teleoperator mockup of the soarplane’s cockpit.
In an electronic sense Connors truly was flying his Little Beauty. He was linked so thoroughly to the remotely piloted vehicle that he felt every tremor of her slender frame, every slight gust of air buoying up her gossamer wings. Nearly a thousand kilometers separated plane from pilot, but Connors was as much in control of RPV-1 as if the tiny plane actually were carrying him through the sky.
The engineers called it teleoperation, the technique of linking man and machine electronically even though they were not physically together. Thanks to teleoperation, an aircraft could range thousands of kilometers across Mars without the need to carry a pilot and all the life-support equipment that a human operator requires. The pilot could remain safely on the ground or in one of the orbiting spacecraft while the plane braved the unknown dangers of the unexplored planet.
Deep in his mind Connors felt almost the exact opposite of the symptoms of space adaptation syndrome. In zero gravity your ears screamed that you were falling while your eyes told you that you were safely bundled inside a spacecraft cabin. Flying Little Beauty, Connors’s eyes told him he was soaring ten miles high, but his butt and all his other body senses reminded him that he was sitting on the ground.
Never mind. He smiled boyishly to himself. This is as good as it’s going to get here on this rust ball. Good enough for now. Not bad for a minister’s son. He remembered his first flights in the backseat of an ancient crop duster’s biplane over the flat wheat fields of Nebraska. Everything square and neat, precise. The barren red ground below him now had never known the touch of human purpose.
Abell opened the hatch abruptly and stuck in a badly made sandwich as he asked again for a turn at the controls. Connors put him off and once more shut himself inside the cockpit.
Far down below he saw a shadow of darker red inching across the barren land. He banked the little plane slightly to get a better view of the ground.
A dust storm. Big one. Must be several hundred kilometers across its front. Connors knew that whatever his cameras saw was automatically relayed to the ships up in orbit and, through them, back to Earth. He made some mental calculations of his own, anyway, and spoke into the microphone of his headset. Toshima would appreciate all the information he could get; the Japanese meteorologist was trying to build a network of weather sensors all around the planet.
'Looks like a major dust storm blowing from northwest to southeast. Front’s at least three-four hundred klicks wide.' He checked his navigation screen, to his right on the control panel. 'Location about longitude sixty, latitude thirty, thirty-one. Speed of advance must be fifty to a hundred kilometers per hour.' Then he grinned and added, 'Tether the camels.'
In addition to its usual complement of sensing instruments, RPV-1 carried beneath its belly a special payload, a tiny oblong aluminum box. Inside was a stainless steel plaque, small enough to fit into the palm of a man’s hand. On it was inscribed:
Connors had never met Thomas A. Mutch. The NASA scientist had been killed in a mountain-climbing accident only a few years after the first automated lander had set down on the surface of Mars, in 1976. That primitive lander, known originally as Viking 1, had been renamed the Thomas A. Mutch Memorial Station shortly afterward. The plaque had been made then, when Connors was still a kid just starting to buzz the farms of Cheyenne County, Nebraska.
Now he guided the remotely piloted Little Beauty to longitude 47°97’, latitude 22°49’ north, the location where the faithful old Viking still stood on its spraddling legs after more than thirty years. Connors was to land the little plane there and detach the box with the plaque inside it, then wait until morning to take off and return to home base.
There was one further line etched into the stainless steel plaque. It read: 'Emplaced,' with the space following it left blank. The date was to be filled in when human explorers finally reached the Viking lander, a feat that was not in the schedule for this first exploration mission.
Connors’s face clouded slightly. He wished he were truly flying this plane, actually on board at its controls, really there so he could land her and bolt that plaque to the old spacecraft and scratch in the
SOL 14: MORNING
There’s no such thing as a private communication here, Jamie thought as he sat at the comm console. Vosnesensky was at his side, Tony Reed, Patel, Naguib, and Monique Bonnet standing behind him.
On the display screen in the center of all the communications equipment was the neatly bearded face of Alberto Brumado, his hair slightly tousled as usual, his smile just a little desperate.
For most of the day they had reviewed the arguments for and against returning to Tithonium Chasma to investigate Jamie’s 'village.' Like all the others, Brumado had been against it.
'All the available evidence,' he had said in his mild, fatherly way, 'points toward its being a natural phenomenon. We cannot upset the mission schedule with another unplanned excursion.'
That word another rankled Jamie. If it hadn’t been for my insisting on going out to the canyon in the first place we would never have seen the village at all.
Then Brumado had surprised them all by saying, 'I would like to speak with Dr. Waterman in private, if I may.'
Jamie felt the others stir behind him. He glanced at Vosnesensky, who pursed his lips, his face glowering with suspicion.
But he said, 'Of course,' as if Brumado could hear him without waiting another dozen minutes. Turning to Jamie, the cosmonaut said, 'You can speak with Dr. Brumado in your own quarters. I will see that no one else uses this frequency.'
'Thanks, Mikhail.' Jamie hurried back to his cubicle, thinking of how many hours of useful work had already been ruined in debate.
He pulled his laptop computer from the tiny desk and stretched out with it on his bunk. There was no way to scramble a conversation; if anyone wanted to eavesdrop all they had to do was turn on their own unit to the same frequency. But the other scientists were heading for their various duties, already behind schedule, and Vosnesensky would guard the main comm console with the single-minded fervor of a Cossack protecting his tsar.
So Jamie hoped.
Brumado’s face took form on the laptop’s small screen. For an instant Jamie felt almost ridiculous. Alone at last, he wanted to say.
Instead, 'You can go ahead now, Dr. Brumado. No one else is on this frequency.'
Then the minutes ticked by. It took more than ten minutes now for a transmission to span the widening gulf between the two planets; twenty-some minutes of lag in each two-way conversation. Jamie watched Brumado carefully; the man merely sat there looking into the screen, waiting with the patience of a true Indian. Maybe he’s using his screen to display other data while he’s waiting for my transmission to reach him, Jamie thought. But Brumado’s eyes did not scan back and forth as they would if he were reading.
Jamie got up from the bunk, found the earphone attachment in his desk drawer and plugged it into the laptop. At least nobody could eavesdrop on Brumado’s end of their conversation, he thought as he settled back on the bunk again.
I ought to answer Edith’s message, he remembered. And send something to Mom and Dad. He had not expected his parents to try to contact him; they would expect him to call them, he knew. It always worked that way. Why should Mars be any different? And Al. What can I say to him that will mean anything? Having a wonderful time, wish you were here? Jamie grinned to himself. Al would play the tape in his store; the only shop
