CHAPTER 2
The First Four
Cape Canaveral, 1979
The confirmation did not arrive as one clean sentence.
It came in pieces.
A controller at the Soviet liaison console lifted one hand.
“Sir. Moscow confirms telemetry.”
At the Japanese station another voice cut across him.
“Tsukuba confirms surface signal.”
A European tracking officer leaned over his headset. “Darmstadt has carrier lock.”
The room had become very quiet.
At the center console, Flight Director Warren Cole did not move.
“Crew?”
“Waiting.”
“How long?”
“Signal should be here now.”
It was the most useless sentence in mission control. Signals did not care what men thought they should do.
Then static broke across the speakers.
A voice came through unmistakably Texan.
“Houston, Mars Surface. Eagle Four is down. Repeat, we are down.”
For three seconds nobody reacted.
Then the room broke.
Men stood. Someone shouted. A Japanese engineer embraced a Soviet communications officer before either of them seemed to realize what he was doing. A row of American controllers applauded. One of the European observers struck the desk with both palms.
Cole allowed it for perhaps ten seconds.
Then his heavy voice rolled across the room.
“Enough.”
The applause died reluctantly.
Cole looked at the mission clock.
“Begin the next phase.”
Two hundred million kilometres away, depending on which set of orbital numbers one preferred that week, four men were already discovering that history was mostly work.
Utopia Planitia, near Chincoteague Crater
The lander settled on six articulated legs and stopped moving.
For a moment nobody inside spoke.
Tom Hale watched the instrument panel. Green lights. Stable pressure. Descent engine shutdown confirmed. Guidance computer satisfied. The numbers looked almost offensively ordinary.
Sergei Morozov broke the silence.
“Well, comrades.” His Russian accent thickened when he was tired. “First delegates of humanity on an alien planet.”
Klaus Richter leaned forward to inspect the final descent readout.
“First delegates with three per cent more lateral drift than planned.”
Morozov looked at him. “Klaus, someday you will ruin a perfectly good historic moment.”
“I am an engineer. That is why they brought me.”
Hiroshi Nakamura checked cabin pressure and suit telemetry.
“Cabin stable. Suits stable. We should inspect seals before opening the hatch.”
Hale released a breath.
“Well, boys. We made it.”
Morozov smiled.
Hale added, “Now let’s make sure we can stay.”
That ended the historic moment.
They checked each other’s suits twice.
No national flag waited beside the hatch.
That decision had consumed more diplomatic hours than several pieces of flight hardware. Washington wanted the Stars and Stripes. Moscow wanted the Soviet banner. Tokyo and the European partners had objected to both. The eventual compromise had satisfied nobody and therefore had a chance of surviving.
They carried one flag.
Mars.
It was simple: a dark field, a red disk and four narrow lines meeting beneath it, representing the four mission blocs that had paid for the first landing. The politicians had called it a symbol of shared human purpose.
Morozov had called it cheaper than carrying four poles.
The hatch opened.
Mars entered as light.
Not air. Not sound. Light.
Rust-red ground stretched away beneath a salmon sky. The horizon seemed too close and too far at the same time. Chincoteague Crater’s low rim broke the plain in the distance. Shadows were sharp. Everything looked ancient enough to resent footprints.
Hale descended first because the mission plan said he would.
His boot touched Mars.
He stood still.
The words prepared for him by three committees disappeared from his mind.
He looked at the horizon, then at the cargo field.
“Well,” he said over the radio, “we’ve got a lot to do.”
Cole heard the sentence minutes later in Houston and closed his eyes.
Months before the crew arrived, an unmanned cargo ship had landed near the chosen site. It had brought prefabricated structural grids, pressure panels, tanks, a compact fission power unit, solar collectors, processing equipment, food, tools, spare suits and two small construction robots scarcely taller than a man’s knee.
Those little robots had spent months teaching their operators on Earth patience.
A command crossed interplanetary space. Minutes later it reached Mars. A robot moved an arm. Telemetry returned. Minutes later Earth discovered whether the arm had done the right thing.
An hour’s job could consume a shift.
Still, the robots had erected frames, sorted cargo and marked the footprint of the first habitat. They had also recorded every failed attempt.
Hale walked the site with a laminated plan strapped to his forearm.
Richter followed.
“Klaus.”
“I see it.”
A structural joint sat four millimetres out of line.
“Robot fastened it from the wrong side,” Richter said.
“Can we live with it?”
“No.”
“Good. I was afraid you’d say that.”
They unbolted it.
Morozov opened the power equipment and began inspecting connections. Nakamura knelt beside one of the little robots and downloaded its log.
“Sergei.”
“Yes?”
“This one has attempted the same panel for four days.”
Morozov looked over.
“Persistent.”
“The bracket is bent.”
Nakamura straightened it with a hand tool and reset the machine.
The robot lifted the panel.
It fitted immediately.
Morozov stared at it.
“Four days.”
“Four days.”
“We came two hundred million kilometres to hit a bracket with a wrench.”
Nakamura nodded. “Humanity has advanced.”
They worked through the first night.
The habitat skeleton became walls. Pressure sections became a room with a hatch heavy enough to make a man trust it.
No one called it home.
On the second day Nakamura unfolded the robotic miner. Earlier probes had confirmed buried ice beyond the low ridges. The machine crawled away across the plain carrying drills and a hopper.
If it worked, ice became water. Water became oxygen and hydrogen. Oxygen became breathing. Hydrogen became stored energy and industrial feedstock.
If it did not work, four men had ten days of supplies and a lander that could still take them back to orbit.
That margin governed everything.
For four days Mars behaved.
The miner reached the ice field. The habitat passed preliminary pressure tests. Morozov brought the starter power system online. Air moved through scrubbers. Hale sat inside the unfinished room with his helmet on and listened for a hiss that did not come.
On the evening of the fourth day, the horizon disappeared.
At first it looked like a stain.
Then the sun weakened.
Dust gathered against hinges and connectors. Visibility collapsed.
The commander aboard the orbital ship ordered them into the lander.
They crossed by guide line.
When the hatch shut, dust whispered against the hull.
The nearly finished habitat stood less than a hundred metres away and might as well have been on Earth.
They remained trapped for three days.
The lander had been designed to carry four men through descent and ascent, not to serve as a hotel.
Carbon-dioxide cartridges filled faster than planned. Solar output fell. Batteries carried circulation fans that were never supposed to run continuously. Four flight seats and three narrow berths forced them into six-hour rotations in which nobody actually slept.
Hale scratched a mark beside the hatch for every hour the weather station remained blind.
At nineteen marks Morozov looked at the wall.
“You are making this place look like a prison.”
“Give me a better view.”
On the sixth day Richter spread the ascent checklist and calculations across his knees.
“If the storm stays tomorrow, we leave without finishing.”
“And if it stays longer?” Morozov asked.
Richter did not answer.
The miner stopped transmitting.
The forecast changed twice.
Earth’s answers arrived after the questions had become old. The ascent margin kept shrinking.
By the seventh morning Hale’s marks reached sixty.
Then the window brightened.
Nakamura leaned toward the weather display.
“We have a horizon.”
They were outside within an hour.
Mars had rearranged their work.
A connector was packed with dust. A test port had lost its cap. The miner had stalled twenty kilometres away with ice in its hopper. Two leaks appeared in the habitat where none had existed before.
Mission Control sent the order to abort surface operations and prepare for ascent.
The four men stood between the lander and the habitat while sunset touched the new metal.
“We can go now,” Morozov said. “That is the last good decision anyone can guarantee.”
Richter touched the repaired pressure seal.
“A month before another attempt. The engineering team stays in orbit. They have nowhere to live.”
“We have the ice,” Nakamura said. “We know the faults.”
Hale looked at the habitat.
Then he keyed his radio.
“Orbit, this is Hale. We heard the order. We’re staying to finish Camp One.”
The answer was immediate.
“You will lose certified ascent margin.”
“I know.”
“Mission Control will want a reason.”
Hale watched three helmet lights moving across the darkening site.
“Tell them we can still make it work.”
Nobody gave permission.
Nobody physically stopped them.
On day eight the shell held pressure.
On day nine the scrubbers failed twice.
On day ten the oxygen compressor and water pump tried to start together and repeatedly tripped the generator protection.
Hale and Morozov stood outside with suit batteries sinking toward warning levels while Nakamura changed the control sequence from inside.
“New sequence loaded,” Nakamura said. “Sergei, cut the pump.”
Morozov threw the switch.
“Three. Two. One.”
The compressor started.
The breaker held.
At Nakamura’s signal the water pump returned at half load.
No warning light followed.
An hour later all four men stood inside the habitat without helmets.
The air smelled of hot insulation and human sweat.
It was the best air any of them had ever breathed.
Hale called orbit.
“Camp One is operational.”
Four days later, the soldiers came down.