Mars (30 page)

“You’ve got no idea how much pressure is building up around this Indian,” the Vice-President was saying, her angry voice like fingernails on a chalkboard. “It’s not only the Indian rights activists. It’s the high-tech gang, too. They’re forming alliances with the Hispanics and the ghetto blacks. It’s the old Rainbow Coalition again, plus the techies, with a real honest-to-god Indian scientist hero to be their figurehead!”

Slowly, with an enormous weight inside him that made his words hesitant, Brumado asked, “Suppose … suppose … I could get Waterman to make a statement that would … support your candidacy?”

Her eyes flashed, then became calculating. “Why would he support me?”

“Because,” Brumado had to struggle to get the words out, “because you will go on record as favoring further missions to Mars.”

“I couldn’t do that,” she snapped.

“When the first expedition returns they will
all
be heroes. The public acclaim will be enormous. And there is no Vietnam War to take the public’s mind off their success.”

The Vice-President muttered, “They’ll be coming back just in time for the primaries.”

“You could capitalize, on their success.”

“You can get Waterman to make a statement supporting me?”

“Once you go on record as supporting further Mars missions.”

The Vice-President had spent enough years in politics to understand that getting elected was the most important thing, and the way to get elected was to clear enemies away from your path. Sometimes this meant adopting their coloration—at least for a while.

She also understood that it was foolish to give a definite commitment right away. “I’ll have to think about that. It sounds as if it might be workable.”

“It will remove Mars as an issue during your campaign,” Brumado said.

She nodded briskly. “I’ll get back to you.”

Then she stepped toward the doors, which a Secret Service agent pushed open for her. The entourage swept out onto the loading dock. Before the doors swung shut Brumado got a glimpse of a phalanx of limousines waiting where delivery trucks usually parked.

Then the doors closed and he was alone in the kitchen with the noisy, banging, yelling, clattering clean-up crew.

He smiled to himself. But the smile faded as he realized that he had just promised to “deliver” James Waterman for the Vice-President’s election campaign.

That will not be an easy task, he realized.

N
EW YORK
: “But it doesn’t make any sense!” Edith insisted. “Jamie’s not the type to snub the media. He wouldn’t refuse to be interviewed.”

“Are you saying that the government’s keeping him from talking to us? Muzzling him?”

“Yes! I’m certain of it!”

It was almost eleven
P.M.
Edith had waited for three days to see Howard Francis. As network news vice-president, he held the power of decision and she was determined to make him decide in her favor. Her days in New York had generated a frantic urgency in Edith. No longer the happily smiling former cheerleader, ex-beauty queen, anchorwoman for the local Houston TV news, she was in the Big Apple now, Struggling
with every weapon at her command to win a job with the network news organization.

Howard Francis’s office was so high above the street that Edith expected to see clouds wafting past the window behind his broad gleaming desk. The walls were covered with photographs of Howard Francis with the great and near-great of politics, show business, and the news industry: smiling, shaking hands, presenting awards, receiving awards. The man behind the desk was almost as young as Edith herself. His suit cost more than Edith’s weekly salary back in Texas. His necktie was fashionably loosened at his unbuttoned collar. He had the sharp-eyed features of a rodent, big teeth, and even a twitch when he got excited. Edith could see the tic contorting one side of his face.

Francis leaned his skinny forearms on his desktop and said to Edith, “Look—it’s late and I haven’t had dinner yet. I’ve got problems up to my eyebrows and a meeting with the corporate brass tomorrow morning at nine. Can you prove what you’re saying?”

She made herself smile at him despite the sick feeling in her stomach. “Well … nobody in NASA is going to admit to it in public.”

“Off the record?”

“I’ve got a lot of friends down at the Johnson Space Center,” she said.

“Look,” he said, “I’ve got whole teams of correspondents working for me in Houston and Washington and everyplace else. What can you do for me that they can’t?”

“What about Jamie’s parents?” she countered. “And his grandfather in Santa Fe? He’s pure Navaho.”

Francis shook his head. “The parents are
dull
Maybe the grandfather, if he’s really an Indian. That might be something. But later. First you’ve gotta prove to me that the government’s muzzling your Indian.
That
would be news.”

Edith kept her smile glowing for him. She was wearing her best silk blouse, creamy white, the top four buttons undone. Her skirt was short enough to show plenty of knee as she sat in the chair before his desk.

“Washington,” said the network vice-president from behind his massive desk. “That’s where the cover-up is going on—if there is a cover-up.”

“Maybe I can get to somebody on the Space Council,” Edith suggested.

“The Vice-President? Fat chance!”

“No, not her. But some of my contacts in Houston are pretty close to a couple of the men on the Space Council. I think I could get one or two of them to talk to me—prob’ly off the record, though.”

“That’d be a start.”

“Let me try that route. If it doesn’t work I can go out to Santa Fe and talk to Jamie’s grandfather.”

The man nodded, his eyes on her blouse.

Edith decided to play her trump card. “And I could always contact Jamie on a personal basis. The project allows personal calls, and I’m sure he’d accept one from me. The officials don’t have to know I’m a newswoman.”

“The personal calls are private.”

“Not if I tape it at my end,” Edith said, turning her smile sly.

The man chewed his lower lip, face twitching furiously. Finally he jumped to his feet and stuck his hand out over the desk.

“Okay. Do it.”

“I’m hired?”

“As a consultant. Per diem fee and expenses. If this works out, then you’ll be hired. Fair enough?”

Edith rose from her chair and took his extended hand in hers. “You won’t regret it,” she said.

Howard Francis grinned at her. “I better not.” Then he added, “Come on, let’s get a bite to eat.”

Edith agreed with a nod, remembering the old adage about not trusting a man who carried two first names.

Halfway to Mars the sun suddenly turned deadly.

The mission to Mars had been timed for a period of low solar activity. Still, there was only the slimmest of chances that the spacecraft could carry their human crews through nine months in interplanetary space without running into a magnetic storm spawned by a solar flare.

Both on Earth and at the underground base on the moon, solar forecasters watched the sun in cramped narrow workrooms crowded with humming computers and video monitors. They saw a set of blotches take form on the shining surface of the sun, each of them bigger than the Earth itself. Their instruments detected weak radio emissions and bursts of soft X rays from the sunspot group. Completely normal.

Then the flare erupted. Nothing spectacular, to the eye. Just a brief flash of light. But the incoming radiation grew swiftly, ominously, its intensity rising a hundred times above normal, a thousand, ten thousand, in the span of a few minutes. Ultraviolet and X-ray sensors aboard monitoring satellites went into overload. An intense burst of radio noise sizzled in astronomers’ receivers all around the Earth and shut down the radio telescope at the lunar base. It was a completely ordinary solar flare, no more powerful than a hundred billion hydrogen bombs all going off at once. Its total energy was less than a quarter second of the sun’s normal output.

But the cloud of subatomic particles it blew into space could kill unprotected humans in seconds.

The solar forecasters’ instruments automatically radioed a warning to the Mars spacecraft, more than seventy million kilometers away from Earth. The electromagnetic radiation
from the flare, traveling at the speed of light just as the astronomers’ radio signals did, hit the spacecraft at the same instant that the warnings arrived.

Alarms hooted down the length of both ships, startling the men and women at their tasks, jolting those asleep into a terrified waking. The first moment of adrenaline-drenched shock gave way to the reactions drilled into the Mars teams by years of training. Every man and woman on each of the two spacecraft dashed, sprinted, raced for the radiation shelters.

For the first wave of electromagnetic energy from the flare was merely the precursor, the flash of lightning that warns of an approaching storm. Following it by a few minutes or perhaps even a few hours would be a vast expanding cloud of energetic protons and electrons, particles that could slice right through the skin of the ship and fry human flesh in seconds.

In low Earth orbit astronauts are protected from solar flare particles by the Earth’s magnetic field, which deflects the energetic protons and electrons flung off the sun and eventually pumps them down into the atmosphere at the north and south magnetic poles. Spectacular auroras can paint the skies for several nights in a row after a big solar flare. The geomagnetic field is bashed and buckled by the storm of incoming particles; for days it vibrates and twangs like banjo strings. Radio transmissions are garbled. Even underground telephone links can be scrambled.

On Earth itself the atmosphere absorbs any particles that power through the magnetic field, so that even the most energetic solar flare does not endanger life on the surface of the planet. On the airless moon, with its minuscule magnetic field, there is only one defense: go underground and stay underground until the storm blows over.

In interplanetary space the only defenses against a magnetic storm are those the spacecraft carry with them.

“Don’t sweat it,” said Pete Connors. “We all knew we couldn’t make it all the way without running into a flare.” He was trying to sound reassuring, but the expression on his long-jawed face looked quite serious, like a doctor discussing surgery with his patient.

“It’s more like the flare is running into us, isn’t it?” corrected George O’Hara, the Australian geologist.

The twelve men and women of the
Mars 1
crew were crammed onto the benches that lined the walls of the spacecraft’s specially shielded radiation shelter. Everyone called it the “storm cellar.” In this small compartment at the rear of the habitat module, the bulky propellant tanks attached to the spacecraft’s outer hull provided a measure of protection against the lethal radiation spawned from a solar flare.

The two Mars-bound craft used their half-depleted propellant tanks to absorb some of the high-energy particles streaming out from the sun. In addition, the crafts’ storm cellars were lined with thin filaments of superconducting wire. The first person to reach the radiation shelter—Pete Connors, as it turned out—punched the switch on the wall by the hatch to energize the shielding system.

The superconducting wire generated a strong magnetic field around the storm cellar, strong enough to deflect the lightweight electrons in the cloud of particles swarming past the spacecraft. But the heavier protons were the real danger, and the magnetic field was not nearly strong enough to deflect them.

Instead, the ship’s defenses included a set of electron guns that charged the outer skin of the spacecraft to millions of volts of positive charge. In theory, the incoming protons would be deflected from the spacecraft by its megavolt positive charge, while the craft’s magnetic field would keep electrons from reaching the skin and neutralizing the positive charge.

Small versions of the system had been tested aboard satellites flung into sun-centered orbits. Unmanned satellites.

“How long will we have to stay in here?” asked Ilona Malater. She was sitting between Tony Reed and the Greek biologist on the backup team, Dennis Xenophanes. Her long fingers clutched the edge of the bench so tightly her knuckles were white.

“Twelve hours or more,” answered Ollie Zieman, the American astronaut who was Connors’s backup. “Maybe a couple of days.”

“My god!”

“No sweat,” Zieman replied, almost jovially. “Radiation level in here is almost normal.”

The shelter already felt crowded and sweltering with the smell of suppressed fear. Jamie leaned his back against the
bulkhead, wondering if the magnetic field being generated by the superconducting wires mere inches away from his flesh actually had no effect on their bodies. According to the system’s designers, the field was shaped so that the storm cellar was in the clear; the field extended outward in all directions, but the shelter itself was like a bubble in its middle.

Vosnesensky and his backup, Dmitri Ivshenko, were standing in front of the communications console built into the shelter’s forward bulkhead, by the hatch. Mikhail had clamped a communications headset over his curly hair.

“Radio communication is difficult,” Vosnesensky announced loudly for everyone to hear, even though he kept his back to them. “We will use the laser system.”

A magnetic storm can screw up radio waves, Jamie knew, but it shouldn’t have any effect on a laser’s beam of light. He felt a tightness in his chest, anxiety, even though they had trained for such emergencies. There’s a semi-infinite number of subatomic particles out there just dying to get in here and kill all twelve of us, he thought. Like a cloud of spirits of the dead scratching and moaning outside the door.

“Mars 2
is all right,” Vosnesensky announced. “Everyone in the storm cellar with no trouble.”

They’ve got the extra man, Jamie thought. Dr. Li makes it thirteen they have to squeeze into their shelter.

Pete Connors got up and went to stand between Vosnesensky and the other Russian. “All the ship’s systems are working okay?” he asked loudly.