Chapter 14 — Farewell to Earth
It was past noon on March 1, 1985 in San Diego. The morning fog had gone and the sidewalks were crowded as they had not been since the day of the Armistice which ended the great war. Police held back the enormous crowds thronging every street leading to the harbor. The city was gaily decorated with star-spangled bunting and the rainbow colors of the United States of the Earth. Greetings to the Mars adventurers hung in great transparencies across the wide thoroughfares.
The steamer Queen of Hawaii lay alongside the string-piece of San Diego's waterfront wall. It was in her that the personnel of Operation Mars would sail for Christmas Island at slack tide in the evening.
Four years had passed since a memorable session of the Congress of Earth had passed the appropriations bill which was to make into a reality the exploration of interstellar space, and had loaded upon the shoulders of its protagonists the enormous burden which such an extension of a man's realm implied. The preparatory work had been unspectacular and quiet, and the general public had become almost unconscious of the mighty deeds which were preparing in their midst. But the departure of these intrepid men had again concentrated the light of publicity upon the enterprise, and Mars again was a familiar word upon the lips of all and sundry. Once more a spate of curiosity welled up as to his mysteries. America left no stone unturned to send forth her sons into illimitable space with proper honors and the proud pomp which was their due.
The great cruising steamer was full dressed with signal flags. Her ample decks swarmed with visitors and voyagers whose families had come to bid them farewell.
Fathers and mothers crowded the companionways. Aunts, uncles, cousins, brothers and sisters of the intrepid explorers cluttered every available space. Here and there lovers made plans for reunions when the three years demanded by the expedition should be over.
Gary and Catherine Holt stood on the boat deck looking at the harbor with its flotillas of submarines and destroyers nested beside their stodgy mother ships.
"Gary, I know you'll do it," she said without looking at him.
"Everything is as ready as we could make it," he answered. "God will have to do the rest."
The deep-toned whistle called those ashore who were not to depart. With a quiet kiss, Catherine descended the long, covered gangplank. The Space Forces band on the deck struck up a merry air and paper serpentines flew between the ship's rail and the pier. With a last loud blast from the whistle, moorings were cast off and the water between the white steel side of the vessel and the shore grew wider. Catherine held up her crossed fingers to Gary's receding figure. He could not see her brimming eyes above her smile fading into the distance and the crowd surrounding her as the ship pulled away…
As the Queen of Hawaii drew clear, every whistle, siren, horn and bell in the city of San Diego blasted its cheering fanfare to Holt and Knight and their enterprising band of spacefarers on the after-deck of the tall ship.
"This is it, Tom," said Holt quietly.
Coronado lay astern and the vessel had begun to lift and descend to the mild swell of the Pacific when the call to dinner rang from the ship's melodious gongs. The great dining hall was bright as the Mars crews seated themselves, to their full number of seventy, at long tables, one of which was occupied by the leaders who had done the planning.
Braden, Spencer, Peyton and Holt took their seats with the ten captains of the space ships waiting in the orbit of departure.
The captains were Henry Burck, whose adventure with the Hercules had earned him the sobriquet of "Captain Marvel"; Anthony Haynes, United Spacecraft's recent chief pilot, whose imperturbability had become legendary; and Frank Sherman who had been a space ship captain in the last war. He had emerged from retirement as a major in the Space Forces when the Mars expedition was activated. Another reactivated Major was fat, cheerful Freddy Duncan with his inexhaustible fund of salty and passable anecdotes.
Trygve Nordenskjold was a Norwegian lieutenant. A slim and silent fellow, he had made more than 60 ferry trips to the departure orbit in Sirius without the slightest incident. He'd been insistent that he could make as good landings on Mars as he could at home. Herbert Steinmetz, Lieutenant Colonel, Space Forces, an old-time space skipper. Fred van Newman, a young, intrepid looking captain. Lieutenant Colonel Tom Knight, with his light hair and winning ways; quiet, contemplative Glen Hubbard and the effervescent, smart Frenchman Charlie Laroche.
Little persiflage passed between them as they sat. Each man was too much affected by thoughts of the great adventure ahead. They had bidden farewell to their loved ones, to wander forth into the emptinesses of space for years; perhaps, indeed, for ever. They would stand on the brink of the unknown.
At a table to the right sat Hal Royer, navigator-in-chief, surrounded by the ten who were to work at that trade and simultaneously copilot their space ships. The next table was for the engineers; to the last man experienced "burner boys" from the war or the Lunetta Ferry. Their dean, tough, grizzled John Wiegand, vainly attempted to draw them into a discussion of specific impulse and the hypergolic propellants which eliminated the complicated machinery formerly required to induce combustion between fuels and oxygen-carriers. John had almost assembled the circling and waiting Mars ships with his own hands during the fifteen trips he had made to the departure orbit. Blindfolded, he could have laid his hand upon any tool in any space vessel. He knew more of the coming problems than any other engineer. But his attempts to lecture them fell on deaf ears. Their minds were elsewhere.
On the other side of the dining room sat the scientists. Dr. Marion Gudunek was a swarthy Yugoslavian research linguist whose fluent seventeen languages might enable him to establish verbal communication with Martians and permit his to study and codify their speech, if any. Near him sat John Henry Billingsley, as British as Brixton with his R.A.F mustache. He had abandoned his archeological diggings in India and China and left his book on the Ming dynasty incomplete so that he might plumb the depths of historical development on Mars. Douglas McRae would record zoological facts; Howard Ross would botanize. Sam Woolf's geological hammer was ready. Dr. Hans Bergmann knew Mars' geography better than he did that of the Earth.
James Barret, M.D. was the surgeon of the expedition and certainly the world's most distinguished practitioner of space medicine. Hardly had he graduated from Medical School than his keen mind apprehended the variety of medical problems which attended flight through space. It was not long before he had made the solution of these problems his main life's work. The effect of high accelerations upon the body caused him to perform studies with the human centrifuge which provided the ground work for his solution to the difficulty in breathing called forth by the inability of the chest muscles to expand the breast under high g's.
His discovery that hyperventilation during the low-g periods would store enough oxygen in the blood of a spacefarer to allow him to withstand the short periods of high g's without breathing at all had made him the medical advisor of the Space Forces, entirely aside from the many other medical innovations he pioneered.
During Lunetta's trial period, Barrett was her surgeon and was able to investigate the physiological and psychological effects of the absence of any acceleration, even that of gravity — the one "g" to which all creatures of Earth are subjected. Of these, the sense of equilibrium was the most affected and the most difficult of solution. When the war was over, he set up his famous Institute of Space Medicine and left it for a time only because of his devotion to the Mars project.