“Okay.”
“Go on.”
“Reduce speed to a few hundred miles per hour, relative to the Earth… enter the atmosphere tail first, engines firing… and burn up in the atmosphere, most likely.”
“A negative attitude’s not going to help you. If Kelly or Alicia reports the strut is damaged, land in the ocean. She should float.”
“Blow the emergency hatch, deploy the rubber raft, and get the hell out of here,” I said. The emergency hatch was the top of Module One. It was held on with explosive bolts. A standard airline inflatable raft would deploy automatically when the bolts were blown, and it would be up to us to abandon the sinking ship.
“You might consider a water landing even if the strut’s okay, if you don’t have confidence about easing her down on land.”
“I don’t have that confidence.”
“Do what you have to do. Anyway, this is all just standard procedure, this briefing, you know that. I’ll be back here in twenty minutes.” He grinned.
Alicia poked her head through the hatch.
“Travis, we’ve been talking, we figure me or Kelly ought to go out and check the strut. You’re the captain, you shouldn’t leave the ship.”
Travis sighed.
“There’s wisdom in what you say. But the suits and the lock haven’t been tested, and as captain I won’t send any of you out in them at this [328] point. I have more suit time than the rest of you put together. End of discussion.”
Alicia looked like she was going to say something else, but remembered what she had agreed to. Dak joined her, and he had a suspicious look.
“How do you flip a coin in free fall. Captain?”
Travis took a quarter from his pocket and set it spinning in the air. We all watched it for a moment, then Travis clapped his hands together, trapping the coin. He moved his hands apart and the coin floated there, the “heads” side facing him.
I WATCHED ON a TV screen as Dak and Alicia helped Travis into his suit. I was glad we’d practiced it. When we began it had taken us the better part of an hour to get into one. After a lot of drilling, we could do it in ten minutes, with another five for systems check. Travis did even better, naturally. Kelly joined me on the bridge and we watched through more cameras as Travis entered the lock and cycled it. I saw the pressure gauge drop to zero, then the door opened.
We switched back and forth between a rear-looking stationary camera and the one mounted on Travis’s helmet. Travis handled himself well, securing his safety line, then swinging out and over the strut, where he commenced his inspection. Pretty soon he located the impact area.
“That dish is headed for the stars, at about three million miles an hour,” Travis said over the radio. “How long before it gets to Alpha Centauri?”
“Is this question going to be on the final exam?” I asked.
“Extra credit.”
“A thousand years,” Kelly said, and when I looked at her, she shrugged. “Just a guess,” she whispered to me.
“Did you give her the answer, Manny?” Travis said with a laugh.
I hadn’t even figured it out myself. But light travels 186,000 miles per second, which would be… eleven million and some miles per minute, 670 million miles per hour, a light-year was 5.8 trillion miles, [329] Alpha Centauri was about four and a half light-years away… the answer I kept getting was 1,004 years. How about that?
“Trick question,” Travis said. “The answer is, never. We’re not aimed at Alpha Centauri.”
Travis moved along the strut quickly. I had another episode of the dry heaves before he got to the most critical area, the welds connecting the strut to the thrust cradle, and from there to the rest of the ship.
It was half an hour before Travis pronounced it good. Another twenty minutes to get inside and up to the cockpit. Five more minutes before he was satisfied we were ready to apply thrust again. And just a bit over an hour after the emergency began, that blessed, blessed thrust settled down on my abused stomach again. I felt like I’d gone ten rounds with the heavyweight champion of the world.
Travis got the ship stabilized on her new thrust vector, and then joined us in the common room.
“Aren’t we going to miss Mars now?” Alicia asked. “I mean, we traveled more than three million miles while you were outside, if I understand right.”
“You understand right. If I stuck to our original flight times we’d go way past Mars and have to come back. But I can compensate by applying just a bit more thrust. I haven’t figured exactly what that thrust should be-that’s one of the nice things about Red Thunder, she’s very forgiving, you basically just have to aim at where you’re going and blast, not calculate complicated orbits. If you go too far, you can just thrust your way back. But it’ll be about one point oh three or maybe one point oh five gees from here to Mars, to bring us stationary a thousand or so miles above the atmosphere. You won’t even feel it. In fact, it’s one point oh five now. Do you feel heavy?”
I did, a little, now that he mentioned it, but it was only a few pounds, and that heavy feel could be just my abused stomach bitching at me.
It wasn’t until then I had time to think about the consequences of what had befallen us with the antenna. We couldn’t transmit or receive signals from the Earth anymore. We were out of contact, and would stay that way.
Suddenly outer space felt pretty lonely.
28
I TAKE BACK everything I said about the lack of a view aboard Red Thunder. When we arrived at Mars, Travis inserted us neatly into a close orbit, and Mars in all his glory filled half the sky.
The Red Planet was not as red as I’d expected. There were infinite shades of rust, then large areas of lighter-colored sand, vast deserts and deep valleys, volcanic mountains that cast a long shadow if they were on the day/night terminator.
If only I felt well enough to truly appreciate it.
We all floated in the cockpit, getting the best view we would have on the entire trip, and my mouth kept filling up with spit. Then I’d try to swallow, and my stomach didn’t like that idea at all. I’d gag, and try to throw up again. I think Kelly, Alicia, and Travis were starting to find Dak and me pretty disgusting. The bastards.
We could have simply eased into the atmosphere without any orbiting at all, Red Thunder was capable of that, but the site Travis wanted to land on was on the other side of Mars when we got there, so we “parked” for an hour.
“Noctus Labyrinthus?” Dak asked. “I thought-”
“Elysium Planitia, what I told everybody during our last news [331] conference,” Travis said, with a grin. “A nice, flat plain where there’s very little of real interest. An excellent choice to make a nice, safe, sane touchdown. But we ain’t going there.”
“Why not?” Kelly asked.
“Because it’s boring, and because that’s what I wanted the Chinese to hear. My children, the two greatest tourist attractions on Mars are Olympus Mons and Valles Marineris. The first is the largest volcano in the entire solar system. Almost seventy thousand feet higher than the surrounding ground. Compare that to Mauna Loa, Earth’s biggest volcano, which is twenty-nine thousand feet above the ocean floor.
“Valles Marineris is the Grand Canyon of Mars, and it would stretch almost from New York to Los Angeles on Earth, four miles deep and four hundred miles across in some places. Either one would be a wonderful place to land.”
“Then why the valley?” Alicia asked.
“Two big reasons. We’re pretty sure we understand the forces behind Olympus Mons. There’s no shifting of the crust on Mars, no continent-sized plates moving along fault lines. Volcanoes form because there’s an upwelling of magma in the mantle. On Earth, the plates move over that hot spot, which is how Hawaii formed, a series of newer volcanoes popping every few million years as the plate slid over the hot spot.