13
North Pole
The three vehicles of the Marineris Expedition approached the Outpost. Six weeks of exploration had taken them through several sections of Candor Chasma, then to the end of Noctis Labyrinthus, where they built a partial ramp to the Tharsis Plateau at the west end of the canyon. Once they had docked to the Outpost’s airlocks, Jerry McCord greeted Roger Anderson with a big smile and a slap on the back.
“It’s good to see you again! Where’s Will?”
“He and Paul will be back in a few hours; they drove to a sand deposit to get a load for the building. Wow, you had quite an expedition!”
“I’m a bit disappointed; I really was hoping we’d get up to the Tharsis Plateau. Maybe next time. We need about twenty tonnes of water to freeze the ramp together.”
“The Sunwings can drop ice blocks, so that when you go back the water’s already there. But you did get up to Tharsis by foot, at least.”
“Yes, that was better than nothing, but we need to be able to clear a route all the way up. As you said, next time. It’ll take maybe a month. I’m surprised to see the building mostly finished.”
“No, not at all. We do have the first floor walls completed, but there’s no second story floor yet or second story walls. But we’re almost back to the original schedule. For a while it was looking impossible. The rangers were constantly breaking.”
“Why did that stop?”
“Because they finished excavating the foundation! We had to weld the bulldozer blades almost every sol and we snapped several power shafts. But we got the hole dug.”
“Good. Well, we excavated about a hundred kilos of gold in Candor Chasma. We broke a blade, too, and welded it. They aren’t very strong.”
“How much gold is there?”
“Hard to be sure, but we conducted a three-sol survey of the placer deposit. There’s probably scores of tonnes of gold there, but it will take a lot of work to extract it. The hundred kilos was hard work!”
“I gather Will’s already been talking to folks in Berlin who are designing a centrifugal separator.”
“Yes, I’ve heard about that as well.” Jerry slapped Roger on the back again. “So, Madhu’s pregnant. Congratulations.”
“Thank you. We’re delighted; or maybe I should say she’s delighted and in a few months I suppose I will be, also. I’m still adjusting to the idea of fatherhood, and on Mars.”
“I bet. What’s that doing to your research?”
“Madhu’s basically grounded me for the next year. So I’ll be doing a lot of local geology and support work.”
“On the other hand, you’ll be able to make up for it later.”
“Yes, we’ll probably be here for a decade or more.”
“That’s a valuable opportunity for research, though I suspect this place would get on my nerves after a few years. I guess that means Érico gets to do more, for a while.”
Roger nodded. “Yes, but Madhu’s working on Carmen, so his freedom may not last.”
Jerry laughed. “My wife is not interested in space flight at all, lets me go, and my kids are in college. We had our kids early, and I’m glad we did! But I miss them.”
“I can imagine. I don’t know how I could stay here without Madhu. I’ve come to agree with Will on this matter; we need to make Mars a marriage-friendly and family-friendly place. It’s the only way this place will become more than a transitory, small hamlet.”
“That’s true; but is the technology mature enough for families?”
“It should be. Madhu and I will find out,” replied Roger, with a shrug.
They all plunged into the work of unpacking. Then Jerry suited up and—out of curiosity—made a walking tour of the new building. The hole in the ground had been filled with a flat slab of duricrete, a mixture of eolian dust and crushed duricrust. The latter had been formed by natural wetting and drying of the regolith over the ages, causing an accumulation of carbonates, sulfates, and salts in the surface layer that cemented together. The wind-borne dust, also, tended to bond together. When the two substances were mixed in the right ratio with the right amount of water and poured into a heated airtight mold, in a few hours they set to make a substance with less strength than concrete but more strength than plaster. Reinforced with iron wire and bars, and coated with plastic to make it water and airtight, the resulting duricrete was an excellent building material.
The foundation was over a meter thick and at Mars’s arctic temperatures was rock-hard. The iron reinforcements had been completely installed for the first floor and ninety percent of the walls had been poured; the last section was still encased in sheet metal molding, ready to receive the duricrete mix. Window holes, still encased in heavy sheet metal, poked through the meter-thick walls. Jerry did a quick calculation based on a density of two tonnes of mass per cubic meter; the first floor alone involved almost 400 tonnes of duricrete. No wonder the construction had taken so long.
He looked inside through a window hole. Installation of the ironwork for the interior walls had begun; they would be much thinner, since they were not designed to hold in pressure. In a week or two the floor for the second story would be poured, then the ironwork for its interior walls would go up. It was a long process, especially when much of the work had to be done in pressure suits.
He walked around the Outpost, then climbed to the top of Boat Rock to admire the view. It was a fascinating place in a beautiful natural setting. It had a lot going for it; he did feel a certain desire to stay.
Then he saw two rangers returning with trailers full of high-quality sand. He headed down to greet the Commander.
----------------------------
Two weeks later a second expedition set out, with two rangers, a portahab, two conestogas, a nuke on a trailer pulled by a truck, and eight people bound for the northern polar region. It was midsummer, with constant sunlight and relatively mild conditions. They moved down the Polar Trail—a route that eventually would run from pole to pole via Aurorae Outpost—fairly quickly, forty kilometers per hour when a human could drive during the day and half that at night when the vehicles drove themselves automatically. For ninety minutes every sol they stopped to do additional geological exploration; every evening the vehicles docked together for ninety minutes so that everyone could eat dinner together. Moving at 600 kilometers per sol, they reached the northern layered terrains and the end of Route 2 as constructed the previous annum (Martian year) in nine sols.
A major problem in driving across the layered terrains was crossing the frequent layer edges, which were either steep slopes or low cliffs. But the portable nuclear reactor, with its 800 kilowatts of thermal output, provided the power for quick construction of ramps. While two rangers bulldozed debris in place against the slope, the reactor was brought forward by its truck and a conestoga with a scoop fed ice chunks into a melter, heated by reactor heat. A steady stream of liquid water was ejected from a hose at the growing ramp, filling the gaps between the chunks with instant ice and freezing the ramp together. Liquid water could also be directed at the top of the cliff to melt it down, the resulting water refreezing into ice almost instantly. Once a ramp was completed the expedition proceeded forward to the next cliff, and the reactor and its melter stopped to fill in cracks and crevasses in the route as it went. The expedition moved forward about twenty kilometers per sol, half their usual speed when one considered that they utilized the midnight sun to extend their road sixteen or eighteen hours per sol.
Three and a half weeks after the expedition set out from Aurorae on the Martian equator, Will got a telephone call from Érico. “Commander, we’ve just stopped at what we believe to be the North Pole,” he exclaimed.
“Congratulations! This is an historic sol. You’ll go down in history as the conqueror of the Martian North Pole.”
“Thanks, Will. It’s really exciting. Most of Brazil will be tuning in when we step outside.”
“They should be proud of you. Let’s please fly the United Nations flag first, then the Brazilian flag.”
“I wanted to make sure that arrangement was agreeable to you. I’m uncomfortable about planting the American flag here.”
“We’ll let Jerry do that, if he leads the expedition to the South Pole or to the top of one of the volcanoes. No, plant the U.N. flag. We do this for all of humanity. We may still be under NASA, but we’re an international team.”
“Thanks, Commander.”
“You’ve also demonstrated that our equipment can handle pretty extreme conditions. You may have paved the way for human exploration of the Galilean satellites.”
“By our children’s generation.”
“Probably. This is an incredible connection; I guess the satellite is up.”
“Yes, we timed our arrival so that the communications and navigational satellite is above the horizon. We’ve got about five hours of coverage before it drops below the horizon again. It is our source of geopositioning signals, which is how we know where we are.”
“I’ll watch on television. Good luck.”
“Thanks. Good bye.” Érico closed the connection and looked at Carmen, who had accompanied him on the expedition. “Let’s suit up.”
She nodded and helped him with his suit, then he helped her with hers. They put on their helmets, checked out all the suits’ systems, then headed for the conestoga’s airlock. The other three were suiting up as well, but no one dared to depressurize their vehicles before the expedition commander. Érico was the first one out.
He opened the door and stepped down onto the frozen ground. The view from the top of Mars was fascinating and breathtaking. The ground was white for as far as they could see. The terrain had whitish materials that a trained eye could tell apart easily by consistency: water ice and dry ice. The latter formed a scattered summer layer on top of the former, sublimated completely away on slopes that exposed it to greater sunlight, and was thick and semi-permanent in shadows. The only objects interrupting the unbroken expanse of bluish-white were occasional meteorites that had fallen from space and crater ejecta that landed on the ice from distant impacts. They had collected hundred of samples and, when possible, photographed the impact features to determine the direction of arrival; in some cases they would be able to match the ejecta with specific craters.
Érico also looked up at the sky. It was unique because of its close resemblance with Earth’s: a blackish-purple blue, it had no dust in it and therefore no pink or orange hues, as was common closer to the equator. Wispy white clouds made the scene almost resemble Antarctica. The sun shone fiercely close to the horizon, but seemed to give no heat.
The others came out of their vehicles. There was a slight mound a dozen meters away; Érico grabbed the flag and moved over there to give the ceremony a bit better setting. The eight of them gathered round in a circle. Carmen stood opposite Érico so that her camera, which was carrying the image of their gathering back to Earth, could capture his facial expressions and movements well.
Érico raised the U.N. flag up slightly. “We gather here to mark another significant milestone in human exploration of this solar system. It is an achievement that is possible only because the governments of all of us have worked together to send us to this world and to develop the equipment to make our journey here possible. We express our gratitude to humanity for this adventure of the human spirit and this scientific development. Human beings now stand at the North Pole of Mars.” He pushed the butt of the pole into a crack in the ice. “We come here in peace for all mankind.”
The others applauded; the sound of gloves beating together came faintly over the microphones. Then Érico held the pole steady while the others brought over ice chunks and meteorites, building a pile around the flagpole to hold it in place. Érico returned to the conestoga, brought over a pressurized twenty-liter canister of water, and squirted it onto the pile, freezing it hard into a permanent anchor for the flag. A breeze rose and caused the flag to billow and flutter, much to their pleasure.
The expedition members deployed their own national flags as well, an array of miniature flags around the base of the big one. Then they got to work deploying the ice drill; they planned to remain in the vicinity of the North Pole several weeks, so there was plenty of time to bore a substantial distance into the layers. Finally, while the satellite connection lasted, they began a systematic exploration of the area. There was much to do.
The event grabbed headlines across Earth and was watched eagerly by tens of millions on television. Its newsworthiness was assisted by the fact that no crisis had occurred on that sol that diverted the attention of the media. But other developments related to the exploration of Mars were going on. Three sols after the conquest of the top of the Red Planet, Will Elliott received a surprising videomail from Harold Lassen, the director of Mars Mission Operations.
“Will, I’ve recommended that you be added to the negotiating team that is working on the establishment of the Mars Commission. Because of your absence from Earth and the likelihood the meetings will not be redesigned to accommodate the time delay to include you, your presence will be something of a token; however, I have said that your track record as an innovator and your experience as Commander makes input from you imperative.
“As you know, the negotiations broke down last year and were resumed two months ago. Currently the parties include the United States, Russia, Japan, France, Britain, the European Space Agency, Canada, Brazil, and India. Australia has applied to join, South Africa and Mexico may apply, and China may apply as well. The White House is set to make a decision whether to invite China in the next few months. There is also the possibility Iran, Pakistan, Korea, Germany, and Italy may join eventually.
“The Commission will involve an international treaty whereby the signators renounce any territorial claims over Mars, Phobos, and Deimos, and agree to turn such jurisdiction over to a Mars Commission, which will be responsible for exploration, exploitation of resources, and settlement. The Commission will have authority over such matters as defining units of civil administration; hence the need to include you, since the residents of Aurorae Outpost have already taken steps to set up a legal civic authority. The Commission will make such a body fully established in a legal sense. The Commission will also be authorized to grant title to land on Mars and utilize the proceeds from sale of such for the further development of Mars. The Commission’s headquarters tentatively is set for Houston, Texas; it’ll probably share space with the Lunar Commission in the new building being erected for the latter. By the way, the powers of the Lunar Commission are under review as a result of the Mars Commission negotiations. Several companies have approached the Lunar Commission and requested the right to purchase or lease plots of lunar land, or at least the mineral rights to the same, to extract water, other volatiles, and nickel-iron. The need to privatize mining operations on the moon, accommodate additional national stations, and build such assets as tourist hotels are forcing a reevaluation of the lunar treaty. An Asteroid Commission is under consideration as well, since the ITVs are now a proven technology and can be flown to other destinations in the inner solar system.
“We look forward to your participation in the work. If you have any questions, let me know.”
Will smiled in excitement as he contemplated the offer. He couldn’t help but think that the White House and NASA were agreeing to participate only because they had a weak hand; Congress has cut NASA’s budget and was considering a huge cut for the next year to force use of the Swift shuttle. He hit reply. “Thank you, Dr. Lassen, for this opportunity. I’ll be delighted to assist. Mars has become my life, as you know. I have a long-term commitment to this place by virtue of the fact that I have a child here. The Commission sounds exactly like the structure needed to move the work here forward into the future. Mars also needs privatization, the chance to sell resources, and above all, it needs settlers. Our work here is deliberately laying the foundation for all of those achievements. So you can count on me to do my best. Bye.”