Marooned on Mars

CHAPTER 7 Mars Ahead

Traveling from one planet to another seems like a simple thing, if the ship has power enough to make the trip. In the old days, most people had figured out that all one had to know was where Mars would be, and then head directly for it with all rockets firing. After all, the orbits of the planets were well enough known, and it wouldn’t be hard to aim the ship.

Actually, it took a lot of high-powered mathematics to make a good approximation of the course needed. The direct trip could be made, but it would take an incredible amount of force. And even with atomic energy, no rocket would have any excess power.

Goddard figured out the best orbits early in the twentieth century, when the only rockets in existence were mere toys. He discovered that the most economical orbit could be found by drawing the orbit of Earth, 93,000,000 miles from the. Sun, and the orbit of Mars, which was 128,000,00 miles from the Sun at its closest point; then, if another cycle is drawn which Just touches both orbits, it will be the ideal orbit for a rocket flight between the two planets.

Chuck stood in the control room of the Eros, resting his hands and studying the chart of their flight with all its markings for days and speeds. Lew was doubled into the ruined control panel, pulling out the mass of bent and fused parts, but the chart was the only thing of any interest to Chuck in the place.

“Stop muttering,” Lew told him. “Either read the stuff aloud, or keep quiet. You’re reminding me of how much I’ve forgotten of the schooling I had whenever you mumble a figure and I can’t remember it”

Chuck grinned, and began trying to make sense of it over the radio.

It wasn’t a simple path. It left Earth on one side of the Sun and went all the way around to the other side before it met the orbit of Mars. Even at the speeds they were traveling, it would take 237 days, from start to finish.

Even then, it was possible only when Earth and Mars were in exactly the right place—which happened over periods that were years apart.

Earth traveled around the Sun at more than eighteen miles a second, and the ship’s acceleration had boosted its-speed to better than twenty-five miles a second. Now they were fighting against the pull of the Sun, which reached out, trying to drag them inward, forcing them to lose speed until they would arrive at Mars’ orbit with only fifteen miles a second left; but that was as it should be, since Mars only traveled in its orbit at that speed. “Simple enough, Lew?”

“If you discount the pull of Mars,” Vance commented, as he entered the control room through the lock they had installed. “You make it sound as if we simply drift down and touch without any more work. Don’t forget that we’ll start falling for Mars as soon as we come near, and we’ll have to land with the rockets, unless we want to ‘be smashed flat or burned up in her atmosphere. That’s why you’d better get those controls fixed.”

Chuck nodded, and took his turn with the wires as Lew came out for a rest. Being a pilot on interplanetary ships began to sound like a worse dose of mathematics than being an engineer.

They were already more than half the way. Now they would begin heading closer and closer to Mars. Already the Sun, as seen through the filters, had shrunk enough to be noticeably smaller.

He pulled a fused box out of the ruins and studied it carefully, comparing it to the diagrams. In the drawings, it was shown as a dotted box around two bars that didn’t quite touch—the symbol for a shielded condenser. But this was obviously a lot more complicated than that.

Chuck picked up the small welding torch and began stripping off the twisted, half-melted shielding. Inside was the wreck of a maze of wires, resistors, condensers, and something that might have been crystal rectifiers once. He motioned to Lew. “Make anything of this?”

“Not much. I’ve been studying that ‘condenser,’ and wondering how it worked. Doesn’t seem to make sense. Give me. those specs.”

They went over them together, trying to figure it out. Beside the box was a number, as there was beside each part. Lew went back for a book of parts, trying to find it. It wasn’t mentioned!

“Nice,” he said bitterly. “They must have put a new circuit in just before the specs were printed—so some engineer drew that in, expecting to key it later. And it got passed over. What is it—some pulsing circuit do you think?”

“Must be. Looks as if it takes the pulses from the motors and chop the tops off them—but it must do more than that.”

“Put it aside,” Chuck suggested. “We can go over it later. You’re strong on theory—you’ll have to figure what went into it, unless we have a part among the spares that isn’t listed in the book.”

Vance picked the box up and turned it over. “How important is this?”

Lew shrugged. “I don’t know, but I suspect it’s the main trick in getting smooth controls. We’re playing this by feel, more or less; control is mostly electronic, but it has some twists I don’t know about.”

Vance put in a call for Steele, but the engineer shook his head as he looked at the box. He picked up the diagrams and began studying them.

There was a cloud on his usually handsome face as he returned the box and drawings. “It’s important—I can tell that much. But it’s some new development I don’t know a thing about. Shall I put the others to work taking inventory?”

Vance nodded tersely, and Steele went out, still scowling. Inventory of stocks went on while Lew and Chuck dug farther into the control panel, and began putting it back together, leaving space for the box. Eventually the last piece had been inspected. There was no spare on board.

The time was getting short. They were beginning to draw near to Mars. The planet now ahead of them was just visible on the radar screen, when it was set for the longest range—where it took a planetary mass to affect it.

Chuck worked on testing the panel, while Lew, Rothman, and Steele pored over the diagrams, trying to figure out exactly what the theory behind it was. They had already put in calls to Earth, but the specifications there were obviously different since they failed to show the box at all; the mix-up on the diagrams had obviously been a complete one. Apparently some engineer had come up with a new development, wired it into the circuit, and marked it hastily into the drawings. He’d failed to report his changes, and when the panel passed its tests, it had been installed without any record that it was nonstandard.

Earth was trying to track down the singularly modest inventor. They reported finally that they had found who it was—but the man had been killed in an auto accident the day he finished the panel!

It accounted for the trouble with the drawings, but it didn’t help any. Chuck could only suggest that they try to find his working notes and see if they contained any information.

Another week passed before the answer came. The notes had been found and decoded. They were incomplete, and the engineers there had no model to work from, but the general theories had been discovered. They read them off to the Eros, spelling each word in triplicate to make sure nothing was lost.

More days went by while Lew, Chuck and Steele pored over the information and the ruined box, redeveloping the dead engineer’s theories, and trying to see how to apply them.

Finally they began work on the actual construction, and none of them looked happy. Chuck knew that half of their work was founded on guesses, but he was too exhausted to worry about it. He took the parts that he needed and began assembling them.

“It all depends—” he answered Vance’s questions. ‘There’s a tricky coil here, and we can only hope we’ve figured out how it was wired from what we found of the original. And we don’t know the size of the two condensers. We’re just making the best guesses we can. If it works at all, we may be able to tune it up properly, and we may not. With enough time, I suppose we could get it working as well as the original—maybe better.”

Vance nodded and left them alone. When he came back, the box was installed, and they were frantically adjusting things in it, trying to get a response from it. The needles on their test equipment stood unmoving at zero.

Chuck lay awake a long time that night. He was sure that the box should work. Of course, he was a little weaker on theory than Lew—but he’d been boning up from the technical books in the microfilm library. He was beginning to feel like a machine, with no human emotions left.

It had seemed romantic, back on the Moon, to get into a ship and sail off to Mars,-the first human beings to visit another planet. He’d even dreamed about finding life there—maybe even intelligent life. Before he ever thought he had a chance to go on the expedition, he’d become involved with the puzzle of how men could communicate with other intelligent races, and had spent the best part of a summer vacation in studying all that had been written on it.

But that seemed flat now. His muscles ached from straining over the delicate workmanship. His back was weary with tension”, and his mind wanted to go around in a continual circle. Sometimes he felt older than any man on the ship—and then he realized that the others were feeling the same.

When he did fall asleep, it was only for an hour. Then some bit of a dream woke him up. Something about his father…

With sudden determination, he dressed quickly and went toward the control room. Technically, he had to get permission to use the radar communications set, but all rules had been dropped in the emergency. He snapped it on, coupling his built-in microphone to the set and began calling his father on Moon City.

Some of the tension he felt was in the operator’s voice. They must have been as worried as the men on the ship—or perhaps they felt worse, since they were powerless to help. He waited impatiently, until his father’s voice answered.

It was a calm, quiet voice. There was the strength and understanding in it he had always found. “Hello, Chuck. What’s the trouble, boy?”

Chuck felt like crying as his muscles relaxed slowly. He choked out the facts, stumbling over the words. Then he waited while the message sped to Earth, his father considered, and the answer came back—they were far enough away that even the speed of radar couldn’t cover the distance in less than minutes.

“Kid, unless I’m mistaken, you’ve run into the oldest trouble an engineer has,” his father told him. “Take a look to make sure all your power cables are hooked up. I remember I spent two weeks on a job once, and only got the answer when one of the cleaning women pointed out…”

But Chuck wasn’t listening. He was across the room, staring into the open panel. Lying curled up in one comer, under a maze of wiring, the unattached cable connection stared back at him accusingly!

He couldn’t remember signing off or thanking his father, though he must have done it. His next memory was of shaking Captain Vance awake, and yelling for Lew. By then, the whole ship was clustered around him, trying to make sense of his words.

Three hour’s later the meters indicated that the panel was working according to specifications.

Rothman made a check, and Steele and Vance rechecked. Everything seemed perfect.

“Looks fine,” Rothman told them. “You boys have done as well as anyone could—better than anyone except the engineer who figured this out in the first place. But until we make an actual landing, we can’t know if it’s perfect. If we’re lucky, well get down in one piece; when we see how it operates we’ll know enough to correct it if it needs it.”

He moved cautiously to the controls and fed a short burst of power into the jets. He nodded slowly, the frown still on his face. “If the gyroscopes were trustworthy…”

He let it hang there. Then he grinned. “Anyway, let’s have a celebration. How about it. Captain?”

Chuck went back to his routine duties, and the regular watches were continued again. Ahead, Mars continued to grow in size, though the spinning of the ship made it impossible to see any detail. The gyroscope wheel was turning over very slowly, cutting the spin down, until they would again be weightless, but Vance was putting no strain on it.

Chuck waited until the ship ceased spinning before he went back to the control room. Here the planet shone ahead, big and red in the near distance. There was air in the control room again, and he heard his breath whistle out sharply.

The markings on the surface stood out plainly. Whether they were “canals” or something else, there was no way of knowing. Still, his eyes proved that die Lunar observatory’s photographs had been right They weren’t as straight as the maps had shown them once, but there was nothing like them on either the Moon or Earth.

It could be intelligence, he told himself. Maybe there had been enough atmosphere for intelligence to develop and to start a civilization. Egypt had built pyramids against a gravity two and a half times as great—and China had erected the Great Wall that still stretched across thousands of miles.

What would they find: perhaps there would be no life of any intelligence, or perhaps ruins to show that intelligence had lost its battle with the vanishing air and water. Yet he could hope that somehow some of it had survived.

Steele had come up behind him and was looking out too. The man’s big chest lifted in a slow sigh; he shook his bead at Chuck. “It’s been too long since there was any real atmosphere. Except for a thin, weak dribble of it. Mars couldn’t hold her air. She was too small and light,” he muttered, as if reading Chuck’s mind. “But it’s hard to be scientific when you look at that. I keep thinking of strange people coming out to help us. Maybe I should be writing poetry instead of taking up atomic engineering. Well, we’ll know all about it tomorrow.”

“And if there are people?” Chuck asked.

Steele sighed again. “I don’t know. Maybe war. Maybe peace. When I was a kid, I heard tales from my grandmother that didn’t make me think much of people—-stories she’d heard from the days when my race were slaves. But. don’t let anybody tell you that men are rotten, boy; they’ve come a long way. I think it will be up to the Martians. If they’re savages, they’ll hate us, and fear us, maybe. You can’t make friends with people who are afraid of you.”

Then he grinned, shaking off his mood. “We’re talking nonsense. Chuck. We’ll be lucky if we find anything as advanced as insects down there. Let’s get back to work on the gardens.”

Chuck was dreaming of fairylike Martians coming out to welcome him with wreaths in one hand and swords in the other when, the next afternoon, the faint motion of the ship turning over to direct its jets at Mars awakened him.

He gobbled down a hasty breakfast from a ration can and plastic bag, and headed toward the control room. He hesitated outside, and Vance motioned him in. Only the captain, the pilot and Lew were there.

The screen above the controls showed the surface rushing up to them, growing as they watched. Rothman was busy with his calculator, and there was a trace of sweat on his forehead. Vance sat at the controls, as cool as ever, until Rothman finished and moved for the seat. Then the captain pulled two of the remaining three seats together and motioned Chuck into one.

The seats swung back to form horizontal shock cushions, while the controls slid out until Lew and Rothman could drop their hands onto them easily. Vance adjusted a throat microphone that was coupled into an overhead speaker. “One minute… thirty seconds… fifteen… ten… five… four… three… two… BLAST!”

‘The pressure of acceleration was easier to take in the carefully built seats. It hit at them, but their eyes remained glued to the screens. Chuck felt a groan slip from his lips.

The ship wasn’t steady. The point of ground at which Rothman was aiming wobbled, and the ship listed from side to side. They could almost feel the control slipping out of the pilot’s hands.

Rothman tapped the levers again, harder this time, fighting against the slipping of the ship. Then one of his hands reached against the savage pressure to a switch. “The instrument readings!” he gasped. “When we get down well figure out the trouble.”

Again he increased the acceleration against the speed, until the meter above registered five and a half gravities. Chuck’s eyeballs seemed to burst, and he could barely see the screen. The ship was slowing now.

“Free fall?” Vance’s hoarse voice asked from the

speaker.

Rothman made no answer, but his fingers suddenly cut off the rocket blast. There was a high, thin whistle -from outside to show they were in atmosphere.

Then they were falling free, trying to correct their motion with the tiny steering-vanes on the stubby wings.