The Martian (38 page)

Then, they had me run a full diagnostic on the MAV. That's in much better shape. Everything's sleek and pristine and perfectly functional. I'd almost forgotten what new hardware even looks like.

Pity I'm going to tear it apart.

“You killed Watney,” Lewis said.

“Yeah,” Martinez said, scowling at his monitor. The words “Collision with Terrain” blinked accusingly.

“I pulled a nasty trick on him,” Johanssen said. “I gave him a malfunctioning altitude readout and made engine 3 cut out too early. It's a deadly combination.”

“Shouldn't have been a mission failure,” Martinez said. “I should have noticed the readout was wrong. It was way off.”

“Don't sweat it,” Lewis said. “That's why we drill. You've still got three weeks to get it right.”

“Will do,” Martinez said.

“We only got a week of remote launch training,” Johanssen said. “It was only supposed to happen if we scrubbed before landing. We'd launch the MAV to have it act as a satellite. It was a cut-your-losses scenario.”

“It's mission-critical now,” Lewis said. “So get it right.”

“Aye, Commander.” Martinez said.

“Resetting the Sim,” Johanssen said. “Anything specific you want to try?”

“Surprise me,” Martinez said.

Leaving the control room, Lewis made her way to the reactor. Climbing “up” the ladder toward the center of the ship, the centripetal force on her diminished to nearly zero as she reached the core. Vogel looked up from a computer console. “Commander?”

“How are the engines?” She asked, grabbing a wall-mounted handle to stay attached to the slowly turning room.

“All working within tolerance,” Vogel said. “I am now doing a diagnostic on the reactor. I am thinking that Johanssen is busy with the launching training. So perhaps I do this diagnostic for her.”

“Good idea,” Lewis said. “And how's our course?”

“All is well,” Vogel said. “No adjustments necessary. We are still on track to planned trajectory within 4 meters.”

“Keep me posted if anything changes.”

“Ja, Commander.”

Floating to the other side of the core, Lewis took the other ladder out, again gaining gravity as she went “down”. She made her way to the Airlock 2 ready room.

Beck held a coil of metal wire in one hand and a pair of work gloves in the other. “Heya, Commander. What's up?”

“I'd like to know your plan for recovering Mark.”

“Easy enough if the intercept is good,” Beck said. “I just finished attaching all the tethers we have into one long line. It's 214 meters long. I'll have the MMU pack on, so moving around will be easy. I can get going up to around 10 meters per second safely. Any more and I risk breaking the tether if I can't stop in time.”

“How fast a relative velocity can you handle, you think?”

“You mean once I get to Mark? I can grab the MAV easily at 5 meters per second. 10 meters per second is kind of like jumping on to a moving train. Anything more than that and I might miss.”

“So, including the MMU safe speed, we need to get within 20 meters per second of his velocity.”

“And the intercept has to be within 214 meters,” Beck said. “Pretty narrow margin of error.”

“We've got a lot of leeway,” Lewis said. “The launch will be 52 minutes before the intercept and it takes 12 minutes. As soon as Mark's S2 engine cuts out we'll know our intercept point and velocity. If we don't like it, we'll have 40 minutes to correct. Our engine's 2 millimeters per second may not seem like much, but in 40 minutes it can move us up to 5.7 kilometers.”

“Good,” Beck said. “And 214 meters isn't a hard limit, per se.”

“Yes it is,” Lewis corrected.

“Nah,” Beck said. “I know I'm not supposed to go untethered, but without my leash I could get way out there-”

“Not an option.” Lewis said.

“But we could double or even triple our safe intercept range-”

“We're done talking about this.” Lewis said sternly.

“Aye, Commander.”

LOG ENTRY: SOL 526

There aren't many people who can say they've vandalized a three billion dollar spacecraft. But I'm one of them.

I've been pulling critical hardware out of the MAV left and right. It's nice to know that my launch to orbit won't have any pesky back-up systems weighing me down.

First thing I did was remove the small stuff. Then came the things I could disassemble. Like the crew seats, several of the back-up systems, and the control panels.

I'm not improvising anything. I'm following a script sent by NASA, which was set up to make things as easy as possible. Sometimes I miss the days when I made all the decisions myself. Then I shake it off and remember I'm infinitely better with a bunch of geniuses deciding what I do than making shit up as I go along.

Periodically, I suit up, crawl into the airlock with as much junk as I can fit, and dump it outside. The area around the MAV looks like the set of Sanford and Son.

I learned about Sanford and Son from Lewis's collection. Seriously, that woman needs to see someone about her 70's problem.

LOG ENTRY: SOL 529

I'm turning my pee in to rocket fuel. It's easier than you'd think.

Urine is mostly water. Separating hydrogen and oxygen only requires a couple of electrodes and some current. The problem is collecting the hydrogen. I don't have any equipment for pulling hydrogen out of the air. The Atmospheric Regulator doesn't even know how. The last time I had to get hydrogen out of the air (back when I turned the Hab in to a bomb) I burned it to turn it in to water. Obviously that would be counter-productive.

But NASA thought everything through and gave me a process. First, I disconnected the rover and trailer from each other. Then, while wearing my EVA suit, I depressurized the trailer and back-filled it with pure oxygen at one fourth of an atmosphere. Then I opened a plastic box full of urine and put a couple of electrodes in. That's why I needed the atmosphere. Without it, the urine would just boil immediately and I'd be hanging around in an piss-based atmosphere.

The electrolysis separated the hydrogen and oxygen from each other. Over time, it reduced the urine to a really gross sludge as it pulled the water out. Now the trailer was full of even more oxygen and also hydrogen. Pretty dangerous, actually.

Then I fired up the Atmospheric Regulator. It doesn't even recognize hydrogen, but it knows how to yank oxygen out of the air. I broke all the safeties and set it to pull 100% of the oxygen out. After it was done, all that was left was hydrogen. That's why I started out with an atmosphere of pure oxygen. So the regulator could separate it later.

Then I opened the inner airlock door and had it evacuate the trailer. It pumped all the air in to the airlock's holding tank. And there you have it, a tank of pure hydrogen.

The final step was to take the airlock's holding tank to the MAV and transfer the contents to the MAV's hydrogen tanks. I've said this many times before but: Hurray for standardized valve systems!

Once I fed it the hydrogen, I fired up the fuel plant and it got to work making the additional fuel I'd need.

I'll need to go through this process several more times as the launch date approaches. I could have done this all at once, but NASA doesn't want me to run low on water until we're close to launch. They'd rather I electrolyze urine over time because I've already “used” that water.

If I survive this, I'll tell people I pissed my way in to orbit.

[19:22]JOHANSSEN: Hello, Mark.

[19:23]MAV: Johanssen!? Holy crap! They finally letting you talk to me directly?

[19:24]JOHANSSEN: Yes, NASA gave the OK for direct communication an hour ago. We're only 35 light-seconds apart, so we can talk in near-realtime. I just set up the system and I'm testing it out.

[19:24]MAV: What took them so long to let us talk?

[19:25]JOHANSSEN: The psych team was worried about personality conflicts.

[19:25]MAV: What? Just cause you guys abandoned me on a godforsaken planet with no chance of survival?

[19:26]JOHANSSEN: Funny. Don't make that kind of joke with Lewis.

[19:27]MAV: Roger. So uh... thanks for coming back to get me.

[19:27]JOHANSSEN: It's the least we could do. How is the MAV retrofit going?

[19:28]MAV: So far, so good. NASA put a lot of thought into the procedures. They work. That's not to say they're easy. I spent the last 3 days removing Hull Panel 19 and the front window. Even in Mars-G they're heavy motherfuckers.

[19:29]JOHANSSEN: When we pick you up, I will make wild, passionate love to you. Prepare your body.

[19:29]JOHANSSEN: I didn't type that! That was Martinez! I stepped away from the console for like 10 seconds!

[19:29]MAV: I've really missed you guys.

LOG ENTRY: SOL 543

I'm... done?

I think I'm done.

I did everything on the list. The MAV is ready to fly. And in 6 sols, that's just what it'll do. I hope.

It might not launch at all. I did remove an engine, after all. I could have fucked up all sorts of things during that process. And there's no way to test the ascent stage. Once you light it, it's lit.

Everything else, however, will go through tests from now until launch. Some done by me, some done remotely by NASA. They're not telling me the failure odds, but I'm guessing they're the highest in history. Yuri Gagarin had a much more reliable and safe ship than I do.

And Soviet ships were fucking deathtraps.

“All right,” Lewis said, “tomorrow's the big day.”

The crew floated in the Rec. They had halted the rotation of the ship in preparation for the upcoming operation.

“I'm ready,” Martinez said. “Johanssen threw everything she could at me. I got all scenarios to orbit.”

“Everything other than catastrophic failures,” Johanssen corrected.

“Well yeah,” Martinez said. “Kind of pointless to simulate an ascent explosion. Nothing we can do.”

“Vogel,” Lewis said, “How's our course.”

“It is perfect,” Vogel said. “We are within one meter of projected path and two centimeters per second of projected velocity.”

“Good,” she said. “Beck, how about you?”

“Everything's all set up, Commander,” Beck said. “I linked all the tethers I could find and spooled them up in Airlock 2. My suit and MMU are prepped and ready.”

“Ok,” Lewis said. “The battle plan is pretty obvious. Martinez will fly the MAV, Johanssen will sysop the ascent. Beck and Vogel, I want you in Airlock 2 with the outer door open before the MAV even launches. You'll have to wait 52 minutes, but I don't want to risk any technical glitches with the airlock or your suits. Once we reach intercept, it'll be Beck's job to get Watney.”

“He might be in bad shape when I get him,” Beck said. “The stripped-down MAV will get up to 12 g's during the launch. He could be unconscious and may even have internal bleeding.”

“Just as well you're our doctor,” Lewis said. “Vogel, if all goes according to plan, you're pulling Beck and Watney back aboard with the tether. If things go wrong, you're Beck's backup.”

“Ja,” Vogel said.

“I wish there was more we could do right now,” Lewis said. “But all we have left is the wait. Your work schedules are cleared. All scientific experiments are suspended. Sleep if you can, run diagnostics on your equipment if you can't.”

“We'll get him, Commander,” Martinez said. “24 hours from now, Mark Watney will be right here in this room.”

“Let's hope so, Major.” Lewis said. “Dismissed.”

“Final checks for this shift are complete,” Mitch said in to his headset. “Timekeeper.”

“Go, flight,” said the Timekeeper.

“Time until MAV launch?”

“16 hours, 9 minutes, 40 seconds... mark.”

“Copy that. All stations: Flight Director shift change.” He took his headset off and rubbed his eyes.

Brendan Hutch took the headset from him and put it on. “All stations, Flight Director is now Brendan Hutch.”

“Call me if anything happens,” Mitch said. “If not, I'll see you tomorrow.”

“Get some sleep, boss,” Brendan said.

Venkat watched from the observation booth. “Why ask the Timekeeper?” he mumbled. “It's on the huge mission clock in the center screen.”

“He's nervous,” Annie said. “You don't often see it, but that's what Mitch Henderson looks like when he's nervous. He double and triple checks everything.”

“Fair enough,” Venkat said.

“They're camping out on the lawn, by the way,” Annie said. “Reporters from all over the world. Our press rooms just don't have enough space.”

“The media loves a drama,” he sighed. “It'll be over tomorrow, one way or another.”

“What's our role in all this?” Annie said. “If something goes wrong, what can Mission Control do?”

“Nothing,” Venkat said. “Not a damned thing.”

“Nothing?”

“It's all happening 12 light-minutes away. That means it takes 24 minutes for them to get the answer to any question they ask. The whole launch is 12 minutes long. They're on their own.”

“Oh,” Annie said. “So we're just observers in all this?”

“Yes,” Venkat said. “Sucks, doesn't it?”

LOG ENTRY: SOL 549

I'd be lying if I said I wasn't shitting myself. In 4 hours, I'm going to ride a giant explosion into orbit. This is something I've done a few times before, but never with a jury-rigged mess like this.

Right now, I'm sitting in the MAV. I'm suited up because there's a big hole in the front of the ship where the window and part of the hull used to be. I'm “awaiting launch instructions.” Really, I'm just awaiting launch. I don't have any part in this. I'm just going to sit in the acceleration couch and hope for the best.

Last night, I ate my final meal pack. It's the first good meal I've had in weeks. I'm leaving 41 potatoes behind. That's how close I came to starvation.

I carefully collected samples from my entire journey. But I can't bring any of them with me. So I put them in a container a few hundred meters from here. Maybe some day they'll send a probe to collect them. May as well make them easy to pick up.