A large anthology of sci.., p.927
A Large Anthology of Science Fiction, page 927
Now hear this, now hear this. Whites to boarding stations immediately. Blues to pre-boarding stations, greens to defensive stations. Pops have breached the perimeter and the security troops have pulled back to the first line of barracks on the eastern side. All white tickets to boarding immediately.
“You guys!”
The armoury sergeant was thrusting two rifles into their hands.
“Come with me.”
Twenty minutes later they found themselves standing at attention as the line of yellow ticket women filed past the detector screens and security guys on the north ramp.
“Single file, have your boarding passes ready.”
The long line of obviously pregnant women filed past, a poignant mixture of anxiety and relief on their faces. Once through the security line their step lightened and they began to smile. They had passed the final hurdle and they were on their way off planet.
The crackle of small arms fire in the distance was quite clear now although still some distance away. Some of the women were beginning to cry and look back over their shoulders. Bon knew, as did they, that out there their husbands were giving their lives to buy them the time to take this chance. The only women allowed on board had to satisfy two criteria. They had to be fertile and carrying a white ticket’s baby. Secondly their husbands paid for the wife’s passage by holding the pops back. Bob had to admit the system was brutal but effective.
Finally the line of women had passed and there was a brief pause on the gangway as the access ramp was reconfigured for the next phase of boarding.
Blue tickets boarding. Blue tickets boarding.
The public address system could hardly be heard over the now incessant crackle of small arms fire. The heavier thud of the cannon on the tanks could be occasionally heard but against a mob it wasn’t the Abram’s best weapon. The ripping sound of the machine guns added a counterpoint of the sounds of combat further out.
The bulk of the blue tickets had finished boarding and now finally it was the turn of the greens. The few guard and security commanders with blue tickets were the only ones, other than the steerage passengers not yet boarded. Already the whole yard vibrated as the massive rocket motors were bought on line one by one and tested for the final time.
Green tickets boarding. Green tickets boarding.
The few white ticket holders had strolled up the ramps, the yellow and blue ticket holders had queued in an orderly fashion. The bulk of the passengers, the green ticket holders, all men, were a mob. The security cordon was closer now, much closer and every so often a bullet would whistle across the open access way.
Bob grabbed Tony and the two of them hustled and pushed their way through to the front of the mob and as such were almost the first to spill into the huge steerage way hold of the ship. Everyone had seen the schematics but most of the steel workers who had built the huge hollow cylinder hadn’t been among the lucky green ticket winners. For Bob it was the first time he’d been inside it.
“Wow! Will you look at that?”
He craned his neck back to stare up inside the several hundred feet high cylinder. A blue ticket worker waved them forward and pointed them toward the central spiral staircase that ran all the way up to the top of the three hundred foot space.
“Go; go . . . come on, up. Climb to the top.”
Bob followed Tony as they ran to the stairs and began the laborious climb to the top. The three hundred foot climb took several minutes and they were both blowing hard by the time they reached the top tier. Every seven feet they had passed a tier like this one. Each floor was simple grillwork walled off from the stairs with only a narrow doorway. The bare enclosures contained no comforts of any type.
“Come on, come on.”
The blue holding the door open for them and literally shoving the panting men through the doorway was none other than the armoury sergeant they’d met earlier.
“Move around, move around and fill the gaps.”
“Sergeant?”
“What now? Oh it’s you two newbies again. Get in there!”
“Where’s the acceleration couches?”
The man laughed.
“They weigh too much for the likes of you and me lad. Stand close together and link arms. Only whites and yellows get couches. You all get each other. Now get in there.
The two friends moved into the space looking down through the maze of tiny holes in the gratings.
“This is something, isn’t it?”
Bob grinned back at his friend.
Already the blue on the landing below was diverting the men still coming up into the tier below. As the level of crowding reached its peak the door clanged shut and Bob watched the sergeant snap the deadbolts into place. He nodded to himself, that made sense, after all if someone fell down those stairs as the rocket lifted off it would be very messy.
He looked down but all he could see was the heads of the men on the tier just below his feet. The noise of the locking doors was receding down the cylinder. A steady stream of blues headed past him to the hatch in the deck just above them. That deck looked very thick and the hatch was obviously armoured as well. Bob manoeuvred himself till he was facing the stairwell, looking out through the mesh as the last few guards ran past.
The hatch just above his head clanged shut with a terrible finality and the thousands of green ticket passengers were now on their own. Bob watched dumbfounded as the stair treads withdrew in sequence into the central spine eventually leaving a hollow tube three hundred feet high through the centre of the well. The whole design reminded him of something but he couldn’t quite put his finger on it. Tony jostled his elbow.
“We’re on the way, sunshine. We’ve made it aboard the last rocket to leave Earth. I told you we’d get lucky!”
Several metal sounding booms echoed up the chamber, probably the final grapples letting go, any minute now the engines would fire and the rocket would be on its way.
On the flight deck hundreds of feet higher up the metal tower, not far below the nose cone itself the colonel in charge of the rocket systems for lift on turned his head within the confines of his acceleration couch and looked at Professor Bringham.
“All systems ready sir. The last guard station reports they will be overrun within five minutes at the most. They can buy us no more time. We have to go.”
The silver aired professor nodded.
“Launch when ready.”
“Aye sir.”
The colonel reached for the public address microphone.
Now hear this, now hear this.
All hands brace for launch.
We go in sixty seconds.
All hands brace for lift off.
The lights dimmed as the power was routed elsewhere in the ship. Dimly over the hum of conversation around him Bob could hear the tannoy continuing to count down.
Thirty-seven, thirty-six, thirty-five.
Tony slapped him on the back he half turned to smile at his friend’s exuberance and was distracted by a movement on the smooth metal of the central shaft.
Twenty-nine, twenty-eight.
Directly on his eye level a small round hole, only an inch or so in diameter had opened up, he glanced down to see another one about nine inches below that, then another and another. Lifting his eyes back up he could see there was another row about nine inches further around. As his eyes snapped into focus he could see the grid pattern of holes repeated all the way around the spine from the top as far down as he could crane his neck to see.
Twenty-one, twenty, nineteen.
The countdown continued remorselessly and finally when it reached fifteen two things happened simultaneously. The lights went out and a fine mist was propelled from what could only be the central spine of the rocket ship.
Thirteen, twelve, eleven
The atomised liquid coated every part of Bob and his clothing in a split second. Luckily his mouth had been shut and he’d instinctively blinked his eyes shut too before any of the noxious liquid hit the sensitive membranes.
Adrenalin coursed through his veins as the elusive thought about the design of the steerage compartment sprang into tight focus in his mind. The smell of the liquid was dreadfully familiar to him from his work on the auxiliary engines.
Seven, six, five
He turned his head to shout to Tony but couldn’t see his friend in the darkness. The mesh in front of his hands was slippery from the fluid, as was the mesh beneath his feet. He slipped and fell to his knees.
Four, three, two
There were screams echoing through the entire compartment now as other men too reached the same conclusion he had. Someone nearby was screaming at the top of his voice. It took barely a heartbeat to realise it was himself.
One, zero
The flash of light at the bottom of the huge cylindrical chamber was intense and travelled rapidly up toward him. Now he knew why the two of them had been given green tickets at the last minute. There was only one place in the rocket where the total mass had to be a minimum rather than a maximum. They were not about to travel into space as steerage passengers at all. Steerage wasn’t for passengers. Steerage had another meaning. They were not passengers in any sense of the word.
With the world’s supplies of fossil fuels exhausted there was only one source of complex hydrocarbons available to launch the last rocket flight to leave Earth.
As the flash engulfed him his mind screamed out one fact. Steerage was fuel.
2011
CITIZEN-ASTRONAUT
David D. Levine
I was trying to fix my kitchen garbage disposal when my phone trilled. I put it on speaker. “Gary Shu,” I said, wiping my hands on a rag.
“Mr. Shu, this is Nnamdi Okonkwo from UNSA.” A low voice, cultured.
“UNSA? Really?” Why would anyone from the UN Space Agency be calling me? I was just a second-string newsblogger.
“Really. This concerns your application for the Citizen-Astronaut Program.”
“Oh, that.” I’d made it as far as the semifinals, but when the finalists had been announced my name hadn’t been on the list. That had been over a year ago. I picked up my screwdriver and resumed poking at the clog. “What about it?”
“You have probably heard the terrible news about Kim Yeun-ja.”
“Yeah.” She was the Korean painter who’d been selected as the first Citizen-Astronaut. Two weeks ago, less than two months before her scheduled launch, she’d broken her neck on a recreational hike in the Alps. She’d recover, but she wouldn’t be up for a trip to Mars any time soon. A tragic story, and an excellent hook for a fundraising call. I kept trying to pry the whatever-it-was out of the disposal’s blades.
“You are probably also aware of the difficulties we’ve been having with funding and public opinion.” We’d had people on Mars continuously for over eight years now. The initial discoveries of water and life—frozen, sub-surface water and fossils of microscopic, long-extinct life—had been newsworthy, but after that interest had declined steadily. And with declining public interest came a declining willingness by the UN’s various governments to fund the ongoing mission.
“Uh-huh,” I said, squinting down the disposal’s throat. By now I was just waiting for the pitch so I could hang up on the guy in good conscience. “So what’s the purpose of this call?”
“My superiors have decided that the loss of Ms. Kim provides an opportunity for us to . . . reprioritize the Citizen-Astronaut Program. Rather than call on Ms. Kim’s backup, we have been instructed to bring in someone who is in a better position to influence public opinion. Someone such as yourself.”
The screwdriver clattered to the floor. “Guh?” I managed.
“Can you come to Geneva right away?”
“Uh?” I swallowed. “Uh, for how long?”
He chuckled. “In Geneva? Thirty-seven days. But after that it might be quite a bit longer . . .”
Thirty-seven days? I checked my phone’s calendar.
Thirty-seven days was the time until the Kasei 18 spacecraft launched for Mars.
The sixty-five-day voyage to Mars was about as exciting as a long bus trip, bracketed by the thundering, shuddering terrors of launch and aerobraking. Though I did what I could to make the trip interesting to my viewers, my ratings dropped steadily the whole time. I was handicapped by limited bandwidth—I couldn’t embed even a single Spin or Jumbo3D frame in my reports, and was reduced to plain text and flat, still images—and by the fact that every day was the same. Although we were going almost two hundred thousand kilometers per hour, from inside the ship there was no way to tell we were moving at all.
But as I lay on my back after touchdown, heart pounding and sweat pooling in the small of my space-suited back, I knew everything had changed. I was on Mars! I couldn’t wait to step out of the lander, to see the endless red desert spread out before me, to feel the dry lifeless dust crunch under my boots.
The exit protocol was one of the things we’d had plenty of time to negotiate during the long trip out. The commander of our craft, the American-born Flemish climatologist Lynne Ann Morse, had graciously ceded her commander’s prerogative to me as Citizen-Astronaut. I would be the first one out of the lander: the sixty-seventh person to set foot on Mars.
But before I could even unstrap myself, the hatch clanged open and Nam Dae-jung’s scratched helmet poked in. I recognized his face immediately—he was one of the three members of the current crew who would be staying on, and with our arrival he was now commander of Expedition 18. A Korean geochemist, he was a small man, built like a fireplug, and his face was just about as red as one. “Get your butts out here,” he shouted. “We’ve got a leak.”
We four new arrivals got ourselves unstrapped and tumbled out of the hatch as quickly as we could, bouncing and stumbling in our haste. We immediately saw the problem: a pipe on the lander’s underside had split open, and a white jet of steam and ice crystals was spewing out into the thin Martian atmosphere. Frost was already building up around the gap. I activated the camera in my helmet and began snapping pictures of the dramatic scene for my blog. Finally some excitement!
“That’s just water,” said Kabir Abuja, our Nigerian engineer, and scuttled to the back of the lander where the main valve panel was located. A moment later the stream of vapor cut off.
Kabir, Lynne Ann, and Dae-jung ducked under the lander to inspect the damage. I joined them, mindful of the descent engine’s bell-shaped nozzle, which was still nearly red-hot.
I saw a dusty red streak leading up to the damaged pipe. “Look at that,” I said, pointing. “Looks like a rock got kicked up by the descent engine.” I took pictures of that too.
“Easily repaired,” said Kabir, and started backing out of the confined space. “It’s only water anyway. No shortage of that.” Even through his faceplate I could see the confident smile that almost never left his dark handsome face.
We’d brought a stock of liquid hydrogen and a cunning little chemical plant that would combine it with carbon dioxide from Mars’s atmosphere to produce the methane rocket fuel we’d eventually use to leave the planet. This chemical process threw off water as a byproduct, some of which was cracked into oxygen and more hydrogen.
“Don’t be so sure,” said Dae-jung.
We all looked at him. My breath was loud in my helmet, which was beginning to fog up.
Dae-jung looked right back at us, his flat face defiant. “We’ve been having some plumbing problems.”
Lynne Ann stepped up to him, their faceplates practically touching. “There was nothing about that in the daily reports.”
Dae-jung turned away from her. “There are things we don’t tell Mission Control. Come on now, let’s get you unloaded. We’ve only got a few hours of daylight left.”
While Kabir and Suma Handini, the current crew’s Pakistani engineer, set up the insulated hoses to pipe our hydrogen into the habitat’s buried tanks, the rest of us set up a bucket brigade to transfer the tonnes of food and other supplies from the lander’s cargo bay. Our lander had set down right between the current crew’s four-person lander and the two-person emergency ascent vehicle, less than fifty meters from the hab, and the boxes and canisters weighed only a third what they would on Earth, but their mass was unchanged so it was still a lot of work to move them around. By the time we got everything shifted my space-adapted muscles were screaming with fatigue. “Why do we have to get all this stuff inside so quickly anyway?” I asked Li Huang, the current crew’s Chinese climatologist, as we struggled with a case of dehydrated meats. “It was fine in hard vacuum for the last two months.”
“They used to leave everything in the landers,” he said, “to save space in the hab. But a couple of expeditions ago a lander fell over right after landing, and all the supplies were inaccessible until they could get it jacked up again.”
“The lander fell over?!”
“Subsidence under the landing pad, I think it was.”
That hadn’t been in the official reports either.
We got everything shifted inside, took off and stowed our suits, and gathered in the wardroom. This half-circular room, eight meters in diameter, took up half of deck 2 of the cylindrical hab. The largest enclosed space on Mars, it would serve as our meeting room, work room, dining room, and living room. It had one long table and with ten people seated around it we were all bumping elbows. We knew we’d have to get used to the crowding, though, as it wasn’t going to change for the next 107 days.
Each new ship from Earth brought four new crew. The usual procedure was that four of the old crew would depart almost immediately, leaving a crew of six: four new crew members, and two experienced ones to provide continuity. But the inexorable mathematics of orbital mechanics dictated that on this particular rotation the old crew could not depart until 107 days after the new crew had arrived. This 107-day period, long for a turnaround but short for an expedition, was my personal territory—I had arrived with the new crew and would be departing with the old crew. Until then, ten people would have to share a space designed for six.
