Stone whistled. “That’s what you get for setting up shop next door to the asteroid belt, I guess.”
Argyre held a Stars and Stripes.
“You’re suggesting we should try for Argyre?” Bleeker asked.
“It’s a possible. Argyre is obviously very ancient, and very deep. But the basins are surrounded by concentric rings — mountain chains, actually — which would be hard to negotiate or land on.
“Now,” she went on, “you can see that the rest of the action is in the western hemisphere. This scarlet area, sprawling over into the north, is the Tharsis Bulge: on average, more than five miles above the surrounding terrain. And these crimson spots are the great shield volcanoes.” She pointed. “Ascraeus, Pavonis, and Arsia Mons; and here, to the northwest, is Olympus Mons: 370 miles across its base, with a caldera fifty miles wide. Olympus is so big it pokes its way out of most of the atmosphere. So you get orographic clouds, formed when the air has to move up the slopes…”
“Sure,” Bleeker said, “but I hear Olympus is so huge that it wouldn’t be so spectacular from the ground.”
She shrugged. “Maybe. Look at this.” She hunted about on the pin board on one wall, until she found the image she wanted. She passed it to the astronauts. It was a perspective view of a huge volcano; a cliff, sharp and well delineated, marked out its nearer rim. “That’s a computer image, an oblique view, faked up from Mariner data.”
Stone pointed to the cliff. “How high is that?”
“The scarp? Oh, three miles.”
“Jesus. A three-mile-high cliff?”
“Give or take.”
They were both staring at the cliff image. Bleeker held up his hands in mock surrender.
She suppressed a grin. Astronauts were easy to impress if you pushed the right gosh-wow buttons.
Stone said, “I see you have a couple of flags on top of those big volcanoes.”
“Yeah. Olympus Mons is the youngest, and the tallest; and the youngest lava flows on Mars emanate from it. But Olympus is seventeen miles high—”
“Too high for aerobraking,” Bleeker said. “And I guess that would rule out the other Tharsis volcanoes also.”
“Okay,” Stone said. “To the east of Tharsis I see a ragged blue streak, stretching along the equator. I guess that’s the Mariner valley.”
“Yes. Valles Marineris. The great canyons: two and a half thousand miles long, four miles deep, and over a hundred miles wide. We know that the Valles system wasn’t formed by water. A lot of the individual ‘canyons’ are boxed in. So water couldn’t have gotten in or out of them; we’re looking at geological faulting here, like the Rift Valley in Africa.”
“The whole valley looks as if it’s flowing out of your Tharsis Bulge,” Bleeker said.
“Yeah. And we don’t think that can be a coincidence. Maybe when the bulge was uplifted, magma withdrew from around it, which would have cracked the surface. There would have been earthquakes and extensive faulting.”
“I see we could maybe go for the Valles Marineris itself,” Stone said.
“Maybe,” York said. “This flag is actually in a tributary called the Candor Chasma; we’ve seen layers in the canyon walls here, so we’d be able to get clues to the canyons’ origins.”
“But I’ll bet the landscape isn’t too easy to negotiate.”
“No. Some of the smaller canyons there are a couple of miles deep. If you had several months to survey the place, and some kind of flying machine—”
“But we don’t,” Stone said. “Okay, Natalie. That leaves two places. Both on the border between the old stuff in the southern hemisphere and the volcanic plains in the north.”
“Yes. This one in the eastern hemisphere” — on the opposite side of the world from Tharsis — “is called Nilosyrtis Mensa. It is what we call ‘fretted’ terrain.” She dug out a photograph, this one a mosaic in black and white. It showed a surface uniformly crumpled.
“Christ,” Stone said. “It looks like beaten copper.”
“We think the older, southern terrain has been eroded, here on the border, leaving this irregular, grooved landscape.”
“Looks bloody difficult to land on,” Bleeker said.
“Yes, and you’d need long traverses to achieve systematic surveys.”
“All right. So that leaves one site.”
The final flag was at the western fringe of the Tharsis Bulge, close to the border of the north and south terrains. It was in the middle of a green stripe that cut north to south across the Valles. The green, together with the blue ribbon of the Valles, made a rough upright cross, straddling the equator.
“This is a region shaped by running water. Apparently. There are channels that seem to flow out of the Valles Marineris, and across the northern plains.”
Stone smiled. “So these are the famous water-carved features you tell us about in the Singing Wheel.”
“It’s an equatorial site,” she said. “So you get a mix of young and old geological types. And that’s important to us. Most mixed terrain is complex, broken up. But here the landscape is pretty forgiving for a landing. And if you’re going to find water anywhere, it’s here. Maybe under the surface. And where there’s water—”
“Maybe there’s life.” Stone got out of his chair and walked across to the map; he leaned close so he could read the label by the little flag. “Mangala Vallis. What does it mean?”
“All the major valleys have been named after words for Mars. Here, to the east of Marineris, we even have an Ares valley…”
“And Mangala?”
“Sanskrit. The oldest language of the Indo-European group.”
“So maybe Mangala is the oldest word for Mars in the western world.” Stone smiled. “I kind of like that.” Standing at the map, he turned to eye York. “So you’ve been pushing the site selection board toward Mangala Vallis. For good operational reasons, of course. A place on which you just happen to be the world’s leading expert. Right, York?”
He was grinning, and so was Bleeker.
“Still wangling to get my seat, Natalie?” Bleeker called, good-natured.
She felt chilled. These guys see right through me.
But maybe that’s not a bad thing. If Bleeker knows I’m right on his tail, maybe he will take his geology a little more seriously.
And all he has to do is slip once…
She started to roll up her maps. “What do you think? I’ll give you a preprint of my next Journal of Geophysical Research paper on Mangala; read it and weep, flyboys.”
“Now what?” Stone asked. “Are we done?”
“Like hell. We’re only just beginning; that was the fun stuff. Now we come to Martian climatology. Compare and contrast with Earth’s, and…”
After some grumbling, the guys settled down again.
The day wore on, and the little room grew progressively hotter. October 1981
In the end, five lead companies submitted proposals to build the Mars Excursion Module: Rockwell, McDonnell, Martin, Boeing, and JK Lee’s company, Columbia.
The post-presentation work of the MEM Evaluation Board was long and complicated. It was all a question of weighted scores; Ralph Gershon had never seen anything like it. There were subcommittees to evaluate the bidder’s “administrative capacity” and “business approach” and “technical qualification” …Gershon was himself involved in three of the subcommittees. And each subcommittee assigned weighted scores to each bid, under hundreds of categories.