4

Findings

Will was walking down the hallway of Mariner Hospital when he saw Martha Vickers in her office. He stuck his head in. “It’s so nice to see you here. I don’t know how we’ll manage when you’re cruising through the asteroid belt.”

“Oh, I don’t know. We’ve got two other psychiatrists and three psychologists and they’re all good. Premarital and marital counseling are organized well; it appears we’ve saved three marriages in six months. The grief counseling is managing loss more effectively than in the past if you consider the percentage of people who’ve lost parents and other significant persons on Earth who have come into our offices. Illness counseling is collecting a larger fraction of people facing serious health issues, too. I could use a break and deal with just 25 other people!”

“I bet, but you’ll still be consulting for us, right?”

“Yes, about twenty-five hours a week, just like I am now. So what brings you to the hospital? The semiannual physical?”

“No, a quarterly scan. They’re watching my prostate, like just about every other male up here, and some funny lipid profiles.” Will sighed. “I’m 55, after all, I’m not getting any younger!”

“No, none of us are. You still haven’t had any cancer, though.”

“No, except for a bit in the prostate that is growing too slowly to worry about right now.”

“You may be lucky, considering your radiation exposure. I watched your testimony before the Aram Accident Commission the other sol. You really did a good job; clear, honest, calm.”

“Thank you. As I’m sure you can appreciate, this has been a very tough two months. Everything I say can be dissected, taken out of context, and distorted; that’s the way these legal processes can be. And no matter how carefully and clearly one defends one’s actions, one can never fully clear one’s name. That’s frustrating and frightening.”

“I think you explained yourself quite well. I don’t know what the Commission will do with Rivers. His testimony was riveting; such a passionate man! It’s now clear to me that the problem at Aram was not just a single man telling everyone what to do, but an entire community developing common attitudes and values about the inevitability of their ‘endeavor’ as they call it, attitudes that led to lax safety standards.”

“Yes, there was a communal component, but there was also a component of individual responsibility. Personally, I think they need to indict Rivers. From a pragmatic point of view, I’d rather they didn’t in that it will cause a lot of trouble and may not solve anything, but morally I think they have no choice.”

“I’m not sure I agree. I’m amazed at the community’s resilience and unity in the face of this challenge to their existence. If they had fallen apart and pointed the finger at Rivers, that would have been one thing; but the fact that they didn’t tells me there’s a culture involved here. Accidents are often caused by our values and not by negligence. The very idea of negligence is culturally defined. I’d favor changing the culture, not punishing the individuals.”

“Perhaps.” Will shrugged, rather than argue with her.

“Say, if you want to talk more about the stress the situation has caused, I’m free several times tomorrow afternoon. It can help.”

Will considered, then nodded. “Sure; I think that would be helpful. What about 3:30?”

Martha checked her calendar, then nodded. “Yes, that’s a good time. See you then.”

“Okay. Ciao.” Will headed out of the hospital with a quicker step than he went in. Martha was always a good person to talk to; he generally visited with her every three or four months. Counseling was inexpensive and was so common that they needed one psychiatrist or psychologist per hundred residents. It had been helpful; people managed their anger better, related to their spouses and children more effectively, and dealt with vocational issues before they became serious. Even existential matters seemed to be resolved better. It was one aspect of their commitment to “living well” that had been successful, and it made all of them safer against the damage that anger could cause.

Will headed straight to the Patio for a quick breakfast; he had been fasting before his blood tests. Then he walked to Vandevelde on the northeast side of the Outpost to visit with Ethel quickly. She was monitoring one of the three large carbonyl metal separation towers at that moment.

“How was the appointment?” she asked.

He shrugged. “Nothing new. I forgot to be sure to arrive with a full bladder, so I may have to go back this afternoon. They have so many urine and blood tests for cancer now, it’s hard to provide enough fluids!”

“I know. I think they did fifty-three blood and urine tests on me last week, and I was lucky there was only one false positive.” She rolled her eyes.

“Yes, I’m wondering what I’ll have to return for in a week or two.” He looked at the screen in front of her. “Is the tower acting up?”

“Oh, nothing we can’t fix. One of the carbon monoxide heat recirculation fans is having trouble. I think we’ll have to take the unit down for the sol. But at the moment we’re short on meteoritic nickel-iron ore. We’ve got enough to run the other two towers at 125% capacity this sol, until another twenty tonnes of ore arrives tomorrow.”

“Do you still think you’ll have six tonnes of platinum group metals to export in the fall?”

She nodded. “Yes. You can count on the 24 million redbacks of income. Of course, we have about 10,000 tonnes of processed metal piling up outside. I still think we should bury it under the cylinder domes.”

“They’re looking into that, but I think they prefer to ‘bury’ the spare water produced by the deuterium extractors. I’d better run. Bye.”

“Bye.” They kissed quickly and he headed out the door. He went next to the Caravel Building, next to Vandevelde, to see the Courageous taking shape. After a quick tour he walked down the South Main Street tunnel to Andalus Dome, just west of Bangalore.

They had just pressurized it a month earlier. The air pressure was the same as the rest of the Outpost, but the air was carbon dioxide because of the high leakage rates into the ground underneath. Will donned a breathing helmet and stepped into the space to see the construction work. He loved the size of the dome; 160 meters in diameter and 80 meters high—525 feet by 264 feet—it felt open and spacious in ways that made even the most capacious domes and biomes feel cramped. It was really amazing that they had the ability to enclose such large volumes, fill them with oxygen, and maintain them safely.

The interior, soon to be the site of Mars’s largest housing and commercial complex, was still heaps of sifted dirt. Excavating equipment was preparing holes for concrete foundations. Water was being poured on the ground in other areas to create a water table and an ice table beneath, thereby reducing the air loss. He wandered around and watched the work to get a feel for it; when he read reports about it later they would fit inside a context of experience. He asked several workers questions about their progress and problems with the subsurface, then headed to his office.

“I wish you had checked your messages; you have an urgent one from the Budget Office,” said Anisa to him, as soon as he stepped in. Her face automatically appeared on the screen of “her” attaché; it was always on and always on one side of his desk.

“I turned off the communicator. It’s very hard to tour the Outpost without getting interrupted, and I want to be able to pay attention to what I see. Please play the videomessage.”

Sally Chines’s face appeared on the screen of his attaché. “Good sol, Will. We have a new projection based on the continued drop in the price of gold; it appears we’ll have 600 million redbacks less in fiscal 2043 than we had hoped. And we’re including a 500 million redback adjustment to fiscal 2042 because we’ve lost some support from national governments; it’s a ripple from the Aram accident. In short, we’re hemorrhaging badly. The cuts are now pushing toward twenty percent of the budget. We’re preparing some priorities, but we’ll have to cut the terrestrial operation to the bone. We have some difficult decisions to make, especially about terrestrial support for environmental management. The Aram accident makes cuts in that area politically risky, but the fact remains that larger domes and smarter software mean that it’s a logical area to downsize. So call me so we can start the process. Bye.”

Will’s heart sank as he listened to the message. It meant a month of tough two-planet negotiations with heads of staff and national representatives. He wished that they could move the bulk of the Commission to Mars; in another decade that would probably be accomplished, but not sooner. They needed to cut the terrestrial support system and expand until Martian gold and other exports paid for the Mars operation. But they were still a decade or more from that milestone. Meanwhile, they were dependent on terrestrial personnel and national government resources that came with strings attached.

With a sigh, Will turned to his attaché to initiate a process of budget revision that he went through several times per year.

-----------------------------

The return of the Project Ceres personnel to Aurorae Outpost initiated a two-month long series of seminars about the geology of the asteroids they were visiting. Three of the four had been studied by ion-powered probes that had orbited them to photograph their surfaces, map their altitudes by laser, and study their exterior compositions through spectral and neutron reflection techniques. Ceres had received two visitors to its surface, the latest being the automated ABC precursor mission, which had deployed a drill and several Prospector-250C remotely controlled rovers. A lot was known about that small and complex world, and the crew had to assimilate as much of the knowledge as possible.

“It’s a really fascinating place,” Helmut said to Anna Racan over lunch. He, Clara, and Charlie had joined Anna, son John, daughter Esther, Clara’s cousin Tomas, and the Hunter clan—John, Vanessa, and sons Maaka and Wicahpi-luta—in the Patio after attending Catholic mass earlier that Sunsol. “Ceres is carbonaceous chondrite, density twice that of water, so it has no metallic core. As it formed, the center—we call it the ‘lower mantle’ because it’s not a core—got hot enough to drive off most of the water and metamorphize the chondrite into rock, though we aren’t sure what sort of rock it is. The rising hot water altered the interior, probably creating all sorts of minerals. When it reached the surface it created cryovolcanoes of dirty, salty ice that over billions of years have partially evaporated and are partially buried by salt and silicate debris. The water spread over the surface as water vapor frost that got buried through impact gardening, forming a permafrost regolith rich in hydrated clays and salts. In places impacts have exposed the ice, causing the formation of chaotic terrain similar to Martian chaotic terrain. The poles have ice caps and temperatures as low as the Galilean satellites, maybe lower; there’s evidence of frozen methane and other gases at the north polar basin. We may be able to witness geological phenomena that occur as far out as the Kuiper belt. It’s a perfect test bed for technologies for use on Callisto.”

“Amazing,” said Anna. “I can see why Project Jove originally had a Ceres precursor mission.”

“It’s also why half the Ceres crew aspires to go to the Galileans eventually,” added Clara.

“Well, I hope you all don’t find the alteration between Ceres gravity and artificial caravel gravity to be difficult,” said Anna. “I’ve had to prescribe physical therapy and exercises for a lot of astronauts who switch between two gravity fields regularly. It’s pretty hard on the musculature. Each gravity field uses a different set of muscles.”

“Juliette’s on top of that,” replied Helmut.

“Yes, she should be; she’s good,” agreed Anna.

“If I have any criticism of the Ceres plans, it’s the lack of an eobiologist,” said Vanessa. “I said this last week at the seminar at Martech about the geochemistry of Ceres, as you probably remember. Half a billion cubic kilometers of warm, wet rock: the lower mantle of Ceres is probably only a few hundred degrees Centigrade, and we know of life that survives in those temperatures and pressures. I doubt there’s life inside Ceres, but there might be all sorts of prebiotic compounds. Heck, it’s likely the asteroid has methane and hydrocarbons inside! Ceres may give us chemical clues for understanding early Martian conditions, which in turn have helped a lot to reconstruct the origin of life on Earth. It’ll help us understand the Europa ocean and the compounds in Titan’s oceans and lakes as well. And because of its size, it can contribute clues that no other asteroid can offer.”

“I suppose we don’t have an eobiologist on board because it’s unlikely we can obtain material from the inside,” said Helmut. “We’ll drill down five hundred meters, of course, but that won’t be enough. I think we need to plan for a permanent human presence on Ceres, and one project of an outpost there would be deep drilling. The lunar mantle drilling project has developed the technology that with modification could go 100 kilometers or more into Ceres. It might eventually be possible to drill 500 kilometers all the way to the center. That would tell us about the chemical and prebiological processes going on inside.”

“If the funding can be obtained,” she agreed.

“The ABC’s working on the funding for another Ceres mission, after the Vesta mission is launched,” said Clara. “Since Vesta’s fairly dry, Ceres is the best source of return fuel, so we’re leaving a functioning fuel manufacturing plant there.”

“I wish we could go,” said John Hunter. “It would be quite an adventure. But I think these boys have to get older first.”

“I want to go to Titan,” replied Maaka, who was five. “I want to see waterfalls of methane.”

“You’ll probably be the right age to go, if you do well at Martech,” replied Vanessa. “Mars looks set to be the source of most of the explorers for the outer solar system.”

“Oh, look, they’re gathering,” said Anna, pointing. The five Mars members of the Aram Accident Commission had just entered the Patio and were walking to the stage.

“They wrote their report pretty fast,” said Helmut.

“Not fast enough,” replied Anna. “Greg’s been consumed by the effort for eight weeks, now, and he has worked harder than I’ve seen him work before. All ten of them have been that way. He says they really overcame the interplanetary communications barrier, too. That’s not easy.”

“No,” agreed Helmut, impressed.

“Ah, there’s Will Elliott,” added John Hunter, pointing to Will, Alexandra, Yevgeny, Ruhullah, and Érico, who had just entered through the same airlock as the Commission members and headed for a table up front.

“They just had a private meeting with the Commission members, where they heard the report summary,” exclaimed Anna. “I can’t tell from their faces what their reaction was.”

“Speculation that Will Elliott will have to resign is extreme,” replied John. “He made a serious, good faith effort to stop the air leaks at Aram and find out how the dome was doing.”

“I agree,” said Anna.

“So, Greg’s wearing his collar?” said Helmut, surprised.

“It gives him gravitas in an occasion like this,” replied Anna with a smile.

The five members of the Commission resident on Mars huddled briefly to talk while more people poured into Yalta Biome. They were scheduled to hold a public news conference starting in three minutes, and everyone knew it. The press conference had been scheduled purposely on Sunsol afternoon to maximize Martian attendance.

Finally the five of them carried their chairs up onto the stage in front of the Patio and Brian Stark walked to the microphone. “Good afternoon,” he began. “Welcome to the official, final news conference of the Aram Accident Commission. This commission is simultaneously meeting in three places today, at Aurorae Outpost, Mars; Houston, Texas; and Paris, France. We cannot present our entire 357-page report in a brief meeting such as this. At the end of this news conference it will be available at our website. At this meeting we will summarize the major findings and the recommendations that follow from them.

“Almost three months ago, a failure of the central dome at Aram Outpost led to the catastrophic failure of the other two domes, the deaths of two personnel, and the injury of four others. It was our responsibility to determine how that happened. The first conclusion of the report, based on interviewing all the survivors of Aram Outpost and all outsiders who visited the outpost from the time it was started to the present, is that the community culture at Aram led to carelessness and inattention to safety. The result was violation of twenty different safety standards and procedures over the first nine months of Aram’s existence. Not all of these violations have been corrected to this day; indeed, our study found, as a second conclusion, three problems—with fire safety, occupational safety, and evacuation standards of biomes—that had not even been identified in the standards as potential problems and had not been pursued systematically. Many of the other outposts on Mars potentially face these problems as well. One cause of Aram’s lax safety standards, we conclude—in our third conclusion—was the outpost’s leadership, which was not yet sufficiently sensitive to the dangers of the Martian environment. Indeed, their negligence of safety appears to be a potential criminal offense.

“Training of Aram Outpost’s personnel was extensive, on Earth, during the flight out, at Aurorae, and at Aram itself. But in retrospect—and this is our fourth conclusion—it was not rigorous enough and did not include enough certification. Indeed, it proved one thing to certify Commission employees with extensive space-related training and experience and another thing certifying new arrivals lacking such background. The personnel who run Aurorae Outpost are extensively certified in all matters that relate to safety. When Cassini, Dawes, Meridiani, and Thymiamata Outposts were founded, their environmental management personnel were also certified and had extensive experience running the environments of earlier outposts. The procedures were changed when Aram was established, partly because of intense pressure from the Aram Outpost’s leadership to give them a wide range of independence. In retrospect, this was in error.

“Because there was inadequate environmental management auditing at the planetary level—which is our fifth conclusion—the problems at Aram went largely undetected, in spite of increasingly vigorous and aggressive efforts to obtain environmental management data and ultimately a fine of one million redbacks per month, which ironically went into place just hours before the dome failure. This error was compounded by—our sixth conclusion—inadequate data and understanding of the type of dome being used at Aram.

“What is to be done differently in the future? This leads us to our recommendations. The Governor quite rightly declared a state of emergency and assumed control over Aram Outpost within hours of the dome failure. The state of emergency continues at a low level to this sol. It cannot be lifted until Aram’s personnel demonstrate full certification in environmental management and the safety culture of the outpost has reached an adequate level, which we define in detail in our report.

“To ensure the safety of the environments of all outposts, we recommend the establishment of an Environmental Management Safety Office for all of Mars. This department would not actually manage the environments of the outposts; that responsibility would be earned by the outposts and exercised by them. Rather, this department would oversee the outposts’ efforts, inspect them, continuously consider ways to upgrade safety standards, and would take away an outpost’s environmental management responsibility if it failed to meet standards. We recommend that the very process of certification be examined, to make sure certification standards are uniform, because in the last decade as the Mars population has expanded, the number of certifiable skills has gone from a dozen to hundreds. Since not all outposts on Mars are run by the Mars Commission—a trend that can only increase in the future—we recommend that safety and certification be a responsibility of the elected authority of the Mars Commonwealth and its employees. To ensure an adequate focus on safety, we recommend that the positions of Commissioner and Governor be separated.”

Stark paused after that statement, which caused an audible reaction in the audience. “We do not feel that the fusion of Commissioner and Governor to date has led to a weakening of safety, but both tasks can only grow more intensive in the future, and they are naturally different tasks, consequently they logically should be separated.

“We recommend that one task of the Environmental Management Safety Office should be to determine when an outpost is ready to assume control over its own environment. This means that any future outposts will have to fulfill a list of requirements before they can become truly self-governing. The legal principle has already been established that an outpost has a territorial jurisdiction and certain responsibilities granted to it by the Commonwealth, such as child education. The vote to establish universal health insurance on Mars was by implication a devolution to the Commonwealth by the Mars electorate of the responsibility for health care. We would recommend that with the continued expansion of the population of Mars, other responsibilities be devolved to the Commonwealth, which in some cases it can in turn devolve to outposts as they are ready to assume them.

“The rapid response of the Governor to the emergency was possible because there was a trained team capable of getting to Aram quickly and managing the crisis effectively. Mars cannot count on the Asteroid Belt Commission to have such a team assembled and ready to go, however. Therefore we recommend the establishment of a Mars Emergency Corps, a team of people with the skills and the training to handle emergencies and the ability to be deployed quickly anywhere on the planet or in near-Mars space. This team will cost a lot of money to develop and maintain, but the growing complexity of human settlement of Mars necessitates its creation. Like a national guard, the corps need not be on constant active duty; rather, it should consist of concentric circles of people, the smaller groups being more ready to be deployed immediately, the larger circles of people being able to provide support and longer term deployment as the emergency continues. The development of the Corps should accompany an overhaul of the emergency plans of all outposts, including Aurorae, where a major disaster could imperil the continued presence of human beings on the entire planet. This reassessment of emergencies should fall under the purview of a new, permanent Emergency Management Office. One specific recommendation: Aurorae must replace Yalta Biome, which it has outgrown, or dramatically expand the escape routes, which are inadequate to handle hundreds of people.

“Finally, we note that disasters are the occasion when safety is reconsidered, emergency preparedness reviewed, and structures of authority overhauled. If Mars is to represent a new sort of society, one more mature than the societies that have gone before, restructuring must be built into its structure. Therefore we recommend that every five years, if events have not demanded it sooner, the Commonwealth appoint a Commission to reexamine and question safety arrangements and propose a new set of recommendations, in order to continue the refinement of our safety systems.”

Brian lowered the pages from which he had been reading. There was silence in the Patio for a moment, then someone began to applaud. Everyone began to applaud and a few even stood, prompting others to do the same. In a few seconds the Commission had received a standing ovation, much to their surprise.

“We can take a few questions,” said Brian, obviously startled by the positive response. Will Elliott’s hand immediately shot up. With a bit of hesitation Brian acknowledged the Commissioner himself, who rose and walked to the microphone.

“It is not necessary for me to thank you on behalf of Mars because Mars just thanked you itself,” he said. “So allow me to offer you my deepest gratitude and appreciation for your tireless and thorough efforts. You have presented all of us with more than a new set of safety standards and procedures; you have offered a new vision of Mars. This indeed is exactly what we need if we are to learn from our mistakes and move this world forward. We will be eternally grateful to you and history will remember you.” Then Will returned to his seat.

Helmut was surprised. “It sounds like he just accepted the Commission’s rather critical conclusions, where he is concerned.”

“I think so,” agreed John. “But that’s how Will is. Wait and see; he’ll make something very interesting from this report.”

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