Large TV consoles had been wheeled into the four corners of the spacious, high-ceilinged parlor. Only a dozen people had been invited to share this moment of triumph with their famous countryman, but more than forty others had squeezed into the room. Many of the men were in evening clothes; the women wore their finest frocks and jewels. Later Brumado and the select dozen would be whisked by helicopter to the airport and then on to Brasilia, to be received by the president of the republic.
Outside, the people of Rio thundered, "Bru-ma-do! Bru-ma-do!"
Alberto Brumado was a small, slight man. Well into his sixties, his dark round face was framed by a neatly clipped grizzled beard and short gray hair that seemed always tousled, as if he had just been engaged in some strenuous action. It was a kindly face, smiling, looking slightly nonplussed at the sudden insistence of the crowd outside. He was more accustomed to the quiet calm of the university classroom or the hushed intensity of the offices of the great and powerful.
If the governments of the world’s industrial nations were the brain directing the Mars Project, and the multinational corporations were the muscle, then Alberto Brumado was the heart of the mission to explore Mars. No, more stilclass="underline" Brumado was its soul.
For more than thirty years he had traveled the world, pleading with those in power to send human explorers to Mars. For most of those years he had faced cold indifference or outright hostility. He had been told that an expedition to Mars would cost too much, that there was nothing humans could do on Mars that could not be done by automated robotic machinery, that Mars could wait for another decade or another generation or another century. There were problems to be solved on Earth, they said. People were starving. Disease and ignorance and poverty held more than half the world in their mercilessly tenacious grip.
Alberto Brumado persevered. A child of poverty and hunger himself, born in a cardboard shack on a muddy, rainswept hill overlooking the posh residencias of Rio de Janeiro, Alberto Brumado had fought his way through public school, through college, and into a brilliant career as an astronomer and teacher. He was no stranger to struggle.
Mars became his obsession. "My one vice," he would modestly say of himself.
When the first unmanned landers set down on Mars and found no evidence of life, Brumado insisted that their automated equipment was too simple to make meaningful tests. When a series of probes from the Soviet Union and, later, the United States returned rocks and soil samples that bore nothing more complex than simple organic chemicals, Brumado pointed out that they had barely scratched a billionth of that planet’s surface.
He hounded the world’s scientific congresses and industrial conferences, pointing out the photos of Mars that showed huge volcanoes, enormous rift valleys, and canyons that looked as if they had been gouged out by massive flood waters.
"There must be water on Mars," he said again and again. "Where there is water there must be life."
It took him nearly twenty years to realize that he was speaking to the wrong people. It mattered not what scientists thought or what they wanted. It was the politicians who counted, the men and women who controlled national treasuries. And the people, the voters who filled those treasuries with their tax money.
He began to haunt their halls of power — and the corporate boardrooms where the politicians bowed to the money that elected them. He made himself into a media celebrity, using talented, bright-eyed students to help create television shows that filled the world’s people with the wonder and awe of the majestic universe waiting to be explored by men and women of faith and vision.
And he listened. Instead of telling the world’s leaders and decision makers what they should do, he listened to what they wanted, what they hoped for, what they feared. He listened and planned and gradually, shrewdly, he shaped a scheme that would please them all.
He found that each pressure group, each organization of government or industry or ordinary citizens, had its own aims and ambitions and anxieties.
The scientists wanted to go to Mars for curiosity’s sake. To them, exploration of the universe was a goal in itself.
The visionaries wanted to go to Mars because it is there. They viewed the human race’s expansion into space with religious fervor.
The military said there was no point in going to Mars; the planet was so far away that it served no conceivable military function.
The industrialists realized that sending humans to Mars would serve as a stimulus to develop new technology — on risk-free money provided by government.
The representatives of the poor complained that the billions spent on going to Mars should be spent instead on food production and housing and education.
Brumado listened to them all and then softly, quietly, he began speaking to them in terms they could understand and appreciate. He played their dreams and dreads back to them in an exquisitely manipulative feedback that focused their attention on his goal. He orchestrated their desires until they themselves began to believe that Mars was the logical objective of their own plans and ambitions.
In time, the world’s power brokers began to predict that Mars would be the new century’s first test of a nation’s vigor, determination, and strength. Media pundits began to warn gravely that it might be more costly to a nation’s competitive position in the global marketplace not to go to Mars than to go there.
Statesmen began to realize that Mars could serve as the symbol of a new era of global cooperation in peaceful endeavors that could capture the hearts and minds of all the world.
The politicians in Moscow and Washington, Tokyo and Paris, Rio and Beijing, listened carefully to their advisors and then made up their minds. Their advisors had fallen under Brumado’s spell.
"We go to Mars," said the American President to the Congress, "not for pride or prestige or power. We go to Mars in the spirit of the new pragmatic cooperation among the nations of the world. We go to Mars not as Americans or Russians or Japanese. We go to Mars us human beings, representatives of the planet Earth."
The president of the Soviet Federation told his people, "Mars is not only the symbol of our unquenchable will to expand and explore the universe, it is the symbol of the cooperation that is possible between East and West. Mars is the emblem of the inexorable progress of the human mind."
Mars would be the crowning achievement of a new era of international cooperation. After a century of war and terrorism and mass murder, a cosmic irony turned the blood-red planet named after the god of war into the new century’s blessed symbol of peaceful cooperation.
For the people of the rich nations, Mars was a source of awe, a goal grander than anything on Earth, the challenge of a new frontier that could inspire the young and stimulate their passions in a healthy, productive way.
For the people of the poor nations — well, Alberto Brumado told them that he himself was a child of poverty, and if the thought of Mars filled him with exhilaration why shouldn’t they be able to raise their eyes beyond the squalor of their day-to-day existence and dream great dreams?
There was a price to be paid, of course. Brumado’s successful wooing of the politicians meant that his cherished goal of Mars was the child of their marriage. Thus the first expedition to Mars was undertaken not as the scientists wanted it, not even as the engineers and planners of the various national space agencies wanted it. The first humans to go to Mars wont as the politicians wanted them to go: as quickly and cheaply as possible.
The unspoken rationale of the first expedition was: politics first, science second — a distant second. This was to be a "flags and footprints" mission, no matter how much the scientists wanted to explore.
Efficiency was an even more distant third, as it usually is when political considerations are uppermost. The politicians found it easier to rationalize the necessary expenditures if the project were completed quickly, before an opposition party got the chance to gain power and take credit for its ultimate success. Haste did not automatically make waste, but it forced the administrators to plan a mission that was far from efficient.