Red Mars(16)

And so on. Janet turned to him, and Ann, looking disgusted, picked up her coffee and left.

Afterward Maya concentrated, trying to recall the looks Boone and Chalmers had exchanged. They had been like something from a code, or the private languages invented by identical twins.

• • •



The weeks passed, and the days each began with a leisurely breakfast. Mid-mornings were far busier. Everyone had a schedule, although some were fuller than others. Frank’s was packed, which was the way he liked it, a maniacal blur of activity. But the necessary work was not really all that great: they had to keep themselves alive and in shape, and keep the ship running, and keep preparing for Mars. Ship maintenance ranged from the intricacy of programming or repairs to the simplicity of moving supplies out of storage, or taking trash to the recyclers. The biosphere team spent the bulk of its time on the farm, which occupied large parts of toruses C, E, and F; and everyone aboard had farm chores. Most enjoyed this work, and some even returned in their free hours. Everyone was on doctors’ orders to spend three hours a day on treadmills, escalators, running wheels, or using weight machines. These hours were enjoyed or endured or despised, depending on temperament, but even those who claimed to despise them finished their exercises in noticeably (even measurably) better moods. “Beta endorphins are the best drug,” Michel Duval would say.

“Which is lucky, since we don’t have any others,” John Boone would reply.

“Oh, there’s caffeine . . .”

“Puts me to sleep.”

“Alcohol . . .”

“Gives me a headache.”

“Procaine, Darvon, morphine—”

“Morphine?”

“In the medical supplies. Not for general use.”

Arkady smiled. “Maybe I’d better get sick.”

The engineers, including Maya, spent many mornings in training simulations. These took place on the backup bridge in Torus B, which had the latest in image synthesizers; the simulations were so sophisticated that there was little visible difference between them and the act itself. This did not necessarily make them interesting: the standard orbital insertion approach, simulated weekly, was dubbed “The Mantra Run,” and became quite a bore to every conceivable flight crew.

But sometimes even boredom was preferable to the alternatives. Arkady was their training specialist, and he had a perverse talent for designing problem runs so hard that they often “killed” everybody. These runs were strangely unpleasant experiences, and did not make Arkady popular among his victims. He mixed problem runs with Mantra Runs randomly, but more and more often they were problem runs; they would “approach Mars” and red lights would flash, sometimes with sirens, and they were in trouble again. Once they struck a planetesimal weighing approximately fifteen grams, leaving a large flaw in the heat shield. Sax Russell had calculated that their chances of hitting anything larger than a gram were about one in every seven thousand years of travel, but nevertheless there they were, emergency!, adrenaline pouring through them even as they pooh-poohed the very idea of it, rushing up to the hub and into EVA suits, going out to fill the pothole before they hit the Martian atmosphere and burned to a crisp; and halfway there, Arkady’s voice came over their intercoms: “Not fast enough! All of us are dead.”

But that was a simple one. Others. . . .The ship, for instance, was guided by a fly-by-wire system, meaning that the pilots fed instructions to flight computers which translated them into the actual thrusts needed to achieve the desired result. This was how it had to be, because when approaching a gravitational mass like Mars at their speed, one simply could not feel or intuit what burns would achieve the desired effects. So none of them were flyers in the sense of a pilot flying a plane. Nevertheless, Arkady frequently blew the entire massively redundant system just as they were reaching a critical moment (which failure, Russell said, had about a one-in-ten-billion chance of happening) and they had to take over and command all the rockets mechanically, watching the monitors and an orange-on-black visual image of Mars bearing down on them, and they could either go long and skip off into deep space and die a lingering death, or go short and crash into the planet and die instantly, and if the latter, they got to watch it right down to the simulated 120 kilometer per second final smash.

Or it might be a mechanical failure: main rockets, stabilizing rockets, computer hardware or software, heatshield deployment; all of them had to work perfectly during the approach. And failures of these systems were the most likely of all— in the range, Sax said (though others contested his risk-assessment methods), of one in every ten thousand approaches. So they would do it again and red lights would flash, and they would groan, and beg for a Mantra Run even as they partly welcomed the new challenge. When they managed to survive a mechanical failure, they were tremendously pleased; it could be the high point of a week. Once John Boone successfully aerobraked by hand, with a single main rocket functioning, hitting the safe millisecond of arc at the only possible speed. No one could believe it. “Blind luck,” Boone said, grinning widely as the deed was talked about at dinner.