Today she had promised herself a special treat. Over in the corner was a large plastic pot, holding her green soul mate, a western white pine. The seeds she’d gathered herself on a last break before their Earthside launch, a short hiking vacation in California’s High Sierra. Buffeted by winds, sheared by ice storms, the pines clung to the stony soil in small groups. Just below timberline they were no taller than shrubs. Finding a partially gnawed cone in a snow bank, she’d tucked it into her pack.
Adapted to cold and dry, living at high altitudes under reduced oxygen, the pines were already partially adapted to living on Mars. And her tree had thrived in the greenhouse, growing to be an astonishing two feet high, with many side branches. The only wild Earth organism on Mars.
She brought her chair and sat beside it, looking carefully at the tips of the branches. She wasn’t an expert on pines, and had never grown one before. The needles on this one were dark green, consistent with the reduced sunlight. The cold nights following the blowout had nipped some of the younger needles, but—what’s this?
Pale green needles at the branch ends! Yes, the tips were growing. Well, look at that, you’re going to make it after all.
She smiled broadly. The first tree on Mars.
40
MARCH 14, 2018
THEY STOOD ON THE HILLSIDE AND WATCHED THE SPREADING RUSTY sunset, stamping their feet against the cold.
What was going to be a midafternoon departure had succumbed to the inevitable last-minute delays. Julia and Viktor had thought they’d watch the launch from outside. It would make better vid footage, to be sure, but it somehow just felt right, too.
Over her suit comm came the last-minute chatter between Claudine and Marc.
“Pressurizing all okay.”
“Flow regular.”
“Max two four seven.”
“On profile.”
“Got the temp envelope steady.”
She let it wash over her, remembering their own departure, and how she’d felt.
There came another delay, something about the nuclear pile running a little too hot because the plates of high-grade uranium were squeezing a bit close together, not kept apart by the gas flow between them. Raoul said that would correct once they were full throttle, pouring water by from the high-pressure pumps. The water flashed into steam in an instant, heated by the plates. But it all had to synchronize.
This Airbus design used the workhorses of chemical rockets, valves and pumps and nozzles, but at vastly higher power levels. Just as the once-newfangled steamships still used hulls and decks and rudders, inherited from the Age of Sail. Perhaps they were witnessing the end of the Age of Liquid Oxygen, outmoded because no one would open up the solar system that antiquated way anymore, burning chemical energy into hot gas.
An era ending, an era beginning.
She shivered and her suit clicked with supporting warmth. Viktor said, “Earth rising.”
So it was. She close-upped the white dot on the horizon and again saw the two points of light, one a gray-white and the other a definite ocean blue. Home.
The desert night fell quickly, applauded by the brilliant jewel starscape.
“Three, two, one. Ramping,” came Claudine’s voice.
Below the slender ship the first bright steam blossomed. Cottony clouds billowed up, licking up past the square port, almost swallowing the rocket.
“Flow standard. Zero eleven seven.”
“Profiling steady.”
Viktor had started the vid and narration. “The Spirit of Ares launches for Earth on water from Mars. This is the first return from another planet since Apollo astronauts walked on the moon.”
It climbed up a growing spire, the alabaster banks of it lit from within with a hot orange glow.
The nuclear rocket climbed gracefully into the darkening butterscotch sky, leaving a huge plume behind. The gases fizzed away into nothingness.
Quick tears stung Julia’s eyes. She imagined being on the ship, on her way home. They’re going home, and I’m not.
Telling her parents had been difficult, but they’d been very good about it. Her father was looking better, the results of the ultrasound cancer treatments optimistic. He would see her when she finally returned, he had said. However long that took.
The ship rose quickly, almost soundlessly, into the deepening blackness of Martian night.
She and Viktor shouted good-byes.
Marc called out altitudes, speeds, voice calm and flat.
She felt a sadness as they angled over at several kilometers up. The rocket plume blazed across the hard blackness.
Reluctantly she looked away from the hard spot of light above to a suddenly empty world, her world.
Then she saw it. A smudge of light toward the horizon. It was a pale white cloud, linear, fuzzier at one end. It seemed to point downward. She realized that she was looking north, and that the cloud glowed. A pale ivory finger of illumination spiked up from the surface, broadening.
It came from the vent, she knew instantly—an impossibly brilliant outpouring.
“Viktor, look. Swing the vid to the north. The vent is outgassing.”
To poke such a glistening probe of light into the sky must have cost the matting enormous energies, she thought. To make it, the vent would first have to be expelling a gusher of vapor. Then the mats would all have to pour their energy into the pale glow, coherently.
