Arthur Clarke - Sunstorm

And were you really going to bust your balls to save the whole world? Including the Chinese who were refusing to take part, and the Africans who, recovering from the disasters of the twentieth century, were becoming newly resurgent? Couldn’t you just save America, Europe? The military chiefs had even started to develop scenarios for what might follow the sunstorm, when Eurasia and America, if they were the only industrial powers left standing, began to move out from their fortresses to “aid” the remnants of a shattered world. It really would be a new world order, Miriam was earnestly advised, a restructuring of geopolitical power that might last a thousand years …

It had taken some deep conversations with Siobhan McGorran before Miriam had been able to wrap her own limited politician’s imagination around the magnitude of the problem. The sunstorm wasn’t another June 9; it wasn’t Krakatoa or Pompeii; it wasn’t a plague or a flood. And you just couldn’t see this as an opportunity to seek petty advantage. The extinction of humankind, indeed of all life on Earth, was possible. This really was a case of all or nothing—a message Miriam had, at last, managed to batter into the heads of the rest of the world’s decision makers.

President Alvarez spoke on, calmly.

It had to be Alvarez up there on the world’s screens, of course. It had been Miriam who had so far led the political effort behind the shield project. It was she who had firmed up a solid industrial and financial base for the project, she who had gathered together the political will in her own fractious Eurasian Union and beyond to make this unlikely project happen—and she who had used up a good deal of her own political credit in the process. But by common consent, in situations like this it had to be the President of the United States who had to give the world the bad news, and the good, as it had been for generations.

“Alvarez is doing a good job,” Miriam said. “We’re lucky we got somebody like her in the hot seat at the right time.”

Nicolaus snorted. “She’s the best actor in the White House since Reagan, that’s all.”

“Oh, she’s more than that. But she might raise false hopes. Whatever we do,” she said grimly, “people are going to die.”

“But far fewer than might otherwise,” Nicolaus said. “And whatever we do, don’t expect medals. Remember, this is engineering, not magic; no matter how well this works, people are sure to die, in great numbers. And in hindsight people will blame us. We will be called the worst mass murderers in history. That is certainly the Polish way!” He grinned with an odd sort of cheerful gloominess.

“You’re too cynical sometimes, Nicolaus.” But her mood was mellow, softened by the whiskey. She sipped it sparingly, letting Alvarez’s warm voice wash over her.

“The shield will be immense in size. But most of it will be made of a vanishingly thin film, and so its mass will be kept to the minimum. The bulk of its substance will be launched from the Moon, where the lower gravity allows space launches many times easier than from the Earth. The “smart” components that will be required to control the shield will be manufactured on Earth, where the most sophisticated manufacturing processes are available.

“All our resources must be dedicated to this project, and other dreams put on hold, for now. That is why I have decided to recall the Aurora 2, the second of our Mars spacecraft, already bound for the red planet. It will serve as our work shed, if you will.”

Born on ripples of electromagnetism, the President’s words washed past the Moon and, some minutes later, reached Mars.

To Helena Umfraville, the voice in her helmet speakers was tinny. But it was her choice to hear Alvarez like this. To watch the flyby of Aurora 2 she had decided to go EVA, to be immersed in Martian nature. Even a president’s speech couldn’t compete with that.

So she had clambered into her EVA suit. It was an “isolation suit” that you left docked to a hatch of your rover or your hab, and then crawled in through the back, so that you never came into contact with its outer surface—and Mars, with its putative native ecology, was never touched by the oily, watery, bug-ridden mass that was you. And now she stood beside her rover, with her feet planted squarely in crimson dirt, as close to Mars as she was allowed to get.

Around her a rock-strewn plain stretched away, unmarked by humanity save for her own tire tracks. The ground was pinkish brown, and the sky was a yellowy butterscotch color that gathered to orange around the shrunken disk of the sun, almost like an Earth sunrise. The rocks on the ground, scattered at random by some long-gone impact, had been in place so long that they had been polished smooth by windborne dust. This was an old, silent world, like a museum of rocks and dust. But there was weather here, sometimes surprisingly violent when that thin air stirred itself.

And on the horizon she could make out an outcrop of layered rock. It was sedimentary, just like a sandstone bed on Earth—and just like terrestrial sandstone it had been laid down in water. You could search the dry Moon from pole to pole and not find one formation like that unspectacular outcropping. This was Mars: the thought still thrilled her.

But Helena was stranded here.

Of course the Aurora 1 astronauts had known basically what the President was going to say long before she had opened her mouth. Mission control at Houston had broken the news of Aurora 2 ’s wave-off gently and carefully, well in advance.

Aurora 2 was actually the Mars expedition’s third ship. The first, labeled Aurora Zero, had delivered an unmanned factory to the surface of Mars, which had patiently labored to turn Martian dirt and air into methane and oxygen, the fuel that would send home the human crews that followed. Then Aurora 1 had made the mighty journey, powered by thermal nuclear rockets and carrying six crew. Footprints and flags had come at last to Mars.

The plan had been that once Aurora 2 arrived the first crew would head back to Earth, leaving the bigger second team to expand on what they had already built—an embryonic settlement that marked, everybody had hoped, the start of the continuous human habitation of Mars. The tiny beachhead had already been christened, a bit grandiosely, Port Lowell.

Now that wasn’t going to happen. After two years the first crew remained stuck here—and the word was, because of the priority of the shield work, there wasn’t likely to be a retrieval mission until after sunstorm day itself, more than four years into the future.

The crew understood the need to stay, for they were all intensely aware of the threat posed by the sun. Despite its greater distance, the sun was actually a much more baleful presence here on Mars than on Earth. The home world’s thick atmosphere offered you the equivalent shielding of meters of aluminum; Mars’s thin air gave you only centimeters—no better than if you were riding a tin-can spacecraft in interplanetary space. The neighborhood magnetosphere was no use either. Mars was still and cold, frozen deep inside, and its magnetic field wasn’t a global, dynamic structure like Earth’s, but a relic of arcs and patches. On Mars, the solar climatologists liked to say, the sun engaged directly with the ground, and you had to hide from flares that wouldn’t even be noticed on Earth. So they understood, but that didn’t make the prospect any warmer.

The mood was hard to lift. They were tired, all the time: a sol, Mars’s day, was half an hour longer than Earth’s, just too long for the human circadian system to cope with. In all their simulations, nobody had anticipated that one of the most serious problems on Mars would turn out to be a kind of jet-lag. And now they were stranded. Thanks to Aurora Zero there was no fear of running out of resources. They could tough it out here; Mars would feed them. Still, most of the crew had been bereft at being cut off from their families and homes for so long.