Adam Bleeker, hiking beside Stone and similarly laden with helmet, pack, and Mars boots, came to a halt. Bleeker was towing a two-wheeled cart called a MET, a Modular Equipment Transporter. Bleeker leaned forward, propping his hands on his knees. His blond hair seemed to be on fire in the sunlight. “I can figure where we are,” Bleeker said wearily.
“Huh?”
“About a mile to the east of the Union Pacific. I just heard a whistle.”
Natalie York’s radio voice crackled in Stone’s headset. “Say again please, EV2; I do not copy.” York was playing capcom in the comparative comfort of her tent.
Bleeker straightened up. He caught Stone’s eye and mouthed an obscenity.
Stone said, “Roger, Natalie. We’re both a little weary here, on the surface of Mars. I guess we’re using up our consumables at a heavy rate.”
“Then take a drink, you babies.”
Bleeker mouthed more obscenities, but Stone waved him silent. “She’s right, goddamn it. Come on.” He reached behind his head, to where two short plastic tubes dangled from his backpack. He pulled one of them to his mouth and sucked; tepid Tang squirted over his tongue.
Bleeker took a mouthful of water from his own plastic spigot, swilled it around, and spit it onto the black rock underfoot, where it sizzled, running away and drying quickly.
“Try some Tang,” Stone said.
“Tang gives me the farts.”
“Yeah, but you need to replace the potassium you sweat out. Good for the heart…”
“You two heroes ready to carry on?”
“Oh, up yours, York,” Stone said.
They straightened up and walked on.
They came to a bed of gravel and clay, broad and sweeping; the bedrock thrust through it like blackened, exposed bone. “We’ve found what looks like loess, Natalie,” Stone said. “River valley deposit.” He found he was breathing hard, and he was aware that Bleeker, struggling with the heavy MET, was sweating so heavily he had soaked right through his thin T-shirt. “I think we should go for a SEP setup.”
“Roger, EV1.”
Damn right it’s “Roger.” Staying in one place and playing at scientists for a while was going to be a hell of a lot easier than footslogging across this goddamn volcanic battleground. After all, this was worse than the real thing; his Mars suit would be air-conditioned, for God’s sake.
“Adam, why don’t you scout on ahead. Go that way, up across the loess.”
“Okay.” Bleeker set down the MET’s handle, hitched his pack on his shoulders, and set off along the loess, his blue Mars boots stained and muddy.
Stone dug out a set of gloves from the MET. The gloves were thick and stiffened with wire, to simulate the pressurized gloves he’d have to wear on Mars. With the gloves on he picked the SEP out of the buggy. The SEP — the Surface Experimental Package, a suite of scientific instruments — was folded up into a heavy dumbbell shape, weighted to mirror how the real thing would feel under Martian gravity.
Bleeker had walked maybe a hundred feet down the loess. “Over here,” he called. “This is good and flat.”
Stone began to walk toward him. “Okay, Natalie, I’m deploying the SEP now.”
“Rog.”
It was a real effort to grip the bar of the dumbbell through his stiffened gloves and to hold the packages away from him. After maybe thirty feet, he stopped and put the SEP down.
Bleeker laughed. “It’s only plywood, Phil.”
“Goddamn it,” Stone shouted at him, “do you have to walk so far?”
“You know I do.”
Of course, Bleeker was right; on Mars they would have to carry the SEPs far enough from their MEM, or from the Mars Rover, that they could be sure to find a piece of surface undisturbed by the dust kicked up by their vehicles.
He pulled off the gloves and threw them in the general direction of the MET; he didn’t bother to look where they’d gone.
Bleeker whistled. “Are you supposed to do that, skipper?”
“Sue me.”
He brought the SEP mock-up to Bleeker and set it down; together, they began to deploy the instruments.
Assembling the SEP was like setting up a home barbecue. Undo the bolts. Take the packages out of their Styrofoam blocks. Tamp down the dirt to make the ground flat — actually that wasn’t so easy here; the loess was gravelly and unforgiving — and set the instruments level. Make sure each instrument is pointed the right way, and is the right distance from the others. And don’t let them get coated in dirt, goddamn it.
When they’d finished, the SEP looked like an odd, multipointed star, with the radioisotope power package at the center, and the instruments set up on the ground all around it, connected by fine orange cables. The seismometer was that silvery paint tin. A little meteorology boom stuck up in the air — the SEPs would act as weather stations for the astronauts during their stay on Mars — and that spidery gold-leaf sculpture was a magnetometer. At the front of the assembly was a pair of tall, thin stereoscopic color cameras. And on top of the whole thing sat a delicate S-band antenna, pointing to an imaginary Earth.
The SEPs would be placed at a variety of sites, as the astronauts completed their traverses. There was every hope that the SEPs could send back data long after Stone and his crew had returned to Earth. It would be kind of a neat memorial to the mission; looking down at the installed balsa-and-card mock-up of the SEP, Stone felt a certain pride in his accomplishment, in a task done well.
“Okay, Natalie, the SEP’s installed,” he said. “What next?”
“Rog. According to our checklist, here, one of you should be setting up the CELSS, and the other taking samples.”
“It ain’t time for lunch yet?” Bleeker asked plaintively.
Stone laughed. “I’ll do you a favor, Adam. You set up the CELSS, and I’ll hike around for the goddamn samples.”
They trudged back to the MET, and Stone sucked a little more of the flat, tasteless Tang from the tube at his neck.
I’d sure rather be watching the Olympics with a couple of cold ones at my side, he thought. But there just wasn’t the time. He’d had no time of his own, it felt like, since he’d joined the Agency.
Stone helped Bleeker haul the mock-up CELSS kit out of the MET. The CELSS, the Controlled Environment Life Support System, was a small inflatable greenhouse. It came packaged as a disk of plastic. Stone and Bleeker laid the disk out on the ground and Bleeker went to work on a small foot pump, pushing air into the ribbing of the greenhouse; soon a dome maybe four feet high had taken shape.
By the time he was done Bleeker was sweating even harder. “My God, Phil, it’s real work operating that damned pump in these boots.”
“You want to go rockhounding instead?”
“No, no,” Bleeker said. “Leave me to my darn vegetable patch.”
He pulled a simple aluminum spade out of the MET and began to scrape without enthusiasm at the soil. Later he’d set up a little water sprinkler inside the dome, and he’d be planting crops — soybeans and potatoes. The idea was that the carbon-dioxide-rich Martian air would be able to reach the plants through the permeable walls of the greenhouse, and the plastic dome would trap a lot of the heat of the sun. Martian soil, it seemed from the limited Soviet lander results, contained most everything needed to grow crops save for phosphorus and free water, so Bleeker would be doping the soil with a nutrient additive.
This CELSS kit was just an experiment; there was no intention of growing foodstuffs to supply the first expedition. The point was to prove that crops could be grown on Mars; it would point the way to techniques for future, longer-term missions — and even the first permanent colony, off in an unknowable future.
Likewise, Ares would be carrying another long-term experiment called ISPP, for In Situ Propellant Production. The crew would set up kits designed to extract oxygen from compressed Martian air, and maybe hydrogen and oxygen from any accessible under-surface water. If it could be shown that propellants and oxidizers for the return journey could be manufactured on Mars, the weight and costs of future trips there could be cut by more than half.