The Martian Race (15 page)

Only when it became embarrassingly obvious that the ISS had nothing much to do did NASA's attention turn to the obvious next goal: systems for true exploration, Mars. Recycling water and air, separation of solid waste, air chemistry—these had gotten worked out in orbit with painful slowness.

Centrifugal gravity was a simpler matter. In 2008 the method got a simple trial in orbit, standing off the ISS a few kilometers for safety, keeping astronauts—NASAnauts—in fractional g for a year.

They performed so well that the zero-g faction in the JSC Life Science Directorate had tried to suppress further work, fearing for their jobs. All they had learned from four decades of endless study of zero g was that it was a bad idea. But after the fractional-g trials the cat was out of the zero-g bag. There were at least some 0.38 g orbital studies to support Axelrod's leap to the simple configuration they would fly to Mars and back.

After all, this wasn't even what the media called rocket science— an interesting cliché misnomer, for rockets are engineering miracles, not scientific ones—tricky but not exactly challenging the limits of knowledge. It was Newtonian mechanics, and as long as the cable deployed all right between the upper stage of the booster and the habitat, all that remained to do was give each a burst from the hydrazine thrusters and spin the habitat about the dead weight of the empty upper stage shell at a few revolutions per minute.

Maybe the best fresh aspect of the Consortium was the absence of paperwork. In Julia's experience, every flight up to the space station produced more paperwork mass than the payload weight. Axelrod cut all that.

“No point in a bunch of Cover Your Ass memos if we fail,” he said happily. “Point isn't the paper we generate, but the paper we lose— thirty billion dollar bills.”

Then, as far as Julia was concerned, petty geopolitical and personnel matters lost their importance. Harry, her father, collapsed in a golf game.

He was diagnosed with one of the newly emerging killer viral diseases, the zoonosis class that migrated from animals to humans, fresh out of the African cauldron. They traced it back to the hunter's camp in west Africa he and the park rangers had found—Harry's spite trip. The animals the poachers were butchering harbored a viral disease ready to make the leap to humans. Harry's prognosis, in the long term, was grim—five years at best. Short term? Nobody knew. He could be dead in a month, if myriad details of blood chem went wrong on him. For starters, he was embarking on an intensive drug regime.

She got the news from her mother, Robbie. Julia had been lucky to have a mother who had dreamed of space and had married a biologist. Not just a loving, loyal husband, but one whose mind wandered to other planets. In those ancient days, the 1970s, the manned space program was solely short shuttle trips. Harry had enthusiastically supported Robbie's astronaut training, postponed his academic future so they could live near JSC, and worked for the exobiology group at NASA.

Her concession to the family was to return to Australia for the birth of Bill, then Julia. Toward the end of her leave for Julia, her mind full of the upcoming resumption of her career, she turned the wrong way into the path of a pickup truck. In the accident, the top of her femur was pushed through her shattered hip joint. Five months in hospital and then a long rehab.

After that she walked with a limp. The folks at NASA were sorry, and offered her a desk job, but her career in space was finished. She was repelled by the idea of becoming a bureaucrat, and with Harry, decided to stay in Australia. Harry snagged a position at the University of Adelaide and they settled into the academic life.

Julia had caught the space bug early on from her mother. An old videotape of the “Martian Chronicles” was her favorite movie. When grown-ups asked what she wanted to do when she grew up, she always said primly, “I'm going to swim in the canals of Mars.” That earned her little amused murmurs and a pat on the head. By the time she learned that there were no canals, it had become her mantra.

When she was fourteen, Harry and Robbie's old NASA connections got them invited to the celebrations surrounding the July 1997 Mars Pathfinder probe arrival:
Back to the Red Planet!

Live video feed from Mars was piped into a makeshift auditorium, looming enormously real on a huge screen. Around her she had felt the press of excited bodies. A group enthusiasm filled the room, actually a screened-off portion of the giant exhibition hall. There in the buzzing dark she was mesmerized. Later on, they went upstairs to a small room where she spent twenty minutes driving a radio-controlled rover toy around a patch of sand and rocks. Tacky, really, just plastic. But it was enough. After that, she read everything about the mission, put up posters of the Sojourner rock garden on her wall.

And her parents had gone not just for her, but for themselves.

Julia considered dropping out of the team to be with her father. She went through a hard night, thinking about it. She had not been able to rush to his bedside because there were some aerobraking trials on for tomorrow and she had to be there. And through the long night she was fully aware of the damage she would cause to the Consortium plans. None of it helped her sleep.

But when she talked to her parents on visiphone, Harry wouldn't hear of it. “Mars has always been your dream, sweetie!” he had exclaimed, frowning at her with Old Testament fury. “Mine, too.”

“And mine,” her mother said wistfully.

So during a long, intermittently awkward call, they reached a negotiated cease-fire. Harry would take his experimental drug treatment. They would all stay linked closely throughout the two-and-a-half-year flight. And, Harry added, “I'll be the first to kiss you when you come prancing down the gangplank. I'll push that Katherine out of the way, I swear I will.” Harry had decided opinions about the whole Raoul-baby-Katherine business. “I damn well promise.”

February 2016.

Time ticked on.

Launch readiness review. Nobody wanted to hear anything but the crisp, can-do NASA style. But this was seat-of-your-pants private sector, and in the eyes of everybody, especially leathery old hands like Brad Fowler, there were too many open items, too much unrehearsed.

NASA flights were like grand operas, the score and cast selected long before, the outcome ordained. This was more like a musical comedy they improvised as the band was warming up.

The solid rocket motors were time-honored technology, and still just a tad tricky. Maybe more than a tad. Stacking the whole assembly, booster and solids, had an uncomfortable resemblance to building a house of cards. Axelrod had paid the better part of a billion bucks to get full use of the Cape's facilities, right up to and including the Vehicle Assembly Building.

The crew flew into Runway 33, right next to the soaring square profile of the biggest building in the world. They marched out in their Consortium uniforms—Axelrod had insisted on the red-blue spandex suits—and stood there staring up at the VAB. They milled around like insects beneath the building's bulk until the press corps arrived, halting at the Axelrod-commanded respectful distance.

In the shimmering Cape heat the reporters and their big sun-shaded cameras looked a lot like old 1950s movie Martians, and Julia treated them pretty much that way—as objects of loathing. She had enjoyed enough exposure, thank you. The best thing about Mars, right then, was not the exploration and frontier and unknown and all that, but the fact that there would be nobody else there.

All four lined up behind a single microphone and spoke a few platitudes for what a PR type called “footage effect”—just enough to get a flash-recognition on the news, not enough to actually make a story out of it.

And what story could there be? Astronauts on their way uphill to the Big Empty. Luckily the reporters and VIP guests alike had to keep the twenty feet distance commanded by the quarantine rules, to avoid the crew picking up a head cold. Not a good way to go into a launch. No viruses to Mars either, couldn't have that.

Once they were into the hab and belted in by the ground crew to the adjustable acceleration couches, the checkoffs went smoothly and then the waiting began.

Julia had been through this already, they all had, and so she knew that the worst moment was before they lit the Roman candle under her. It was right
now
, when there was only waiting and too much thinking with not a damn thing to do. Astronauts were people built to be busy, not at their best when stuck immobile. When the prickly fears could come inching up the spine.

Tick, tick, tick.

Her whole life did not flash before her, but pieces of it flapped by like anxious seagulls as her attention darted around the cockpit. Voices buzzed in her headphones and she tried not to think of sitting on top of two million kilograms of supercold hydrogen and oxygen, two basic molecules yearning to kiss each other and explode in their elemental passion, to fling them at the empty eggshell blue sky.

They were all alone out here in the rippling tropical heat, all their relatives and friends and public standing a respectful five kilometers away because if anything went wrong …

Liftoff.

There was nothing about
lift
in it. Instead, there was huge noise and rattling and shaking and then a hard hammering and a pressing weight. The hab was being shaken profoundly, as if by an angry giant that could jar and jiggle in all directions at once.

She had done it before, but every time there was the same momentary terror, far too late.
Why am I here?

They spent a day in near Earth orbit, checking out systems before casting off into the deep.

Microgravity bothered the brain. The perception of primordial primate unease busied the mind with the business of trying to offset shifting fluids in the skull. Senses kept screaming to the mind that
we're falling!
—all the time. Fretting about survival led to dumb astronauts. Julia found, just as on space station flights, that her reflexes were doughy, her thoughts muddy.

Plus, half those in zero g got sick. No matter if they had been there before, as all four had. This time it was Julia's turn. She had always felt a bit superior to her NASAnaut companions on space station flights, as they grew woozy.

She felt odd, then ill, then a lurching, hideous nausea. The “queasy cruds” struck arbitrarily, with an impartiality she found insulting. She was an old space hand! On her way to more important destinations than crummy old orbit! Her stomach was betraying her.

The medicos still couldn't prevent it or predict it. This proved to be of little comfort. But there were little pills that got it under control within a day. You turned green, threw up, weren't much good for anything, and then you got okay. Yippee ti yi yay, space cowboys!

Or cowgirls. As fluctuations would have it, the men were fine.

Hurried preparations went on all around her in the cockpit/hab while she lolled in her g-couch, following Viktor's orders and not thinking about the food he offered and looking out the port at the big creamy world she was about to leave. The return ship was full of fuel, waiting for them on Mars.

Planets perform a grand gavotte, forcing humans to dance to the same grave rhythms. Viktor checked and rechecked their ship. The most fuel-stingy method of reaching Mars, or any other world, started by slipping away from Earth's nearly circular orbit on a long, slow tangent. Their boost would start them on this glide, an ellipse that paralleled Earth's orbit at one end and that of Mars at the other. Sliding like a bead along this smooth course, they would swoop near Mars at a velocity very nearly that of the planets.

But getting there meant hitting the window. Leave a month late and the fuel cost ran up enormously. Leave half a year late and no rocket imaginable could get you around the long loop in time; you would chase Mars all around its orbit—watching the blue-green world dwindle away, as every second, that oasis of air and water fell behind another 33 kilometers. Even moving that fast, a thousand times the speed of the Apollo missions to the moon, it would take six months to ride the 400 million kilometers.

Axelrod did a ‘cast with them, saying confidently, “We're going to Mars!” to big background applause. She tried not to throw up, for several reasons.

All systems were
go.
So they went.

11

JANUARY 14,2018

T
HEY HAD ALL BEEN SHAKEN UP BY THE AEROBRAKING ON ARRIVAL. SURE,
the simulations had been tough—harder vibrations than at liftoff, gut-wrenching swerves as they hit high-altitude turbulence that nobody had predicted (and what if they had?).

Coming in, they had to lose several kilometers per second of speed. Doing that by rocket braking would have imposed a considerable fuel cost. So they used friction, just like ordinary brakes. Slamming into even the tenuous CO
₂
atmosphere meant heating their aeroshell to the same temperature range that the Shuttle tiles had to endure.

The hard-hammering jolts came in all three axes at once.
Like a dog shaking a rag doll,
she thought as her stomach lurched. She tried to pay attention, through the shattering noise—a wall of sound that threatened at each new shrill note, as if the whole hab were starting to come apart. And through that came the incredibly calm drone of Viktor's voice, somehow close and personal in her headset.

“Coming up on max delta, heading at four four three seven, coming close to margin on that. In the envelope, adjusting for pitch, altitude four eight seven.”

He was talking to Marc but it had a hugely comforting effect on her. She knew that he was documenting every step in real time, so that if something failed, at least there might be some record of what went wrong. One of the pre-positioned orbiting comm satellites for the Mars Outpost program was receiving whatever signal could escape the plasma discharge glow that made them look like a fresh orange comet high up in the Martian day.

She held on through it all, praying to Viktor, not God, to bring them through the long agonizing minutes while they skated around a quarter of the planet. Wind friction howled and the rugged shell in their nose turned bright red, shedding its nose tiles like a spaceship with skin disease. Then—
whang! whoomp!
—they blew the aeroshell and the heavy hand of deceleration lifted a bit.