Voyage (61 page)

Stone, surreptitiously, was checking his watch.

‘Have I got your full attention, gentlemen?’

Stone and Bleeker glanced at each other, like guilty children.

‘I’m sure you’re just doing your job, Natalie,’ Bleeker said languidly, ‘and we’re glad you’re running the site selection committee –’

‘I’m not running it. I’m just on it.’

‘Whatever. But we’d have a year en route to Mars with nothing much else to do but study this stuff. Can’t this wait until then?’ As usual, Bleeker sounded calm, rational, reasonable, colorless.

A year? Yes, but I won’t be there to hold your hands, or make you think. I’ll be light minutes away …

And this guy was likely to be designated the Ares mission specialist.
My God
.

Phil Stone waved Bleeker quiet. ‘Go on, Natalie. We’re committed to the science. You’ve got us.’

‘All right. Now,’ she ploughed on, ‘the probes have shown us that in the case of Mars we have two main types of landscape. The yellow stuff in the south is heavily cratered, and looks ancient. And this pink stuff, to the north, is made up of smooth, young plains. The planet bulges out below the equator; most of the south is above the mean altitude, and most of the north is below.’

‘You say “ancient” and “young,”’ Stone said. ‘Meaning?’

‘“Young” is maybe half a billion years old. The plains are volcanic – frozen lava fields. And the ancient cratered stuff is three to four billion years old. That’s almost as old as the planet itself …’

Bleeker said, ‘So let’s get back to the flags. I guess those seven Hammer-and-Sickles are the sites the Soviets have identified as prime interest.’

‘Yes. You can see –’

‘So screw that,’ Stone said easily. ‘Let’s look at the good old American selections. Those two white stripes at the top and bottom of your chart – I guess we’re looking at the polar caps.’

‘Yeah.’

‘I see no flags up there.’

‘No. We have to rule out high latitudes.’ Spacecraft arriving from Earth would naturally settle into a parking orbit around Mars with not much inclination to the equator; changing the orbit to reach the poles would take a lot of extra energy. ‘But it’s a shame; the poles are interesting.’

‘What are the caps? Water ice?’

‘Maybe. The orbit of Mars is more elliptical than Earth’s. And that distorts the seasons. In the south you get a short, hot summer, but a long, cool winter. And the make-up of the caps seems to differ as well. We think the cap in the north is water ice, yes. But the southern cap is probably carbon dioxide – dry ice.

‘There are a lot of puzzles about the poles.’ She walked across the room to a blow-up photograph; it showed a thick band of layering in brownish terrain.

‘What the hell’s that?’ Bleeker asked. ‘It looks like melted chocolate.’

‘These are bands of thick layered deposits, thirty or forty feet thick, that surround the poles for hundreds of miles; they are made up of dust and ice, mixed up, laid down by the Martian winds. The bands tell us that the deposition process must vary, over the years. Or the millennia, anyhow. But what caused the variation? We’ve got three possible mechanisms. First, maybe the eccentricity of Mars’s orbit changes.’

‘Why should it?’ Stone asked.

‘Mars is a lot closer to Jupiter than we are; Jupiter’s mass is capable of a lot of perturbation. Or maybe the tilt of the planet’s axis changes.’

‘I can see how that would happen,’ Stone said. ‘That bottom-heavy southern hemisphere would make a hell of a difference to
Mars’s moment of inertia. The whole damn thing must wobble like a spinning top.’

She smiled. ‘On geological timescales, yes.’

‘And what’s your third mechanism?’

‘That the heat output of the sun changes, in some way we don’t understand.’

Bleeker frowned. ‘But that would change the Earth’s climate.’

‘That’s right. And that’s why the layering is a good reason for going to the poles some day. Mars is like a dusty mirror, Phil, Adam; every time we look into it, we learn something about the Earth.’

They were silent for a moment, digesting that.

York felt pleased with herself. Even if they learned nothing else, if she could puncture their complacency, make them
think
about the significance of the flight they were likely to take, she’d have achieved something.

She glanced again at her polar blow-up. It was actually of much lower quality than the images taken by later generations of probes, which had concentrated on equatorial landing-site mapping. Because of the Mars landing program, paradoxically, much less was known about the plant as a whole than might otherwise be possible.

And it was in the hands of these two guys to make it all worth while.

Adam Bleeker said, ‘I’d guess the high-latitude problems would also rule out the site you’ve marked far to the south there, Natalie.’

‘I guess. But it’s another interesting site. That’s the Amphitrites Patera: an ancient volcano, much older than the volcanic plains in the northern hemisphere. We don’t fully understand how it was formed. Maybe the vulcanism there was sparked off by the huge impacts which created the massive impact craters in the south. You see these mustard-yellow spots in the center of the southern fields: that’s Argyre and Hellas – huge, ancient impact basins, more than three billion years old. Hellas is bigger than anything we’ve found on the Moon – bigger even than the Mare Imbrium, for example. Hellas is where the Soviets put down Mars 9.’

Stone whistled. ‘That’s what you get for setting up shop next door to the asteroid belt, I guess.’

Argyre held a Stars-and-Stripes.

‘You’re suggesting we should try for Argyre?’ Bleeker asked.

‘It’s a possible. Argyre is obviously very ancient, and very deep. But the basins are surrounded by concentric rings –
mountain chains, actually – which would be hard to negotiate or land on.

‘Now,’ she went on, ‘you can see that the rest of the action is in the western hemisphere. This scarlet area, sprawling over into the north, is the Tharsis bulge: on average, more than five miles above the surrounding terrain. And these crimson spots are the great shield volcanoes.’ She pointed. ‘Ascraeus, Pavonis and Arsia Mons; and here, to the northwest, is Olympus Mons: three hundred seventy miles across its base, with a caldera fifty miles wide. Olympus is so big it pokes its way out of most of the atmosphere. So you get orographic clouds, formed when the air has to move up the slopes …’

‘Sure,’ Bleeker said, ‘but I hear Olympus wouldn’t be so spectacular from the ground.’

She shrugged. ‘Maybe. Look at this.’ She hunted about on the pin board on one wall, until she found the image she wanted. She passed it to the astronauts. It was a perspective view of a huge volcano; a cliff, sharp and well delineated, marked out its nearer rim. ‘That’s a computer image, an oblique view, faked up from Mariner data.’

Stone pointed to the cliff. ‘How high is that?’

‘The scarp? Oh, three miles.’

‘Jesus
. A three-mile-high cliff?’

‘Give or take.’

They were both staring at the cliff image. Bleeker held up his hands in mock surrender.

She suppressed a grin. Astronauts were easy to impress if you pushed the right gosh-wow buttons.

Stone said, ‘I see you have a couple of flags on top of those big volcanoes.’

‘Yeah. Olympus Mons is the youngest, and the tallest; and the youngest lava flows on Mars emanate from it. But Olympus is seventeen miles high –’

‘Too high for aerobraking,’ Bleeker said. ‘And I guess that would rule out the other Tharsis volcanoes also.’

‘Okay,’ Stone said. ‘To the east of Tharsis I see a ragged blue streak, stretching along the equator. I guess that’s the Mariner valley.’

‘Yes. Valles Marineris. The great canyons: two and a half thousand miles long, four miles deep, and over a hundred miles wide. We know that the Valles system wasn’t formed by water. A lot of the individual “canyons” are boxed in. So water couldn’t have got
in or out of them; we’re looking at geological faulting here, like the Rift Valley in Africa.’

‘The whole valley looks as if it’s flowing out of your Tharsis bulge,’ Bleeker said.

‘Yeah. And we don’t think that can be a coincidence. Maybe when the bulge was uplifted, magma withdrew from around it, which would have cracked the surface. There would have been earthquakes and extensive faulting.’

‘I see we could maybe go for the Valles Marineris itself,’ Stone said.

‘Maybe,’ York said. ‘This flag is actually in a tributary called the Candor Chasma; we’ve seen layers in the canyon walls here, so we’d be able to get clues to the canyons’ origins.’

‘But I’ll bet the landscape isn’t too easy to negotiate.’

‘No. Some of the smaller canyons there are a couple of miles deep. If you had several months to survey the place, and some kind of flying machine –’

‘But we don’t,’ Stone said. ‘Okay, Natalie. That leaves two places. Both on the border between the old stuff in the southern hemisphere and the volcanic plains in the north.’

‘Yes. This one in the eastern hemisphere’ – on the opposite side of the world from Tharsis – ‘is called Nilosyrtis Mensa. It is what we call “fretted” terrain.’ She dug out a photograph, this one a mosaic in black and white. It showed a surface uniformly crumpled.

‘Christ,’ Stone said. ‘It looks like beaten copper.’

‘We think the older, southern terrain has been eroded, here on the border, leaving this irregular, grooved landscape.’

‘Looks bloody difficult to land on,’ Bleeker said.

‘Yes, and you’d need long traverses to achieve systematic surveys.’

‘All right. So that leaves one site.’

The final flag was at the western fringe of the Tharsis Bulge, close to the border of the north and south terrains. It was in the middle of a green stripe that cut north to south across the Valles. The green, together with the blue ribbon of the Valles, made a rough upright cross, straddling the equator.

‘This is a region shaped by running water. Apparently. There are channels that seem to flow out of the Valles Marineris, and across the northern plains.’

Stone smiled. ‘So these are the famous water-carved features you tell us about in the Singing Wheel.’

‘It’s an equatorial site,’ she said. ‘So you get a mix of young and old geological types. And that’s important to us. Most mixed terrain
is complex, broken up. But here the landscape is pretty forgiving for a landing. And if you’re going to find water anywhere, it’s here. Maybe under the surface. And where there’s water –’

‘Maybe there’s life.’ Stone got out of his chair and walked across to the map; he leaned close so he could read the label by the little flag.
‘Mangala Vallis
. What does it mean?’

‘All the major valleys have been named after words for Mars. Here, to the east of Marineris, we even have an Ares valley …’

‘And Mangala?’

‘Sanskrit. The oldest language of the Indo-European group.’ “So maybe Mangala is the oldest word for Mars in the western world.’ Stone smiled. ‘I kind of like that.’ Standing at the map, he turned to eye York. ‘So you’ve been pushing the site selection board toward Mangala Vallis. For good operational reasons, of course. A place on which you just happen to be the world’s leading expert. Right, York?’ He was grinning, and so was Bleeker.

‘Still wangling to get my seat, Natalie?’ Bleeker called, good-natured.

She felt chilled.
These guys see right through me
.

But maybe that’s not a bad thing. If Bleeker knows I’m right on his tail, maybe he will take his geology a little more seriously
.

And all he has to do is slip once …

She started to roll up her maps. ‘What do you think? I’ll give you a preprint of my next
Journal of Geophysical Research
paper on Mangala; read it and weep, fly-boys.’

‘Now what?’ Stone asked. ‘Are we done?’

‘Like hell. We’re only just beginning; that was the fun stuff. Now we come to Martian climatology. Compare and contrast with Earth’s, and …’

After some grumbling, the guys settled down again.

The day wore on, and the little room grew progressively hotter.

In the end, five lead companies submitted proposals to build the Mars Exploration Module: Rockwell, McDonnell, Martin, Boeing, and JK Lee’s company, Columbia.

The post-presentation work of the MEM Evaluation Board was long and complicated. It was all a question of weighted scores; Ralph Gershon had never seen anything like it. There were
subcommittees to evaluate the bidder’s ‘administrative capacity’ and ‘business approach’ and ‘technical qualification’ … Gershon was himself involved in three of the subcommittees. And each subcommittee assigned weighted scores to each bid, under hundreds of categories.

It didn’t make sense to Gershon. Would all these numbers really determine the final outcome? If you could reduce decision-making to a mechanical process, the day would come when a computer could run an outfit like NASA.

In this bidding war, for instance, it was pretty obvious to Gershon that Columbia had the most plausible strategy. NASA, with the bigger players, had pissed away the best part of a decade on studies and proposals and evaluations of ever more exotic Mars landers, without ever really getting to the point. Lee’s people had come in fresh and had cut through all that crap, and presented something that looked as if it could be up and flying in a couple of years.

The trouble was, the scoring didn’t back up that intuition. Even though its technical pitch was well received – and the human factors stuff seemed particularly well thought through – Columbia was penalized by its status as a small experimental outfit. It just didn’t look as if Columbia was capable of delivering a complete spacecraft.

When the first-cut summary sheets came in, the overall totals gave Rockwell first place, with Boeing and McDonnell tied for second, and Columbia a distant last.

Gershon argued against the scoring in the final plenary sessions. ‘Damn it, you’ve got the results of the sims. I bust my balls trying to get a biconic to fly. We got to pick the bidder with the best chance of building something that will work …’