The Martian Race (17 page)

They ate slowly.

Axelrod was livid. “NASA's repair blew out? What kinda shit instructions did they send you?” He was pacing around his office, vid feed clipped to his collar. “That's why they call them whiz boys, ya know. They can't find their whizzes without instructions. Detailed instructions.” He paused for breath. “First they sold us a defective ship, then they fuck up the repairs. Someone's on the take to Airbus, I promise you.”

Viktor had been the first to notice that the monologues had slowly changed in tone, from the friendly go-get-’em team chats to daily rants.

Axelrod was being worn down by constant media pressure, amidst the capital drain that the mission was costing him. In addition, relations between him and NASA, always edgy, had deteriorated. He no longer trusted their communications team.

The problems dated to the very first days of Consortium mission planning, when Axelrod announced his plans to use the ERV to get his crew home. NASA had resisted, and the whole project teetered.

“Who's gonna stop me?” Axelrod had said. “You want to send guards to Mars to keep the team out?”

After two months of hassling, they had reached a settlement—the Consortium could buy the ERV for $1 billion. Up front. But elements in NASA never forgot Axelrod's original presumption.

When Raoul discovered the damage to the ERV, Axelrod was furious. He lashed out at NASA in the press, described the ERV as “a derelict piece of government surplus equipment,” and demanded his money back. This proved unwise.

Having already spent the money—after all, it was the government, and that is government's job—NASA refused. Instead it offered to help model the repairs with a duplicate ERV sitting in a hangar at Johnson Space Center.

Axelrod became increasingly hostile, threatening to file suit to recover all costs for the mission unless the ERV could be repaired.

NASA, in turn, hinted that smooth communication with the Mars crew could be a casualty of any open breach of contract. If he filed suit, they said with solemn sincerity, the government lawyers would almost certainly not allow them to deal with Axelrod anymore. Even worse things could happen …

In fact, he had hinted darkly to his crew, NASA was already not transmitting his vids to them reliably.

On screen, Axelrod continued to pace. “If we lose because their piece of shit equipment won't work—listen, Raoul, I want you, first thing, to—
arrrrrrp.”

The screen went blank.

“That won't help his state of mind,” said Julia mildly. She was relieved not to have to listen to him any longer. “He's so paranoid about NASA.” She sent back a “Did not receive message” reply.

Raoul shrugged. “Just another comm satellite glitch.”

“Does seem to happen more with boss's vids,” said Viktor.

“Well, he
is
on the horn more than anyone else. So it would happen more to his vids.”

Julia knew what all four of them were thinking. That if he had followed the original mission plan, the one they had all signed on to, they wouldn't be in this fix.

The original Mars Direct plan included a second ERV. This spacecraft would be launched about a month after the crew, on a slower trajectory. On arrival, it would land about 1,000 kilometers from the first mission, refuel itself, deploy its robot probes to recon the area, and await the second manned hab. Or, it could be used as a backup in case of trouble with the first ERV, and land at the first base.

But there was no second ERV at Mars Base. Or even an awkward 1,000 klicks away.

The nearest ERV was at a distance of 40 million miles, safely stowed in a NASA warehouse at Cape Canaveral.

Viktor had been handling the comm that evening, about a month into their outward journey, when Axelrod's squirt came through.

At a delay of about a minute and a half, it was more like verbal e-mail with both parties on-line than a conversation. This the psych team had not anticipated—these almost-conversations, surrealistic, displaced.

So they worked it out by themselves. Only one of them responded to Axelrod at a time, although the others felt free to suggest things to say.

“Hi up there, crew! How's the weather? Oh, yeah, that's right—no windows.”

After this ritual joke, Axelrod was brisk, efficient, upbeat—sending along hails and tributes from various countries and luminaries. Somehow these fixtures of his messages never ebbed. Julia suspected the psych advisors of massaging them.

They let him run down. “Hey, we can read the calendar, even a minute behind time,” Raoul said to the camera on their callback. “We're waiting to hear about the backup ERV launch. It's today, right?”

Somehow the delay seemed to stretch unbearably. They had all picked up something in Axelrod's breezy manner. When he came on again his face was sober, studied, wary. “I been meaning to tell you, but things get in the way. Mostly, money. Or lack of it. Right, the lack of money is the real root of evil.” A sigh. Eyes veered away, then back. “I couldn't get it off the ground. Couldn't get the funding. I mean, I
tried.
Thing is, I'm down to nickels and dimes here. No reserves, running off income from the ads and promotions and all. I was never as rich as people said, y'know. Plenty of my holdings, they were mortgaged one way or another …”

He paused, took a sip of what looked like water. Julia wondered if it could be gin. She had seen him drink it that way before. Champagne for public, gin off to the side.

He freshened. “See, NASA kept pilin’ on more costs, and it was always up front, too, no cost deferment. I tried everythin’, bonds, floatin’ a dummy corporation for future proceeds, the whole damn game. It just wasn't there. I couldn't get the capital together. My backers wanted out, even. So to cut costs and hold it together here on the ground for you guys up there … well, we missed the launch window.”

Very slowly, as Axelrod went on with his rambling confession, Raoul said, “Son … of… a … bitch.”

It came out like an angry prayer.

They took a week to work off their anger. Plenty of gym time.

NASA had organized itself for decades around the implicit assumption that astronaut safety was not just the first rule, it was the only rule. But they weren't NASAnauts anymore.

They all spent more time in the exercise circle. Marc ran for hours on the treadmill, so much that Raoul complained that he was going to wear out the bearings. Since the treadmill would turn into a conveyor belt for off-loading at the landing site, this was not an idle complaint. Julia used the stationary bicycle, but worked out a lot of her feelings in push-ups, isotonics, and chin-ups. They all liked to exercise alone— time spent away from the others was getting steadily more precious— and though none of them was a very verbal type, they had to talk it out, too.

The second ERV was backup. It was to have come screaming in after they had settled in on the ground, providing perhaps a more distant base camp for far forays. The extra ERV wasn't necessary, in the day-to-day sense. Without it, nothing in their mission profile altered.

But the reassurance of having another way to get off the planet— that would be gone, for the whole 1.5 years they spent on the ground.

Not that they could do anything, of course.

But talk they did. They had to arrive at a consensus statement about the “unfortunate shortfall” the Consortium had suffered, how they “fully understood the difficult choices that the corporation had to make,” and that they “would shoulder these new burdens with a sense of confidence in the long-term outcome of the mission.”

It took a week more before they could all say such things to the camera.

There was help, though. Before leaving they had each sat for hours of “template setting” for a hotshot new software. Facial Management could cover for you if you were agitated, naked, fresh from the shower, or just hungover. The media managers reassured the crew that their slips and errors would be smoothed over and made better by the software. All their errors would be morphed and toned long before it went into the lucrative media mix that was paying many of the Consortium's daily expenses.

And they could review the results, if they wished, before release. They all did at first. Few did after a few months. It was eerie, watching yourself say things more confidently, with tones that carried the right accents and emphasis, complete with expressive and seemingly sincere lip movements, lifts of eyebrows, and utterly believable looks of complete candor.

“Old joke about what prostitute says to customer,” Viktor observed. “Sincerity, it costs extra.”

It got them through the roughest patch.

But they never forgot.

She brought up the unthinkable as a way of edging her way around to her own agenda.

What the hell, they were all exhausted from laboring on the repairs, and it had been three days since she had last mentioned the vent. Long days. And then a grand failure. Time to think the unthinkable again and do some planning.

As they were finishing lunch, Julia turned to face her three crewmates. “Okay, suppose we can't get this thing fixed. Then what?”

Raoul's face darkened, but he said nothing.

“Have to hitch ride home,” said Viktor.

“But when are they getting here?”

The Airbus mission had been well cloaked, Chinese style. Publicly, Airbus said only that their crew had launched more than a year after the Consortium, and would arrive at Mars “soon.” Some sketchy bio stuff about the crew of three, nothing more. A few “under wraps” leaks, but those proved to be planted.

The Germans at Airbus let their Chinese partners play the inscrutable card. Secrecy only heightened suspense.

Axelrod's moles had confirmed that it was indeed a nuclear rocket, put up on a Chinese three-stager, into a two-hundred-kilometer-high orbit. There, systems checkout took eight days—which meant they either had some minor trouble or were being very, very careful; maybe both.

Then a trial burn, which the Chinese government denied had “a significant nuclear component,” doublespeak for
We don't give a damn what all those European and American protesters think.
NASA and the National Security Agency both analyzed the burn optical signatures, and sure enough, it was hydrogen exhaust warmed by a medium-hot nuclear pile, design unknown.

Axelrod had sent them close-up shots of the craft, imaged from the Keck telescope complex. “It is big, sleek,” Viktor had observed. “With specific impulse two and a half, maybe three times ours, they can use that much less fuel. Hydrogen—fine for getting speed up, best choice. But they are not bringing liquid hydrogen to surface of Mars?”

The Consortium intelligence operation thought the fuel for the return part of the mission could not be hydrogen, though. “Keeping hydrogen at very low temperatures, landing it, then using it to return—no,” Viktor said decisively. “One heat leak and they scrub the mission. No, they have some other plan for later.”

But what? Nobody knew. A day later, Airbus had laconically announced a decision for Go. Their big boosting burn into interplanetary space was a long, hot, silvery plume scratched across the night sky.

It had been eight months since the Airbus launch. Because of the configuration of the two planets, the trajectory guys at Johnson assumed that they were doing a Venus flyby mission. In effect a planetary handoff, the nuke would slingshot around Venus halfway through the trip, picking up extra delta vee. The physics resembled bouncing a tennis ball off a moving freight train, so that the ball came off with the train's velocity added to what it had.

That was the only way to get to Mars, launching when they did.

“Venus flyby takes ten months,” said Viktor. “So they get here two months from now. Our launch window. They get here in time to see us leave.”

If we leave,
Julia thought but did not say.

But Axelrod had sprung a surprise, right after the Airbus launch.

“Been keeping this secret, didn't want the negative publicity,” he admitted on his next priority vid. “I laid a side bet for you guys. Cost me plenty, let me tell you, and I don't just mean money. I had to tip my hat and bow for this one.”

Raoul whispered, “Which means he had to pay more than he bargained for.”

“You knew about this?” Julia shot Raoul a glance.

He shrugged. “Axelrod said to keep quiet.”

“I went to our fellow explorers, those German Airbus management types. Followed Raoul's estimate of what he might need, if his on-site repairs don't quite work out. Dickered. Finally got Airbus to fly his box.”

Cheers and shouts from all four of them. Julia glanced at Raoul again.
Keeping secrets.

“I got the weight of all that gear down, way down. Had to. Engineers here said it's the best they can send. Parts, tools. Airbus will get it to you somehow.”

“Tell them just look for only humans on Mars, we be here,” Viktor said happily.

“They're under no guarantee to land at your site. They may go somewhere else, they won't say.” Axelrod shrugged modestly. “Thought you guys would want to know. I hope it kind of makes up for not flying the second ERV.”

It didn't for Julia, not entirely. But she had to appreciate the way he brought it off. His last flourish was impressive: “And I had to lay out a cool one hundred million dollars for them to fly it to you. Biggest freight bill in history, got to be. At least I'll get in the record books for that.”

They had popped one of Viktor's last bottles of champagne over this message. “Welcome to the captain's table,” he had said grandly. “Part of special mass allowance.”

The voluptuous curve and weight of the bottle was wasteful to Julia's eyes, and wonderful. After nine months on Mars, they had needed a celebration. He had even produced caviar, eyes gleaming— the best pale sturgeon, in a delicate little box.

Help was on the way. And so was the competition.

“I was speaking to Katherine,” said Raoul slowly, visibly trying to wrench his thoughts away from the engine failure. “They can cut the time by using more fuel. Leave Earth faster, and power decelerate at Mars.” He toyed with his coffee mug.

“I, too, worked out most available orbits,” Viktor said. “They come in with big velocities, eight kilometers per second. Have to lose that energy with a long aerobrake, I think.”