“I am ready, Captain,” answered Nobuo Okita, ship’s nuclear physicist and all-around engineer.
Looking out the neo-glass window from his pilot’s seat, Boutillier wondered aloud.
“Why do we call this huge cavity the Stickney Crater? An unusual name, I’d say.”
“It was named after the wife of the discoverer of the Martian moons, Asaph Hall of the U.S. Naval Observatory. His wife’s maiden name was Chloe Angeline Stickney.” Okita, who was an astronomy buff, offered the answer, spelling out her first name for the benefit of his audience. “I understand she was a brilliant mathematician and an interesting woman. After her marriage to Hall, she would sometimes sign her letters using her initials, C.A.S.H.”
After his discovery in 1877, Hall named the two moons Phobos and Deimos, Fear and Panic, the two ancient companions of the war god, Mars. The Crater was not discovered for about a century after the discovery of the little moon. It was “imaged” by a flyby probe in the latter part of the twentieth century. Asaph had always publicly acknowledged that he would not have succeeded in the search but for Chloe Angeline’s constant encouragement to keep looking. The International Astronomical Union approved naming the Crater Stickney to honor her important contribution.
While donning his space suit, Okita mumbled an aside to his captain. “The Consortium ship Ares was only several days behind us the last time we checked. If they go for a direct landing on Mars, they can reach the planetary surface before us.”
“Yah, don’t we all know it! We have no time to waste. Let’s get going.”
Presently, Eriksen and Okita stood on the surface of Phobos, where no human beings had walked before. The robot ships that had landed a few months before were visible at a distance of a few hundred meters. The sunlight striking the bottom of the Stickney Crater was reflected by something shiny there, possibly a dark patch of ice.
“When you start walking, slide along the surface. Avoid up and down motions. It might not be easy on this godforsaken surface, but move horizontally as much as possible. If you try jumping over an obstacle, you might end up getting into orbit around this moonlet", cautioned the captain.
“Roger that.” Actually, walking horizontally with a minimum of ups and downs came naturally to Okita. It was one of the first lessons he had to internalize in his judo class.
Many a time at the beginning, failure to do so caused him to be thrown down on his back.
As they made their way toward the two unmanned ships, Eriksen started planting automatically-piercing metallic sticks, about one and a half meters long, into the moon’s crust at an interval of several meters. Like the harpoons for anchoring the ship, once the sharp point reached a certain depth, the stick would release an anchorlike hook that would open underground. But he had to be careful when he gave the stick an initial shove downward so as not to propel himself into a trajectory. Okita, following his captain, ran a wire through a loop on each pole. Those who would follow the path to the supply ships in the future could run a hand around the wire and avoid the embarrassment of pushing themselves into a flight path.
An inspection of the inside of the ships showed that the shipments had arrived intact and that the habitat, after minor rearrangements, would provide a living space for several occupants.
“Good, now we can stay on Phobos without worrying much about consumables. When we send the shuttle down to the surface, we may even be able to bring back some ice from near the polar regions,” said Eriksen, sounding optimistic.
The shiny dark patch was another few hundred meters away. Upon arriving there, Okita got down on his stomach without being told to do so and cautiously crawled onto the shiny material. Somewhat to his disappointment, the shiny surface was not ice; it would have been too good to be true, anyway. The shiny surface was a glassy material and was smooth and slippery. He was glad that he had taken the precaution; he might otherwise have skidded off, if not into a low orbit around the moon, at least to the other side of this shiny patch some fifty meters away. At the far side, he could see an overhang of rocks—
just beyond where the glassy material ended. Whatever was below the overhang was totally shaded from the sunlight.
“This stuff is glassy—maybe it’s molten rock. Too bad it’s not an ice patch. I want to take a look at what’s underneath that protruding rock over there.” Okita informed Eriksen.
“Okay, go ahead. Watch your step. I’ll hang around here and check things out on this side.”
Okita decided to walk around the slippery patch rather than crawl across it. When he reached the spot, he saw that the overhang concealed a cavelike structure underneath.
The ceiling was high enough so that he could walk into it. It was total darkness inside as there were no air molecules to scatter the sunlight from outside. One moment he was stepping into the cave and the next moment he skidded and ended up on his back.
Thankfully, in the low gravity of Phobos, the fall was slow and gentle. He felt foolish for not having turned on his portable flashlight before stepping in. When he corrected his mistake and turned on the light, he was instantly alert. For instead of finding more of the glassy staff, what he saw definitely looked like an ice deposit.
Eriksen joined him promptly, as fast as the low gravity permitted him to move. After ascertaining to his satisfaction that the stuff was indeed ice, Eriksen brought out instruments and started measuring the dimensions of the ice lake inside the cave. The surface area was easy enough to estimate. It was the thickness of the ice that presented a problem in determining the volume of the ice deposit, as the thickness could vary from place to place. He solved the problem by measuring the depth at several randomly selected sites. The average depth seemed to be no less than ten meters. As the surface area was about twenty by thirty meters, this represented several thousand tons of water, which could sustain the crew for a long time. Of course, once they established a base on the Martian surface, there would be a virtually inexhaustible supply of water in the form of polar ice, even without counting on the possible underground deposits of ice in some places.
While Eriksen was measuring the size of the ice deposit, Okita looked around his surroundings for anything unusual. During the long voyage out, Jacques Boutillier had shared with Okita his secret suspicion that Mars might not have been an entirely dead planet. The mysterious catastrophe that befell Expedition I several years earlier had probably been a natural disaster, but it could also have been caused by something else—or, should he say, something artificial?
Mars Expedition I, the first manned mission by an international consortium—consisting of the U.S. (NASA), European Union (ESA), the Russian Federation and Japan—to Mars seven years earlier, ended up in a mysterious disaster. The exact cause of the failure was still under investigation and remained unclear.
The crew of Mars Expedition I, the first expedition to the fourth planet, had no leeway in picking the time to land. They had to land when they arrived and where they were supposed to, no matter what the planetary conditions were. Mars Expedition I lost contact with Earth when it was behind the planet—just as it was preparing to land.
Those back on Earth had never learned what had happened during the communications blackout as no message had since been received.
The orbital probes that were sent later to the Red Planet could find no trace of the spacecraft anywhere on the ground. Since the doomed ship’s orbit was inclined to the equator, the ship might have plunged into the dry ice in the polar cap and disappeared underneath. The total surface area of the Red Planet was comparable to that of the entire land area of Earth. Finding the ship, if it had indeed crashed somewhere, would be more difficult than finding from space a Boeing 707 that had crashed somewhere on the Eurasian continent, even if the terrain were completely bare of any plants, animals, or artifacts.