Kurtz said, “Congressmen are scared of people getting sterilized.”
“Not really,” I said. “They’re scared of not being on the right bandwagon.”
All three of them turned toward me.
Rohr said, “Next time you dream up a project, pal, make it underground. Something in a lead mine. Or deeper still, a gold mine. Then Congress won’t have to worry about cosmic rays.”
Wisdom tried to laugh, but it wouldn’t come.
“You know,” I said slowly, “you just might have something there.”
“What?”
“Where?”
“A supersonic transport—in a tunnel.”
“Oh for Chri—”
But Wisdom sat up straighter in his chair. “You could make an air-cushion vehicle go supersonic. If you put it in a tunnel, you get away from the sonic boom and the air pollution.”
“The safety aspects would be better too,” Kurtz admitted. Then, more excitedly, “And pump the air out of the tunnel, like a pneumatic tube!”
Rohr shook his head. “You guys are crazy. Who the hell’s going to build tunnels all over the country?”
“There’s a lot of tunnels already built,” I countered. We could adapt them for the SSST.”
“SSST?”
“Sure,” I answered, grinning for the first time in weeks. “Supersonic subway train.”
They stared at me. Rohr pulled out his PDA and started tapping on it. Wisdom got that faraway look in his eyes. Kurtz shrugged and said, “Why the hell not?”
I got up and headed for the door. Supersonic subway train. That was my ticket. I was going back to Washington, I knew. And this time I’ll bring Lisa with me.
Introduction to
“Mars Farts”
Inspiration is where you find it.
The robotic spacecraft we’ve sent to Mars have found some surprising things, including the fact that the Martian atmosphere includes occasional whiffs of methane gas. The methane appears seasonally, then disappears, only to show up again the next year.
Methane is composed of one atom of carbon and four of hydrogen: CH4. Sunlight in the thin, clear Martian atmosphere quickly dissociates the compound into individual atoms. The hydrogen—lightest of all the atoms—rises to the top of the atmosphere and eventually wafts off into space. The carbon atom presumably becomes part of the scant Martian atmosphere, which is predominantly composed of carbon dioxide.
Okay, we know where the CH4 goes. But where does it come from?
One possible explanation is that it comes from microscopic creatures living deep beneath the surface of Mars. On Earth there are “bugs” living deep below the surface that eat dirt and even rocks—and excrete methane. Similar microorganisms may exist deep beneath Mars’s surface.
Mars farts?
MARS FARTS
“A Catholic, a Jew, and a Muslim are stuck in the middle of Mars,” said Rashid Faiyum.
“That isn’t funny,” Jacob Bernstein replied wearily.
Patrick O’Conner, the leader of the three-man team, shook his head inside the helmet of his pressure suit. “Laugh, and the world laughs with you, Jake.”
None of them could see the faces of their companions through the tinting of their helmet visors. But they could hear the bleakness in Bernstein’s tone. “There’s not much to laugh about, is there?”
“Not much,” Faiyum agreed.
All around them stretched the barren, frozen, rust-red sands of Utopia Planita. Their little hopper leaned lopsidedly on its three spindly legs in the middle of newly churned pockmarks from the meteor shower that had struck the area overnight.
Off on the horizon stood the blocky form of the old Viking 2 lander, which had been there for more than a century. One of their mission objectives had been to retrieve parts of the Viking to return to Earth, for study and eventual sale to a museum. Like everything else about their mission, that objective had been sidelined by the meteor shower. Their goal now was survival.
A barrage of tiny bits of stone, most of them no larger than dust motes. Once they had been part of an icy comet, but the ice had melted away after God knows how many trips around the sun, and now only the stones were left when the remains of the comet happened to collide with the planet Mars.
One of the rare stones, almost the size of a pebble, had punctured the fuel cell that was the main electrical power source for the three-man hopper. Without the electrical power from that fuel cell, their rocket engine could not function. They were stranded in the middle of the frozen, arid plain.
In his gleaming silvery pressure suit, Faiyum reminded O’Connor of a knight in shining armor, except that he was bending into the bay that held the fuel cell, his helmeted head obscured by the bay’s upraised hatch. Bernstein, similarly suited, stood by nervously beside him.
The hatch had been punctured by what looked like a bullet hole. Faiyum was muttering, “Of all the meteoroids in all the solar system in all of Mars, this one’s got to smack our power cell.”
Bernstein asked, “How bad is it?”
Straightening up, Faiyum replied, “All the hydrogen drained out during the night. It’s dead as a doornail.”
“Then so are we,” Bernstein said.
“I’d better call Tithonium,” said O’Connor, and he headed for the ladder that led to the hopper’s cramped cockpit. “While the batteries are still good.”
“How long will they last?” asked Bernstein.
“Long enough to get help.”
It wasn’t that easy. The communications link back to Tithonium was relayed by a network of satellites in low orbit around Mars, and it would be another half hour before one of the commsats came over their horizon.
Faiyum and Bernstein followed O’Connor back into the cockpit, and suddenly the compact little space was uncomfortably crowded.
With nothing to do but wait, O’Connor said, “I’ll pressurize the cockpit so we can take off the helmets and have some breakfast.”
“I don’t think we should waste electrical power until we get confirmation from Tithonium that they’re sending a backup to us.”
“We’ve got to eat,” O’Connor said.
Sitting this close in the cramped cockpit, they could see each other’s faces even through the tinting of the helmet visors. Faiyum broke into a stubbly-chinned grin.
“Let’s pretend its Ramadan” he suggested, “and we have
