He thought for a moment, then scratched it off his list. The others hadn’t been forced to face it yet, but Ryan knew that every one of them would die if they tried to stay here. Saving three of them was a step forward, not a drawback. He looked up to make sure that nobody was watching him, then went over it and obliterated the note he had written with heavy black lines until it was completely illegible. The Jesus do Sul was their only chance, and if they could only save three, it would be best to just not mention that fact until they actually made it to the pole. If they got to the pole.
Two, he wrote. Valles Marineris.
The enormous Valles Marineris stretched like a huge barrier across their path. They would have to cross it to get to the northern hemisphere. But the key to the expedition would be the rockhopper, the six-wheeled, pressurized Mars rover, and how would they carry the rockhopper up and down a vertical cliff two miles high?
They’d have to deal with it somehow.
Three, he wrote. Can we carry enough consumables?
Oxygen would come from the zirconia cells in their suits and the larger zirconia electrolyzer built into the rockhopper; as long as they had power, they would be able to break down carbon dioxide for oxygen to breathe. But what if they malfed? Could they carry enough spare parts? Could they carry enough food?
Four, he wrote, Breakdowns. The rock hopper would eventually break down; it had an expected time before failure of only one thousand kilometers. When it failed—
Five, he wrote. Not enough range.
That was the killer problem: simple distance. Ryan Martin plotted it, and came up short. They didn’t have enough range. He replotted, and even with more optimistic assumptions, there was simply no way that they could make it to the north pole. They just didn’t have the range. It was just impossible.
He leaned back and rubbed his eyes to think. There was only one other place on Mars that humans had been. Acidalia.
The landing site of the ill-fated second expedition to Mars.
Painstakingly, Ryan began to plot the path to Acidalia.
25
Indecisive Decisions
It was a wild idea, and John Radkowski distrusted wild ideas. A desperate journey to the pole, on an unlikely chance that they could salvage the Brazilian ship? Ryan Martin was a danger. He was too young, and had too strong a tendency to go off on a wild idea without paying attention to caution.
The cautious thing to do would be to stay right where they were.
But they would die.
They would probably die if they headed to the pole.
It was an impossible dilemma. John Radkowski didn’t like dilemmas. For every problem, he had always believed, there was one right solution. But this problem didn’t seem to have a right solution.
Radkowski still wondered if it had been some error of Ryan’s that had killed Chamlong. He would have to hold Ryan Martin back. It might be tough; Ryan had a great feel for machines but no common sense.
With his right hand, John Radkowski rubbed the place where three fingers were missing on his left hand. He often did this when he was uncertain or worried; he didn’t even notice that he was doing it. Caressing the rough scar tissue gave him a sort of tactile comfort: Whatever came, he could survive it.
The crew was looking to him for guidance, but he didn’t have any better solutions to offer. He knew that of all the things that a commander could do, the decision that was always wrong was to be indecisive. Better to be wrong, and boldly wrong, than to dither over the right solution.
But that didn’t mean to act without learning the facts. “Check the maps and orbital photographs, and give me a briefing in two days,” he’d told Martin.
But now the two days were over, and he was no closer to an idea of what to do than when he’d started.
They would die if they stayed.
There really wasn’t a choice. Desperate and stupid as the idea was, it was their only chance. They had to go.
He let nothing of his feelings show when he called the crew together.
“Engineer Martin has explained his plan to you,” he said. “I’m not going to lie to you and say that it’s going to be easy; it’s not. It’s a tough haul, and it’s not clear whether it’s even possible at all.
“You have discussed it among yourselves. Ryan has come up with some refinements of his plan, but before we go any further, I want to hear from you. All I want from you is one single word. Do we accept his plan or not? Yes or no.
“Martin, we know your opinion. Doctor Jackson?”
Tana nodded.
“Say it,” Radkowski said.
“It’s our only chance.”
“I take that for yes. Ms. Conselheiro?”
Her eyes were shadowed. “We die here. I don’t like that choice.”
“Your vote?”
“I vote to live.”
“Mr. Whitman?”
“I haven’t heard any better of a choice, have you? Hell, let’s stomp.”
Radkowski nodded. The decision was made, and they had bought into it. He didn’t even have to vote himself.
Under the circumstances, that was the best he could hope for.
“Then it’s decided,” he said. “Get yourselves ready. We leave tomorrow at first light.”
26
Africa
There is a visceral feeling to piloting a jet fighter that can never quite be described. It is a feeling of power and of control, of riding a bestial strength tamed just barely enough to respond with fury to your least suggestion of stick pressure. John Radkowski would never admit it, but if there had ever been a choice between the two, he would rather fly than have sex. In its way, piloting the F-22 fighter was better than sex.
Two years at the Eastthorpe Military Academy, paid for by his brother’s drug dealing, and four years of ROTC at New York University had changed Johnny Radkowski. He was no longer the rebellious punk from the projects. He had learned caution and discipline. His classmates admired him, but none of them were particularly close to him.
He’s got the killer instinct, his Air Force flight instructor wrote in his recommendation for him to move on to train on fighters. He was not, in actual point of fact, a spectacularly good pilot; he was more than competent, but he would never reach that mystic fusion of the machine with his own nervous system, the unity with the machine that marks the very best pilots. But what he lacked in finesse, he made up for in sheer determination. The kid has guts, his flight instructor wrote.
So John Radkowski, bad boy from the bad side of Queens, became a fighter pilot. A year later he was flying fighter escort for the relief missions in Africa.
It was a stupid, dirty little war, or rather, a tangled matrix of wars, all linked together in hard-to-understand ways. Nobody in the fighter corps really knew what they were fighting for, or why.
“We’re talking a mix of colonialism, neocolonialism, tribalism, religious conflicts, foreign troops, modern weapons, economic decline, political aspirations, international debts, racism, nationalism and pan-nationalism,” the briefing officer had told them, before they had first shipped out for Africa.
He was reading from a list that had been prepared in a book. “Don’t even try to understand it. We’ve got a job to do, and we’re going to do the best we can.”
That evening he had been flying escort for a bomber. Columns of greasy black smoke rose from burning rebel camps like signal fires to reticulate the African sky. However many camps, or purported camps, they had bombed, there were always more.