4

Gradivus

Adam took over the steering wheel and drove like hell to Cassini. Will said nothing; he and Raul retreated into the rear bathroom, which was safe, and listened to the radio on a spare attaché that had been turned off and therefore had not acquired the virus. The Islamic Army of Turanistan released a video of their statement, confirming that they had used a computer virus.

They reached Cassini in two hours; the average speed had been a teeth-clenching seventy-five kilometers per hour. Just before they arrived the Marscomm satellite system came back on, complete with the global positioning system. Aurorae’s ten minute prediction had proved wildly optimistic.

Will and Emily retreated into her office and opened a video connection to the Aurorae Control Facility. Ruhullah and Érico were both there. “Everyone here will be working all night,” said Ruhullah. “We’re taking a census of functioning computers. All four of the shuttles are alright because they were shut off. We still haven’t heard from Gradivus, though.”

“In two hours.” Will felt a pit in his stomach. “A thousand things could have happened up there. Keep trying.”

“We couldn’t have heard from them at all until ten minutes ago,” noted Érico. “The Marscomm system is essential to be in touch with them.”

“Here in Cassini, all the main computers but one were knocked out, but the backups were alright,” said Emily. “We lost all the primary mining computers as well, and one backup that came on immediately. We have found that half the attachés were affected. We’re in the process of programming our spare attachés to serve as backups for environmental control and mining.”

“Our situation’s about the same,” added Feodor. “Dawes lost the environmental control system of its biome, but we got the backup going right away.”

“Well, our situation is much more complicated here,” said Ruhullah. “The biomes were run in tandem; Yalta’s main computer was the backup for Catalina and vice versa. As a result, we lost environmental control over all four. We’re in the process of shifting controls to the shuttle computers, even though their different design makes that complicated.”

“Thank God the shuttles are okay,” said Will. “What about the expeditions?”

“The Alba Patera expedition was asleep at the time and they have had no damage at all. The North Polar expedition lost a few computers only. Both are on their way to Cassini as fast as they can drive.”

“How much of our communications are back?”

“Intraplanetary, about thirty percent,” replied Ruhullah. “The satellites will all need to be visited and repaired to restore full capacity. I’m afraid people won’t be watching much television for the rest of the year. We have thirty percent of our interplanetary capacity back and it’s already full with voice and emails flying back and forth. We’re receiving media from Europe and Asia—the signals have been rerouted via other satellites in Earth orbit—but we still have nothing coming from North America. Euronews has transmitted a photograph of North America from the Chinese South Polar station that shows it dark; there is still no power after two hours.”

“What an incredible disaster,” said Will. “Thousands are going to die down there. Have we communications with the Paris office of the Mars Commission? I think we can assume Houston will be knocked out for quite a while.”

We haven’t tried,” replied Ruhullah. “But it’s six a.m. there, so we should wait. Enlai has emailed colleagues at the Space Institute in Beijing. We’ve heard over Chinese radio that they’re serving as mission control for all lunar facilities at the south pole. Shackleton’s struggling with the same problems we are.”

“What about the space suit computers?” asked Will.

“Almost everyone had come inside,” replied Ruhullah. “The spacesuits were hung up and the computers were off. So they should be fine. They will be our main source of spares.”

“Oh, we just received a radio call from the Gradivus mission!” exclaimed Érico. “We’re piping it through to this conversation.” There was a pause, then a hiss of interplanetary static. They were six million kilometers from Mars, so the round trip communications time was 40 seconds.

“Acknowledged,” replied Neal Stroger, to a previous message from Rostam Khan. “We’ve ridden quite a rollercoaster up here. About two hours ago, all the systems on both shuttles suddenly crashed: the main system and the backup. For about forty minutes we had no controls at all, except the few systems we could control manually. The main computers, it turns out, appear to be okay, but the attachés all went down, and we haven’t been able to restore them. We had to shift their functions to the mains.

“Communications were down as well, and when we called Mars we got no response, so we called Earth, then the moon; still no response. We were beginning to half think an alien invasion had wiped out humanity. But then we emailed Venus and they emailed back with a brief description of the trouble on Earth. It’s unbelievable that the virus was written to insinuate its way even into our computers; it must have been incredibly sophisticated. We’re still in the process of checking out all our systems to verify we have no other damage. The next step will be to reassess the mission. Back to you.”

“Acknowledged, Gradivus,” replied Érico. “Send us the email you got from Venus; they may be in a better position to brief us than anyone else. Prepare a transfer of the complete record of your systems for the hour before the crash, but don’t send it yet; our communications bandwidth is severely impaired. We’ve started reviewing records and know that computers started failing at slightly different times. We were dealing with some difficulties at least a half hour before everything went down, and when it went down it was really quick; maybe 90 seconds. We want to know how the virus took down your systems.”

“Gradivus, this is Will Elliott. I want to add that we are all immensely relieved you guys are alright, up there. You should email relatives and assure them you’re okay. Run communications to Earth via Venus to save our communications systems. We’ll use you as a relay, in fact, because we can broadcast more to you at a lower power for relay to Venus than we can send to Venus directly. We’ll have to ask Venus to relay for us, but we can be confident they will do so.” Will turned to Emily Scoville, then to the screen showing the people at Aurorae and Dawes. “We have three hours before we can contact the Paris office. I suggest we make a damage assessment of all systems by then. I assume, Ruhullah, that a team is ready to figure out what happened?”

“There are several people here who want to investigate, but we’re still busy with emergency conditions. Give us three hours and I think we can start to shift to investigation of the cause. Of course, there’s probably fifty thousand people on Earth investigating as well, and they will make more progress than we can.”

“What have we heard about the cause?” asked Will.

“Just that the Islamic Army of Turanistan claims responsibility and calls the attack a ‘computer program.’ They did not use the term virus. The United States government is up and running in spite of losing most of their computers and through their Turanistani Embassy, they have demanded the government of that country to arrest the entire leadership of the organization immediately. The Lashkar-i-Islami-i-Turanistan, as it’s called there, is semi-public and is not in hiding.”

“They will be now,” replied Will. “The United States is in mid winter and half of it is very cold, and the power won’t be restored for several days or weeks. That means millions of Americans will have burst pipes and ruined houses, and their workplaces may not be much better. There will be a war over this; a big war.”

“Don’t forget the overflowing shelters, the looting and riots, disruptions of the food supply, the marshal law, and the economic depression. This could trigger use of nuclear weapons,” said Ruhullah.

“The stock market and banks will be closed for a long time, the banking machines won’t be working; this is major hardship for everyone,” agreed Will. “We may be lucky to be here. But let’s focus on the tasks at hand. I want reports in three hours and a meeting together in three and a half to plan our next sol or two. We should assume we will have no expert advice from the Commission for the next week. Goodbye everyone.”

Will thanked Emily and headed out of her office to the cubicle down the hall where he could work. They had thoughtfully provided him with a spare attaché. He logged in and set up a few things, then turned to his email. There was a message from his sister, Molly Nuri, who lived with her Iranian husband, Taraz Nuri, in Santa Cruz, Bolivia. Will immediately turned his thoughts to their mother, in southern Connecticut, and Molly’s son Paul, a college student in central Connecticut.

Will, at least acknowledge this. I need to know you all are alright up there. I hear Mars has been hit by the virus as well. We’re fine here; Santa Cruz is normal and the computers are functioning fine. I’m trying to reach a Bahá'í who lives near mom and has a satellite phone. He’s a physician and travels to less developed places in the world a lot to provide medical services. So far I haven’t found his number, but I still have a few contacts up on the altiplano; he was there a few months ago. You keep in touch with me and I’ll get in touch with mom. I may need to fly her down for a few months. Reaching Paul will be tricky, but I have some options there as well. Fortunately, the campus should be safe and warm. Bye.”

Will read the email again and felt a small amount of relief. At least his sister would open contact to mom. The reference to a satellite phone prompted him to remember that Louisa Turner had such a phone as well, and it was a French phone, not American. He turned to his address book, which had been backed up on the Mars network and thus was accessible. Yes, he had the number and the company name. The email address for the phone was guessable so he sat and pounded out a quick message.

Dear Louisa: Let me know immediately if you get this. We’ve lost all the active computers except shuttle mains, but we have enough backups to keep environmental management and other essential services running. We’ve restored about one third of our communications capacity. No one is in danger at the moment, but there is disruption. We’re preparing a preliminary report for completion at about 9 a.m. Paris time with a heads of staff meeting an hour later to make plans for the next two sols. We’re assuming Houston headquarters will be unavailable to help us for at least a week and that the Paris office will provide limited support, possibly with ESA cooperation. What are the conditions there? Let me know. Will.

Then he dug up David Alaoui’s email and sent him a similar summary of their situation, but concluded with We assume the Paris office of the Mars Commission will provide some ground support, but the staff there is secretarial and diplomatic, not technical. Can you help? We have no idea what help we need yet, but we’ll certainly need help with the computers. The systems on Magellan Station, Venus orbit, are very similar. The virus will be figured out sooner or later. Some of the damage may be reversible. Maybe the Venus-Mercury Commission can help us. We will certainly be able to return the favor.

Then Will sat and stared out the window at the darkened landscape, dimly illumined by the light of Deimos. He felt pretty helpless, far from Aurorae and unable to help much at Cassini. So he pulled out his Bahá'í prayer book and said some prayers.

He was about to listen to the BBC coverage when an email popped into his box from Molly, confirming receipt of his email. Then, most unexpectedly, Louisa responded.

Will, I’m shocked to get this from you! I had no idea you knew my number. I’ve been using the phone to maintain essential communications only. I was in my apartment in Houston when everything went down. Houston has no power, phones, anything. Several radio stations are now back on the air, though, and martial law has been declared because there’s been a lot of looting of downtown stores. Morgan and I are at the Commission headquarters. He says to email the report to him as well via this phone. The battery won’t last much longer, but he’s got some guys working on the power situation. We have about a quarter of our computers functioning only, and they’re of the type on the shuttles. The attachés are down unless they were shut off at the time of the attack. We only had the night shift here and a lot of them have to go home to their families, so we may not have many people left in a few hours. It’ll be months before we can recover from this. We may even have to cancel Columbus 8, at least the passenger part. They say tomorrow morning there will be a big run on all the supermarkets, by people who have cash that is, because the rumor has it that checks and credit cards will not be honored. The President has said that this means war and there will be no stopping until the terrorists who did this are caught. His message was relayed by satellite telephone to the BBC, and many stations here can pick up their satellite signal. The US media networks are still down.

We’ll be here regardless. I’m glad I’m not in Boulder right now; I’d be freezing in the dark. Houston’s not bad this time of the year, usually. But I go to Paris every spring, and I think I’ll be going early this year! Bye.

He was relieved he was in touch with someone in Houston. He turned to the news, to get a better idea of the context, then began to compose a statement.

Everywhere, work continued frantically. Up on the Tharsis and Hadriaca the inventory of systems proceeded fairly quickly, since the entire crew could help and the functioning computers allowed for the work to be automated. Stroger called a meeting after it was finished in the great room of the Tharsis.

“Okay, we now know that the damage is confined to the regular computers,” he said. “We have spare spacesuit computers and can wire them in to serve as backups if necessary.” He gestured at the window. “If you look out there, you can actually see Gradivus now. Our rendezvous burn is scheduled for twenty-one hours from now. We can replace it with a burn that will return us directly to Mars in about four weeks. If we make the rendezvous burn, we can abort to Mars at any time up to three and a half weeks from now. Remember, if we miss that, in three months there is an abort that gets us to Earth in seven months; but we’d be very thin, because we’d be living on half rations. Mars can send us emergency equipment if necessary as well, unless all their vehicles lose their computers.”

“And we have the spare computers for space suits and back up computing,” added Charles.

“Yes, because the six of us have ten space suits, so we have four spare computers.”

“It makes no sense to come all this way, then perform a flyby,” said Helmut. “If we rendezvous, the danger is only marginally raised, and at least we’ll have access to resources.”

“Not much resources,” replied Neal. “Gradivus is a stony asteroid, with relatively little water or nickel-iron.”

“We should be able to extract some water, though,” said Charles, the meteorite expert. “But I don’t know why we’d need it because if we don’t fire the engines, we’ll have tonnes of liquid oxygen and methane on board.”

“We’ll also have extra radiation shielding from the asteroid,” noted Zach. “I’m in favor of going in. I agree with Helmut; we’ve come a long way to change course for Mars now.”

Hutan nodded as well. Ernesto considered. “There’s no real risk as long as we keep some computers turned off so they can’t get infected. Besides, we could run the shuttle engines even without a computer if we had to. It would be hard, but it’s theoretically possible.”

“I’m surprised we’re unanimous,” said Neal. He looked around. “Okay, I’ll put it in my report to Mars. We’re going to Gradivus. It’s late; I guess we can go to bed. Hutan and I have the watch.”

People gradually drifted out of the small “great room.” Helmut headed back to his tiny quarters on the Hadriaca. He closed the door and sat, staring at the wall. He had had no time to think about the dangers they had faced while they were busily handling the crisis. Now that he thought about the situation, he saw his hands starting to shake involuntarily. He looked at his attaché, which had been turned off during the virus attack and therefore was alright. He turned it on and composed an email to his father.

Hey dad, I hope you’re okay at Shackleton. I have no idea how to get this to you; actually, I guess I’ll email it to Yan Guo, she can get it to you and her email should be functioning. Our crisis up here is now over for a time. We had no functioning computer control for forty minutes. Charles had to take physical control of the two shuttles’ orientation and spin because the nav computer was off line. I was checking computers on the Hadriaca. We had no life support, which means the fans stopped. I kept thinking about how sharks can’t live in the water unless they kept moving and thought about the bubble of carbon dioxide around me, so I kept rocking back and forth to keep the air around me moving! It was weird and frightening.

But then we shifted the functions of the attachés to the mains, since they’re fine—their operating systems were unaffected—and everything came back up. We’ve checked out the systems and everything else is fine, so we’re planning to rendezvous with Gradivus tomorrow on schedule.

I hear Shackleton went down, too. I suppose you’ve turned to the Lifters; their computers should be fine, just like ours. Please let me know you’re okay. I’m copying this to mom, too; she must be frantic. But you had better send messages to me via Guo, since I have no idea when your email will come back on line.

Looking forward to hearing from you. Bye.

Helmut sent the message, then went out of his room to brush his teeth. He took off his clothes and climbed into bed—the two shuttles, docked nose to nose and spinning end over end, had normal Martian gravity. But even though he turned off the light, he laid in bed a long time, uncertain whether he dared to sleep.

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It was the middle of the night—3 a.m.—when the various reports began to arrive in Will’s inbox. He forwarded them to the other heads of staff, Louisa, and David immediately. Then he met with his staff by videophone. “We do have a plan,” said Will. “Or maybe I should say plans, since Cassini and Dawes have ideas different from Aurorae. Thanks to the space suit computers, our supply of spares, and dead computers we can cannibalize, we can manage to return to basic functionality in one to two weeks.”

“One week at Dawes and Cassini because we have simpler systems to repair,” added Emily. “But we won’t really return to normal until replacement parts arrive or until we can repair equipment locally. We can jury-rig solutions that will give us eighty or ninety percent of our old capacity.”

“We’re looking at the question of repairing equipment, so our plan is longer,” agreed Ruhullah. “We can have Aurorae’s systems functioning pretty well in two weeks. We’re resetting the clocks of every functioning computer we have for the 24:00 time zone; it’s an option no one on Earth has, thanks to our longer day.”

“It sounds like there will be an anti-virus patch coming out of Sweden in about three hours, too,” exclaimed Will. “Who would have thought that the Lashkar-i-islami would have a collaborator inside an antivirus company who could get the virus sent out as an anti-virus update! It’s really shocking.”

“We all dutifully and routinely loaded it into our computers, too,” added Érico.

“And the guy wasn’t even Muslim, but a British convert to Buddhism,” added Ruhullah. He was clearly relieved that the attacker himself had not been Muslim.

“It shows the international face of terrorism nowadays,” agreed Emily. As a British citizen, Ruhullah’s relief was her discomfort, even if she was Muslim as well. She added, “There are now random shooting in a European high school or restaurant every other month, and even more often in the United States. Just last month they caught that pipe bomber in the U.S. who had set off a dozen bombs.”

“And let’s not forget the nuke set off in Paris two years ago,” added Will. “Life on Earth is getting pretty scary, and now there’s going to be a war and probably a big economic downturn. If history serves us, we can be sure the war against Turanistan will trigger more terrorism, not less. So let’s get our work done up here and work on making Mars more stable and diverse. We’re small, but we can be an example.”

“Are you thinking of making another address?” asked Érico.

Will nodded. “But I need to wait until Louisa can focus on the matter, because I don’t want to say something that will complicate our relations with the United States government. Morgan’s been working very hard to build bridges.”

“That’s a tough problem,” agreed Érico. “Now, we have one more matter to discuss: Gradivus. They’ve decided to go for the landing.”

“We should let them make the decision,” exclaimed Will. “They’re out there, they know their equipment. Houston’s out of communication. We may want to cut the mission short, though, if we later find any damage to their systems. Right now the delta-v to return to Mars and land on Gradivus is about the same, and the delta-v from Gradivus to Mars right now is pretty small, but increases every sol. It’s still small for at least a week.”

“They should implement the one-week scenario,” agreed Érico. “It gets the basic stuff done. If they stay a month, so much the better.”

“That’s the plan,” agreed Will. “Thanks, everyone. Have your people get some rest. Let’s plan another meeting for 8 p.m. Aurorae time tomorrow night to see how we’re doing.”

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By the end of the next sol, the situation on Mars had stabilized. The virus had finally been identified on Earth and an antivirus program written to remove it, and once the program was sent to Mars their machines were free of it quite fast. The damage done by the virus was determined pretty quickly as well. It was irreversible, but the chip that was damaged was quite small and replaceable, so all the computers could be repaired once the parts arrived toward the end of the year that had just started.

The knowledge about the nature and progress of the virus gave them added confidence that the Gradivus mission could proceed. The sol after the computer crash, the two shuttles stopped their rotation, separated, and prepared to fire their engines. As Gradivus loomed up out of the darkness of space to become a noticeably large worldlet, the Tharsis and Hadriaca fired their engines for several minutes. When they finished they lay about five kilometers away, in exactly the same orbit around the sun, and slowly were being pulled in by the asteroid’s gravity. The next morning everyone prepared for landing in the two shuttles as they drifted in at about a kilometer per hour. Periodically the reaction control system fired briefly to hold the approach speed down.

Helmut watched the grayish surface loom larger and larger as he ran the spectral analysis instrument. Gradivus was almost certainly a slice of Vesta, as the sensor package was now confirming. But Helmut was impressed by the range of colors the screen showed. Chondritic asteroids and meteoroids had struck Gradivus; their debris showed up in yellow. Stony meteorites produced orange craters and aureoles. Vesta material itself was reddish in the false color portrait; Gradivus was covered by a patchy regolith of smashed fragments of the stuff. But one crater surprised Helmut; not far from where they were landing there was a bluish patch. He pointed it to Charles, who was surprised.

“Huh. I haven’t seen that before.”

“What is it?”

“I don’t know; we’ll have to take a look. Purple often reflects calcium minerals in this particular display mode. This is close to that.”

“Anorthite?”

Charles considered. “No, I don’t think so. It doesn’t have enough calcium for that color.”

“Anorthite would be lunar crustal material?”

“Maybe. It’s the product of magmatic differentiation, and that has occurred in the belt, as Vesta herself demonstrates. We’ll see.”

Helmut nodded. Soon it was time to stow the instrument; they were too close to the surface to see much of the asteroid’s area anyway. So he sat back and waited for the landing.

It took a long time, and when it occurred it was barely noticeable, they landed so gently. Both shuttles touched down within a minute of each other. Then came an hour of shutting down systems, suiting up, and going outside one at a time in a prescribed order.

The EVA was broadcast back to Mars and Earth; Aurorae’s cafeteria was full for lunch at the time, and on all continents a few people tuned in. Helmut was the sixth and last person to exit the shuttles. Experience on Phobos taught Helmut to stick to his compressed gas propulsion system and not try to walk on Gradivus; its gravity was about a ten thousandth that of Earth and virtually unnoticeable. He jetted out about five meters from the shuttle and fired the jets on the top of his backpack gently so he would come down on a patch of regolith. He had long metal cleats on the bottoms of his boots and “ski poles” in both hands and anchored all four of them into the regolith immediately so that he could stop himself without any gas. He was pleased that he remembered how to stop and that he had not embarrassed himself.

“Mars-based exploration of the asteroids continues,” he said. He had to say something, even though no one paid attention to “first words” any more.

“That’s all of us,” said Neal. “Don’t forget your buddy system; it’s pretty easy to get out of sight of everyone and to lose track of where you are. Gradivus may be small, but it has twenty-eight square kilometers of surface, and even though you can’t get more than five kilometers from the shuttles, you might not find your way back for hours. When in doubt, jet 200 meters from the surface and look around, then jet back. Questions?”

No one said anything. “Okay, let’s go.” They all began to turn toward their predetermined destinations. Ernesto and Neal were heading for North Crater. Hutan and Charles were heading for a fissure east of North Crater which exposed considerable bedrock. Zach and Helmut were staying close to the shuttles so they could get inside to provide support if necessary.

Helmut reached down to pick up a few grains of regolith to examine them. The fragments were a mix; some were differentiated igneous rock as expected on a Vesta-class asteroid and some were fragmentary pieces of chondritic, stony, and even nickel-iron meteorites. Phobos was similar, except it had no Vesta-class material and a lot of dark, carbonaceous pieces. “Hey Zach, there’s a crater over there—” Helmut pointed, “—where the false color spectrometer showed material with unusual calcium concentrations. Shall we check it out?”

“Sure,” replied Zach.

Helmut looked around again. There was a boulder about eight meters in diameter that was being looked at by Hutan and Charles. It was his landmark. He took off and aimed himself to the right of the boulder and headed up about twenty meters so he could see around. That was the advantage of asteroid exploration; one could fly from place to place. He took his time and never went faster than a meter per second.

The little crater was about ten meters in diameter and he soon spotted it. He turned toward it and fired the jets again to coast over. He and Zach took two minutes to get there even though it was only a hundred meters away. As soon as they landed, they looked around to spot landmarks that would help them head back. Fortunately, the top of one of the shuttles was still visible.

“This is strange,” said Zach, picking up a big chunk. “Carbonate, sort of.”

“Not quite, though.” Helmut grabbed a small boulder very carefully and lifted it. The crystals were large and gray. Helmut turned on his helmet lamp to improve the light, and pushed a button to rotate a magnifying lens inside the helmet in front of his eye.

“It’s wollastonite!” he said, excitedly a moment later.

“Really? Zach looked closely with his magnifying lens. “You know, you may be right. It’s a mix, I think. Some of it looks like sandstone. Fairly uniform grain size. Definitely not a breccia. Smooth, rounded grains.”

“This is a planetary fragment; it has to be,” said Helmut. He switched to a stronger public frequency. “Hey Charles, the blue false-color crater is full of impact debris. It’s small grained, the grains are rounded, and the composition appears to be a silica sand-carbonate mix that has been converted to wollastonite.”

“Really? Hutan and I are on the way.” Charles sounded fascinated.

“What do you think it is? This could be a chunk of Earth.”

“Possible, but the wollastonite tells you it was in a hot environment, right? On Earth, it’d have to be a carbonate-rich sandstone affected by an intrusion. Venus is a more likely venue.”

“Venus; I hadn’t dare think it’d be from there.”

“He’s right,” said Zach. “It looks to me that the impactor was a couple hundred kilos, and there may still be a hundred kilos of stuff left on the ground here.”

“There will be fragments scattered all over the surface, too.”

“Yes. Helmut, they’ve recovered about one hundred kilos, total, from Venus, and maybe forty kilos more of tiny fragments from the moon. If this is Venus, we may double the total quantity known!”

“But from only one locality on the surface, and an unknown locality.”

“Even so, it’ll be useful for chemical analysis.”

They saw Charles and Hutan on their way. Helmut began to photograph every square centimeter to document the find. The crater was perhaps three meters deep; the impact had been fairly low velocity, for a shattered block still rested in the crater. He briefly imagined an asteroid punching through the atmosphere of Venus so fast that it created a corridor of vacuum for several seconds, and the explosion tossed surface material up fast enough to shoot through that corridor into space. Some of the ejecta entered orbits around the sun until they encountered another object: the moon, Earth, Mars, or in this case, Gradivus.

A minute later Charles and Hutan landed on the crater’s rim, sinking into the loose material until they came to a stop. Charles immediately scooped up some pieces and flipped his magnifying lens into place.

“Amazing,” he said. “I’m sure of it. Helmut, this is a piece of Venus. We’re flying past Mars on a chunk of Vesta, examining a chunk of Venus.”

“It’s a small inner solar system,” said Helmut.

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Will Elliott watched the Gradivus expedition from his work area at Cassini while he coordinated the recovery efforts. About the time the crew went back into their shuttles, he was pleased to see an email from Douglas Morgan pop into his in-box. Congratulations, Will. I’m glad to see the expedition was able to proceed without us. And who would have thought they’d immediately find a chunk of Venus! I hear the news received headline treatment on several international media outlets, and that’s impressive with all the news on Earth right now. It looks like Gradivus will prove to be a gamble that was worthwhile.

We’re recovering here only gradually. The Commission has power because of emergency generators; Houston has twenty percent of its power back on line and there are rolling blackouts. They could have one hundred percent of the power back on line in two more days, but the computer systems for managing the power are so badly damaged, they can’t; the estimate now is for fifty percent power within a week and one hundred percent in four to six weeks. The rest of the U.S. is pretty much in the same boat. This will knock five percent from the GDP this year, the experts say. The communications systems are at about ten percent capacity right now, so all we can do is email. The radio and television networks are back up, at least, but they’re covering the U.S. plans to invade Turanistan and little else. About fifty percent of the Commission’s employees are unavailable because they have to be home for various reasons; the kids aren’t back in school yet, air and rail transport is disrupted, many stores are closed, etc. Those who are working have to focus on rebuilding computers. As you can imagine, the necessary spare parts are unavailable except at fifty times their old price; functioning used computers have increased in value tenfold. So we won’t be able to provide full support to Mars for some time. I gather from your report that recovery there is going better than it is here, and we’re grateful for that.

This situation has effected our lobbying in Washington, too. As you can imagine, no one in the White House or State Department has the time or functioning equipment to return our calls, and even if they physically could, the war is distracting them. More seriously, the war has turned them away from international cooperation like Mars. It’ll be some months before we can build bridges with the new Administration, I’m afraid. At least they’re too distracted to pressure the current NASA administrator to step down, so we can be sure we can continue working with him for some time.

But keep in touch, and we’ll do what we can to help. Thank God the gold exports will be strong. The price of gold has skyrocketed to twenty million dollars a tonne and they say economic uncertainty will keep the price high for at least a year. That will help us a lot. Doug.

Will was relieved to hear from the Commissioner. He immediately wrote back and included a new report. Then he headed off to bed; it was late.

The next morning at dawn he boarded a sunwing bound for Aurorae. The sunwings were back in the air; only one had crashed as a result of the virus, and it had been a small, old, sunwing dedicated to cargo flights and transporting Prospectors. He flew in the remaining Sunwing-D, which had been strengthened structurally to handle stress better and had a more robust rocket system. Unfortunately, those two measures reduced the cargo by a third. Since he was the only additional mass on board, the mass of silane fuel was increased and the vehicle flew higher and faster than was otherwise possible. The sunwing touched down at Aurorae an hour before sunset there, fifteen hours after takeoff; a new speed record.

The next sol was Satursol, February 1^st, Marshall’s tenth birthday. Will woke up two hours before sunrise because of jet lag and couldn’t get back to sleep, so he made himself a cup of coffee—they had a microwave and ground coffee in the flat—and settled onto the couch to relax, watch t.v., and wake up. Marshall got up at dawn, excited about his birthday, and sat on the couch next to his dad and leaning on him.

“Dad, I was so afraid you’d miss my birthday,” Marshall said. “I thought you might get stranded in Cassini.”

“No, the damage to the computers wasn’t that severe. I was worried about all of you, especially when I heard environmental control was knocked out.”

“Oh, I didn’t worry about that too much; I figured the farm and the trees would keep the air in here breathable for a long time,” replied Marshall. He paused. “But I guess it was a little scary.”

“I’m glad you realized that. Yes, the biomes are pretty safe.”

“I worry about nanna.”

“And we haven’t heard anything yet, after three sols. I’m worried, too.”

“Maybe she should fly here, where she’d be safe,” suggested Marshall. “We don’t have to worry about winter here, after all. Except in Huron Biome, that is. And we won’t have terrorism and all that stuff.”

Will smiled. “It’s too bad it’d be so expensive for her to fly here.”

“Dad?” said Marshall. “You know, I’m not so worried about not being able to get some of the latest toys, now. I think maybe we might be protected by space. I always figured I’d go back to Earth someday, maybe for college, but maybe I should stay here.”

“Well, let’s wait and see. This is a pretty dangerous place to live, Marshall. We’ve now had two people killed in vehicle crashes, either rangers or sunwings. If we had a fire inside one of these biomes, the dome could burst and a dozen people could die in one minute. Madhu’s cancer might have been caused by Martian dust. Joseph Stroger died because we weren’t expecting the flu. So don’t think you’re safer here.”

“I know, but I think I’m safer here from people, dad! No one here has been murdered, mugged, robbed, raped, or blown up!”

“True, and I hope that doesn’t happen here for a long, long time. But remember when you hear about those things on Earth that they affect very, very few people. If you chose where you live and what neighborhoods you visit at night, your chance of having trouble is pretty small. And as we get more and more people here, we’ll start to have some of those problems.”

“Dad, do you and mom want to go back to Earth?”

Will looked at his son, trying to read his face for a clue for Marshall’s concern. “We plan to stay here at least until you and Lizzie are old enough to decide whether you want to go back. Maybe at some point when you finish high school, the four of us will sit down and talk about whether the whole family should go back or not. Or maybe you, or Lizzie, will decide you want to go back on your own. By then I think you’ll be able to fly there for school, then come back here later.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t go back without you and mom!”

Will smiled. “We’ll see; that’s still eight years away, and people can change a lot in eight years. So, do you want to go outside for a hike after your birthday party, or maybe tomorrow afternoon? We could go to the top of Boat Rock. I’ve been wanting to take you up there.”

“Oh, that’d be fun! With Sammie and his dad?”

Will nodded. “Sure. Lizzie and mom could come along, too; Lizzie is old enough now.”

“Can I see the golf course some time? I keep hearing about it, but I’d like to walk it.”

“That’s a good idea because it has a really good trail and it twists and turns around the area east and north of the Outpost, with some very good views of it. The Golf Club just developed the sixth hole very nicely, too. Okay, maybe we can do that instead of Boat Rock.”

“No, I want to do Boat Rock tomorrow, but maybe we can hike the golf course next weekend!”

“Okay. There’s some good geology along the trail, too, so we can do that.” Will had to smile. He loved to do things with Marshall, and at age ten, the boy could manage a space suit pretty well, though he had to have adult supervision when he went outside, and they didn’t let him outside more than three or four times a year. Maybe now that would change.

He tapped his son on the shoulder. “Let’s go to the cafeteria and get breakfast for everyone.”

“Okay.”

Will and Marshall rose. The boy carried Will’s empty coffee cup to the cafeteria. They returned a few minutes later with breakfast; by then, Ethel and Lizzie were up and ready to eat. After breakfast, Ethel and Lizzie went into the girl’s bedroom and came out a few minutes later with a birthday cake for Marshall. Ten candles burned on top; they had finally abolished the ban on birthday candles. They all sang happy birthday to him, which pleased Marshall immensely. It was the first of two parties, the bigger one at lunchtime being for his friends and their parents. Will went into his bedroom and brought out the presents and Marshall eagerly pulled them from the gift bags. He got some eighteen month old toys and clothing he hadn’t known that his parents had ordered on Columbus 7, and which had been in hiding for the entire time. They were relieved he was pleased by their guesses. They had just ordered some presents for his eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth birthdays, because Columbus 9 might not arrive in time for the latter. One was a rock hammer; Will suspected Marshall would want to do serious geology at some point in the next few years. Other presents would be software that could be imported between flights.

Marshall hurried off to show Sam the toy robot he had received. Ethel took the breakfast dishes back to the cafeteria while Will and Lizzie gathered together a huge load of laundry—two baskets, stacked one on top of the other—which Will hauled to the new laundry facility in Huron. He put the two baskets straight into the robotic washing system; after a long wait for the loads ahead of them, they would come out washed, pressed, and folded about 5 p.m. Every item was bar coded and Will could type instructions via his attaché indicating what needed a little sewing, or extra starch, or bleach. It was a much better system then relying on Father Greg to do it all.

He came home and glanced at his attaché He was surprised and relieved to see an email from his mother.

Will, I’m sorry it took so long to reach you. I’m fine, though the house has about $15,000 of damage from burst pipes, and the insurance company will probably go bankrupt before it can pay me. I’ve spent the last three days at the Stanford Bahá'í Center, which has been set up as an emergency shelter. I tried leaving you a voice mail on someone’s satellite phone, but the Commission’s voice mail system still isn’t functioning. So let me know if you get this. My email is now up again.

“It’s been really crazy, as I suppose you can imagine. Well, maybe you can’t imagine. We now have power three hours a day, except the Center now has an emergency generator, so it’s all right. There are serious shortages of gasoline and groceries because trucking and pipelines have been disrupted. There’s a dusk to dawn curfew everywhere. In New York City they’ve started shooting looters because it got so bad; some businesses have been destroyed forever. We’re safe in the Center, though, because someone who’s a security guard had some extra uniforms, the young men staying here rotate who wears them! It makes us look official and guarded very well. That’s worked, so far.

Paul got here from Wesleyan yesterday. He was safe on campus, but he was worried about me. It was a harrowing trip, with police roadblocks to pass through and a lot of suspicious questions. The campus will be closed at least another two weeks. We have a few ‘refugees’ from New York here; they plan to go back next week because by then there should be power six hours a day. I’m not sure when I’ll go home. They say the state of emergency will last at least another week. Power may not be back 24 hours a day for another month.

Molly forwarded to me all your messages to her. I’m relieved all of you are all right. I hope Marshall is having a happy birthday! Give him a kiss for me and wish him a happy birthday.

Looking forward to hearing from you.

Love,

Mom.

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