5.1
19 November
H.S.F. Concordia
Moored to Transit Point Station
Low Earth Orbit
“Explain it to me again,” Beseman was saying.
“I’ve explained it to you,” Miyuki said wearily. “Several times.”
“Refresh my memory. I’ve got an interview tomorrow, and I can’t seem to hold onto the details for very long.”
She sighed. They were in the octagonal crew quarters of the Mars ship, theoretically inspecting the functioning of all the recently rewired switches and touch screens. But in fact, they were at the end of a long day, and basically just hanging out in their respective quarters, with the fanfold doors open so they could see each other and talk. In zero gee it didn’t matter that the beds were padded, rather than simply flat polymer slabs, but it seemed like a luxury just the same, and Miyuki was tempted to crawl into her sleeping bag and call it a night. But as always, there was more to do.
Beseman, in the berth opposite Miyuki’s, was doing zero-gravity push-ups—something he did to “get his blood moving.” As physical exercise it wasn’t worth much, but when he was tired it seemed to help him think.
At issue: she had placed, with his consent, an electromagnet at the L1 position between Mars and the Sun. Not a gigantic electromagnet, just a surplus one from an unneeded fusion reactor, with a little ion engine to keep it in place. It wasn’t hard to do at all. Its purpose was the same as the tower magnets around a moonbase: to deflect radiation from the solar wind and keep it from striking the planet’s surface. In theory, the people of Antilympus would be partially protected from solar radiation even when they were away from the township. Even when they were on mountaintops far above the top of the sensible atmosphere! In theory, the atmosphere would be protected, too; that one little electromagnet could slow the rate at which solar protons knocked Martian gas particles off into the eternal void.
“You told me it would take millions of years to change the atmosphere,” Beseman said.
“I said it would immediately slow the rate of erosion,” she answered. “But it would take millions of years for lithosphere outgassing to make a noticeable pressure difference. That’s still true.”
“How could it still be true?”
“The surface pressure of the atmosphere hasn’t changed. Only the density.”
Tiredly, resignedly, she retrieved her rollup from a leg pocket and pulled up her viewgraphs on the subject. She held up the most critical diagram: the Before and After cutaway of the Martian atmosphere.
Beseman waved her away. He’d seen it already, many times, but stubbornly refused to understand it. Miyuki had seen this behavior from him before, but it never failed to surprise and disappoint. Though self-taught, Beseman knew an awful lot about space science, and about the particle entanglement that ran his quantum computing servers, and about hundreds of other things besides. But he was no physicist, or even really an engineer, and his brain could sometimes just run up against a barrier of incuriosity and proceed no further. At times this had actually served him well, because he never believed people when they said something was impossible, and he had pushed some amazing developments because of it. But at other times it was simply a liability, and he knew it.
Miyuki was, in theory, Beseman’s personal assistant, little more than a secretary. But his global marketplace company, Enterprise City, was too vast and complex for one person to run, and his side hustle—the Antilympus Project—was deeply technical in every possible way. And Miyuki was a physicist, and an experienced manager of large projects, so in practice, she actually had more power and access and public exposure than the company’s vice presidents. And more chance of actually going to Mars, which was why she’d taken the job.
“The size of the atmosphere has shrunk,” she said, pointing again to the diagram on her rollup. “We’re not sure why, but it has something to do with reduced excitation of atoms in the thermosphere. That’s here, between the stratosphere and the exosphere.”
“Mmph,” he said, grumpily continuing his push-ups.
“It’s difficult to tell without a probe drop, but it doesn’t appear the exosphere itself is affected.”
“But the lower layers are,” he said. “Right down to the ground.”
“Yes.”
The effect had unfolded over a period of months, and had nearly stabilized by the time anyone noticed, nine weeks ago. Now, they were all scrambling to measure and explain. The United Nations was up in arms about it, although Miyuki wasn’t sure who they thought had been harmed, or why it was any of their business.
“The air density is higher,” Beseman said.
“Right. Because you have the same number of gas molecules in a smaller volume.”
“It’s a lot higher.”
“Shockingly so,” she agreed. “Twenty-eight percent, as measured by the weather station at Antilympus. That’s twenty-eight percent of fuck-all, but still a surprising result.”
“And we did that. You did that.”
“The press thinks you did it,” she said, without envy. “So does the UN Security Council.”
“I’ll tell Mars Today it was your project.”
“There were dozens of people involved,” she said. “The magsat wasn’t my idea, and literally no one anticipated this result.”
“You made it happen,” he said.
And that much was true. He hadn’t really cared one way or the other, but with one hundred percent surplus equipment, the cost was so absurdly low that he’d had no reason to object. So she went ahead and did it.
“You sound tired,” he added.
“I am,” she agreed.
She and Beseman were more than work friends. Sharing close quarters for months at a time, they were as emotionally and logistically entangled as any two harried business partners ever were. If things went well for Miyuki then they might end up on Mars together, too. Fellow administrators of Antilympus Township, coworkers forevermore.
But she never forgot that he held the power to terminate her employment on a moment’s notice. He’d done it before; there’d been two assistants before Miyuki—both terminated in exactly that way. They’d been given generous severance packages and such, but when the rug was pulled out from under you like that, a bit of money didn’t really address the injury. Beseman could be that way: a charging bull, given to snap decisions. Not cruel, certainly, but sometimes heedless of the impact he had on people’s lives. Miyuki was far more qualified than either Linda Calhoun or Bob Fun had ever been, and she liked to think she had more “grit” as well. She was certainly a lot better at navigating Beseman’s moods. And yet, he could still fire her! He could!
This theoretically wouldn’t affect her standing in the Antilympus Project, because (again, theoretically) Beseman did not play favorites. However, she’d be out of his inner circle, and back on Earth with everyone else, and she knew damn well the magic aura that surrounded her would quickly dissipate, and her sponsors would drift away to other candidates. She had negotiated a golden-parachute deal in case that ever did happen, but again, could money address such an incalculable harm? She wanted Mars! She had always wanted Mars! Losing her berth on Concordia and at Antilympus was simply not an acceptable risk. So obviously she did not want to find out what would happen if Beseman lost faith in her, and so she made sure not to let that happen. This did not stop them from being friends, though, and good ones.
“I’m married,” Beseman would say, with grave annoyance, whenever some nosy blogger asked leering questions about their special relationship. “Doctor Miyuki Ishibashi is a colleague.”
It was the smart thing to say, for any number of reasons, but it also underscored the fact that he really did seem to love Carol quite a bit, and to miss her when they were apart. Which was often. That was an asymmetric relationship of a different sort; he’d married Carol while they were both still in college, before all the money happened. She owned half of everything—literally everything—and so if she ever got unhappy enough to divorce him, she had the power to bring down his whole empire, and to mothball the Antilympus Project forever. But he seemed to enjoy keeping her happy, and also keeping her as close as circumstances permitted.
He’d brought her up to the ship twice already—and himself down to the surface multiple times, at exorbitant cost each time—just so they could be together. Miyuki respected that, even if it meant she had to move back into Transit Point Station for a few days to give the two of them some privacy. In fact, Carol was due here in three days, so Miyuki was going to have to block out some time in her schedule for that.
Beseman continued his push-ups for another several seconds, then finally rested. Finally looked at the diagram Miyuki was holding up.
There were no windows in the crew quarters. That was partly for safety reasons and partly because there was nowhere to put them without stretching the whole thing vertically and thus adding mass to the ship. But it was also nice. The view of Earth rolling by underneath you was always spectacular from the cockpit, but Miyuki truthfully got tired of it sometimes. It was hard to look away from, and yet the ever-changing vistas—blue and green and brown and white and dead-black—took too much attention and mental energy to pay attention to. It also still caused her vertigo sometimes, looking “down” at the planet through the cockpit windows. At the end of a long day it was nice to get away from all of that, and just be.
“Tell me why the pressure isn’t different,” he said.
She pointed to an equation at the top of the chart: P = ρgh.
“Air pressure depends on three things: density, gravity, and the height of the air column above the point you’re measuring. The density went up, and gravity didn’t change, but the height of the air column shrank. It’s like a teeter-totter: one side goes down, the other goes up, but in a very constrained way. We’re not adding gas to the atmosphere, just pulling it in a little closer. It’s called isobaric compression.”
“But it affects the weather.”
“Yes. We’re seeing twice as much cloud formation in Hellas Basin, and warmer temperatures.”
“Slightly warmer,” he said.
“Right. About four degrees. Which doesn’t make sense, by the way, because temperature is on the other side of that teeter-totter. It should have increased a lot more, as the volume decreased.”
Hellas Basin was a monstrous impact crater in the surface of Mars, and Antilympus was a smaller impact crater near its northern rim. The lowest point on Mars, and the site of a cluster of twenty habitat modules arranged around a central glass dome. Antilympus Township. Current population: zero, unless you counted robots. But that’s where, four years from now, a hundred human beings would be living out their dreams.
Even a small planet like Mars was ridiculously immense by human standards, and its atmosphere—a wispy mass of mostly CO2, bombarded by cosmic rays and churning with weather and suspended mineral fines—was too complex a system for Miyuki, by herself, to model even approximately. Nor did she have the spare manpower right now to set a team on the task. And yet, Mars’ surface temperature had barely moved, and the temperature of the upper atmosphere had actually dropped. So where had all that energy gone? Where had it come from in the first place? How had a fifty-kilowatt electromagnet done all this? She could not say with any confidence what was going on in there, and at the moment, neither could anyone else. “Isobaric compression with a proportional increase in convecto-radiative cooling” was all pop-astronomer and Antilympus candidate Tim Long Chang had to say about it. Which was pretty much gibberish, and simply meant he didn’t know either, and was a blowhard besides, though a likable one. Miyuki herself suspected a shift in van der Waals forces between the gas molecules, with consequent deviations from ideal gas behavior, but that was just a guess. Tim Long Chang had disagreed wildly when she posted her suspicions online, and the two of them had had a colorful public argument about it. Van der Waals forces don’t operate in sparse atmospheres, he insisted, while offering no better explanation himself. One opinion that had cropped up several times in the comments section—simplistic but hard to argue with—was that the cold rock of Mars itself provided such a vast heat sink that the atmosphere couldn’t heat up.
Anyway, for whatever reason, the atmosphere had nestled in closer to the planet. Not just measurably closer, but really significantly closer. And now all those things—the cosmic rays, the dust storms, the clouds and frost and sublimation—were happening in a smaller volume. Average wind speeds—not only at Antilympus but at every weather station planetwide—were about ten percent lower than they had been, and peak wind speeds were down by almost half. There also seemed to be changes in the surface itself, with the dust fines being less prone to lifting off the surface as the wind blew across them.
It was an immense shift, achieved at negligible cost, and although Miyuki would never say so out loud, she was awestruck to have played any part in it.
“And we can’t do this, like, ten times harder than we are?” Beseman asked.
“I don’t think so,” she said. “As it stands, we’re deflecting almost half the charged particles that would’ve hit the planet. So it’s conceivable we could double this effect, but even that’s uncertain, because we don’t really know what’s going on. The dynamics are very complex.”
“And it’s not the start of some kind of cascade phenomenon that will terraform the planet?”
“No. You’re reading too many tabloids.”
“Okay, that’s what I figured. I like your teeter-totter analogy. It’s simple, and I’m going to use it.”
“Please do,” she said.
He squinted at her chart for several seconds, clearly formulating what he was going to say to the interviewer. “The fact is,” he tried, “we’ve taken the most Earthlike planet in the solar system, and made it a little bit more so. The first step in terraforming, and all the more interesting because that’s not what we set out to do. If we start really thinking about it, what other quick fixes can we come up with? We don’t really know, but already the conditions at Antilympus are approaching what you’d see at, say, 1.5 times the height of Mount Everest here on Earth.”
“Don’t say that last part,” she advised. “That’s not really true.”
“Okay, what’s the actual number?”
“Depends how you define it,” she said.
Beseman didn’t like that answer, so he ignored it and said, “Pure oxygen isn’t breathable below one hundred thirty millibars.”
“That’s true,” Miyuki said, “but millibars are a unit of pressure. We’re talking about density.” Also, Mars had almost no free oxygen, and even at Antilympus the air pressure was a tenth that much.
“Way ahead of you,” Beseman said. Having halted his push-ups and let go of his berth, he was now drifting out of it, and very slowly downward toward the “floor” of the crew quarters. Or upward, away from the Earth. “But if we the increase the density, then there’d be more air molecules to breathe. Regardless of pressure.”
“It doesn’t work that way,” she said. “Unless you’re willing to breathe a gas that . . .” She trailed off, thinking about van der Waals forces again. If the gas molecules were stickier, that would drive up the density and drive down the pressure. Or drive up the density while holding the temperature and pressure constant. “Hmm.”
“See?” he said. “We’ve reduced the effective elevation of Antilympus, by quite a bit.”
“I don’t know,” she said, cautiously. “I don’t think we should be framing it that way. Isn’t the truth dramatic enough?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “What’s the truth?”
“I don’t know,” she admitted.
“Exactly. I’m going to say 1.5, and nobody can honestly tell me that’s wrong.”
Miyuki paused a moment, and then said, “Fine.” The iffyness of his point was not worth fighting about. “On a different subject, we’ve got twelve loads of Concordia parts waiting down at Paramaribo, sealed and ready. Do you want to go over the launch schedules?”
“No,” he said, suddenly looking as tired as she felt. “I really don’t. Have you eaten?”
“Not for a while,” she said. “But I think I’m too tired.”
The two of them had long ago lost track of what time zone they were supposed to be in, and simply ate and slept when their bodies demanded it. It was easy for people to say that “an army of workers” were responsible for all of Beseman’s miracles. This was true, of course, both literally and figuratively. But it was also true, and usually overlooked, that nobody worked harder than Beseman himself, with Miyuki coming in a close second. They worked hundred-hour weeks together, each doing the work of five or ten normal employees, for the simple reason that if they didn’t, the company and the Antilympus Project would fall apart, and nobody would be colonizing Mars in their lifetimes. Let the UN suck on that.
“You look done,” he agreed. “You should get some sleep.”
“You too,” she advised.
“I will, soon. But first I’m going down to TPS for a meal and maybe a round of Call of Valor.”
But instead, Beseman’s phone rang. He cast a surprised glance at Miyuki, because this happened maybe once every ten days. First of all, anyone who worked directly under Beseman knew not to try and get ahold of him that way. Instead, they would update the appropriate shared documents, which Beseman checked obsessively. If a call were really necessary, he would spot it in the documents and typically get back to that person within a few hours. Ergo, anyone trying to call him either wasn’t a direct report, or else had a genuine emergency on their hands. For the nonemergencies, Beseman had two layers of round-the-clock secretarial buffer that would shuttle any concern to an appropriate underling, and when all else failed, the call would normally go to Miyuki. If the receptionists passed the call directly to him, that meant it was really important.
The tan Antilympus uniforms had excellent leg pockets, and Beseman withdrew his phone from one of these and pressed a button. The thing was fifty percent faux-antique (a fourth-generation smartphone design from the early thirties that “did everything a phone should ever need to, thank you very much”) and fifty percent bleeding-edge (a rubberized intercept case with a built-in “unbreakable or we’re all dead anyway” quantum-encryption firewall). Holding it to his ear, he said, “Beseman. What do you need?”
He paused. Miyuki could hear a male voice on the other end of the line, vaguely distorted in that tinny SpaceNet way that said the signal was highly compressed, and coming from a long way off.
“Seriously?” Beseman said. Then, to Miyuki: “It’s Igbal Renz.”
That surprised her. Other than his official communications with the United Nations, Renz hadn’t been heard from by anyone, in months. The most reclusive of the Horsemen, he was holed up tight at ESL1 Shade Station, 1.5 million kilometers sunward of the Earth, on the very outer boundary of cislunar space. If rumors were to be believed, he had even refused calls from the Nobel Prize committee!
Apparently it surprised Beseman as well, because the next thing he said was, “We haven’t spoken in, what, five years? You’ve got . . .”
But then the disdain on his face drained away, replaced with keen interest and mild alarm.
“You what? Uh huh. Uh huh. Oh, I see. Well . . .”
He looked across the crew chamber at Miyuki, and said, “I’m going to take this one in private. Can you stay out of the cockpit for twenty minutes?”
Too tired to even really wonder what was going on, Miyuki said, “No problem.”
He left, and closed the hatch behind him, and Miyuki unstowed her sleeping bag, slithered into it, and was gone, gone, gone.