It began at a quarter to four in the morning, Washington time, and the President had himself awakened to see it. “That priest,” he said, frowning, “what kind of a pilot is he? If anything goes wrong—”
“He’s checked out, sir,” soothed his NASA aide. “Anyway, he’s actually only about a third-place back-up. The automatic sequencing is in primary control. If anything goes wrong, General Hesburgh is monitoring it from the orbiter and he can override. Father Kayrnan doesn’t have anything to do unless everything goes wrong at once.”
Dash shrugged, and the aide noticed that the President’s fingers were crossed. “What about the follow-up flights?” he asked, staring at the screen.
“No sweat at all, sir. The computer will inject into Mars orbit in thirty-two days, and the generator twenty-seven days later. As soon as the lander is down General Hesburgh is going to perform a course correction and overtake the moon Deirnos. We expect to land both the computer and the generator there, probably in the crater Voltaire; Hesburgh will make that determination for us.”
“Um,” said the President. “Has Roger been told who’s on the generator spacecraft?”
“No, sir.”
“Um.” The President abandoned the television screen and got up. At the window, staring out at the pretty White House lawn, June-green and blossoming, he said, “There’s a man coming over from the computer center in Alexandria. I’d like you to be here when he arrives.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Commander Chiaroso. Supposed to be pretty good. Used to be a professor at M.I.T. He says there’s something strange about our projections about this whole project. Have you heard any gossip?”
“No, sir,” said the NASA aide, alarmed. “Strange, sir?”
Dash shrugged. “That’s all I need,” he said, “getting this whole son-of-a-bitching thing going and then finding out — Hey! What the hell’s happening?”
On the TV screen the image was jumping and breaking up; it went out entirely, restored itself and disappeared again, leaving only the tracery of raster.
“That’s all right, sir,” said the aide quickly. “It’s reentry buffeting. When they hit the atmosphere they lose video contact. Even the telemetry’s affected, but we’ve got ample margins all around; it’ll be all right.”
The President demanded, “Why the hell is that? I thought the whole point was that Mars didn’t have any atmosphere?”
“Not a lot, sir. But it does have some, and because it’s smaller it’s got a shallower, flatter gravity well. In the upper atmosphere it’s just about as dense as the Earth’s is, at the same altitude, and that’s where the buffeting happens.”
“God damn it,” snarled the President, “I don’t like surprises! Why didn’t somebody tell me this?”
“Well, sir—”
“Never mind! I’ll take it up later. I hope surprising Torraway isn’t going to be a mistake — Well, forget it. What’s happening now?”
The aide looked not at the screen but at his watch. “Parachute deployment, sir. They’ve completed retrofire. Now it’s just a matter of coming down. In a few seconds—” The aide pointed to the screen, which obediently built itself into a picture again. “There! They’re in controlled descent mode now.”
And they sat and waited while the lander slid down through the thin Martian air under its immense canopy, quintuple the size of a parachute built for air.
When it hit the sound came a hundred million miles, and then sounded like trash cans falling off a roof. But the lander had been built for it; and the crew were long since in their protective cocoons.
There was a hissing sound from the screen and the clicking of cooling metal.
And then Brad’s voice. “We’re on Mars,” he said prayerfully, and Father Kayman began to whisper the words from the Ordinary of the Mass, “Laudamas te, benedicirnus te, adoramus te, glorificamus te. Gloria in excelsis Deo, et in terra pax hominibus bonae voluntatis.”
And to the familiar words he added, “Et in Martis.”
Fifteen
How the Good News Went from Mars to Earth
When we first realized that there was a serious risk that a major war would destroy civilization and make the Earth uninhabitable — which is to say, shortly after we collectively began to realize anything at all — we decided to take steps to colonize Mars.
It wasn’t easy for us.
The whole human race was in trouble. Energy was in short supply the world over, which meant fertilizer was expensive, which meant people were hungry, which meant explosively dangerous tensions. The world’s resources were none too ample for the bare necessity of keeping billions of people alive. We had to find ways to divert capacities that were badly needed elsewhere to long-range planning. We set up three separate think tanks and gave them all the facilities we could steal from daily needs. One explored options for solving the growing tensions on Earth. One was charged with setting up refuges on Earth itself, so that even if a thermonuclear war did occur a small fraction of us could survive.
The third looked into extraterrestrial possibilities.
In the beginning it seemed as though we had a thousand options to choose from, and each of the three major tracks had branches that looked hopeful. One by one the tracks closed off. Our best estimates — not the ones we gave the President of the United States, but the private ones we showed to nobody but ourselves — were of point nine to ten nines probability of thermonuclear war within a decade; and we closed down the center for solving international tensions in the first year. Setting up refuges was a little more hopeful. It developed that worst-case analysis indicated a few places on the Earth that would be unlikely to experience direct attack — Antarctica, parts of the Sahara, even some of Australia and a number of islands. Ten sites were selected. Each one had only a point zero one or less probability of being destroyed; if all ten were considered, the probability that they would all be destroyed was relatively insignificant. But fine-grain analysis showed that there were two flaws. For one, we could not be sure how much long-life isotope would remain in the atmosphere after such a war, and the indications were that there would be excessive levels of ionizing radiation for as much as a thousand years. Over that time scale, the probability that even one of the refuges would survive became far less than point five. Worst of all, there was the necessity for capital investment. To build the refuges underground and fill them with the immense quantity needed of complex electronic equipment, generators, fuel reserves and so on was, as a practical matter, impossible. There was no way for us to get the money.
So we terminated that think tank and put all the resources we could manage into extraterrestrial colonization. At the beginning, that had looked like the least hopeful solution of all.
But — almost! — we had managed to make it work. When Roger Torraway landed, that completed the first and hardest step. By the time the ships that were following him reached their positions, in orbit or on the surface of the planet, we would be able, for the first time, to plan for a future, with the survival of the race assured.
So we watched with great satisfaction as Roger stepped out on the surface of the planet.
Roger’s backpack computer was a triumph of design. It had three separate systems, cross-linked and sharing facilities, but with enough redundancy so that all systems had point nine reliability at least until the 3070 backup computer reached orbit. One system mediated his perceptions. Another controlled the subsystems of nerve and muscle that let him walk and move. The third telemetered all of his inputs. Whatever he saw, we saw on Earth.