When it’s time to head home to Earth, you haven’t earned back anyone’s trust, haven’t gone on any expeditions, and haven’t managed to help expand the base like you had hoped. And that’s awfully hard to swallow.
“I think we should go with windmills,” you volunteer. After listening to the debate, you figure it makes sense to add a new power source to what you already have.
Over the next week, construction goes well and soon there are rows of windmills ready to spin. But then, wouldn’t you know it, there’s…no wind. Actually, there’s some wind, but just during dust storms. And when all the dust settles, the windmills get weighed down, and they just sit. You have to brush the dust off the arms, which is a lot harder than cleaning a solar panel. And the occasional Martian breeze isn’t generating enough power.
You should have stuck to the tried-and-true method that worked: solar panels. Or, even better, you should have spoken up and prevented the nuke from being shut down in the first place!
In a week, the base grinds to a halt without power. Your team is forced to evacuate and is sent into orbit around Mars until the spare part for the nuke arrives from Earth, which seriously delays the mission. The disappointment you feel is one of the most powerful emotions you have ever experienced—and you wish you could somehow use that power to fuel the base. There would be no shortage then!
You wait in the rover for the rescue team to come get you. There’s a tense silence as you and Julie sit there with nothing much to say. A few minutes earlier, you listened in as she made the unpleasant call back to base, squirming as she tried to explain to Commander Wen what happened. You felt a little bad for her, but not a whole lot. Even though you can’t blame her for your being here—you did make the decision yourself—you still wish she had never invited you! Even more, you wish one of you had remembered to check the tank before leaving.
After half an hour, the rescue team arrives and fuels up the rover. On the drive back to base, you try to memorize as much of the Martian landscape as you can. You’re positive that it’ll be a long time before you’ll be allowed to leave the base again.
And sure enough, when you’re back at the central dome, Commander Wen tells you and Julie that you are banned from any personal rover use.
“We don’t limit rover use to keep you trapped here on base. There’s good reason for the policy. Rovers are extremely valuable, since their parts are all manufactured on Earth. We need to take very good care of them to make sure they last us a long time,” he explains. “Replacement parts take many months to get here.”
Now that you’re never allowed to take a rover out, it sure feels like you’re trapped on base. And, even worse, for the rest of your time on Mars, you don’t seem to be able to do anything to impress Commander Wen. All the best opportunities go to other people. When your mission is over, you realize that you didn’t get to do many of the things you’d hoped to do. Your list of accomplishments is painfully empty—very much like that rover’s fuel tank.
“I can’t find one of the goats—she’s escaped from the pen!” you confess to Julie.
“When did she get out?” she asks you.
“I’m not sure,” you reply, sheepishly. “I just noticed. It could have been a while ago.”
“Don’t worry, we’ll find her!” Julie reassures you. “Show me how she got out.”
You show Julie the hole in the pen, and she helps you seal it off to make sure you don’t have any more runaways. And then the two of you search the greenhouse together, section by section. There’s no sign of the goat anywhere.
“What if she got out of the dome?” you ask.
“She wouldn’t be able to get through one of the air locks without someone noticing,” Julie says, and then her eyes suddenly go wide. “Wait a second! I hope she isn’t eating my edible prehistoric plants! They have really strong scents, and you know how goats will try anything.”
The two of you run over to the other side of the greenhouse, where Julie has set up a special protected section with rows of the seedlings she raised on the spacecraft. Luckily, there’s no damage to the plants. At that moment, you hear a muffled bleating.
“I think the goat’s behind those leaves!” Julie says. You push back the leaves, and what you see makes you gasp…
There’s Coco, lying on a nest of leaves, with a tiny kid nestled up against her!
“Wow! Look at that!” Julie whispers.
“How beautiful,” you add, slowly reaching your hand toward the pair to avoid alarming the new mother goat. She lets you pet the kid, and you marvel at the beauty of the moment. I guess watching goats isn’t all bad, you think. Even though they can be loud and smelly, you realize that you’ve grown kind of attached to the seventeen—make that eighteen now—creatures. And who knew, even goats like a little privacy sometimes. You’ll add that to your notes!
Julie helps you get the two goats back to the pen, and you both make sure that all of them are counted and fed for the night. You’re really glad you asked Julie for her help, and you appreciate that she didn’t make you feel bad about losing one of the goats in the first place! You’re relieved that you found the goats before they got hurt, and before they caused any damage to the plants, the dome, or anything else.
“Thank you so much for all your help,” you tell Julie.
“No problem! I can actually use your help with the greenhouse plants for the next few weeks,” she says. “I need to go on a field mission to collect soil samples. Do you think you can tend to the vegetable garden and watch over my seedlings while I’m away?”
“Sure,” you reply, eager to return the favor. Plus, since you’ve been reading up on growing plants on Mars while you’ve been goat-sitting, you can apply what you’ve learned.
Even though it’s not the most exciting place, you know the greenhouse is a really important part of the future of human survival on Mars. Since the Red Planet is such a long way from Earth, it’s way too expensive and slow to import large amounts of food, so food must be grown here. The good news is that the soil on Mars is pretty decent, and there’s enough light to grow food in a greenhouse. For now, the dome you are in is pressurized to be similar to the Earth’s atmosphere, and the first vegetable garden has been thriving.
The next wave of experiments will include testing to see if the lower gravity conditions on Mars compared to Earth will make it possible to grow heavier or more fruit-loaded plants, to allow for bigger crops to feed more people. Until then, the goal is to make sure that you have enough food to feed the recently expanded staff on the colony, and particularly to get a good harvest from the vegetable garden.
Taking care of the plants is pretty simple. You just need to check that the watering system is working, test the acid level of the soil, and make sure the greenhouse temperature and humidity levels are where they should be. Piece of cake! But after a few more days tending to the vegetable garden, which is mostly potatoes, beans, and tomatoes, you notice something strange about a lot of the tomato plants. Even though they’ve had the same growing conditions as before, you notice some brown spots on the leaves and stems. The leaves also have white dust on the edges. The plants just don’t look healthy, compared to a few days ago. What should you do?
You could try to track down Julie, but she’s out in the field and will be hard to reach. It might take her days to get back in touch with you. Plus, she did put you in charge of the garden, and you want to prove that you can handle the job.
You know enough about gardening to know that there are many reasons plants get brown spots. There hasn’t been any change in the temperature or lighting conditions, and the watering system has been doing its job properly. You’re going to have to puzzle through this. There’s a gardening guide you refer to for advice, and this is what it says:
After looking at the guide and thinking about the plants’ symptoms, you decide there are two choices: they either need more fertilizer or they have a disease. If it’s fertilizer they need, you’ll spray extra nutrients
onto the plants with a hose. If it’s a disease, you’ll have to remove all the affected plants before they infect the rest of the crop. The guide you read had a lot of serious warnings about plant diseases. It said that the diseases were very contagious, and infected plants had to be immediately removed and sealed in bags.
So, if you’re right about the disease, your fast action will save the food supply from a serious threat. But if you’re wrong, the loss of the tomato plants will mean less food to eat over the next few months—and a lot of raised eyebrows from your fellow Martians. What should you do?
DECIDE TO GIVE THE PLANTS EXTRA FERTILIZER.
REMOVE ALL THE PLANTS WITH BROWN SPOTS.
You sit down and unscrew your flashlight first. Then you disconnect the wires that power the radio to your space suit, since you’re not communicating with a spacecraft anyway. It’s tricky to handle the wires while working with your stiff gloves, and you fumble a bit, but you finally get ahold of them. Then, you carefully connect the wires to the terminals in the flashlight. The flashlight should be connected to the radio’s power source. You flip the switch and…voilà! The light shines brightly! Yes!
Now that you’ve got some light, you feel a burst of energy and start to hurry back to base. You can’t help but think of Dorothy and how much she wanted to get back to Kansas from Oz—and you never thought the Mars base would feel so much like home. Right now, you can’t imagine being happier anywhere else in the universe. The lights get brighter as you get closer, and you can make out the domed warehouse and spaceport. You’re almost there!
You burst into the central dome and find several people inside.
“Hey, everyone!” you pant, out of breath. “Our expedition team had a rover accident and Cooper and Victoria were injured. Did you guys find them yet?” you ask hopefully.
Commander Wen, Aneesa, and Julie are immediately by your side. Everyone is talking at once.
“We’ve been so worried about you!” Julie says. “We tried to send out a signal but couldn’t reach you!”
“How did you get back here?” Commander Wen asks.
“I walked all night,” you say, “using the stars to guide me.”
“Wow!” Aneesa says. “That’s awesome!”
You pull off your helmet and give the coordinates of where you left the stranded rover. Luckily, Nico already left a while ago with a search and rescue team, and your information is immediately sent to him.
“Copy that. We should be at their location in less than an hour,” you hear Nico report back over the walkie-talkie. Thank goodness. More exhausted than you ever remember being, you slump into a chair, too tired to even get out of your space suit.
But pretty soon you realize that your missing expedition team isn’t the only reason why everyone is awake in the middle of the night.
“We have another serious problem,” Commander Wen tells you. “We received a warning alarm from our nuclear power generator. It’s overheating.”
“Why? What happened?” you ask.
“The dust storm,” Commander Wen responds with a grimace. “The radiators are covered with a thick layer of dust, and that’s causing the overheating. The wipers are too weighed down by the dust, so they can’t clean off the radiators.”
Nuclear generators have waste heat they need to get rid of to keep working. With the dust covering the radiators, the heat is trapped and causing the system to overheat.
“Can’t someone just climb up there and clean off the radiators?” you ask.
“No, it’s way too dangerous for anyone to go near the nuke. It’s really hot, not to mention radioactive!” Julie says.
“If we can’t clean them, what can we do?” you ask.
“We’re going to have to activate the emergency shutdown system in a few minutes,” Commander Wen says.
Wow. If the nuke is shut down, the majority of the power for the settlement will be shut off with it.
“Then what?” you wonder.
“Well, we have to get the dust off the solar panels outside, so they can start working again. And we have no choice but to operate with minimal power for a while, which will make life hard for all of us. We’ll have to see if we can restart the nuke again, which will save the mission. But it’s
very uncertain. It might not start back up again, or, if we don’t get it right…” Commander Wen’s voice trails off.
Yikes. You don’t even want to think about things going seriously wrong with a nuclear reactor. You rack your brain trying to think of any other solution. What about using something else to clean off the radiators? Isn’t there a tool or something you could use that wouldn’t get affected by the heat or the radiation? Something like a…telerobot!
That’s it! No one other than Nico knows about the new telerobot design that you were working on before you went on your expedition. The new robot has much more capability than the old ones. With your improvements, the telerobot could be commanded by remote to climb straight up the side of the radiator and shovel off the dust. Then the wipers would be able to start doing their job again!
Unless…what if it doesn’t work? You’ve never tested the robot for a scenario like this—or anything close to it! And even though you’ve practiced with the robots a bit, and you’re better at moving them around, you’re not sure you’re ready to take responsibility for the entire settlement, or confident enough with a robot’s ability to clean off a nuclear generator’s radiator. You’d feel a lot more comfortable if Nico was around to help you.
You’re tempted to just let the experts handle the situation the way they think is best. They have been dealing with the crisis for several hours, and they have gone through all the scenarios at length. They might have already thought of and dismissed the robot idea, and you don’t want to come across as a know-it-all. What if you use the robot and still don’t fix anything, or cause damage to the radiators…or take too long and cause a meltdown?
It’s a tough one. Your heart starts pounding as you decide whether or not to speak up.
SUGGEST USING YOUR MODIFIED TELEROBOT.
LET THE GENERATOR BE SHUT DOWN.
You make sure that Cooper is busy elsewhere and head over to the service module where you find Cooper’s tablet on one of the consoles. No one is around, so you quickly pull up Cooper’s log file.
I’m doing this for everyone’s safety, you tell yourself, but you still feel sneaky going behind Cooper’s back.
You check the entries for the past few days. Everything is in perfect order. According to his log, Cooper did check out the ventilation system earlier. And he identified the fans needing to be replaced, and scheduled the replacements for today, too.
It’s pretty impressive that he managed to fit everything into his busy day—Cooper must be more on top of things than you realized or gave him credit for.
“Do you need something?” you hear as you are scrolling through the bottom of the page. You turn around, and there is Cooper, looking at you with a furrowed brow. Yikes. He must have wrapped up his call right after you left.
“Um, no…” you start to stammer.
“Why are you looking in my log?” he asks.
“It’s just that…I was…I’m sorry,” you continue to babble, feeling your face turning red.
“Are you checking up on me?” Cooper asks slowly.
“Um, yeah, kinda,” you confess. “I was just wondering if you had done the ventilation system work, since I never saw you get to it, so I looked in your file.”
Gosh. That sounded really lame, you think.
“You could have just asked me directly,” Cooper says. You can hear the hurt in his voice. “I would’ve told you the status of the job. We’re all a team, and we’re supposed to be open and honest with each other.”
“I know. I wasn’t thinking straight,” you apologize. “I guess I was afraid that you’d be upset that a junior astronaut was questioning your work.”
“Well, you know what? Until now, I’ve always looked at you as an eq
ual on this mission,” Cooper replies. “But now… well, now I’m not so sure.”
Ouch. You hope that Cooper isn’t going to tell the others about what happened, especially Commander Wen. And, more than anything, you hope that you can earn back his trust and respect…soon.
CONTINUE...
“I’m going to hike back to base to get some help,” you inform your teammates.
“Are you sure you’re up for it?” Victoria asks.
“I’ll be okay,” you reply, trying to sound more confident than you feel.
“How about if I come with you?” she offers.
“That would be great, but shouldn’t you play it safe and stay here since you hit your head? Plus, I’m pretty sure Cooper will need your help more than I will,” you say.
“Thanks for looking out for me,” Cooper replies. He’s leaning on the upturned rover with his injured leg out in front of him. “I wish I could be the one making the trek. I’m so sorry, guys—for crashing and for putting us in this situation.”
“There’s no point blaming yourself,” Victoria says kindly. “Let’s just focus on getting back to headquarters.”
Victoria helps you gather the things you’ll need for your trek. You make sure you have the essentials, including an extra oxygen tank, water, rations, flashlight, and survival kit.
You look out into the landscape and everything looks exactly the same. It’s all dusty rust-colored rocks, some pebble size, and others that are small boulders. There are no roads, no street signs, and no landmarks—but as far as you can see, you can make out the rover tracks.
Ultimate Adventure Novel: Mars Page 5
