Read Making Mars Volume 1 Page 5

“Are we adequately compensated for serving on this desolate wasteland?” she asked him.

  “No ma’am!” the Sergeant responded, not sure where she was going with this.

  She paused, peering intently at him. After at least a minute, (which felt like 10 as she stared into his eyes in an extremely awkward moment) she said, “We can be honest with each other, yes?”

  “Yes ma’am!” he said, feeling uncomfortable.

  “How many robots are here on Mars?” she asked.

  “About 50 or so, but half of those have broken and are junk. Too expensive to repair, at least until the Elevator is fully operational.”

  “Right,” she said. “Repairing robots is expensive, and they tend to break in these austere environments. You may have heard that back on Earth I ran into some issues concerning Robot repair parts.”

  The Sergeant had, but kept his face a blank hoping to avoid revealing his knowledge with a smirk.

  The Director continued. “Robots, like all mechanical things, break occasionally. Not every part is replicable through 3D printing on Luna, the asteroids, or Mars. This means that some local storage of parts is necessary. Though there are not many robots on Mars, there are sufficient numbers that maintaining a stockpile of spare parts is prudent.”

  She paused and looked intently at him before continuing. “My great insight was to declare Robot parts as ‘essential resources’. Although the Company objected, the government, following my advice, did it anyway, using precedents set on Luna when NASA was still lead agency in the latter part of the last century.”

  This was all a bit beyond the Sergeant’s grasp, but he nodded as if he were following the discussion.

  Not convinced he understood, the Director continued to explain. “The Government can control the distribution of ‘essential resources’. Robot repair parts are of course expensive on Earth, and are obviously even more expensive off Earth - beyond Earth orbit the transport costs increase geometrically with distance. Thus refurbished Robot spare parts, repaired in lunar facilities, are dramatically less expensive, although not as good as new and intended only for emergency use until new parts arrived from Earth.”

  “As you pointed out, there are not many robots on Mars. Since robot parts are ‘essential resources’, I made a decision in the best interest of everyone. Instead of shipping new replacement parts to Mars, I managed, along with a few colleagues, to send refurbished parts instead. This of course enabled us to capture the benefits of the price differential between refurbished and new parts.” She watched the Sergeant’s expression to judge his reaction.

  The continuation of his non-committal look must have satisfied her, because she continued.

  “To my mind, it was wasteful to send such valuable components to Mars, where, as you pointed out, there are so few robots that the parts were unlikely to be required. Since my insight generated the efficiency, it is only fair that I benefited from the cost savings created by the delta between sending new parts from Earth and refurbished parts from the Moon.”

  “That is only fair,” the Sergeant agreed.

  “Great idea, but my execution was somewhat suboptimal. I, through no fault of my own, mind you, failed to enable some other key personnel to benefit from this organizational design. As a result, I am in this ‘lovely’ place today.”

  The Sergeant had heard rumors about this scheme back on Earth. The idea was too good to prosecute her for but it was also too good to allow her to profit from it alone. Her superiors had solved the problem by sending her to Mars, appropriating the position of “Off world Robot supply manager” for themselves. The Sergeant had not been pleased to learn that his new Director was the one who had angered the senior leadership in the Government to such a degree that she was banished to Mars.

  “It is never good to associate with the outcasts,” he said to himself, striving to preserve his neutral expression during the pause.

  (7) Day 7 The Director recalls her motivation

  During the pause, unbeknownst to the Sergeant, the Director had allowed her thoughts to wander to the series of misfortunes that had brought her to Mars. Still not fully accepting her situation, she remained angry with herself for her foolish mistakes. There were few ways to get rid of a government employee and she had somehow boxed herself into one. She blamed her lack of a family. In the early stages of her career the lack of a family had been an asset. She’d focused solely on the job, and done well. The lack had only created a vulnerability after she had achieved a degree of success in the government service to benefit from her position (as is customary).

  Due to the lack of family, no friends she could trust, she had been forced to deposit the kickbacks and other profits of her decision making into accounts more easily linked to her than she had thought possible. When the scheme had been uncovered by the anti-corruption algorithms the few degrees of separation between her normal accounts and the Robot parts related accounts had made it impossible for her to claim the “gifts” sent from those accounts to her personal accounts were unrelated to her position.

  Safe from dismissal, and lacking close colleagues in the service she had been at first sent to undesirable places like New York and Rio as a punishment. However, when the Mars requirement popped she was voluntold to sign up for the list of potential ‘winners’. Her lack of family hurt her again as anyone with even the most tenuous biological connection to another human exploited it to beg off the trip. For her, professional advantage turned into a massive liability. She had even considered marriage out of desperation, but since the thought of sharing anything repulsed her – an apartment, checking account, vehicle – it was too massive a sacrifice to make.

  In hindsight, she recognized the massive stupidity of the decision – she would have gained far more than she lost by sharing. However, a late marriage would not have guaranteed getting out of the trip to Mars – she could, she thought with a shudder, have a husband on Earth buying things with the pay she was receiving while stationed on Mars for some indefinite (generally considered permanent because of the effects of gravity) period.

  She shook her head and refocused on the Sergeant. If she had to be the Martian “representative” of the Robot repair scheme, she was going to maximize her personal advantage, even if that means branching out into new “endeavors”.

  (8) Day 7 1241 The Director’s New Plan

  “I’m not going to make a similar mistake again,” she emphatically blurted out.

  Before going into hibernation on the trip out she’d racked her brains for an idea that would generate sufficient profits to enable her to return from what was in effect a death sentence. The intellectual effort had paid off. Her new idea had come when she was still in the hypnogogic state upon awakening from hibernation.

  The “tools” in the diplo pouch on the desk in front of her enabled the initial steps of her new plan.

  “If I can’t leverage a government position into significant revenue, I don’t deserve to call myself a bureaucrat and should suffer,” she thought. “These Company delivered tools will enable a glorious return from exile, which I must admit is actually not all that bad since the goodies had started arriving in the Diplo pouches, to Earth, where I’ll enjoy a life of retirement and wealth from the cash flow generated by the Mars project.”

  “The blood of these frontier folk will make us both rich,” she said out loud.

  “And get me back home,” she thought silently.

  The Director fished through the pouch, unloading medical vacuum tubes and old-fashioned needles onto a nearby table.

  “I’ve sent you some links to some eBooks for study on the Dark Internet. It will take days to download the information, but you’ll still get it. If anyone asks, you accessed them as part of your professional development research. You’ve gained a new collateral duty – blood lab tech.”

  A little confused, the Sergeant fell back onto his tried and true response. “Yes Ma’am.”

  “I’ll figure it out later,
” he said to himself heading back to his office and the end of the movie. As he walked out he realized she hadn’t given him a box from the pouch.

  “The food is late!” he said to himself. “Another day on Mars, terrible as usual.”

  (9) Day 7 1236 CentripGym

  Dirk stormed down the streets toward Tom’s house. The encounter with the bureaucrats had put Dirk in a foul mood, that increased, instead of decreased, with each step away from the lame City Hall. His dissatisfaction with his life rose up like a wave of sand from one of the all too frequent Martian storms.

  “I’ve only been here a month, I hate wearing the compression/sweat recycling suit every time I go outside, I hate walking to the Crane Farm, and I hate being forced to do a job, a job just as easily done by a robot, as is proven by the fact that my only coworker is a robot! I could be back on Earth with my own apartment, own car, making boatloads of money competing in the Games!” Dirk thought to himself, in what was becoming his customary self-pitying rant/daily negative affirmation.

  He knocked on Tom’s door. Tom was the City engineer, responsible not only for the Power Plant, his main area of focus, but the water system and, it seemed to Dirk, everything else mechanical.

  After a moment, Tom opened the door, his son Tom Junior, who Dirk had nicknamed T2, in his arms.

  “Hi, Tom,” Dirk said.

  “Hi, Dirk, Hi, Radius” Tom said. “T2, say ‘Hi,’” he said to his son, and moved T2’s arm for him in a wave at both Dirk and Radius. Dirk waved back and smiled in spite of his terrible mood.

  “We were heading over to the CentripGym,” Tom said. “It is an improved version of the Omni Directional Fitness system on the ships. You guys want to come along?”

  “Sure,” Dirk said, happy for the distraction.

  “No, thank you,” said Radius. “I have maintenance to accomplish.”

  “Back in a while,” yelled Tom to his wife and making sure T2’s suit was adjusted properly closed the door behind him and started down the street.

  “Don’t you guys have your own centrifuge?” Dirk asked.

  “Yes, but I like taking T2 to the big one at least every couple of days. He can crawl around on ours, but I want him to experience the bigger space so he doesn’t get used to the small scale of ours and become uncomfortable with the larger ones.”

  It took less than five minutes to get to the CentripGym. It was on the east side of the city, close to the Power Plant. The single biggest power consumer, other than the water system and the greenhouses, it was divided from the rest of the City by a small hill made from soil excavated during the installation of the City water system.

  “Why did they build this berm between the CentripGym and the rest of the City? Is it so people get a little warm up as they approach the gym to work out?” Dirk asked Tom.

  Tom laughed. “No, but that is a good guess. Back on Earth, I remember seeing people riding the escalator from the free weights floor to the exercise machine section. On Mars, if something gets built, it is for one of three reasons. One, it is a absolutely essential for human life, or two constitutes a preparatory system for enabling human life.”

  “Yeah, like the Oxygen/Nitrogen producers or the Crane Farm,” Dirk said.

  “Correct,” responded Tom. “Or three, it is a safety requirement. This berm serves the same function as your berms at the Crane Farm. The centrifuge can generate up to 15 earth Gs of force – if it catastrophically failed at that speed, (the cab separated from the drive shaft for example) it would blast like a missile right through the building and go shooting and bouncing along until it dissipated the accumulated potential energy. Being involved in that translation from rotational to linear movement is unpleasant for anything in the way: force = mass times acceleration (F=MA) and you don’t want to be at the receiving end of that force. Hence the berm – it blocks movement toward the City – if the breakage sends the cab or counterweight out into the plain, that is much less a concern from a safety perspective,” Tom concluded.

  “– unless you are the guy in it when it breaks” said Dirk.

  Tom laughed. “Right, good point.”

  Tom opened the door and they walked in. The lights came on automatically, and Dirk was underwhelmed. “It is a scaled up version of the home ones,” he said to Tom.

  “Yeah, but this one you don’t have to pedal.” Tom continued, “As you know, the home CentripGyms consisted of one or two (depending on the number of people living there) arms on which a recumbent bike seat and pedal assembly are mounted. The people are back-to-back and rotate around the center point. Depending on the speed at which they pedal (or alternatively it is possible to disengage the assembly linking the pedals to the drive shaft and allow an electric motor to do the work) the arms spin, applying centripetal force to the people on the arms. The spinning, like in a dryer, rapidly generates a large force the body experiences analogously as gravity. The first centrifuges were used for fighter pilot and astronaut training, and later adapted for use on space stations and long voyages to help retain muscle mass and skeletal functionality. But take a look at this – this, this, is what makes our CentripGym the best in the solar system.”

  He walked along the raised pathway, past a guardrail demarcating the CentripGym spin area to the wall opposite the door. Behind the CentripGym cab hung a set of shiny Olympic lifting bars and bumper plates.

  “Whoa!” Dirk shouted. “This is fantastic!”

  Tom smiled. “Yes, its great and practically no one else uses the stuff - no wait for equipment.”

  “It is even better than the Omni Directional set up on the ship I used on the trip to Mars,” Dirk said.

  The trip over had taken about 11 months. Hibernational technology had to compensate for the lack of propulsion system advances. Most people stayed in hibernation the entire time – after a week of the space cruise they were ready to stay asleep. Dirk’s dad, however, hadn’t wanted him to sleep that long.

  “You’re still growing, Dirk, and I don’t think spending nine months racked out is going to be good for you.” Dirk, uncharacteristically, failed to offer any opposition to his dad’s proposal. The idea of losing all his muscle mass was extremely unappealing. Indeed, he almost didn’t come to Mars because of it.

  So on the trip over, instead of sleeping the entire time, he read and worked out on the hydraulic Omni-directional fitness system (ODF). The ODF consisted of a series of pistons arranged in a sphere with handles at the top of each piston. The pistons extended to provide a full range of motion. For example, securing his feet to two pistons and pulling himself up, enabled him to emulate pull-ups by working against not gravity but the suction provided by the pistons. Presses were easy, requiring pressing against the pistons, like pushing down on a bike pump when filling an almost full tire. With the system he was able to do most of his workout. Once he programmed it for the exercise he wanted to do the computer adjusted the pistons to the proper positions relative to his body (length of arms and legs, etc.) so he was able to glide into the center of the machine and get to work.

  Sometimes, to emulate the Hero Workouts, he allowed the ODF to select programs for him at random – the 16 display screens would indicate the exercises and the appropriate handles illuminated to indicate where to the do the press or pull. It was actually really fun, and he’d only wished that there had been someone else there to work out with – competing against the computer was not as much fun.

  Some moves, such as the muscle-up, remained difficult to emulate. Even with resistance bands, performing a muscle-up in the minimal induced gravity of the transport cruiser was infinitely easier than on Earth, and thus stimulated less strength development. Still, what working out he was able to do generated enough of a load on his body that although he knew he wasn’t ready for competition he also hadn’t entirely lost the physical skill and capabilities he’d worked so hard to develop.

  “But how do you work out with it here? I mean, you can practically lift the entire set with
one hand – the 45 lb. plates only provide 17 pounds of resistance.” Dirk said.

  “Right,” agreed Tom. “And that is why we have this!” He flung open the door of the cab to reveal a complicated arrangement of bungee cords and a squat rack and bench bolted to the back wall.

  Dirk stared for a moment, taking it in. “When rotating that back wall is the floor, right?” he asked Tom.

  Tom smiled and nodded.

  “And the bungee cords are used to secure the weights so they don’t fly off independently.”

  “Yeah, and pound you to a pulp as they do so,” Tom said.

  “That is awesome,” Dirk said. “Let’s work out.”

  “Hold T2,” Tom said. After handing the baby to Dirk, Tom grabbed an Olympic bar and climbed into the cab. “First you hook up the bar onto the straps depending on what you are going to do – squats, bench press, thrusters, cleans, whatever.”

  “Why the straps? Doesn’t that make it too easy?”

  Tom laughed. “Wait until you try it. On Earth you are only working against gravity, which is exerting a pulling force straight down. You move through the range of motion without having to adjust for the direction of the force, or deal with any additional forces, other than the ones you are generating. It is a complicated, but fairly simple process of sequential movement through several planes. In the CentripGym you are dealing with rotational force as well, even though once the assembly is up to speed the force is predominately perpendicular to the axis of movement, or in other words, directly ‘down’ toward the wall. The weights, due to mass variation, are affected differently by the movement. So when during a move in which the bar becomes “weightless” (as for example during that instant when you transition under the bar during a squat clean) in the centrifuge it is still under the influence of the rotational movement, and wants to move away from you opposite the direction of motion.”

  The importance of this dawned on Dirk. “So not only do you have to lift the weight, you have to control it simultaneously through the rotation.”

  “Yes!” said Tom. “Even at very low weights it is an incredible workout, because you have to control the weight in multiple dimensions simultaneously. The stabilization that your shoulders do during a bench press, for example, is exponentially more difficult here. But of course, difficulty is good, because struggle generates muscle growth.”

  Dirk was extremely excited – this was much better than the machine dependent resistance training he’d done on the trip out to Mars. Since fitness is in a large part the result of the intensity of the physical challenge and response, not the duration, short periods under multiple g’s (3 or 4) could compensate for spending the remainder of the time weightless – and life on Mars wasn’t weightless. Now with the large CentripGym he could get back into some real lifting and performing the WODs. “I’ll win the first Martian Games!” he told T2.

  “I’ll participate in the Games too, buddy,” Tom said in response.

  Dirk thought quickly, “Oh of course, but we’ll be in different age groups - I meant I’d win in my age group.”

  “Ah, that is what T2 and I thought you meant,” he said with a smile. “Competition is good, and I’m glad you’re here to provide me with a bit of a challenge. You chasing me down will keep me motivated to train. It’s been difficult at times to convince myself to suit up and walk over here.”

  “So let’s get to it,” Dirk said happily.

  (10) Day 3 The Crane Farm

  “Dirk, you’ve read the Book concerning your responsibilities, right?”

  “Yes,” Dirk responded sullenly. He’d enjoyed working out with Tom, but that couldn’t make up for the rest of his Martian life. He’d arrived on Friday, and his dad had only allowed him the weekend before insisting that he immediately get to work! On the ship they had gradually adjusted the pressure and oxygen content so that when people arrived they were already 95% acclimatized, but he still felt weird, with a touch of altitude sickness – his head ached and he felt a little nauseated.

  That Monday his dad could tell he wasn’t happy. “Dirk, I know you don’t want to start work immediately, but the Company needs you on the job. The delivery pace is increasing significantly in order to get all the necessary Elevator parts down to the anchor point so we are ready when the top assembly arrives in orbit.”

  The Book described his job as follows:

  “Two landing zones constitute the Elevator staging and construction area (which Dirk referred to as the ‘Crane Farm’) – Zone 1 is a 100 meter dynamic net system into which low mass but high value packages land, bounce, releasing their kinetic energy, and eventually roll down into the center to the collection point.” (Loc 270)

  Dirk referred to it as the ‘spiderweb’, and it had proven less expensive than including a 100lb parachute in each delivery package. (The thinness of the Martian atmosphere, even after 100 years of terraforming, entailed extremely large, and thus heavy, parachutes (even when made of expensive Zylon) were required to slow reentry effectively. As a result, the parachutes were so big it cost more energy to get the parachute assemblies to Martian orbit than any possible payload they would deliver. Once the packages ceased bouncing, he’d walk underneath the net, and deflate the "bubble wrap" as he referred to the Vectran composed impact container/air bag assembly in which the packages were encased. Leaving the Vectran there as extra cushioning for the next delivery, he took the package to the holding area for delivery to the City when his shift concluded and he went home for the day. Except for the addition of the spider web (carbon nanofibers strung above 2 million year old meteor impact crater) the system was nearly identical to that used for delivery of the Martian rovers Spirit and Opportunity by NASA in 2003.

  “The only problem with it,” Dirk said to his dad after the first few deliveries, “Is that more often than not the little packages blow off course, setting off the alarm and making me hike out to retrieve them.”

  The second area was more fun – there he guided the Sky Cranes through the final landing sequence. As the Book explained, “The Cranes are designed for heavy load delivery, and are descended from the ‘Sky Cranes’ that landed the Curiosity Rover on Mars in 2012. An expendable heat shield covers the lower half of the Crane, protecting it as it skids through the atmosphere. Released by explosive bolts, it spins up and over the Crane once it is within 100 km of the Crane Farm. At that point the retrorockets in the Crane begin to fire, slowing and finally bringing the Sky Crane above it to a stop above the main landing zone. In order to keep the unit cost of the Cranes down, (and to ensure that a failure to the guidance system caused by the bouncing through the atmosphere on entry is not fatal to the City) a simple homing system guides the Crane into the landing zone where the terminal phase is directed manually by the Crane Farm operator.”

  “The Book leaves out a lot of this description,” his dad had explained to Dirk. “The Cranes can get themselves close to the landing pad, using the few GPS satellites in orbit. But once they get within 40 miles of the landing zone they require active guidance.”

  “But why not use Artificial Intelligence, like they have for all transportation modes on Earth?” Dirk asked.

  “A simple artificial intelligence system coupled with a robust ground architecture (glide slope indicators, location broadcasting beacons in place, etc.) could provide the Cranes with sufficient organic intelligence to steer themselves down. However, creating systems capable of functioning reliably through the heat, bumps and dust storms was too expensive - especially for a single use delivery Crane. So instead of building the intelligence into each single use Crane, the decision was made to rely on an intelligent actor on the ground – and that is you,” his dad explained.

  “What about Robots?” Dirk asked. “They could use robots to provide the on ground guidance.”

  “The Company does employ robots, but remember, on Mars we lack the Robot infrastructure present on Luna and on Earth. We have spare parts here, of course, but not every possible pa
rt potentially required. In addition, Robots require power. This is not a big deal on Earth or Luna, where batteries are plentiful and the energy network ubiquitous. But here on Mars we are energy poor and at the very end of the industrial/technological supply lines. This is the frontier, and every decision incorporates the fully embedded cost of energy, especially the availability opportunity cost, into account. We live in a world of scarcity more similar to the Old West in the 19th century in the early days of the railroad than the 22st Century United States. Shift your thinking from a world in which energy is basically free back on Earth to one in which energy production, storage and distribution constitutes one of the biggest challenges we face.”

  “Then how are humans better than Robots in this situation? We have the food, housing and water infrastructure requirements that Robots don’t.”

  His dad paused. “We’ll talk about it later.”

  (11) Day 3 Meeting Radius

  As they climbed up the protective berm marking the beginning of the Crane Farm, Dirk again began complaining. “But why do I specifically have to do the work? Haven’t robots done the work up until now?” Dirk said.

  “We have a few robots, yes, but remember, we lack the power infrastructure here to easily keep them fully charged. It is not a problem on Earth, but the lack of power shapes everything we do here.”

  “Yeah, I’ve started to notice that,” Dirk said sarcastically. He was not convinced of the utility of human workers performing the tasks he was now assigned.

  His dad laughed, not allowing Dirk’s crankiness to annoy him. “Anyway, I think you’ll be pleased with your new coworker.” They topped the berm and headed down to the Crane Farm. The Control Tower was to their right. To the left were the Garages, formed when they built up the berm by covering a 3D printed framework with soil. Dirk saw a robot walking from the closest Garage toward the Control Tower.

  “Hi, Radius!” yelled his dad. “How’s it going?”

  “Good, Mr. K,” Radius said. “Two Cranes are scheduled for this afternoon.”

  As they finally reached Radius, Mr. K shook hands with Radius. “Good to see you again. It has been a few days.”

  “Nice to see you as well,” said Radius.

  “Radius, I’d like you to meet the newest Company employee stationed here on Mars, my son Dirk.”

  Radius shook Dirk’s hand. “Nice to meet you,” he said.

  “Hi,” said Dirk.

  Robot owners divided into two broad types – those who interacted with the robots as if with a multifunctional and self-propelling appliance and people who placed the Robot on a continuum between pet and friend. Dirk was in the former group. Back on Earth robots were everywhere, but they were mostly single function tools, lifters, sorters, telepresence platforms, etc. Humanoid multifunction robots, while available, were still fairly rare – the functionality they provided was seldom worth the extra cost (about the same as a luxury car). Some things robots could do better than humans, like lifting extremely heavy car components, or repetitive tasks like picking fruit and assembling communicators. “But,” as he’d said to a friend while they were watching a Robot version of a Games competition (which Dirk had soon abandoned to work out on his own) “There is no challenge, and thus nothing to admire, in performing a task that one is perfectly designed to do. It is like being impressed by the digestive process. If a robot is designed to do X, and it does X effectively, so what?”

  Therefore, Dirk wasn’t impressed with Radius.

  This was quite unfair – Radius was not a simple unitasker, but an extremely complex multifunction robot based on a model originally developed for disaster response. Non-humanoid robots, wheeled and multi legged, had important roles in disaster response, but it turned out that for combining the ability to transit chaotic terrain, like that caused by a building collapse in an earthquake or typhoon caused flooding, with the ability to carry heavy loads, no designs could match that of a bipedal human with two arms. As a result, rescue robots were humanoid not because it made humans more emotionally comfortable (humans were very comfortable with non-humanoid robots) but because such a form was optimized for the operational environments generated by disasters.

  The two Cranes had landed, and Dirk had helped Radius unload the gear using the exoskeleton lift (first he watched Radius do it, and then performed the task himself with Radius providing guidance) and had pushed the Cranes into storage. With no more deliveries scheduled, it seemed reasonable to Dirk to call it a day. “There is no point in standing around,” he said to himself as he started up the berm.

  “Dirk, where are you going?” Radius called after him.

  “Home,” said Dirk, abruptly, not turning around, irritated his actions were questioned.

  “But Dirk, we still have preventative maintenance to do. I can show you how to do the first set of radar checks.”

  Dirk stopped, groaned and turned back around. Two hours elapsed before he once again headed back home, this time with Radius accompanying him.

  (12) Day 5 Lifeguards

  A few days later, even though no deliveries were scheduled, Radius walked into the garage and found Dirk surrounded by a growing pile of carbon fiber poles, tie downs, and Crane wiring insulation next to him.

  “Dirk,” Radius said, “You should not make unauthorized modifications to the Company gear.”

  Dirk was not in a mood to be bothered, still angry about a fall into a crevasse while recovering a stray package. On Earth the fall would have at best, broken a leg or two, but here on Mars had merely made him feel foolish.

  Sick of listening to Radius’ “pre-briefings” before each stay package recovery and needing time alone, he’d taken off without Radius. The package was only a mile away, the day clear and windless, and the impact plume stood out against the horizon. He’d hopped a couple of crevasses, ditches really, and was thinking about lunch when he came to what appeared simply another shallow ditch. Without thinking, he jumped across, not even breaking his stride. His right foot hit the other side – not just his toe, but his entire foot. It was a solid landing, and his momentum was carrying him forward as normal when the ground underneath his right foot collapsed. His left foot hit the side. In the low gravity he did a partial back flip. He pushed off in an attempt to regain control, but instead of helping him recover his balance, the push caused him to sprawl backwards into the crevasse. Tucking his head (his jujitsu training paid off), he landed on his shoulders. He’d paused for a second to catch his breath, his mouth filling with the dust from the crevasse collapse. His head up display (HUD) glasses had fallen off his face, through they were still attached to their lanyard around his neck. It took him a minute of wiggling to rest more comfortably on his back, with his legs up against the side. After putting his glasses back on, he instantly checked the signal strength indicator in the upper right corner – 1 bar. Seeing Radius on the map (which served as the screen saver) he heaved a sigh of relief.

  He didn’t call for help – seeing that it was available (if he had Radius on the display that meant he was within the WiMAX coverage and thus had comms) dispelled the first panic fingers. Working down the crevasse to the left a little way he wiggled his back against the wall closest to the Crane Farm. Pushing his feet against the opposite wall, he walked up until he could split his legs. With one foot on the front wall and one on the back, he jumped out onto his belly into the faint Martian sunshine.

  After getting the package (another diplo) he headed back.

  “I’m losing my rock climbing ability, heck, my ability to do much of anything athletic here on this stupid planet,” he thought in a recurring loop on his way to the Crane Farm, the bruises on his ego intensifying as he rehashed the experience.

  Therefore, when Radius hassled him later that same afternoon, Dirk rolled out from underneath the Crane and exploded. “But Radius, it’s junk now! It is not worth the money to refuel the Cranes to get them back into orbit, so once they land they are useless.” The rapid end of the
service life of the Cranes, many of which had already been used for years for asteroid mining, enabled Dirk to justify his ‘salvage operation’ and he didn’t appreciate Radius undermining his rationalizations.

  “But Dirk,” Radius said calmly, “Your modifications and reuse have not been properly authorized.”

  “How could they be authorized? No one knew doing this was necessary!” Dirk’s own doubts about the appropriateness of his actions fueled his anger at Radius’ questioning. “We are here because the Company couldn’t anticipate every possible emergent requirement from Earth. We earn our pay when we think creatively, and recycling Crane parts in order to accelerate package delivery, and protect the Company’s investment in package retrieval capability (us) is thinking creatively, right?”

  These kinds of questions were difficult for Radius to answer. Dirk pressed his advantage.

  “Anything we do to facilitate Elevator construction is good, yes? So by repurposing this junk we are ensuring the Elevator construction remains on schedule.”

  “Perhaps,” said Radius. “But what are you doing?”

  This caused Dirk to pause, and his anger to subside a bit.

  “Um…” he said. “I’m building Lifeguards.”

  “What are Lifeguards?” Radius asked.

  “They are tools to keep us from falling down the crevasses when we jump them. It occurred to me that on Earth we’d have safety harnesses attached to drones when we made these sorts of jumps, but here we of course don’t. When out of WiMAX range if we fall into a deeper one, only someone following our precise path would ever find us. The surveying and terraforming assessment drones are not calibrated (and calibration before we froze to death is unlikely) such that they would discern a six foot human even if they were tasked to look for us specifically and we weren’t hidden by the crevasse. So I thought of a tool enabling us to jump the crevasses and catch ourselves if we fail to stick the landing,” Dirk explained. “I’m using the wire insulation as cordage to tie the carbon fiber poles originally used to secure some of the cargos together. If we carry one in each hand as we jump a crevasse, and then cross them, making an X, we can use it to catch ourselves when we miss.” Dirk held up two finished Lifeguards and showed them to Radius.

  “But how will they help if we are climbing into or out of one of the larger crevasses?” Radius asked.

  “They won’t,” Dirk agreed, but there are only about 5 of the big ones requiring a climb, and 20 or so we can jump, so it is worthwhile to have them. I figure once I make enough of them we can leave sets along the paths at each crevasse so we don’t have to carry them out and back.”

  Radius thought for a minute. “Ok,” he said.

  (13) Day 8 Another day at the Crane Farm

  The next morning Dirk paused for a moment at the top of the berm. He’d had to come down the Crane Farm earlier than usual. His irregular work hours, determined by the competing vectors of the Martian weather and the Company Elevator delivery schedule were both a blessing and a curse. A blessing, because he didn’t have to go to work at the same time everyday, and occasionally had days off in the middle of the week. On the other hand, any morning was fair game for a delivery.

  “Well, there are many worse jobs,” Dirk said to himself. “I’m lucky in that I’m able to actually make decisions with significance.” When the radar indicated that a Crane was in range he took control and fired the jets on the Crane as necessary to bring it in for a landing. Although no one could see him (and if they did wouldn't care), he felt good about making a sweet landing, in which the Crane’s load kissed the dirt at the very center of the landing zone bullseye. He considered a weekly on target landing percentage less than 95% a major failure. He’d gotten the hang of it with little effort – for him it was just another live video game.

  Standing atop the berm he looked at the patterns he and Radius had made in the lichen. Around the landing zone the lichen grew thicker than in most areas – the erratic heating of the area by Cranes coming in for a landing facilitated growth. The lichen, extremely delicate, was crushed, though not killed, by every step. Although it bounced back after a few months, Dirk tried to avoid further damage by adhering to the paths that had emerged as a result of his work. The path design, optimized for the tasks he performed, gave him a sense of ownership.

  As he and his dad had walked around after dinner the night before, he’d pointed out the patterns.

  “Dad, you engineered the lichen and I completed the landscaping,” he’d joked after noticing the complex path design he’d generated just by walking around.

  The genetic engineering of the vegetation was quite a feat – one that he was learning to appreciate more and more as his education in genetic engineering progressed. His dad, who had designed much of the biological component of the terraforming process, had explained it to him soon after Dirk arrived, as they toured the outskirts of the City.

  “Much of the initial thinking concerning genetically engineering plants to optimize them for the Martian environment,” his dad explained, “focused on taking genetically well known, and thus highly developed plants, like corn, and modifying them as necessary for Mars. Optimizing the plants for the environment would necessarily, it was hoped, maximize growth and thus production. I had had a different, more indirect approach in mind. The goal was not to maximize production of any single plant type – instead, the goal was to produce an environment in which the large variety of plants (and ultimately animals, of which humans are a member of the set) could flourish. Thus optimization of any one plant type could retard, instead of advance, the ultimate goal.”

  “So what did you do,” Dirk asked as they passed one of the oxygen generators.

  “I proposed a slower in the beginning, faster in the long run, approach to the problem. I started with analysis of Martian fossil microbes, brought back by landers in the mid 2020s, but didn’t really start to make useful progress until I found analogous Terran microbes in Antarctica, (especially those found on slopes of and in the caldera of Mount Erebus) and some geothermal vents in Yellowstone. These were sufficiently akin to the Martian fossils that I believed they could effectively produce soil based biomass.”

  Dirk hadn’t been born when his dad did all this, and realized as his dad was talking that he didn’t know anything about his dad’s life before it became part of his own memories.

  “I realized,” his dad continued, “on a planetary level, (or more realistically in selected microclimates) we had to focus on ‘growing’ the soil. If we grew the proper soil, the entire rest of the food pyramid could flourish on that solid foundation. Absent appropriate soil, we’d be forced, like Earth bound farmers, to rely on petroleum based fertilizers. Of course, these fertilizers were a fantastic boon to humanity, enabling the Earth to feed itself, with food to spare, but on Mars such assistance is unavailable.”

  “Therefore, I was compelled to start from the ‘bottom up’. Such a low start was less than popular,” he continued, “both within the Company and with the public. The man on the street thought that such an indirect approach was a waste of time, a way to extort resources from shareholders. Gradually, however, my position gained allies, not least because I was able to demonstrate in the lab that my indirect approach generated more biomass in a shorter time than the corn and other easily modified plant based methodologies. In addition, my work on soil microbes proved to be the key to affecting atmospheric composition on a sufficiently large scale to generate change in the Martian atmosphere on a meaningful (decades, not centuries) timescale.”

  “What do you mean?” Dirk asked.

  “The Martian atmosphere disappeared as a result of some mysterious cataclysmic process we still don’t understand. Atmospheric terraforming, essential to sustain human life, was therefore the first priority. The original plan was based on bombarding the northern Martian hemisphere, the great Northern Plain, with C-type asteroids and comets, rich in water and atmospheric gases like nitrogen and oxygen. However, af
ter about ten years the Company realized that it was proving inadequate to recreate an atmosphere suitable for humans.”

  “So what did you do?”

  “Well, the microbes I examined for their utility for soil amendment put me on the path to large scale hacking of the Martian atmosphere.”

  “What, you mean you were hacking the planet’s operating system?” asked Dirk.

  His dad smiled. “That is a great way to put it! Yes, the atmospheric approach is in effect rewriting the operating system. In order to overcome the entropy that ‘killed’ Mars, we have added knowledge to the system. The knowledge acts like negative entropy.”

  “Which you did through genetic engineering – the information of the genes was added back into Mars,” Dirk said, “to ‘Make’ the planet hospitable.”

  “Precisely!” said his dad. “On Earth, wetland microbes have an inordinately large impact on the atmosphere, producing methane, oxygen, nitrogen and other atmospheric gases and absorbing carbon dioxide. The salinity and amount of biomass are the primary determinates of the variation. I realized that we could use similar microbes on Mars to build the atmosphere using methane and water locked in the Martian permafrost. By seeding the Northern Hemisphere lowlands with the appropriate microbes and adding heat, I was able to create ‘atmosphere engines’. The orbital mirror system, which you can actually see with the naked eye (it’s up there)” he said pointing to the northeast “creates a band of warmth, a temperate zone above the equator in the Northern Hemisphere. This band of warmth enables the microbes seeded in the Northern Hemisphere to flourish. Six months after ‘planting’ they began pumping out atmospheric gasses at an increasing rate. The gasses they produced captured additional heat, creating a reinforcing cycle.”

  “But isn’t the greenhouse effect bad?” Dirk asked. “I remember something about that in history.”

  “For a while people thought the CO2 gasses in the atmosphere would lead to catastrophic global warming. But it turns out the changes people thought were anthropogentic were actually normal for the planet. Variations in sun activity – when the sun is more active it pumps out more thermal energy, and conversely, when less active it pumps out less, making the Earth, and Mars, cooler - accounted for the temperature variation.”

  “But how did this particular band of microbes have such a significant effect on the atmosphere?” Dirk asked. “I thought the Martian atmosphere was almost completely gone 100 years ago.”

  “It was, but the atmospheric engine was able to produce the atmosphere we enjoy today because of the size of the microbe filled wetlands. On Earth, three percent of the planet is wetlands. The Company’s terraforming activity made 20% of Mars a wetland, turbocharging atmosphere creation – and that is why you can walk around now.”

  “And have to wear these stupid suits.”

  “Yeah,” his dad agreed. “I hate them too. But we’d dehydrate too quickly without them, and more importantly, the cosmic rays would cause cancer.”

  “But we can fix cancer,” Dirk protested.

  “Yes, on Earth, but poorly understood side effects of cancer treatments still occur, and the brain cancers are not yet fully defeated. Better to wear the suit.”

  (14) Day 9 0835 Pre-Delivery Brief

  The next day, as usual, Radius was at the Crane Farm early. After doing a few minor errands, Radius called Dirk over to the Control Tower. Another diplo pouch had gone astray.

  Dirk, bored, listened sullenly to yet another of Radius’ pre astray-delivery-retrieval briefings.

  “…and that concludes the first step, understanding the microenvironment in which the retrieval will unfold,” Radius said.

  “Ugh,” said Dirk rudely. “Radius, we can develop a better process for this other than talking through the steps each time as though we’ve never done this before.”

  “Pre-briefs are required for all evolutions,” Radius responded, unperturbed by Dirk’s outburst.

  Dirk stood up. “Look. We have six critical factors we have to address every single time.”

  “Command and control, intelligence, maneuver, protection, sustainment,” he wrote onto the wall mounted tablet that served as a whiteboard.

  “First, the command and control is always the same – we document the landing site so the location appears on the log in the control tower and the we are off. Agreed?” Dirk asked, turning to Radius.

  “Roger,” said Radius. Dirk checked off ‘C2’.

  “Second, intelligence, or better situational awareness. We have to understand the area in which the package appeared to have landed. I see this in terms of two factors- distance and terrain. Distance from the Crane Farm determines time. Time determines the supply load required, and whether we leave immediately or have to wait until the next day. Most packages land in the low plain surrounding the zone or on the slope leading to the City and Mount Olympus. The Great Rift with its canyons is about 8 miles to the southeast, but so far no packages have gone there.”

  “Therefore,” Radius interrupted, “We can simply put range rings on the map and refer to the distance that way. If it is in A through D, and between 270 and 30 degrees we know it will take less than three hours round trip.”

  “Exactly,” said Dirk. “However, we have to keep in mind the second factor, the terrain. Those crevasses can really slow us down. We already have a pretty good idea of the crevasses and the way around them, but we have to take them into account.”

  “So if one of us reports a package landing site within those parameters, we both know the required immediate actions, in accordance with our standard operating procedures, and can execute quickly,” Radius said.

  “Right,” Dirk concurred, placing a check mark by ‘Intelligence’.

  “Third, maneuver. This refers to the urgency and overlaps with the terrain aspect of the second factor. Those crevasses can ruin our day. They are easy enough to climb through, or even leap in the low Martian gravity, assuming we see them first and are not attempting to carry a heavy package as we negotiate the gap. To my mind, the difficulty of the crevasse transit is the key factor in our overall time evaluation.”

  “Remember,” Radius said, “The locator beacons cease after five hours.”

  “Yeah,” Dirk said. “As my Dad says, whenever I complain about something here, ‘Every ounce, over the 140,000,000 miles between Earth and Mars, adds up.’ It would have made our jobs easier if they had included larger batteries to keep those beacons on.”

  “But the point is to build the Elevator, not make our jobs easier,” said Radius.

  Dirk grudgingly agreed. “You’re right. We are the least important part of the process – they only care about us when a package is delayed. Anyway, weight and size of the package also affects our maneuver capability. We have the weight and cube dimensions of each of the scheduled packages – those diplomatic pouches cause our biggest headaches. Taking a wheelbarrow with us will increase the time required and our sustainment requirements.”

  “Agreed,” said Radius. Dirk checked off ‘Maneuver’.

  “Protection and sustainment are really the same thing for us here,” Dirk said. “We bring our emergency body bags as protection from a sand storm and the chill of the night and enough food and water to keep us alive if we get stranded out there for some reason.”

  The “body bags” as Dirk referred to them, were modeled after the bags smoke jumpers used to carry when wildfires were still a problem. If a wind shift brought a wall of fire toward them as they were isolated on the side of a mountain, the smoke jumpers would zip themselves into the bags in order to survive the inferno. The bags, similar to sleeping bags, were made of fire resistant material, sufficiently thick to keep a person alive while a fast moving fire passed over the individual zipped inside, like a caterpillar in a cocoon. They were known jokingly as ‘body bags’ because they made recovery of the remains much easier if they didn’t work in a specific case.

  On Mars they were designed for sandstorm protection – n
ot much danger of wildfires. Even Radius had one, since a sandstorm could scour him down to bare metal and destroy his electronics.

  “Food for you,” said Radius. “I’ll simply power down.”

  Dirk laughed. “Good point. Another advantage you have over me.”

  “Actually,” said Radius, “That is one of my major limitations. In an austere environment I am unable to recharge. I’m designed to receive power from the wireless induction system that is easy to find on Earth, but is only in a few locations, including the control tower and City homes, here on Mars. You are actually much easier to refuel than am I. That is why, I believe, you humans are carrying the bulk of the labor load here. The logistical requirements for building out the robot power infrastructure exceeds the value at this stage of Martian development.”

  Dirk had never thought about the situation in those terms before. He had wondered why he had the job, in other words, why the Martian workforce was not completely robotic. Radius’ explanation made sense, but he still felt that it was not the entire answer.

  “I hadn’t thought of that before, Radius” Dirk said. “If that happens I’ll either carry you home or come back with some fresh batteries for you.”

  “Thank you,” said Radius.

  “So, Radius, we now have a process for working through the brief. If it is within the A, B, C or D rings we simply grab the basic set of gear (water, food, etc.) and can head out immediately unless it is after 1600. If it is we’ll have to take a little more time to analyze the situation to see if we can make it back before dark. Otherwise, we go. Agreed?”

  “Agreed,” said Radius. “That seems like an effective approach.”

  “In this case, we’ll take the Circle Path 1, which circumnavigates the landing zone, and then strike out past that rock outcropping over there. What do you think?”

  “Agree,” said Radius, “But we’ll have to do a lot of jumping over the crevasses on the way out. We may have to take the northern route back.” The northern route was a path they had developed that reached almost to the initial slope of Mt Olympus. There was only one crevasse there and they had, one long afternoon, dug a path into and out of it so they could run the wheelbarrows through without stopping.

  They headed out after grabbing their supply packs, with enough water, food and their key survival gear.

  After 20 minutes they arrived at the first crevasse. Dirk grabbed two Lifeguards and jumped over.

  It had taken some practice on a crevasse near the Crane Farm to perfect the ‘catch’ as they referred to it. Initially they had used only one, but found that they couldn’t hold on with one hand to the Lifeguard as they fell. Holding one in each hand simplified the catch by providing a broader cushion and commensurate margin of error. Slightly crossing the Lifeguards, creating an unbalanced X, made it possible to either catch one’s weight in a dip or land on the chest, saving the arms and shoulders from damaging impact. In the light gravity of Mars pressing up, getting the feet onto the guards and then bear crawling forward was easily accomplished. It didn’t look cool, but 1) there was no one around to see and 2) it looked much cooler than freezing to death stuck upside down in a ditch.

  “No falling today – nice,” Dirk thought.

  The package, after a 55 minute walk, was in sight. Its cushioning ‘bubble wrap’ still slowly deflating, caught the light of the setting sun.

  (15) Day 9 1130 Atmosphere

  The trip back to the City was not bad – the road rose slightly up but the Crane was easy to push, even fully loaded, and unless a windstorm was blowing, he enjoyed the hike back. It made for a relaxing workout, similar to an active recovery day on Earth.

  As he and Radius walked back, they passed the first of many oxygen generators, long metal tubes, extremely rusty, with solar powered fans on each end – one sucking air in and the other almost pure oxygen out.

  His dad had explained the atmospheric transformation efforts. “NASA sent In-situ Resource Utilization units to Mars in the 2020s to scrub the atmosphere of carbon dioxide and make oxygen. Extracting consumables like oxygen from the Martian environment itself was an essential precursor to not only terraforming but to any sort of human activity on Mars,” he’d said.

  “Where did the technology come from? Was it designed specifically for Martian colonization?” Dirk asked.

  “No,” his dad said. “The initial units, based on carbon sequestration technology developed for coal fired power plants, were intended to create and store oxygen for fuel generation purposes. Large plastic bladders of nanotubes were attached to reactor tubes. The nanotubes trickled out of the bladder a few at a time, and when exposed in the large reactor tubes to the carbon dioxide rich atmosphere of Mars, 95% carbon dioxide, 3% nitrogen and 1.6% argon, the Sabatier reaction occurred, breaking the carbon dioxide into carbon and oxygen. As a result, the large metal tubes were covered with rust and the ground surrounding them black with graphite.”

  “If we have the reactors, why did you design and distribute the lichen?” Dirk asked.

  “Although the carbon reactors, dropped all over the planet, did start the atmospheric changes, they failed to generate the necessary changes fast enough. Therefore, the Company asked me to develop a biological supplement. I was able to take advantage of the atmospheric changes the reactors had brought about, and so the microbes and lichens I designed had a head start.”

  “Are the reactors junk now then?” Dirk asked.

  “No,” his dad said. “The microbes have reduced the demand for the reactors, but after Elevator completion the Company intends to again ship reactant nanotubes to Mars. Reloading the reactor tubes will further accelerate atmosphere regeneration.”

  “With all the terraforming work, why is it still so hard to breathe here, or am I just having trouble acclimatizing?” Dirk asked.

  “The atmospheric changes induced atmospheric pressure increases – however, not enough to ensure human health,” his dad explained. “The human body is optimized for one atmosphere. The Martian atmospheric pressure is now 33% of Earth pressure at sea level - a major improvement from the around 5% of Earth’s atmospheric pressure when the terraforming process began, but still not sufficiently Earth like to live comfortably. The combination of the low gravity and low atmospheric pressure doesn’t result in explosive decompression, as exiting a spaceship would for example, but over a period of days leads to widespread bruising and joint pain.”

  “Like living at the top of Mount Everest,” Dirk said.

  “Exactly,” his dad agreed.

  “Although the long trip out from Earth was used to gradually acclimatize people to the atmospheric conditions,” his dad continued, “People still have to wear protective suits when outside of pressurized buildings. The suits not only recycle sweat and thus reduce dehydration in the cold dry air, but also provide protection from cosmic rays that due to the thin atmosphere, and absence of a magnetic filed, constitute a serious health threat. Over time, the suits have become more like wetsuits (or more precisely, drysuits like those used for cold water diving) than spacesuits.”

  “Yeah,” Dirk agreed, “But wearing a wetsuit surfing is infinitely more comfortable than this thing. I wish there were somewhere to swim on Mars.”

  “Yeah, so do I. That is probably what I miss the most. A long shower is not the same,” his dad said. “The City was built at the base of the Mount Olympus range. Though there is no running water now, the City was placed next to a dried up lake that had a million years ago been fed by snowmelt and underground springs. As Mars cooled some of the water evaporated into space, but most of it sank into the ground creating the permafrost, and perhaps underground aquifers, like the Ogallalla underneath the Great Plains in the US. Melting that permafrost with ‘moles’ and ‘flamingos’, like heating the tundra on Earth, will bring that water back into a useful form.”

  “Moles and flamingos?” Dirk asked.

  “That’s my nickname for the system’s robotic components. The Moles
are robotic diggers. They drag hoses carrying antifreeze heated by waste heat from the Power Plant methane generators. The Moles dig into the ground and then spread, like the horizontal drills in natural gas systems. By using the waste heat to melt the permafrost ahead of them, they dig into the softened, marshy soil. Digging, waiting for the ground to soften, pulling the tube forward and waiting some more is a very slow process. We started 2 years ago, when the Power Plant was completed. Progress is measured in runs – the time it takes the moles to reach the end of the lakebed. Once at the end, the Moles return to the Power Plant on the surface, are attached to another run of u-tube, and sent back out, this time ten inches lower than the previous run. The second run has just begun.”

  “So that explains those huge spools,” Dirk said. “I’d wondered about them.”

  “Yes,” his dad explained. “The u-tubes slowly unroll from the spools. Indeed, the spools were one of the single largest deliveries on Mars, each requiring three Cranes to land. With Radius’ help (he was indispensible to the process) we rolled them to the Plant where Tom and I jacked them up on to the racks. After plugging one end into the heat exchanger/antifreeze dispenser, we attached the other end to a Mole, who was ‘set free’ to dig.”

  “So what do the Flamingos do?” Dirk asked.

  “I’m getting to that. After a few months, the lake area transformed from hard packed frozen dirt to a series of muddy puddles above the mole paths. Other robots, affectionately referred to as “Flamingos” walk through the marsh on pneumatic legs attached to hoses that lead back to the water treatment plant. Continuously searching the marsh for standing water, they lower their ‘beaks’ (the suction nozzle) into any puddles they find. The hoses are attached to a vacuum tank and a small pump in the flamingo’s body provides extra propulsive force to move the water along the over two kilometer length tube. Neither process is quick – converting permafrost to marsh and harvesting the water for us to use, but since the robots work constantly, they are able to produce enough water to make up the losses due to metabolic action of plants and people, and thus keep the City alive.”

  “So why are we allowed to take regular showers?” Dirk asked. “With water scarce I thought we’d have to take Navy or California showers, turning the water off while soaping up.”

  His dad laughed. “Yes, that would make sense. However, from a biosphere cultivation perspective, humans are a valuable source of soil amendment. The gray water from the showers (everyone uses biodegradable soap) is sent to the hydroponic farm. The remaining sediments are pumped into a walled off section of the marsh that will serve as a future soil based farm. The sediments from the gray water, along with those from the waste treatment plant, are worked into the soil by robotic “earthworms”. They follow the mole melt paths aerating the soil, facilitating melting, and mixing the human provided ‘fertilizer’ into the Martian soil.”

  “So Dad, have you found an microbes yet?” Dirk asked.

  “I’ve detected conditions that are hospitable to Marian life, based on what we think we understand about its potential forms, but nothing has come to life as a result of the limited terraforming of the City ‘garden’.”

  “Are you disappointed?” Dirk asked.

  “Yes – it is not especially scientific of me to admit, but I’m very disappointed, and a little sad about it. I thought, with a high degree of (misplaced) certainty that the combined effect of increases in atmospheric pressure, humidity and soil moisture would suffice to get life going again. It seems I was wrong.”

  “Could it be the result of the cosmic rays?”

  “Good thinking, Dirk. I’m afraid you may be right. The loss of cosmic ray protection might have led to the zapping of all life on the surface, and it won’t snap back. I keep looking for wee beasties, like Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, but my enthusiasm decreases every day.”

  (16) Day 10 Vampirism on Mars

  “Sergeant, clean off a shelf in the kitchen – we’re going to use it as a storage area. The ship comes in a month, and first load must be ready to go.”

  The question, which had been nagging at the back of the Sergeant’s mind ever since the Director first explained the Project, jumped unbidden from his lips: “Why does Martian blood have a value on Earth that justifies the cost of getting it there?”

  Her condescending look made him regret asking.

  The Director, however, was not entirely displeased at an opportunity to explain. She’d fleshed out the idea over the past few months, and given the nature of the Project, had been unable to share it widely. As a result, she’d felt keenly the absence of the admiration from others she felt the idea deserved. The plan, to her mind, was brilliant in its simplicity. She and her Partners on Earth (this sharing wounded her, but was necessary – she’d learned her lesson about creating incentives for others in the Government to protect her, and she couldn’t do everything from Mars) will sell blood from the Martians to high net worth individuals on Earth. Impressing the Sergeant with the plan’s beautiful logic, while less than completely satisfying, was certainly better than impressing no one.

  “Excellent question,” she said. Her initial look of bored contempt transformed into her best fake smile, making the Sergeant feel as though she was happy, overjoyed actually, that he’d asked the question. She had not risen as far as she had without a sufficient command of apparent pleasantness. The smile (which he’d never seen before) dazzled the Sergeant.

  “As you know,” she began, “Genetic and other nanobiomechanical engineering has solved most health problems. However, people still seek an edge, a way to get ahead of others. What this Project enables is the transformation of a commodity service, health care, into a fashion accessory. Moreover, fashion creates it own market. We are providing pure blood, free of Earth toxins, oxygenated by red blood cells adapted to an environment similar to that of the Himalayas on Earth, but without the Chinese generated smog.”

  The Sergeant, initially impressed, voiced a doubt. “But is the blood actually better than the stuff you get in the hospital?”

  “Do people pay for organic produce?” the Director asked rhetorically. “The actual efficacy of the blood we supply in terms of increasing health is immaterial. My Partners back on Earth have confirmed there is indeed a lucrative market – some people have more money than sense, and our product will help redress that imbalance. With the supplies we have here –specially made because few actual blood transfusions occurred anymore –we can now begin harvesting in time for delivery back to Earth on the next transport ship.”

  “But how will we compel people to donate blood?” asked the Sergeant. “There is no reason to.”

  The Director looked at him like an exasperated parent looks at a four year old who asked the same question three times in a row. “We are the Government – the Government controls medicine. Any excuse will do - cosmic ray exposure testing, Martian atmosphere contamination checks, whatever. On this first shipment we only require enough to provide samples to stimulate demand, so a small quantity of blood will suffice.”

  “Who will provide the samples?” the Sergeant asked.

  “Good question. In addition to purity, we are also selling youth,” she said.

  “The delivery boy,” the Sergeant guessed.

  “Yes – the delivery boy. He is our best option, you know, because the average age on Mars is actually higher than that back on Earth. In these early days of colonization only people on the older end of the spectrum are willing to leave Earth behind, never to return.”

  “You’re not on the ‘older end of the spectrum,’” the Sergeant said.

  The Director gave an indulgent smile – “And I’m not here voluntarily. You’re not that old either – we still have a chance at a life, an actual life!” Her emotions began to show in her voice. She caught herself, paused, and stood staring at her desk.

  The Sergeant, sensing the conversation was over, left.

  (17) Day 10 Rock Climbing

  “Hey Radius
, let’s see if Tom wants to do some climbing.” Dirk said.

  “Ok,” Radius agreed. He enjoyed the climbing not because it presented him with a physical challenge but because he enjoyed predicting fall, near falls and landings. Two subjects made the calculations more difficult and thus more fun. As he spent more time on Mars his predictive algorithms were improving. The continuous improvement of Dirk and Tom’s skills added additional complexity and thus kept it interesting.

  Dirk knocked on Tom’s door. Texting, though possible, was out of favor among the Martians except for work, another result of the lack of privacy. People didn’t desire constant connection through communication devices – they were connected enough already by physical proximity. Circumnavigation of the entire City took only 30 minutes.

  Dirk waited patiently for over a minute – Tom always took an inordinately long time to answer the door. He was either talking to his wife, reading, or more likely, playing with his baby son, T2.

  So actually, Dirk was the second youngest human on Mars, Tom’s wife Mandy the third and Tom the fourth.

  “Climbing?” Dirk asked Tom when he finally opened the door.

  “Sure!” said Tom. “Let me grab T2.” “Mandy,” he yelled into the house, “I’m going out with Dirk and Radius and am taking T2.”

  “No climbing with T2,” Mandy yelled back.

  “Ok,” said Tom, smiling at T2 and shaking his head “Yes.” Tom put T2 in his carrier (a hammock like piece of fabric) facing forward so he could see the world as they walked. When tired, T2 could lay down and take a nap.

  They headed northeast to the Power Plant where Dirk had first met Tom, the City Chief Engineer. Dirk had noticed him outside the Plant on a Saturday afternoon. He’d been called to the Plant by a high temperature indicator on one of the turbine generators. Unfortunately, the cipher lock on the main door, always kind of balky due to the regular practice of sending obsolete versions of most types of gear to Mars instead of buying the latest and greatest, seemed to have failed. Sending old security equipment made sense in a way, since no one wanted to test new equipment on Mars when the replacement costs were so high, and the security threat was very low. However, from an actual daily user perspective, it seemed, to Dirk anyway, dumber than dirt because reliability was at such a premium 140,000,000 away from Earth.

  Dirk had happened by as Tom, his frustration growing with every turn of the dial, was attempting the combination for the tenth time. Dirk and Tom had met before, but not really talked. Dirk waited with Tom as he struggled with the lock, becoming increasingly frustrated. He needed access to the Plant in order to check out the high temp alarm on gas generator number four – a high turbine temp could turn into a fire. Remaining outside and hoping for the best was not an option. After about 15 minutes Dirk spoke up.

  “Hey Tom, is there another way in, a window or something?”

  Tom thought about it for a moment. “You know, there might be. There is a hatch on the roof. I’m too big to fit, but Dirk you could probably squeeze through.” They went around to the back of the Power Plant.

  “Ok Dirk, I’ll boost you up to that ledge. From there, you’ll have to jump and get over onto the roof,” Tom explained.

  Dirk analyzed the distance. “I can make it,” he said. “I’ll do a muscle up after grabbing the lip of the roof.”

  “Sounds good,” said Tom. “And in this low gravity it won’t hurt too much if you miss,” he said with a laugh.

  Dirk easily made the leap and pulled himself up and onto the roof.

  “The hatch is almost in the middle of the roof, over to your right. When you open it you’ll see a ladder on the side of the support column,” yelled Tom.

  “Ok,” said Dirk. “No problem.”

  Dirk climbed down the ladder and after a couple of wrong turns in the confusing mass of enclosures, tanks, and piping, found and opened the door.

  “Thanks, Man!” said Tom. “I’m removing this lock and replacing it with an analog hasp and padlock – and I’m going to give you the extra key so I can’t lock myself out.”

  “Happy to help,” said Dirk.

  Following Dirk’s practical application of climbing skill, the two had often met to do parkour through the town and climb in the ravines around it.

  They arrived at the ravine closest to the City.

  “Here, hold T2,” Tom said.

  Dirk took T2, put the baby carrier over his shoulder and sat T2 in it so he could watch his dad.

  T2, smiling happily, wiggled up and down, using the carrier like a bungee bouncer.

  Tom dusted his hands and climbed down into the ravine. After shaking his arms back and forth and stretching his forearms, he climbed up to the point, distinguishable by the stark change in soil color on the surface, at which they had decided the course started.

  T2 settled himself, and as Tom began his bouldering T2 raised his little arms.

  “Ooo ooo,” he said, opening and closing his hands and moving his head up and down in emulation.

  “You have not evolved so far from the monkeys after all,” said Radius.

  Tom laughed and kept climbing.

  Dirk looked at Radius with surprise. Had Radius just made a joke? Humor was not included in his model – the type of Artificial Intelligence necessary for actual humor was not installed in off planet models. Maybe he’d received a free software upgrade with humor subroutines?

  His thoughts were interrupted by Tom sliding to the bottom of the ravine after missing a hold.

  “Your turn, Dirk,” he said. ‘The nubbies are slippery today.”

  (18) Day 11 Dirk’s Hacker Credentials and another package goes astray

  “Radius, another ‘screamer’ (Dirk’s nickname for off track packages, because of the annoying alarm they stimulated) inbound,” Dirk called out over the net, in spite of knowing it was unnecessary. Radius received the messages over the network as long as he was in range, but Dirk was in the habit of using voice with Radius. While on Earth people would text across the table while eating lunch, on Mars Company training encouraged them to use voice. The communication, unmediated by a screen, supposedly decreased nascent feelings of loneliness. This one had activated the “off course,” but not the “impact” alarm. It was so far off course there was only a negligible chance (due to a high altitude windstorm perhaps) its trip would conclude with a violent impact on the Crane Farm.

  He picked up his hiking backpack from the corner of the control room. His dad insisted on it and Dirk didn’t argue or resent it – most of the time – as he would have on Earth. It was heavy, even on Mars, but “Be Prepared” was no less a valid motto to live by on Mars than on Earth. Indeed, at this stage of development such an approach to daily life was even more necessary because the automatic dispatch of medical rescue (based on automated monitoring of the individual’s physical datastream) people habitually counted on was no longer available.

  The landing area was located on a plateau a slight rise at the foot of Mt Olympus. It, along with the City, had been placed there because the mountain generated a lee that created some shelter from the full force of the occasional massive dust storms. In addition, the plateau simplified the landing and tracking process – it stood out clearly against the background. Indicating an excess of optimism, or as his dad would say, “Confidence in the terraforming process,” the planners placed the City so that flash floods coming off Olympus would not negatively impact the Crane Farm or City the way they would if the primary inhabited area had been placed on the wider plain below.

  “Beepe beepek” The express package squawked, revealing its location on the monitor.

  “Sometimes I wish Dad had not thought of these heavy clothes,” Dirk said as he and Radius strode out toward the area of uncertainty in which the package (supposedly) rested. The Crane Farm radar system calculated a projected area of uncertainty for the stray packages. In other words, it drew at ellipse within which, at a 90% probability, the package rested. However, du
e to what Dirk referred to as the “Swerve” resulting from variations in wind speed and direction in the layers of Mars’ thin atmosphere as the package plummeted toward the surface, the predictions were sometimes way, way off. They had yet to fail in a recovery, but only due to Dirk’s justified confidence in his sense of direction and ability to find things honed through Scouting back on Earth.

  He’d been pleased when his dad sent him a message to come over and get his new clothes – the sweat suit he’d had to put on before leaving the transport ship was uncomfortable, and he still hadn’t become used to wearing it. Accustomed to running, swimming and jumping in minimalist shoes and shorts, the suit, like a full body compression sock with plumbing to recycle his sweat, was an unpleasant tactile reminder of the harshness of Martian life.

  His pleased excitement had rapidly turned to disappointment when he’d picked up the clothing. “What are these, snow pants?” he’d snapped, not trying to hide his displeasure. “What are they made of, old tarps?”

  His dad laughed, annoying him further. “Yes, actually, they are repurposed cargo covers. I needed some way to add weight to your body, and the cargo covers, designed to shield delicate electronics from cosmic rays during transit fit the bill.”

  Dirk was so angry he couldn’t even speak. He’d been looking forward to a newer, lighter (and thus more comfortable) compression sweat suit, and his dad had given him trousers and a vest with heavy patches sewn down the outside of the trouser legs and along the back and shoulders. A large patch covered his stomach.

  “I’m not wearing this,” he said.

  “I disagree,” said his dad. “This isn’t like your retainer when you were 13.”

  “Why do you want me to wear these?” Dirk asked, furious.

  “Gravity,” said his dad.

  When Dirk didn’t respond, he continued. “Martian gravity is only 38% of Earth gravity. Our bodies are accustomed to a much stronger gravitational pull - therefore living on Mars is easier on our bodies, in terms of load placed on our muscles, than even laying in bed on Earth. So what is living here going to do to your muscles?”

  “They’ll atrophy, but I’ll prevent that with the CentripGym,” Dirk responded.

  “Yes, the CentripGym is necessary, but not sufficient. Even if you use it an hour a day, that still means 90% of your time your body is unloaded. I’m not sure that is good for you, especially since you are still growing.”

  “If Mars is so bad for me why did you force me to come here?”

  “Leaving aside the ‘forcing’ I’ll tell you later why are you are here, but I’m certainly glad you are. The important issue is that you must wear the special clothes I’ve made for you, in order to avoid losing entirely the physical capabilities you’ve worked so hard to develop.”

  Dirk thought for a moment. Even though he’d worked out regularly on the ship on the way over, while most people slept, he’d still noticed a substantial loss of muscle mass. Actually, the problem had been nagging at the back of his mind, and now as he’d had time to process the clothing idea, he agreed it was a good, perhaps even great, solution - but he wasn’t about to admit that to his dad.

  “Ok, I’ll wear them,” he said grudgingly. No one would see them under the Bedouin type overcoat he wore. The first City inhabitants had started the fashion. Too much sand infiltrated regular clothes worn over the pressure sweat suit (to protect it from abrasion) for comfort. They had therefore started wearing full length tunics, like Bedouin tribesmen in the 20th century, to keep the sand out.

  “Nice!” said his dad, slapping him on the back. “Look at this.” His dad pulled another set off the floor. “I made myself some too!”

  “Great,” said Dirk unenthusiastically.

  He could feel the difference wearing the heavy clothes as he walked. “I guess they are working,” he thought.

  “Package sighted,” said Radius.

  “That was quick,” said Dirk. “I wish all the retrievals were this easy. It seems like the spider web that is supposed to catch these little guys repels them instead.”

  (19) Day 12 Fire!

  “Tom,” Dirk yelled into the Power Plant. “My Dad says I can build my own house! And that you are the guy to talk to!”

  Tom didn’t hear Dirk – he was inside the #3 methane GTG (Gas Turbine Generator) enclosure that thermally and acoustically isolated the engine from the rest of the Power Plant. The thermal isolation didn’t matter now – a heat exchanger captured much of the waste heat from the engine and used it for greenhouse thermal management, but the acoustic isolation ensured he was utterly oblivious to Dirk’s message.

  Dirk wandered around the Power Plant. Tom’s wife, Mandy, had said he was here somewhere. Dirk grabbed the “Mickey Mouse” earmuff like hearing protection and put them on as he passed into the noisy side of the plant. The City was powered for the most part by gas turbine engines, the kind they used to use on airplanes. Although considered obsolete on Earth, due to its robustness it was a favorite for off planet applications. The printed assemblies had lifetimes measured in 100s of years at a minimum and could run for hundreds of thousands of hours on a wide variety of fuels. On Mars they burned predominately methane, but the methane was only filtered, not refined, so the robustness of the gas turbines was essential.

  They did however require some limited Preventative Maintenance, and Tom was engaged in semi-annual Preventative Maintenance System (PMS) checks when Dirk finally found him, Tom’s feet sticking out of the enclosure as he lay on his back reinstalling a filter.

  “Hey Tom!” Dirk said as he poked his head into the enclosure.

  “Hi, Dirk,” Tom yelled. “Hand me that rag if you would please. I cleaned this in the ultrasonic washer, and it is still a little wet.”

  Dirk looked around and handed Tom the first rag he saw. Tom wiped the reinstalled filter and wiggled out from under the combustor housing.

  “Thanks,” he said. “Let’s get back to the quiet zone before we talk. I have double hearing protection in and can’t understand anything you are saying.”

  Dirk nodded and followed Tom as he walked to the control area.

  Dirk sat down and waited as Tom entered the maintenance completion into the log. He then walked over to the main control panel and removed a red tag tied to the main switch for the #3 GTG.

  “What is that tag for?” Dirk asked.

  “To prevent getting killed,” Tom answered.

  “Huh?” responded Dirk.

  “It is not such a big deal here, especially since I’m the only tech. However, the system developed by the nuclear powered navy back in the 1960’s proved its value in blood conservation. The systems on the subs and ships were so complex that someone could have taken a piece of gear apart, like a valve on a steam line, in order to do maintenance. Someone else, not knowing the system was in pieces, would route the steam to that line, perhaps to do maintenance on some other system, sending steam onto the guy doing the work.”

  “That would ruin your day,” said Dirk.

  “Yeah,” agreed Tom. “No one wants that to happen on any industrial system, but on nuclear systems that is especially suboptimal. In order to avoid such accidents, they created the Planned Maintenance System (PMS) system, which requires a physical tag on the switches that affect the system whenever that system is not fully operational, as when for example it has been taken apart for maintenance.”

  “But you are the only one here? Why waste the time? If you don’t change the position of a switch, no one will.”

  “Two reasons,” said Tom. ‘First, it is an effective practice to maintain as a professional engineer. Second, I might do maintenance on a part, forget about it, and misalign the system causing damage. On Mars we cannot afford those sorts of dumb mistakes.”

  Dirk thought for a moment. The concept of “Safety” had all but disappeared back on Earth, and it was taking him some time to adjust to Tom and his dad’s safety obsession.

  Prior to his Mars arriva
l, Dirk had thought about safety only in terms of injury avoidance during training - not because an injury was catastrophic, but because it would take time, time he could ill afford as he was making the jump from amateur to professional athlete in the Games. Acquiring another arm, leg or even eye, was fairly easy. However, full integration of the new part, and using it effectively in competition still took training and time. In addition, the rules concerning augmentation in the Games were very strict – for the average man on the street a bionically enhanced arm had no downside, but for an athlete the increase in physical capability could mean the end of an athletic career. There were leagues consisting of augmented players, but they had come to occupy the niche previously covered by professional wrestling – fun to watch, but not taken seriously as sport.

  Here on Mars, however, he couldn’t get away from thinking about it and making “safety” a way of life. For as his dad said, “If you don’t make time for safety there will not be time for anything.”

  “Dirk,” Tom said, wiping his hands an another rag and putting the tool box on the floor against the wall within a box drawn on the deck that matched the dimensions of the box and was labeled ‘GTG PMS,’ “What can I do you for?”

  “My Dad says I can make my own house!” Dirk exclaimed. “He said you have the printer and building ink and to come see you to get the Book with the designs and mod program.”

  “Great,” said Tom. “I was wondering what your Dad was planning to do with the extra ink. I guess it wasn’t ‘extra’ after all. The Printer Book is in my other office. Come on.”

  Tom led the way through the maze of headers, engine enclosures, and lube and fuel tanks up the huge ramp into the first City bound cargo ship. The 500 meter ship dominated the City, like a Cathedral in a medieval market town.

  It had served as the initial home of the colonists as the City was built two years prior to Dirk’s arrival. The Power Plant had been built adjacent to the ship.

  “This is awesome!” Dirk said as they walked into the belly of the ship via the cargo ramp, stepping over and ducking under the huge spaghetti like mess of cables snaking from the ship to the Power Plant. All the initial life support systems had issued from the ship – water, sewage, oxygen and nitrogen storage for emergencies, and of course electrical power – in the Colony’s early days. The Power Plant now performed most of the command and control functions, while the ship served as an emergency backup.

  Once off the cargo deck they climbed up two levels and continued down the central passageway, occasionally stepping through airtight hatches.

  “Hey Tom, these look like the same kind of hatches you see on ships in old movies,” Dirk observed.

  “That’s right,” Tom responded. “Whereas on Earth the objective is to preserve water tight integrity to ensure the buoyancy necessary to keep the ship afloat in the event of a collision, engineering casualty or hostile action, the vacuum of space generates atmospheric integrity preservation requirements.”

  “But I don’t remember similar doors on the ship I took to Mars,” Dirk said.

  “They spend more money on the passenger freighters. Those ships have integrated meteor defenses that zap debris with lasers before it impacts the ship. They also have thicker hulls and, even though you didn’t notice them, emergency pneumatics that isolate the ships into air tight zones. Next time a ship comes we’ll go on it and I’ll point them out to you. Like airbags in a car they automatically inflate when required. The problem with them however is that once they are activated you cannot move around the ship easily. In order to patch the hull penetration, the crew must depressurize and then dis-inflate the pneumatic barriers. However, since the barriers are the third line of defense the designers figured that constituted a manageable cost.

  “So why don’t you have that here?”

  “Two reasons,” Tom said. “First, cost. Second, this was originally an asteroid mining services ship - so the chances of hull penetration were much greater. We had to take vacuum management very seriously. Movement around the ship to make repairs, even in a vacuum, was essential for our small crew. Therefore, the pneumatics didn’t work for us.”

  “Does anybody live in here still?” asked Dirk.

  “No,” Tom said. “It is nice enough, but the staterooms are very small and keeping the entire ship ventilated, heated and the water and sewage systems operating is too energy intensive.”

  “But I hear ventilation,” Dirk said.

  “Yes, I keep the basic system going, but it barely keeps the ship alive. The main control spaces are maintained at a habitable level, but if we went through any of these hatches we are passing you’d notice an immediate difference in the air quality.”

  They took a series of ladders up and walked forward again for what seemed to Dirk an inordinately long time. Finally, Tom opened a hatch and Dirk saw the entire City with his own eyes for the first time. He’d seen pictures before leaving Earth, but he now looked out over the houses and buildings from four stories up – an insignificant height on Earth, but a staggeringly high perspective on Mars. He’d been on Mars for a month and had become accustomed to operating entirely at ground level – this was a welcome change.

  The ship faced North, and from the port side of the bridge Dirk saw the City spread out to the West, with Mons Olympus occupying the Western horizon. He walked along the bridge from left to right, taking in the sights. Off the starboard side he was able to look down onto the greenhouses, the water ponds and the power field where they “mined” the methane crystals that provided 90% of their power.

  “What are all of these controls?” Dirk asked, pointing at a chair with a yoke and foot pedals. “Don’t you control the ship from the tablet and let the automatic systems do the navigation and flying?”

  “It is certainly possible to allow the ship to fly itself, but this ship is designed for manual operation,” Tom said.

  “Why?” asked Dirk. “Isn’t that a waste of human time when computers could do it faster and better?”

  “In some ways, that is true, but the operational requirements for this type of ship are such that keeping the human in the loop was deemed essential for two reasons. First, when this ship was built the malicious hacker threat had reemerged. In the constant battle between offense and defense, the offense had gained the advantage and hackers were both infecting ships with malware and taking control of ships. In the best cases committed piracy – the age old hijacking of ships for their cargo, to use the ship for other illegal activity, or to sell it. However, there were also cases of ships being hijacked and destroyed by environmental activists. Even on ships designed with emergency manual controls the hackers were often able to lock out the manual control capabilities, or retain computer control of the key functions, such as engine thrust for example, at a deeper level of the system, negating the manual control cut outs. In addition, the predominantly computer control makes pilots lazy and less capable of responding effectively to emergencies. A computer can do everything better than a human, except when it can’t,” Tom concluded. “As a result of these threats, this ship is designed for predominantly manual control.”

  As Dirk began his second circumnavigation of the row of bridge windows an alarm sounded. Dirk jumped back, afraid he’d set it off somehow.

  Tom’s eye went to the indicator panel on the aft bulkhead.

  “Come on,” he said calmly but firmly. “You can help me deal with this dust bunny attack.”

  Tom quickly left the bridge. As Dirk followed closely behind him, he heard hatches slamming shut throughout the ship.

  “What’s that banging?” he asked Tom, a little bit nervous.

  “Don’t sweat that – it is the fire zone doors shutting. When there is a fire alarm the ventilation system shuts down to avoid spreading smoke. The fire zone doors, which are held in the open position by electromagnets, close to further isolate the fire.”

  Dirk almost had to run to keep up with Tom. Tom swung up ladders, down passageways, thr
ough closed fire zone doors until they reached the staterooms near the upper part of the ship. The flashing of the alarm lights was brighter here, indicating proximity to the fire.

  Tom opened a locker, one of many they had passed on their movement through the ship, and removed a oxygen breathing apparatus (OBA) complete with face mask and a fire fighting ensemble, and handed them to Dirk.

  “Put this on” Tom said, as he stepped quickly into the ensemble and pulled his own OBA on. He was done before Dirk had even started.

  “Put on the mask, but don’t activate it unless I tell you to or I don’t come back out of that door in 3 minutes,” Tom said. Tom pulled the door open and was in the space before Dirk could respond. He tightened the mask onto his face – he’d practiced with this sort of gear one year at summer camp, but hadn’t touched (or actually thought about it) since.

  Dirk suddenly remembered to check his watch and started the stopwatch. He stared at it as he listened for Tom.

  The door opened at 2:30 seconds and Tom walked out. “As I suspected,” he said, the mask still on, “dust bunnies in a ventilation fan. In spite of all the filters, dust and sand gets into the ventilation uptakes and from there into the fans. After a while, it scours away the insulation on the wires and we get a class Charlie fire.”

  Dirk recalled the four types of fires: Alphas - wood and other stuff, like paper, that leaves ash; Bravo - petroleum products, fuels, lube oils, etc.; Charlie - electrical and Delta, or special like Magnesium and self oxidizing fuels.

  “So you used CO2, right?” Dirk asked.

  “Yes, we have a fixed flooding system. We can make CO2, but we can’t make halon. You know a lot about fire fighting Dirk. So why did I put the mask on before I opened the door? Why not rush in?”

  Dirk thought a moment. “You said it was a fixed flooding system?”

  “Yep,” said Tom.

  “CO2 displaces oxygen – that is how it puts out the fire. If you had gone into a confined space, like a fan room with the fans secured, without supplemental breathing equipment, you would have passed out from lack of oxygen.”

  “And died,” Tom agreed. “Very good. I’m glad I had you along. I’ve isolated the fan – another ventilation degradation for the old girl.”

  Tom removed the ensemble. “Did you activate your OBA?”

  “No,” Dirk said.

  “Good, I don’t want to waste it. If I hadn’t come out in the three minutes you would have activated the OBA and come in to get me, right?” he asked.

  “Of course,” Dirk said. “Somebody has to carry T2 around.”

  “Thanks. Let’s put these ensembles away and head back to the bridge.”

  Tom sat down in the Captain’s chair and began typing on the flat panel that he swung in front of his chair. The giant tablet, mounted on a robotic arm that adjusted the position of the screen based on Tom’s position, continually ensuring it was optimized for typing or reading.

  “Hey, are you allowed to sit in the Captain’s chair?” Dirk asked.

  Tom smiled. “I’m pretty sure its ok – I’m the Captain.”

  Dirk felt really stupid, and stared out at the greenhouse as his face flushed with embarrassment. “Ok, of course” he said.

  “You’ll find that everyone here has a broad skill set. One reason I took this position was to enable me to stay at home with Mandy and T2. I spent 6 years qualifying and then piloting ships to and from asteroid mining projects.”

  “I thought those ships were autonomous,” Dirk said.

  “Yes, most of them are, but there are still a few jobs that require human intervention. I piloted those specialized ships and was on the team performing those complex engineering tasks. As a result, I was gone most of the time, it seemed. Mandy and I didn’t even live together until after we’d been married for a year and even after that I was gone, it seemed, all the time. So I had to move to Mars to spend every day with my family.”

  “Why didn’t they use the ship to power the city? Dirk asked. “It’s big enough isn’t it?”

  “In some ways it is big enough, but its auxiliary power systems were designed to run the ship, not power a town. They could have installed additional auxiliary power capability, but that would add to the cost. In addition, they wanted the City to become self sustaining, which requires more power than the ship can provide. It was thus cheaper to transport gas turbine generators and only rely on the ship until the methane fuel production system became operational,” Tom answered.

  “And I guess relying entirely on the ship for power and services could prove seriously suboptimal in the event of a fire bigger than the one we saw,” Dirk said.

  “Excellent point,” Tom said, with an admiring smile. “Relying on any single system, even an inter-solar service craft, for our ‘household’ services - in other words, the basic life support systems - is not smart. In fact, that is why your job is so important.”

  Dirk looked quickly at Tom. “Huh?” he said. “How is my job important?”

  “We are currently operating at a level of high risk – the boundary between life and death for the entire colony is razor thin. We have to wait for the Elevator to deliver the necessary equipment to establish our backup infrastructure, like a secondary control system for the water and power. I’ve been working on jury rigging an emergency pumping system in order to maintain enough pressure in the water system to ensure sufficient flow to avoid it freezing – and thus keep us alive – but I’m not sure it would work and don’t want to take the chance. For that and many other reasons, the faster you get the Elevator equipment delivered the better for all of us.”

  Dirk had a new found respect for his job – not enough to make him look forward to doing it, but Tom had provided another perspective from which to look at his day of tedium interspersed with a delivery challenge every few days, and the always annoying diplomatic pouches.

  Dirk turned away from the window to look more closely around the bridge. “This is an awesome workspace,” Dirk said, changing the subject. “You can see for miles. But where is the Printer Book?” he asked, his greed for independence inspired by the view of the other houses. If he’d stayed on Earth, and succeeded in going pro this year, he’d have moved into his own apartment – without roommates. He’d been excited to see his dad again, but also bummed that his opportunity to live independently had been pushed into the future by his move to Mars. Therefore, he’d been ecstatic when his dad told him he could have his own house, and absolutely overjoyed when told he could build it himself.

  Tom walked over to a shelf – “All home construction is in here. Pay special attention to the plumbing modules – getting those right is essential, for obvious reasons. In fact, I’d recommend you pause after the first foundational build and ensure the plumbing is aligned correctly. It is not too difficult to cut out the piping sections and re-lay them when there is nothing on top of them, but once the upper layers are printed making a fix is nearly impossible. In fact, I’d say you’d have to live with your dad and wait until the Elevator has normalized the logistics network before we’d be able to get the parts necessary.”

  “Got it,” said Dirk. “Pause for plumbing check.”

  “Your choices are also very limited – most of the architectural drawings in that Book have not been modified for Mars. Our walls, to enable the water storage used for cosmic ray shielding and thermal insulation, are extremely thick. No windows either - as you’ve noticed,” Tom said. “That severely limits your design choices.”

  “But the Power Plant has skylights and windows,” Dirk said.

  “The Power Plant’s light tube windows are specially coated sapphire. We installed them because at the beginning we didn’t have a good feeling for our energy consumption and didn’t want to have to spend energy on lights (transporting them here, installing, and powering them) to set up the Power Plant,” explained Tom.

  “I’d wondered about that.”

  “There are several reasons. First, it makes con
struction easier. Two, windows capable of standing up to the constant scouring by the sand and thus sufficient to block cosmic rays are both heavy in themselves and difficult to manufacture and thus expensive. Three, back on Earth people have lost interest in windows – a static view of some other building is simply insufficiently interesting. Most people are in an augmented reality anyway, and can present themselves with whatever computer generated scenes they want to enjoy – Kailua beaches, San Gorgonio peak, the high desert of New Mexico, Balinese beaches, the veldt, and so on. Windows have thus become a waste of space, better replaced by screens.”

  “Then why do you walk all the way to the bridge as your office?” Dirk asked.

  “I love the view,” Tom said. “When underway I’d spend my watches staring out into space. Approaching an asteroid mining operation was especially fantastic – brightly illuminated, spinning softly against a backdrop of stars, or with Jupiter looming behind – fantastic! And now we live on Mars! Of course I want to see more than what is visible on the walk between the various City habitations.”

  Now that Dirk had seen the view, he had to agree. Life on Mars was still so new to him, and his walk to work gave him plenty of time to enjoy the view, (too much time in some cases) that he hadn’t thought about those who worked inside.

  “Thanks a lot, Tom, for the Printer Book. I’ll get to work on figuring it out immediately.”

  “Why in such a hurry?” Tom asked. “Is living with your Dad that much of a bummer?”

  “No, no,” Dirk said. “Living with Dad is great! I’m going to build my house right next door to his actually. It is not that living with Dad is bad - having my own place is better.”

  “Yeah, I can understand that. I would have loved my own place at age 14. Remember what I said about the plumbing – I’ll remind you again when we start construction. There are not that many choices, so decide in a day or so and get started on the actual construction by the end of the week.”

  “Great, thanks,” said Dirk.

  “Can you find your way out?” Tom asked.

  “Yeah, once I’ve been somewhere I’m generally pretty good at finding my way back. Though if you hear frantic banging and screaming in a few hours you’ll know its me.”

  Tom laughed. “Ok, see you later.”

  “See you.”

  (20) Day 12 1630 A Maker makes a Martian home

  Dirk made his way out of the ship without incident, and headed back to his room at his dad’s house.

  He linked the Printer Book to the large projection system and began flipping through the possible designs.

  They were less than impressive. He’d wondered why there was so little variety in the buildings here and thought that perhaps it was due to the shieling requirement. However, as he looked through the plans and read the specifications for each building, he saw that the lack of variety was not due to technical limitations of the printer or the cosmic ray shielding demands. The limited quantity of building “ink” and the shielding affected the designs, but there was a lot more leeway within the specifications than anyone had taken advantage of.

  “Perhaps no one willing to come to Mars really cares about architecture. They have other things on their minds,” he thought.

  Dirk was not in that position however. He had studied art history extensively, even though many of the buildings discussed had long since disappeared. He loved the ideas about living instantiated in the old buildings, like Gaudi’s apartment buildings in Barcelona.

  Yet his motivation to modify the available designs was not only driven by his interest in art history. Another factor also influenced his interest in tweaking the available designs – rock climbing.

  His climbing ability constituted his main differentiator in the AR Games, and he’d planned on ‘riding’ that capability all the way to pros. Although he’d had to give up that dream, he was itching to climb more. The rifts on Mars were great. However, the requirements to wear the suit, carry all the extra water, and the safety aspect which mandated he only go with a buddy (and Tom was the only buddy he had, with a full schedule all his own) motivated him to create a home based solution that was both convenient and most importantly, challenging.

  “This will require programming modifications,” Dirk said to himself as he typed in the terminal prompt and worked his way past the admin layers into the root directory.

  Dirk had some experience with such things. After he’d communicated his willingness to move to Mars the Company had immediately started sending preparatory materials. These included training programs for the Crane Farm and most importantly to his mind, a state of the art tablet, The Book. Using a holographic memory, the Book contained all the information about the Martian colony – including systems drawings and the technical manuals for every piece of gear on the planet.

  However, Dirk was less pleased when he tried to download his own texts, music and video collections to the Book and was met with a 403 error – permissions denied.

  Dirk called the Earth Company representative in charge of emigration

  “Hi, this is Dirk – I’m heading to Mars to serve as your Crane Farm operator.”

  “Yes Dirk, welcome to the Company,” the rep said.

  “I’ve received my Book and am trying to go through it in order to prepare for the mission, but I cannot figure out how to upload my own material. I keep getting a 403 error ‘Permissions denied’”.

  “Yeah…..” the rep said.

  “Not a good sign,” thought Dirk.

  “The Book contains primarily Company proprietary information. However, it also contains all the NASA information on Mars. Until five years ago such information was considered in the public domain. However, this Administration has retroactively asserted a Government copyright on that data and information. As a result, we have had to lock down the Books because otherwise the data would be sharable again online to the world, violating the terms of the copyright.”

  “Can’t you get a site license?” Dirk asked. “Old government information can’t be that expensive.”

  “You would think so, and I personally agree with you. But this administration believes differently – they feel that the Company should not be permitted to benefit from information generated at taxpayer expense. So they are retroactively charging.”

  “But the Company is a taxpayer!” Dirk said.

  “You are preaching to the choir, friend.”

  “So I’m out of luck then,” Dirk said after a pause.

  “Afraid so.”

  “Ok, thanks,” said Dirk, holding in the angry retort that was bubbling past his throat. It certainly wasn’t the Company’s fault.

  His dad had made him take multiple programing certifications, which he up to then found less than useless. “Maybe they will come in handy now,” he thought.

  It took a few hours of research to determine the language in which the Book operating system was written. Once he had that he quickly figured out what machine language it used. Dirk reviewed some of his old courses and then dove in.

  Cracking a Government protected book was not something you could search online for, but that didn’t mean that it was extremely difficult to do. He wrote a few trial scripts, one of which provided root drive access. From there he was able to get into the Unix and really get to work.

  He was bothered by the illegal aspect of the cracking, but justified it (self servinginly and with less than complete integrity) saying that since he wasn’t going to give away the Government or Company data, it was ok under the “personal use” exemption. “I’m moving to Mars – I’ve got to take my shows, music and books.” There was of course limited streaming of content from Earth, but when accustomed to thousands of movies and shows constantly available, the idea of a severely limited selection, curated by people much older than himself, was less than attractive.

  Yet his morally ambiguous cracking effort was now coming in handy – the Printer Book had the same operating system. After about 20 minutes of l
ooking at the coding associated with the provided templates he discerned a way to make the structural modifications he wanted.

  “This is going to be great!” he said to himself as he began coding furiously.

  (21) Day 20 Home Revelation

  “Ok Dirk, this looks good,” Tom had said after completing his foundation and plumbing build inspection.

  “Thanks for checking it out,” Dirk said.

  “I see you chose the Palladian plan, the basic two bedroom, two bath. Good choice.”

  “Yeah, simple and functional,” Dirk said.

  Following the foundation inspection, it took Dirk a week, to build his house. Of course, the printer really built it, but he had to monitor the process, responding to the occasional clogged nozzle or other problem. He timed the final build sequence so that it took place after dark. He wanted to surprise his dad and friends with what he’d designed.

  “What is that!” his dad exclaimed. “That’s not in the design Book,” he said, smiling in amazement when he saw the tower on Dirk’s house, rising above every other building except the ship and Power Plant.

  “How did you make the tower?” asked his dad. “I know that is not a plan option.”

  Tom agreed. “The tower is higher than the printer! I noticed it when I passed by this morning. How’d you do that?”

  Dirk, pleased by their admiration of his work, explained. “As you know, the printer elevates or unfolds itself, kind of like a spider raising up on its legs, as a result of the pressurization of the ‘ink’. The ‘ink’ itself thus provides the tension in the structure. With that in mind, I build an extension for the ink head, moving it up and to the right.”

  “That’s the great thing about additive manufacturing – you can use the printer to make more printer parts,” his dad chimed in.

  “Precisely,” said Dirk. “Using the printer/3d milling machine, I made an additional pipe and junction sets. This enabled me to remove and reinstall the printer head at the new higher elevation on the extender.”

  “But how did you get the printer to print properly? It still thought the head was using the center of the printer as its 0,0 point, not a point up and to the right.”

  “That took a little reprogramming,” Dirk said. “I had to put in an offset to get the printer to think the printer head was still at 0,0. I lost about 60% of the printing speed too because of the increased elevation – the pumps had to work harder to get the ink up there. But since the tower isn’t that big it wasn’t a problem.”

  “Impressive,” said Mandy.

  “Come on inside,” Dirk said, leading the way.

  The house opened into a large room, with the kitchen on the left and a couch on the right wall. The two bedrooms were straight ahead, each with their own bathroom. Three features of the space proved most amazing to the group: first, the walls were textured with what at first glance appeared as a complex pattern of shadows of varying intensity. On closer examination, they saw that they were created by indentations and protrusions on the walls and ceilings.

  “You made a climbing gym!” exclaimed Tom.

  Dirk beamed with pleasure as Tom began bouldering around the house. The protrusions and indentations continued up the tower, the opening of which was immediately in front of the bedrooms. Tom rapidly climbed up.

  “Why the curves in the tower?” Tom asked as he started to climb up it.

  “I wanted to be able to climb by myself, whenever I wanted, without someone on belay. Therefore I put the curves in so in the event of a catastrophic fail I don’t plummet all the way down to the ground, but have a place to land in-between. It is possible to climb up and down uninterrupted though too.”

  “Brilliant” said Tom, as he disappeared from view.

  “Nice job, Dirk,” his dad said as he checked out the bedrooms. “Why did you make two bedrooms?”

  “I figured I might want one later, so better to build it now.”

  “Good thinking,” said his dad.

  “So that’s what you did with it!” yelled Tom from the top of the tower.

  “What is he talking about?” asked Mandy.

  “The light – I installed a solar tube at the top of the tower, and built additional tubes through the walls in order to allow the light to filter through the entire house. The solar tube blocks the cosmic rays but allows light. The curves in the tower mitigate stray cosmic rays,” Dirk explained.

  Tom descended from the tower. “Fantastic climb, Dirk! And there is so much variety. You’ll never get bored. I thought you wanted the solar tube for one of the garages – this is a far superior application,” he said.

  “Your programming study really paid off,” said his dad proudly.

  Dirk smiled. Maybe Mars wasn’t going to be so bad after all.

  (22) Day 21 0830 Making Crane Mods

  Dirk opened the “garage” door. The 3D printed structure extended 3 meters from the rock face and was two meters high. The front opened like a shell to allow for vehicle ingress and egress. Dust from the storms still entered the shelter, but at low velocities so it did little damage – or so the Company designers had believed.

  Dirk was finding out damage occurred – more than he liked. He had an idea to improve upon the push Crane he’d created. However, the Crane he wanted to work on wouldn’t start. He ran through the pre-start checks contained in the Book a second time, without joy. Feeling the frustration welling up he did his best to tamp it down. Getting upset was utterly pointless - machines break. It is, as his dad often said, a result of “The perversity of inanimate objects”. That is all there is to it.

  He scanned to the troubleshooting section of the Book. It contained checklists for every possible problem, staring with “not starting”.

  “Check that the on/off switch is in the on position.”

  “Check battery level.”

  “If level less than 10%, charge battery and return to step one.”

  And so on.

  Dirk sighed and began working through the checklists. After completing the obvious checks he tackled the more esoteric ones.

  “If I’d been to the maintenance school, I would have seen these, and the repairs they directed, at least once before.” However, as his dad had explained when he had learned no actual classes were required for his new job, “The Company decided that online simulation training was sufficient to operate the Cranes (very simple devices due to the requirement they function in a wide range of harsh environments) for three reasons. One, they probably wouldn’t fail catastrophically anyway, and two, any failures wouldn’t materially affect the Space Elevator construction schedule. Therefore, the course cost exceeded the possible utility.”

  “What was the third reason?” Dirk asked.

  “The Company has a lot of experience with people heading to space for long term work. Therefore, they knew that few people heading to Mars would be willing to attend the course - spending time to study to do something that would probably never happen was not an attractive prospect for people for whom the relative value of each minute they had on Earth increased geometrically with the approach of their Mars lift off.”

  “Makes sense, I guess,” said Dirk to himself, “until you need to fix one of these puppies.”

  “Replace drive control motherboard,” was the final step in the flow diagram governing the checklists.

  “This looks like a simple change – I remove a panel on the console to the right front of the driver, take out the old motherboard and put in a new one. But where will I get a new one?” Dirk asked himself.

  “I could put in a requisition for an emergency part delivery, but even that would take months.” More importantly, Dirk dreaded the idea of making a formal request of the Company. “It wasn’t my fault (I’m pretty sure) and the prospect of the attention and ensuing scrutiny of my actions is extremely unattractive.”

  He sat down in the drivers seat, in the dim light of the garage, and thought through his options. The Sky Cranes
were equipped with wheels. On the larger asteroids, once they delivered their cargo, they were used for ore movement. The Crane turned (slowly) by varying the speed and or direction of the wheels, each of which was powered by its own electric motor.

  “I wonder if the motherboard for all the Cranes is the same?” Dirk said to himself, the troubleshooting manual unable to help him at the moment.

  This was a potentially fecund thought, because there were several Cranes in the “bone yard”, the large garage where he parked the used Cranes.

  “If the motherboards are the same, undamaged by sandstorms and time, and the programing for the controls was stored in memory not located on the motherboard, it should be possible to switch out the motherboard.”

  “There is only one way to find out,” he said to himself, climbed out of the drivers seat, ducked through the door of the garage, closed it behind him (storms were unpredictable) and headed over to the control building to get his other bag of tools.

  Radius was sitting in the control room. “Hey Radius, I’m cannibalizing one of the Cranes – want to watch?” Dirk said.

  Dirk could almost see him trying to figure out the use of the word “cannibalism” in this context as Radius looked at him. Dirk laughed to himself – it wasn’t often that he knew or understood something that Radius didn’t.

  Radius stood up. “Ok” he said, but with a lack of certainty.

  Dirk took the tool bag with the screwdrivers and specialized tools designed to remove and replace Crane circuit boards.

  They walked across the bone yard and Dirk stopped at the newest Crane, figuring it was most likely the least degraded by the Martian weather and old age. The only delivery for the day was a large Crane containing an elevator cable pulley. He referred to these massive loads as “Titans”. It wasn’t due for 5 hours, which gave him plenty of time to work on this project.

  Opening the cover he peered inside, checking the layout against that shown in the Book. He broke the plastic seal covering the cards and removed the middle one, as the diagram indicated. After he did he realized he hadn’t checked the Crane model number to see if it was the same family, and thus backward compatible with the Crane he wanted to repair. “Oh well, too late now,” he said.

  “What?” asked Radius?

  “Nothing, I was muttering to myself,” Dirk said.

  “Ok,” said Radius.

  Dirk snapped the panel closed, and put the card in an anti-static bag left over from a previous delivery. “Let’s see if it works,” Dirk said, and started walking over to the garage. Radius followed along.

  Dirk opened the garage door and hopped into the driver’s seat and looked for the model number. “LM2500”. It matched. He let out a sigh of relief and removed the malfunctioning motherboard from console, and put it on the workbench.

  Sitting back down in the driver’s seat, he removed the replacement panel from his protective bag. “Now for the moment of truth,” he said, the new card in his hand.

  Placing the replacement card in the slot, he gently pressed down – click. It fit!

  “Sweet!” Dirk said, excited. He flipped through the Book and started the “After repair start checklist”. He didn’t want to screw something up now.

  “Check battery level. If battery level is below 10%, charge before starting.”

  “73.2 %” Dirk said out loud, working through the checklist.

  “Turn the on/off switch to the on position.”

  “Here we go,” he said to Radius.

  Click.

  The panel lights illuminated at the same moment the “stray package” alarm sounded.

  (23) Day 21 1030 Injury

  “Whoa!” said Dirk at first thinking he’d caused the alarm, not immediately realizing the alarm had nothing to do with his current efforts. “We’ve got to move!”

  Dirk grabbed the tool bag, sprinted out the garage, hitting the “down/close” switch on the way out, and started running. The garage was further away from the emergency shelter than their normal watch station, so Dirk knew that his timing was all off.

  Radius had pulled ahead. Suddenly he stopped and yelled at Dirk: “Drop the tools!”

  It was very good advice - he dropped the bag and caught up to Radius.

  They ran to the shelter, the alarm still sounding the alert. As they hunkered down it shifted to the “impact imminent siren” and Dirk thought about his dad and mom back on Earth.

  “The pulley is huge and heavy – even a near miss could be fatal. But why is it so early?” Dirk thought. He looked at the monitor in the shelter – the package was close. At 15 seconds to impact the package appeared to drift far to the East. The alarm stopped. Dirk listened for the muffled impact of the crash.

  But it never came.

  Dirk waited, crouched down in the shelter.

  “High priority package location approximately 2.7 kilometers on bearing 087” appeared on the monitor.

  “Area D,” Radius said.

  “High priority package?” Dirk said aloud. “What package? No packages were scheduled. Radius, were there any other packages for today?”

  Radius paused, even though he didn’t need to – he had developed the habit of pausing before answering questions to avoid stepping on his interlocutors. If he answered as soon as he had successfully anticipated the question and formulated a response he could start answering before the human was finished asking, which they seemed to find annoying. It was another example of the strange hybrid condition of being a robot on Mars. He was treated as a companion, more than he would be on Earth, and so in several ways had to act less like a robot. In some situations this was due to a self-throttling back, like a restrictor on a Nascar engine. In others it was an actual restriction, resulting from the time and distance from the Earth based “cloud”. Instead of the normal procedure of, in response to a query, providing information based on the collective intelligence of 10 billion people and the hyper connected Internet of Things through cloud based search he had to retrieve information he assessed as relevant, analyze that information, and formulate a response from his own local holographic memory.

  “No packages scheduled. Astray package is a high priority diplomatic pouch.”

  That explained it. The Company would never schedule another delivery on the days when the Titan Cranes were scheduled. No point in adding a complication to the already extensive set of opportunities for the Galactic Ghoul to wreck havoc on a delivery. Better to keep them temporally separated and thereby simplify the problem as much as possible.

  “We better go get it,” Dirk said grudgingly. He checked the Book for the schedule for the main delivery. Now that the Crane was fixed he actually had enough time to get the other package. He hadn’t known how long the repair was going to take. If he’d had to try several different motherboards it could have taken him all day.

  “The tools,” Radius said, as Dirk arose and climbed out of the shelter.

  “Oh yeah,” Dirk responded sheepishly. His panicked run was a little embarrassing in hindsight. They walked back to the tool bag. A couple had spilled out of the bag when he’d dropped it, but nothing appeared broken. He zipped the bag closed and headed to the garage to make sure he’d turned off the Crane so he didn’t run down the battery after having fixed the darn thing.

  He hadn’t turned it off, and did now. “We should grab some water before going out there,” he said to Radius.

  “I’ll get it,” Radius said, and turned back to the main control station.

  “Let’s meet at the southern radar receiver,” Dirk said.

  “Ok.”

  Dirk walked toward the far end of the port. They had to go East, but he didn’t want to climb the berm and then go through the widest and deepest part of the ravine that bordered the eastern edge of the Crane Farm. The ravine was much shallower at the bottom end of the landing area, and they could cross to the south and then work their way back further north to get back on track. The area of uncertainty f
or the stray package’s location at 2.7 km was 500 meters, and there was no telling how long the beacon would last. He might have to wander around for a couple of hours to find it – “Better save some energy while I can,” he thought.

  As Dirk passed the southern radar repeater Radius caught up carrying a backpack.

  After a boulder field the land leveled out to a sizable plateau. Most packages were visible then, so he’d take a quick visual fix against a mountain peak in the far distance in case the signal died, and head out to get them. No such luck this time. Nothing in sight, and the signal was weakening rapidly.

  “Ugh,” said Dirk, looking at Radius. “Let’s spread out – I’ll head north a little and you start going straight out here. You keep the main track and I’ll adjust to you.”

  “Roger,” said Radius.

  Radius could navigate based on the WiMAX signal from the port, while they had it. In addition, he could acquire fixes on the limited Mars Global Positioning System (MGPS) to a limited extent. That quickly drained his power, however, so they generally only used it in emergencies.

  More usefully in these situations he could also dead reckon, creating a track by counting his steps and mapping them on the topographic maps he had stored in his flash random access memory (RAM). Dirk had him download these tracks periodically – he enjoyed looking at the ground they’d covered, ground no one else in history, Terran and Martian, had covered before.

  In 30 minutes they reached the end of the plateau and the signal still indicated that the package was due east. They’d have to cross another ravine, and now their time was growing short – they should be back in the control station 30 minutes before the package was due to arrive – that gave them two and a half hours to find the package and return.

  “Where do you think we should focus?” Dirk asked Radius, knowing Radius could acquire a bearing and estimate range to the package from the signal strength, and then extrapolate to produce a more refined area of uncertainty in which to search.

  “093 relative” Radius said. That bearing took them down into another wide (it extended both to their left and right) but narrow ravine.

  “Do you think we can jump it?” asked Dirk, eyeing the chasm. Jumping would save a lot of time, but if he or Radius fell short they faced a long walk back injured.

  Radius did some calculations and quickly decided that it was too far. “No, too far. You have only a 20% chance of making it.” He didn’t mention that he could, since Dirk’s jumping ability constituted the limiting factor.

  On Earth, where the stakes were lower and assistance closer, Dirk would have taken the leap – it would be shameful not to. He’d made similar leaps in the past, in greater gravity. But he didn’t second-guess Radius – that sort of immature foolishness would get him killed. Even if a distress call made it back, someone would have to come on foot to find them, and a fall of 20 feet, even on Mars, could do sufficient damage that the couple of hours required for rescue could prove fatal.

  “Let’s find a place to climb down then - hurry. That signal is going to fail any minute and we still have to get back to the port for today’s actually scheduled delivery” Dirk said.

  He scanned the map on the Book. “According to the Book, there is a small crater on the other side of the ravine. Maybe the package is in there, and that’s why the signal is so weak.”

  Radius moved south, scanning for the signal and surveying the ravine. Dirk walked quickly past him – he’d seen a spot he thought looked promising. He stopped and drank from the water bottle Radius had brought him. The suit filtered sweat and urine, and put it back into the drinkable reservoir, but his level indicator was blinking “Red”. He’d consumed most of his water while working on the Crane, and had been in such a hurry to retrieve the package that he hadn’t filled up the suit reservoir and his extra pouch in the backpack before he took off –not smart, and he was paying for it now. If Radius hadn’t brought water he’d be in serious trouble already. He took a slow sip and stopped, still thirsty but wanting to save some to moisten his mouth with, at least, on the hike back once they had retrieved that dumb package. He’d only been on Mars for a few months, and he was already sick and tired of always having to worry about water whenever he left the confines of the City.

  “Even for a day at the Crane Farm I have to carry my own water (about four liters) down from the City, walking like a 20th century village girl from the local well. And that four liters is barely enough to get through the day,” Dirk thought.

  Initially, he’d been angry with his dad for forcing him to take four liters. However, the air on Mars, like the high windy deserts of the Tibetan plateau, was extremely dry. Only the recycling ability of the ‘sweatsuit’ enabled him to comfortably make it through the day, especially when chasing a stray screamer, on what was actually a small quantity of water.

  “I’ll be glad when the elevator is working and the Company can deliver more water, in useable containers (instead of crashing snowball comets into the planet as they had done for the first 90 years of the terraforming effort),” he thought.

  There was actually plenty of water on Mars, but it was still mostly stuck in the permafrost. The 100 years of terraforming made the ground soggy during the summer in the temperate zone at lower altitudes. However, the altitude and geology of the City (they hadn’t wanted to build the City in a future lake) meant that there was little useful surface water other than that created by the moles. All the water the City produced was stored in tanks or in the greenhouses in order to limit evaporation. So while supposedly some lakes and even creeks were forming in the Northern lowlands, they did thirsty Dirk no good at the moment.

  Pushing the thought of water from his mind, he surveyed the rift and returned his attention to the immediate problem at hand.

  “Radius, check this out. We can go down here, brace against that rock face, and then spider walk along to that collapsed section. That will get us down, across and over in two minutes,” Dirk said.

  Radius didn’t object, and so after checking his watch again Dirk began the climb.

  He scrambled down, and jumped into the gap, landing with his feet pushing against each wall. Swiveling to the right, he grabbed the easternmost face and pulled himself over. He then moved laterally to the collapsed section and easily walked up.

  About 100 meters away he saw what looked like a bright yellow rock. There was nothing that color on Mars, so it must be part of the deflated balloon structure that cushioned the landing. “Come on Radius. I think I can see the package from here.”

  He started to rush off, but realized he should wait for Radius and looked back. Radius was following his lead, copying his movements. Radius weighed about 50 pounds more than Dirk, but still, if a hold could support Dirk it would probably support Radius. Radius, with less effort than Dirk since his arms and legs were longer, placed his feet and reached for the handholds on the eastern wall.

  After one complete move along the rift face Radius abruptly slid down the wall about half a meter and stopped. Dirk couldn’t see all of him, and couldn’t tell precisely what had happened.

  “Radius, you ok?” he yelled.

  “No,” said Radius, but kept moving toward the collapsed section. He right foot had slipped as he moved across the rock face – the resulting shift in weight had damaged his left knee – as his body slid down, the inner side of his knee assembly had crumpled. It was not designed, like the human knee is not, to take sudden laterally distributed loads. A human however, would have pivoted on the foot and ankle, saving the knee – Radius’s programming was unable to perform such a chaotic movement as a result of the instantaneous input provided by the sudden collapse of the soil upon which he had shifted much of his weight as he switched his hand hold.

  Radius climbed up using only his right leg and arms. Dirk rushed to his side and helped pull him out.

  “What happened?” Dirk asked.

  “My right foot slipped as I shifted my weight to move acros
s the rock face. The resulting excessive transverse loading caused my left knee to collapse,” Radius calmly replied.

  Dirk looked at Radius’ left leg - his left calf and foot were canted out at a 30-degree angle. Radius was standing calmly on his right as if nothing was the matter, but Dirk could tell by watching the way he had climbed up the collapsed section that his mobility was now severely restricted.

  “Tell you what,” Dirk said. “You sit here and rest – I’ll go ahead and get the package. I think I can see the balloon from here. It’s in the crater, as we thought. That is why the signal was so weak – we were only able to catch the upper signal lobes. Maybe when you’ve had a chance to rest you’ll be able to walk better.” Dirk strode off quickly.

  As he walked he realized that what he’d said was pretty stupid. “Rest is not going to help Radius ‘feel better’. If his knee is damaged it had to be repaired or replaced – resting won’t help at all. Radius could have been designed with a self healing capability, but the cost associated with that was so much greater than replacing the broken parts when they occurred (even when those parts had to get to Mars) that it didn’t make sense,” he thought.

  Based on the cursory visual analysis Dirk couldn’t tell if it was a repairable fault and he had no idea what parts were available on planet.

  “I’ll have to figure that out once we are safely back in town. Now I have two critical tasks requiring my full focus - grabbing the package, and getting back to the port before the next package arrives.”

  The crater was fairly smooth, and after a couple of minutes he was able to see that the yellow shape was in fact the package. He walked quickly, with long strides, to the package, hoping it was small and light. Not only was he going to have to carry the package alone now, he’d have to help Radius walk as well.

  “Diplomatic pouch!” he said disgustedly. “And it is super light! No wonder it floated so far off course.”

  “Its crazy the Company has to eat the cost of delivering this stuff. What could be so important?” He picked up the shoebox-sized package.

  “This won’t slow us down much,” Dirk said to himself, and headed back to Radius.