Red Planet Run (9 page)

Great Galactic Ghoul? “I beg your pardon?”

There was a pause. When Crip spoke again he sounded sheepish. “Sort of a legend around these parts. There’s a history of spaceships going out of control on approach to Mars.”

“So?”

“So it’s sort of a Bermuda Triangle in vacuum. Spacers made up the Great Galactic Ghoul to account for the disappearing ships.”

And disappearing ships’ crews? I wondered, but didn’t say. “You’re the last person I figured to be superstitious, Crip.”

“Superstitious my ass, Svensdotter,” he snapped, “Mariner 4 had control problems, so did Mariner 7; Mariner 9’s navigational system went haywire, fourteen Russian probes failed both orbit and/or touchdown; no one has ever found so much as a single nut off Fobos 1 or 2, and you want to tell me what happened to the
Observer
, the
Newton,
and the
Sagdeyev
?”

“I don’t know,” I said meekly.

“Nobody does,” he said, triumphant.

I’d heard worse. I’d even heard dumber. I kept my mouth shut and let Crip stave off the efforts of the Great Galactic Ghoul to put a spin on our tail.

It had been a short, uneventful trip, thirty days door to doorstep, and now Crip and the twins and I had withdrawn to our respective ships; the twins and I to wait out the interval, Crip to perform all the minute, finicking, down-to-the-wire corrections in our vernier-assisted trajectory that would, hopefully, insert us into the Martian atmosphere at the proper angle.

I wasn’t worried. Crip always got me from point to point in one piece. As sure as I was lying there, staring at the soon-to-be ceiling, he was sweating and swearing over the console in the
Pushmepullyou,
coaxing that little bit of extra thrust out of Starboard Vernier Number 23 that would make the difference between popping our drogue over Chryse Planitia or, the way the planets were lined up that afternoon, the Huyghens Rift on Titan. Well, eventually Titan, long after any of us would be in any shape to appreciate it.

Not that I was worried about it.

“Sixty seconds to beacon detach,” Crip said.

That meant we were right on top of Phobos. I counted the seconds down with him.

“—three, two, one, beacon away.”

There was the distant thud of explosive bolts. The craft shuddered once. I waited, tense. Landing the beacon in exactly the right place on Phobos was critical. It would be the
Kayak
’s only means of communication, however delayed, as well as the primary means of data relay. If it missed its mark, at our present velocity Crip had about ten minutes to change the
Pushmepullyou-Kayak
’s mind about landing us on Mars, and maybe half an hour after that to get us re-oriented for a return to Outpost. There would be no second chance at the Red Planet. This, I told Helen mentally, is what comes of planning a Mars mission in such an all-fired, jet-propelled hurry.

I knew why she’d done it, of course: I was on board. If the mission had been delayed one day more, I wouldn’t have been, and she knew it.

The minutes inched by like snails. “Bulls-eye!” Crip shouted. “Beacon on target!”

“Is it transmitting?”

“Stand by one.”

I glanced at the digital readout on my communit. I wasn’t sure we had a minute, but they continued to crawl by, with or without my permission.

And then Crip’s voice came back over the headset. “Phobos Lander 1, transmitting, loud and clear, five by five.”

I felt as relieved as he sounded. “Hooray.”

“First thing that’s gone right since we dropkicked out of the Belt.”

I said nothing. Pilots swear, avow, and attest that they want each and every flight to go by the book and by the numbers, but around the bar all they talk about is how they brought that baby home to Mama with the IMU out, half a stabilizer missing, the rest of the crew incapacitated, and the ship running on empty. Pilots are weaned on the difficult and raised on the impossible, and they sulk when everything goes right, because afterwards there is no reason to brag about how smart and capable and talented and superhuman they are. Crip would drink for free on the past thirty days for the next three hundred and sixty-five.

The ship shuddered again. “Okay,” Crip said. “We just dipped into the top layer of Martian atmosphere. All secure?”

“Okay here,” I said.

“Five by five,” Paddy said glumly over my headset, and Sean echoed her, equally glum. “Five by.”

All the graphplex ports were shielded with an ablative bumper, but I knew from countless briefings what was going on outside. The
Kayak
was bottom down, its circular hull broadside to the Martian atmosphere. The
Pushmepullyou
crouched like a hairless, metal tarantula over the toroid’s doughnut hole, connected to the
Kayak
by eight spidery legs that would detach by explosive bolts when the insertion maneuver was complete. Our large flat surface optimized atmospheric drag, which would enable air friction (such as it was on Mars) to slow us down. Crip, controlling the process with small, repeated firings of the
Pushmepullyou
’s verniers, would dip us repeatedly into the atmosphere, skipping across its upper fringes like a flat rock skipping across water, our velocity decreasing with every skip. Finally, and may I add, theoretically, our speed would slow from an arrival velocity of over 33,000 kph to a little less than 20,000 kph, in preparation for orbit, insertion, and descent.

Landing on Terra took a spaceplane. Landing on Luna, all you needed were retro rockets. To land on Mars, we were using the Martian atmosphere to ease on down the road with parachutes, three of them. If they popped too soon, they would burn up in the atmosphere. In that case controlling the speed of our entry would become academic, as would our rate of ablation, as would the length of our survival. The timing was precise, as the
Pushmepullyou
had to separate soon enough to escape Martian gravity itself, and at the same time remain connected to us long enough to ensure that that same gravity had firmly captured the
Kayak.

The designers had saved on Delta-vee by making the command module a one-holer; I would have felt better if Crip had had at bare minimum a co-pilot. My subconscious reached out for a yoke, a throttle, a brake lever, rudder pedals—anything to make believe I was in even partial control of our descent.

I wasn’t worried at all.

There was no sound from the other side of the craft, so I didn’t know if the twins were worried or not. At this point, they would have cheerfully ripped their tongues out at the roots before they would have told me one way or another. I thought back to the scene around the galley table four weeks before.

· · ·

“How am I supposed to study astronomy from inside a balloon that is itself inside the distorting influence of a planetary atmosphere?” Paddy demanded. “I won’t have access to a telescope or star charts or Sam or anything else I really need!”

“You know perfectly well that Mars’ atmosphere is barely worthy of the name,” I told her, “and we won’t be inside the balloon, we’ll be inside the gondola. As for the telescope and the charts, we each get a personal freight allowance. I’m sure you can find a telescope to fit within that allowance, and if you go over I’m willing to give you some of mine. As for Sam’s classes, if you ask I’m sure he’ll be glad to set up a course schedule for you. We can load it into the computer and your education will suffer no significant interruption. Pass the rice, please.”

“And what about me?” Sean demanded. “I suppose Mars is just lousy with arable acreage and irrigation ditches? I suppose I write my botany thesis on the seven different species of Martian winter wheat?”

“You’ll be too busy tending to our grocery list to do much writing. Your thesis will have to wait, and,” I added evenly, “considering where the study of botany and hydroponics has led you lately, a brief hiatus at this time seems appropriate.” If not imperative.

They didn’t even have the grace to look ashamed. “You want to go to Mars, go!” Paddy cried.

“Yeah, unlike you, Mom, we have lives
here,
not on Mars.”

“You will shortly,” I said.

“It’s not fair! I’m not going!”

“I’m not either!”

“Yes, you are.”

“Mom!”

“Why?” Sean said angrily. “Why do we have to go, too?”

I chewed and swallowed, deliberately taking my time. “Because I say you’re going, and because I’m bigger, older, and tougher than you are, which means I can make it stick. We’re going to Mars. We’re leaving at the end of the month. Start packing.”

For a moment I thought Paddy was going to throw her glass at me. For a moment I thought Sean was going to upend the entire table in my lap. If I’d known my announcement was going to start World War IV, I might have reconsidered.

Mother cut across the ominous silence. “My very dears, why all this fuss? You are going to enjoy yourselves thoroughly, I assure you. Imagine, a whole new world to discover and explore. You’ll get to see the tallest volcano and the longest planetary rift valley in the System, you’ll have the ruins of the ancients to wander through.” She examined a lumpia closely for flaws. “Although, lacking the education and expertise of, say, someone of my background, you will naturally enough be unable to understand and appreciate them as they should be understood and appreciated.”

“Why don’t you go with her, then,” Paddy muttered.

“Perhaps because I was not invited, dear,” Mother replied in her most excruciatingly affable tone.

“Natasha,” Crip said.

She raised an eyebrow. “Is it possible, Crippen dear, that you are about to instruct me as to my behavior?” She smiled at him.

Crip shot me a look that said clearly,
You’re on your own, Star,
and buried his face in his plate.

“Star, just tell me one thing,” Charlie pleaded. “Just tell me you’re not going to Mars because I tried to get you laid. You aren’t, are you? I mean, what kind of reason is that?”

“It’s no kind of reason at all,” I said. “It’s probably why I’m not.”

The twins brightened. “Not going to Mars?”

“Not going to Mars for that reason,” I explained, and their faces fell again.

It was like that for days, degenerating into sullen silence on the part of the twins and resigned acceptance in everyone else. What little time I could spare from handing Outpost over to Simon I spent familiarizing myself with our ship and packing for it to arrive the only way it could arrive, two days late. Packing a Martian year’s worth of food and supplies for three people into the gondola of a balloon discourages materialism. So does having to label every single item in the gondola with its own weight, so us aeronauts would know its value as ballast. Not that that was anything I ever wanted to need to know, as it would indicate an immediate need to lift high and fast and a deficiency of either helium and/or hot air to do the lifting with. I must have tested the floor hatch on the gondola fifty times. If I had to pitch anything over the side, that hatch was, by God, going to work.

In an average man day, the average man consumes seven kays of food, eleven kays of water, and five kays of oh-two. Some of that we’d bring with us; much of it we were going to have to grow or make. Water, I devoutly hoped, we were going to find on Mars, in the permafrost layer frozen beneath the Martian surface. To these ends we packed seeds as well as vacuum-packed entrees, stasis-H as well as decaliter jugs, atpaks as well as molecular sieves and window boxes. The gondola had graphplex windows every second bulkhead panel all the way around. As soon as I found that out I showed them to Paddy, not without a trace of smugness. Making the best of a bad situation, she immediately appropriated the science station, with its pop-out bubble, for her astronomical observatory. Sean was slower at making himself to home; I found him muttering something—I hoped not incantations—over a box of seed packets one morning. Later that day I caught him helping Roger Lindbergh doing a practice install of a window box, although he naturally quit as soon as he became aware of my presence.

Charlie kept reminding us that we would be going from Outpost’s half gee to Mars’ one-third, and that we’d have to boost our exercise accordingly. Simon was reprogramming the gondola’s computer for the seventh or eighth time and wondering out loud why so much space had been wasted on unnecessary things like exercycles when anyone with half a brain could see that with just one more storage rack, just ten more cards, he could make the environmental program foolproof. Mother was still sulking because she hadn’t been invited along, and on every inhale reminded us that she was the one who’d been on her way to Mars when we insisted she stay on at Outpost to monitor the ongoing investigation into planet Prometheus. Archy had stopped speaking to me at all except when absolutely necessary, which was better than the twins hammering at me, but not much. Between Brother Moses breathing fire and smoke up one arm of the Belt and down the other, and the nearly mutinous conditions that prevailed across the station, I was actually glad when departure day arrived.

· · ·

It was awfully quiet and awfully dark, strapped to my couch, hurtling toward the Red Planet at umpteen kph. I wasn’t worried, though. With Crip on the stick, what could go wrong? And if worse came to worst, I could set us down. If I could get to the
Pushmepullyou
’s cockpit in time. I’d never landed on a planet with atmosphere and thermals and winds and things, though. But I knew my way around the ship’s navigation console; Helen had made sure of that long before we broke orbit for launch.

· · ·

“So what do you think?” Helen’s voice over the p-suit headset was proud and invited me to be, too.

The silver, gray, and black tricolor doughnut that was the Mars lander was stuck on one end of the squat, spidery launcher. The dish-shaped pressure plate brought up the rear like an apologetic afterthought. What I thought was that the Mars Viking 3 looked like a solar-celled bagel in a stelatite skirt, as well as a menace to space traffic and every space traveler within a hundred light-years. I said so.