Mikeys

by Robert J. Sawyer

Damn, but it stuck in Don Lawson’s craw—largely because Chuck Zakarian was right.

After all, Zakarian was slated for the big Mars surface mission to be launched from Earth next year. He never said it to Don’s face, but Don knew that Zakarian and the rest of NASA viewed him and Sasim as Mikeys—the derisive term for those, like Apollo 11’s command-module pilot Mike Collins, who got to go almost all the way to the target.

Yes, goddamned Zakarian would be remembered along with Armstrong, whom every educated person in the world could still name even today, seventy years after his historic small step. But who the hell remembered Collins, the guy who’d stayed in orbit around the Moon while Neil and Buzz had made history on the lunar surface?

Don realized the point couldn’t have been driven home more directly than by the view he was now looking at. He was floating in the control room of the Asaph Hall, the ship that had brought him and Sasim Remtulla to Martian space from Earth. If he looked left, Don saw Mars, giant, red, beckoning. And if he looked right, he saw—

They called it the Spud. The Spud, for Christ’s sake!

Looking right, he saw Deimos, the outer of Mars’ two tiny moons, a misshapen hunk of dark, dark rock. How Don wanted to go to Mars, to stand on its sandy surface, to see up close its great valleys and volcanoes! But no. As Don’s Cockney granddad used to say whenever they passed a fancy house or an expensive car, “Not for the likes of us.”

Mars was for Chuck Zakarian and company. The A-team.

Don and Sasim were the B-team, the also-rans. Oh, sure, they had now arrived at the vicinity of Mars long before anyone else. And Don supposed there would be some cachet in being the first person since Apollo 17 left the Moon in 1972 to set foot on another world—even if that world was just a 15-kilometer-long hunk of rock.

Why build a space station from scratch to orbit Mars, the NASA mission planners had said? Why not simply plant the spaceship you had used to get there on Deimos? For one thing, you’d have the advantage of a little gravity—granted, only 0.0004 of Earth’s, but still sufficient to keep things from floating away on their own.

And for another, you could mine Deimos for supplies. Like Mars’ other moon Phobos, Deimos was a captured asteroid—specifically, a carbonaceous chondrite, meaning its stony mass contained claylike hydrous silicates from which water could be extracted.

More than that, though, Deimos’ density was so low that it had long been known that it couldn’t be solid rock; much water ice was mixed into its structure.

Deimos and Phobos were both tidally locked, like Earth’s moon, with the same side always facing the planet they orbited. But Phobos was just too damn close—a scant 2.8 planetary radii from Mars’ center, meaning it was really only good for looking down on the planet’s equatorial regions. Deimos, on the other hand, orbited at seven planetary radii, affording an excellent view of most of Mars’ surface. In Deimos, Mother Nature had provided a perfect infrastructure for a space station to study Mars. The two Mikeys would use it to determine the exact landing spot and the itinerary of surface features Zakarian’s crew would eventually visit.

“Ready?” said Don, taking his gaze away from the control-room window, from glorious Mars and drab Deimos.

Sasim gave him the traditional thumbs-up. “Ready.”

“All right,” said Don. “It’s time to crash.”

Deimos’ mean orbital velocity was a languorous 1.36 kilometers per second. Don and Sasim matched the Asaph Hall’s speed with that of the tiny moon and nudged their spaceship against it. A cloud of dust went up. Phobos had a reasonably dust-free surface, since ejecta thrown up from it was normally captured by Mars. But more distant Deimos still had lots of dust filling in its craters; whatever was blown off by impacts remained near it, eventually sifting down to blanket the surface. Indeed, although Deimos probably had a similar number of craters to Phobos, which sported dozens, only two on the outer moon were large and distinct enough to merit official International Astronomical Union names: Voltaire and Swift.

The Asaph Hall settled without so much as a bang—but it wasn’t a landing, not according to the mission planners. No, the ship had docked with Deimos: the artificial part of the space station rendezvousing with the natural part.

Apollo flights had been famous for discarding three stages before the tiny CSM/LM combo reached the Moon. But Asaph Hall, like the Percival Lowell that would follow with Zakarian’s crew, had retained one of its empty fuel tanks. Each mission would convert its spent cylinder into a habitat module: the Hall docked with Deimos in orbit about Mars; the Lowell down where the action was, on the Martian surface. There was good precedent, after all. The first space station to orbit Earth, Skylab, had been made out of an empty Saturn S-IVb booster. And, of course, Skylab had been crewed by the Mikeys of their day, Apollo pass-overs who were not quite good enough to go to the Moon.

“Mission Control,” said Don, “we have completed docking with Deimos.”

When Armstrong had said, “Tranquillity Base here, the Eagle has landed,” Houston had immediately replied, “Roger, Tranquillity, we copy you on the ground. We’ve got a bunch of guys here about to turn blue—we’re breathing again. Thanks a lot.”

But currently, Mars was 77,000,000 kilometers from Earth. That meant it would take four minutes and twenty seconds for Don’s words to reach Mission Control, and another four minutes and twenty seconds for whatever reply they might send to start arriving here. He doubted Houston would say anything as emotional as the words beamed back to Tranquillity Base; Don would be happy if they just didn’t make a crack about Mikeys.

Tranquillity Base. That had been such a cool name. This place needed a good name, too.

Sasim had evidently been thinking the same thing. “I’m not a fan of ‘Mars Landing Precursor Observation Station,’” he said, turning to Don, quoting the official title.

“Maybe we should call it Deimos Station,” said Don.

But Sas shook his head. “Mir is Russian for ‘peace’—that was a good name for a space station. But Deimos is Greek for ‘terror.’ Not quite correct in these difficult times.”

“We’ll come up with something,” Don said.

After the mandatory sleep period, Don and Sasim were ready to venture out onto the surface of Deimos. Although nobody would likely ever quote them back, Don had thought long and hard about what his first words would be when he stepped onto the Martian moon. “We come to the vicinity of the God of War,” he said, “in godly peace and friendship.”

Sasim followed him out, but evidently felt no one would care what the second person on Deimos had to say for posterity. He simply launched into his report. “The surface, as expected, is covered with dust and regolith…”

Once Sasim was finished, Don looked at him through their polarized faceplates. A big grin broke out on Don’s face. He used his chin to tap the control that cut the broadcast back to Earth, while leaving the channel to Sasim open. “All right,” he said. “Enough of the formalities. Here’s one thing we can do that Zakarian will never be able to.”

Don flexed his knees, crouched down, then pushed off the surface, straightening his legs as he did so, and—

Clark Kent had nothing on him!

Up, up, and away!

Higher and higher.

Further and farther.

Closer and closer to Mars itself.

Don looked down. Sasim had dwindled to the size of the proverbial ant, his olive-green space suit just a mote against the dark gray surface of Deimos.

Don continued to rise for a while longer, but at last he felt gentle fingers tugging at him.

It took several minutes, but slowly, gradually, sensually, he settled to the ground. He’d tried to just go up, but there’d been a slight angle to his flight, and he’d found himself coming down a hundred-odd meters from where he’d started.

“A true giant leap,” said Sasim, over the radio. “Beats all heck out of a small step.”

Don smiled, although he knew he was too far away for Sasim to see him do that. The jump had been exhilarating. “Maybe this station isn’t going to be so bad after all.”

“I’ve got an idea,” said Sasim, as they continued to work converting the fuel tank into a habitat. “We could call this place Asaph Hall.”

“That’s the name of our spaceship,” said Don, perplexed.

“Well, yes and no. Our ship is called Asaph Hall, after the guy who discovered the moons of Mars. And when you refer to a ship, you write the name in italics. But this whole station could be Asaph Hall—’hall,’ like in a building, get it?—all in roman type.”

“That’s a pretty picayune distinction,” said Don, unfolding an articulated section divider that had been stored for the out-ward journey. “It’ll get confusing.”

Sas frowned. “Maybe you’re right.”

“Don’t worry. We’ll think of something.”

It took several days to finish the conversion of the empty fuel tank into the habitat, even though all the fixtures were designed for easy assembly. During the process, Don and Sasim had slept in their spaceship’s command module, but at last the habitat was ready for them to move in. And although it was roomy—bigger than Skylab or Mir—Don was finally beginning to appreciate the wisdom of making an entire moonlet into a space station. He could see how being confined to just the habitat would have gotten claustrophobic after a while, if he and Sas didn’t have the rest of Deimos to roam over.

And roam over it they did. It only took a dozen leaps to circumnavigate their little—well, it wasn’t a globe; the technical name for Deimos’ shape was a triaxial ellipsoid. It was a lot of fun leaping around Deimos—and, despite the low gravity, it was actually excellent exercise, too. Up, up, up, that brief magical moment during which you felt suspended, at one with the cosmos, and then gently, oh so gently, sliding down out of the sky.

Don and Sas were approaching the line that separated Deimos’ nearside—the part of the moon that always faced toward Mars—from its farside. Like the blooded horn of some great beast, the now-crescent Mars stretched from Deimos’ smooth surface up toward the zenith. One more leap, and—

Yup, there it went: the Red Planet disappearing behind the horizon. With its glare gone from the sky, Don tried to find Earth. He oriented himself with Ursa Major, found the zodiac, scanned along, and there it was, a brilliant blue point of light, right in the heart of Scorpius, not far from red Antares, the rival of Mars.

Sas, Don had noticed, had a funny habit of bending his knees when he contacted the surface. It wasn’t as if there was any real impact to absorb—it was just a bit of theater —and it made Don smile. Don’s space suit was a sort of mustard color, a nice contrast with Sas’. The dark ground loomed closer and closer to him, and—

There wasn’t enough speed with contact to make any sort of sound that might be conducted through Don’s boots. And yet, still, as his soles touched Deimos, something felt strange this time, just different enough from every other landing Don had made so far to pique his curiosity.

He’d raised up a fair bit of dust, and it took him a few seconds to realize exactly what had happened. His foot hadn’t hit crumbly regolith. It had hit something unyielding.

Something smooth.

Don did a gentle backflip, landing upside down on his gloved hands. He used his right one to brush away dust.

“Sas!” Don called into his helmet mike. “Come here!”

Sasim did a long jump, bringing him close to where Don was. Another small hop brought him right up to Don. “What’s up?” asked Sas—perhaps a joking reference to Don’s current odd posture.

Don used his fingertips to gently flip himself back into a normal orientation. “Have a look.”

Sas tipped over until he was more or less hovering just above the surface. “What the heck is that?” he said.

“I’m not sure,” said Don. “But it looks like polished metal.”

Don and Sas brushed dust away for more than an hour, and were still exposing new metal. It was indeed manufactured—it looked to be anodized aluminum. “Maybe it’s part of the Viking orbiter, or one of those Mars missions like Mars Polar Lander that went astray,” said Don, sounding dubious even to himself.

“Maybe,” said Sas. “But it’s awfully big…”

“Still no sign of an edge,” said Don. “Maybe we should try another approach. Let’s each go ten meters away, dig down, and see if the sheet is there under the surface. If it is, go on another ten meters, and try again. Keep going until we come to the edge. You go leading; I’ll go trailing.” On any tidally locked satellite, “leading” was toward the leading hemisphere, the one that faced forward into the direction of orbital motion; trailing was the opposite way.

Sas agreed, and they each set out. Don easily hopped ten meters, and it didn’t take more than digging with his boot’s toe to uncover more of the metal. He hopped another ten and again easily found metal, although it seemed a little deeper down this time. Ten more; metal again. A further ten and, although he had to dig through about a meter of dust to get to it, he found metal once more. Of course, because of the puny gravity, there was no danger of sinking into the dust, but the stuff that had been disturbed was now hanging in charcoallike clouds above the surface.

Although it had been Don’s plan to go by ten-meter increments, he was starting to think that such trifling hops might result in a lot of wasted time. He gave a more vigorous kick off the ground this time and sailed forward fifty-odd meters. And yet again he found smooth metal, although it was buried even deeper out here, and—

“Don!” Sas’ voice, shouting into his speaker. “I’ve found the edge!”

Don turned around and quickly flew across the 150 or so meters to where Sas was standing. The edge he’d uncovered was perfectly smooth. They both dug down around it with their gloved hands. It turned out the aluminum sheet was quite thin—no more than a centimeter. Don started working along one direction, and Sas along the other. They had to expose several meters of it before they noticed that the edge wasn’t straight. Rather, it was gently curved. After a few more minutes, it was apparent that they were working their way along the rim of a disk that was perhaps a kilometer in diameter.

But no—no, it wasn’t a disk. It was a dish, a great metal bowl, as if an entire crater had been lined with aluminum, and—

“Jesus,” said Don.

“What?” replied Sas.

“It’s an antenna dish.”

“Who could have built it?” asked Sas.

Don tipped his head up to look at Mars—but he couldn’t see Mars; they were on Deimos’ farside.

The farside! Of course!

“Sas—it’s a radio telescope!”

“Why would anyone put a radio telescope on the back side of Deimos?” asked Sas.

“Unless… oh, my. Oh, my.”

Don was nodding inside his space helmet. “It was built here for the same reason we want to build a radio telescope on the backside of Earth’s moon. Luna farside, with all those kilometers of rock between it and Earth, is the one place in the Solar System that’s shielded from the radio noise coming from human civilization…”

“And,” said Sas, “Deimos farside, with fifteen kilometers of rock between it and Mars, would be shielded from the radio noise coming from…” His voice actually cracked.

“…from Martian civilization.”

Sas and Don continued to search, hoping there would be more to the installation than just the giant dish, but soon enough Deimos’ rapid orbit caused the sun—only half the apparent diameter it was from Earth and giving off just one-quarter the heat—to sink below the horizon. Deimos took thirty hours and nineteen minutes to circle Mars; it would be almost fifteen hours before the sun rose on the tiny moon again.

“This is huge,” said Sas, when they were back inside the habitat. “This is gigantic.”

“A Martian civilization,” said Don. He couldn’t get enough of the phrase.

“There’s no other possibility, is there?”

Don thought about that. There had been a contingency plan for Apollo 11 in case it found Soviets already on the Moon—but NASA was no longer in a space race with anyone. “Well,” said Don, “it certainly wasn’t built by humans.”

“Zakarian and company are going to have a lot to look for on the surface,” said Sas.

Don shrugged a bit. “Maybe. Maybe not. There’s weather on Mars, including sandstorms that last for months. All the large-scale water-erosion features we see on Mars are at least a billion years old, judging by the amount of cratering overtop of them. That suggests that whatever Martian civilization might have once existed did so at least that long ago. In a billion years, wind erosion could have destroyed every trace of an ancient civilization down there.”

“Ah,” said Sas, grinning. “But not here! No air; no erosion to speak of. Just the odd micrometeoroid impact.” He paused. “That dish must have been here an awfully long time, to get buried under that much dust.”

Don smiled. “You know,” he said, “every space station humanity has ever been involved with has been inhabited by successive crews—Skylab, Mir, Alpha. One crew would go down; another would come up.”

Sas raised his eyebrows. “But there’s never been such a long hiatus between one crew leaving and the next one arriving.”

When they knew the sun would be up on Deimos farside, Don and Sas headed back to the site of the alien antenna dish. They had almost finished making their way around its perimeter when they found a spoke, projecting outward from the rim of the antenna.

They kept digging down, following it away from the dish, until—

“Allah-o-akbar!” exclaimed Sasim.

“God Almighty,” said Don.

The spoke led to a buried building, and—

Well, its inhabitants had been astronomers. It made sense that they’d have a glass roof, a clear ceiling through which they could look up at the stars.

As Don and Sas brushed away more and more dust, they were better able to see in through the roof. There was furniture inside, but none of it designed for human occupants: several bowl-shaped affairs that Don imagined were chairs, and low worktables, covered with square sheets of something that seemed to serve the same purpose as paper. Scattered about were opaque cylindrical units that looked like they might be for storage. And—

Slumped against the wall, at the far end—

It was incredible. Absolutely incredible.

A Martian, perfectly preserved for countless millennia. Either they had no such thing as bacteria leading to decay, or everything had been sterilized before coming to Deimos, or perhaps all the air had leaked out somehow, preserving the being in vacuum.

The former resident of the building was vaguely insectoid, with rusty exoskeletal armor, four arms, and two legs. In life, he would have walked proud and upright. His mandible was tripartite; his giant eyes, lidless behind crystal shells, were a soft, kind blue.

“Amazing,” said Sas softly. “Amazing.”

“There must be a way inside,” said Don, looking around. For all they knew from what they’d exposed of the transparent roof so far, the building might be no bigger than a single room. Still, it had been carved into the rocks of Deimos, so the air lock, if there was one, should be somewhere on the roof.

Don and Sas worked at clearing debris, and, after about twenty minutes, Don found what they were looking for. It was a transparent tube, like the one George Jetson shot up through, stretching between the glass roof and the floor. The tube had an opening in its circular walls at ground level, and a hatch up on the roof, forming a chamber that air could be pumped into or out of.

Any space station had lots of electrical parts, but doors were something sane engineers would make purely mechanical. After all, if the power went out, you didn’t want to be trapped inside or outside. It took Sas and Don a few minutes to work out the logic of the door mechanism—a central disk in the middle of the roof had to be depressed, then rotated counterclockwise. Once that was done, the rest of the hatch irised open, and the locking disk, attached by what looked like a plastic cord, dangled very loosely at one side.

Don glided down the tube first. He wasn’t able to open the inside door until Sas closed the upper lid; a safety interlock apparently prevented anyone from accidentally venting the habitat’s air out into space.

Still, it was immediately obvious to Don, once he was out of the air lock tube, that there was no air inside the habitat. The rigidity of his pressure suit didn’t change; no condensation ap-peared on his visor; there was no resistance to waving his arms vigorously. Doubtless there had been some air once, but, despite the safety precautions, it had all leaked out. Perhaps a small meteor had drilled through the roof at some point they hadn’t yet uncovered.

Sas came down the air lock tube next—the locking disk could be engaged from either side of the iris. By the time he was down, Don had already made his way over to the dead thing. Its rusty color seemed good confirming evidence that Mars was indeed the being’s original home. The creature was about a meter and a half tall, and, if there had been any doubt about its intelligence, that was dispelled now. The Martian wore clothes—apparently not for protection, but rather for convenience; the translucent garment covering part of its abdomen was rich with pockets and pouches. Still, the body showed signs of having suffered a massive decompression; innards had partially burst out through various seams in the exoskeleton.

While Don continued to examine the being—the first alien life-form ever seen by a human—Sas poked around the room. “Don!” he shouted.

Don reluctantly left the Martian and glided over to Sas, who was pointing through an open archway.

The underground complex went on and on. And Martian bodies were everywhere.

“Wow,” said Sas. “Wow.”

Don tried to activate the radio circuit to Earth, but he wasn’t able to pick up the beacon signal from Mission Control. Of course not: this facility had operated a massive radio telescope; it would be shielded to prevent interference with the antenna. Don and Sas made their way up the air lock tube and out to the surface. There they had no trouble acquiring the beacon.

“Mission Control,” said Don. “Tell Chuck Zakarian we hope he has a good time down on Mars’ surface—although, given all the erosion that goes on there, I doubt he’ll find much. But that’s okay, Houston; we’ll make up for that. You see, it seems we’re not the first crew to occupy…” He paused, the perfect name coming to him at last. “…Mike Collins Station.”

Content

Mikeys
by Robert J. Sawyer