FREE STORIES 2012(34)

Personal Log: Lori Childs - Senior Planetary Scientist

Date: 23/04/2037 (+4 Months 18 days)

Distance From Earth: 1.201AU





Just when I thought we were beginning to accept our situation, our little community started to tear itself apart.

Our mission plan included a fly-by of comet 10P/Tempel. We were never going to get closer than five hundred kilometres, but that would have been close enough to view it with the naked eye. There had been robotic missions to comets before: even impacters and landers, but this was to have been a first for the manned space programme.

The problem was, the manoeuvre would use fuel.

"I don't see why we should stick to the mission plan when it's going to dramatically reduce our options later." By virtue of having the loudest voice, Ed Carradine had become the unofficial spokesperson for the ditch-the-mission-plan faction.

Craig Rowe took a deep breath. As pilot and second in command, he was responsible for internal ship matters including quelling a nascent mutiny.

"Our trajectory has been locked in since we left Earth. Yes, there will be a course correction both to finalise the fly-by and also to put us back in the groove for orbital insertion at Mars. But changing the trajectory to avoid the comet will also cost fuel."

"But it will save some."

"You don't know that.”

"Where exactly do you want to go?" Tom Barischoff the Chief Engineer said. "We can forget both burns if you like. Just carry on the way we're headed now. It won't mean anything. We'll die with full fuel tanks, that's all."

There it was: the "d" word. Up until now everyone had been talking about efficiency, optimum use of resources, avoiding the obvious objection to all these plans which was that none of them would get us back to Earth.

We were in the storm shelter again. It was even more crowded than usual now that a third of the space had been given over to Beth’s expanded aeroponics racks. The crew had split right down the middle. From day one there had been two distinct groups on the mission. Mission Control had even fostered the split with friendly, morale-building softball matches on the Antarctic tundra during our training.

On one side were the scientists: the guys who were going to study Mars. We were not so much payload specialists (as we would have been called in the shuttle era), but payload. We were the reason for the mission: to get our hands and eyes and brains to the surface of Mars.

On the other side were the flight crew and engineers, professional astronauts whose job it was to deliver us safely to Mars and keep us alive when we got there.

By a few days after we were told about the accident, you could run your finger down the roster and by looking at each person’s job description you could tell which side of the debate they would come down on.

The flight crew argued that we would best honour our memories by following our mission plan to the last breath. A few even argued for an attempted landing on Mars. The arguments had started with the hope that enough of the base would be salvageable to allow the mission to continue. Later some expressed a wish to at least stand on the red planet before they died.

But there were difficulties even in dying. Along with the fuel farm, the habitat and all the solar panels, we had also lost the transponder that would guide the lander in. Finding a nice spot on Mars to sit down and just let your air run out had a certain tragic beauty to it. A forced march across the landscape with a broken collar bone and a ruptured suit because the unassisted landing was a bit too hard was less attractive.

But the scientists didn’t have the same response to authority as the flight crew. Absolute obedience to the chain of command wasn’t drummed into us the way it was into them. We had all had years of training, but we were still scientists first and astronauts second. And guys like Ed objected to following the plan, not because they had any particular notion of what to do instead, but out of a more general inertia.

With every gram of fuel and litre of air being precious, the reluctance to utilise any of it was paralysing.

And Claire? Despite being one of the most vocal of the science department, she never aligned with either camp and instead attacked all ideas equally. Tom joked that talking to her for five minutes was like a stress-test for ideas. She probed every problem from multiple, simultaneous fronts. Some of the things she threw into the discussion were fanciful to say the least, but they were always novel and her scientific knowledge was prodigious extending well outside her specialty in geophysics.

I had spent hours in deep discussion with Claire. Indeed, in the days following Campbell's announcement it seemed that everyone on board had spent hours with her.

Our predicament seemed to instil in her a fervent energy. For most of us the adrenaline produced by fear was a short-lived reaction. In the face of such a gradual catastrophe as ours, no one could sustain the flight-or-fight reaction for long.