“Excelsior, I’ve exited the craft, and I’m heading for the solar array, as requested.”
“That’s a roger,” José said from indoors. “Houston, you receiving?”
“I’ve seen some pretty night skies in my day,” Jim remarked, “but this beats them all. Jed, you’re clear to proceed.”
There was a moment when I didn’t know if I wanted to proceed, when I thought that maybe the human conception of space travel was just so much froth, like elves and dragons but more expensive. An intoxicant meant to distract the miserable inhabitants of Earth from their circumstances. Why go? Why go out there? There was no such place as space, because a location couldn’t be an absence of locations, and the vacuum wasn’t a true vacuum, lest it should subsume into it even the notion of vacuum. These latitudes just couldn’t be as mysterious and ancient as they plainly were. The night sky was a fresco that one of the old masters painted on the ceiling of the world, back in the quattrocento! I didn’t want to go wading in the real thing. But before I gave in to my adolescent anxiety, I was out, and here is how slow things go in space, kids — in the time it takes you to read this sentence, I had drifted only a foot or so. It’s not like there were tailwinds! In a minute or so I could see my foot approaching the surface of the craft. You could do several flips, out there, and it would be nothing, but then you would be well out of control and could go spinning off, on the tethers. And who knew, really, how tethers behaved at temperatures approaching absolute zero.
And yet, since by Terran nightfall you were meant to have footage of us, out here, attempting to work a screwdriver and other power tools with these clumsy gloves, we had to keep moving. NASA had us on their leashes too. It was a while before Rose and Richards, the Martian voyagers, stood at the far end of the Excelsior, listening to some Earth-bound engineer remind us how to effect the repairs.
It wasn’t until we were hunched down over the solar panels and fiddling with the electricals that Jim mumbled, “I’m not trusting him either; I’m not trusting José.” If Jim Rose was worried, well, there was real cause for worry.
“Last night, before you woke,” Jim said, “he got some kind of transmission from Mission Control. I just happened to see it appear in his in-box. What would have happened if I hadn’t? The substance of the transmission was this: we’re changing the landing coordinates. Does that seem sensible to you? We train for three years to land on the southern pole, we announce to the world that we’re going to land there, because we’re going to do experiments with water. Water, water pressure, water freezing and evaporating. Tests and more tests. That’s the whole purpose of landing on the poles, right? We have to have enough water to last twelve months, we hope, and most of the planet is completely barren. And suddenly there’s this plan, that José hasn’t even mentioned yet, to try to see if we can’t fly the ultralights down into the canyon.”
“The canyon?”
The canyon he referred to, in case you haven’t heard, is the biggest known canyon in the universe, the Valles Marineris, which is 3,117 miles long (as far across as North America), 75 miles from wall to wall, and, get this, over six miles deep. It makes the Grand Canyon look like a surface scratch.
“That’s what the transmission said.”
“Did you get confirmation? From Mission Control?”
We had the mission directives on pocket-sized electronic clipboards. We got them as digital downloads. Normally this stuff came in the evening, so we could talk it over while eating. The few moments when we were all awake. Also: we needed something to do at mealtime because the food was so bad.
“Why would we have such a substantial change of plans at this point? And why weren’t we warned about the possibility?”
“And how the heck are we supposed to get out of the canyon once we’re in it?” I asked. “Do we have enough fuel for these trips in the ultralights?”
“No details, obviously.” He kept it all to a whisper, suit to suit.
“He’s pretty good at letting us know when he doesn’t have to do his regular rotation on the laundry duty or waste reprocessing. That’s about all he’s good at. There’s some kind of parallel mission track going on here.”
Palace intrigue was much more interesting, but there was no choice, having suited up for a solid hour, but to stand out there in space and repair the solar panels, which are essential to the circulation of oxygen, redundant computer systems, the operation of our thrusters, all of which made it possible for us to fly this soda can across the solar system. And even though we have layers upon layers of solar panels, the kind that you probably have running your hot water, there is the ever present possibility of asteroids or microscopic meteors. We couldn’t let the panels deteriorate. In the next half hour or so, Jim and I were doing just what we had trained to do. And, frankly, this was the moment when I started to see what a good guy Jim Rose was. We had the years of training, the months of vomiting in the zero-gravity training, all of that stuff, we had dinner together, our families, at one of those chains near Jim’s place in Florida, but I never quite thought I knew the guy. There was always his reserve. His wife, Jessica, had that look that wives get when they’re trying their hardest to appear like the women behind the men. Chafing at the burdens the whole way. And the four kids were mute, perfectly dressed, almost starchy, obscenely well behaved. Jim strode among and around them as if he had no idea they were there. At the salad bar, I saw him get the thousand-light-year stare, and he attacked this solar panel with the same kind of intensity. He didn’t just fix a solar panel, he applied himself to a solar panel as though it were a codex from a tomb in ancient Egypt that was going to tell of the secret prehistory of man. All I did was hand him the appropriate tools. That said, there’s nothing like standing out in space with someone.
When he had finished, Jim said, reopening the com channel, “Excelsior, solar array is back online. Houston, repairs complete; we’re heading for the hatch door. Please confirm.”
After a long delay, one of the innumerable faceless voices from Houston came over the open frequency. “Roger, Captain Rose. We hear you. Fine work.”
He handed me the power drill and I holstered it.
“How sturdy you think these tethers are, Jed?”
I used to know the load rating, because it was in the manual somewhere, and I was good at memorizing this stuff. Supposedly, we could tow an entire extra ship on one of them if we had to, because in space nothing really weighs anything. But that didn’t mean I didn’t panic a little when Jim said, “Let’s live a little, Jed.” After which he jumped.