Mars (3 page)

“You must go out, Alberto,” said the mayor of Rio. “They will not stop until you do.”

Large TV consoles had been wheeled into the four corners of the spacious, high-ceilinged parlor. Only a dozen people had been invited to share this moment of triumph with their famous countryman, but more than forty others had squeezed into the room. Many of the men were in evening clothes; the women wore their finest frocks and jewels. Later Brumado and the select dozen would be whisked by helicopter to the airport and then on to Brasilia, to be received by the president of the republic.

Outside, the people of Rio thundered, “Bru-ma-
do
! Bru-ma-
do
!”

Alberto Brumado was a small, slight man. Well into his sixties, his dark round face was framed by a neatly clipped grizzled beard and short gray hair that seemed always tousled, as if he had just been engaged in some strenuous action. It was a kindly face, smiling, looking slightly nonplussed at the sudden insistence of the crowd outside. He was more accustomed to the quiet calm of the university classroom or the hushed intensity of the offices of the great and powerful.

If the governments of the world’s industrial nations were the brain directing the Mars Project, and the multinational corporations were the muscle, then Alberto Brumado was the heart of the mission to explore Mars. No, more still: Brumado was its soul.

For more than thirty years he had traveled the world, pleading with those in power to send human explorers to Mars. For most of those years he had faced cold indifference or outright hostility. He had been told that an expedition to Mars would cost too much, that there was nothing humans could do on Mars that could not be done by automated robotic machinery, that Mars could wait for another decade or another generation or another century. There were problems to be solved on Earth, they said. People were starving. Disease and ignorance and poverty held more than half the world in their mercilessly tenacious grip.

Alberto Brumado persevered. A child of poverty and hunger himself, born in a cardboard shack on a muddy, rain-swept hill overlooking the posh
residências
of Rio de Janeiro, Alberto Brumado had fought his way through public school, through college, and into a brilliant career as an astronomer and teacher. He was no stranger to struggle.

Mars became his obsession. “My one vice,” he would modestly say of himself.

When the first unmanned landers set down on Mars and found no evidence of life, Brumado insisted that their automated equipment was too simple to make meaningful tests. When a series of probes from the Russian Federation and, later, the United States returned rocks and soil samples that bore nothing more complex than simple organic chemicals, Brumado pointed out that they had barely scratched a billionth of that planet’s surface.

He hounded the world’s scientific congresses and industrial conferences, pointing out the photos of Mars that showed huge volcanoes, enormous rift valleys, and canyons that looked as if they had been gouged out by massive flood waters.

“There must be water on Mars,” he said again and again. “Where there is water there must be life.”

It took him nearly twenty years to realize that he was speaking to the wrong people. It mattered not what scientists thought or what they wanted. It was the politicians who counted, the men and women who controlled national treasuries. And the people, the voters who filled those treasuries with their tax money.

He began to haunt their halls of power—and the corporate boardrooms where the politicians bowed to the money that elected them. He made himself into a media celebrity, using talented, bright-eyed students to help create television shows that filled the world’s people with the wonder and awe of the majestic universe waiting to be explored by men and women of faith and vision.

And he listened. Instead of telling the world’s leaders and decision makers what they should do, he listened to what they wanted, what they hoped for, what they feared. He listened and planned and gradually, shrewdly, he shaped a scheme that would please them all.

He found that each pressure group, each organization of government or industry or ordinary citizens, had its own aims and ambitions and anxieties.

The scientists wanted to go to Mars for curiosity’s sake. To them, exploration of the universe was a goal in itself.

The visionaries wanted to go to Mars because it is there.
They viewed the human race’s expansion into space with religious fervor.

The military said there was no point in going to Mars; the planet was so far away that it served no conceivable military function.

The industrialists realized that sending humans to Mars would serve as a stimulus to develop new technology—risk-free money provided by government.

The representatives of the poor complained that the billions spent on going to Mars should be spent instead on food production and housing and education.

Brumado listened to them all and then softly, quietly, he began speaking to them in terms they could understand and appreciate. He played their dreams and dreads back to them in an exquisitely manipulative feedback that focused their attention on his goal. He orchestrated their desires until they themselves began to believe that Mars was the logical objective of their own plans and ambitions.

In time, the world’s power brokers began to predict that Mars would be the new century’s first test of a nation’s vigor, determination, and strength. Media pundits began to warn gravely that it might be more costly to a nation’s competitive position in the global marketplace not to go to Mars than to go there.

Statesmen began to realize that Mars could serve as the symbol of a new era of global cooperation in peaceful endeavors that could capture the hearts arid minds of all the world.

The politicians in Moscow and Washington, Tokyo and Paris, Rio and Beijing, listened carefully to their advisors and then made up their minds. Their advisors had fallen under Brumado’s spell.

“We go to Mars,” said the American President to the Congress, “not for pride or prestige or power. We go to Mars in the spirit of the new pragmatic cooperation among the nations of the world. We go to Mars not as Americans or Russians or Japanese. We go to Mars as human beings, representatives of the planet Earth.”

The president of the Russian Federation told his people, “Mars is hot only the Symbol of our unquenchable will to expand and explore the universe, it is the symbol of the cooperation
that is possible between East and West. Mars is the emblem of the inexorable progress of the human mind.”

Mars would be the crowning achievement of a new era of international cooperation. After a century of war and terrorism and mass murder, a cosmic irony turned the blood-red planet named after the god of war into the new century’s blessed symbol of peaceful cooperation.

For the people of the rich nations, Mars was a source of awe, a goal grander than anything on Earth, the challenge of a new frontier that could inspire the young and stimulate their passions in a healthy, productive way.

For the people of the poor nations—well, Alberto Brumado told them that he himself was a child of poverty, and if the thought of Mars filled him with exhilaration why shouldn’t they be able to raise their eyes beyond the squalor of their day-to-day existence and dream great dreams?

There was a price to be paid, of course. Brumado’s successful wooing of the politicians meant that his cherished goal of Mars was the child of their marriage. Thus the first expedition to Mars was undertaken not as the scientists wanted it, not even as the engineers and planners of the various national space agencies wanted it. The first humans to go to Mars went as the politicians wanted them to go: as quickly and cheaply as possible.

The unspoken rationale of the first expedition was: politics first, science second—a distant second. This was to be a “flags and footprints” mission, no matter how much the scientists wanted to explore.

Efficiency was an even more distant third, as it usually is when political considerations are uppermost. The politicians found it easier to rationalize the necessary expenditures if the project were completed quickly, before an opposition party got the chance to gain power and take credit for its ultimate success. Haste did not automatically make waste, but it forced the administrators to plan a mission that was far from efficient.

Hundreds of scientists were recruited for the Mars Project. Scores of cosmonauts and astronauts. Thousands of engineers, technicians, flight controllers, and administrators. They spent ten years in planning and three more in training for the two-year-long mission. All so that twenty-five men and women could spend sixty days on Mars. Eight paltry
weeks on Mars, and then back home again. That was the mission plan. That was the goal for which thousands devoted thirteen years of their lives.

To the world at large, however, the excitement of the Mars Project grew with each passing month as the chosen personnel went through their training and the spacecraft took shape at launching centers in the Russian Federation, the United States, South America, and Japan. The world made itself ready to reach out to the red planet. Alberto Brumado was the acknowledged spiritual leader of the Mars mission, although he was not entrusted with anything more concrete than moral support. But moral support was desperately needed more than once during these years, as one government or another would want to opt out of the decade-long financial burden. But none did.

Too old to fly into space himself, Brumado instead watched his daughter board the spacecraft that would take her to Mars.

Now he had watched her step out onto the surface of that distant world, while the crowd outside chanted their name.

Wondering if he had done the right thing, Alberto Brumado went to the long, sunlit windows. The crowd cheered wildly at the sight of him.

K
ALININGRAD
: Mission control for the Mars expedition had more redundancy than the spacecraft the explorers flew in. While redundancy in the spacecraft was required for safety, at mission control it was required by politics. Each position in mission control was shared by two people at identical side-by-side consoles. Usually one was a Russian and the other an American, although at a few of the desks sat Japanese, British, French, and even an Argentine—with a Russian by the side of each one of them.

The men and women of the mission control center were just starting to celebrate. Up to the moment of touchdown they had been rigidly intent on their display screens, but now at last they could lean back, slip off their headsets, laugh together, sip champagne, and light up victory cigars. Even some of the women took cigars. Behind the rows of consoles, in the glassed-in media section, reporters and photographers
toasted one another and the mission controllers with vodka in paper cups.

Only the chief of the American team, a burly balding man in his shirtsleeves, sweat stains at his armpits, unlit cigar clamped between his teeth, looked unhappy. He leaned over the chair of the American woman who bore the archaic title of CapCom.

“What did he say?”

She glanced up from her display screens. “I don’t know what it was.”

“It sure as hell wasn’t what he was
supposed
to say!”

“Would you like to replay the tape?” asked the Russian working beside the young woman. His voice was soft, but it cut through the buzz of conversation.

The woman deftly tapped a few buttons on her keyboard and the screen once again showed the figure of James Waterman standing in his sky-blue pressure suit on the sands of Mars.

“Ya’aa’tey,” said Jamie Waterman’s image.

“Garbled transmission?” the chief asked.

“No way,” said the woman.

The Russian turned from the screen to give the chief a piercing look. “What does it mean?”

“Damned if I know,” grumbled the chief. “But we’re sure as hell going to find out!”

Up in the media section, one young TV reporter noticed the two men hunched over the CapCom’s seat. He wondered why they looked so puzzled.

B
ERKELEY
: Professor Jerome Waterman and Professor Lucille Monroe Waterman had canceled their classes for the day and remained at home to watch their son step out onto the surface of Mars. No friends. No students or faculty colleagues. A battalion of reporters hovered outside the house, but the Watermans would not face them until after they had seen the landing.

They sat in their comfortably rumpled, book-lined study watching the television pictures, window blinds closed tightly against the bright morning sun and the besieging media reporters encamped outside.

“It takes almost ten minutes for the signals to reach the Earth,” mused Jerry Waterman.

His wife nodded absently, her eyes focused on the sky-blue figure among the six faceless creatures on the screen. She held her breath when it was Jamie’s turn at last to speak.

“Ya’aa’tey,” said her son.

Lucille gasped: “Oh no!”

Jamie’s father grunted with surprise.

Lucille turned accusingly to her husband. “He’s starting that Indian business all over again!”

S
ANTA FE
: Old Al always knew how to pack the store with customers even on a day like this. He had simply put a TV set prominently up on a shelf next to the Kachina dolls. People thronged in from all over the plaza to see Al’s grandson on Mars.

“Ya’aa’tey,” said Jamie Waterman, from a hundred million kilometers away.

“Hee-ah!” exclaimed old Al Waterman. “The boy did it!”

Mars.

Picture Death Valley at its worst. Barren desert. Nothing but rock and sand. Remove every trace of life: get rid of each and every cactus, every bit of scrub, all the lizards and insects and sun-bleached bones and anything else that even looks as if it might have once been alive.

Now freeze-dry the whole landscape. Plunge it down to a temperature of a hundred below zero. And suck away the air until there’s not even as much as you would find on Earth a hundred thousand feet above the ground.

That is roughly what Mars is like.