Keystone (10 page)

The
Clarke
slid through space
effortlessly and silently at just over eight kilometres per second. The bright
blue beam of charged ions escaping the spaceship’s exhaust, powered by a
nuclear particle accelerator, made it the fastest manned craft ever built.
 
Despite this, the gradual acceleration over
eight weeks made the sensation of incredible speed practically imperceptible to
its crew, who continued to float inside.

The ion drive and particle accelerator were
housed within a large grey oblong structure to the rear of the
Clarke
, narrowing at the end to a slit
through which the ions were forced.
 
The
structure was connected by a one hundred feet section of titanium scaffold to
the main living quarters.
 
Running the
entire length of the scaffold, through its centre, was a series of thin
metallic tubes containing xenon gas, the fuel for their entire journey.
 
On their arrival in Mars orbit, the spent
canisters would be jettisoned carefully in space, away from the planet, to save
on mass for the return journey; mass still had the same effect on objects as it
did on Earth, even in the weightlessness of space.

Closest to the ion drive was a group of four
cylindrical pods bunched together in a circle, each one fifteen feet high and
ten feet in diameter.
 
There was one pod
for each crew member, containing a bunk, computer, cupboard and drawers for
personal items, and a small desk and chair with strap to retain its occupant.
 
The remaining space was used for storage;
enough food for one person for eight months.

These personal quarters all led to a single
cylindrical pod, ten feet high and twenty feet in diameter. Known to the crew
as the ‘Hygiene Bay’, it housed the toilet and cleaning facilities.
 
From the inside, it was a long way from a
normal domestic bathroom; the walls and floors were made of thin stainless
steel plates and fibreglass moulds. Any water used whilst cleaning would go
through a purification process and return to the water canisters housed around
the outside of the pod. Similarly, all bodily fluids were also recycled and
returned to their reserve supply.

From the Hygiene Bay a small opening led to
the southern pole of the Lounge.

The Lounge was designed to be a multi-purpose
living area in which the crew would spend most of their time.
 
Recessed cupboards opened out to reveal
exercise mats and treadmills, and along one wall a complex scientific
laboratory could be assembled.
 
The
Lounge’s sheer scale allowed it to perform several functions at once, meaning
that the crew of four could all use the space at the same time while not being
restricted to the same activities.
 
The
flexibility had been deemed indispensable by the mission psychologists, who had
also made efforts not to separate the crew.
 
For this reason, aside from emergency airlocks between each pod, there
were no closable doors throughout the ship.

Attached to the northern pole of the Lounge
was the ten-foot long Command Module, containing four bucket seats in which the
crew would be strapped during any navigation or propulsion changes. Surrounding
the seats, an array of computer screens and old-fashioned flick switches
covered every possible surface.
 
Several
portable fire-extinguishers were fastened to the walls.
 

Whereas the other modules, with the exception
of the Hygiene Bay, were designed to be welcoming and friendly, using pastel
colours and soft lighting, the Command Module was exactly the opposite; from
its grey rivet-covered walls to the un-enticing control panels, entering the pod
felt like getting into a World War II submarine. It was designed for
functionality only, and doubled as the
Clarke
’s
optimistic emergency escape pod.
Optimistic
because everyone knew that
save for incredible good fortune, to enter the Command Module and leave the
Clarke
mid-mission was a one way ticket,
as if they did so at any appreciable distance from Earth, it simply couldn’t
sustain life for long enough to allow a rescue party to reach it.

A single, closed hatch left the Command
Module.

The final element of the
Clarke
interplanetary spaceship had been the subject of years of
debate and research between the participating nations: the Mars Lander Pod. The
MLP would be the first
manned
landing
craft ever to touchdown on another planet. Larger objects had been placed on
the surface of the Moon, but its lack of any substantially abrasive atmosphere
naturally meant that aerodynamics did not need to be factored in; any
sufficiently powered and controlled town house could be placed on the surface
of the Moon with relative ease. Only the relatively small return modules needed
to re-enter the Earth’s atmosphere.

The MLP had eventually been developed as a
compromise between volume, mass and form.
 
At thirty feet in diameter and ten feet tall, shaped like two shallow
soup bowls, one upside down on top of the other, it bore more than a passing
resemblance to a nineteen-fifties flying saucer. Despite this, its method of
entry into the Martian skies would be very conventional, sliding in like a
Frisbee at such an angle as to ensure friction did not destroy it, but not so
shallow as to cause it to bounce off the atmosphere and back into space.

Montreaux opened his eyes.
 
His personal music player had stopped
shuffling through his favourites list, and the ship’s lighting had auto-dimmed,
which told him it was Nightmode. Glancing at his watch, he noted with interest
that he had been sleeping for nearly four hours.
 
Lifting the headphones from his ears, he
listened intently for voices.

Silence, save for the gentle hum of the
Clarke
’s air circulation system.

Although the ship was in Nightmode, thin
strips of light ran along the edges of his door, and along all of the
passageways outside it, throwing an eerie blue glow across his room. Looking
round in the dim light, he unclipped himself and moved carefully through the
door and into the Hygiene Bay.
 

The sound coming from Captain Marchenko’s
quarters was proof that it was possible to snore in zero gravity, and Montreaux
smiled as he headed for the Lounge.

He reached for a small sliding switch on the
inside of the connecting tunnel and the lights inside the Lounge turned on,
faintly at first, then more brightly, until it was bathed in a soft, day-like
warmth that reminded him of a summer afternoon in California.
 
Were it not for the fact that he was now
floating three feet above the sofa, he could almost imagine he was there, on
the porch of the beach house, the sun touching his face gently.

“Couldn’t sleep, Sir?”

Due to the lack of gravity he didn’t so much
jump as contract in surprise.
 
He also
couldn’t stop a small gasp of shock from leaving his mouth.

“Sorry, I didn’t mean to scare you,” Su Ning
apologised.

He looked up and saw her, lying flat on the
ceiling, on her stomach, looking out of one of the Lounge’s four windows. Her
body and legs, held against the curved hull of the
Clarke
, made it look like an impossibly uncomfortable position.

“That’s OK, Lieutenant. No, I had no problem
sleeping, If anything I overslept! I’m just doing my rounds to make sure things
are ticking along nicely, albeit a little later than usual. You?”

She continued to look into space. “I come up
here every night, for an hour or two; when the ship goes into Nightmode, there
is no reflection in the Plexiglas, and I can see all of the stars.” Her voice
drifted off, almost to a whisper.

“I had no idea you did this.”

Su Ning arched her head up to look down at
him. “You may be the Captain, Sir, but with respect you don’t know everything.”

She had spoken in her usual, kind voice.
 
But something about the choice of her words,
possibly her intonation, raised his suspicions. He was, after all, the
commanding officer of the first manned mission to Mars. The mission’s most
valuable asset was its crew, and their well-being was always his highest
priority. The revelation that Su Ning stared out into the depths of space every
night wasn’t concerning on its own, save for the fact that the controllers on
Earth should have alerted him in his weekly psych report. However, the way in
which she’d addressed him did seem a little out of sorts.

He pushed against the sofa and made his way
to her, anchoring himself on the rung beside the window and lying down opposite
her. He looked into space with her for several moments.
 
She was right: with the light on, the window
was more like a mirror. In it, he saw her worried look.

“Lieutenant, is everything OK?” He pushed
away from the window to face her.

She looked away quickly.

The Captain allowed a long, uneasy silence to
play out before opening his mouth and drawing breath.
 
Before the words could come Su Ning
continued, speaking quietly as if she did not want anyone to overhear.

“I am not sure if it is an issue, Sir,” she
whispered. “I would not worry you with anything unless I was certain.” She took
a final look out of the window, before pushing off towards the door. “I am very
tired, Sir, please excuse me.”

Montreaux lay confused for several seconds
before turning quickly. “Wait, Su Ning!”

He was alone.

Her parting words echoed in his head for
minutes, although he decided to let her be. He could easily have reached her
pod and confronted her; after all there was no door to close between them. But
his experience told him that people, and none more so than astronauts,
cosmonauts and taikonauts cooped up for months on end, sometimes needed their
own space.

He launched himself from the wall to finish
his inspection of the
Clarke
.

Jane sighed and looked towards
the small window on the opposite side of the Lounge. Danny Marchenko sat beside
her, his bottom lip curled upwards in an amused smile.
 

“The United
States is no longer a superpower, Jane,” he said calmly, enjoying every minute
of their debate.

She unclipped
herself and launched towards the Lounge’s ceiling. Halfway there she expertly
twisted her lower body round so that she was facing him, while at the same time
holding her arms outstretched to catch the edges of two metal rungs attached to
the wall.
 
Wedging her arms behind the
rungs, she crossed her legs and looked him in the eyes.

“Danny, whilst
I am all for the
International
nature
of this mission,” she said sarcastically, “NASA remains the main stakeholder in
Clarke
.” From where she was now
perched, she could see both entrances to the Lounge.
 
She squirmed as she saw Captain Montreaux
enter from the direction of the living quarters.

He glanced up
at her and laughed at the look on her face. “Captain Marchenko, are you winding
Dr Richardson up again?” he said as he made his way to a small drawer recessed
into the opposing wall.

“I know I
shouldn’t, but she bites so easily,” Danny laughed.

She scowled at
them both before returning her eyes to the darkness of space with a flick of
her chin.

“Like it or
not, Dr Richardson, this
isn’t
an
American expedition.” He opened the drawer in front of him and removed a
writing pad and pen. “This is the twenty-first century, and no matter how much
lobbying goes on in Washington, this mission will not be putting the Star
Spangled Banner into the soil of another planet.”

Captain Danny
Marchenko found himself in the unusual position of being in complete agreement
with his American counterpart. “Absolutely,” he made himself say. He had been
leading Jane on for a quarter of an hour on the subject, as was their
almost-weekly ritual, but while he did it purely for the look on the doctor’s
face, he recognised that sometimes things did get out of control. Twice already
there had been heated arguments on board the
Clarke
, arguments that Earth had been quick to reprimand.

Today was one
of those days, and Jane was taking the subject particularly badly.

“I don’t see
why we can’t put all of our flags on Mars, that way everyone is happy!” she
complained without looking away from the stars outside.
 

Montreaux
closed the drawer and pushed himself towards the living quarter’s entrance.
 
“And can we put a Canadian flag, also?”

“Why not?”

“How about
Japanese? I believe that Su Ning’s Grandfather is from Kyoto,” Captain
Marchenko added.
 

“Naturally,” she
pursed her lips.

“Oh, wait a
minute,” Montreaux said theatrically. “My Grandfather was French, so how about
a
Tricolore
? And a European Union
Flag, so as not to upset everyone?”

Jane did not
reply.

“Dr
Richardson, this is part of our mission brief, and it does not matter how
strongly you feel about the matter, the
Clarke
mission will be planting
no
flags
in the Martian soil.” He waited for a response, but none came. “Furthermore,
whilst I happily encourage topical debate, I do believe that we have already
covered this subject several times.”

He had reached
the door and was about to pull himself through the tunnel to leave the Lounge
when Jane shouted out in his general direction. “You’re an
idealist
, Yves,” she made no attempt to mask her sentiment. “The
world you dream of can’t exist, and never will!”

Captain
Montreaux stopped himself on the metal hand bar which ran the full
circumference of the doorway. He pulled himself round slowly to face her,
leaving his notepad and pen floating in the tunnel behind him. What amazed him
wasn’t that the topic of flags seemed impossible to put to bed; instead it was
that of
all
the crew, with their
military backgrounds and patriotism, it was the only
civilian
among them who seemed to take it all so personally.

“You are
absolutely correct, Dr Richardson: my ideal world cannot exist. Not on Earth,”
he said carefully, looking straight into her eyes. “But on Mars, maybe. So why
spoil this opportunity by setting off on the wrong foot?”

Danny nodded
in sombre agreement as Montreaux pulled himself through the door, grabbing his
notepad and pen as he went.
 
The parting
words weighed down on the Lounge for some time, before Jane finally spoke.

“It’s only a
flag,” she muttered bitterly under her breath.
 

Marchenko
unclipped his retaining straps and let himself float towards the centre of the
room, giving the sofa a brief nudge with his toes as he went.
 
This caused him to spin slowly as he crossed
the Lounge, and as his body turned to face Jane, who was still lodged into the
ceiling but was now looking down at him, his face burst into a huge grin,
showing his large, perfectly white teeth.

“Exactly,
Jane,” he said gleefully as he span, like a child on a fairground ride. “It is
only
a flag.”

Back in his
pod, Montreaux set the notepad down on his desk and let the pen float as he
secured himself in his chair.
 
Grabbing
the pen, he pressed down on the end to expose the writing tip and placed it
against the paper.

After a brief
pause, he lifted the tip again and looked over his shoulder at the door behind
him. There was no way of closing it, but the faint noise of the crew’s voices
still emanating from the Lounge assured him he would not be disturbed.

Touching the
paper with his pen once more, he started writing.

The
Clarke
was a true technological marvel,
and was breaking practically every record in the space exploration book.
 

It was the
biggest and most expensive space craft ever conceived, designed to take its
crew of four on a seven-month round trip to Mars, punctuated in the middle by a
nine-month sojourn orbiting the Red Planet while its occupants had their shore
leave. In total the mission would last nearly a year and a half.

The simple
logistics of such a task had been a headache for the mission planners, who had
spent the last fifteen years meticulously calculating volumes of water, oxygen,
food and even hygienic wipes.
 
Every
ounce of mass was accounted for, agreed and triply signed-off.
 
In their favour, the laws of physics had
given the
Clarke
’s designers grace
when it came to putting the ship together. As far as science was concerned, it
wouldn’t have mattered if the Hygiene Bay had been jutting out at right angles
to the Command Module and the crew’s quarter’s connected end to end in a train eighty
feet long: the vacuum of space simply didn’t care for aerodynamics.

Constructed
using a modular design, the
Clarke
followed the same basic principles as the ISS.
 
When it came to putting it together, it was simply a question of
choosing a layout that looked good, and the decision to go for a familiar
structure had been widely approved, not least of all because it suited the
public relations officers and marketing departments; a spaceship that actually
looked
like a spaceship, and not an
upside down foil-covered colander with tripod landing gear, the likes of which
littered the moon, had been most welcome and had led to a marked increase in
public attention.

The modular
approach had another, more serious benefit. The ship’s computer was programmed
to monitor every cubic inch of the
Clarke
for environmental anomalies, ranging from loss of pressure to temperature
irregularities.
 
At the slightest sign of
danger, it was able to completely shut down the affected areas and minimise the
impact on the rest of the ship until the problem could be addressed.
 
In worse-case scenarios, the faulty module
could be jettisoned into space, leaving the rest of the
Clarke
completely unaffected.
 

Everyone knew
that if they were in a faulty module at the time, they only had thirty seconds
from the alert being raised to reach a safe part of the ship. Getting stuck on
the wrong side of a sealed doorway could have fatal consequences.
 

To help the
crew interpret these situations accurately, the ship’s lighting had been
developed to change colour and pattern: in a danger area, the lights would go
red, and the marker strips along doors and passageways would indicate the
nearest safe route by flashing.
 

They had
practised all possible evacuation scenarios, from the Lounge imploding to the
Hygiene Bay losing pressure. During training exercises simulating everything
from fires to meteorite strikes, they had not always ‘survived’.

Additional
safety came in the form of the lead-lining in the Command Module. Exposure to
radiation from space weather, caused by solar flares and coronal mass ejection
on the surface of the Sun, could at best lead to a high probability of
developing cancer. At worst, it would result in death. It was a risk that the
inhabitants of the Earth’s International Space Station had been coping with for
many decades, rushing to specially shielded areas whenever the warning of a
major solar event came.

It was a
sobering thought that such precautions were relatively recent additions to
space exploration. In August 1972, between the manned Apollo 16 and Apollo 17
missions to the Moon, a solar flare blasted past Earth. Had it occurred four
months earlier, or four months later, it would certainly have proven fatal to
the unprotected crews.

The modular
design had brought flexibility, safety and had also reduced building time and
cost. This had combined to create the hundred and eighty foot long
Clarke
.

But the most
technologically advanced feature of the
Clarke
was not something that could be seen.

The early
twenty-first century had been marked by a massive improvement in
miniaturisation. Everything from small combustion engines to computer
processors was benefiting from advances in the field of nanotechnology: while
with the
Clarke
human spaceships had
grown in scale, everything else was getting smaller. Much smaller.
 

The
Clarke
was leaving a world obsessed by
size. Whereas the Industrial Revolution of the nineteenth century had been
typified by a desire to make things bigger, the brave new world of the 2040s
required things that not only fitted in your pocket, but also performed
better.
 
Gadgets
were by now a necessity: everyone needed the latest
telephone, because not only did it weigh less, it could also take your calls
for you, set up meetings and call people back, and all while it sat silently in
your coat.
 

As a
consequence, in contrast to the ship’s vast dimensions, the
Clarke
’s on board computers were neatly
stowed away in small recesses in the ship. But the computers’ external sensors
were everywhere.
 
Every single module of
the ship was constantly being monitored, assessed and recorded by hundreds of
mobile
nanostations
.
 
Barely big enough to see with the naked eye,
nanostations incorporated a camera, microphone, light sensor, smoke detector,
environmental pressure sensor and thermometer.
 
They were each powered by a minute motor with six tiny ‘jets’ on all
sides, forcing air through to allow the station to move in any direction in
three dimensional space.

They were
normally fully automated, but could be guided by the main computer at any time,
which in turn would take its directives from Mission Control on Earth.

Each module
contained a small, saucer-sized surface, on which the nanostations would
occasionally sit to recharge their batteries.
 
They did not need to dock precisely on the surfaces, as the energy would
transfer by magnetic induction directly into their power cells.
 

The
nanostations sent all of their information back to the ship’s computers.
 
These were located in not one, but in
all
of the
Clarke
’s eight habitable modules. Each pod was fitted with a wafer
thin rack, hidden inside a wall, which at all times was receiving input from
every nanostation on board, and at any time could assume main control of the
Clarke
.
 
By default, this control was normally taken by the computer housed in
the Command Module, but it would periodically shift for a few hours every day,
so that over a period of seven days every computer on board had taken control
for a short time at least. It was an effective way for the computers to
auto-test themselves, and something the crew took completely for granted.
 

They expected
that in the event of an emergency, they would not be jumping into a mindless
module, leaving the ship’s brains to jettison themselves into the space.