Red Planet Run (13 page)

The balloon was actually two balloons, a Charliere inside a Montgolfier, a gas envelope inside a hot-air envelope. The envelopes were designed to remain inflated all the time, but as the sun set, the atmosphere cooled and the Montgolfier’s hot air contracted; lift decreased and the craft settled to the surface. The helium in the Charliere contracted as well during the evening, but enough of a lift-to-weight ratio was maintained to keep the envelope’s soft structure upright. The exterior of the Montgolfier was coated with a graphite composite to attract and absorb Sol’s rays; it was slick, too, so that any ice that formed during the subzero Martian night would slide off. It worked fine for ice, and as I would soon discover, it also worked fine to keep us from grabbing hold in mid-patch, further lengthening the process and shortening my temper in about the same ratio.

We had to repair the exterior envelope before we got to the interior one, and you haven’t lived until you’ve tried to patch one balloon from inside another, perched on a merrily swinging, jury-rigged jumpseat controlled by a running line usually in the hands of an idiot on the ground (it didn’t matter who was in the seat; whoever held the running line was an idiot), in subzero temperatures, wearing a goonsuit, which due to Mars’ gravity and joke of an atmosphere was lighter in weight and more maneuverable than a pressure suit but didn’t seem like it after an hour’s worth of patching.

Still, I didn’t let up until we’d examined every square centimeter of every single slick, black, 30-centimeter-square panel of graphabric that made up the Montgolfier and Charliere, as well as each and every horizontal load tape and vertical load line, from crown to throat and back again, and then one more time just to make sure. We deployed both jibs, inspected them for damage from entry—wonder of wonders, found none—and repacked them. We checked the jib sheets to see that they were intact and ran free. I hauled myself up hand over hand to personally examine the running blocks and the rest of the tackle. “Check the rip cord,” I called down, “and I mean yank on it. I’ve got it on belay up here.”

Someone took hold and gave the line a sharp tug, and I bumped into the exterior balloon. My weight depressed the surface and the helium inside it. It was helium instead of hydrogen because helium was cheap and easy to make in the Belt. Hydrogen lifted less than one percent better, and if we ran out of nitrogen we could mix helium with oh-two and breathe it. Plus, hydrogen burns. Helium doesn’t. As Helen had pointed out to me with exaggerated patience, there wasn’t much chance of fire in Mars’ oxygen-starved air. I didn’t care. Hydrogen fires had been the norm rather than the exception in the Belt, due to careless handling of explosives and the do-it-yourself gas refineries found on every other rock. If I never saw another hydrogen fire again in my life, I’d die a happy woman.

It took two weeks to locate and patch all the tears, and another two days for the He-maker, red-lined, to make enough helium to inflate the Charliere to its performance pressure. Judgment Day came almost a month after touchdown. I picked us out a new campsite, a level plot of red gravel half a klick up the canyon. We weren’t going any farther until I was certain the
Kayak
was in full fighting trim.

We waited until noon to move so that we could take advantage of the midday breeze. After the solar cells powered up the instrumentation, I’d begun logging the local weather conditions. In spite of our protected position and the small size of the canyon, a breeze came up almost every day at about eleven, usually between two to four kph, usually steady, usually lasting until about three in the afternoon. If it held true to form, it would be enough to move us to a less lopsided location.

I squinted, watching the telltale tied off to the pole stuck in the ground at the mouth of the canyon. The thin strip of yellow paper hung limp. Between the
Kayak
and the pole stood Sean, safety line wrapped once around a stanchion fixed to the ground, the end clutched in both hands, feet braced.

“I don’t know why you had to use my washi paper,” Paddy grumbled. “I’ve only got a ream of it with me, and it’s not like I can get more when I run out.”

Then again, if the breeze failed me, I was just tired enough of sleeping strapped into my slanting bunk to pick the goddam doughnut up and pack it across the canyon on my back, balloons and all.

“There,” Paddy said. The paper stirred.

“Okay,” I said. “Is the jib deployed?”

“For the third time, yes.”

“Is the anchor up?”

“For the third time, yes.”

“Okay.”

And it was as easy as that. The gentle little zephyr drifted into our canyon and curled inside our triangular jib. Two of the
Kayak
’s legs were already free of the gentle slope we had landed on; the third had jammed itself so securely into the ground on impact that it had resisted every attempt with shovels to loosen it, and I was too afraid of damaging the water-recovery gear inside to insist. The only way out for that leg was back up the same way it had come down. I held my breath as I felt the gondola sway, tugging at the buried leg. I strained with the motion of the balloon, pushing my feet against the floor, pulling at the edge of the control console.

It must have worked. The leg relaxed its grip and slid free with an almost audible click. We began to move.

“Sean?”

The goonsuited-figure outside waved, and with the end of the safety line he held took an extra loop around the stanchion. That line was the only thing holding us down. From the port in CommNav I could see the foot of the jib bellied out.

“We’re moving too fast,” Paddy said.

The ground slid beneath us.

“We’re moving too fast! That stanchion’s not gonna hold, Mom!”

“Okay, drop the jib.”

Before the words were all the way out of my mouth, I heard the sound of a fist slapped down, the click of a switch. The jib snapped tight, spilled air, went limp, and slid down the throat of the Montgolfier to drape itself in untidy folds on the gondola, thankfully not over the CommNav port.

At the same time, the line from the gondola to the stanchion went taut. Sean dug in his heels and leaned back against the pull of the line, but it wasn’t necessary. We floated, stationary, less than a meter from our new campsite.

“Talk about dumb luck,” Paddy said. “We couldn’t do it that right again if we tried for the next year.”

I had purposefully inflated the envelopes to less than half their maximum load, hoping that it would be unnecessary to deflate them once we got where we were going, but the Montgolfier was still too full to let us sit all the way down. I activated the deflation port and bled some air out, just a little, and we made the gentlest three-point landing in the history of aeronautics.

That night I rolled into bed and stayed there.

· · ·

Up till then we’d been using water from the storage and recycling tanks, but the
Kayak
’s life support systems had been designed around the assumption that we were going to be able to recover water from Martian permafrost through the extractors in the ship’s tricycle gear. Of course, that assumption was based on the Viking probes in the late twentieth century, the Ares roving probes in the early twenty-first, and some iffy data from unverifiable reports published by the New Martians at Gagarin City. From the available data, our worst-case scenario required drills three meters in length, and ours extended to four. We took a core sample with an opticannon and found permafrost a little over one meter below the surface.

In the galley Sean and Paddy beat the core sample into pieces and dumped them into a pot and nuked them. When six centimeters or so of liquid lay on the bottom of the pan, I scooped out a mugful and ran it through the manual filter. It tested safe for human consumption. “Big surprise,” Sean said. “The only thing more antiseptic than Mars is Auntie Charlie’s clinic.” It was flat and tasted kind of minerally, but it was indubitably water, cool water, clear water; we weren’t going to have to face the barren waste without a taste of water. “Okay,” I said. “Let’s start the leg drills.”

There was a life support instrument panel on one bulkhead in the galley. I pushed a button and shifted a lever and prayed that the gauges were reading right and that the
Kayak
’s drills really were grinding into permafrost, passing electrical current generated by the solar cells to melt said permafrost and thereby provide us with water. The next morning we retracted the drills, pumped the evening’s melt-off into the scrubber for desalinization and de-bugging. The aerator kicked in and ten minutes later we had running water in the kitchen and both heads.

“How about that?” I asked no one in particular. “Something actually worked, first time.” I switched on the solar water healer, and half an hour later took my first hot shower in 500,000 kilometers.

· · ·

I had to give Helen credit; once the
Kayak
achieved her proper orientation, she was one sweetly designed craft.

The gondola hung beneath the two balloons, a doughnut-shaped cabin forty meters across. The top third of the exterior was sheathed in solar cells; the middle third alternated rectangular graphplex ports with water storage compartments built into the bulkhead, both following the curving side of the toroid; the bottom was solid lockers all the way around the ring, storage for equipment we needed easy access to for work outside.

Inside, the gondola was divided into wedge-shaped compartments; the galley/recreation area, the sciences station, which came equipped with a pop-out bubble for its viewport, the twins’ suite, including two bedrooms and a tiny sitting room between, the storeroom, the CommNav center, and my bed-sitter, with the galley/rec area on the other side. If I raised my hand, the tips of my fingers just brushed the ceiling.

The first thing we did after setting up shop at our new campsite was find Deneb, Mars’ pole star, even if it was a couple of degrees off, and even if we did have to wait all night before it came into view between the steep walls of the canyon. Paddy ran a sun sight the next day.

“So where are we?”

“Valles Marineris, where else?” she replied.

I ignored the barely concealed scorn in her voice. “Do we know where in Valles Marineris, exactly?” She shrugged, and I resisted the temptation to take her by the shoulders and shake her until her head fell off. “Well, wherever we are, we’re half a planet away from where we’re supposed to be. I can hear Crip now.”

“He didn’t even get the right hemisphere,” Paddy said.

Sean, looking over Paddy’s shoulder, snickered. “The Great Galactic Ghoul strikes again.”

“Okay, let’s bounce a message off Phobos and tell Outpost what happened and that we’re okay.” I paused. “Let’s set up a loop on the transmitter, too, to bounce a message off Phobos back to Mars, say every hour. Maybe the guys at Cydonia look up once in a while. At least they’ll know we’re okay.”

“And if they don’t?”

No answer for that one.

We each had our own life support chores, assigned on a rotational basis, although each crew member had his or her own favorites. Paddy unpacked her telescope, growling ungracious refusal when offered help. The three of us broke out the window boxes from their hull locker and stuck their brackets into the slots mounted next to every window on the gondola. We brought in pail after pail of Martian dirt, sterilized it, watered it, fertilized it, and even ground some of it finer.

Sean, every bit as protective of his precious plants as Paddy was of her telescope, started seeds for lettuce, carrots, radishes, and sugar snap peas. In square, shallow flats he germinated strawberries, tomatoes, broccoli, cauliflower, zucchini, and green peppers; eventually these would be transplanted to the larger planters fixed in odd corners in every room on our craft. We were going to be a floating hothouse. It reminded me of those days when Caleb used to infest our quarters with every living species of orchid known to man. I stuffed that thought back into its sack as soon as it popped out.

Four of the larger planters already contained a couple of self-pollenating dwarf fruit trees (one mandarin orange, one midget Granny Smith apple) as well as, hurrah,
Coffea arabica
and
Solanum tuberosum;
thanks to Roger Lindbergh’s AggroAccel program all four were close to bearing. I liked hash browns in the morning, home fries for lunch, and mashed potatoes for dinner, and I wasn’t conscious in the morning until my third cup of coffee. I hovered behind Sean as he carefully unwrapped each planter; I winced as he cut into a branch to see if the sap was still running on the coffee tree; I groaned audibly when he pinched off a leaf of the potato bush, rubbed it between his fingers, and sniffed at it. He turned and gave me a look. I retreated, reluctantly, to the kitchen, where Paddy was setting up the meat and milk vats. “Any problems?” I liked cream in my coffee, too.

She gave me a look the twin of Sean’s. “What kind? You think I can’t get the lid off the MCP vat, or that the enzyme switch on the FBE synthesizer is too tough for me to throw?”

We went back outside and started banging on the hull, locating and opening every hatch and inventorying its contents. “Three Eddie Bauer One-Man Survival Kits, 14D-FWS, expiration date January 1, 2051,” Paddy read from the label of a bundle in one locker. She shoved it back inside and started to close the hatch on the locker.

“Open ’em up,” I said.

She looked martyred. “Mom.”

“How do we know one of those kits isn’t filled with seeds for pansies, giant, variegated?”

“They weren’t on Outpost,” she muttered.

“Do you know that, your own self? Did you stock this locker personally?” She didn’t answer. “Open them up, Paddy, one at a time, and enter the contents on the computer. When we’re done, we’ll check Outpost’s inventory of what they packed against ours of what we find.”

Her lips moved but I heard nothing over the headset. She began emptying the locker onto the ground and opening the bundles up, one at a time.