Read Online The Martian Race by Gregory Benford - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Gregory Benford
Tags: Fiction, General, Science-Fiction, adventure, Space Opera, Interplanetary voyages, Mars (Planet)
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would not be. Mars never forgave.
6
AUGUST 2015
S HE HAD FELT TROUBLED, AFTER SHE HAD GOTTEN V IKTOR ONTO THE crew.
She had gone into the meeting with Axelrod without a thought of pushing Marc off—she'd been prepared to resign. Her NASA experience should have warned her. Crew selection was the most Byzantine of all the rotations at NASA, fraught with personality and pull. Nothing was ever done for just one reason. In the Missions Operations Directorate there had been an intricate promenade of personalities and rank and “pull,” traits that now seemed as distant and stylized as the mating dance of birds.
Still, at NASA, the art of picking crews took time and much influence-peddling, government style, and there was time to second-guess. Not here. Axelrod had done his calculations and acted with only a moment's thought. She lacked such decisiveness about people. Quite acutely she felt the soft inner squishiness of them, how easily damaged. With Viktor she shared a hesitant vagueness about emotional matters. This was the standard astronaut profile—strong on externals, weak on communication of internals, as current psych-talk had it. But that did not mean that she was unaware of people's feelings. Wounding Marc had been painful, even if she was not the primary decider.
There was precious little time to brood about it, though. After Marc left, they all swung into relentless mission training.
Using centrifugal gravity simplified many tricky engineering points. Plumbing and structural designs were far easier to make work with gravity to help. But there were plenty of new techniques to master. Despite this being a private venture, work got sliced into the same pigeonholes as at NASA: operations planning, robotics, computers, flight support, vehicle systems, operations managing, payload, habitats, EVA.
Axelrod had imported NASA veterans to run these, too. Soon the air was thick with acronyms, clipped sentences, and can-do mannerisms.
Then Axelrod called them into another astronauts-only meeting in his office, with thirty minutes notice. He sat on his desk again, carefully arranging the creases in his dark blue tailored suit before beginning.
“We're a team, right?”
Nods all around. Julia nodded enthusiastically. She liked these conditions. The NASA Astronaut Office had been a perpetual playground of primate rivalry. Pilots looked down on mission specialists. Veterans lifted eyebrows at the newbies. Military thought the civilians were soft. Doctorate holders felt themselves above all others; they were in it for the science, not the ride.
“I've got something to tell you that will demand that you pull together.” Axelrod was savoring this, for some reason she could not detect. Then she saw: he was in the team, too. As close as he would ever get to being an astronaut. Luckily, he was more important than just another team element. He knew how to cut through layers of NASA fatty tissue.
The special demands of going to Mars with just four astronauts had disrupted the NASA style. Ideally astronauts were supposed to be interchangeable. That broke down somewhat under the space station's pressure for detailed specialists, and disintegrated under the work specs for Mars. Crews of four or six could not explore a whole world without a lot of special knowledge and techniques. So this team had few overlapping abilities.
“This is entirely top secret. Not even a hint to the press or anybody else, even inside the Consortium. Clear?”
They all nodded. Axelrod's assistants all left the room as if on signal.
“Remember that Mars flight gear I tried to buy? One-of-a-kind hardware? Well, NASA turned me down, then the ESA people. So I put some industrial espionage people onto tracing where it had disappeared to.” He lifted eyebrows. “Guess.”
Nobody did.
“I always like mysteries, just about the only kinda book I read. I go for the real detection stories, with clues you piece together. So let me give you an intercept
6
AUGUST 2015
S HE HAD FELT TROUBLED, AFTER SHE HAD GOTTEN V IKTOR ONTO THE crew.
She had gone into the meeting with Axelrod without a thought of pushing Marc off—she'd been prepared to resign. Her NASA experience should have warned her. Crew selection was the most Byzantine of all the rotations at NASA, fraught with personality and pull. Nothing was ever done for just one reason. In the Missions Operations Directorate there had been an intricate promenade of personalities and rank and “pull,” traits that now seemed as distant and stylized as the mating dance of birds.
Still, at NASA, the art of picking crews took time and much influence-peddling, government style, and there was time to second-guess. Not here. Axelrod had done his calculations and acted with only a moment's thought. She lacked such decisiveness about people. Quite acutely she felt the soft inner squishiness of them, how easily damaged. With Viktor she shared a hesitant vagueness about emotional matters. This was the standard astronaut profile—strong on externals, weak on communication of internals, as current psych-talk had it. But that did not mean that she was unaware of people's feelings. Wounding Marc had been painful, even if she was not the primary decider.
There was precious little time to brood about it, though. After Marc left, they all swung into relentless mission training.
Using centrifugal gravity simplified many tricky engineering points. Plumbing and structural designs were far easier to make work with gravity to help. But there were plenty of new techniques to master. Despite this being a private venture, work got sliced into the same pigeonholes as at NASA: operations planning, robotics, computers, flight support, vehicle systems, operations managing, payload, habitats, EVA.
Axelrod had imported NASA veterans to run these, too. Soon the air was thick with acronyms, clipped sentences, and can-do mannerisms.
Then Axelrod called them into another astronauts-only meeting in his office, with thirty minutes notice. He sat on his desk again, carefully arranging the creases in his dark blue tailored suit before beginning.
“We're a team, right?”
Nods all around. Julia nodded enthusiastically. She liked these conditions. The NASA Astronaut Office had been a perpetual playground of primate rivalry. Pilots looked down on mission specialists. Veterans lifted eyebrows at the newbies. Military thought the civilians were soft. Doctorate holders felt themselves above all others; they were in it for the science, not the ride.
“I've got something to tell you that will demand that you pull together.” Axelrod was savoring this, for some reason she could not detect. Then she saw: he was in the team, too. As close as he would ever get to being an astronaut. Luckily, he was more important than just another team element. He knew how to cut through layers of NASA fatty tissue.
The special demands of going to Mars with just four astronauts had disrupted the NASA style. Ideally astronauts were supposed to be interchangeable. That broke down somewhat under the space station's pressure for detailed specialists, and disintegrated under the work specs for Mars. Crews of four or six could not explore a whole world without a lot of special knowledge and techniques. So this team had few overlapping abilities.
“This is entirely top secret. Not even a hint to the press or anybody else, even inside the Consortium. Clear?”
They all nodded. Axelrod's assistants all left the room as if on signal.
“Remember that Mars flight gear I tried to buy? One-of-a-kind hardware? Well, NASA turned me down, then the ESA people. So I put some industrial espionage people onto tracing where it had disappeared to.” He lifted eyebrows. “Guess.”
Nobody did.
“I always like mysteries, just about the only kinda book I read. I go for the real detection stories, with clues you piece together. So let me give you an intercept
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