Element 79 (12 page)

The next step was to use the Moon for developing the techniques needed in the conquest of Mars. A permanent lunar laboratory was established. The essence of the business was to achieve self-sufficiency with the aid of regenerative life-support systems. For energy in its grosser forms, an interesting multistage method was used. For a start, a compact nuclear reactor was transported from Earth. This was used to power small diameter boreholes through the ice. So long as the water was allowed up only in small quantities, through a carefully constructed pipe, the flow could be kept under control. The critical thing was pressure at the surface. Instead of the water being permitted to spurt out freely into a vacuum, the pressure was taken down in several stages, in each of which the speed of the water was adjusted to match a set of turbines. Getting everything right in the beginning was very tricky indeed. However, once the difficulties were past, abundant energy was available in practically a permanent supply. Technically it was hydroelectric power, but on the Moon the water flowed uphill, not downhill, as on the Earth.

Oxygen came in ample quantities from the dissociation of water. Ultraviolet light from the Sun produced the dissociation, yielding nearly a kilogram of oxygen per day per square meter of exposed area. Ten square meters gave sufficient oxygen for a man. Nitrogen and carbon were problems, particularly nitrogen. The water from below had a lot of carbon dioxide dissolved in it, however. Really, it was soda. Less nitrogen, but enough, also came up with the water. Photosynthesis was quick and efficient, enabling a subsistence diet to become established. Trace elements, vitamins, and so on, were still imported from Earth. Even this dependence could have been overcome in time, but the time available for research on the Moon was now running out. As a NASA spokesman succinctly put it, the nation had acquired a Martian-wise capability.

it had come as a shock many years earlier to discover how very similar the Martian surface is to the Moon. This should really have been obvious from the beginning. It should have been obvious that the general dappled appearance of Mars is the same phenomenon as the “Man in the Moon” pattern of the lunar surface. The pattern comes from an overlapping of circular patches, like the “seas” or maria of the Moon, themselves produced by the large-scale impacts of huge meteorites, craters on the biggest scale of all. The canals that many observers thought they had seen turned out to be mere chains of craters. The human eye always tends to connect together a number of dots along a line, to see them as a complete line. This became obvious from the first fly-by pictures. Mars was simply a larger-scale version of the Moon.

This was why the lunar laboratory was so important. Much the same conditions could be expected on Mars, the same glaciers, the same water problems. Apart from the sheer dynamics of reaching Mars, demanding much more powerful boosters, apart from the length of the voyage—several months instead of days—most local problems should be less difficult on Mars. There would be somewhat stronger gravity, which was an advantage. The Martian atmosphere would remove the solar X-rays against which all lunar scientist-explorers had to be endlessly shrouded. There was some oxygen in the Martian atmosphere. Compressors would therefore give an adequate oxygen supply. The Martian atmosphere would reduce electrostatic effects so that dust would not be quite such a bad problem. The Martian atmosphere seemed to be an advantage in every way.

Both the atmosphere and the white polar caps of Mars were well understood now. With water coming up occasionally from below, exactly as on the Moon, thin polar caps of hoarfrost were just what one would expect. Martian gravity is intermediate between Earth and Moon. Terrestrial gravity is strong enough for the Earth to have retained most of the water squeezed from its interior throughout the eons. At the opposite extreme, the very weak lunar gravity of the Moon permits it to retain no surface water. Mars lies between. Mars holds water, but not for long. There is always a little water on the surface, water recently come from below which has not yet had time enough to escape away into space. The oxygen comes, of course, from dissociation of the water by sunlight, and carbon dioxide and nitrogen also come up with the water. The clouds observed from time to time by early astronomers were simply occasional squirts, released by an impacting meteorite from without. Mars was more subject to bombardment than the Moon, being nearer the asteroidal belt. Protecting spacecraft from impact was a serious difficulty, one that it didn’t pay to think about too closely.

Mars was expected to be similar to the Moon in another respect, one which might well have served as a warning. A theoretical speculation dating from the 1960s was now entirely confirmed. Earth and Venus are both built from very roughly equal amounts of rock and unoxidized metals, particularly iron. The two components are largely separate, with the metals on the inside, the rocks on the outside, which raises the problem of how they got that way. Given a homogeneous, solid mixture of rock and metal in the first place, the metal would not sink to the middle. So much was realized. Perhaps when the planets were formed from a hot gas the metal was the first to condense. Then the rocks condensed later around the metal. This would solve the problem in one move. The trouble was that calculation showed rock and metal should both condense more or less together, as a mixture.

The solution came in a most surprising way. It was natural in the first calculations to assume the temperature of the cooling gases went steadily lower and lower as time went on. But this apparently reasonable hypothesis wasn’t right. The temperature first went down, then it lifted for a while, before taking a final plunge in the last cooling phase. The temperature curve had first a minimum, then a maximum, after which it declined away. Condensation of rock and metal occurred equally at the minimum. The surprise came with a calculation which showed that although the rock and metal condensed together, they would not evaporate together at the succeeding temperature maximum. The metal would evaporate, but not the rock. So in the final decline of temperature it would be the metal that would condense bodily around the rock. Earth and Venus had the metal and rock separate, all right, but the wrong way round, the metal on the outside, not the inside.

This arrangement—an inner ball of rock surrounded by a substantially more dense shell of metal, the shell with a similar mass to the ball—was quite unstable, however. The shell collapsed inward, so that shell and ball interchanged themselves. The whole Earth was turned inside out, like Baron Munchausen’s fox. The same was true for Venus, but not for the Moon or Mars. Neither the Moon nor Mars had very much metal, and what they had was still outside the rock. Their outer metallic shells had never become massive enough for the same instability to have occurred. A lot turned on the difference, on Mars having its metal on the outside.

With space technology developed to a state of planet-wise capability, and with the mass of data collected from the many telepuppets now in orbit around the planet, the stage was set for a manned mission to Mars. Although the astronauts assigned to the mission were as dedicated as ever, they were naturally much worried by the sterility problem.

The first lunar rockets had possessed no more than a certified sterility. Used for soft landings, they were dealt with by simple ethylene-oxide techniques. The priority was soon off the sterility problem, however, so far as the Moon was concerned. Cynthia turned out to be herself entirely sterile. No wonder, with the drenching of X-rays she was receiving, and with the cold on her backside and the heat on her frontside. Thereafter nobody had any worries about “ejecta” on the Moon.

Mars was another breed of cats. Twenty years earlier, Mars had already been declared a biological preserve. This had been agreed internationally. As one cognizant biologist put it, “The mere suggestion that fecal material might be jettisoned under conditions which would contaminate the surface is symptomatic of attitudes which fail to give appropriate consideration of exobiological objectives.” Such irresponsible procedures were condemned, totally and emphatically. In plain language, readily understandable to one and all, this meant you couldn’t shit on Mars.

A tremendous amount of research, it is true, had been put into the development of space suits equipped with really efficient “biological barriers,” as the pundits of NASA put it. Be this as it may, all astronauts found these things the very devil. It seemed much simpler to go chronically constipated.

Then come the problem of back-contamination, not that there seemed much chance of pathogens existing on Mars. Nobody at NASA was ever known to call a spade a spade, or to use a simple word where a complicated one would do. In plain language, again, precautions had to be taken against a “bug” being imported back from Mars. So it came about that an incredibly complex quarantine “machinery” was set up. It wasn’t just a matter of keeping the returning astronauts in isolation for some defined period. After all, any bugs that happened to be inside them had already been cooking for three months or more, throughout the return voyage. It was more that the astronauts had to be “degaussed,” that is, to have the contents of the intestinal tract entirely removed, the blood supply withdrawn and replaced, and so forth, all by glove-box techniques.

The first Martian mission was given over to glamour, just like the first lunar mission. It was a case of nipping down from orbit, nipping for a little while out onto the planet itself, nipping back into the module—a quite fat job, this time—and of nipping up again into orbit. Three months out from Earth, three months back, unconscionable thick lumps of bread enclosing an excessively thin slice of meat. Still, the first expedition already cast doubt on the “life on Mars” theory. Not a bug, not a protein, not an amino acid, or any conceivable biochemical relation thereof, was found in the samples brought back to Earth.

The cognizant biologists took a bad knock. They had pushed a lot of people around, spent a lot of money, and achieved precisely nothing. Goaded into a last spasm, they insisted that further tests be made. Although very extensive samplings were taken by the second mission, not a trace of organic material was found. Life did not exist on Mars. Thereafter the planet was given over to the scientist-explorers.

Nothing really epoch-making was expected. Yet the instinct to stand where nobody has stood before is strong in all of us. The third mission set about its task of establishing a long-term Martian station with zest and zeal. Preliminary to setting up a permanent energy supply, the same boring down through the underground glaciers was put in hand. It had all been done before, but not there on Mars. This made the mission interesting and worthwhile.

A great discovery was made during a lull in these preliminary operations. Instruments deep below the surface found sound waves propagating everywhere throughout the ice of the glaciers. Records were immediately flashed back to Earth. They were processed in the NASA laboratories. The amplitude and frequency patterns were definitely not random. Highly complex variations were repeated from time to time, making it virtually certain that the sound waves must be information-carrying. But what, and to whom, and from where? Instructions to the third mission were to keep on transmitting the sound patterns back to Earth and to “proceed” with all due caution.

Here were Martians at last. It was a good story, told with febrile intensity by press, radio, and T.V. The NASA top brass allowed themselves to be dug up for the occasion. This was the very lifeblood of their budget. It was gravely emphasized that timely and responsible decisions would be made, just as soon as the analysis now in progress had ingested the situation.

Actually, nobody was getting anywhere toward cracking the code of the sound signals, which just went on and on without cease, night and day, week after week. If only somebody could have had an idea, an idea for making one single rational contact with the stuff. Then a second contact might have been possible, followed by a third, and so on. But nothing whatsoever came of all the writhing and thrashing.

When the news media saw how the mountain labored, they dropped the whole thing like a hot potato. Time enough to wrestle with the Martian problem as soon as there was something or someone to wrestle with. So the massive-hearted, palpitating public got itself back to the latest aspects of sex-worship.

By 1984 the stories currently popular on the screen would have seemed pretty ripe material to an earlier generation. Entertainment had been enjoying an apparently never-ending boom, a boom soundly based on affluence and leisure. Yet as it grew, the entertainment industry destroyed itself by consuming, like a fantastic lotus-eating dinosaur, the very material on which it depended for its existence. By now it seemed as if every idea had been flogged to death, as indeed it had. Suspense stories were the hardest hit of all. With each succeeding year, sensation had to be piled on sensation. By 1970, the successes of 1965 seemed woefully out of date. By 1975, it was exactly the same way with the successes of 1970. The human race was steadily becoming “sophisticated,” it was burning out its natural responses, first to more or less normal situations, then to abnormal ones, then to utterly pathological ones.

Every so often someone came up with a really new gimmick. Then you always kicked yourself for not having seen it first yourself. Gimmicks no longer needed to be clever. The important thing was to be quite new. Like snow in May, they didn’t last long, but while they lasted, you did all right.

It was easy to understand why in these circumstances sex had become such an intensely marketable commodity. This was the major field of entertainment now, because it was the one field in which originality was not important. Evolution proceeded, not by increased sophistication, but by increased display, by an increased emphasis on realism, the very opposite from the suspense area. Unrelenting pressures from a wealthy industry had forced censorship into retreat after retreat, until by now all attempts at control had virtually broken down. Against sex, the Martian story barely made it as a nine-days’ wonder.