The Martian Race

by Gregory Benford

  “You knew about this?” Julia shot Raoul a glance.

  He shrugged. “Axelrod said to keep quiet.”

  “I went to our fellow explorers, those German Airbus management types. Followed Raoul's estimate of what he might need, if his on-site repairs don't quite work out. Dickered. Finally got Airbus to fly his box.”

  Cheers and shouts from all four of them. Julia glanced at Raoul again. Keeping secrets.

  “I got the weight of all that gear down, way down. Had to. Engineers here said it's the best they can send. Parts, tools. Airbus will get it to you somehow.”

  “Tell them just look for only humans on Mars, we be here,” Viktor said happily.

  “They're under no guarantee to land at your site. They may go somewhere else, they won't say.” Axelrod shrugged modestly. “Thought you guys would want to know. I hope it kind of makes up for not flying the second ERV.”

  It didn't for Julia, not entirely. But she had to appreciate the way he brought it off. His last flourish was impressive: “And I had to lay out a cool one hundred million dollars for them to fly it to you. Biggest freight bill in history, got to be. At least I'll get in the record books for that.”

  They had popped one of Viktor's last bottles of champagne over this message. “Welcome to the captain's table,” he had said grandly. “Part of special mass allowance.”

  The voluptuous curve and weight of the bottle was wasteful to Julia's eyes, and wonderful. After nine months on Mars, they had needed a celebration. He had even produced caviar, eyes gleaming— the best pale sturgeon, in a delicate little box.

  Help was on the way. And so was the competition.

  “I was speaking to Katherine,” said Raoul slowly, visibly trying to wrench his thoughts away from the engine failure. “They can cut the time by using more fuel. Leave Earth faster, and power decelerate at Mars.” He toyed with his coffee mug.

  “I, too, worked out most available orbits,” Viktor said. “They come in with big velocities, eight kilometers per second. Have to lose that energy with a long aerobrake, I think.”

  “So they could be here anytime?” asked Marc.

  Raoul shrugged. “Basically.”

  “We don't even know where they're going to land,” said Julia. “They have to land near here or we can't reach them.”

  “It's a big planet,” Marc said.

  “Up to boss to arrange passage with Airbus.”

  “Okay. Even if they get here soon, they have to refuel—”

  “With what?” asked Marc. He looked at Raoul and Viktor. “What can they use? What are they using now?”

  “Hydrogen, probably,” said Viktor. “Is lightest—most bang for mass.” Raoul nodded. “What they use to go home, that is anybody's guess.”

  “What else could they do?” Marc demanded.

  “What we did—or the ERV, I mean,” Raoul said. “Bring hydrogen. Run a chem plant to pull in CO2, make methane and oxygen and water. Even with a big nuclear reactor to run a bigger plant, that's several months’ work.”

  Marc pressed, “You're sure?”

  Raoul nodded. “We'll beat them home, I'd say.”

  “There are too many unknowns about Airbus,” said Julia, “and I don't understand how they affect our mission.” I never expected this would become a technical discussion about nuclear rocketry. Time to edge us back to the vent trip. Guess I was being a little too sneaky about my intentions. She looked pointedly at Marc. “I'm trying to go someplace else with this discussion.”

  “Well,” said Marc, “even if they get here tomorrow, they still have to fulfill the prize conditions if they hope to win. We've collected the geological data, taken the core samples, done the meteorology, and surveyed the hell outta this corner of Mars. If they hope to win, they'll hafta do the same. That'll take time.”

  “It's useless to ask how much. It took us almost a year and a half.”

  “But we squirted all the data back to Earth. They know where to find everything.” Marc's upper lip wrinkled with exasperation. “No dry holes for Airbus!”

  Julia said mildly, trying to keep them talking despite their fatigue, “How can they use that?”

  “They can't reach water very easily,” Marc said. “I mean, they had to launch with some kind of plan, and I hadn't found any ice back then, when they were figuring out their mission profile.”

  “With lot of power, people can adapt,” Viktor said, toying with his cup.

  “Yeah, that nuke can do a lot of work,” Raoul said.

  “So there are plenty of maybes,” Julia said forcefully. “But the orbital mechanics, they can't change.”

  “Even nuclear obeys Newton,” Viktor said with a grin.

  “If they miss the launch window in two months,” she said, “how long are they here for? Another two years?”

  “Got to be,” Viktor said. “They freeze through winter, like us.”

  “We had cold, but at least it was clear. They'll get the southern summer first, with its dust storms,” Marc said. “Nasty time to get much exploring done.”

  “Remember, they had no choice,” Julia said. “They launched late into a screwball trajectory. Going in as far as Venus, they've come through about twice the heating we had. Probably took a lot of fuel loss from boil-off, right?”

  Raoul nodded. “But they have that extra push from the nuke. They could carry more of everything—”

  “Speaking of that, what's our supply situation?” She asked it although everybody knew the answer. She was afraid to let the conversation get out of the channels she wanted.

  “The ERV has seven months times six people,” Marc said automatically, since he was in charge of provisions. NASA had provisioned it to return a full crew of six to Earth. “We've got maybe six weeks’ worth here for each, not counting greenhouse food.”

  “I am surprised that we have not eaten it all,” Viktor said with an artificial lightness.

  A clear signal to her. She saw that he, too, had caught the sense of gathering tension in the room, apparent in tone but not so far in words. Their advisors had trained “the couple,” as they termed it, in “counterconversational” tactics, useful to defuse conflicts.

  Julia nodded, letting a silence grow for a moment, hoping that would help. Indeed, Viktor was right. They had devoured so much after the landing, as they adjusted to the heavy labor and constant cold, that early estimates showed them running out weeks early. So they had tapered off, watched their cold exposure—the real culprit, it turned out, not the muscle work—and got their eating rate down. Mars imposed harsh demands on the body, burning between five and six thousand calories a day. “I asked because we may have to be here until the very end of the launch window.”

  “Why?” Raoul demanded suddenly.

  “I mean, if the repairs take longer than we think—”

  “They won't.” He chopped the air with his hand. “I know the problems, we can make good progress.”

  “I'm sure—”

  “Right, Viktor?”

  “I believe our fix, it is correct. Not the double line.”

  A white lie, Julia thought. Viktor was plenty worried about the repairs.

  Marc gave Viktor a skeptical scowl. “You're sure?”

  “No one can be sure until we have another test,” Julia said in what she thought was her best perfectly reasonable voice.

  “I am sure,” Raoul said.

  “You were sure before the test, too,” Marc said evenly.

  “What does that mean?” Raoul shot back.

  Julia tried to head them off with, “Look, I don't believe—”

  “Repairs, that's your whole reason for being here,” Marc said, again with his deceptively easygoing manner.

  “Rocks, that's your reason,” Raoul said. “Which is harder?”

  Marc said, “I'm just saying—”

  “Maybe say less, would be better,” Viktor put in.

  “Harder isn't it,” Marc said. “Getting the job done, that's it.”

 
Raoul said, “I explained out there, pretty clear I thought. We been sitting here in this sand, these ‘fines’ you geologists call them. Not just grit, but peroxide grit. Smaller than anything on Earth. Microsand! It gets into those systems, eats away, works on them for years while every day and night the temperature goes up and down, maybe a hundred and fifty degrees in a few hours. No way anybody could simulate or duplicate that on Earth. So no way to plan for it. No way. That ERV, it's been here three years. We're lucky any of it works.”

  Raoul stopped abruptly, breathing hard, the moment teetering on a precarious point.

  “Absolutely,” Julia said. “No way any engineer could know what that would do. Even the Outpost experience, that was with simpler systems, easier couplings, lesser pressures—right?”

  It was a calculated risk, taking one side. Marc could run up his aggravation curve, go over the top. And she needed his support for more exploration.

  But Raoul had to come ahead on this one, she sensed. If he lost heart, or even slowed his relentless labors, they were all in even more trouble.

  She thought again of her strategy in initiating this discussion. Get everything out into the open, agree on tasks, relieve some of the tension. And get the okay to go exploring.

  She looked at Raoul and said carefully, “Well, I'm relieved you and Viktor think the ERV can be repaired, but we have a supply problem if we miss the launch window. I think Axelrod or NASA—and I'm not going to get in the middle of that one—should get that second ERV on its way, loaded with two and a half years of supplies.”

  Raoul looked very unhappy, but did not object.

  “Either that, or confirm that Airbus can take us back at the launch window,” she finished.

  Marc said, “Yeah, why haven't we heard from them? We know the crew, why the bloody radio silence?” He was still angry, but had found a new target.

  “Not very likely they can help,” said Viktor. “Even with a nuke, mass is mass. Seven people plus food is no doubt more than they can carry.”

  “You're sure?” Julia sat up, startled.

  “From its dimensions, from simple scaling laws—yes.” Viktor looked at each of them in turn. “Do not expect miracles.”

  “Damn,” said Raoul. “I'd been hoping …”

  “Who wants to go limping home with them anyway?” Marc grimaced. “Christ, after all this time, we've worked our asses off doing those inane manufacturing tests, collecting all those samples—and all for nothing.”

  Before the conversation veered again into confrontation, she leaped in with her trump card.

  “Raoul, I have no reason to doubt your assessment of the dust problem. You and Viktor can't be expected to fix the unfixable. If all the seals are exhausted, or the metal is fatigued, it's a major miscalculation on NASA's part. It's a planning failure, not a mechanical glitch. The ERV you're trying to fix should've been only the backup, to give us reserve fuel and an oxygen supply. Our return ship should've launched just after we did, not two years before. Earth needs to send us a fresh vehicle.”

  Raoul looked at her with surprise.

  Through Viktor, Julia had sensed Raoul's growing frustration with the repairs. Every time he looked at a new system, he found the same creeping disintegration. He was attempting a Sisyphean repair, and the weight of the boulder threatened to crush him. But he wouldn't give up. Couldn't. Latin pride plus astronaut training equaled superman image.

  Viktor had the last word. “Raoul and me, we want to test again— with our single line—and soon. If there are still problems, we go ahead with Julia's idea.”

  Nods all around. Nobody spoke. Their fragile peace worked best with silence.

  He was the commander and had taken the decision. A big hill had been crested. She'd caught them off-guard with her assessment, and it had worked.

  But Julia was still unsatisfied. She gritted her teeth.

  Damn. I couldn't quite get there. It'll have to be after the next test. But maybe this was more useful. After all, it's 40 million miles to the nearest grocery store.

  13

  JANUARY 14, 2018

  EARTHSIDE MEDIA REACTION WAS INTENSE. THEY ALL FELT IT, EVEN BE-hind the thick screen the Consortium kept between them and the rampaging media.

  She got a long e-mail from Robbie and Harry, plus all the other relatives. Once you were famous, she had learned, every distant cousin was on the doorstep. They remembered poignant moments from childhood, fraught with portent for the future Mars voyager—all on interview shows or in op-ed pieces, and so what if Julia herself couldn't remember those episodes?

  Okay, she had to admit to herself, she had gotten cynical. Years of exposure to the Mesh's worse problem—having an essentially infinite number of pen pals—had sharpened her sense of the absurdity of it all. Here she was in very real danger, and she was expected to take time to answer letters about it.

  The others felt the same, but each handled it in a different way.

  Viktor had long since stopped sending anything but bland visuals to anyone but his mother. Raoul sent long e-mails to Katherine and a very few others. Marc, though, wrote general letters that got reposted to a huge list of “intimates.” Julia did the same, trying to make them less stiff than they needed. The Consortium had contractual rights to see these group letters, scooping off any reasonably good writing for “on Mars” journalism pieces under their bylines, polished up by staff and licensed out by Axelrod. Showbiz.

  Even in this crisis, the system worked. Habit, mostly, and they all had found during the long flight here that they needed the time away from each other, to speak to another audience than the same three mugs they confronted each breakfast.

  They had met only one other real crisis, and it had been the same then, though compressed.

  Three days after their boost out of low earth orbit, well beyond the moon, they had done the spin-up for centrifugal gravity. Carefully Viktor blew the bolts that freed for deployment the cable-gravity system.

  This was the scheme the Magnum booster had been going into orbit to test. The postmortem showed that a pump failure lay at the bottom of the spectacular blowup that had killed the original Mars crew.

  So no one had actually done the entire run-through, from launch to spin-up. There had been trials at the space station, but no trial could simulate every dynamical aspect. And astronauts were trained to be professional skeptics about any piece of new gear.

  They all huddled around the cockpit as Viktor checked systems and then blew away the unneeded outer manifold. Their external camera showed a clear separation. The cable came snaking out, then, as the upper stage of their Magnum eased away.

  “Clean snake,” Viktor had said in a precise, controlled voice that could not hide his joy.

  The cable had to take the full eighty-five tons of the habitat plus the upper stage, all subject to 0.38 Earth g, the Mars normal. Viktor let it unfurl fully, two hundred meters like a slick fishing line dwindling away. He fired the hydrazine thrusters. Plumes blossomed from both the long tube of the empty upper stage and the habitat. They accelerated smoothly, upper stage becoming their counterweight.

  “Some of the manifold bolts don't fire correctly,” Viktor noted, eyeing the video. “See?” Small motes tumbled in the darkness along the cable, winking on and off in the sunlight.

  Raoul said, “Right. That seems minor. They came off the separation cowling, I guess.”

  “Should stay with cowling,” Viktor said.

  “Good riddance.”

  They were all in their acceleration couches by then, feeling the return of partial gravity. Julia had felt 0.38 g in the centrifugal spinner of the space station, but as she got up and walked around this felt subtly different. The other system had used a short, ten-meter rotation arm, and when she had walked then her inner ear sent out faint alarms. None here.

  Raoul was running the video camera for Earthside, plus the incabin fixed one, as Viktor pulled a champagne bottle from the refrigerator. Viktor's eyes popped in mock surprise. �
�Drink on board?!” for the home audience. They all laughed and beamed and watched Viktor pour an enormously expensive long pale golden stream into Julia's glass, falling in slow-mo in the new gravity—

  Thunk.

  “What is?” Viktor's brow wrinkled.

  They sprang to the external video. Tumbling away into the blackness was a sharp piece of ragged painted metal and a bolt attached to it.

  “Damn!” Viktor said. “Cowling fractured.”

  Raoul studied the dwindling shape. “Must be those bolts didn't come free easy, stressed the frame, tore it.”

  “So we spin up, we run into it.” Viktor wrenched his mouth around, as he always did when a piece of inanimate matter did not behave.

  Marc glanced at the cockpit board. “We got a light on the internals.”

  They all turned as one. Julia was still cradling the glass she had not drunk from.

  “Water pressure,” Marc said. Plumbing was one of his subsystems, though Raoul had responsibility for the overall ship systems, plus their integration.

  “We're losing it,” Raoul said. He punched in a question and the systems inventory showed them digits declining. “That's a pressure drop.”

  They looked at each other, each reaching the same conclusion as Viktor: “Cowling punch a hole in outer habitat jacket.”

  The hab was a cylinder with water-filled walls that functioned also as a radiation shield. Once they landed, the water would also provide thermal protection against Mars's bitter cold. Ingenious, but the designers had not anticipated the danger of collisions to the precious water supply.

  “It's that thin?” Marc asked. “Just a piece of metal—”

  “Moving a few meters per second, yes, could,” Viktor said. “Did.”

  Raoul had done a quick calculation. “Dropping, but not fast. This is a tiny leak, maybe as big as a thumb.”

  “We can't live with that,” Marc said.

  “Got to go EVA.” Viktor scowled at Raoul. “We.”

  It would have taken a month to lose their water through the hole, which was halfway up the habitat outer skin. Which meant that they would die perhaps four months before reaching Mars.