"Go ahead." She had heard McGee play plenty of times on the outbound journey; he wasn't too bad. Besides, it would be a long drive. McGee began strumming a vaguely Celtic tune, not too different from the Appalachian fiddle music she had often heard as a girl. Somehow it warmed her to hear it. She looked at McGee and smiled.
"You're a man of unexpected talents, Professor."
CHAPTER 6
OPHIR PLANUM
DEC. 14, 2011 21:00 MLT
TOWNSEND, MCGEE, AND REBECCA sat in the galley of the Hab and watched the NASA broadcast. Luke and Gwen were away on a rover excursion. Lucky them, thought Rebecca. If I have to hear much more of Mason, I'm going to vomit. Too bad about the signal transmission delay. There's a lot I'd love to tell this bozo real-time. Instead I just have to sit here and take it. She tapped her right foot on the Hab floor as Mason's televised lecture droned on.
"Look gang, due to reduced budget here in Houston, and the fact that you have some onboard artificial intelligence capability to provide advice, we've let you do your own minute-by-minute mission planning, within broad guidance parameters from us. As you know, your early mission abort window closed last week."
Thank Reason, Rebecca thought. At least that opportunity to wreck the mission is out of your hands.
"You're on Mars for the duration, and that means from here on you have to stay strictly within NASA-prescribed safety guidelines. The initial photo reconnaissance led by Major Llewellyn was by the book, but that first science sortie by Sherman and McGee was way out of line. They had no business going so far over the horizon from the base. We lost all contact with them for over seventeen hours, and let me tell you, I had the NASA Administrator himself all over my tail on that."
Rebecca looked at Townsend. Did the mission commander buy any of this? "Gee, sorry we worried his pretty little head. How were we supposed to reach the lake bed without going over the horizon?"
The buffoon droned on, impeccably dressed, wearing another subtle silk tie. "Furthermore, Dr. Sherman should have known that distant lake bed was a low-priority site, as determined by the site selection board of the Mars Science Working Group."
Rebecca shook her head. "Right. A committee of old farts making compromises with each other so that everybody can get something to publish in the Journal of Geophysical Research. Well, I'm here doing the hands-on work, they're not."
Townsend gave her an indulgent smile. Surely as a combat veteran, he understood that the people on the ground needed the freedom to make their own decisions.
Mason continued. "And, precisely as foreseen by the board, nothing of interest was found there. Unauthorized risk was taken, a week was wasted, and no results were achieved."
This was absurd. Rebecca slapped her hand down on the table to get Townsend's full attention. "Colonel, this is post hoc, ergo propter hoc reasoning."
He looked at her with a puzzled expression. "You mean like Monday morning quarterbacking?"
Now it was Rebecca's turn to be puzzled. We're not speaking the same language. Monday morning quarts of what? She turned to McGee; maybe he could translate English into Male.
"That's exactly what she means," the professor said, causing the colonel to nod. Separated by the long signal lag, Mason continued, oblivious. It's not really a technical problem though, Rebecca thought. He'd still be oblivious if he were standing in this room.
Now he spoke directly to Townsend. "Andy, after that unscripted landing of yours, some of the upper-level managers here at JSC started remembering the Skylab mutiny and suggested the need to tighten the leash on the Mars crew. Since then, it's been getting a lot worse. I know that if we take too heavy-handed an approach down here it's going to hurt the mission, but if your guys keep operating open loop, the pressure will be too much for me to stop it. Goddammit, Andy, you've got to get the situation under control. That's why you're there. I know you can do it, you old battle-ax. Enforce discipline. We're all rooting for you here. Keep up the good work. Mason, out."
The Chief of Operations disappeared from the TV and was replaced by a NASA logo.
Townsend turned to face her. "Well, there you have it, Doctor. Straight from the horse's mouth."
"Horse's ass is more like it."
McGee chuckled. "Rebecca, I'm surprised at you. Such language."
"I'm a scientist. I always use accurate language."
Next, the image of Mission Control's Al Rollins appeared on the monitor. "The Mars Society in Boulder is continuing the debate right now about the Martian life question. Thought you might be interested, so we're uplinking it to you live."
Rebecca grinned and winked at McGee. "Oh, this oughta be good."
The image switched to a panel of scientists on the podium of the Glenn Miller Ballroom at the University of Colorado. Lev Chelovkin, of the Russian Institute for Space Research, was talking. "Over the years we have devoted a great deal of discussion to problems of biological experiments. But the subject was sort of hung up in the air. Does the as-yet-fruitless search for life on Mars retain the same priority that it had at the time of Viking?"
Rebecca scanned the panel and predicted correctly that Chuck Stein would answer this largely rhetorical question.
"Let me attempt to answer your inquiry, Dr. Chelovkin," Stein said. "In pursuing further life detection experiments on Mars, we should be looking at sites of greater potential interest than the ones that received cursory study during the Viking mission. Unfortunately, the Beagle's landing site is far from the most optimal areas for a life search. In any case, I feel that the chances of finding extant life are very, very remote. While I think that biological experiments should still be done, given the large number of other important scientific questions that can be usefully addressed by the mission, the search for life should receive only a secondary priority."
"Thanks a lot, Chuck," Rebecca commented dryly. So much for old friends.
Now Magorsky of the USGS was talking. "It's too bad that the mission did not land near the North Pole's eroded areas, which extend down from the icecaps through the layered terrain. On Earth we have made remarkable finds by drilling through the Antarctic icecap, and there may well be living organisms at different levels of the icecap on Mars."
Even Townsend reacted to such absurdity. "They want me to land on the polar icecap? Right."
"Well, I guess you blew it there, Colonel," McGee joked. "What were you thinking as we were careening through the atmosphere?"
Rebecca regarded her crewmates. Perhaps they were beginning to understand what she'd always been up against.
Magorsky continued. "But since the Beagle is near the equator, the best place to look would be near lava flows, which release water. On Earth, we frequently see lichen established just a few weeks after a lava flow has cooled."
Rebecca hit her forehead in mock chagrin. "If only I had known. Colonel, could you please arrange for a small volcano to erupt, say fifty kilometers from here? It doesn't have to be very large, but please set it off in the early morning, so we can drive over there in daylight."
"I'll see what I can do, Doctor."
"Chuck, Harold, aren't you a little close to romantic wishful thinking here?" Rebecca recognized the condescending tone of Norm Harwitz, a cantankerous old pedant. "The Viking experiments were quite conclusive. Despite some people's wishful thinking, there is no life on Mars, and the expedition should not waste any time looking for it."