“THAT WAS A BIG-ASS DELTA VEE YOU GUYS JUST RIPPED OFF!” DOOB said when he heard Dinah’s voice on the other end of the link. “You deserve congratulations.”
Dinah’s response, after a few seconds’ delay, was guarded. “But not big-ass enough?”
It was strange hearing the voice of one you knew well modulated through this old-school audio tech. Like hearing Dinah doing a Buzz Aldrin impression at a party. The emotional nuance came through more clearly than the actual words.
“Konrad is still calculating your params,” Doob said, “but just on visual inspection we can see how much you slowed down. Fantastic.”
“Sounds like we’ll be needing another pass then,” she said. Meaning that they would have to wait for Ymir to loop once more around the Earth, and do another burn at her next perigee, in order to slow down enough to rendezvous with Izzy.
“This time you can work with a higher perigee,” he pointed out, “so you don’t have to fly that damn piece of ice through the pea soup again.”
“Flying this damn piece of ice kind of stresses me out,” Dinah allowed.
“The glass is half full, baby,” Doob said. “The glass is half full. You lit that candle. It worked. You bounced off the atmosphere. You’re a hell of a lot closer to us—Konrad is saying your apogee is definitely sublunar.” Meaning that Ymir would turn around and start falling back toward the Earth before reaching the orbit of the former moon. “This is huge,” he added. “It is going to change the picture politically.”
After a lengthy pause, Dinah asked, “Politically?” as if she couldn’t quite believe what she had heard.
“I’M AWARE OF THE FACT THAT IVY HAS TURNED A DEAF EAR TO ALL of your ideas,” Julia began, just as soon as Spencer had typed in the commands that disconnected Arklet 453 from the Situational Awareness Network. “I presume she also went out of her way to place obstacles in the path of your coming here for this meeting.”
The Martians—Dr. Katherine Quine, Ravi Kumar, and Li Jianyu—looked somewhat nonplussed. It was always difficult to travel between arklets. The waiting time for nonurgent Flivver trips was about two days, and emergencies could rearrange the queue at the last minute. As a member of the General Population, Dr. Quine had the most Olympian perspective on this—she was an urgent care doctor frequently called upon to make excursions to arklets. She was about ten years older than Kumar and Jianyu, who were Arkies chosen in the Casting of Lots from India and China respectively. Those two had ended up together in Arklet 303, which had turned out to be a hotbed of Martian agitation. It was part of a triad with a total population of eighteen, half of whom currently had the flu, and so Katherine Quine had had a legitimate excuse to go there. She’d made the most of the opportunity by scooping up Ravi and Jianyu and coming here with them. Of the people in this conversation, she was probably the least inclined to see dark deeds by Ivy in the slowness of inter-arklet transport. It was a different story with Ravi and with Jianyu, who, for a number of reasons, were receptive to Julia’s suggestions on that front. In another time and place, Dr. Quine might have quibbled. But time was short, and trying to raise Julia’s opinion of the Cloud Ark’s current management did not seem like an efficient way to use it. So she let it go. And by the time she had processed all of that, Julia had moved on anyway.
“Given that, I’m all the more appreciative that you made the arduous and risky journey to meet with me in person,” Julia said. “It is my firm conviction that, centuries from now, young Martians sitting in classrooms on the Red Planet will read in their history books—or whatever they have in place of books—about this meeting and what came of it.”
Ravi Kumar raised an index finger. “Instead of educating the young in classrooms,” he said, “why not do away altogether with the traditional structure of mass education and take a personalized, individualized approach? There’s no reason to repeat Earth’s mistakes on Mars.”
“I could not agree with you more,” Julia said, “and these sorts of fresh ideas only make me more eager to find a way of getting as many people there as soon as possible. How do we get started? What would be entailed in sending a forward advance party to Mars?”
For the second time in as many minutes, Dr. Quine looked a bit unsettled. She glanced around Arklet 453. This was the central, common-space arklet of the heptad that included numbers 174—the abode of Julia and Camila—and 215—that of Spencer Grindstaff. Or at least that was what it said on the official records. Some reshuffling had occurred. All the men and women who lived in those two arklets now seemed to conceive of themselves as members of J.B.F.’s personal staff. They had taken over 453 and turned it into a sort of West Wing.
Katherine Quine said, “Presuming we had authorization to send such a mission—”
“Let me just cut you off there, if you would indulge me, Dr. Quine. What you just raised is a matter of politics. I consider that to be my ‘superpower’ and I would like to place it at the disposal of you and the other members of the Martian Community—the ones you already know of, the ones who sympathize with you in secret, and others who may sign on once it becomes clear to them what a fundamentally sensible idea the Mars trip really is. So I would propose that we assume, for purposes of this little chat, that authorization is not a problem. I would like to see you three using your own ‘superpower’ of designing this mission in a way that makes sense without letting the political dimension interfere at all. Once we have designed a coherent plan, we can then move on to questions of implementation.”
“In a perfect scenario we would dump the rock and simply take everything, all at once,” Jianyu said. It was the first time he had spoken, but he seemed to have been emboldened by Julia’s talk of superpowers.
“There are powerful forces that would have to be convinced before such a thing could happen,” Julia said. “Let’s think in terms of an advance party: lean, efficient, smart, but big enough to get the job done. That means landing on Mars and reporting back to the remainder of the Cloud Ark.”
“We’ve been talking about such a mission. We think we could do it with a bolo consisting of a heptad and a triad,” Katherine said.
“Ten arklets,” Julia said. “That doesn’t seem all that many, does it?”
“During the initial delta vee,” Ravi Kumar said, “the arklets would be stacked. Once they were on course for Mars they would form a bolo, so that the members of the expedition could experience Earth-normal gravity during the six-month journey.”
Jianyu added, “Propulsion and other components could come from the MIV kit. Most of the design work has already been done for us.”
Katherine said, “Aerobraking would be needed at the end, to slow it down. Before that, the bolo could be reeled in, the arklets could restack into a unified ship, and there would be time to survey the surface from orbit and decide on a landing place.”
Julia nodded. “And if I may put a hard question to you all, what would be the survival time of this isolated colony, once it had landed? How long before it ran out of provisions?”
This caused the three Martians to clam up and look at one another.
“I only ask,” Julia said, “because politics—my department—once again rears its ugly head here. Once your heroics have been accomplished, the burden falls to me to seal the deal, as it were. The advance party lands and sends back its joyous message. A ticking-clock element enters the picture. Which I do not mean in a negative way—this can be a powerful incentive to mobilize people’s energies, as we saw in the case of the buildup to the Hard Rain. It is at that point when I can address the people of the Cloud Ark and say, ‘Here is the opportunity—will we seize it? Or will we shrink away from it and let these brave people slowly expire?’ That is a speech that I think I could deliver to great effect. I just need to have some sense of the time element.”