Yes, for some it would be insulting just because she was a woman. But the problem was more because of the kind of woman she was. After she had become famous, she spoke up for population control efforts in opposition to many of the religious leaders of Earth. She used a non-traditional feminist surname. She had posed for a magazine. I and many other NASA astronauts—especially the women—had publicly blasted her for that. In return, she had made comments about American prudery.
Was Ingrid Karinsdatter someone to dangle before forty men fifty million miles from Earth? Ten of my crew were from conservative Islamic countries. Now, in the Norwegians, I faced a culture whose ideals of womanhood were ski champions, marathon runners, Valkyrie warriors, prime ministers, or Viking queens with names like Aud the Deep Thinker. To that, add the crazy license with which all these modern European women display themselves now that the fear of AIDS has gone.
I stared, tight-lipped, at the large, but simple and spare living room behind Halvorsen, waiting for transmissions to go there and back. Finally he shrugged, almost as a Frenchman would.
“I recruited Per and Ingrid who were with me on the Amundsen Crater expedition. Their children are old enough to leave alone now and I am too old and too blind to do anything but think and talk. But I still do that not too bad, nei? Ja, I know how you talk of Ingrid. But that is your problem. As for mission control, this is it such as it is. I use my house computer and my videophone.”
So their standing army was this old half-blind man standing in front of me. Who did he think he was? Goddard? Korolev? Von Braun?
“Oslo University,” he continued, “is giving me time on their radio telescope and some volunteer help. That is all. We only have a two person expedition, assembled from standard modules. Over.”
I frowned. The Norwegians had bought their way into space with oil money and a cut-rate single-stage shuttle design that NASA had smothered to death. It had a payload of five tonnes to a five-hundred kilometer orbit at best. And they’d hardly changed a thing since their Moon escapade. There was no way they could reasonably hope to get a round trip out of that, I thought. They were planning on using us—they had to be—and that made me angry.
“This isn’t fair, Halvorsen. Our lives may be put at risk. Now will you tell Per Nordli to follow our lead; to do just what we say? So we can get him and his wife back safely? Over”
I waited. Halvorsen’s expression changed to ice when he got my transmission. “Nei! We plan that they get back by themselves! As for putting lives at risk, you do things so stupid and complex it is you that may all die. That is why I walked out of your meetings. Uf dah! Bureaucrats, empire builders, and egomaniacs. Bah!” Across six million kilometers and through two sets of communications electronics, this craggy gray old Viking speared me with the contempt in his nearly sightless eyes. “It is too late to be talking such nonsense. Halvorsen out!”
The image dissolved to a UN link operator who told me that Halvorsen had hung up, not waiting for my sign-off. In retrospect, I may have been too peremptory myself, but still, the insult stung.
I called a staff meeting to decide how to deal with the Norwegian expedition. It would take us four days to rendezvous with our Deimos supply depot, refuel, deploy our landers, and be ready to mount any kind of an operation, we reasoned. The Norwegians would most likely have trouble during aerobraking, so it would be best if we were in place before they got there.
Nobody wanted to call it a race, but we examined our trajectory margins to see if we could get to Mars earlier. But the trajectory people told us the time to have done that was in low Earth orbit. Now, it would eat into our reaction mass budget more than mission rules would allow. The Norwegians, it seemed, would get to Mars orbit before us. Dead or alive, but first.
Not if I had my way. We had plenty of fuel margin—there ought to be some way of stealing a little of that to shave some days off our trajectory. There was a planned midcourse burn only forty hours away. If it was just a little bigger… I knew my way around mission planning bureaucracies—I called the man in charge of trajectory analysis and asked him if he could run some contingency cases that had looked good to us. Strictly hypothetical? I grinned at the planner and he grinned back. He wanted to win, too.
It looked good.
Two days later, I was smiling and it was Halvorsen who was angry.
“We plan so our ships will be out of your way. Now we all get there at once bam-bam and will all be so busy that no one will have time to help anyone! And you use up your fuel margin! Over!”
“You are mistaken in your exaggerations, Dr. Halvorsen,” I answered, calmly. Dr. Obote, our ground orbit analyst, also exaggerated when he’d called to upbraid me for my non-nomi-nal burn. But after a few Swahili expletives, he acquiesced to the fait accompli and participated in the “discretionary-modification-well-within-mission-parameters” official cover.
“My fuel margin,” I continued to Halvorsen, “is not used up and we will arrive in Mars orbit well ahead of you.
For which you should be profoundly thankful if we have to rescue your people. Now that possibility is an unplanned complexity and need for coordination. Over”
I relaxed and contemplated our trajectory display with a smile. The arrival time difference was up to five hours, now—in our favor.
Finally, Halvorsen frowned and opened his mouth. “We have sufficient redundancies and do not require or plan on your help. You have enough problems just executing all you have planned. I ask you now to forget we are there and concentrate on your task. Over.”
I prayed for equanimity in the face of such arrogance, and my prayer was answered—-with the Lord s help, I did not lose my temper, but instead answered in measured tones. “I’m verv sorry you feel that way. But we can’t let past disagreements stand in the way. When we … I mean, if it may be necessary for me to rescue your people, I will need your cooperation. Over.”
I waited a minute to hear him snort and shout, “Halvorsen out!” Touchy hombre, Halvorsen.
We watched the Norwegians on our telescopes as it approached time for their course correction. Our ships were getting closer every day, on paths that would arrive at Mars separated only by hours, and within the last week had gotten close enough so that our twenty-meter baseline synthetic-aperture optics could see the details of their ship’s construction. Each Norwegian ship appeared to be a bundle of four squat cylinders sitting on their ends in a saucer-shaped heat shield. Range and apparent angle told me the cylinders were each about four meters tall and two meters wide. The cylinders were capped by transparent domes, through which we could occasionally make out one or both of the crew members. There were four holes in the heat shield, one under each cylinder, apparently for the rocket exhaust.
The ships were tied “nose”-to-“nose” by a tether almost half a kilometer long, rotating every fifty seconds; at high magnification, it was like watching the second hand of a clock move. We expected to see that clock stop and watch the Norwegians dock, untether, undock, do their burns, rendezvous, redock, re-tether and, in what should be one of the dicier maneuvers in astronautics, reestablish their tethered rotation. I looked at the clock—they were seriously behind schedule if they were going to meet their window. Had something gone wrong already?
Suddenly, one of the ships spouted fire for a couple of seconds. The acceleration was apparently much less than their centrifugal weight, because there was no sign of slack or vibration in the cable. Twenty-five seconds later the other ship also fired when its engines were pointed in the same direction as those of the first ship when it had fired. This went on for five cycles. Nothing wobbled, nothing broke. Mustaffa, as dumbfounded as I was, looked from the bridge video to me, and back again.
I shook my head. I had no idea of how complex their internal procedures and checks were, but the operation viewed from outside was simple to the point of elegance—yet our engineers had justified management s position of not trying spin gravity by citing the complexity and uncertainty of doing such maneuvers. It was something that had never been done before with a manned spacecraft.
Well, now it had—and that tight spot in my stomach that had materialized as soon as I heard of Halvorsen’s mission grew a little tighter. We were up against someone who did not live by the rules of managers, politicians, and tame engineers. He did not respect the zonas intangibles. He and his people could do things we could not. It wasn’t fair. I thought about Ingrid Karinsdatter. It was most definitely not fair.
Midway to Mars, I was forced to hold a disciplinary hearing. Planetologist Kadir Ibn Muhunnad caught Sajag Kedar, our biotechnician, examining the Norwegian ships at maximum magnification, something that would have attracted no adverse notice except for the data he saved.
I must explain. The Norwegian ships were still somewhat sunward of us and the Sun was in the plane of rotation of the tethered ships, plunging their domes into shadow for about ten seconds each revolution. During this time, glare vanished and one could see inside. The Norwegians seemed to use the dome for relaxation—as a Sun deck mostly—there were plants and acceleration couches, but almost no visible equipment.
Whether Dr. Karinsdatter was aware of our surveillance, or whether she would have dressed more modestly even if she had been aware of it, is a matter of conjecture. Our telescopes were larger than those the Norwegians carried and I doubted that either of them had thought that we could observe them; we must have been just four very bright stars from their point of view But Halvorsen, who sent them to plague us? He might have thought of it. Oh, he might have.
In one of Sajag’s five-second clips, Dr. Karinsdatter, alone on her couch, chanced to look through her bubble, across the megameter of space between us, through the optics and the electronics, from the view plate, and right into my eyes. It was obvious from what she was doing that she had no idea that anyone was looking back at her at such high resolution. Still, I felt taunted—and much more.
“In my country, she could be shot for this,” Kadir told me—as he viewed the video evidence just as compulsively as everyone else. “It is her responsibility not to be seen in such a way.”
Sajag was removed from the telescope schedule, but I am sure he was just the one who was careless enough to be caught. We all had access, and we all had times when we were the only ones awake on the ship. Several of us had valid reasons to be studying the Norwegian ships. We edited the logs after the hearing; common sense decrees that not everything be saved for posterity. Not only that, but we did not want to give Halvorsen the satisfaction of knowing what he’d done to us.
The Norwegians gradually passed below us and drew away. Their midcourse maneuver had put them slightly ahead for now, and my hopes for getting permission for an autonomous catch-up burn were about nil. But I was sure I could slip a few more meters per second into the next scheduled one.
Another month had passed. Mars became a small, reddish moon to our eyes, and in our telescope, we seemed to fly over its surface. The communications time lag was approaching its maximum of six and a half minutes. Soon Earth would pass sunward of us as we coasted uphill to our destination.
We watched each other, we and the Norwegians. Officially, we pretended they did not exist. Unofficially, forty men envied Per Nordli more and more, and praised our mission plan less and less. We had a few heated arguments, and a broken nose in the Leonov.
The Norwegians made no attempt to talk to us either. But time had not solved anything, and I had put off making my contingency plans too long. Our final midcourse maneuver was scheduled in two days and things would be too busy then, and too locked in concrete, to coordinate any trajectory changes with the Norwegians. I called Halvorsen.
With almost six minutes between sender and receiver, one doesn’t wait for greetings before proceeding to business. After my testy preliminaries, I asked, “Can you at least tell me what kind of parking orbit they are going to try to achieve? We may be able to match inclinations. Over.”
Hopefully time and a little conciliation would put the conversation on a professional basis. We needed to make plans and the communications round trip was eating up time.
His eyebrows went up and a hint of a smile crossed his face. “Commander Lopez, I provided all of this data to Dr. Worthing and your mission control two months ago. Per and Ingrid are not going into a parking orbit. They plan to proceed directly to the surface. Parking orbit is a backup. Over.”
“What?” With Halvorsen, I should not have made assumptions. He stared out of the screen at me as, somewhere deep inside me, a sense of doom started to form. I was dealing with a different kind of human being, a leader who dealt with the laws of nature directly, instead of through intermediaries. Everyone’s mission plans went to parking orbit—everyone’s except Halvorsen’s.
History assaulted my mind when I saw his craggy, ancient face. Some recent—Halvorsen’s own incredible lunar south pole mission twenty years ago. But in the mists there were Amundsen, Nansen, and, of course, Leif Eriksson. As to why Dr. Worthing had not told us? He presumably feared what I might do to make up the time. He feared right.
“Did you receive?” Halvorsen asked. “You are silent too long.”
I had forgotten to say “over” and wasted six minutes. I shrugged my shoulders, and struggled for internal peace. I was not an inexperienced astronaut; I led explorations of several major lunar features and was second in command on the mission to the asteroid Eros, the trial for this mission. I’d had all the resources of the United Nations behind me. There was no reason for me to be flustered. But I sat there in front of the screen pickup open-mouthed.
“Well,” he continued, “the whole thing I will run through while you figure out what you say. Ja, ten years ago I left the ISA Mars conference. We have already discussed why. Then I talked to our prime minister who nod-ded his head to some things and shook it to others. Our space program is a matter of national pride, ja, but it has to be a not-so-expensive program.
“So, officially, I had the go-ahead to do a small Moon base. The Italians have one, the Tysker, the Nederlanders, even the Svensker!” Halvorsen scowled at this, and it was my turn to smile. If you look at the Scandinavian peninsula, you see not golden fields of Nordic brotherhood, but a line of tall mountains down its middle.
“So our little single-stage-to-orbit Norgedraken flew ten missions and twice docked four payloads to big composite disks. Then we sent them both toward the Moon. You remember?”
Very well, I remembered. It had been a fiasco. Both their seven-million-kroner base modules failed to make nominal Lunar Orbit Insertion burns and had whipped by the Moon out into interplanetary space. It had been such a loss to the minuscule Norwegian space program that observers thought that it would pretty much end the thing. But their parliamentary committee had met in closed session and voted more of their oil money for a second attempt.