Red Thunder

Our radar equipment had been scavenged from an Air Force airplane graveyard, from the nose of an old fighter plane. It was the best we could do.

It seemed to be functioning well as we descended, the numbers flickering down rapidly on my screen. Ten miles. Nine miles. Eight miles. More and more detail appearing on the screen. I made myself relax, breathing steadily. Not for the first time on this trip, I wondered if I was really cut out to be a spaceman. My stomach was protesting all the changes in gravity as Travis nursed the big, awkward contraption down to her destiny on the Red Planet.

Three miles. Two miles.

The terrain undulated gently in a washboard pattern created by the dust storms that periodically swept Mars from pole to pole, and could last months. If one had been happening when we arrived we would have been out of luck, orbiting for no more than a week before we’d be forced to go home. But the air was clear as glass.

One mile. Half a mile.

“There they are!” Kelly shouted. I followed her pointing finger to a screen showing two regular shapes in the sea of shallow craters and rocks of every size.

“I see them,” Travis said in our headphones. “Please don’t holler so loud.”

“Sorry,” Kelly said.

One thousand feet. Five hundred feet. Travis meant to land us someplace where the Chinese might not spot us on the way down. It wasn’t critical that we not be seen, but it would help. The Chinese were following the pattern of the Russians during the Soviet Union days, landing completely on automatic, just like the pathfinder ships. Communists apparently just hated to relinquish any control they didn’t have to, so Soviet and now Chinese cosmonauts had to be content to let machines handle chores that our own “Right Stuff” astronauts would have claimed as their own.

[334] “One hundred feet,” Travis called out. “Picking up some dust. Fifty feet. Thirty feet. Fifty feet to starboard. Still thirty feet elevation.” There had been a big rock at the spot Travis had been about to land on. He moved over, then again. Twenty feet. Ten feet.

“I have a touchdown signal on strut two, Captain,” Dak said. Then, quickly, “Touchdown on strut one… and strut three.”

“Cabin listing less than two degrees,” I called out.

“Air systems four by four,” Alicia shouted.

“Cutting power,” Travis said, and the roar of the engines-not nearly so loud in the thin atmosphere of Mars-tapered off and died. I kept my eyes glued to the tilt-meter, which settled another degree, then half of a degree. If tilt exceeded five degrees I was to recommend another liftoff and touchdown… something Travis could of course see and do from his own instruments. But on a ship you back everything up.

The meter stabilized.

“We’re down, guys and gals,” Travis shouted from above.

Somebody should have thought to bring some ticker tape and confetti. We made up for the lack by cheering our lungs out.

We had made it. We were on Mars.

FIRST WE ALL had to crowd into the cockpit, wearing our bomber jackets and big, goofy grins. Kelly the shutterbug took pictures of us. The view was stu

The external thermometer was reading minus eight degrees, Fahrenheit.

“Time to suit up, don’t you think?” Travis said. He got no argument. We all trooped down to the crossroads deck and then down into the suit room.

[335] I don’t know if Dak and Kelly and Alicia were holding their breaths, as I was. We’d never discussed this part of the journey.

Who gets to be first? Who gets the headline in the history books, and who ends up in the fine print? Travis was the captain, so didn’t he have the right to be first? But, being the captain, didn’t he have an obligation to stay with his ship? And if he did, who would tell him? I wasn’t eager to try.

“You kids get to be first,” Travis said, and smiled at the guilty looks on our faces. “Sure, I’ve thought about it. But, plain truth, none of this would have happened without you four. And Mars belongs to the young. And… well, hell! Get your suits on before I change my mind and beat y’all out the door!”

We didn’t need more prompting. We all set new records getting into the things. Then down into the lock, Travis sealing the hatch behind us. Final suit checks, buddying each other. Then cycle the lock, watch the pressure equalize with the breath of carbon dioxide gas outside, and open the outer lock door.

Dak deployed the ramp, made of metal mesh, impossible to slip on. We started down the ramp, suddenly shy about it.

We had talked about the famous “first words.” Everybody knows the pressure Neil Armstrong was under, how they had a camera set up just to capture that moment, that first step, and all America was asking, “What will his first words from the surface of the moon be?” Armstrong must have worried about it. And once there, he blew it, though he always maintained he really said, “One small step for a man…”

I had toyed with the idea of something like, “Holy crap! We’re on Mars.” But I knew I didn’t have the nerve for that, and it would have stunk to high heaven, anyway. But, gosh darn it… I don’t think any of us were up to saying something like, “What hath God wrought?”

So I had an idea, and while we were still standing on the ramp I told the others about it. It was agreed to with no objections. We all went to the foot of the ramp.

“On my signal, kick off with the left foot,” I said.

“Roger.”

“Will do.”

[336] “Weeee’re …” and we all stepped off.

“… off to see the Wizard! …” We skipped ahead a few feet-skipping’s not easy in a space suit, even at one-third gee-and then nearly collapsed laughing.

I swore a mighty oath the Chinese were not going to steal this moment from us. The truth was going to get out, no matter what.

We were the first!

WE HAD TALKED about ru

We were all Americans, all proud to be Americans. But we were not, strictly speaking, an American mission. We had no co

The United Nations flag? But Travis didn’t have a very high opinion of the UN, and neither did Kelly. Dak and Alicia were like me, politically not very involved. We were willing to go along with Travis and Kelly.

“How about the state of Florida?” Dak had suggested, not very seriously.

“Looking at what Florida has done to the land,” Kelly said, “I wouldn’t trust those idiots in Tallahassee to run a mud puddle, much less a whole planet.”

“Besides, they wouldn’t be interested,” I pointed out. “There’s no beachfront land to screw up.”

Travis suggested they use the flag of his old alma mater, Tulane.

“Do they have a flag?” Alicia asked.

“I could find out. Better yet, how about the flag of MIT? That ought to get you guys a full scholarship, don’t you figure?”

In the end we decided to go flagless.

We set aside thirty minutes for just looking around, for getting used to the idea that we were really on Mars. “Gosh-wow!” time. Travis had put us down in a small valley. We walked up the gentle slope of the dune north of us and took a look around. Walking was easy in the.38 gravity, even with the pressurization that made space suits a bit hard to bend, even with the added weight of suit and backpack.

[337] I’d hoped the trio of volcanoes in a straight line, Arsia Mons, Pavonis Mons, and Ascraeus Mons, might be visible in the distance. The map scale had deceived me. We were over four hundred miles away from them, with Olympus Mons another five hundred beyond that. From the rise we saw more of the same terrain we had landed in. The spectacular views in these parts were down, not up, and we wouldn’t see it until we were standing on the edge of the Grand Canyon of Mars.