Martian Valkyrie

Command ops occupied the forward end of the cylinder, some nine meters away, and I prided myself on my ability to jump the distance without using the pole, shoot through the opening without touching its sides, and catch myself with my toes.

My little maneuver went unwatched above. Mustaffa was alone, twirling his moustache, his dark eyes intent on the command video display as Dr. Worthing of the U.N. International Space Authority gave their version of events. They, he said, “welcomed all space exploration efforts” but “were concerned about the possible complications of another mission, and in particular, one formulated with so many differences in basic philosophy.” This went on for a few minutes, then the ISA signed off.

“Nobody on the back line for me?” Mustaffa turned toward me and shrugged. “What bureaucrat has the patience for a time lag between speeches? We have a half-megabyte download of instructions on how to handle press questions from the ISA. It’s GMT midnight at Earthport—the public relations people are asleep.”

“The press! Public relations! Caramba! What do we do about Halvorsen’s mission?”

Mustaffa shrugged. “It appears we arc to continue for now as if nothing has happened”

“But what if they… Get a ground line. I’ll talk to Halvorsen myself!”

“Enrico, it is after midnight in Norway and he must be eighty—”

“Wake the old fart up!” I pursed my lips. Halvorsen, for all his obstreperousness, was a legend of space exploration. It wouldn’t do to display my anger to the crew. “I’ll take it in my cabin.”

I’d worked for the U.S. NASA for twenty-three years, but I was dark-complexioned, had straight black hair, and had retained my Argentine citizenship. This had made me politically acceptable as the U.N. expedition commander—and a target for some of Halvorsen’s criticism. So, if he succeeded in beating us to Mars, he would get back at me and prove me not only wrong, but unnecessary.

It took twenty minutes, but Mars Mission Control made the connection and I saw the old, straight-backed, craggy-faced, iron-haired descendent of Viking barbarians, dressed in a night robe, frowning at me in what seemed to be a living room. At least the backdrop was a great stone hearth strewn with models of rockets and Moon rocks.

I started by asserting my authority as leader of Earth’s official expedition and taking an attitude of outrage. “What do you think you are doing? Over.”

Forty seconds of light-speed delay gives one time to question one’s wording with no opportunity for recall. I was talking to a man many years my senior and an acknowledged legend. This was not a pleasant way to converse.

“Well,” he said, pronouncing his “W” as if it were a “V.” “I am sitting in my home listening to Grieg. Per and Ingrid are going to Mars. Over.”

The same crew that had gone to the Moon with him. Per Nordli was a cool, tall, diffident, brown-haired man. He had no cojones, but was otherwise respectable. But his wife looked and acted like someone more comfortable in a bikini than a spacesuit. Make that half a bikini.

“You sent that bimbo Karinsdatter!” I shut my eyes to regain my composure. I needed to interface with his technical staff on flight plans, to prepare contingencies, before we got too far away for comfortable discussion.

“Where are your people, your mission control center? I was told you are heading a mission control operation. Over.”

While I waited for his response, I shuddered to think of the problem Karinsdatter represented. Our Mars expedition was full of men from developing Islamic, Oriental, and Hispanic cultures—and the sponsoring nations thought the first mission would be hard enough without sexual complications. We had carefully negotiated a decision not to include women on the first mission. Now Halvorsen, on his own, had decided otherwise. Bad enough—but for him to send Dr. Ingrid Bodil Karinsdatter, however theoretically qualified, to Mars was an unforgivable insult.

Yes, for some it would be insulting just because she was a woman. But the problem was more because of the kind of woman she was. After she had become famous, she spoke up for population control efforts in opposition to many of the religious leaders of Earth. She used a non-traditional feminist surname. She had posed for a magazine. I and many other NASA astronauts—especially the women—had publicly blasted her for that. In return, she had made comments about American prudery.

Was Ingrid Karinsdatter someone to dangle before forty men fifty million miles from Earth? Ten of my crew were from conservative Islamic countries. Now, in the Norwegians, I faced a culture whose ideals of womanhood were ski champions, marathon runners, Valkyrie warriors, prime ministers, or Viking queens with names like Aud the Deep Thinker. To that, add the crazy license with which all these modern European women display themselves now that the fear of AIDS has gone.

I stared, tight-lipped, at the large, but simple and spare living room behind Halvorsen, waiting for transmissions to go there and back. Finally he shrugged, almost as a Frenchman would.

“I recruited Per and Ingrid who were with me on the Amundsen Crater expedition. Their children are old enough to leave alone now and I am too old and too blind to do anything but think and talk. But I still do that not too bad, nei? Ja, I know how you talk of Ingrid. But that is your problem. As for mission control, this is it such as it is. I use my house computer and my videophone.”

So their standing army was this old half-blind man standing in front of me. Who did he think he was? Goddard? Korolev? Von Braun?

“Oslo University,” he continued, “is giving me time on their radio telescope and some volunteer help. That is all. We only have a two person expedition, assembled from standard modules. Over.”

I frowned. The Norwegians had bought their way into space with oil money and a cut-rate single-stage shuttle design that NASA had smothered to death. It had a payload of five tonnes to a five-hundred kilometer orbit at best. And they’d hardly changed a thing since their Moon escapade. There was no way they could reasonably hope to get a round trip out of that, I thought. They were planning on using us—they had to be—and that made me angry.

“This isn’t fair, Halvorsen. Our lives may be put at risk. Now will you tell Per Nordli to follow our lead; to do just what we say? So we can get him and his wife back safely? Over”

I waited. Halvorsen’s expression changed to ice when he got my transmission. “Nei! We plan that they get back by themselves! As for putting lives at risk, you do things so stupid and complex it is you that may all die. That is why I walked out of your meetings. Uf dah! Bureaucrats, empire builders, and egomaniacs. Bah!” Across six million kilometers and through two sets of communications electronics, this craggy gray old Viking speared me with the contempt in his nearly sightless eyes. “It is too late to be talking such nonsense. Halvorsen out!”

The image dissolved to a UN link operator who told me that Halvorsen had hung up, not waiting for my sign- off. In retrospect, I may have been too peremptory myself, but still, the insult stung.

I called a staff meeting to decide how to deal with the Norwegian expedition. It would take us four days to rendezvous with our Deimos supply depot, refuel, deploy our landers, and be ready to mount any kind of an operation, we reasoned. The Norwegians would most likely have trouble during aerobraking, so it would be best if we were in place before they got there.

Nobody wanted to call it a race, but we examined our trajectory margins to see if we could get to Mars earlier. But the trajectory people told us the time to have done that was in low Earth orbit. Now, it would eat into our reaction mass budget more than mission rules would allow. The Norwegians, it seemed, would get to Mars orbit before us. Dead or alive, but first.

Not if I had my way. We had plenty of fuel margin—there ought to be some way of stealing a little of that to shave some days off our trajectory. There was a planned midcourse burn only forty hours away. If it was just a little bigger… I knew my way around mission planning bureaucracies—I called the man in charge of trajectory analysis and asked him if he could run some contingency cases that had looked good to us. Strictly hypothetical? I grinned at the planner and he grinned back. He wanted to win, too.

It looked good.

Two days later, I was smiling and it was Halvorsen who was angry.

“We plan so our ships will be out of your way. Now we all get there at once bam-bam and will all be so busy that no one will have time to help anyone! And you use up your fuel margin! Over!”

“You are mistaken in your exaggerations, Dr. Halvorsen,” I answered, calmly. Dr. Obote, our ground orbit