“Given that, I’m all the more appreciative that you made the arduous and risky journey to meet with me in person,” Julia said. “It is my firm conviction that, centuries from now, young Martians sitting in classrooms on the Red Planet will read in their history books — or whatever they have in place of books — about this meeting and what came of it.”
Ravi Kumar raised an index finger. “Instead of educating the young in classrooms,” he said, “why not do away altogether with the traditional structure of mass education and take a personalized, individualized approach? There’s no reason to repeat Earth’s mistakes on Mars.”
“I could not agree with you more,” Julia said, “and these sorts of fresh ideas only make me more eager to find a way of getting as many people there as soon as possible. How do we get started? What would be entailed in sending a forward advance party to Mars?”
For the second time in as many minutes, Dr. Quine looked a bit unsettled. She glanced around Arklet 453. This was the central, common-space arklet of the heptad that included numbers 174—the abode of Julia and Camila — and 215—that of Spencer Grindstaff. Or at least that was what it said on the official records. Some reshuffling had occurred. All the men and women who lived in those two arklets now seemed to conceive of themselves as members of J.B.F.’s personal staff. They had taken over 453 and turned it into a sort of West Wing.
Katherine Quine said, “Presuming we had authorization to send such a mission—”
“Let me just cut you off there, if you would indulge me, Dr. Quine. What you just raised is a matter of politics. I consider that to be my ‘superpower’ and I would like to place it at the disposal of you and the other members of the Martian Community — the ones you already know of, the ones who sympathize with you in secret, and others who may sign on once it becomes clear to them what a fundamentally sensible idea the Mars trip really is. So I would propose that we assume, for purposes of this little chat, that authorization is not a problem. I would like to see you three using your own ‘superpower’ of designing this mission in a way that makes sense without letting the political dimension interfere at all. Once we have designed a coherent plan, we can then move on to questions of implementation.”
“In a perfect scenario we would dump the rock and simply take everything, all at once,” Jianyu said. It was the first time he had spoken, but he seemed to have been emboldened by Julia’s talk of superpowers.
“There are powerful forces that would have to be convinced before such a thing could happen,” Julia said. “Let’s think in terms of an advance party: lean, efficient, smart, but big enough to get the job done. That means landing on Mars and reporting back to the remainder of the Cloud Ark.”
“We’ve been talking about such a mission. We think we could do it with a bolo consisting of a heptad and a triad,” Katherine said.
“Ten arklets,” Julia said. “That doesn’t seem all that many, does it?”
“During the initial delta vee,” Ravi Kumar said, “the arklets would be stacked. Once they were on course for Mars they would form a bolo, so that the members of the expedition could experience Earth-normal gravity during the six-month journey.”
Jianyu added, “Propulsion and other components could come from the MIV kit. Most of the design work has already been done for us.”
Katherine said, “Aerobraking would be needed at the end, to slow it down. Before that, the bolo could be reeled in, the arklets could restack into a unified ship, and there would be time to survey the surface from orbit and decide on a landing place.”
Julia nodded. “And if I may put a hard question to you all, what would be the survival time of this isolated colony, once it had landed? How long before it ran out of provisions?”
This caused the three Martians to clam up and look at one another.
“I only ask,” Julia said, “because politics — my department — once again rears its ugly head here. Once your heroics have been accomplished, the burden falls to me to seal the deal, as it were. The advance party lands and sends back its joyous message. A ticking-clock element enters the picture. Which I do not mean in a negative way — this can be a powerful incentive to mobilize people’s energies, as we saw in the case of the buildup to the Hard Rain. It is at that point when I can address the people of the Cloud Ark and say, ‘Here is the opportunity — will we seize it? Or will we shrink away from it and let these brave people slowly expire?’ That is a speech that I think I could deliver to great effect. I just need to have some sense of the time element.”
“A year for sure,” Katherine said. “Beyond that, it becomes a medical question. A statistical question.”
“Statistics,” Julia repeated, and sighed. “I have been hearing a lot about that from Dr. Harris.”
“SO, YOU’RE TELLING ME WE’VE LOST TRACK OF WHO IS EVEN IN J.B.F.’S heptad?” Ivy asked.
There was silence around the big table in the Banana. Ivy had begun to hold important meetings in this old familiar space, closer to the central axis of the Stack and farther forward in Amalthea’s cone of shelter. It wouldn’t do to have the Cloud Ark’s command structure decapitated by a single unlucky bolide strike — a disaster much more likely to happen whenever they met in the big T3 spaces like the Tank and the Farm.
Present for this meeting were Doob, Luisa, Fyodor, and three handpicked members of Markus’s staff who had become a sort of executive troika: Sal Guodian, the one-man judicial system. Tekla, the head of security. And Steve Lake, the dreadlocked ginger who was responsible for network and computer matters.
“The default system for keeping track of who is where,” Sal began, “is based on the assumption that people will actually cooperate with it.”
Ivy held up a hand. “Stop. Before you go into explanations, I need a yes or no.”
“Yes,” Steve Lake said, “we have lost track of who is in J.B.F.’s heptad.”
“Thank you,” Ivy said. “And somehow the SAN isn’t helping us fill in the gaps?”
Steve said, “One of the people who is definitely in that heptad is Spencer Grindstaff.”
Ivy nodded.
Sal said, “Steve, when Markus pulled you into his office, just before the White Sky, and put you in charge of the network — replacing Spencer — you made some remark to the effect that Spencer might know of back doors into Izzy’s systems. Back doors that would be impossible for you to know about until he used them.”
“Yeah,” Steve said. “Almost by definition, we can’t find something like that until it’s used. Not without manually reading through every line of code.”