minutes. What a depressing thought. To be so close to making a genuine historic first and ending up being a second team in. No one will remember us, Boutillier thought furiously.
Some minutes later, back on Earth at the Headquarters of the European Space Agency in Paris, the Director General, Professor Dominique Laget was listening to the live news retransmitted from the receiving station in Villafranca near Madrid. The video screen on the great wall of the conference room would soon be showing the Martian surface from the television camera on Ares. Upon hearing the report that their ship was about to land on Mars, his distinguished face brightened in an inimitable Gaulish smile. He was joined by several dozen ranking officials of the Consortium that included a number from the Russian Federation.
Laget’s pert strawberry-blonde secretary from Brittany started filling up the champagne glasses with the finest produce from the Champagne province. The same scene was being repeated all over Europe, with some variations in the choice of beverages. The entire subcontinent of Europe was ready to have the greatest festivities ever.
By design, the landing would take place when the side of Mars with the landing site was facing Earth.
It was only seconds before Ares was actually to make a touchdown that the transmission suddenly broke down. The last scene from the video camera on Ares showed an
immense tornadolike dust cloud rapidly approaching the spaceship over the barren wasteland of Mars. The last vocal transmission received, just before the communication was cut off, said, “We are about to be overtaken by a great tornado. We will…” Ritter never got to complete his sentence.
After what seemed like an eternity of waiting, television and radio broadcasters were announcing that the transmission from Mars had been disrupted by unexplained technical difficulties.
After a while, in place of the direct report from Ares, there came a transmission from Orbital Base Phobos. They had had to wait a few hours for it, as the Martian moon had gone behind its mother planet in its approximately 0.31 day orbit.
As soon as Phobos was over the horizon for the line-of-sight contact with Ares, Captain Eriksen reported to Earth with a sense of foreboding. “We have no radio contact with Ares—no visual sighting either. The area surrounding the landing site is near the center of an immense dust cloud. We’ll try making radio contact and keep looking for a break in the sandstorm.”
Aboard Trailblazer, the crew huddled for a conference.
“What’s your diagnosis now, Linde? Will the storm clear up anytime soon?” Eriksen asked.
“The storm appears to be local and relatively minor. We lack sufficient data about such events on Mars and it’s hard to tell. There’s an indication, though, that it may be clearing up. We need to keep watching.”
“It’s troubling there’s no radio contact with Ares. The storm may have damaged the communications antennae,” Boutillier interjected his thoughts.
Eriksen looked grave. “What worries me most is whether the ship itself is still intact. I don’t think it was designed to cope with a sandstorm like that. I’m concerned about the safety of her crew.”
Another orbit later, there still was no communication from Ares despite repeated attempts at contact from both Trailblazer and the Consortium’s control antennae on Earth. All receiving stations around the globe were intently listening in for any signal from Ares. In the meanwhile, the Trailblazer crew worked around the clock to complete the refitting of the supply ships as a habitat so that they could house refugees from Ares if any were rescued.
At another all-hands meeting, Eriksen recapped the situation succinctly. “There are still no signals from Ares. Linde, bring us up to date on the conditions below, will you please?”
“At the landing site of Ares there may be a break in the dust storm soon, lasting maybe about an hour or so.”
“How about the conditions at the spot picked for our own landing?” Eriksen wanted to have a more complete weather report.
“Unless it’s for an emergency, I would not advise you to land Valkyrie there for at least a few days.”
Anyway, it was clear in the minds of everybody present that ascertaining the safety of Ares and rescuing any surviving members came first before the completion of their own mission objectives. The crew selection board for Trailblazer would not have passed anyone whose first concern would not be for the well-being of their comrades, even when those colleagues were on the competing team.
Before Eriksen had the chance to address the issue, Boutillier spoke up eagerly.
“Unless we hear from Ares very soon, I volunteer to take Valkyrie down for a look. If there are survivors, I’ll rescue them. The shuttle is a two-seater, but if I don’t take any cargo, we can jury-rig another seat in it. If all four are alive, I guess I’ll have to go back again.”
“How are you going to get inside Ares to find out if there are survivors? If you force your way through the hatch, you may be sealing the fate of any survivor by exposing them to the near-vacuum of Mars,” Okita objected.
“I’ll knock on the door or something and find out if there’s anyone inside who’ll respond.
If no one responds, it probably won’t matter if I force my way in. Besides, if they have any sense, they’ll all be wearing their space suits by now. I’ll take four portable oxygen masks with me, though, just in case. Maybe, I can put the masks on their faces before they suffocate in near vacuum.”
Eriksen cut in before the discussion progressed any further. “Piloting Valkyrie for a mission of mercy should be my job. It’s still chancy there. As the captain, I can’t expose Jack to such a risk.”
If Eriksen sounded firm about his counterproposal, Boutillier was even more adamant about his idea. “Poul, as captain, your foremost responsibility is to the entire crew. The rescue mission for Ares has to come second. There’re two experienced pilots on this mission for a good reason. Even if something should happen to one of us, the other will be able to take Trailblazer back to Earth. Obviously, you are more qualified than me in completing this mission and taking Trailblazer home. You are indispensable and I am expendable.”
Boutillier declared with finality. “No, Captain, I must be the one to go.”
Eriksen considered the Cajun’s impassioned plea for several moments and reached a decision. It was evident that he did not like what he was about to say.
“All right, you win, Jack. One condition, though. You will not risk your life unnecessarily and you will do your utmost to come back safely, with or without any surviving members of Ares. Don’t forget, we still need you to land Valkyrie at our own site and complete the mission. You are still the best pilot within tens of millions of kilometers.”
Eriksen knew that Boutillier might not follow his injunctions but, by Mighty Odin, he had to tell him.
It took one more orbit of Phobos around Mars before Hoerter gave Boutillier a reluctant “go” sign. Hoerter cautioned him that the safety window was brief and that Boutillier ought to head back at most within an hour of landing, no matter what he found there.
There was no telling what a fierce dust storm, with wind velocities sometimes running up to several hundred kilometers an hour, could do to the propulsion system of Valkyrie, even in the low air density of Mars.
While descending to the ground, Boutillier had the time to indulge in his secret concerns about Mars and its moons, most of which he had not shared with his crewmates. For one thing, he had always wondered if the Martian moons were entirely natural. As an undergraduate at the U.S. Naval Academy, he had studied celestial mechanics for its own elegant beauty. He loved the subject. It was clear to him that those two Martian moons should not be there—not by an act of nature, anyway. For one thing, if they had been two passing asteroids acquired by the gravitational field of Mars, why weren’t their orbits significantly eccentric? At the time of the capture by Mars, their orbits must have been hyperbolic; even stipulating the presence of another much more massive asteroid at the time of the capture to provide the required perturbation, the orbital eccentricities for Phobos and Deimos should have remained close to unity, i.e., close to being hyperbolic.
He had often wondered if those two moons had naturally been placed in those neat orbits. Had they been put there artificially? That would imply the intervention of intelligent beings, perhaps some millions of years ago; the orbits of Phobos and Deimos seemed to be ideally suited as space stations for inhabitants of Mars. He was hoping that a thorough exploration of Phobos and Deimos—and Mars itself—would in time answer those questions.
That led to another question he had been harboring for a long time. Was the disaster that befell the first expedition seven years ago naturally caused? Or, was some sort of ancient defense system against invading ETs, meaning creatures like us, activated after all those years? He had to admit, however, that the idea of an ancient Martian strategic defense system being activated from time to time sounded more than a little far-fetched and even
