She looked at Raoul and said carefully, “Well, I’m relieved you and Viktor think the ERV can be repaired, but we have a supply problem if we miss the launch window. I think Axelrod or NASA—and I’m not going to get in the middle of that one—should get that second ERV on its way, loaded with two and a half years of supplies.”
Raoul looked very unhappy, but did not object.
“Either that, or confirm that Airbus can take us back at the launch window,” she finished.
Marc said, “Yeah, why haven’t we heard from them? We know the crew, why the bloody radio silence?” He was still angry, but had found a new target.
“Not very likely they can help,” said Viktor. “Even with a nuke, mass is mass. Seven people plus food is no doubt more than they can carry.”
“You’re sure?” Julia sat up, startled.
“From its dimensions, from simple scaling laws—yes.” Viktor looked at each of them in turn. “Do not expect miracles.”
“Damn,” said Raoul. “I’d been hoping…”
“Who wants to go limping home with them anyway?” Marc grimaced. “Christ, after all this time, we’ve worked our asses off doing those inane manufacturing tests, collecting all those samples—and all for nothing.”
Before the conversation veered again into confrontation, she leaped in with her trump card.
“Raoul, I have no reason to doubt your assessment of the dust problem. You and Viktor can’t be expected to fix the unfixable. If all the seals are exhausted, or the metal is fatigued, it’s a major miscalculation on NASA’s part. It’s a planning failure, not a mechanical glitch. The ERV you’re trying to fix should’ve been only the backup, to give us reserve fuel and an oxygen supply. Our return ship should’ve launched just after we did, not two years before. Earth needs to send us a fresh vehicle.”
Raoul looked at her with surprise.
Through Viktor, Julia had sensed Raoul’s growing frustration with the repairs. Every time he looked at a new system, he found the same creeping disintegration. He was attempting a Sisyphean repair, and the weight of the boulder threatened to crush him. But he wouldn’t give up. Couldn’t. Latin pride plus astronaut training equaled superman image.
Viktor had the last word. “Raoul and me, we want to test again—with our single line—and soon. If there are still problems, we go ahead with Julia’s idea.”
Nods all around. Nobody spoke. Their fragile peace worked best with silence.
He was the commander and had taken the decision. A big hill had been crested. She’d caught them off-guard with her assessment, and it had worked.
But Julia was still unsatisfied. She gritted her teeth.
Damn. I couldn’t quite get there. It’ll have to be after the next test. But maybe this was more useful. After all, it’s 40 million miles to the nearest grocery store.
13
JANUARY 14, 2018
EARTHSIDE MEDIA REACTION WAS INTENSE. THEY ALL FELT IT, EVEN BE-hind the thick screen the Consortium kept between them and the rampaging media.
She got a long e-mail from Robbie and Harry, plus all the other relatives. Once you were famous, she had learned, every distant cousin was on the doorstep. They remembered poignant moments from childhood, fraught with portent for the future Mars voyager—all on interview shows or in op-ed pieces, and so what if Julia herself couldn’t remember those episodes?
Okay, she had to admit to herself, she had gotten cynical. Years of exposure to the Mesh’s worse problem—having an essentially infinite number of pen pals—had sharpened her sense of the absurdity of it all. Here she was in very real danger, and she was expected to take time to answer letters about it.
The others felt the same, but each handled it in a different way.
Viktor had long since stopped sending anything but bland visuals to anyone but his mother. Raoul sent long e-mails to Katherine and a very few others. Marc, though, wrote general letters that got reposted to a huge list of “intimates.” Julia did the same, trying to make them less stiff than they needed. The Consortium had contractual rights to see these group letters, scooping off any reasonably good writing for “on Mars” journalism pieces under their bylines, polished up by staff and licensed out by Axelrod. Showbiz.
Even in this crisis, the system worked. Habit, mostly, and they all had found during the long flight here that they needed the time away from each other, to speak to another audience than the same three mugs they confronted each breakfast.
They had met only one other real crisis, and it had been the same then, though compressed.
Three days after their boost out of low earth orbit, well beyond the moon, they had done the spin-up for centrifugal gravity. Carefully Viktor blew the bolts that freed for deployment the cable-gravity system.
This was the scheme the Magnum booster had been going into orbit to test. The postmortem showed that a pump failure lay at the bottom of the spectacular blowup that had killed the original Mars crew.
So no one had actually done the entire run-through, from launch to spin-up. There had been trials at the space station, but no trial could simulate every dynamical aspect. And astronauts were trained to be professional skeptics about any piece of new gear.
They all huddled around the cockpit as Viktor checked systems and then blew away the unneeded outer manifold. Their external camera showed a clear separation. The cable came snaking out, then, as the upper stage of their Magnum eased away.
“Clean snake,” Viktor had said in a precise, controlled voice that could not hide his joy.
The cable had to take the full eighty-five tons of the habitat plus the upper stage, all subject to 0.38 Earth g, the Mars normal. Viktor let it unfurl fully, two hundred meters like a slick fishing line dwindling away. He fired the hydrazine thrusters. Plumes blossomed from both the long tube of the empty upper stage and the habitat. They accelerated smoothly, upper stage becoming their counterweight.
“Some of the manifold bolts don’t fire correctly,” Viktor noted, eyeing the video. “See?” Small motes tumbled in the darkness along the cable, winking on and off in the sunlight.
Raoul said, “Right. That seems minor. They came off the separation cowling, I guess.”
“Should stay with cowling,” Viktor said.
“Good riddance.”
They were all in their acceleration couches by then, feeling the return of partial gravity. Julia had felt 0.38 g in the centrifugal spinner of the space station, but as she got up and walked around this felt subtly different. The other system had used a short, ten-meter rotation arm, and when she had walked then her inner ear sent out faint alarms. None here.
Raoul was running the video camera for Earthside, plus the incabin fixed one, as Viktor pulled a champagne bottle from the refrigerator. Viktor’s eyes popped in mock surprise. “Drink on board?!” for the home audience. They all laughed and beamed and watched Viktor pour an enormously expensive long pale golden stream into Julia’s glass, falling in slow-mo in the new gravity—
Thunk.
