Red Thunder

by John Varley

  We switched back and forth between a rear-looking stationary camera and the one mounted on Travis’s helmet. Travis handled himself well, securing his safety line, then swinging out and over the strut, where he commenced his inspection. Pretty soon he located the impact area.

  “That dish is headed for the stars, at about three million miles an hour,” Travis said over the radio. “How long before it gets to Alpha Centauri?”

  “Is this question going to be on the final exam?” I asked.

  “Extra credit.”

  “A thousand years,” Kelly said, and when I looked at her, she shrugged. “Just a guess,” she whispered to me.

  “Did you give her the answer, Manny?” Travis said with a laugh.

  I hadn’t even figured it out myself. But light travels 186,000 miles per second, which would be… eleven million and some miles per minute, 670 million miles per hour, a light-year was 5.8 trillion miles, [329] Alpha Centauri was about four and a half light-years away… the answer I kept getting was 1,004 years. How about that?

  “Trick question,” Travis said. “The answer is, never. We’re not aimed at Alpha Centauri.”

  Travis moved along the strut quickly. I had another episode of the dry heaves before he got to the most critical area, the welds connecting the strut to the thrust cradle, and from there to the rest of the ship.

  It was half an hour before Travis pronounced it good. Another twenty minutes to get inside and up to the cockpit. Five more minutes before he was satisfied we were ready to apply thrust again. And just a bit over an hour after the emergency began, that blessed, blessed thrust settled down on my abused stomach again. I felt like I’d gone ten rounds with the heavyweight champion of the world.

  Travis got the ship stabilized on her new thrust vector, and then joined us in the common room.

  “Aren’t we going to miss Mars now?” Alicia asked. “I mean, we traveled more than three million miles while you were outside, if I understand right.”

  “You understand right. If I stuck to our original flight times we’d go way past Mars and have to come back. But I can compensate by applying just a bit more thrust. I haven’t figured exactly what that thrust should be-that’s one of the nice things about Red Thunder, she’s very forgiving, you basically just have to aim at where you’re going and blast, not calculate complicated orbits. If you go too far, you can just thrust your way back. But it’ll be about one point oh three or maybe one point oh five gees from here to Mars, to bring us stationary a thousand or so miles above the atmosphere. You won’t even feel it. In fact, it’s one point oh five now. Do you feel heavy?”

  I did, a little, now that he mentioned it, but it was only a few pounds, and that heavy feel could be just my abused stomach bitching at me.

  It wasn’t until then I had time to think about the consequences of what had befallen us with the antenna. We couldn’t transmit or receive signals from the Earth anymore. We were out of contact, and would stay that way.

  Suddenly outer space felt pretty lonely.

  28

  * * *

  I TAKE BACK everything I said about the lack of a view aboard Red Thunder. When we arrived at Mars, Travis inserted us neatly into a close orbit, and Mars in all his glory filled half the sky.

  The Red Planet was not as red as I’d expected. There were infinite shades of rust, then large areas of lighter-colored sand, vast deserts and deep valleys, volcanic mountains that cast a long shadow if they were on the day/night terminator.

  If only I felt well enough to truly appreciate it.

  We all floated in the cockpit, getting the best view we would have on the entire trip, and my mouth kept filling up with spit. Then I’d try to swallow, and my stomach didn’t like that idea at all. I’d gag, and try to throw up again. I think Kelly, Alicia, and Travis were starting to find Dak and me pretty disgusting. The bastards.

  We could have simply eased into the atmosphere without any orbiting at all, Red Thunder was capable of that, but the site Travis wanted to land on was on the other side of Mars when we got there, so we “parked” for an hour.

  “Noctus Labyrinthus?” Dak asked. “I thought-”

  “Elysium Planitia, what I told everybody during our last news [331] conference,” Travis said, with a grin. “A nice, flat plain where there’s very little of real interest. An excellent choice to make a nice, safe, sane touchdown. But we ain’t going there.”

  “Why not?” Kelly asked.

  “Because it’s boring, and because that’s what I wanted the Chinese to hear. My children, the two greatest tourist attractions on Mars are Olympus Mons and Valles Marineris. The first is the largest volcano in the entire solar system. Almost seventy thousand feet higher than the surrounding ground. Compare that to Mauna Loa, Earth’s biggest volcano, which is twenty-nine thousand feet above the ocean floor.

  “Valles Marineris is the Grand Canyon of Mars, and it would stretch almost from New York to Los Angeles on Earth, four miles deep and four hundred miles across in some places. Either one would be a wonderful place to land.”

  “Then why the valley?” Alicia asked.

  “Two big reasons. We’re pretty sure we understand the forces behind Olympus Mons. There’s no shifting of the crust on Mars, no continent-sized plates moving along fault lines. Volcanoes form because there’s an upwelling of magma in the mantle. On Earth, the plates move over that hot spot, which is how Hawaii formed, a series of newer volcanoes popping every few million years as the plate slid over the hot spot.

  “On Mars, the crust just sits there, and Olympus Mons just grows, and grows, and grows, over billions of years.”

  “Sounds great,” I said. “Why don’t we go there?”

  “Because Valles Marineris is more likely to contain the answer to the most important question about Mars. Is there any water still there? The valley looks like it could have been formed by running water. But how long ago? Is any still left, frozen in the ground like permafrost in the tundra? The canyon’s an obvious place to look.” Then he smiled a little broader. “Besides, it’s where the Chinese will land.”

  He called up a map of Mars on his screen. He jabbed his finger at a point just above the north rim of the Valles.

  “Longitude ninety-five degrees, six degrees south latitude. I’ll be able to eyeball the correct landing site, because we’ll be able to see the Chinese pathfinders.”

  [332] It was the successful landing of two out of the three “pathfinder” ships on Mars that had finally lit a match under the complacent butts of those in charge of America’s manned space program. One of the ships had failed to respond to commands from Earth and zipped on past Mars and into oblivion. But the other two had landed within half a mile of each other.

  “The Chinese have to land there, they’ve got no choice. So I will come down at the landing site they announced to the world. I’ll find the supply ships and put down within a couple miles of them. And then… then, my friends, we’ve got them.

  “We’re going to hijack the Chinese mission.”

  And he explained his plan to force the Chinese to acknowledge our presence on Mars… and soon we were all grinning with him. It sounded foolproof to me.

  Providing, of course, that we didn’t kill ourselves during our landing.

  TRAVIS FIRED A long burst to slow us out of Mars orbit, then we were weightless again for what felt like three hours but really wasn’t nearly so long.

  Once again the four of us were strapped to our chairs in the windowless control deck. There was a cruciform cursor superposed on our aft-looking cameras, the ones that would be giving Travis his only useful view of where he was going. The cursor was right on the knife edge of the western reaches of the Valles Marineris. Of course we were also using our radar to judge altitude, but radar was one of the weak points of Red Thunder. To keep our costs under one million-okay, in the final accounting we had spent more like $1,150,000 of Travis’s and Kelly’s money-the great majority of the ship was built with parts purchased off the
shelf, from the tanks the ship was made out of, right down to our pressurized ball point pens, an item NASA had once spent almost three million dollars to develop. But good civilian radar equipment that would meet our needs was hard to come by. We wanted to be able to bounce signals off Mars and the Earth while still hundreds or thousands [333] of miles away, and would need even more range if we had to find a crippled and lost Ares Seven.

  Our radar equipment had been scavenged from an Air Force airplane graveyard, from the nose of an old fighter plane. It was the best we could do.

  It seemed to be functioning well as we descended, the numbers flickering down rapidly on my screen. Ten miles. Nine miles. Eight miles. More and more detail appearing on the screen. I made myself relax, breathing steadily. Not for the first time on this trip, I wondered if I was really cut out to be a spaceman. My stomach was protesting all the changes in gravity as Travis nursed the big, awkward contraption down to her destiny on the Red Planet.

  Three miles. Two miles.

  The terrain undulated gently in a washboard pattern created by the dust storms that periodically swept Mars from pole to pole, and could last months. If one had been happening when we arrived we would have been out of luck, orbiting for no more than a week before we’d be forced to go home. But the air was clear as glass.

  One mile. Half a mile.

  “There they are!” Kelly shouted. I followed her pointing finger to a screen showing two regular shapes in the sea of shallow craters and rocks of every size.

  “I see them,” Travis said in our headphones. “Please don’t holler so loud.”

  “Sorry,” Kelly said.

  One thousand feet. Five hundred feet. Travis meant to land us someplace where the Chinese might not spot us on the way down. It wasn’t critical that we not be seen, but it would help. The Chinese were following the pattern of the Russians during the Soviet Union days, landing completely on automatic, just like the pathfinder ships. Communists apparently just hated to relinquish any control they didn’t have to, so Soviet and now Chinese cosmonauts had to be content to let machines handle chores that our own “Right Stuff” astronauts would have claimed as their own.

  [334] “One hundred feet,” Travis called out. “Picking up some dust. Fifty feet. Thirty feet. Fifty feet to starboard. Still thirty feet elevation.” There had been a big rock at the spot Travis had been about to land on. He moved over, then again. Twenty feet. Ten feet.

  “I have a touchdown signal on strut two, Captain,” Dak said. Then, quickly, “Touchdown on strut one… and strut three.”

  “Cabin listing less than two degrees,” I called out.

  “Air systems four by four,” Alicia shouted.

  “Cutting power,” Travis said, and the roar of the engines-not nearly so loud in the thin atmosphere of Mars-tapered off and died. I kept my eyes glued to the tilt-meter, which settled another degree, then half of a degree. If tilt exceeded five degrees I was to recommend another liftoff and touchdown… something Travis could of course see and do from his own instruments. But on a ship you back everything up.

  The meter stabilized.

  “We’re down, guys and gals,” Travis shouted from above.

  Somebody should have thought to bring some ticker tape and confetti. We made up for the lack by cheering our lungs out.

  We had made it. We were on Mars.

  FIRST WE ALL had to crowd into the cockpit, wearing our bomber jackets and big, goofy grins. Kelly the shutterbug took pictures of us. The view was stunning. I’m a Florida boy who’s never been anywhere. There was nothing like this in Florida. Not a speck of green to be seen anywhere. Rocks everywhere you looked, though this spot wasn’t as stony as the places where previous Mars probes had landed. It was midday, and the sky was a pale pinkish on the horizon and a deep blue straight up. Wisps of high cloud so thin you could barely see them. Dust, I think, not water.

  The external thermometer was reading minus eight degrees, Fahrenheit.

  “Time to suit up, don’t you think?” Travis said. He got no argument. We all trooped down to the crossroads deck and then down into the suit room.

  [335] I don’t know if Dak and Kelly and Alicia were holding their breaths, as I was. We’d never discussed this part of the journey.

  Who gets to be first? Who gets the headline in the history books, and who ends up in the fine print? Travis was the captain, so didn’t he have the right to be first? But, being the captain, didn’t he have an obligation to stay with his ship? And if he did, who would tell him? I wasn’t eager to try.

  “You kids get to be first,” Travis said, and smiled at the guilty looks on our faces. “Sure, I’ve thought about it. But, plain truth, none of this would have happened without you four. And Mars belongs to the young. And… well, hell! Get your suits on before I change my mind and beat y’all out the door!”

  We didn’t need more prompting. We all set new records getting into the things. Then down into the lock, Travis sealing the hatch behind us. Final suit checks, buddying each other. Then cycle the lock, watch the pressure equalize with the breath of carbon dioxide gas outside, and open the outer lock door.

  Dak deployed the ramp, made of metal mesh, impossible to slip on. We started down the ramp, suddenly shy about it.

  We had talked about the famous “first words.” Everybody knows the pressure Neil Armstrong was under, how they had a camera set up just to capture that moment, that first step, and all America was asking, “What will his first words from the surface of the moon be?” Armstrong must have worried about it. And once there, he blew it, though he always maintained he really said, “One small step for a man…”

  I had toyed with the idea of something like, “Holy crap! We’re on Mars.” But I knew I didn’t have the nerve for that, and it would have stunk to high heaven, anyway. But, gosh darn it… I don’t think any of us were up to saying something like, “What hath God wrought?”

  So I had an idea, and while we were still standing on the ramp I told the others about it. It was agreed to with no objections. We all went to the foot of the ramp.

  “On my signal, kick off with the left foot,” I said.

  “Roger.”

  “Will do.”

  [336] “Weeee’re …” and we all stepped off.

  “… off to see the Wizard! …” We skipped ahead a few feet-skipping’s not easy in a space suit, even at one-third gee-and then nearly collapsed laughing.

  I swore a mighty oath the Chinese were not going to steal this moment from us. The truth was going to get out, no matter what.

  We were the first!

  WE HAD TALKED about running up a flag. All the Apollo astronauts did. We knew the Chinese planned to. But what flag?

  We were all Americans, all proud to be Americans. But we were not, strictly speaking, an American mission. We had no connection to our government, and that’s the way we wanted to keep it.

  The United Nations flag? But Travis didn’t have a very high opinion of the UN, and neither did Kelly. Dak and Alicia were like me, politically not very involved. We were willing to go along with Travis and Kelly.

  “How about the state of Florida?” Dak had suggested, not very seriously.

  “Looking at what Florida has done to the land,” Kelly said, “I wouldn’t trust those idiots in Tallahassee to run a mud puddle, much less a whole planet.”

  “Besides, they wouldn’t be interested,” I pointed out. “There’s no beachfront land to screw up.”

  Travis suggested they use the flag of his old alma mater, Tulane.

  “Do they have a flag?” Alicia asked.

  “I could find out. Better yet, how about the flag of MIT? That ought to get you guys a full scholarship, don’t you figure?”

  In the end we decided to go flagless.

  We set aside thirty minutes for just looking around, for getting used to the idea that we were really on Mars. “Gosh-wow!” time. Travis had put us down in a small valley. We walked up the gentle slope of the dune north of us and took a
look around. Walking was easy in the.38 gravity, even with the pressurization that made space suits a bit hard to bend, even with the added weight of suit and backpack.

  [337] I’d hoped the trio of volcanoes in a straight line, Arsia Mons, Pavonis Mons, and Ascraeus Mons, might be visible in the distance. The map scale had deceived me. We were over four hundred miles away from them, with Olympus Mons another five hundred beyond that. From the rise we saw more of the same terrain we had landed in. The spectacular views in these parts were down, not up, and we wouldn’t see it until we were standing on the edge of the Grand Canyon of Mars.

  So we took a few pictures, or Kelly did, with her camera in a plastic box usually used for underwater photography. Then we went down to deploy our surface vehicle.

  We had loaded it into Module Four. It was hard to believe that, a few months before, it had been Dak’s pride and joy, Blue Thunder. All that was left of it was the pickup bed and body. Sort of like those “stock cars” they drive at Daytona, called Fords or Chevys, actually nothing but car-shaped Fiberglas shells surrounding an engine and chassis, built from the ground up.

  Module Four had been pressurized and heated during our flight. Now Dak climbed up a ladder and found a control that released the 15 psi atmosphere inside. When that was done the simple plug-type door was pulled in and up by an ordinary garage-door opener. He stepped inside and handed out six metal tracks, which me and Kelly and Alicia fitted together into two corrugated metal ramps. We lifted one end of each track so Dak could fit them into slots on the module, then carefully aligned them.

  Dak operated an electric winch and slowly, slowly, Blue Thunder came down toward us. When it reached the ramp Dak shoved it until its wheels were in the tracks, then we lowered it the rest of the way.

  Its undercarriage had been greatly modified. A framework of steel and giant shock absorbers supported the truck body a full three feet above its wheels. But those wheels were just for getting it down the ramp. When we’d rolled the vehicle away from the ramp Dak operated a second winch, and the real wheels came down, like four pink donuts on a spike. They were earthmover tires, a bit over seven feet high.