The Martian Race

by Gregory Benford

  Live video feed from Mars was piped into a makeshift auditorium, looming enormously real on a huge screen. Around her she had felt the press of excited bodies. A group enthusiasm filled the room, actually a screened-off portion of the giant exhibition hall. There in the buzzing dark she was mesmerized. Later on, they went upstairs to a small room where she spent twenty minutes driving a radio-controlled rover toy around a patch of sand and rocks. Tacky, really, just plastic. But it was enough. After that, she read everything about the mission, put up posters of the Sojourner rock garden on her wall.

  And her parents had gone not just for her, but for themselves.

  Julia considered dropping out of the team to be with her father. She went through a hard night, thinking about it. She had not been able to rush to his bedside because there were some aerobraking trials on for tomorrow and she had to be there. And through the long night she was fully aware of the damage she would cause to the Consortium plans. None of it helped her sleep.

  But when she talked to her parents on visiphone, Harry wouldn't hear of it. “Mars has always been your dream, sweetie!” he had exclaimed, frowning at her with Old Testament fury. “Mine, too.”

  “And mine,” her mother said wistfully.

  So during a long, intermittently awkward call, they reached a negotiated cease-fire. Harry would take his experimental drug treatment. They would all stay linked closely throughout the two-and-a-half-year flight. And, Harry added, “I'll be the first to kiss you when you come prancing down the gangplank. I'll push that Katherine out of the way, I swear I will.” Harry had decided opinions about the whole Raoul-baby-Katherine business. “I damn well promise.”

  February 2016.

  Time ticked on.

  Launch readiness review. Nobody wanted to hear anything but the crisp, can-do NASA style. But this was seat-of-your-pants private sector, and in the eyes of everybody, especially leathery old hands like Brad Fowler, there were too many open items, too much unrehearsed.

  NASA flights were like grand operas, the score and cast selected long before, the outcome ordained. This was more like a musical comedy they improvised as the band was warming up.

  The solid rocket motors were time-honored technology, and still just a tad tricky. Maybe more than a tad. Stacking the whole assembly, booster and solids, had an uncomfortable resemblance to building a house of cards. Axelrod had paid the better part of a billion bucks to get full use of the Cape's facilities, right up to and including the Vehicle Assembly Building.

  The crew flew into Runway 33, right next to the soaring square profile of the biggest building in the world. They marched out in their Consortium uniforms—Axelrod had insisted on the red-blue spandex suits—and stood there staring up at the VAB. They milled around like insects beneath the building's bulk until the press corps arrived, halting at the Axelrod-commanded respectful distance.

  In the shimmering Cape heat the reporters and their big sun-shaded cameras looked a lot like old 1950s movie Martians, and Julia treated them pretty much that way—as objects of loathing. She had enjoyed enough exposure, thank you. The best thing about Mars, right then, was not the exploration and frontier and unknown and all that, but the fact that there would be nobody else there.

  All four lined up behind a single microphone and spoke a few platitudes for what a PR type called “footage effect”—just enough to get a flash-recognition on the news, not enough to actually make a story out of it.

  And what story could there be? Astronauts on their way uphill to the Big Empty. Luckily the reporters and VIP guests alike had to keep the twenty feet distance commanded by the quarantine rules, to avoid the crew picking up a head cold. Not a good way to go into a launch. No viruses to Mars either, couldn't have that.

  Once they were into the hab and belted in by the ground crew to the adjustable acceleration couches, the checkoffs went smoothly and then the waiting began.

  Julia had been through this already, they all had, and so she knew that the worst moment was before they lit the Roman candle under her. It was right now, when there was only waiting and too much thinking with not a damn thing to do. Astronauts were people built to be busy, not at their best when stuck immobile. When the prickly fears could come inching up the spine.

  Tick, tick, tick.

  Her whole life did not flash before her, but pieces of it flapped by like anxious seagulls as her attention darted around the cockpit. Voices buzzed in her headphones and she tried not to think of sitting on top of two million kilograms of supercold hydrogen and oxygen, two basic molecules yearning to kiss each other and explode in their elemental passion, to fling them at the empty eggshell blue sky.

  They were all alone out here in the rippling tropical heat, all their relatives and friends and public standing a respectful five kilometers away because if anything went wrong …

  Liftoff.

  There was nothing about lift in it. Instead, there was huge noise and rattling and shaking and then a hard hammering and a pressing weight. The hab was being shaken profoundly, as if by an angry giant that could jar and jiggle in all directions at once.

  She had done it before, but every time there was the same momentary terror, far too late. Why am I here?

  They spent a day in near Earth orbit, checking out systems before casting off into the deep.

  Microgravity bothered the brain. The perception of primordial primate unease busied the mind with the business of trying to offset shifting fluids in the skull. Senses kept screaming to the mind that we're falling!—all the time. Fretting about survival led to dumb astronauts. Julia found, just as on space station flights, that her reflexes were doughy, her thoughts muddy.

  Plus, half those in zero g got sick. No matter if they had been there before, as all four had. This time it was Julia's turn. She had always felt a bit superior to her NASAnaut companions on space station flights, as they grew woozy.

  She felt odd, then ill, then a lurching, hideous nausea. The “queasy cruds” struck arbitrarily, with an impartiality she found insulting. She was an old space hand! On her way to more important destinations than crummy old orbit! Her stomach was betraying her.

  The medicos still couldn't prevent it or predict it. This proved to be of little comfort. But there were little pills that got it under control within a day. You turned green, threw up, weren't much good for anything, and then you got okay. Yippee ti yi yay, space cowboys!

  Or cowgirls. As fluctuations would have it, the men were fine.

  Hurried preparations went on all around her in the cockpit/hab while she lolled in her g-couch, following Viktor's orders and not thinking about the food he offered and looking out the port at the big creamy world she was about to leave. The return ship was full of fuel, waiting for them on Mars.

  Planets perform a grand gavotte, forcing humans to dance to the same grave rhythms. Viktor checked and rechecked their ship. The most fuel-stingy method of reaching Mars, or any other world, started by slipping away from Earth's nearly circular orbit on a long, slow tangent. Their boost would start them on this glide, an ellipse that paralleled Earth's orbit at one end and that of Mars at the other. Sliding like a bead along this smooth course, they would swoop near Mars at a velocity very nearly that of the planets.

  But getting there meant hitting the window. Leave a month late and the fuel cost ran up enormously. Leave half a year late and no rocket imaginable could get you around the long loop in time; you would chase Mars all around its orbit—watching the blue-green world dwindle away, as every second, that oasis of air and water fell behind another 33 kilometers. Even moving that fast, a thousand times the speed of the Apollo missions to the moon, it would take six months to ride the 400 million kilometers.

  Axelrod did a ‘cast with them, saying confidently, “We're going to Mars!” to big background applause. She tried not to throw up, for several reasons.

  All systems were go. So they went.

  11

  JANUARY 14,2018

  THEY HAD ALL BEEN SHAKEN U
P BY THE AEROBRAKING ON ARRIVAL. SURE, the simulations had been tough—harder vibrations than at liftoff, gut-wrenching swerves as they hit high-altitude turbulence that nobody had predicted (and what if they had?).

  Coming in, they had to lose several kilometers per second of speed. Doing that by rocket braking would have imposed a considerable fuel cost. So they used friction, just like ordinary brakes. Slamming into even the tenuous CO2 atmosphere meant heating their aeroshell to the same temperature range that the Shuttle tiles had to endure.

  The hard-hammering jolts came in all three axes at once. Like a dog shaking a rag doll, she thought as her stomach lurched. She tried to pay attention, through the shattering noise—a wall of sound that threatened at each new shrill note, as if the whole hab were starting to come apart. And through that came the incredibly calm drone of Viktor's voice, somehow close and personal in her headset.

  “Coming up on max delta, heading at four four three seven, coming close to margin on that. In the envelope, adjusting for pitch, altitude four eight seven.”

  He was talking to Marc but it had a hugely comforting effect on her. She knew that he was documenting every step in real time, so that if something failed, at least there might be some record of what went wrong. One of the pre-positioned orbiting comm satellites for the Mars Outpost program was receiving whatever signal could escape the plasma discharge glow that made them look like a fresh orange comet high up in the Martian day.

  She held on through it all, praying to Viktor, not God, to bring them through the long agonizing minutes while they skated around a quarter of the planet. Wind friction howled and the rugged shell in their nose turned bright red, shedding its nose tiles like a spaceship with skin disease. Then—whang! whoomp!—they blew the aeroshell and the heavy hand of deceleration lifted a bit.

  The hab rotated abruptly, pulled by the deploying parachutes into a wrenching one-eighty. Noises trickled away. A sudden silence.

  They were swaying beneath their chute canopy and suddenly she was cheering, they all were. Falling, still, but slower—

  Their rocket flared with a roar, working with the chutes. Viktor was calling out numbers, getting smaller—their altitude, seventeen, fourteen … in kilometers. They had crossed hundreds of millions of kilometers and now just eight klicks … five …

  She had held her breath. Amateurish, but to hell with that.

  Liftoff had been rough, sure, but they had not had to hit a patch of sky a few klicks across. Just anywhere in orbit would do; correct for it later.

  This time Viktor had to put them smack next to the Earth Return Vehicle, the ERV. Sure, close enough to reach with a dune buggy would be okay, though inconvenient for the next year and a half.

  Viktor had liked Raoul's going outside to dump their dung—saved a ton of mass that didn't have to be gingerly lowered onto Mars with their precious fuel. He used the extra fuel now, bringing them in at less than one hundred klicks/hour to a near hover a few kilometers up. He used the radar altimeter, the Outpost Mars location finder beacon. And not to forget the external camera that was feeding the view to Earthside, making Axelrod millions per moment.

  “Easy, heading one eight three, drifting north … I see the site. ERV. Looks like home! … Coming up … got parking spot all picked out …”

  A roaring. “Plenty dust … touch … Engines off!”

  After the eerie first hour, the magic of Mars lifted enough to make Raoul walk over to the ERV. First priority was his checkout. It was a pleasant stroll, crossing ruddy rock-strewn land they had seen a thousand times through the dune buggy TV eyes. Julia ambled off to the left, kicked a rock to see it tumble away in the delicious low g. Then she heard Raoul groan in her suit comm.

  By the time she got to the ERV, Raoul had crawled up under it. She saw what he had—a dark stain on the sand, maybe as big as two hands across. Small. But enough.

  The ERV had had no human to guide it. Given that, its performance was miraculous. It had touched down within 2.3 kilometers of the exact center of its ellipse. A tribute to NASA's skill.

  But Raoul quickly found that it had come in off-level. No problem, but a strut had jammed against a boulder. At its descent speed, the jar and wrench had crushed fuel pipes and valves around the thruster.

  “How come none of the diagnostics detected this?” Marc demanded.

  Raoul had just crawled out from under the cowling, while the others stood waiting nervously, looking at the twisted strut.

  “Those lines were not pressurized,” Raoul said.

  Viktor said nothing, just ducked and went under to look for himself.

  When he emerged he was frowning. “A yaw failure in aerobraking maneuver, probably. Ship came in too fast. Only a shade too fast would do it.”

  Marc swore.

  “How bad is it?” Julia asked.

  “Not too bad, I think,” said Raoul. But he grimaced, which told the true story. “And I am without a real machine shop,” a phrase they all would get very tired of hearing. “I will have to improvise.”

  After the shock of it the men said little. She understood—why stress the obvious? Fix it, or die.

  Julia sat at the comm, savoring her last mug of tea. Soon enough she and Marc would have to suit up and go outside the hab for the liftoff test. Raoul and Viktor had just left. She'd felt a thump as the outer door of the air lock closed after them.

  They generally worked in pairs. Backup systems were the order of the day, always. Redundancy was the key to survival.

  On Mars, the threats were redundant also. If the cold didn't get you, the atmosphere would. If both of them failed, the dryness was always waiting. Not to mention the damned toxic dust.

  The buddy system had a proud tradition on Earth, from scuba diving to NASA, she mused. On the flatscreen she watched as two colorful suits, one yellow and one purple, walked outside across the landscape, one skipping lightly, one walking carefully, toward the ERV.

  Although they had trained in the Devon Island arctic base, there it was only the cold you had to defend against. A wrap of wool across the face had protected Shackleton, Amundsen, Peary and the other crazy pole seekers of a century ago. And their technology had been barely sufficient to shield them against even the one peril. Plenty of frozen bodies at both ends of the Earth. With the new fabrics—warm, lightweight, basically self-regulating to release excess moisture—you really only had to be careful for your nose and lungs.

  Not until Everest were the twin threats of cold and airlessness combined. The lethal zone, they called the upper reaches of the mountain, where even the best prepared ventured at extreme risk, losing brain cells to anoxia and becoming weaker by the day. This whole planet is a lethal zone.

  Sitting here in the hab, a mug of tea in her hand, in comfortable sweats, it seemed safe enough. But they never forgot that outside Mars waited, implacably hostile. Not a bad place, just not one tailored for humans.

  Sometimes, in her dreams, she imagined there was something, an unseen terror, lurking just outside her door. If she stepped out unprepared, she would be lost. Rationally, she knew it was just anxiety over having to be constantly prepared that gave her the dreams—but the afterimage remained.

  Living on Mars was really more like living in the wet ocean, ironically, than at dry and cold Devon Island. That joint NASA/Mars Society facility had been built just about the turn of the millennium to prepare for a manned mission to Mars. There they were drilled into the habit of always suiting up by the numbers before going outside, going through an internal checklist of necessary gear. This amused the permanently Earthbound staff, some of whom had become quite cold-tolerant, and dashed between buildings in indoor wear.

  But Julia had never become accustomed to that first great shock of cold air when she went outside. Ironically, on Mars, so much colder than the arctic, they never felt it. You'd have to be suicidal, or crazy, to step outside without a pressure suit and helmet. Best estimates were that you could survive less than thirty seconds.

  So, o
n cold, dry Mars, like divers they checked and rechecked air tanks and connectors, heaters and sensors—their own and those of the ever-present buddy.

  And they watched each other's backs. Always. And so they had survived a year and a half.

  The liftoff test came after two days of hard labor.

  They had been burning methane with oxygen in the rovers for over 500 days. But that was with carbon dioxide to keep the reaction heat down, acting like an inert buffer much as nitrogen did in the air of Earth. The ERV boosters would burn at a far higher temperature. The many engineering tests said the system would withstand that, but those were all done in comfortable labs on Earth. The test ERV had not been sitting on cold, dusty Mars for four years. And did not involve a system that had ruptured on landing. Or one that Raoul had labored month after month to fix. His extensive labors had hampered the exploration, casting a shadow over their long months here.

  They'd debated doing just an engine test, maybe even a partial pressurization.

  “Maybe we should just warm it up this time,” said Marc.

  “You mean do the test in steps?” Raoul looked worn and tired from the accumulated tension.

  “So why do test at all?” Viktor's voice had an edge that they all knew by now meant he was keeping his feelings under control. “It works, it doesn't work. We should find out as soon as possible.”

  “It might be safer,” said Marc.

  “Partial test is only useful if it doesn't work.” Viktor's finger jabbed the air, though careful not to point at anyone. He needed to express himself but had learned to not irk others at the same time.

  Marc said, “If you lift off and come down wrong, maybe the wind blows you some—”

  “Weather is calm. And I know how to fly straight up.”

  Marc nodded. Julia said carefully, “The logic seems compelling.”

  “Yeah, if we test-fire it too many times we risk other problems,” said Raoul. “Can't beat the devil.”

  The men looked at each other. Somehow this had turned into a minor challenge-response between the three, leaving her out of it. At times like this, when the technical expertise was wholly outside her realm, they treated her like Mrs. Viktor.