Mars

IN TRANSIT: STORM CELLAR

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.

“Yes, yes.” Vosnesensky pointed to the panels of lights that showed the condition of the rest of the ship. Most of the lights were green. “The equipment was built to withstand radiation. It is only we fragile creatures of flesh and bone who need protection.”

Cheerful, Jamie thought. Very cheerful.

Fourteen hours later the radiation levels outside the shelter had not gone down discernibly. Jamie had dozed for a while, slumped back on the bench that lined the compartment’s wall. Joanna and the Polish biochemist who was Ilona’s backup had found enough room on the opposite bench to curl up and sleep. There were foldout cots built into the walls above the benches, but no one had bothered to use them.

Looking around with blurry eyes, Jamie saw that all four pilots were sitting up near the hatch and the comm console. The Christmas tree of monitoring panels still showed mostly green lights, although there were more red ones than before. Tony Reed was chatting amiably with Ilona and the Aussie geologist, George O’Hara, at the other end of the compartment, where food and drink dispensers were built into the rear wall.

Jamie pulled himself to his feet, feeling stiff and dull-headed. O’Hara was redhaired, rawboned, tall enough to need to stoop slightly unless he stood exactly in the midline of the compartment. Otherwise his head brushed the curving ceiling panels. He seemed an amiable enough sort. Jamie had not detected a trace of jealousy over the fact that O’Hara was to stay aboard the ship while he would be the one to go down to the surface.

“…in Coober Pedy the miners live underground most of the year,” O’Hara was saying. “Too bloody hot to live up on the surface, so they’ve built a by-damn city down in the shafts and galleries. Swimming pools and everything.”

Ilona was not impressed. “How much longer must we stay in here?”

“Don’t be so anxious to go out,” Tony said. “This is the best place in the entire solar system to be, right now.”

“Except for Earth,” said Jamie.

“Ah well,” Reed admitted, “we can’t have everything now, can we?”

“Reminds me of being stuck inside a bloody airliner,” O’Hara said, grinning down at Ilona. “I remember once a couple years ago at Washington National, they had us buttoned up on the rampway and made us wait five bloody hours inside the bloody airplane before we could take off. Some mechanical problem they took their sweet time fixing. We drank all the booze on board and we still hadn’t moved a fucking inch. It was like a zoo by the time we actually took off.”

“I’m feeling as if I’m in a zoo,” Ilona muttered. “In a cage.”

“Steady on,” Tony said in his best British stiff-upper-lip manner. But he looked tight to Jamie, tense, his smile forced.

“How much longer will it be?” Joanna’s sleepy voice came from behind Jamie.

It was a rhetorical question. She pushed past them and went into the lavatory.

“Ever wonder why they always put the pisser next to the water fountain?” O’Hara asked no one in particular.

“Plumbing,” Jamie said.

“Or recycling?” suggested Reed.

Jamie walked the length of the compartment, as much to stretch his legs and get some circulation going as to reach the pilots up by the comm console and equipment monitors. Katrin Diels, the German physicist, was deep in earnest conversation, a headset clamped over her blonde curls.

“When did the intensity peak?” she asked into the pin-sized microphone in front of her lips.

Jamie almost smiled at the fierce intensity on her snub-nosed freckled face. She was slight of frame, as butter blonde and blue-eyed as the people you would see in a travel poster advertising Oktoberfest. The pilots had made room for her and she sat on the end of the bench where she could operate the communications console.

She whipped the headset off and sprang to her feet.

“Good news, everybody!” she called out. “The lunar observatory reports that the storm’s intensity peaked there almost an hour ago.”

Smiles broke out. Heads nodded. Everyone murmured happily.

“According to the orbiting magnetosphere observatories,” Diels continued, “the storm should be over in another twelve to sixteen hours.”

Groans. “Another sixteen hours in here?”

Tony Reed raised his arms for silence. “Now don’t complain. As long as the toilet works we should be perfectly fine.”

Ilona was not amused. “Sixteen more hours. Ugh!”

“Try to relax,” Reed urged. “Take a nap.”

“Would you like to play a game of bridge?” asked the Greek biologist.

“Not with you,” O’Hara snapped. “It’s like swimming with a bloody shark.”

Xenophanes laughed, but to Jamie it seemed strained.

Vosnesensky said, “We should not sit idly for another fourteen hours.”

Ilona’s lips curled into the start of a sneering reply, but before she could say anything Reed jumped in.

“What would you suggest, Mikhail Andreivitch?” the Englishman asked.

“A workers’ council,” the Russian replied. “We are all here. None of us has pressing duties to perform. Now is the time for a self-analysis session.”

“A quality circle, like the Japanese?” asked Tad Sliwa, the backup biochemist.

“More like a self-criticism circle,” said Ilona, “like prisoners in Siberia.”

Vosnesensky’s beefy face flushed slightly, but he did not reply to her. Ivshenko, lean in face and body, darkly handsome in an almost Levantine way, said, “Self-analysis can be a very useful way to examine interpersonal problems.”

There was some argument, but Vosnesensky was determined and none of the others really had any suggestion to offer as an alternative. So the twelve men and women sat along the benches facing one another.

“How do we start?” asked Ollie Zieman.

“I will start,” Vosnesensky said. “This was my idea, so I will be the first volunteer.”

“Go right ahead,” said Reed, sitting across the central aisle from the Russian.

Vosnesensky glanced at Ilona, then turned his gaze to sweep the men and women on the bench opposite him. “I feel resentment from some of you. Resentment that I am in command. Resentment, perhaps, that a Russian is in command.”

“That’s rather natural, is it not?” asked Katrin Diels. “There is bound to be some resentment against any authority figure.”

That started the discussion, and around and around it went. Jamie watched in silence, noticing that Ilona sat leaning back against the wall like a cat, her eyes following from one speaker to the next, her lips slightly curled in what might have been a smile. But she did not volunteer a word.

Like meetings of the student council, Jamie thought, remembering his undergraduate days. The ones who did most of the talking were the ones who were already in charge. The ones who needed to talk the most were the ones who stayed silent and kept their anger bottled up inside them.

After nearly an hour Jamie was startled to hear O’Hara say, “Well, if we’re baring our souls and all that—I don’t particularly like the idea that I’m going to be sitting up in orbit all during our stay at Mars while my esteemed colleague here,” he jabbed a thumb in Jamie’s direction, “gets to spend the whole seven weeks down on the surface. I don’t think that’s fair.”

“I agree with you,” Jamie heard himself say. “It’s not fair.” But, he added silently, that’s the way the mission plan has been written and that’s the way it’s going to be.

O’Hara’s gripe launched another hour’s debate on why the mission had been planned the way it had been, and whether or not they could appeal to Dr. Li to change the procedure so that the backup teams could spend some time on the surface.

“It would be useless,” Vosnesensky said flatly. “All these procedures were examined very thoroughly for years. One team stays on the surface and the backup team remains in orbit. That will not be changed. I know this for a fact.”

“I agree with George,” Ollie Zieman grumbled. “It’s not fair.”

“But more efficient,” Vosnesensky countered, with the flat finality of a man who had decided the subject was closed.

“Why must the leader of each team be a Russian?” Ilona asked, her throaty voice purring, almost sleepy.

Everyone turned toward her.

“I mean, we have men and women of every nationality on this mission. Yet of the four teams, each group is headed by a Russian. A Russian male, at that.”

For a long moment there was absolute silence. Jamie could hear the electrical hum of the ship’s equipment and the quiet hiss of the air fans.

“I can answer that,” said Pete Connors.

“Please do,” Ilona said.

The black astronaut was sitting beside Vosnesensky, who had the other cosmonaut, Ivshenko, on his other side. Connors gave them a small grin, then turned back to Ilona.

“First,” he raised a long finger, “the commander of each team must be a pilot. A man from the military, accustomed to giving orders and having them obeyed. Accustomed to receiving orders from higher authority and carrying them out. Without discipline we could all get killed. This is no weekend hiking trip we’re on.”

“You said a man,” Katrin Diels interrupted. “Why not a woman?”

Connors made an elaborate shrug. “Guess they couldn’t find any women with the necessary qualifications.”

All three women hooted at him. Even most of the men laughed.

Once they calmed down, Connors resumed, “Second, the Soviet Federation has provided the boosters and the life-support equipment for this mission. Soviet cosmonauts have more experience in spaceflight than anyone on Earth; they’ve been doing long-term missions aboard their space station since 1971, for god’s sake!”

“Because you Americans waited twenty-five years before you put up a permanent space station,” Xenophanes said, practically sneering.

“Yeah, that’s true,” Connors agreed. “So when we started planning the Mars mission, the American government agreed that the team leaders would be picked from military pilots who had the most experience in spaceflight.”

“Meaning Russians,” said Xenophanes.

“That’s the way it worked out.”

Sliwa huffed, “The Russians outsmarted you at the very start of the program. They have always been clever at negotiations.”

“I don’t think you can say that Mikhail or Dmitri are here because some Russian politician outslicked his American counterpart,” Connors objected.

Sliwa hunched his shoulders. Vosnesensky was glaring at the Pole.

Ivshenko glanced at his compatriot, then said, “The Soviet Union has made some sacrifices for this privilege of providing leadership. No Soviet scientist was selected for the ground team, even though we have many men — and women—who are highly qualified in the fields of planetary sciences.”

“Same thing with the States,” added Connors. “We have astronauts on all four teams, but no scientists on the ground team except for Jamie here.”

They all turned toward Jamie, who forced himself to remain silent. I’m here by accident, he told himself. They all know that. And back in the States I’m only half American, whichever way you look at it.

“Perhaps we should change the subject,” Reed suggested. “This kind of argument will get us nowhere.”

Jamie was tempted to ask Reed to explain how he could sneak sex-suppressant drugs into their food or drink. But he thought better of it. No sense starting a real fight, he told himself. So he remained quiet while the others stared at one another, unable or unwilling to find a new topic for discussion.

“Well then, perhaps we should get some sleep,” Reed said.

Vosnesensky nodded vigorously. “Yes. A good idea. In ten hours or so the radiation levels should be low enough for us to leave this shelter. Then we will have to check the ship’s systems and all our equipment thoroughly to assess what damage the storm has done, and then repair it. We should sleep now.”

It was an order, not a suggestion. No one argued, not even Ilona.