They shot downward. Fiberthread walls rushed past, illuminated by regular yellow daubs of electrified phosphor paint. Carl watched Ould-Harrad’s swarthy face for signs of some reaction, but the man kept his eyes intently ahead and said nothing. Carl felt a twinge of disappointment. He had lined this shaft himself, without mechs, putting in fourteen-hour days to meet the deadline. And a pretty job, it was. Damn-all if anybody’d say word one about it, though.
Of course, Ould-Harrad was an Ortho, and pretty hard-line about it, according to scuttlebutt. All during the voyage out the man had been distant, formal, his poker face giving away nothing. He clearly expected that young upstarts would remember their place. Not likely he’d be glad handing a menial Percell.
Carl shrugged and turned up the Fifth Sonata. Only after some time did it occur to him that they were, after all, failing face down in a shaft that dwindled away into the distance, the phosphors converging dots… Even in a micro-G, Ould-Harrad’s mental alarm bells were probably ringing.
“Hit the brakes, the vault’s only a few hundred meters ahead,” Carl sent.
—I see. Good-.- was the only reply.
They slowed as the tunnel flared into a roomy chamber, already partly lined with brilliant lime-green insulation. The sleepslot module was already descending from the intersecting Shaft 4, a stubby intrusion. It nearly filled the uninsulated half of the vault. Everywhere the primitive ice gave back glinting reflections of the sweeping lamps of men and mechs. Carl had helped hack out the rough-cut walls, using big industrial lasers. Seams of carbonaceous dirt and rusty conglomerates made curly, mysterious patterns on the broad stretches of black ice, like writing by some unseen biblical hand.
—Ahhh,— escaped from Ould-Harrad as he braked to a stop. Carl noticed that the man looked relieved. Maybe they should have gone slower.
—C’mon,— Jeffers called on open channel. —Got to get these coffins buried.—
Ould-Harrad’s clipped, authoritative voice was unmistakable. —I would appreciate you men not referring to the slots that way.—
—Yessir,—Jeffers said curtly.—You bet.—
Carl sent, “I’ll take the blue-coded mechs,” and locked his board on a dozen flitting forms. The slot-sleep equipment was nearly obscured by robotoids swarming around it, an army of gnats splitting off sections.
Sleepers would be stored in three widely separated vaults, to minimize chances that a single accident might cripple the mission. Technical teams—Computers, Life Sciences, Mechanical Operations—were evenly spread. The boxy slots were laid outward like the arms of a starfish from the central utilities spine. The lifesupport gear was a knobby backpack on each coffin—Carl couldn’t help but think of them that way, both from appearance and because the sleepers were as near to dead as you could get and still come back.
Each slot had to be fitted into hardplast nooks that protected them and yet allowed the interior to exchange heat with the nearby ice. The original idea had been to let the ice cool the sleepers directly, but Carl had seen the results of that at Encke. There was a lot of carbon dioxide or amorphous snow which could vaporize explosively, blowing valves and seals on the coffins. It wasn’t a snap to use volatiles in high vacuum. So the engineers had to rig buffers to save the sleepers from shudders and bumps and sudden, freezing death.
—Pack those Orthos in tight,— Jeffers sent on short-range comm. —Don’t want ’em feelin’ lonely.—
Jeffers was fitting hoses into place nearby, his transmission shielded from the others. Carl triggered a self-closing clamp, finishing off his own job, and kicked clear.
“Give it a rest. There’re are Percells in here. too.”
—Not very damn many.— This came from Sergeov, who drifted into view from behind a silvery heat-exchange sphere. The Russian spacer was quick, deft; as Carl watched, he flipped, caught a cable from a spaghetti tangle, and inserted it into a control cabinet.
The agility almost made you envy him. Almost. The Percell treatment had eliminated the blood disease Sergeov would have inherited from his parents… but it also took away his legs.
Unforeseen side effects.
Carl wondered how many times that cool, analytic phrase had made him bristle, his face flush, his hands knot into fists.
Sergeov had been one of the early, lucky failures—still alive. Such survivors stirred the first misgivings The great unwashed see Sergeov’s lost legs. A dirty little question wormed its way into their minds: What couldn’t you see? What about his mind? Was he normal? Was he even human?
If it was normal to be able to drink a full bottle of vodka and still easily balance the empty glasses on top of each other, five high—yes, Sergeov was normal.
Better than normal. He had gone directly into space, where legs were, in fact, a drawback. All that bulky muscle and bone were useless in freefall, demanding food and oxygen and time to exercise them. Leftovers from the struggle against gravity. Sergeov had lived in orbit from the age of ten, making top wages as an assembler. His arms looked like tree trunks; Carl had seen him juggle a hapless Ortho inspector like a helpless doll, back in Earth orbit. The man had mumbled an insult, and paid with five minutes of humiliation. Yet, Sergeov was not a Plateau Three advocate; he expended his energies in blanket, burning dislike of all Earthsiders.
“Stop yammering,” Carl said. “Come help me with these thermobuffers.”
—Is true, however,— Sergeov said. —All for good reasons, for sure. Percells work good, so they get into space. Deepa! Orthos think we’re garbage, so we stay in space.—
Jeffers put in, —An’ end up chauffeurin’ Orthos out beyond Neptune.—
Sergeov grinned. His hands-noticeably large, even through vac gloves—worked swiftly among the cables, deftly quick, free of the levered counterweight of dangling legs. —Da. Not prefer serving as workboy for Orthos.—
Jeffers said, —Damn right. When we could be doing our own work.—
Carl asked, “Such as?”
Jeffers whirled himself about with one arm, while the other fished free a short-bore laser. He thumbed it. A blue-white bolt lanced into the ice meters away.
—Hey!— Sergeov cried.
White fog exploded past them. It boiled away into the vault, thinning, but Ould-Harrad saw. —Hey! I ordered no quick-solder work in here!—
—Sorry.— Sergeov winked at Jeffers and called, —Was just a small one. Needed to refuse a socket joint.—
—These are people.—
—Am sorry.—
Sergeov grinned as he said it. Ould-Harrad was hundreds of meters away and couldn’t see the design Jeffers had drawn with instant, practiced ease in the ice.
“I didn’t know you were a Mars-boy, Jeff,” Carl sent.
A female flower enclosed by the Mars symbol—a graphic depiction of a dream. Once comets could be steered into the inner solar system, they could be harvested. Even easier, an artful nudge far out beyond Neptune could smack iceballs into the Martian plains.
Hammering Mars with cometary nuclei would build up an atmosphere, perhaps even get the volcanoes spouting again. Nature’s slow sucking would still. The parching march of aeons put to rout—a Promethean dream. Splitting a hard blue sky, flame-cloaked ice mountains would gouge the lands, rip the permafrost, and release more ancient ice below. Clouds, fog, then rain—weather unknown since the sun’s wan warming had boiled away the last mudflats in the spare Martian river valleys, billions of years back, during that false spring.
In a century or so, a suitably adapted human might be able to breathe on the surface. The idea was old, but some Percells had seized on it. They saw Mars as the one plausible location where genetically altered humans might truly have a place. Even though still dry and cold and roiling with strange storms, Mars could become a world where their descendants, genetically engineered still further, would be the norm, while Orthos would cough out their lungs in minutes.