Encounter With Tiber

by Buzz Aldrin

  “Yes, sir?”

  “Please switch to a private radio channel. Let’s use channel seventeen.”

  I switched.

  A moment later his voice crackled in my ear. “Word has reached me of a conspiracy involving Second Site Mobile. I don’t like having my officers sneaking around behind my back. Therefore … from now on, if you and Olga should happen to decide to spend time in each other’s personal compartments, you are ordered to just do so, without any effort to conceal it from anyone. And if anybody complains, he or she can walk home.”

  “Yes, sir.” I was a little giddy with relief; he’d really thrown a scare into me for a moment.

  “Back to public channel,” he said.

  I clicked back, just in time to hear Gander say, “Hey, Paul, you lose the bet. He didn’t faint before I got to the punchline.”

  There was a lot of laughter from everybody on the radio. Maybe I didn’t owe Paul quite as many favors as I had thought I did.

  Later that afternoon, after driving back, we watched the two landers descend. They set down near the five landers that we already had fueled up and waiting to go, and we went out to greet them. There was a certain amount of fun in watching Scotty get his “ice legs.”

  The dinner that evening was fun and exciting, and Gander declared the next day would be our first official day of rest, because everyone stayed up way too late talking. We had set up the old MarsHab that the third expedition had left behind as Five Alpha’s quarters. They made a point of telling us how nice it was, which of course was a way of telling us that they knew perfectly well what housing on Mars was likely to be like, and they weren’t angry with us. We all spent the day off sitting around watching recorded movies and chatting. Scotty found time to tell me he thought Olga was “cute, but too good for you, you lucky bastard.” I agreed with him.

  The next few weeks went by in a blur. Normally the fuel plant ran at about a tenth of its capacity, converting carbon dioxide and water to liquid oxygen and liquid methane. But now we had to get Aldrin fueled for its unmanned return trip. It was slated to be the GOcycler for Mars Six, almost two years from now. That meant getting the plant running at full capacity, not just to make the needed fuel in the six months before it was due to depart, but also to provide enough fuel for the tankers that would carry Aldrin’s fuel up into orbit. The tankers were fairly smart, as robots go, and could handle their own rendezvous with the GOcycler and return to Korolev, but someone still had to make sure they were behaving themselves, and that someone was always me, Scotty, or Olga—and whenever we weren’t operating tankers, we were still going out to the dig site. They were getting farther down now, with the added crew, closer and closer to where the precious artifacts lay. There was still nothing unusual anyone could discern in any of the ice, but we didn’t abandon the protocol; if there was any information we needed in the frozen record, or anything anyone could get in future generations, we’d make sure that it was preserved.

  Two months later Kireiko said she had a small announcement, adding, “It would be easier to show you. I had to do this away from the landing site.”

  She had set up a clear plastic tent with a black floor, and in the middle of it there was a plastic container of the same type we used in the kitchen, filled halfway with water.

  “I sterilized it thoroughly before I put it in there,” she said.

  A thick green scum floated on its surface. “What the hell—?” Captain Gander asked.

  “After I sterilized it, I put a couple of liters of Martian topsoil into the water and let it sit for a month,” Kireiko said. “Nothing happened except that I got mud, and the salts in the soil plus the warmth from the tent kept the soil from freezing. Then I took the big step: I put several of those spores from the ice samples into the water. That was five days ago.”

  “And you’re sure it’s not Martian?”

  “Depends on how long you have to live on Mars to get naturalized,” Kireiko said. “It was certainly born here, but its DNA is Tiberian. And get this, folks: it eats carbon dioxide and releases both oxygen and nitrogen; it also excretes an enzyme that would break down iron oxides. If it isn’t a tailored algae for terraforming, I don’t know how we’d recognize one.”

  That seemed like good enough news for another celebration. Apparently the Internet was exploding with debates between people who bought Nari’s theory and people who didn’t, but up here on Mars we had planetary unity: we were all on Nari’s side. Halfway through the celebration, Captain Gander took me aside. “I’ve got a little bit of news for you, Jason. I don’t know how you’ll feel about it. First thing, the Mars Consortium has asked me to stay on as base manager for one more opposition mission, then return to command all Mars arrivals and departures at Earth. The new transit strategy using Mars GOcyclers will start soon and more than double the launch traffic. So it’s turned into sort of a great opportunity. As you know, Johnston was really the only pilot-astronaut that came out on Aldrin; their captain and engineer were two-hat types that are staying here as scientists. So … it looks like the Collins REcycler will return with just you, Scotty, and any of our group here who need to go back for medical or personal reasons, which might be Akira or Doc C, but probably no more than a couple of people. And that means you get to be mission commander for an interplanetary mission, if you want the job. It’s a pretty big promotion, even if it’s just kind of a case of being short of officers, and it would do great things to your record. I don’t think NASA would mind having a new Captain Terence in its astronaut corps, and I know Lori Kirsten well enough to be sure she’d like it. Of course …” and now he looked me straight in the eye, “it is completely your decision. Understand? And for all I know Scotty will want to stay over, or he may decide he doesn’t mind going back by himself—it’s a chance to catch up on his reading, I guess. So you can decline, but it’s up to you.”

  “How long do I have to decide?”

  “Maybe ten days. Talk it over with friends or whoever. Sleep on it. You don’t have to give me an answer right away.”

  The party went on a while longer, but my mind wasn’t really there anymore. I had a chance to be a mission commander at a very young age, by current standards. Since the space program had been running at a high level and with a lot of missions, they had insisted on more and more qualifications before taking you up to that level, so that nowadays ten years or more was normal before you got to do it (except for the little orbital hops with cargo, where technically the pilot was the commander because he was the only one on board). For that matter, with Gander taking a permanent position here, there would be at least one command slot in the Seventh Interplanetary Squadron opening up, and though I didn’t have much seniority, I’d have more experience than a lot of the candidates … and it would be kind of fun to see what a fuss Mom and Aunt Lori would make about it all.

  Against that, there was the fact that the current research schedule didn’t have them trying to bring up the Encyclopedia until right around the time Collins would depart, and they’d probably only turn it on, or try to, long after I was on my way back. And there was the way I was really needed here. Back home on Earth, between missions, I often just slept or went to one movie after another; here they needed everyone all the time. Back home you couldn’t do anything you weren’t certified for; up here, if they needed something done and you were the one available, then even if they had to talk you through it on the radio, you just did it. I’d been to the north pole in a lander, by myself, to get Akira’s weather station working again, because Akira was tied up in a gas deposition experiment and everyone else was so busy. By the time I completed that mission I could have built a weather station, blindfolded, from loose parts. And while I wasn’t Akira, I was on my way to being a pretty fair aerometeorologist; somebody had to calibrate the station to local conditions and compare it with readouts from other stations, and Akira was still busy.

  And there was Olga.

  Funny thing, I’d never been a very passionate guy o
r anything, and Olga was pretty kicked back, too, but I’d also never been friends that way with anybody, such close friends for so long, before becoming lovers, and, well, I would miss her terribly.

  On the other hand, I had a career at home that was more or less what I’d been shooting for ever since the night on Aunt Lori’s back porch when I’d sat up and looked at the Moon rise and told myself that I would be an astronaut, I would go out there, and I would keep going.

  I didn’t sleep much that night, which may be why I wasn’t quite as excited as I would normally have been when I discovered that I wasn’t going to be cutting ice at all that week. First I would be flying up to go over Aldrin and take the notes that would lead to my plan for outfitting her for unmanned return to Earth, now just a few months away since she was the GOcycler. And upon my return I was going to be flying a lander down to the south pole, taking Akira, Nari, Paul, Gander, Chalashajerian, and Olga.

  Mars Mission Control had finally decided that we needed to do the last confirming step on Nari’s hypothesis before we dug all the way down to the Tiberian site, and therefore, we were to proceed to Crater Rayleigh, the one that looked most like it had been reshaped, to gather evidence of a “past Tiberian intervention”—by which Nari meant, of course, evidence that nine thousand years ago the Tiberians had set off an atom bomb there in order to get terraforming underway. A mission to the ship I might one day command, on a future return to Mars, if I said yes, and to the south pole for an important investigation—all in one week. It was another night without much sleep.

  8

  I’D DONE A FEW takeoffs from Mars before. I was always a little surprised at how gentle they were compared to the thundering heave of taking a Yankee Clipper up from Earth. It was a couple of hours before dawn, and I was sitting in the Pigeon by myself, running the countdown. Here, where hands were short, when Olga, Gander, Scotty, or I flew anywhere, we just made sure there was fuel in the tanks, ran the diagnostics the night before, got in and ran them again just before liftoff, had the computer generate the course—and took off. A little more complicated than pulling the car out of the driveway, but a lot less ceremony than the maglev driver puts into it when he pulls out of New York and heads for Westchester County.

  The countdown hit zero and we shot upward at a steady one and a quarter g’s. Everything looked fine, so I relaxed and enjoyed the view. The terminator line was swinging toward Korolev—I kind of liked the fact that home was easy to pick out from orbit, a neat white circle below the polar ice cap, roughly opposite the huge Chasma Boreale.

  Though you don’t have to climb as fast to get off Mars, thanks to the scale height you have to climb farther, so it was some time before I angled over and worked into the orbit that would let me intercept Aldrin. It gave me a little time to think, but not enough time to reach any conclusions. After a while I just looked out the window. On this outbound trajectory I was headed away from the pole, down toward Elysium Mons, an immense volcano a bit over one and a half times as tall as Everest back home—though of course it was still dwarfed by distant Olympus, the tallest mountain by far in the solar system, which I could see poking above the horizon. I climbed steadily higher, and after a while Aldrin appeared, first on radar (the new heads-up displays were sort of nice for that—they projected a little glowing circle on your window, enclosing where you should look to get it on visual) and then after a bit visually.

  Though it bore a superficial resemblance to the Zubrin hab that we’d come to Mars in, and of course its center section was a modified HT, a Big Can like all the others that had carried us into space, a closer look revealed a lot of differences. The booster was shorter and squatter, befitting the fact that it had to hide behind the broader and flatter heat shield. There were many brackets still visible on the frame that surrounded the central living module, but I could also see that the tankers had been busy, for there were nine fuel and oxygen tanks now attached to the framework. There would be twenty before it was done with the process.

  We closed in on the docking port, and I let the computer do the job. It was perfect as always; with a slight clang, the Pigeon docked to Aldrin. Pressure was okay on both sides, so I opened the hatches and went in to look at Aldrin, sister ship to the Collins REcycler, which I would be commanding.

  It didn’t have the nice personal compartments that the MarsHab did, but then there would only be four or so of us, at the very most, rattling around in here. I made my way forward to the cockpit. The cockpit of our MarsHab was long since gone, I reminded myself, torn out to make room for our small infirmary. This cockpit was in beautiful order—Scotty always had been kind of a perfectionist. …

  I floated there in weightlessness for a long moment before I did it; I pulled myself down onto the commander’s chair, belted myself in, and found myself sitting in the place where Walter Gander had sat during Phobos One. I was in one of humanity’s great spaceships—part of the roll of honor that had begun more than seventy years ago, with Vostok 1, Friendship 7, Columbia, Eagle, Aquarius, Challenger … and Tiber Prize, my father’s ship, for that matter. This was Aldrin’s fifth trip to Mars orbit. It might have four or five more before it was given honorable retirement, whatever that might be; since it couldn’t be brought down to Earth, scuttlebutt was it might end up as a space station in Martian polar orbit, doing more or less what it was doing now, but serving the needs of a growing Mars colony.

  I looked around and imagined myself on the ship as commander. Funny, when I was a kid it might have been a kick, but now I was mainly thinking about the fact that the only job with less real work than being the pilot of an interplanetary mission is being the commander of one. I would be sitting in the same place in Collins telling Scotty to do things that he knew perfectly well it was time to do, then telling Houston he’d done them. And then, I figured, I’d go below and … well, I’d finally have time to catch up on my reading, and on my studying of Tiberian … but then there wasn’t going to be much point in learning Tiberian, was there? And even less point in what I wanted to get caught up on reading. I’d finally learned enough of the specialties of enough of our scientists to want to study some things systematically and get myself up to speed on the whole project, but again … what would I need that for?

  Well, I’d probably look pretty good in the captain’s dress uniform, and it might get me some dates. If I didn’t spend weekends writing to Olga.

  I looked around the ship and walked her from booster end to shield end, and no matter how I sliced it, she was a great ship with a proud history, but I wouldn’t be doing anything very interesting on her, and I knew in the pit of my soul that I’d be spending all my time wondering what was happening back at Korolev.

  I noted down that so far as I could tell the ship was in perfect order—they’d certainly been more than careful with her—and spent a couple of hours confirming that Aldrin was cleared for an unmanned return as a GOcycler. I knew Scotty would want to check out Collins just as thoroughly before its REcycler return. I hoped he’d have a couple of extra people on board, so he could be the commander, because if he was all by himself he’d just be a pilot. And I did want him to get to be the commander—it would be such a leg up to his career.

  For a long time after, whenever I let some reporter interview me on the Internet, he would ask if I had any premonitions about the Crater Rayleigh mission, and I would tell him no. Then he’d ask why everyone was strapped in and I’d say that it was because I’m a by-the-book pilot, and Captain Gander is really a by-the-book type, and nobody would have gotten away with not being strapped in. And we would go back and forth, and he’d think I was playing games, trying to make his life difficult.

  The truth was, I had spent years and years practicing doing things exactly the way the manual said to do them. And NASA had been smart enough to design a universal ship-control software interface, so that no matter what you flew, if it had a particular control or a menu option, that was always in the same place. NASA and I were working off the same princip
le, the one known to martial artists, drill sergeants, paramedics, shortstops, and ballerinas: if you practice doing the right thing the right way long enough, and often enough, when the time comes when you have no time to think, you will do the right thing right.

  So when at the end of an otherwise normal descent something slammed our lander violently upward and sideways, everyone was tied in, and all the equipment was tied down, and I didn’t have to worry about loose bodies or lab equipment cannonballing through the space where I was trying to work. Actually I didn’t worry at all because I didn’t have time. I reached forward instantly and, without a thought, overrode the control software and told it to abort us to orbit.

  Four g’s of acceleration slammed into us as the capsule whirled about and climbed into the sky; something kicked us in the ass as we went, as if the ghosts guarding Tiberian secrets in the crater were trying to shove us along on our way. But we climbed, and I reprogrammed and got us heading back to Korolev before we actually got up to orbital velocity.

  “What the hell was all that?” Gander asked, with a quiet authority that made everyone who had started to babble shut up.

  “If I had to place a bet, sir,” I said, “I think we came down over some fairly thick carbon dioxide ice. It’s nothing up at Korolev, and there’s not even much at the north pole, but the south pole is where all the carbon dioxide tends to end up, isn’t it, Akira?”

  “That’s right,” he said. “It’s the pole that has winter at aphelion, so winter is longer and colder there, and it’s a couple of kilometers above average level, where the north pole sits in the middle of a huge depression. And it’s late fall down here. About a quarter of Mars’s atmosphere is frozen onto the south pole. In that crater, it might have been half a meter deep, or more with drifting.”

  “And I was moving sideways, on hover, to find a spot where we could set down,” I said. “Low enough so that flame was hitting the ground. Probably I heated up that big chunk of dry ice, and blooey. Sorry about that, Captain, some preplanning would have saved us all a rough ride.”