Analog SFF, June 2011 (16 page)

We'd brought a stock of liquid hydrogen and a cunning little chemical plant that would combine it with carbon dioxide from Mars's atmosphere to produce the methane rocket fuel we'd eventually use to leave the planet. This chemical process threw off water as a byproduct, some of which was cracked into oxygen and more hydrogen.

"Don't be so sure,” said Dae-jung.

We all looked at him. My breath was loud in my helmet, which was beginning to fog up.

Dae-jung looked right back at us, his flat face defiant. “We've been having some plumbing problems."

Lynne Ann stepped up to him, their faceplates practically touching. “There was nothing about that in the daily reports."

Dae-jung turned away from her. “There are things we don't tell Mission Control. Come on now, let's get you unloaded. We've only got a few hours of daylight left."

While Kabir and Suma Handini, the current crew's Pakistani engineer, set up the insulated hoses to pipe our hydrogen into the habitat's buried tanks, the rest of us set up a bucket brigade to transfer the tonnes of food and other supplies from the lander's cargo bay. Our lander had set down right between the current crew's four-person lander and the two-person emergency ascent vehicle, less than fifty meters from the hab, and the boxes and canisters weighed only a third what they would on Earth, but their mass was unchanged so it was still a lot of work to move them around. By the time we got everything shifted my space-adapted muscles were screaming with fatigue. “Why do we have to get all this stuff inside so quickly anyway?” I asked Li Huang, the current crew's Chinese climatologist, as we struggled with a case of dehydrated meats. “It was fine in hard vacuum for the last two months."

"They used to leave everything in the landers,” he said, “to save space in the hab. But a couple of expeditions ago a lander fell over right after landing, and all the supplies were inaccessible until they could get it jacked up again."

"The lander fell
over?!"

"Subsidence under the landing pad, I think it was."

That hadn't been in the official reports either.

We got everything shifted inside, took off and stowed our suits, and gathered in the wardroom. This half-circular room, eight meters in diameter, took up half of Deck 2 of the cylindrical hab. The largest enclosed space on Mars, it would serve as our meeting room, work room, dining room, and living room. It had one long table and with ten people seated around it, we were all bumping elbows. We knew we'd have to get used to the crowding, though, as it wasn't going to change for the next 107 days.

Each new ship from Earth brought four new crew. The usual procedure was that four of the old crew would depart almost immediately, leaving a crew of six: four new crew members, and two experienced ones to provide continuity. But the inexorable mathematics of orbital mechanics dictated that on this particular rotation the old crew could not depart until 107 days after the new crew had arrived. This 107-day period, long for a turnaround but short for an expedition, was my personal territory—I had arrived with the new crew and would be departing with the old crew. Until then, ten people would have to share a space designed for six.

The ten of us introduced ourselves around the table—purely for etiquette's sake, of course, as we were all familiar with each other's dossiers. When it came to me, I told them how much I looked forward to posting my first blog from the surface of Mars, and showed off some of the exciting photos I'd gotten after the landing.

"You can't post those,” Dae-jung said.

I stared at him. “Doesn't the habitat have at least as much communications bandwidth as the ship?"

"Not bandwidth,” he said, raising one finger. “Politics. We don't let the public know about small problems that don't seriously impact the mission.” All of the current crew nodded their heads in agreement.

I wasn't happy about the situation, but rather than provoke a conflict in my first day on Mars, I acquiesced. That night I posted a blog about our aerobraking, descent, and landing, emphasizing the noise and vibration; it wasn't bad, but I really felt that it lacked something.

It wasn't until hours later, lying on my hard narrow bunk with a gluey rehydrated meal in my belly, that I realized I had no idea who had wound up being the sixty-seventh person to set foot on Mars.

The next day, once we had breakfasted and unpacked our few personal items into our tiny, Spartan quarters, we found out we had a lot to learn.

It turned out that all the training we had received before departure, and the manuals we had read on the trip out, were almost completely worthless. Just about every system in the habitat, from the surface suits to the sinks, had been repaired, modified, or updated. “Do not under any circumstances touch this button,” Dae-jung said, pointing to the toilet's FLUSH button, which was crossed with an X of tape. He and the four new kids—as he called us—were all crammed into the habitat's one tiny bathroom. “We don't flush urine at all, and when it's time to flush feces you wash it down with one liter of gray water.” On a shelf glued to the wall stood a scarred plastic pitcher, above which a tap hand-labeled GRAY WATER protruded from a hole that looked like it had been melted through the plastic wall with a soldering iron.

"What happens if we push the button?” Lynne Ann asked, quite reasonably.

"We call it the Blue Spew. And whoever pushes the button has to clean up the mess."

Kabir looked dubious. “So why don't you just disconnect it?"

Dae-jung gave a little smirk and pulled a panel off of the wall, revealing a disordered nest of variously-colored wires, conduits, and pipes. It didn't look a thing like the tidy pictures in the training manuals. “The last time we tried it, we lost power in the kitchen for half a week. Best to leave well enough alone."

Despite the close quarters and hassles of the hab, I was excited by actually being on Mars after the boring months of travel. Just about every day I got to put on my surface suit and tromp around on the surface of Mars—
Mars!
Lifeless and airless though it might be, it had a desolate beauty to it; the low-gravity mineral formations were spectacular and their colors changed from hour to hour as the sun passed across the sky. We'd brought a supply of new weather balloons, ultra-light hydrogen-filled spheres that carried tiny instrument packages high into Mars's thin atmosphere, and they brought back more great pictures and interesting scientific data. I supplemented the limited number of photographs I could post each day with text: moments of personal drama and exciting new findings in biology, climatology, paleontology, and geology. My blog's ratings started to climb.

You might think that science is inherently dull, but personally I was fascinated by the question of why Mars's climate had changed from hospitable to inhospitable all those millions of years ago. I agreed with Secretary- General Zirinowski, who'd declared over twenty years ago that only through study of our dead sister planet could we find a way to reverse the climate change that was threatening to kill our own. I was thrilled by the opportunity to share my enthusiasm with the public, and I think that passion came through in my blog.

We new kids made a lot of mistakes in our first few weeks in the habitat, though. Lynne Ann forgot to plug in her backpack after her first EVA, so the battery ran down overnight and she couldn't go out at all the next day. (We called our outings EVAs because the hab was, technically, a vehicle—the first crewed vehicle to land on Mars, in fact—even though it wasn't going anywhere anymore.) Audra Miskinis, our Lithuanian paleobiologist, was the first of us to do a Blue Spew, but all four of us made the same mistake at least once in the first two weeks. Even Kabir the engineer managed to mess up, damaging the pressurized rover's gearbox the first time he tried to shift it into reverse.

I managed not to break any of the hab's systems, but the error I made was much worse.

The day Kabir stripped the rover's gears, I was riding in the shotgun seat. When the horrendous grinding noise came vibrating through the rover's frame, we looked at each other in horror, but it soon became clear what had happened—the exact same kind of boneheaded mistake any teenage driver might make with the family car. The necessary parts were just steps away in the hab, Kabir and I worked together to repair the damage, and by dinner that day the rover was again ready to go, and we were both laughing our heads off at the whole incident. It made such a good story that I led off with it in my daily post that evening, and I was still chuckling about it when my head hit the pillow.

Nobody was laughing the next morning, though. While we'd slept, my humorous blog story had turned into a political scandal. A US senator, one who'd been opposed to the Kasei program since its inception, had seized on the incident as yet another example of waste and mismanagement, with a racial slur for Kabir thrown in for good measure. Mission Control had managed to blunt the public-relations damage, but they were none too pleased with Kabir for breaking the rover or with me for mentioning it in my post.

Dae-jung's face was dark as a storm cloud when he came thundering into my narrow little room. “Give me one good reason not to shut you out of the network right now,” he said through clenched teeth.

I looked him straight in the eye. “I was just doing my job!” I said. “I'm here to represent the average citizen and increase public interest in the mission. All I did was report a minor incident in a humorous way."

He didn't back down. “I
told
you there are things we don't share with Mission Control, never mind blabbing it all over the public nets! Your little blog has undone
years
of careful political maneuvering in the UNSA Council."

"It's not my fault some senator used my blog to grind his own well-worn axe!"

"It's your fault for not
thinking!
” He slammed his fist against the cracked plastic wall. “
Everything
we do is being analyzed by people who want to shoot us down, and we can't hand them any ammunition!"

I had to look away. He was right—I'd been foolish to forget about how many political enemies the program had. “I'll be more careful in the future."

"You'll be more than careful,” Dae-jung said. “From now on, you will not mention
anything
in your blog that could cast this program in a negative light."

"Now wait just a—"

"I will review your entries before they are posted."

"You can't do that!"

He straightened, and even though he was at least ten centimeters shorter he managed to look down his nose at me. “I am the commander of this expedition,” he said. “You will obey my orders or you will be subject to discipline."

"I'll go over your head!"

In reply he gave me a smug little grin. “I'm sure Mission Control will give your protests the full attention they deserve."

I matched his grin with a level stare, jaw clenched and breathing hard through my nose. But he had the authority, he had the administrative passwords, and I was as certain as he was that in case of a dispute our superiors would side with him. They were already upset with me, and insubordination wouldn't help my case.

"All right,” I said after I had gotten my temper under control, “I'll let you review my posts.
For a while.
"

"We will see,” was all he said. He shut the door behind himself, leaving me seething in my narrow little stall like an angry bull with no rider.

I came back to my quarters after a grueling geological EVA to find a blinking video-message indicator on my display. Even though I had red dust caked in every crease of my body, I played it right away—it wasn't often anyone back home cared enough to spend the money on sending a video all the way to Mars.

It was my agent. “I'll get right to the point,” she said. “The syndicate isn't happy."

Of course they weren't. Dae-jung insisted that anything negative, controversial, or unprofessional—in other words, anything of interest to the average viewer—be removed from my blog, and that the scientific content be accurate and complete. Thanks to his careful editing, my blog had turned into the same snooze-inducing stream of technical bafflegab that all the non-Citizen Astronauts had produced before I'd come along. After almost two months of this, my ratings were in the toilet.

"They're giving you three weeks. If your ratings don't improve substantially by the fifteenth of next month, they're moving you off the front page."

I sighed and put my head in my hands. They couldn't drop me completely—I had a contract through the end of my mission—but if my blog didn't appear on the syndicate's front page my already puny ratings would vanish off the bottom of the chart. I'd come home to a tiny paycheck and a smoking hole where my career used to be. I'd have to start over from scratch.

I sent my agent a text message reminding her of the censorship I was facing—not that it should be a surprise to her; I'd kept her in the loop all along—and promising that I'd do everything I could to make my blog more interesting. But after I'd sent the message I found myself sitting and staring disconsolately at the blank screen.

I'd said I would do everything I could. But I'd already tried everything I could think of, including arguing with both Dae-jung and Mission Control, and nothing had helped.

Just then came a knock on the door. It was Kabir. “Hey, can you give me a hand with something here?"

I was still grimy and exhausted from my EVA, as well as depressed, but I knew Kabir wouldn't ask for help unless he really needed it. “Yeah, sure,” I said.

It was the electrical system again, of course.

The small nuclear plant on the other side of Bathtub Ridge provided more than enough power for our needs. But the omnipresent dust, ultraviolet light, and extreme temperatures made insulation crack, switches short, fuses blow, and backup batteries fail, adding up to a rickety mess that could barely meet our needs on a good day.

And today was not looking to be one of the good days. We'd lost power in half of Deck 2 and none of the usual tricks had brought it back.