The chime sounded; full pressure, 90 percent Earth normal. She turned off her suit oxygen, released the clamps on her helmet and as quickly as possible shucked her parka, leggings, and finally, her suit. She shivered as she stepped out into the chilly cabin: she had actually been sweating on Mars—a novel experience.
A prickly itch washed over her face and neck and already she regretted their dusty entry. The usual routine was to brush the suits down outside with a soft brush. Some genius from mission prep with a lot of camping experience had thoughtfully stowed it aboard, and it quickly became one of their prized possessions. The Martian surface was thick with fine, rusty dust heavily laden with irritating peroxides. Her skin had felt like it was being gently sandpapered all during the long months here—especially when she was tired, as now.
Fluffing her short black hair, she donned a red Boeing cap and went over to help Viktor. She upped the rover pressure to get him more oxygen, and together they gingerly peeled off his insulating layers and his suit. A look at his leg confirmed her guess: sprained ankle, swelling fast.
From there it was straight safety manual stuff: bind, medicate, worry.
“I love you, even zonked on painkillers,” she murmured to his sleeping face when she had checked everything five times.
He had dropped off disturbingly fast. He kept up a front of invincibility, they all did somewhat or they wouldn’t be here; it went with astronaut psychology. But he had the bone-deep fatigue that came from a hard mission relentlessly pursued. He didn’t talk about it much, but the launch coming up was troubling him.
She was suddenly very tired. Emotional reaction, she diagnosed wryly. Still, better tend to it.
On Mars, you learn to pace yourself. Time for a cup of tea.
She looked around first for her tea cosy, carefully brought from Earth as part of her personal mass allowance. Nothing could’ve induced her to leave it behind—home was where the cosy was. She retrieved it from a corner of the cooking area. Originally light blue and cream colored, it was now permanently stained with maroon dust. When things got tough she sought the comfort of a proper cup of tea made in a teapot. There were precious few emergencies that couldn’t wait until after a cuppa.
As the water heated she got on the emergency band and tried to reach the other two back at the hab. No answer. They were probably deep in the guts of the Return Vehicle, starting the final checks for the approaching test fire. She left a heads-up on the ship’s message system, saying that they were coming back pronto, hurt. No way could she get any more done out here on her own. Anyway, Viktor came first, and any solo work was forbidden by their safety protocols.
With the robot arm on the front she unhooked the last solar-powered electromagnetic hailer from the outside rack and placed it in what she hoped was a good spot. It was always a judgment call. The winds were fickle, and the constantly shifting dunes had buried more than one.
She stared out of the forward viewport at the pale pink hills, trying to assess what this accident meant to the mission. Maybe just a mishap, no more. But Viktor still had plenty to do preparing for their return launch. No, this would screw up the schedule for sure. Her own work would get shoved aside.
And the vent—when would she get back? For about a microsecond she considered going down the hole herself. No, contrary to all mission procedures. Worse, stupid.
Face it, she thought—biology was not the imperative here anymore. She had made her big discovery. To the world, their expedition was already a big success—they’d found fossil life. But she wanted more than long-dead microbes.
And now they had one more accident to complicate things. Plan all you want, Mars will hand you surprises.
Like the accident that had gotten them all here.
2
MARCH 2015
“DAMN, STUCK AGAIN!”
She had been driving the Rover Boy, as they called it.
Rover was the telepresence explorer on Mars which had scouted the landing site. It was still operating after five years, thanks to the Mars Outpost program. There was a chem factory to feed Rover and backup electronics packages sitting in the Outpost base. Plus a microwave dish to keep in constant Earth contact through the three communication satellites above. She had trained with Rover from Johnson Space Center for years. Right now Julia was coaxing it across the tricky landscape, like a mother tending a toddling, balky child.
She was taking it around the edge of Thyra Crater, letting the autopilot on board negotiate the slope and rocks. There was no choice, given the time delay of over half an hour. Rover Boy was the most advanced model ever developed, but it had problems. Big, insurmountable ones.
“Where is it?” Viktor asked beside her.
“Stalled on a sand dune, looks like.”
She thumbed through close-up processing commands, fingers drumming on the driver’s console. Nearby hummed the station-keeping labors of the Jet Propulsion Lab.
At thirty-two, she had lost none of her impatience with life. What was more, she did not intend to. Piloting Rover Boy with infuriating delays was more trying than she could ever let on, or else risk being scrubbed from the Mars mission. So her fingers danced uselessly, rather than slamming on the gas in Red Rover and trying to back out of the clogging sand fifty-three million miles away.
“Yah, the dune to the left, last time.”
“Its onboards must’ve chosen to go that way.”
“Looks maybe to turn wheels left, reverse out,” Viktor said in what he probably thought was a helpful tone.
“It’s a day’s work getting out of a chuckhole,” she said uselessly, sending the Reverse order and cutting the wheels to the right. Before they got free her watch would be over.
She glanced at her framed picture of the little Sojourner rover, one she had saved from her first brush with space excitement at age fourteen, way back in 1997. Sojourner had suffered from the same time delay problem—no way around the speed of light!—but its plucky nosing around had got Julia started on her Mars fixation. She brought it on her watches here, for luck. Today it didn’t seem to be working.
Rover Boy was hugely bigger, better, but—“We’re never going to get far from Thyra in slow-mo.”
Viktor pointed to a smudge on the horizon. “Cloud?”
“Ummm.” She thumbed up the last view in that direction, north-west. “Wasn’t there last time.”
“Unusual to have cloud at midday. Evaporate at dawn.”
“Could be transmission error.” It would take over an hour to get another look that way. She sent the order to swivel the TV cameras.
Julia sighed. She had still not come to terms with the simple fact that she and Viktor and the rest, fine folk all, were not in the six-person crew going to Mars in one year. Sure, they had known that half of the astronauts in training would form a backup crew. Sure, they might be in the second expedition. If there was a second. Unless the first crew found something damned interesting, that seemed improbable. NASA was already far over budget on this one.
Nothing to do but wait for the return signal, probably Rover barking back that it was still stuck. Viktor flicked the console view controls. “Let’s catch news.”
With a touch of pensive sadness she watched the TV feed from Cape Canaveral. There it stood, only moments from launch: the Big Boy Booster, as the media gang called it. She thought fleetingly of how everything on this mission was Rover Boy or Big Boy or some other closed-club name. How had that happened?
Atop its cigar-shaped bulk was the seemingly tiny Mars Transit Vehicle, ready to be flung into orbit for its first space trials. She thought of her friends in there, waiting to ride into the black sky and deploy the silvery cylinder, spin it up with the last stage booster as a counter-weight, try out the 0.38 g for a month in gravity physiological trials—and felt another sour jolt of pure envy.
