John Radkowski stood watching, silent with his thoughts. It’s not a disaster, he told himself. One dead, a stupid accident, we can deal with it. Thank the Lord the rest of us are okay. If this is as bad as it gets, we’re lucky.
He could never admit it to his crew, but John Radkowski was scared.
The expedition is fine, John Radkowski told himself. The expedition is fine.
15
Mapping the Disaster
The expedition was not fine. Ryan consulted by video-link with support engineers on Earth until the Earth had set below the horizon. It was annoying that the communications relay satellite that Agamemnon had left in orbit had failed; after working perfectly for seven years, it was just bad luck for it to fail when it did. Without a communications relay, they could consult Earth only during the Martian day, when the Earth was visible in the sky.
Without mission support, Ryan worked alone, late into the night.
He answered questions from the other crew members in monosyllables or not at all.
Fiber-optic probes lowered through the piping and into each of the tanks confirmed what Ryan knew: The Dulcinea’s fuel tanks were dry.
While Ryan Martin and John Radkowski worked, Tana and Estrela cooperated in leveling a patch of ground with shovels and then anchoring and inflating the habitat bubble. There was no way they could help with Dulcinea, and, regardless of the decisions made regarding their future, the habitat was needed. Once it had been inflated and the interior fittings checked out, they had a comfortable living area with, for the first time in seven months, actual privacy for sleeping and other bodily functions.
There were no firm conclusions from Earth by the time Earth had set the next day and they went to sleep. Between Ryan’s testing and that of the engineers on Earth, though, they had the beginnings of an understanding of what had happened.
Mars is a sulfur-rich planet. Without an ozone layer, far-ultraviolet radiation from the sun reaches all the way to the surface. A consequence of this is the presence of a small amount—less than a few parts per million—of highly reactive, UV-energized sulfur radicals near the surface. Over the seven years that the Dulcinea had been making rocket fuel on Mars, contamination by sulfur radicals had crept into all of the parts of the system, including the microelectromechanical sensors that measured the fuel capacity and the pipes and seals of the propellant manufacturing. The pressure sensors on the tanks had been fooled by the contamination, and the microprocessor control system, following the readings unquestioningly, had allowed the fuel manufacturing to proceed until all of the tanks held a far higher pressure than they had ever been designed for. The backup mechanical gauges, frozen by ice buildup, had failed to report any problems.
Worse, though, the energetic sulfur radicals had slowly hardened and embrittled the polymer of the seals that had isolated the liquid oxygen tanks from the propellant production system. When Chamlong had tapped on the manifold, the fragile seal ruptured, and the consequent spray of liquid oxygen had caused the seal on the next tank to burst, and in short order all the tanks had ruptured and drained their contents to the sand.
The first American expedition to Mars, the Agamemnon expedition, had had an entire second ship ready for a backup in 2022. Contingency planning, they called it. That backup ship had been the Dulcinea.
After Dulcinea, there was no spare return ship.
The crew of Don Quijote were stranded on Mars.
16
The Captain and the Kid
While Ryan Martin worked on the problems with Dulcinea, Commander Radkowski instructed the rest of the crew to continue with their science activities on the Mars surface. Whatever had gone wrong, he knew, it would only be made worse if the crew was left idle to brood it over. That included his own activities—which at the particular point in the schedule were listed as aiding the other crew members as he saw fit. None of the crew members, at the moment, seemed to need assistance.
He was getting used to the surface. At first Mars had seemed odd, the horizon too close, the rocks unexpectedly rough, the color of the light too yellow. A speckling of dark rocks gave the ridge face in the distance an oddly dappled appearance, always changing slightly as the shadows moved with the sun. Now it was beginning to seem familiar.
Trevor came up and walked next to him. Trevor’s suit was a bright lime green, so strongly contrasting against the yellowish-orange Martian terrain that it nearly made his eyes hurt. Trevor had his own list of science activities—a whole schedule of things to observe and look for, from a list contributed by the brightest students at fifty elementary school classes across America. But at the moment, he seemed more interested in Radkowski.
“Did you ever have a brother?” Trevor asked.
Commander Radkowski was startled. How could Trevor have known he had just been thinking about his brother? Just making conversation, he expected. Trevor didn’t seem to be very good at making friends and small talk, but give him some credit, at least he was trying. “Sure,” he said cautiously. “Sure, I had a brother.”
“Just one?”
“Just one. Karl. Two years older than me.” He paused. “How about you?”
“The same, an older brother.” Trevor stumbled, and then said, “No, no, younger. Why did I say older?” He laughed. “Younger. A kid brother. Brandon.”
Radkowski had known that already; he’d read the kid’s dossier. But if the kid was going to ask about his family, he would carry his half of the conversation. It was funny, on all of the seven-month voyage out, they had been bored as hell, but he didn’t recall talking about his family at all. None of the crew had asked him.
They walked on in silence, and then Trevor asked, “What was he like?”
“Karl? He was okay, I guess.” Radkowski thought about it. “Kinda bossy, I suppose, now that I think about it.” He paused, and then said, “I guess older brothers are like that.”
“You said it,” Trevor said.
“How about your brother?”
Trevor shrugged. “He’s okay.” He paused for a moment, gathering his breath. The kid was trembling, Radkowski noticed. What was going on? And then he asked, “Did you ever do anything really awful to your brother?”
Radkowski’s heart stopped for a moment, and then life went on. “Like what?”
“You ever betray him? Did you ever make him lie for you? That sort of thing—you know.”
He didn’t want to think about it. Why was the kid asking these questions? He looked around. Estrela was out of sight behind the ship. Tana Jackson was working on a rock, levering it up in order to sample the soil beneath for signs of organic material that might have been protected by the rock from the harsh ultraviolet. “One moment,” he said. “I think Dr. Jackson could use my assistance. Would you excuse me, please?”
Trevor looked disappointed, but he nodded.
Radkowski brooded over it. The kid knows, he thought. Somehow he sensed something. God, he’s a lot like I was. Was I really like that? There’s an aura of guilt over me. I wonder if the others can see it?
17
Radkowski
John Radkowski had grown up without ever meeting his father. His mother and an aunt had tried to raise the two boys as best they could, but they had been wild, and paid little attention to adults, or to any authority figures. More than anyone else, it had been his brother Karl that had raised him.