Voyage

by Stephen Baxter

  In his own mind, Muldoon kept comparing Curval with another good pilot: Ralph Gershon.

  Muldoon had kept a weather eye on Gershon for a while now. He’d shown himself to be willing to work at anything he was asked to. Muldoon had followed Gershon’s performance in the sims, and he’d heard – ironically, from Ted Curval himself – how determined Gershon had been to get on the Mars Landing Training Vehicle, and then, once he was there, to make that baby his own. And he’d spent a hell of a lot of his time out at Newport Beach, working on the long, slow grind of MEM development.

  Gershon was gradually putting himself into the position of being the automatic choice as MEM pilot.

  He was surely aware he was doing that – he was probably even planning for it – but that was no bad thing. It showed Gershon was figuring out the system, and knew how to apply himself around here.

  The contrast with the complacent Curval was marked. In Muldoon’s opinion, Gershon’s potential as a pilot wasn’t quite that of Curval, but then Curval showed no signs of realizing the potential he had.

  Flying Gershon would shut up another corner of the minority-rights lobby, anyhow. America’s first black face in space … But Muldoon wasn’t about to let that influence his decision one way or the other. If Gershon was seen to be getting preference he didn’t deserve – if he was appointed to a mission ahead of guys who were better qualified – then a hundred resignations would be hitting Muldoon’s desk within a day. And Muldoon would be banding them together and sending them on to Josephson, with his own stapled to the front. He was absolutely clear in his own mind about that issue.

  What was of a lot more concern to him was the fact that Gershon was a rookie. And, of course – and a big reason why Gershon was still grounded after so long in the corps – there was the question of Gershon’s stability.

  Gershon had been through Vietnam.

  That was a different type of war from what some of the older guys remembered. Gershon was a loner, a bachelor, too wild and eccentric for many of the guys – particularly the older ones who, in their own way, were deeply conservative.

  Gershon was a risk, then. But the bottom line was that Gershon could probably land the MEM in situations where a lot of other guys would abort, or even crash.

  And if Muldoon bumped him onto the upcoming D-prime mission, let him fly the test MEM in Earth orbit, he could maybe prove that quickly, and he wouldn’t be a rookie any more.

  Muldoon wrote out three names.

  CDR: Stone. MSP: Bleeker. MMP: Gershon.

  It didn’t look so bad. It was still a crew of pilots. All USAF, actually. You had a streak of brilliance in Gershon, which was missing in Curval, and which might make a lot of difference if it came down to the wire, forty million miles away on Mars. And, unlike Curval, Muldoon knew he could rely on Gershon to apply himself to every aspect of the mission, including all the dull shitty stuff. Like the geology.

  And he could expect Stone and Bleeker, both calm and unflappable, to compensate for Gershon’s instability.

  Gershon, then.

  It didn’t go any way toward satisfying the carping scientists; but, hell, he’d just have to absorb the flak about that. Bleeker was a good man, and there was no way he was going to bounce him.

  And, of course, he reflected, with Gershon being a rookie that definitely ruled out any chances of selecting Natalie York, even if he could get Gershon some experience on the D-prime. One rookie, or near-rookie, on the crew was bad enough; two would be laughable, in his opinion.

  He picked up the phone and asked Mabel to set up calls to Stone, Bleeker, Gershon, and Curval.

  He wondered if he should call York. He decided there was no need.

  Thursday, July 12, 1984 Cheney-Palouse Scabland, Macall, Washington State

  Although it wasn’t yet ten a.m., the sun was already intense on Phil Stone’s head and back. He could feel the sweat pool beneath his collar and under his light Snoopy helmet, and it soaked into the shirt on his back, under the heavy pack.

  The ground was just black rock, it seemed to him, and the heat from the cloudless furnace of a sky came blasting straight back up at him. There was nothing but rock, scrubby grass, and smashed-up gravel for miles around.

  Dangling in a plastic wallet at Stone’s belt there was a pack of aerial photographs of the area, together with a couple of outline US Geological Survey maps. Now he unclipped the pack; he looked around, trying to figure how the features he saw compared to the photographs and maps. The photographs had been blurred, artificially, so that he couldn’t see any detail finer than would be shown in Mariner photos of the surface of Mars.

  The landscape here was extraordinary. Sculpted, full of knobby hills and canyons, some cut right into the bedrock. He’d never seen anything like it.

  ‘I don’t know where the hell we are,’ he admitted. ‘It’s damned difficult. Everything looks different, from the ground.’

  Adam Bleeker, hiking beside Stone and similarly laden with helmet, pack and Mars boots, came to a halt. Bleeker was towing a two-wheeled cart called a MET, a Modular Equipment Transporter. Bleeker leaned forward, propping his hands on his knees. His blond hair seemed to be on fire in the sunlight. ‘I can figure where we are,’ Bleeker said wearily.

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘About a mile to the east of the Union Pacific. I just heard a whistle.’

  Natalie York’s radio voice crackled in Stone’s headset. ‘Say again please, EV2; I do not copy.’ York was playing capcom in the comparative comfort of her tent.

  Bleeker straightened up. He caught Stone’s eye and mouthed an obscenity.

  Stone said, ‘Roger, Natalie. We’re both a little weary here, on the surface of Mars. I guess we’re using up our consumables at a heavy rate.’

  ‘Then take a drink, you babies.’

  Bleeker mouthed more obscenities, but Stone waved him silent. ‘She’s right, goddamn it. Come on.’ He reached behind his head, to where two short plastic tubes dangled from his backpack. He pulled one of them to his mouth and sucked; tepid Tang squirted over his tongue.

  Bleeker took a mouthful of water from his own plastic spigot, swilled it around and spat it onto the black rock underfoot, where it sizzled, running away and drying quickly.

  ‘Try some Tang,’ Stone said.

  ‘Tang gives me the farts.’

  ‘Yeah, but you need to replace the potassium you sweat out. Good for the heart …’

  ‘You two heroes ready to carry on?’

  ‘Oh, up yours, York,’ Stone said.

  They straightened up and walked on.

  They came to a bed of gravel and clay, broad and sweeping; the bedrock thrust through it like blackened, exposed bone. ‘We’ve found what looks like loess, Natalie,’ Stone said. ‘River valley deposit.’ He found he was breathing hard, and he was aware that Bleeker, struggling with the heavy MET, was sweating so heavily he had soaked right through his thin T-shirt. ‘I think we should go for a SEP set-up.’

  ‘Roger, EV1.’

  Damn right it’s ‘Roger.’ Staying in one place and playing at scientists for a while was going to be a hell of a lot easier than footslogging across this goddamn volcanic battleground. After all, this was worse than the real thing; his Mars suit would be air-conditioned, for God’s sake.

  ‘Adam, why don’t you scout on ahead. Go that way, up across the loess.’

  ‘Okay.’ Bleeker set down the MET’s handle, hitched his pack on his shoulders, and set off along the loess, his blue Mars boots stained and muddy.

  Stone dug out a set of gloves from the MET. The gloves were thick and stiffened with wire, to simulate the pressurized gloves he’d have to wear on Mars. With the gloves on he picked the SEP out of the buggy. The SEP – the Surface Experimental Package, a suite of scientific instruments – was folded up into a heavy dumbbell shape, weighted to mirror how the real thing would feel under Martian gravity.

  Bleeker had walked maybe a hundred feet down the loess. ‘Over here,’ he called. ‘This is
good and flat.’

  Stone began to walk toward him. ‘Okay, Natalie, I’m deploying the SEP now.’

  ‘Rog.’

  It was a real effort to grip the bar of the dumbbell through his stiffened gloves, and to hold the packages away from him. After maybe thirty feet, he stopped and put the SEP down.

  Bleeker laughed. ‘It’s only plywood, Phil.’

  ‘Goddamn it,’ Stone shouted at him, ‘do you have to walk so far?’

  ‘You know I do.’

  Of course, Bleeker was right; on Mars they would have to carry the SEPs far enough from their MEM, or from the Mars Rover, that they could be sure to find a piece of surface undisturbed by the dust kicked up by their vehicles.

  He pulled off the gloves, and threw them in the general direction of the MET; he didn’t bother to look where they’d gone.

  Bleeker whistled. ‘Are you supposed to do that, skipper?’

  ‘Sue me.’

  He brought the SEP mockup to Bleeker and set it down; together, they began to deploy the instruments.

  Assembling the SEP was like setting up a home barbecue. Undo the bolts. Take the packages out of their Styrofoam blocks. Tamp down the dirt to make the ground flat – actually that wasn’t so easy here; the loess was gravely and unforgiving – and set the instruments level. Make sure each instrument is pointed the right way, and is the right distance from the others. And don’t let them get coated in dirt, goddamn it.

  When they’d finished, the SEP looked like an odd, multi-pointed star, with the radioisotope power package at the center, and the instruments set up on the ground all around it, connected by fine orange cables. The seismometer was that silvery paint tin. A little meteorology boom stuck up in the air – the SEPs would act as weather stations for the astronauts during their stay on Mars – and that spidery gold-leaf sculpture was a magnetometer. At the front of the assembly was a pair of tall, thin stereoscopic color cameras. And on top of the whole thing sat a delicate S-band antenna, pointing to an imaginary Earth.

  The SEPs would be placed at a variety of sites, as the astronauts completed their traverses. There was every hope that the SEPs could send back data long after Stone and his crew had returned to Earth. It would be kind of a neat memorial to the mission; and now, looking down at the installed balsa-and-card mockup of the SEP, Stone felt a certain pride in his accomplishment, in a task done well.

  ‘Okay, Natalie, the SEP’s installed,’ he said. ‘What next?’

  ‘Rog. According to our checklist, here, one of you should be setting up the CELSS, and the other taking samples.’

  ‘It ain’t time for lunch yet?’ Bleeker asked plaintively.

  Stone laughed. ‘I’ll do you a favor, Adam. You set up the CELSS, and I’ll hike around for the goddamn samples.’

  They trudged back to the MET, and Stone sucked a little more of the flat, tasteless Tang from the tube at his neck.

  I’d sure rather be watching the Olympics with a couple of cold ones at my side, he thought. But there just wasn’t the time. He’d had no time of his own, it felt like, since he’d joined the Agency.

  Stone helped Bleeker haul the mockup CELSS kit out of the MET. The CELSS, the Controlled Environment Life Support System, was a small inflatable greenhouse. It came packaged as a disk of plastic. Stone and Bleeker laid the disk out on the ground and Bleeker went to work on a small foot-pump, pushing air into the ribbing of the greenhouse; soon a dome maybe four feet high had taken shape.

  By the time he’d done Bleeker was sweating even harder. ‘My God, Phil, it’s real work operating that damned pump in these boots.’

  ‘You want to go rock hounding instead?’

  ‘No, no,’ Bleeker said. ‘Leave me to my darn vegetable patch.’

  He pulled a simple aluminum spade out of the MET and began to scrape without enthusiasm at the soil. Later he’d set up a little water sprinkler inside the dome, and he’d be planting crops – soybeans and potatoes. The idea was that the carbon-dioxide-rich Martian air would be able to reach the plants through the permeable walls of the greenhouse, and the plastic dome would trap a lot of the heat of the sun. Martian soil, it seemed from the limited Soviet lander results, contained most everything needed to grow crops save for phosphorus and free water, so Bleeker would be doping the soil with a nutrient additive.

  This CELSS kit was just an experiment; there was no intention of growing foodstuffs to supply the first expedition. The point was to prove that crops could be grown on Mars; it would point the way to techniques for future, longer-term missions – and even the first permanent colony, off in an unknowable future.

  Likewise, Ares would be carrying another long-term experiment called ISPP, for In Situ Propellant Production. The crew would set up kits designed to extract oxygen from compressed Martian air, and maybe hydrogen and oxygen from any accessible under-surface water. If it could be shown that propellants and oxidizers for the return journey could be manufactured on Mars, the weight and costs of future trips there could be cut by more than half.

  Dragging the MET, Stone began to walk, more or less north of Bleeker.

  ‘Okay, Natalie. I’m coming off this layer of loess, now. I’m arriving on what looks like a gravel bed, loosely compacted. I can see striations. Kind of streamlined, like scour marks. It looks as if water has flowed here …’

  York called, ‘Why don’t you make a sample stop?’

  ‘Rog.’

  He picked a spot, reasonably level, and set up the calibrating gnomon. He walked around the gnomon, carefully photographing it from every side. Next he worked the mechanical tests. He pressed a spring-loaded metal plate against the soil, and thrust a cylindrical probe into the ground. Then he put a lump of aggregate into a crusher, a handheld nutcracker affair. He called out readings to Natalie York as he worked.

  When he’d fully documented his site he took samples from the surface. He picked up loose material with tongs, rakes and scoops, and tried breaking a piece off a larger rock with a hammer.

  Actually, the landscape baffled Stone. He’d been taking a geology field trip each month for the last year, and he’d gotten familiar with the subject to some extent. But he’d never seen an area like this.

  Most EVA training was taking place out in the high deserts in the western USA. At one site, in Nevada, half a square mile of desert had been faked up to simulate the Martian surface as observed by the Soviets, with fine sand raked in, large boulders set deliberately on the surface. There was even a fake MEM descent stage set up there, a mockup of wood and paint. The MEM had a compartment for a full-scale Mars Rover, which you could pull down and unfold, just like the real thing. Now, that was a sim exercise Stone could appreciate: bouncing across a fake, but recognizably Martian desert, in a four-wheel-drive Rover …

  But he really did not know what the hell was going on here today. How was this piece of shit in Washington State, across which they were dragging this fucking Apollo-class golf buggy, supposed to relate to whatever the hell was waiting for them on Mars?

  After maybe half an hour, he’d piled the MET with carefully selected – and uniformly worthless – samples of Washington State. ‘Okay, Natalie, I figure I’m done here.’

  ‘Well done, Phil. We’ll make a rock hound out of you yet. But I still haven’t heard much about the morphology of your site.’

  He growled, and wiped sweat from his brow with a dusty hand. ‘Give me a break.’

  ‘Come on now, Phil. Taking samples isn’t enough – you ought to know that by now – what’s crucial for the geologists is the context. Tell me what you see.’

  Stone began to walk forward again. His pack chafed at his shoulders, but now, looking around more systematically, he began to see some pattern, some logic underlying the landscape formations; and as he did so, he began to forget his discomfort.

  ‘I see a mix of landscape here. I see what looks like bare bedrock, and sedimentary stuff that’s been scoured out, and depositional material. As if left behind by running water.’
/>
  ‘Good.’

  ‘The land here can’t be of much value. Light pasture, maybe; there isn’t much growing, certainly not in the bare rock faces. I think the rock is basalt. Volcanic, anyhow. The macroforms in the bedrock are mostly channels. The channels are pretty straight: not much sinuosity. They look as if they are basically river valleys, but widened and deepened. Maybe by glaciation?’ Great tongues of ice, flattening and deepening valleys, scouring down to the bedrock –’

  ‘Don’t speculate, Phil. The goddamn Apollo astronauts speculated all the time, and they confused the hell out of everybody. Just observe.’

  ‘Sure.’ Speculating test pilots, on Mars. Natalie’s number one nightmare. ‘I see evidence of channel anastomosis. And uplands left isolated between the channels.’

  Back at the CELSS, Bleeker looked up skeptically. He called, ‘Anasto-who?’

  Stone imagined York’s chagrin at that remark. Bleeker’s comparative backwardness at the geology wasn’t surprising. The guy was under real pressure; as well as field trips like this in support of the eventual landing mission, Bleeker was also working toward the D-prime Earth-orbit mission, next month.

  But then, Stone reflected, Bleeker was supposed to be the landing mission surface specialist.

  ‘Anastomosis, asshole. It’s all in your Boy’s Coloring Book of Geology. Where a channel has been breached, and cut a branch through into another channel. Look. See the way the channels over there seem to diverge, then join up again. And you can see over there, where that bit of plateau has been left isolated. Cut off by the new channels.’

  The isolated upland was like a table top of rock, stuck in the middle of the plain.

  ‘Yeah. Okay, I see it. So what caused the breach?’ ‘Phil –’

  ‘Okay, okay, Natalie. Don’t ask me questions like that, Adam. I won’t speculate.’ It could be glaciation, though. Must be. What the hell else could have caused so much damage to the landscape? A lava flow, maybe?

  ‘What other macroforms?’ York asked.