by T I WADE
“Now that sounds like I might get to like this rock,” Jonesy interrupted. The rest of the crew laughed enjoying Jonesy’s dilemma.
“This reaction is used in welding, purifying ores, and in fireworks,” the scientist carried on unperturbed. “Iron is used in making magnets, electromagnets, paints, dyes, insecticides, and is used in some water filtration systems. With iron always comes nickel. Nickel plays important roles in the biology of microorganisms and plants. Nickel is used in many specific and recognizable industrial and consumer products, including stainless steel, magnets, and our future production of rechargeable batteries.
“Also, enzymes of some microorganisms and plants contain nickel which makes the metal an essential nutrient for them,” added Suzi from in Astermine One, and adding to their Chief Astronaut’s bad attitude toward the lecture.
“OK, that’s enough science crap for today, ladies and others,” interrupted Jonesy. “I need to get us down, and if you don’t let me, I’m going to get the gun and blow this shiny marble to smithereens.” That shut Martha Von Zimmer up.
The asteroid’s rotation was easy to maneuver, it was only in one direction, and it was big enough for them to go into orbit; one by one they parked next to Jonesy. That was it for the work day; Jonesy needed to run numbers through the computers for gravity. He knew the results a millisecond before they did. His engines had used double the thrust to get him down, which meant that there was more gravity on this planet compared to the last one. He was pretty accurate, the computers showed 59 percent of earth’s gravity. They weren’t going anywhere and were secure on the asteroid.
Twelve hours later VIN was, as always, first out to unload the mining equipment as well as the two spiders from Asterspace Three. Ryan had spoken to Martha an hour earlier and both had decided that ten canisters of iron and nickel would be enough. This asteroid was predicted to be composed of a limited range of materials they needed, especially the Rare-Earth metals. Also VIN noticed that there were no rubble piles on this one, nor any ice. It felt like solid metal underneath his feet.
He hit the ground with a shovel, he couldn’t hear anything, but he did feel the vibration of metal against metal. Apart from the spiders digging in, they could only search around for loose rocks or stones. There was no way they would get through this rock. VIN asked Boris, the spider specialist, to come out, and told everyone else to stay put.
Between VIN and Boris, they found a smooth flat area about 200 feet from the ships. VIN selected the place because there was a cliff on one side about 20 feet above his head, and the flat ground was pockmarked with small holes big enough to put his fist into. It was like blast shrapnel had hit this particular area, or somebody had tried to dig here before, to test the area. He laughed internally at the idea, telling himself that he was either going mad, or had already gone mad. People digging here? What were the chances of that?
He and Boris programmed the spiders’ computers and watched as their lasers turned on, emitting short intermittent blue light blasts at the rock between their eight feet. The two spiders began the vertical shaft by standing on opposite sides of the selected site and poured laser fire onto the same piece of rock between them. The hole had been computerized to be the exact size hole to have a docking port installed one day at its entrance, if necessary.
Once the spiders were thirty feet underground, they could be programmed to start tunneling a larger horizontal underground structure. Their lasers could blast rock as high at four feet above their bodies, creating underground corridors and rooms in levels of eight feet. Ryan and his scientists didn’t want large underground spaces, as they didn’t want to waste atmospheric air by pumping it into them.
These spiders were about the same size and weight as VIN, ten times more powerful, and they could do just about anything with their eight legs. They could also work 24/7 for the next couple of decades. All that was needed was a “dig” diagram mapped out on their main computers. The CAD program that controlled them was like a computerized design program. The length, breadth, and height of a hole or cavern could be programmed into the computers, and they would automatically work as a team to complete the task, allowing for levels within the cavern.
It was interesting to see how fast they burrowed into this asteroid, causing minute chips and rocks to spew out in all directions. Once they blasted rocks loose, each spider had a shovel system under its belly, which would empty the hole of loose rubble. Next, they would fill an aluminum canister with rock and carry it with four legs while walking out of the hole with the other four. VIN knew the spiders could walk faster than he ever could, even using only four of their legs. They could climb up a tunnel or along a floor at up to 30 miles an hour with a 500-pound load of rocks in a canister.
Once out of the cavern, they would place the rocks at a pre-programmed location. Of course, Boris programmed the robots to place the canisters close to the ships and return with an empty canister.
The spiders were already working two hours after the two men stepped onto the asteroid so they still had an hour to check out the surrounding area.
VIN permitted Martha and Michael to exit the vehicles. The two newbies were to unload a few more canisters from the craft, inspect the metal chips blasted loose by the spiders, and begin collecting them. Once the two emerged, VIN and Boris went further afield. They found a slope to walk up onto the ledge where they could see further.
“It is really weird on this planet,” VIN told everybody listening to him, including the America One Bridge crew. “It is smooth and clean of dust up here. Also the daylight hours are less than three hours in length. When we first exited the sun was over the one horizon, and now it’s about to set over the other. I suggest all the craft turn on your external lights, so we can continue work.”
For 30 minutes they looked around for rubble piles; there weren’t any to find. What they did find was a vertical hole hidden behind the small cliff in the surface only thirty feet from where their spiders were digging. It was nearly perfectly round and slightly smaller than the one their spiders were digging. VIN aimed his helmet light into the dark hole. The light penetrated only several feet, and stopped revealing rubble that looked like melted rock. A cold shiver went down his back.
“Boris, what do you make of this hole?” VIN asked.
“You know, I have a feeling that something made this hole. It is too perfect to just be a hole made by an asteroid hit. I don’t know, but the edges are cracked and jagged slightly more than ours will be. It is very old, you can tell by the weathering. VIN, I don’t know what to say; maybe it was made by a piece of molten lava, or a hot comet, by the melted rock at the base.”
It was time to return to the ships and a twelve-hour rest.
Over their rest period, other spacewalkers went out in pairs to collect the shards of rock. By the time VIN and Boris returned the two spiders were already two feet deep into the hole. They headed back to the other hole they discovered, searched around the area, but found nothing.
The days came and went every three hours. The rapidity of day to night to day again was very disconcerting and two of the crew were already feeling ill.
During their next shift, VIN and Boris joined Jonesy and family in SB-III, and they spent twenty minutes during the daylight hours flying a hundred feet above the surface of the asteroid. They saw a second hole, about a hundred feet away from the first one, and Jonesy put the craft down.
VIN, Boris and Maggie exited to examine the second hole; it was exactly the same size and in the same condition as the first, old and very cracked, only one foot deep, with the same solid, melted rock sealing it. There were several dozen loose rocks lying around it.
Boris was on one knee, feeling the solid, sealed entrance to the hole. “It looks like the rocks were pushed up from underneath. The force must have been extremely hot because they melted together. Whatever pushed them up must have spewed all these rocks out around the hole. I believe now that it was some sort of volcanic reaction from inside th
e planet, not from a comet hitting it.”
“I have an idea about this,” Maggie offered. “Maybe there was a volcanic explosion inside the asteroid, just like on Earth, and lava spewed up creating these round exit holes to release pressure. I bet when these rocks are analyzed they will show volcanic activity.” Both men nodded, happy that a woman could give them a reasonable, alternative to thinking that somebody had been there before them.
VIN and Boris felt relieved, and now with the possibility of something hot and dangerous under their feet, on such a small round asteroid, they wanted to leave for home as fast as possible. What might happen if the spiders hit lava and it began to spray out over them?
Ryan, listening in to all conversations, agreed that they should leave after the next shift. He asked the three crews to fill a canister with any loose rocks they found for analysis on board the mother ship.
They returned to the first landing zone to find one of the spiders still hard at work, now eight feet deep. The other was on standby mode waiting for the other to complete the tunnel so it could enter and work in a different area.
After two more shifts, the ten canisters were filled, plus the one from the second site. They had been on the asteroid for three days and within ten hours, it was going to pass within 1,500 miles of America One. It would be a short trip home.
Because they had six months before the planet approached Mars, the second spider wasn’t really needed. Ryan directed Boris to reprogram the first spider to complete a two-level internal chamber beginning 25 feet under the surface, 60 feet across, and eight feet high.
The spider’s computerized readout analyzed that at the current digging speed, the cavern would be complete in 152 days and six hours, or in just over five months.
Boris set up an area within thirty feet of the hole, where the sider would deposit the rubble it dug out, and programmed smooth walls and floor. A slightly rough ceiling wouldn’t matter, as with the good gravity, they wouldn’t be walking on the ceiling.
The four ships lifted off two hours later and exited orbit towards America One. The single robot continued its work. It didn’t need solar power, and with its tiny power pack of plutonium-238, it could work underground 24/7. As they headed away, Maggie and Suzi agreed over the intercom that they hoped it wouldn’t be lonely. VIN replied that he hoped the robot wouldn’t be waylaid by a female robot blinking its blue light at the masculine spider. Jonesy decided not to contribute to the conversation.
“Great job!” stated Ryan as the mining team gathered in the cafeteria, after bathing and cleaning up. The bridge had actually seen the asteroid, the size of a lit-up star in the night sky pass by several hours earlier. It had passed from left to right in front of them, and they would see it again in the near future.
Chapter 19
Mars sighted.
The next three months aboard America One went by without many more asteroids coming into range of the 200,000-mile radar screens. One passed by 170,000 miles away, traveling over 100,000 miles an hour, which made Ryan realize that the range of their defense system, would not give them enough time to dodge a bullet if a rock headed their way at high speed. Boris, Martha and Igor were sure that even a million miles an hour was possible out here in the deepness of space.
Nothing remained still except the sun itself. Everything from a tiny piece of rock to the largest planets was on the move, if not in orbits around the sun or other planets, then just passing through space. Every object in space was moving, which made something standing still just as dangerous, due to excessive high speeds.
The only revelation from the last asteroid came a month out from Mars; it surprised everyone, especially, Maggie, VIN and Boris. The loose rocks they had retrieved from the second location revealed no sign of any volcanic activity. Something, with temperatures of over 2,000 degrees, had broken them up, but it was not volcanic or lava. Whatever it was, it appeared to have melted and sealed the hole.
Ten days later, Martha and her team reported even more spell-binding news. The melting had occurred over ten thousand years ago. That relieved VIN and Boris somewhat.
Jonesy remarked that at least the poor lonely spider left on the asteroid wouldn’t be fried spider by the time they could retrieve it.
Two weeks later, Mars, slightly starboard to the center of the Bridge, appeared as a red marble. The sun had decreased in size slightly but was still powerful enough to light up their destination. They weren’t heading directly to the planet, but to where it would be in two weeks.
Many, in addition to Jonesy, had grown weary of the long flight. Six months of being cooped up in a space ship was certainly a challenge to get used to. He and the other pilots were raring to go; they wanted to get out and do some flying.
America One had been designed to always stay in orbit and never land on any planet. Her landing undercarriage had been designed for when new vertical thrusters would be placed on her and then, one day, maybe land on another world. Unfortunately the maximum gravity could be no more than 30% of Earth’s, or the ship’s superstructure and cylinders could collapse.
“Team, here are the facts about Mars,” started Ryan the next morning at a flight crew meeting in the Bridge. “Length of day, 24 hours 37 minutes; temperature, same as space, down to a cold minus 190 degrees on average, and possibly minus 237 at one of the poles in midwinter. It can be much colder on Mars than the average temperature we have had up here in space. Atmosphere, 95% carbon dioxide, 0.13% oxygen and other gases. But, what interests me is the gravity: 38% of Earth’s; nearly low enough to land America One, but unfortunately not low enough to risk it.”
“Are we going to tour all the unmanned, human-made junk heaps littered around the planet?” Jonesy asked. “I’m sure we could power them up and get them to do things like bring us coffee, or a beer when we are slaving away digging holes in the planet.”
“Yes, we will have salvage rights, and I’m sure that we can do so if we need them,” smiled Ryan. “But first we need to decide on a place to land. For at least two weeks, we will orbit the planet and search for anything out of the ordinary that might tempt me to set up base. The poles have ice, so we will do a flight down there to gather information on what it is comprised of. We do have room for more water, only water, and I would like to fill all our tanks and not have to recycle it through us so often. The two tanks built inside the cubes are still only half full and we could handle another 20,000 gallons. The biology team and I will be ecstatic to have that much water on board.”
“Maybe they could produce a Mars beer, maybe a fine lager to beat Bud on Earth? We could all become very rich. I can see it now,” continued Jonesy, interrupting the meeting. “Why drink polluted Budweiser when Astermine’s virgin Mars lager will give you better taste with water that hasn’t gone through 100 humans before it reaches the bottle!”
“Thank you for your creativity, Mr. Jones,” smiled Ryan. “I didn’t realize that you had so much in you. Unfortunately, at minimum, it would cost at least $500 a bottle, which would not tempt the average American beer drinker. I don’t think you figured in the cost to get a beer, even one manufactured in orbit and sent back to earth.
“A smaller, wealthy market, maybe?” added Jonesy. “At least we can make it and perfect it up here. I’ll be chief taster.”
Coffee arrived with freshly made cakes, and Jonesy was left to think about his new business venture by himself.
Over the morning, a plan of action was developed to get all three shuttles and the mother ship fitted with a range of cameras, to span out and record information on the planet’s surface. Ryan wanted a more accurate, more up-to-date map of the Martian surface. Igor calculated that 14 days of continuous orbits at 110 miles altitude over the entire surface would produce that map. The information would be recorded on a hard drive in a computer on the Bridge and then the computer would search for any abnormalities it could find in the information. Martha Von Zimmer’s team had spent the last month programming the system.
Igor continued the discussion explaining the activities of liquids and frozen solids on Mars. “Sublimation, or phase transition, is the transition of a substance directly from the solid phase to the gas phase without passing through an intermediate liquid phase. Solid carbon dioxide, or dry ice as you pilots know it, sublimes readily at atmospheric pressure at -78.5°C. Snow and ice also sublime, although more slowly. For example, this allows a wet cloth to be hung outdoors in freezing weather and retrieved later in a dry state. In freeze-drying, the material to be dehydrated is frozen and its water is allowed to sublime under reduced pressure or vacuum. The loss of snow from a snow layer during a cold spell is often caused by sunshine acting directly on the upper layers of the snow. So, under conditions on Mars, solid frozen matter does come and go much like Earth, but under much harsher conditions. If you left drops of ice on the planet’s surface, they wouldn’t be there a few days later. The ice sheets on the planet’s south and north poles move through sublimation constantly. The ice disappears and returns. That is why we don’t want a permanent station in the colder regions; however, our mining craft can certainly land there for a few days, up to a week at a time, and collect water to fill our tanks.”
“What are we looking for?” VIN asked Ryan.
“Thank you, Igor. Mr. Noble, a good mining venture as well as a new permanent or temporary base on Mars. There are very mean storms on Mars, far worse than on Earth. The climate of Mars has been an issue of scientific curiosity for centuries because Mars is the only terrestrial planet whose surface can be directly observed in detail from the Earth. Although Mars is smaller, at 11% of Earth’s mass and 50% farther from the Sun than the Earth, its climate has important similarities, such as the polar ice caps, seasonal changes and the observable presence of weather patterns. Although the climate is similar to Earth’s in some respects, including seasons and periodic ice ages, there are also important differences such as the absence of liquid water, though, as I earlier mentioned, frozen water exists. Mars’ atmosphere has a scale height of approximately 11 km, or 36,000 feet, 60% greater than that on Earth. Pilots, please go and study ‘scale height’ after we are finished here. It will be important for landing on the planet. The climate is of considerable relevance to the question of whether life is or was ever present on the planet.
