The Space Trilogy (23 page)

I too salute to you across the gulfs of space—as I send my greetings and good wishes from the closing decade of the century in which mankind first became a space faring species, and set forth on a journey that can never end, so long as the universe endures.

Alas, owing to a failure of the launch vehicle, MARS 96 ended up at the bottom of the Pacific. But I hope—and fully expect—that one day our descendants on the red planet will be chuckling over this CD/Rom—which is a delightful combination of science, art and fantasy. (It is still available from the Planetary Society, 65, N. Catalina Ave., Pasadena, Ca, 91106, USA.)

On 4 July 1997, with a little help from the World Wide Web, Mars was news again. Pathfinder had made a bumpy landing in the Ares Vallis region and disgorged the tiny but sophisticated rover, Sojourner, whose cautious exploration of a distant place in the sky became a real world.

Shortly afterwards, to my surprised delight, the engineer who had run the program sent me her autobiography
Managing Martians
(Broadway Books, 1998) with a dedication 'To Arthur Clarke, who inspired my summer vacation on Mars'. Reading further, I was even more pleased to see that it opened with a quotation from
The Sands of Mars
… But let Donna Shirley tell you the story in her words…

Foreword

I was about 12 years old when I first read
The Sands of Mars
. I read it feverishly, completely entranced by the concept of a group of people actually living and working on Mars. I had already decided to be an aeronautical engineer and build aeroplanes when I grew up, but now the idea of building spaceships to go to Mars began to nibble at the edges of my mind.

Forty-five years later, on July 4, 1997, I achieved my dream of landing on Mars—at least virtually—when Pathfinder delivered the microwave oven-sized Sojourner Rover to the surface of the red planet. From 1992 to 1994 I had been the manager of the team that built the rover and in 1997 I was managing the United States' entire robotic Mars Exploration Program.

A year later I published an autobiography,
Managing Martians
, in which the Pathfinder project figured largely. I could think of nothing more appropriate than to include quotes from my first inspiration,
The Sands of Mars
, in my book. In fact, I found an appropriate quote for every chapter (although the publisher only chose to use one at the beginning and end). Sir Arthur Clarke graciously allowed me to use the quotes.

Rereading
Sands
as I wrote my book brought back the sense of wonder and adventure that it inspired in my childhood. I found it astounding how fresh and relevant the story remains. The characters are much like the people I worked with at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory for 32 years—brilliant and hard-working, but also funny and human. The way that humans would live on Mars (for example, domes and pressurised rovers) are still the concepts being used by NASA planners. Some of the details of the Mars environment unfortunately turned out to be optimistic. The little Martian 'Squeak' and the plants he fed on could not survive on the bleach-sterilised surface that we first discovered with the Viking landers. Some primitive life might have existed on Mars sometime in the past, or may even be surviving deep underground, but the butterscotch-coloured surface is dead.

And humans will not reach Mars for a few more years. Sadly, humanity's progress has lagged Arthur Clarke's vision of exploring Mars—no commercial liners yet ply the interplanetary space lanes. But commercial space ventures are beginning. People are making money from communication satellites and are paying to be flown to the Russian Mir Space Station. Private launch vehicle companies are springing up. And an international fleet of robotic spacecraft continue the exploration of the skies and sands of Mars.

There is a growing interest in Mars exploration, with organisations like the Planetary Society and the Mars Society providing a focus for the personal dreams of private citizens. An international educational project called the Mars Millennium Project, for which I was the official spokesperson in 1999-2000, used a vision of a human colony of 100 people on Mars in the year 2030 (see www.mars2030.net) to inspire children to think about how communities work and prosper. Hundreds of thousands of children designed colonies which often looked very much like the colony portrayed in
The Sands of Mars
. I hope its republication will inspire this same generation of children to keep the dream of human exploration of Mars alive.

Donna Shirley
Assistant Dean of Engineering
University of Oklahoma

One

So this is the first time you’ve been upstairs?” said the pilot, leaning back idly in his seat so that it rocked to and fro in the gimbals. He clasped his hands behind his neck in a nonchalant manner that did nothing to reassure his passenger.

“Yes,” said Martin Gibson, never taking his eyes from the chronometer as it ticked away the seconds.

“I thought so. You never got it quite right in your stories—all that nonsense about fainting under the acceleration. Why must people write such stuff? It’s bad for business.”

“I’m sorry,” Gibson replied. “But I think you must be referring to my earlier stories. Space-travel hadn’t got started then, and I had to use my imagination.”

“Maybe,” said the pilot grudgingly. (He wasn’t paying the slightest attention to the instruments, and take-off was only two minutes away.) “It must be funny, I suppose, for this to be happening to you, after writing about it so often.”

The adjective, thought Gibson, was hardly the one he would have used himself, but he saw the other’s point of view. Dozens of his heroes—and villains—had gazed hypnotized by remorseless second-hands, waiting for the rockets to hurl them into infinity. And now—as it always did if one waited long enough—the reality had caught up with the fiction. The same moment lay only ninety seconds in his own future. Yes, it
was
funny, a beautiful case of poetic justice.

The pilot glanced at him, reading his feelings, and grinned cheerfully.

“Don’t let your own stories scare you. Why, I once took off standing up, just for a bet, though it was a damn silly thing to do.”

“I’m not scared,” Gibson replied with unnecessary emphasis.

“Hmmm,” said the pilot, condescending to glance at the clock. The second-hand had one more circuit to go. “Then I shouldn’t hold on to the seat like that. It’s only beryl-manganese; you might bend it.”

Sheepishly, Gibson relaxed. He knew that he was building up synthetic responses to the situation, but they seemed none the less real for all that.

“Of course,” said the pilot, still at ease but now, Gibson noticed, keeping his eyes fixed on the instrument panel, “it wouldn’t be very comfortable if it lasted more than a few minutes—ah, there go the fuel pumps. Don’t worry when the vertical starts doing funny things, but let the seat swing where it likes. Shut your eyes if that helps at all. (Hear the igniter jets start then?) We take about ten seconds to build up to full thrust—there’s really nothing to it, apart from the noise. You just have to put up with that. I SAID, YOU JUST HAVE TO PUT UP WITH THAT!”

But Martin Gibson was doing nothing of the sort. He had already slipped gracefully into unconsciousness at an acceleration that had not yet exceeded that of a high-speed elevator.

He revived a few minutes and a thousand kilometres later, feeling quite ashamed of himself. A beam of sunlight was shining full on his face, and he realized that the protective shutter on the outer hull must have slid aside. Although brilliant, the light was not as intolerably fierce as he would have expected; then he saw that only a fraction of the full intensity was filtering through the deeply tinted glass.

He looked at the pilot, hunched over his instrument board and busily writing up the log. Everything was very quiet, but from time to time there would come curiously muffled reports—almost miniature explosions—that Gibson found disconcerting. He coughed gently to announce his return to consciousness, and asked the pilot what they were.

“Thermal contraction in the motors,” he replied briefly. “They’ve been running round five thousand degrees and cool mighty fast. You feeling all right now?”

“I’m fine,” Gibson answered, and meant it. “Shall I get up?”

Psychologically, he had hit the bottom and bounced back. It was a very unstable position, though he did not realize it.

“If you like,” said the pilot doubtfully. “But be careful—hang on to something solid.”

Gibson felt a wonderful sense of exhilaration. The moment he had waited for all his life had come. He was in space! It was too bad that he’d missed the take-off, but he’d gloss that part over when he wrote it up.

From a thousand kilometres away, Earth was still very large—and something of a disappointment. The reason was quickly obvious. He had seen so many hundreds of rocket photographs and films that the surprise had been spoilt; he knew exactly what to expect. There were the inevitable moving bands of cloud on their slow march round the world. At the centre of the disc, the divisions between land and sea were sharply defined, and an infinite amount of minute detail was visible, but towards the horizon everything was lost in the thickening haze. Even in the cone of clear vision vertically beneath him, most of the features were unrecognizable and therefore meaningless. No doubt a meteorologist would have gone into transports of delight at the animated weather-map displayed below—but most of the meteorologists were up in the space stations, anyway, where they had an even better view. Gibson soon grew tired of searching for cities and other works of man. It was chastening to think that all the thousands of years of human civilization had produced no appreciable change in the panorama below.

Then Gibson began to look for the stars, and met his second disappointment. They were there, hundreds of them, but pale and wan, mere ghosts of the blinding myriads he had expected to find. The dark glass of the port was to blame; in subduing the sun, it had robbed the stars of all their glory.

Gibson felt a vague annoyance. Only one thing had turned out quite as expected. The sensation of floating in mid-air, of being able to propel oneself from wall to wall at the touch of a finger, was just as delightful as he had hoped—though the quarters were too cramped for any ambitious experiments. Weightlessness was an enchanting, a fairylike state, now that there were drugs to immobilize the balance organs and space-sickness was a thing of the past. He was glad of that. How his heroes had suffered! (His heroines too, presumably, but one never mentioned that.) He remembered Robin Blake’s first flight, in the original version of
Martian Dust
. When he’d written that, he had been heavily under the influence of D. H. Lawrence. (It would be interesting, one day, to make a list of the authors who
hadn’t
influenced him at one time or another.)

There was no doubt that Lawrence was magnificent at describing physical sensations, and quite deliberately Gibson had set out to defeat him on his own ground. He had devoted a whole chapter to space-sickness, describing every symptom from the queasy premonitions that could sometimes be willed aside, the subterranean upheavals that even the most optimistic could no longer ignore, the volcanic cataclysms of the final stages and the ultimate, merciful exhaustion.

The chapter had been a masterpiece of stark realism. It was too bad that his publishers, with an eye on a squeamish Book-of-the-Month Club, had insisted on removing it. He had put a lot of work into that chapter; while he was writing it, he had really
lived
those sensations. Even now—

“It’s very puzzling,” said the M.O. thoughtfully as the now quiescent author was propelled through the airlock. “He’s passed his medical tests O.K., and of course he’ll have had the usual injections before leaving Earth. It must be psychosomatic.”

“I don’t care what it is,” complained the pilot bitterly, as he followed the cortege into the heart of Space Station One. “All I want to know is—who’s going to clean up my ship?”

No one seemed inclined to answer this heart-felt question, least of all Martin Gibson, who was only vaguely conscious of white walls drifting by his field of vision. Then, slowly, there was a sensation of increasing weight, and a warm, caressing glow began to steal through his limbs. Presently he became fully aware of his surroundings. He was in a hospital ward, and a battery of infrared lamps was bathing him with a glorious, enervating warmth, that sank through his flesh to the very bones.

“Well?” said the medical officer presently.

Gibson grinned feebly.

“I’m sorry about this. Is it going to happen again?”

“I don’t know how it happened the first time. It’s very unusual; the drugs we have now are supposed to be infallible.”

“I think it was my own fault,” said Gibson apologetically. “You see, I’ve got a rather powerful imagination, and I started thinking about the symptoms of space-sickness—in quite an objective sort of way, of course—but before I knew what had happened—”

“Well, just stop it!” ordered the doctor sharply. “Or we’ll have to send you right back to Earth. You can’t do this sort of thing if you’re going to Mars. There wouldn’t be much left of you after three months.”