became more and more grateful that Sig had been there when I was a teenager.
“Anyway,” she said, “I hope you found a place with decent decor, and not in a high-crime area.”
“It’s sort of brown-orange,” I said. “JSC isn’t anywhere near the city, and even if it were, there aren’t really any high-crime areas anymore.”
“You still don’t have to live near them,” she said, firmly. We talked for a while about trivial things. She and Sig were coming down to visit Lori next month, and now they would have an excuse to see me as well. Sig’s niece had graduated from medical school and was thinking of taking a specialty in microgravity medicine. It was raining more than usual in Washington.
After we said good-bye and hung up, I found myself wandering through the furnished apartment, idly getting used to what views there were, and thinking about the conversation. Older people like my mother still remembered times when there were large parts of every big city where you couldn’t go after dark. There were still places I wasn’t crazy about, but things were different now; the prisons were slowly emptying.
It wasn’t that people were nicer; there were as many jerks as ever, but now they were all jerks with jobs, generally good jobs, which meant they had homes and cars and something to lose, and so they behaved themselves. The world had changed a lot on its way from the disaster on the Moon to this moment, when we were going to take our second chance. I sat in the darkening living room, looking out over the highway full of headlights shooting by, and thought about what had made the changes. It seemed strange that although the world had changed so thoroughly, bringing me to this critical moment in human history, what I remembered most vividly were the things anyone does, the normal changes in my life, growing up and growing older.
It took me a year or so, after I got back from the ShareSpace trip, to really accept and recover from my father’s death. During that year, though I didn’t pay much attention to it, numerous politicians and pundits made a lot of speeches, did a lot of fingerpointing, and generally demanded that someone do something. Only two things were clear: the first was that space flight was the key if we were to do anything at all about the loss of the vast archive that was now scattered in useless bits of metal and silicon across the far side of the Moon. The second was that now that we knew it existed, we had to have that archive. Materials found at the Tiberian base at the lunar south pole indicated that they had been literally centuries ahead of us in materials science; almost everything of theirs, from the four-story-tall lander to their hammers and screwdrivers, was made of stuff stronger, lighter, and more durable than anything we knew how to make. Devices in their small infirmary were quite often compact efficient versions of what we were just barely managing to make at all in our laboratories. The optical computer (unfortunately quite inert) in the lander, and the optical information storage device that had been the Encyclopedia, clearly treated problems that we were only just learning to phrase, let alone to solve, as bits of routine engineering. And of course, as Chris and Xiao Be had noted, the propulsion system that had gotten the Encyclopedia here in a matter of a few decades (if the message was to be believed) was only about half the size of an ordinary garbage can, and had no apparent fuel source at all. By comparison, to get a package of the same mass to Alpha Centauri in one thousand years, we would have had to use the combined thrust of about 100,000 Energiyas, the biggest rocket then in use.
In a way the match was perfect; they were just far enough ahead of us (or had been at the time they stopped visiting) so that we could understand the significance of what they did and realize how much power and potential was in their technology, but not so far ahead that we couldn’t eventually understand it—if we could get the Encyclopedia. Here was the chance to advance every field of natural science by centuries; here was the chance, for the first time, to compare humanity’s art, religion, history, and everything else with that of another species, to gain some insight into what might be unique to our species and what might be common to all intelligence.
Or rather, here had been the chance. With the lunar Encyclopedia smashed to bits, there was only one choice now—get to Mars, get the other one, and do it right this time.
The big five space programs had suddenly had plenty of resources, but they had needed every bit of them. There were a dozen things to do right away: begin preparing for the eventual voyages to Phobos and Crater Korolev, to try to retrieve whatever might be there; return to the Tiberian moonbase and conduct history’s most important archeological dig, a quarter of a million miles away, in hard vacuum, in a place where the Sun hadn’t shone in billions of years; take hundreds of engineers’ daydreams out of the technical literature and turn them into reality; educate the people who could do these things, and get them there.
That last part had been the key. We had to educate more people, better, in less time than ever before, because we needed millions of brilliant and well-trained scientists and engineers for every one of those gigantic tasks. We couldn’t even begin until we got every good brain we could find trained as well as it could be.
The first way that I noticed it was two years after the accident, when people with Ph.D.s started turning up to give math tests to my ninth grade class—and if you did well, suddenly you had a scholarship to a superb school where those Ph.D.s would be your teachers. I was relieved, though Sig was disappointed, when I didn’t turn out to be quite that brilliant.
It didn’t matter anyway, because money and talent were pouring into all the schools, at all levels. For a while, good teachers were so much in demand that many of them were working twelve-hour days and pulling down more pay than corporate middle managers. They had a volunteer program going so that a lot of engineers and professors were “retiring” into teaching in the public schools, at increased pay.
By the time I was in college, the acceleration of education had meant huge expansions of opportunity, so much that even though there were four times as many engineers and scientists as there had been in 2010, the shortage was worse than ever. If you passed a few science classes you could have corporate recruiters beating down your door by the end of your sophomore year—or at least you could if you were at a civilian school. I’d chosen to go to the Air Force Academy.
And it wasn’t just the job market that was changing. After decades in which every big project took much longer and cost much more, suddenly things were getting done ahead of time and under budget. Suborbital airliners were being talked about when I was a freshman, but I flew home for Christmas my senior year in one. Six years after the first maglev line between Los Angeles and San Jose, there were 15,000 miles of maglev track in the United States alone. One year after the Japanese pilot project for growing wood into preformed shapes in a tank, Mitsui was shipping whole prefab houses everywhere on the globe. Ocean-floating aquafarms were abolishing hunger; doctors had cured AIDS and Alzheimer’s and were talk
ing about human life extension to 150 years.
And all of this was caused merely by the overflow—if you need to recruit and train a thousand superb people, in any field, the best way to do it is to recruit and train a million people, and then pick the best tenth of a percent. Thus to get enough of the very best, the University Space Research Associates had had to produce many times that number of people who were “merely” excellent, and the release of so much highly trained talent into the world had done the rest.
But even while global knowledge and production were taking a leap forward on a scale not seen since the Renaissance, with the news full of one triumph after another, it had all been overshadowed by the archeological dig at the lunar south pole.
That was the hard one to believe. It didn’t seem that long since my dad and Xiao Be were going to be the seventeenth and eighteenth people to walk on the Moon, but now, in 2032, the Moon’s South Pole Station was a small town with over 200 quasi-permanent residents. A couple of the archeologists and the base operations people had been residents of the Moon for more than five continuous years, and last year a baby girl had been born there.
I got up and got myself a diet Coke from the fridge, drinking it straight from the bottle as I watched the dark settle over the neighborhood and the electric lights blaze to life. I had been in seventh grade at the time of the accident. There had been a swift redesign and replanning, since now they knew that they would have to spend hundreds of person-years studying that site. When I graduated from high school, the first crews to stay over on the Moon, not going back on the same ship that brought them, had been there for just a few weeks, and unmanned probes and supply ships had been going out to Mars on the last few oppositions, a steady stream of material going out and data coming back for the explorers to follow.
During summer training after my junior year at Colorado Springs, they had suddenly loaded us all onto buses to go watch a big-screen TV. We had watched Walter Gander—the man who would now be my commanding officer, I realized, and it still astonished me—step off the Phobos One landing craft, a slightly modified Pigeon the cycler Aldrin had carried with them, and carefully plant his boots on the dusty face of the new world. Looking up at the vast ruddy bulk of Mars hanging over his head, he said, “We have come this far, and we’re here to stay. And—” suddenly his voice grew emphatic, no longer delivering a dignified public address, but declaring what he really meant “—and next time it won’t be another fifty years! Worlds of thanks to Frank Borman, Jim Lovell, and Bill Anders, who paved the way for Neil, Buzz, Mike, and all.” NASA had timed the landing carefully; it was December 25, 2018, fifty years to the day since Apollo 8 first reached the Moon.
