The Long Mars

10

There was no great space-programme-type fuss before Sally Linsay’s journey to Mars: no bone-crunching physical training or survival exercises, no hours in simulators, no photographs on the cover of Time magazine. It did take a couple of weeks for Willis, Frank Wood and Sally to get their act together, however. There were briefings, which Sally mostly skipped, almost on principle…

And then, at last, astonishingly, Sally found herself in what Raup called a white room: a suiting-up room, for astronauts.

With the assistance of a couple of female attendants in jumpsuits bearing Boeing logos, Sally had to strip off, was given a rub-down with alcohol, and then put on soft white underclothes. Throughout the flight she would have to wear a belt of some kind of medical telemetry equipment around her chest: the corporate rules of GapSpace, Inc. Then came the spacesuit itself, a kind of heavy coverall of some tough orange fabric, with a rubbery, airtight inner layer. You climbed into this backwards through a gap in the stomach, then zipped it all up at the front. Sally groused her way through this, and through a pressure test when she had to screw on her helmet and the suit was pumped so full of air it made her ears pop.

But one of the technicians, a humorous-looking older woman, told her to cherish her suit. “You’re going to be walking on Mars in this, honey,” she said. “And it’s more than likely that it will save your life en route. You’re going to come to love her. Based on good Russian technology, by the way—decades of experience have gone into the design of that garment. Look, if you like, we can even sew a little name tag on the chest for you—”

“Don’t bother.”

As she was led out of the white room, the techs made her sign her name on the back of a door already covered with hundreds of signatures. “Just a tradition,” the tech said.

Outside she joined her father, Frank Wood and Al Raup, all suited as she was. Then, with help from the techs, they all bundled into a compact “stepper shuttle’, a cone-shaped spacecraft not unlike an Apollo command module. Raup was to pilot this craft, delivering the Mars crew to the Gap. They were in four seats jammed in side by side, with Raup in the left-hand commander’s seat, Willis and Frank in the middle, Sally to the right. The craft had a surprisingly complex-looking instrument panel, most of it in front of Raup, but with basic duplication in front of the others. They wore their spacesuits and helmets but with the visors open. There was a hum of fans, a smell of just-cleaned carpet; it was like being inside a freshly valeted car, Sally thought. Small windows revealed blue English sky.

And a toy spaceman dangled from a chain over Willis’s head.

Sally flicked the toy with a gloved finger. “What’s this, Raup? Another dumb astronaut tradition?”

“No. An essential indicator. You’ll see. Well, we’re good to go. You guys strapped in? Three, two, one—”

There was no more ceremony than that. He didn’t even touch any controls.

But Sally felt the subtle lurch of a step.

Suddenly the sky outside the windows was black. That spaceman started to float upwards, his chain slack.

And the shuttle’s rocket booster lit up, shoving them hard in the back. They were all strapped tightly into their couches, but even so Sally was startled by the sensation. Maybe she should have paid more attention to the briefings.

The rocket burst lasted twenty seconds, perhaps less. Then it died. Once again the spaceman hung loose on his chain.

And then the weightlessness really cut in. To Sally it felt as if she were falling, as if her internal organs were rising inside her. She swallowed hard.

Willis, sitting silently, showed no reaction. Frank Wood whooped.

There were knocks and bangs, and the craft swivelled with tight jerks.

Al Raup produced a flask, squirted out water that hung in the air, a shimmering globe, and then closed his mouth around it. “OK,” he said. “The noise you hear is the firing of our attitude rockets, and the manoeuvring system. The shuttle is taking itself in for its docking with the Brick Moon.”

The Brick Moon, an artificial satellite station-keeping in the position of the vanished Earth in its orbit, was the Houston of the Gap, a constant comms presence for space travellers, a place where some basic research was going on, and a link to home. They were to stay there for only a few hours, before boarding their Mars ship, the Galileo.

“Everything’s automated,” Raup said. “But because I know some of you paid no attention whatsoever to the briefings, I draw your attention to this big fat red button here.” He pointed.

“You understand we’re dealing with the rotation of the Earth here. I mean, the Earth you just stepped off of. When you thought you were standing still on Earth you were already moving through space, being dragged around with the surface of the world—at a speed of hundreds of miles an hour at the latitude of GapSpace. When you step between worlds you keep that momentum, and without compensating you’d be flung away through space. The first time you stepped into the Gap, incidentally, Sally, aboard that airship, it’s lucky you stepped back as quickly as you did before getting thrown around too far. Here we have to shed that velocity, so the stepper shuttle burns its rockets, and brings us to a halt relative to the Brick Moon.

“But if we ever want to go back we need to accelerate again, to match the Earth’s spin. OK? Otherwise you’d be like a leaf in a thousand-miles-per-hour gale. So if all else fails, if I’m in capacitated and you’re out of touch with the Brick Moon, press that button and the systems will take you home. Comprende?”

“Clear enough,” Willis said.

“The other likely contingencies which we may hit in the shuttle are a drop in air pressure—just close up your suits. There are sick bags in front of you, airline style. Or you may need to use the bathroom. We do have a john in here, which folds out of the wall.” He grinned evilly. “But your suits do have diapers. My advice is, if you can’t hold it in, let it out—”

“Just get on with it,” Sally said coldly.

“Everything’s tooty. Just relax and enjoy the ride…”

With a speed that was surprising, given Sally’s memories of TV images of stately dockings at the International Space Station, the stepper shuttle closed in for a rendezvous with the Brick Moon. The station was a cluster of spheres, the whole about two hundred feet across, each component sphere brightly lettered A to K. The station-keeping satellite had been hastily assembled from prefabricated sections in brick and concrete, doped to withstand the vacuum and filled with airtight pods. Sally had been amazed to learn, during the briefings, that troll labour had been used to manufacture the concrete.

In zero gravity, they scrambled out of the shuttle and through hatches. To Sally the open hatches, surfaces that had been exposed to space, smelled oddly of hot metal.

And on the other side of the entrance hovered a worker, looking strangely like a clone of Al Raup, who handed them bread and a salt dip as they drifted through. “Old cosmonaut traditions,” Raup said. “The Russians always got more into this stuff than we ever did.”

Inside the Brick Moon, the big chambers were cluttered with stuff: various kinds of equipment, bundles of bedding and clothing, bags of garbage, bales of what looked like unopened supplies. Every wall surface seemed to be covered in Velcro; more equipment clung there, roughly shoved out of the way.

Sally bounced around, shoving off the walls, getting used to movement in these conditions. Without gravity all these curved-wall compartments felt roomy, despite the clutter. She had a feeling adjusting back to gravity would be a lot tougher.

There was a constant clatter of fans and pumps. Sally saw loose bits of paper drifting in the air currents towards grimy-looking grilles. After five minutes in the dusty air, she started sneezing violently. Dust, hanging in the air, failing to settle out without gravity.

She glimpsed only a few other people in this station during their short visit. Most people just passed through this place, exchanging one specialized craft for another, but there was some dedicated work going on here which Raup showed them perfunctorily. New kinds of materials were being tested, many of them ceramic composites; panels of the stuff were pushed out of airlocks to be tested in the conditions of space. There was a programme of medical testing, of studies of the effects of zero gravity on the human body—repeating studies that dated back to the mid twentieth century and the first spaceflights, but with much more sophisticated gear.

And there were some more intriguing, less obvious projects: on the growth of crystals in the vacuum, on the development of plant and animal life in zero gravity. Sally surprised herself by being utterly charmed by a bank of bonsai trees she found growing in reflected sunlight, vivid colours against the bleak concrete walls.

And from the windows of the Brick Moon, the Galileo could be seen to hang in empty space.

Their Mars ship was unprepossessing, just two tin cans separated by a long metallic strut, with a single flaring rocket nozzle at the base of one cylinder, a snub-nosed lander aircraft piggybacking on the side of the other, and sprawling solar-cell wings. The spinal strut was adorned with spherical fuel tanks swathed in thick silvered insulation foam; they looked like huge pearls. There was fuel enough, Sally learned, to push the Galileo to Mars and back again. The trip each way would take nine or ten weeks.

The lander was called the MEM, officially the Mars Excursion Module. The upper cylinder to which it clung was the hab module, where the three of them would live for the ride out to Mars, and back. The cladding on the hull would protect them from radiation and meteorites. Light gleamed from windows cut through the cladding, bright and cosy and warm.

They spent twelve hours in the Brick Moon. They stripped out of their pressure suits, which were checked over; they were put through brisk medical tests by an onboard doctor; they had a meal, of paste from tubes and pots, and coffee squirted from bulbs. They all used the bathroom while they were out of their suits.

Then they suited up once more, and crossed into their ship, and Sally Linsay was that bit further away from Earth, and closer to Mars.