4

Virus

In late January Will Elliott was coming out of the new Vandevelde Industrial Facility and heading for Riviera Biome when he encountered Skip Carson in the north main tunnel. “Good sol,” he said.

“Good sol,” replied Skip. “So, is it now definite that there won’t be a Columbus 7 passenger flight back to Earth?”

Will nodded. “Everyone who had planned to fly back on seven wants to stay an extra eight months and fly back via Venus. That’s fine with you, right?”

“Yes. I had planned to fly back via Venus last year, so now I get to stay on Mars longer and see Venus. There won’t be a problem, flying all the cargo vehicles back unstaffed?”

“No. We’ll be sending six automated cargo vehicles and the shuttle Olympus. The latter will have a remote manipulator arm and tanks full of fuel; it’ll push the automated cargo vehicles to trans-Earth injection and they’ll fly docked to the Olympus until a few hours before aerobraking. There shouldn’t be any problems.”

“Good. Say, Satursol I’m inviting a few people over to see the film as it exists so far. Can you make it?”

“Oh, I’m sorry; I’m leaving for Dawes on Frisol and won’t be back for a week. I’m taking the automated cargo caravan from there to Cassini, then flying back here. But let me know if there will be other screenings.”

Skip nodded. “Definitely. Brian’s a pretty good actor, it turns out; who would have thought!”

“A man with hidden talents. How much shooting do you have left?”

“It’s mostly done. Originally I had planned to head back to Earth on Columbus 7, so I set my filming schedule to finish everything up in January, and leave February and March to wrap things up. Now I’m glad I have another eight months; we can get everything just right. I hope you don’t mind my tying up two people for that much longer.”

“I hadn’t counted on it, and we are shorthanded. On the other hand, I had expected to lose six folks flying back on Columbus 7 in April and now I have their work until December. How are you and Brian getting along, politically speaking?”

Skip laughed. “We fight every sol! We usually schedule it for the later afternoon, after we’ve gotten our work done. Yestersol we took a break to watch White getting sworn in as President and he was gloating. It burns me up; the man will do terrible damage to our country and possibly to the world. But Brian thinks he’ll be the greatest President since Reagan.”

“Which is supposed to be a compliment, too,” added Will. “But he gave a masterful inaugural speech and avoided all the hot-button issues. Perhaps he will bring the U.S. together.”

“Perhaps. I doubt it, though.”

“So do I. Partisanship’s too deeply engrained in the political culture. He couldn’t heal the partisan divide if he wanted too; the other side wouldn’t trust him and his own party would resist.”

“I am always amazed by your resistance to partisanship and parties, Will. It really makes no sense to me; they are inevitable, even here.”

“Not necessarily. We Bahá'ís have no factions in our decision-making bodies or election conventions, and we’ve managed that for almost two centuries, in spite of having a lot of members and handling tens of millions of dollars of funds.”

“That’s an achievement, but it requires a lot of religious conviction to work! Anyway, enjoy your trip to Dawes, Will. When you get back, I can give you a private showing.”

“Excellent.” Will waved goodbye and headed for his office, where he had a pile of work to do.

The next four sols were packed with tasks to do before the flight to Dawes. He got on the sunwing with some relief Frisol evening for the long overnight flight to Dawes. A bit before noon Satursol the solar-powered quadriplane was closing in on Dawes’s landing strip. After landing a conestoga approached and attached a docking tunnel to the rear of the sunwing so he could exit without a spacesuit. Feodor Velikovsky, Commander of Sibireco’s operations was inside. “I’m so glad you could make it to Dawes, Governor!” he said, using Will’s new, formal title. “How was the flight?”

“Not bad.” They shook hands. “I got a pretty good view of operations on the way in, too. I’m glad I’m finally getting a chance to visit.”

“We’re glad you came. I hope you can visit again; say, at least once a year. It’d smooth out communications.”

“Oh, I agree.” Will placed his suitcase under one of the beds in a secure spot while Feodor closed the tunnel. Then he followed Velikovsky to the front of the vehicle.

“Let me take you past the gold mining operations on our way to Orinoco Biome,” suggested Feodor.

“Sure.”

Feodor turned a key and got under way. “We just hit a particularly rich spot and recovered half a tonne of gold in three sols. That’s a fifth of our usual monthly yield.”

“You all are making us work hard to export all the gold. The three operations combined are digging ten tonnes of gold per month. That’s 120 tonnes per year and a quarter of the Commission’s annual operating costs, but it’s also quite a strain on our infrastructure.”

“Yes, but what a profitable strain it is!” Feodor laughed. “At least the new flight software has increased the shuttles’ launch capacity, and the new cargo capsule we’re designing with Muller Mining should simplify the trans-Earth flight.”

“True, but we have to do a lot of work to put the capsule together here from the parts imported from Earth! And we’re worried about the effectiveness of the heat shield. Aerobraking twenty tonnes of gold on a direct descent to northern Kazakhstan will save on space capture and deorbiting; but you could have a shield failure and a rain of molten gold instead.”

“Well, our experts say the shield should be fine. We’ll have to import about a tonne of equipment to make the shield right, and we’re importing all the avionics and the reaction control system. But they’ll be reusable.” Feodor sounded a little touchy about the capsule, a simple spherical “cannonball” 5.5 meters in diameter with a heatshield covering the bottom and a parachute built into the top. The development had cost the two companies about twice as much as expected and Aurorae would have almost twice as much work to do to manufacture and assemble the spheres as expected. Finally, the spheres had to be launched as two halves because of space constraints in the shuttle’s cargo bay, and the halves had to be snapped and bolted together in orbit, which would require two tricky spacewalks. At least one shuttle flight would be able to carry two complete spheres and their cargo to low Mars orbit, minimizing the number of flights necessary.

The conestoga topped a low rise—a very old, almost totally erased crater rim—and in front of them was the rolling highlands just east of Dawes crater where the gold deposit had been found. Will could see the outpost about eight kilometers away, a silvery bubble in the midday sunshine. Between it and them was a rolling stony plain pocked by scattered large pits. “As you can see, we have found good gold all over the place,” said Feodor. “We’re gradually turning this area into the scene of a World War Two bombing.”

“So I see. But you’re maximizing return, and Mars has plenty of desolate land.”

“I suppose we’ll grade the area after the gold is exhausted, but meanwhile it looks pretty bad. We’re only digging where the deposit exceeds two hundred parts per million gold; but that’s still five thousand tonnes of rock for every tonne of gold available, and we only recover 75% of it. The cyanide process recovery equipment we’re getting on Columbus 8 will get most of the rest, and the new centrifugal recovery equipment will be more efficient as well. So yields should keep climbing.”

Will saw the gold recovery unit working about two kilometers away; it was hard to miss because it raised quite a cloud of dust. “Wow, that thing is big.”

“I’ll drive you past it, if you’d like.” Feodor turned the wheel and drove the vehicle onto an intersecting dirt track that led toward the behemoth. “It consists of two mobilhab chassis welded together, so it’s fourteen meters long altogether. It’s also been widened to five meters in front so that it has plenty of capacity to dig a wide hole. It has three diggers—we call them ‘mouths’—in front to break apart and ingest regolith, with diamond-tipped steel teeth able to haul in boulders. The loose regolith falls through a sieve and the larger pieces are sent to a crusher, then back through the sieve. The silt-size particles that result go through the centrifuges, concentrating the gold particles. In the far back are two trailers that fill with the silicate waste; they’re robotic and can go dump themselves at the dump, then come back and dock to refill. We have three gold recovery units operating side by side; each one can be fed by either its own equipment or the equipment of the adjacent unit, so if the crusher in one isn’t working and the sieve in the other is broken, crushed input can be handed to the sieve of the adjacent unit. That way we can always keep at least two units running.”

“I gather you have all three operating 75% of the time, too.”

Feodor nodded. “The equipment is pretty good, and we do intensive routine maintenance. In between the gold recovery machinery in front and the tailing trailers is a large pressurized repair chamber; it actually occupies about forty percent of the total volume of the vehicle. Parts can be moved there and repaired on the spot; some parts, in fact, are mounted on rails and can be pulled back into the repair area, fixed, then pushed back into place. It’s a state of the art facility. If you’d like a tour, we can do it right after supper time when there’s a change of staffing. It used to be top secret, but now we have a deal with Muller Mining to sell one to them in return for sharing the research and development to improve it.”

“Thank you, I’d love to see it. I gather the newer model will be more energy efficient?”

“So I’m told; the input rock is scanned with a neutron activation instrument and rock with low gold content is rejected. This baby sucks up four hundred kilowatts; that’s over two and a half tonnes of methane and oxygen per sol. But it can process as much as twenty-four tonnes of rock an hour.”

“Really impressive, but energy efficiency will help a lot. Aurorae Outpost had been running under emergency conservation until the sunwing crashed and we converted its panels to power production. But since then demand has crept upward again.”

“I know, we’re feeling the pinch here as well.” Velikovsky stopped the vehicle so they could admire the gold recovery unit in action. A steady stream of rock dust poured out of three spouts in the back, kicking up a huge cloud. As they watched, one of the two trailers catching the powder, now full, detached and drove itself to the tailings area to unload. Another “docked” to receive tailings.

“It’s much taller than I imagined,” said Will.

“The sieving units are eight meters tall,” agreed Feodor. “The biggest mobile surface feature on the planet.”

“And there are two people on board at all times?”

“Yes, they work a twelve hour shift.”

Will looked at the remarkable vehicle for several minutes. Then Feodor put the conestoga back in drive and drove them past the tailings area, where neat haystacks of ground rock dust covered several hectares. Then he turned toward Orinoco Biome. “We might as well go inside.”

“I gather building one is completed.”

“It is, and the bubble for building two is in place, though we won’t get a complete building inside it until the middle of Columbus 8. We’re rather cramped and could use more space.”

“Of course. Cassini was stuck in the same situation for almost two years. But we can only get so much done.”

“I know, but I thought I’d ask.” Velikovsky sounded a bit disappointed. “Orinoco is pretty hot and humid, and as you may know we complained a few months ago. Since then, Lisa turned down the humidity. So far, the vegetation has adjusted fairly well, and we’re much more comfortable.”

“I heard. We need to create a real rainforest biome some time, but I guess it’ll be at Aurorae, where we have alternative climates if we don’t like that one.”

“We’re planning a big town meeting for tonight so you can meet everyone and answer their questions.”

“Excellent. Usually the meeting breaks the ice and a lot people come up to me privately later about one thing or another. I don’t get in the field much any more.”

“Are you sure you want to take the robotic truck caravan to Cassini? It’s the slow way!”

“I want to see the sights, and we have a field stop scheduled in Tikhonravov Crater; the so-called ‘coal deposit.’ I’ll get plenty of office work done on the trip, too.”

“Okay, suit yourself,” replied Velikovsky with a shrug.

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

The town meeting proved to be lively, with a lot of unexpected questions. The next sol Will met people all morning, then got a tour of the gold recovery vehicle. That evening the monthly cargo caravan arrived from Aurorae after a nine-sol trip: a conestoga, one cargo trailer with nine tonnes of stuff, and a nuclear reactor on its own robotic cart. As usual, there was a big meal to celebrate its safe arrival, and the Outpost store opened to sell some of the new items that arrived.

The next morning the caravan left for Cassini. The two-sol trip included Adam Haddad, a tall, lanky, young driver who was Mars’s deputy transport officer and a master mechanic; Raul Gonsalvez, a geology technician; and Will Elliott. The trailer, bound for Aurorae, had three tonnes of gold. On the conestoga was fifty kilograms of tropical fruit from the orchard inside Orinoco Biome, bound for Cassini.

They set out in an upbeat mood, sitting up front, watching the terrain roll by, and chatting. In fifteen minutes the Cassini-Dawes Trail entered a tight stretch between two crater rims furrowed by ancient arroyos. “This is one of my favorite stretches,” said Adam, with a smile, while he drove them down the road at fifty kilometers per hour. “Three months ago the two of us on the trip got out and climbed up an arroyo to the rim. We were surprised to find a trace of snow under the eolian drifts in the arroyo, too!”

“Really?” said Will, surprised. “That’s unusual, on the equator.”

“I’ve seen it, too,” replied Raul.

“Now, you’re going to Cassini for three months?” Will asked Raul.

The Spaniard nodded. “I’ll run mining equipment from inside the outpost, do some routine gold exploration, and help repair broken equipment. Leona Verdi’s rotating home.”

“And I’ll drive her back to Aurorae,” said Adam, pleased.

“You drive this route just about every time, don’t you?” asked Will.

Adam smiled slightly. “I sure do, every month. Seven sols to Cassini, two sols to Dawes, two sols back to Cassini, then seven sols back to Aurorae, with up to sixteen tonnes of cargo each time. I get back to Aurorae, complete routine maintenance on the vehicles, take a week off, then repeat the whole thing again.”

“You must know the route real well, by now.”

He nodded. “Of course, we’re talking about 8,000 kilometers of dirt roads, which is equivalent to driving from Florida to Alaska, so it’s a lot of terrain! Some of the flat, boring stretches don’t stand out very well, but I know the road pretty well now. This is my. . . tenth run.”

“Wow,” said Raul. “I think it’d drive me crazy!”

Adam shook his head. “I love it. You see, I’m a landscape painter as well; having an entire free week per month to paint helps a lot, too. The trips are very good for my landscape painter’s eye. There have been some very subtle colors I’ve seen out here, and there are some stretches of terrain I feast my eyes on. Tiu Vallis, for example, or the Cassini rim crossing, or Henry Chaos.”

“Spectacular,” agreed Will. “I didn’t know you painted. Have you seen Ernesto Alves’s work?”

“Yes. He’s more literal than I; I do more abstract work. But he’s good and I like some of his pieces.”

“We should do an exhibit of the two of you some time,” suggested Will. “Do you do e-canvas work too?”

“Sometimes. I prefer watercolors, but I’m running out of supplies, so electronic paintings are the next best thing!”

“They’re easier to export to Earth, too. Say, with your eye, I bet you could name all the good spots along the trail where we could sell plots to small landowners. We want rolling terrain or land with vistas; people don’t want to buy five square kilometers of boring plain. They want at least to have a gully on their land, and they prefer land with meteoritic iron on it as well.”

“I can’t tell you where the iron is, but yes, I have a long list of favorite spots, and since we’re allowed to stop up to an hour a sol, I’ve walked around a lot of them, too. In fact, there’s one spot I’d like to buy myself. I often wonder whether, thirty or forty years from now, I could retire on it.”

“Where is it?” asked Raul, startled.

“Oh, out on the middle of nowhere. No one could live there now, but by the time I’m old enough to retire it might be possible.”

“Buy a used mobilhab and put it there with some solar panels, drill a well for water, and you’d be set,” said Will. “Are you guys both planning to stay here?”

“Assuming I can find a wife!” replied Adam.

“Ditto,” added Raul. “Unless I can get a position on a future Mercury mission. I’d like to go there for a few years, then settle here.”

“If there is a Mercury mission,” noted Will. “The new administration in Washington may complicate European plans. Adam, I want to thank you for your broadcasts. They’ve been well received.”

He smiled. “Thanks. My Christmas broadcast was really popular among the Eastern Orthodox around the world and among Arab Christians.”

“And you were the one who got Arieh Feldman and Fatima and Husni Hijazi together for a joint broadcast about peace in the Middle East last time things escalated. Getting the Arabs here to work with the Israeli was symbolically very important, even if it is something we actually do routinely.”

“The appearance that was important to me was when Fatima and Husni agreed to appear with me, not with Arieh! Six months ago we did a broadcast about Arab Christians and Muslims working together. Husni’s conservative parents in Saudi Arabia were outraged. Their anger about his appearing with an Israeli was muted by it. In both cases he blamed Fatima, since she’s Palestinian!”

“Were you sponsored by Lebanon?” asked Raul, curious.

Adam shook his head. “I went to the U.S. for university and got citizenship. But Lebanon did make a contribution, since I’m still a citizen there.”

Raul nodded. “A lot of the people here are dual citizens but work for NASA or ESA. Commander, what are the chances we’ll be able to fly?”

Will was surprised. “Everyone wants to fly and everyone asks that. As long as we have six shuttles here we’ll send pairs to asteroids, as long as they’re back for the arrival or departure of a Columbus mission. The main reason we’ll do it, frankly, is because we can and we want to. It would take less human resources to send robotic vehicles. But it’s part of our strategy to attract the best people and to keep our profile high.”

“Still, if you’re talking about one mission per year, it’ll be a long time before everyone gets to go.”

“About five years.”

They continued to chat for another hour, then Will headed to the rear of the vehicle to do office work. It was difficult because the vehicle bounced a fair amount; fifty kilometer per hour was the maximum speed for the dirt trail. When Raul and Adam switched the vehicle to robotic mode, it proceeded at thirty kilometers per hour and the bouncing was much less.

The next morning they rolled over the battered rim of Tikhonravov and entered its ancient bowl. They stopped for a half hour to see the “coal deposit,” a seam of biotic carbon a mere centimeter thick; Tikhonravov had had a lake on part of its floor for a million years or so and it had been biologically quite productive. They all took samples; Will got a few for his collection, then filled a bag with several kilos of the stuff. It was likely to be a popular export item, and the seam had hundreds of tonnes of carbon. A quick look through the microscope showed that the carbon was pure fossils.

They continued on northward and reached Four Corners, the point where they crossed the Circumnavigational Trail: it consisted of an emergency shelter, a water well, a small solar array, and a sunwing landing strip, all set on a featureless stonefield. Adam pushed a button and detached the trailer with the gold; he’d pick it on the trip to Aurorae. They stopped to fuel up from the nuke’s tanks as well, and filled the nuke’s water tank from the shelter’s cistern. Then they were on their way robotically. They’d be at Cassini before dawn.

Before going to bed Will went to the conestoga’s driver’s cabin and called Ethel, who was on her way to meet the kids. “I don’t have much time to talk,” she said. “I’m almost to Yalta. You need to call back in an hour or so to talk to Marshall. After lunch we went to the store to shop for his birthday. He didn’t want any of the things Silvio has; he was pretty disappointed. He said he saw a Roman soldier set on tv the other sol and wanted that. I explained to him that we can’t get it from Earth for over a year. He understood that and was disappointed, but then he didn’t want anything.”

“Oh.” Will thought. “I’ll surf for software; a Roman soldier game. Are you sure this isn’t something we can make from company specifications?”

“Maybe we could, but it’d be expensive and I’d have to do the work, and I don’t have the time. You know how overworked we’ve been.”

“We never recovered from the delays caused by the Sunwing D crash, and we really bit off more than we could chew.”

“Especially in terms of fabrication and construction,” agreed Ethel. “See what you can find, okay? I’ll talk to Madhu also; they may have bought something for Sam that we can trade for. How’s the trip?”

“Pretty good. We stopped at the coal bed this afternoon. It was fascinating. Not much new from here. David Alaoui emailed me; the Mercury mission is almost certainly postponed three years because the French don’t want to deal with the new President.”

“Just to rent a nuclear engine?”

“They may even partner with the Chinese! That’s probably a threat to get American attention, but who knows? Anyway, that’s confidential.”

“I’m sure. Anyway, call later.”

“How was your sol?”

“Pretty good. We’re fabricating fifty toilets; enough to last us two or three years. They’re not flushing well, for some reason, so we’re seeking expert advice from Earth. It’s been more fun fabricating pseudo-wood grain finish for the new run of plastic chairs, tables, desks, cabinets, and sideboards. It looks almost real. I’m glad to say that quality--”

Then the phone went dead. Will listened a moment, puzzled. Then he picked up his attaché and looked at the screen. The connection had been lost. He punched redial.

Nothing happened. Before he was able to investigate, the conestoga suddenly began to slow down, then stopped completely. Will looked at the controls.

Then Adam opened the door and hurried in. “What happened?”

“I don’t know. It stopped. I lost a phone call, too.” He pointed to a screen. “Huh. No GPS coordinates.”

“The satellite network must have gone down.”

“Impossible.” Will pointed. “We’re on the backup computer.”

“Weird.” Adam switched on the main computer and looked at another screen. The machine began to boot up. Will watched and wondered. It occurred to him that the backup computer would still have GPS coordinate information and would have prevented the call from being interrupted.

Raul came into the cabin as well and watched. The computer booted up very slowly and the three of them began to run diagnostics on it. Meanwhile, the backup machine continued to run the vehicle’s life support systems, but had no access to the global positioning system or communications.

“There’s something wrong,” said Adam, after a minute. “It comes on, but won’t boot up properly.”

“Where are the shortwave controls?” asked Will. “There’s something wrong. The computer going down shouldn’t have anything to do with loss of GPS or of communications.”

“Right.” Adam reached over to the main screen and pushed a few icons, transferring the shortwave radio controls to a screen in front of Will. He opened a frequency and began to call over the common frequency “Aurorae, this is Cargo Run 39, do you read?” He repeated it every few seconds and was greeted by a hiss. He flipped through different frequencies and repeated.

He came back to the common frequency and called again. Then he heard, in the background, “Aurorae, this is Dawes Outpost. Do you read?”

It was Feodor Velikovsky’s voice, for the boss of the Sibireco operation was also Commander of Dawes and Chair of the Borough Council. “Dawes, this is Cargo Run 39, do you read?” Will exclaimed.

A pause. “Cargo Run 39, this is Dawes. Have you been able to contact Aurorae?”

“Negative, Feodor. We just lost GPS, satellite communications, and our main computer on the conestoga. We’re attempting to restore all three.”

“The same here, Will. Half of the computers in Dawes have gone down; no, more like two thirds. Life support was out for thirty seconds, though it’s now restored. Mining operations have stopped as well. We are attempting a link with Earth via Phobos to bypass the satellites, but that link is down as well.”

“The link to Earth is down? Please acknowledge that, Feodor.”

“Acknowledged. The link to Earth is down. The problem does not seen to be our equipment. I doubt the backup on Phobos has been knocked out, too. There is nothing coming here from Earth. No BBC radio and television signals, for example.”

Will looked at Adam and Raul, shocked. They looked a bit frightened. “Roger would say it might be the end of the world,” commented Raul.

“Maybe he’s thinking that right now,” agreed Will. “Let’s get the computer back on line, Adam.”

“I’m trying, but so far it isn’t cooperating. I’m running diagnostics on it right now.”

“Give me the comm controls, okay?”

Adam nodded and shifted all communications to Will. He left the shortwave on; Cassini had come on the line as well and was talking to Dawes. They had lost half their computers also. “Looks like a computer virus to me,” exclaimed Emily Scoville, Commander of Cassini.

“A virus?” said Will, interrupting. “How’s that possible, Emily? We update our antivirus software daily and run everything that arrives through filters.”

“She’s right,” said Adam, nodding. “This looks like a virus.”

“I don’t know how it’s possible, Governor, but that’s what I see,” she replied. “It has taken out the computers on the satellites as well as the computers in both outposts and the conestoga.”

“That’s impossible. The hardware and software are not all of the same type,” said Will.

“But all our systems have standard computers or standard operating software playing a role,” noted Emily. “They seemed to be the parts that are knocked out, and that brings everything else down.”

“I suppose that’s possible,” said Will.

Just then Ruhullah Islami called from Aurorae Outpost, confirming that they, too, had lost satellite services and computers. “Is there danger?” asked Will.

“The biomes have no power or environmental management,” replied Ruhullah. “We’re not evacuating them, however, because they appear to be safe for now and there’s no place for everyone to go. The computer controlling the liquid oxygen and liquid methane tanker farms is down.”

“Oh my God,” said Will. He looked at the screen in front of him, wondering how this could happen. He resumed his scan of the Earth channels and suddenly he got something. “Voice of Beijing is still broadcasting!” he exclaimed. “Of course, it’s in Chinese!”

“Tang’s right down stairs; we’ll get him,” said Ruhullah. He turned and ordered someone else in the room to go get Tang.

Meanwhile, Will resumed scanning the channels. There was burst of talk; Will leaned close to listen.

“Peru and Columbia are down as well as all of North America,” said the announcer, a man speaking English with a slight Indian accent. “We now have a report from Bangalore Customer Services, Limited, that their telephone service professionals have lost all incoming calls from customers in the United States and Canada, and they cannot call the various companies with whom they have service contracts.”

“And Rajiv, we now have a report from All-India Communications that they have no telephone or internet contact with the United States,” added a woman’s voice.

“Chitra, I tried the Toronto Globe and Mail site and it is down as well, so it appears there is no internet for all of North America,” responded Rajiv.

“My God, this is incredible,” said Will.

“Someone did something big,” said Adam, still working on the computer. He shook his head. “I think this computer is fried.”

“If it’s a virus, we had better keep this other computer isolated until we can get antivirus software from Earth,” said Will. “How far are we from Cassini?”

“About 150 klicks,” said Adam.

“Let’s drive it as fast as we can,” said Will. “We can be there in three hours. We had better not get stuck out here.”

“I wonder how the expeditions are doing?” asked Raul, thinking about the teams exploring the North Pole and Alba Patera.

“I wonder what’s happening to the Gradivus mission,” said Will. “Meanwhile, in North America, the power grid may be down.”

“And what about the several thousand passenger aircraft in the air right now,” added Adam. “I wonder whether there are any prisons rioting, too.”

“And operations in hospitals being disrupted,” said Raul.

“Raul, you drive,” said Will. “Adam can keep working on the computer.” He turned to his attaché, over which he had been talking to Ethel. He pushed an icon. It didn’t respond. “My attaché is fried, too.”

Raul got into the drivers seat and took off down the road at 55 kilometers per hour, which was as fast as they could drive safely. At least they were pulling no trailers; that gave them a greater safety margin.

“Aurorae calling all points,” said Ruhullah over the shortwave. “We think we can get Marscom back up using backup computers. We will be trying in ten minutes. We have to stabilize Aurorae’s environmental control systems first.”

Will heard a fragment, “. . . Islamic army of Turanistan . . .” over the Indian radio broadcast. “What did he say?” he asked.

“The Lashkar-i-Islami-i-Turanistan has taken responsibility,” replied Adam. “Phone call to the Turanistan Office of Al-Jazira. We should be listening to Al-Jazira right now!”

“We’re not getting it. Both India and China send their media signals to Mars via their own satellites. The conestoga doesn’t have enough power to receive video, just audio.” Will shook his head. “This means war. If North America’s computers have been fried by a virus, there will be war for sure.”

“I wonder what percentage of all computers survived,” said Raul. “Macs, I suppose.”

“Maybe, but nowadays they share many of the same chips with the other standard types,” said Adam. “That’s the weakness; nowadays almost everyone uses the same chips. And it’s also a clue to figure out what is broken. Probably ninety-nine percent of the parts in these machines are fine; one component has been destroyed.”

“But we can’t import that one component for a very long time!” replied Will. “This is a disaster for us.”

“Of course, back at Aurorae we have every computer that was ever shipped to Mars and has broken or is obsolete; something like fifty or seventy-five of them,” noted Adam. “They’re not even turned on, so they don’t have the virus. They’ll have a lot of spare parts we can cannibalize.”

“That’s true,” said Will.

“Hey, they’re saying something else!” exclaimed Raul, pointing to the radio.

“We repeat, there is a speculation over Al-Jazira television that the virus was designed to be triggered in computers set for certain time zones,” said Chitra. “This would explain how the United States was targeted. It would explain why Peru and Columbia have suffered, but the rest of South America was spared; most of the continent is east of the United States. We have also learned that the Atlantic time zone of Canada seems to have been spared, with only scattered problems. Many web sites in the Atlantic province of Nova Scotia are still functioning, although service is spotty because most of it is routed through the rest of Canada, which is out of communication.”

“It would also explain the Agence France Press reports that Tahiti has been hit,” added Rajiv. “Its clocks are the same as Hawaii’s.”

“And ours!” added Will. “If I remember correctly, this sol Aurorae’s clocks were roughly the same as Hawaii’s. Our clocks here, in Dawes, and in Cassini are the same hour as New York’s.”

“The Conestoga’s computer is set on Aurorae time,” corrected Adam.

“If this theory is right, Shackleton Station will be in trouble,” said Will. “Their clocks are set on Houston time. The Chinese station may be okay; they operate on Houston time, but I bet the computers are set on Beijing time. And the Venus orbit station should be okay, since they’re on Paris time.” Will looked out the windshield. “Let’s get to Cassini. We need to muster all our resources in one place so we can figure out what we’ll do.”

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