Robert Sawyer: Mikeys

Damn, but it stuck in Don Lawson’s craw—largely because Chuck Zakarian was right.

After all, Zakarian was slated for the big Mars surface mission to be launched from Earth next year. He never said it to Don’s face, but Don knew that Zakarian and the rest of NASA viewed him and Sasim as Mikeys—the derisive term for those, like Apollo 11’s command-module pilot Mike Collins, who got to go almost all the way to the target.

Yes, goddamned Zakarian would be remembered along with Armstrong, whom every educated person in the world could still name even today, seventy years after his historic small step. But who the hell remembered Collins, the guy who’d stayed in orbit around the Moon while Neil and Buzz had made history on the lunar surface?

Don realized the point couldn’t have been driven home more directly than by the view he was now looking at. He was floating in the control room of the Asaph Hall, the ship that had brought him and Sasim Remtulla to Martian space from Earth. If he looked left, Don saw Mars, giant, red, beckoning. And if he looked right, he saw—

They called it the Spud. The Spud, for Christ’s sake!

Looking right, he saw Deimos, the outer of Mars’ two tiny moons, a misshapen hunk of dark, dark rock. How Don wanted to go to Mars, to stand on its sandy surface, to see up close its great valleys and volcanoes! But no. As Don’s Cockney granddad used to say whenever they passed a fancy house or an expensive car, “Not for the likes of us.”

Mars was for Chuck Zakarian and company. The A-team.

Don and Sasim were the B-team, the also-rans. Oh, sure, they had now arrived at the vicinity of Mars long before anyone else. And Don supposed there would be some cachet in being the first person since Apollo 17 left the Moon in 1972 to set foot on another world—even if that world was just a 15-kilometer-long hunk of rock.

Why build a space station from scratch to orbit Mars, the NASA mission planners had said? Why not simply plant the spaceship you had used to get there on Deimos? For one thing, you’d have the advantage of a little gravity—granted, only 0.0004 of Earth’s, but still sufficient to keep things from floating away on their own.

And for another, you could mine Deimos for supplies. Like Mars’ other moon Phobos, Deimos was a captured asteroid—specifically, a carbonaceous chondrite, meaning its stony mass contained claylike hydrous silicates from which water could be extracted.

More than that, though, Deimos’ density was so low that it had long been known that it couldn’t be solid rock; much water ice was mixed into its structure.

Deimos and Phobos were both tidally locked, like Earth’s moon, with the same side always facing the planet they orbited. But Phobos was just too damn close—a scant 2.8 planetary radii from Mars’ center, meaning it was really only good for looking down on the planet’s equatorial regions. Deimos, on the other hand, orbited at seven planetary radii, affording an excellent view of most of Mars’ surface. In Deimos, Mother Nature had provided a perfect infrastructure for a space station to study Mars. The two Mikeys would use it to determine the exact landing spot and the itinerary of surface features Zakarian’s crew would eventually visit.

“Ready?” said Don, taking his gaze away from the control-room window, from glorious Mars and drab Deimos.

Sasim gave him the traditional thumbs-up. “Ready.”

“All right,” said Don. “It’s time to crash.”

Deimos’ mean orbital velocity was a languorous 1.36 kilometers per second. Don and Sasim matched the Asaph Hall’s speed with that of the tiny moon and nudged their spaceship against it. A cloud of dust went up. Phobos had a reasonably dust-free surface, since ejecta thrown up from it was normally captured by Mars. But more distant Deimos still had lots of dust filling in its craters; whatever was blown off by impacts remained near it, eventually sifting down to blanket the surface. Indeed, although Deimos probably had a similar number of craters to Phobos, which sported dozens, only two on the outer moon were large and distinct enough to merit official International Astronomical Union names: Voltaire and Swift.

The Asaph Hall settled without so much as a bang—but it wasn’t a landing, not according to the mission planners. No, the ship had docked with Deimos: the artificial part of the space station rendezvousing with the natural part.

Apollo flights had been famous for discarding three stages before the tiny CSM/LM combo reached the Moon. But Asaph Hall, like the Percival Lowell that would follow with Zakarian’s crew, had retained one of its empty fuel tanks. Each mission would convert its spent cylinder into a habitat module: the Hall docked with Deimos in orbit about Mars; the Lowell down where the action was, on the Martian surface. There was good precedent, after all. The first space station to orbit Earth, Skylab, had been made out of an empty Saturn S-IVb booster. And, of course, Skylab had been crewed by the Mikeys of their day, Apollo pass-overs who were not quite good enough to go to the Moon.

“Mission Control,” said Don, “we have completed docking with Deimos.”

When Armstrong had said, “Tranquillity Base here, the Eagle has landed,” Houston had immediately replied, “Roger, Tranquillity, we copy you on the ground. We’ve got a bunch of guys here about to turn blue—we’re breathing again. Thanks a lot.”

But currently, Mars was 77,000,000 kilometers from Earth. That meant it would take four minutes and twenty seconds for Don’s words to reach Mission Control, and another four minutes and twenty seconds for whatever reply they might send to start arriving here. He doubted Houston would say anything as emotional as the words beamed back to Tranquillity Base; Don would be happy if they just didn’t make a crack about Mikeys.

Tranquillity Base. That had been such a cool name. This place needed a good name, too.

Sasim had evidently been thinking the same thing. “I’m not a fan of ‘Mars Landing Precursor Observation Station,’” he said, turning to Don, quoting the official title.

“Maybe we should call it Deimos Station,” said Don.

But Sas shook his head. “Mir is Russian for ‘peace’—that was a good name for a space station. But Deimos is Greek for ‘terror.’ Not quite correct in these difficult times.”

“We’ll come up with something,” Don said.

After the mandatory sleep period, Don and Sasim were ready to venture out onto the surface of Deimos. Although nobody would likely ever quote them back, Don had thought long and hard about what his first words would be when he stepped onto the Martian moon. “We come to the vicinity of the God of War,” he said, “in godly peace and friendship.”

Sasim followed him out, but evidently felt no one would care what the second person on Deimos had to say for posterity. He simply launched into his report. “The surface, as expected, is covered with dust and regolith…”

Once Sasim was finished, Don looked at him through their polarized faceplates. A big grin broke out on Don’s face. He used his chin to tap the control that cut the broadcast back to Earth, while leaving the channel to Sasim open. “All right,” he said. “Enough of the formalities. Here’s one thing we can do that Zakarian will never be able to.”

Don flexed his knees, crouched down, then pushed off the surface, straightening his legs as he did so, and—

Clark Kent had nothing on him!

Up, up, and away!

Higher and higher.

Further and farther.

Closer and closer to Mars itself.

Don looked down. Sasim had dwindled to the size of the proverbial ant, his olive-green space suit just a mote against the dark gray surface of Deimos.