An hour after the Polar Lander was due to have sent its long-awaited first signal from the surface of Mars, I couldn’t take the suspense any longer. I logged-off and fled from my PC. A short walk took me up to the top of my favourite quiet hill, where I stood, hands in pockets against the cold, until the sky was dark enough to allow me to catch a glimpse of Nova Aquilae. It was there, just where the SKY & TELESCOPE map had said it would be. A new star…!
I was alone… but not. Standing there I could hear Mars calling to me, as always, but I couldn’t bear to look at it. I felt like it was taunting me, taunting everyone who had spent the day nervously looking forward to the Polar Lander’s arrival. It was as if the planet had its hands behind its back, hiding the probe. “Come on! Which hand is it in?” I fought hard for half an hour to stop myself looking towards the south, but it was no use. I looked. And there it was, a tiny orange flame flickering through the bare branches of the trees. Mars. My Mars.
But it looked different. Felt different. As I looked at it I could almost see the probe sitting there on the dusty red ground, frantically scanning the sky for Earth. Closing my eyes I imagined the machine crying out in the darkness like a lamb lost on a barren hillside, its electronic bleating going unheard…
Two nights later the new star and Mars were both hidden behind thick cloud, and as a howling gale blew leaves and trash past my window the TV newsreader was reporting how yet another “window” had passed in silence. Fighting off images of the little probe smashing into the surface of Mars like a meteorite, obliterated in a cloud of tinkling metal, plastic and glass I stared at the NASA artwork on the screen behind him, and wondered if the probe really was dead, . Could the Universe really be that cruel? Or crueller? Could the probe have reached the surface only to land awkwardly on a boulder, and topple over onto its back to lie there like a turtle, with its robot arm flailing and twitching on the frost-covered sands..?
The talking head and artwork were replaced with a view of the JPL control room, and as I looked at the faces of those gathered before the screens and monitors my heart went out to them. Their haunted expressions revealed their thoughts. They didn’t know, they just didn’t *know*. All they had was the silence. The awful, lonely silence. I felt like a gate-crasher at a funeral, and had to turn the TV off. Too much.
Almost a week after the landing there is still a faint hope that the probe will phone home, but that hope literally grows fainter with every minute, and in our hearts we all know the truth. It’s gone. We’ll never hear from it. And although it is just a machine, a construction of nuts, bolts and paint, I ache inside. Children often sigh and moan about how things are “unfair”, but that just sums it up. It happened again. Again. It *is* unfair, damn it.
But it’s gone, and now difficult times lay ahead: despair for the stubbornly-optimistic men and women of JPL, who deserve so much better than this cruelty; frustration for all of us who Believe in Mars and our future on it; disappointment and confusion for all the children who go to sleep and dream of becoming astronauts, of walking on Mars one day.
Among the most disappointed will be the million people who travelled to Mars with the Polar Lander; a CD etched with their names was carried by the probe, a truly wonderful gesture which will be repeated in years to come, I have no doubt. But the gesture was not wasted, because whatever happened to the probe I know the CD survived. Don’t ask me how I know, I just do, I can feel it, in *here*. Whenever I visualise the probe tearing itself apart during its fiery re-entry I see the CD falling clear of the conflagration, gliding down through the thin martian air, glinting in the sunlight before knifing into the red dust, lost but safe. One day it will be found, and my name, and the names of all my fellow travellers, will be read by the people of Mars, and they’ll smile. I’m smiling now, just thinking about it. It eases the pain… a little.
But here in the present I fear there are confrontations ahead. I am sure that even as the Friday night news showed the mission controllers rubbing their tired eyes there were ambitious, publicity-hungry politicians plotting in the light of their widscreens how to turn the tragedy to their advantage, rubbing their hands with glee at the prospect of ridiculing and condemning NASA for its spectacular waste of money.
But as depressed and down-hearted as we are, now is not the time to give in to such dark thoughts or feelings, or ignorant, short-sighted enemies. We have to keep our faith in Mars and in each other, in our belief, and keep our gaze fixed firmly on the future. We must learn from this tragedy, not live within it forever.
There will be those who will laugh at the tragedy – we must ignore them. There will be those who will mock us for feeling and expressing such disappointment- we must walk away from them. There will be those who will despair – we must comfort them. There will be those who will be enraged – we must make them smile again.
Most important of all, there will be those who will want to stop it all, and retreat from Mars, from the future. We must take their hands and lead them on. And if they won’t follow, we must leave them behind and carry on without them.
There is much to think about. As we stubbornly continue to strain to hear chirps or cheeps in the crackling static coming from Mars, we need to think very carefully about our reliance on machines and software. Robot probes are cheap, fairly. Reliable, usually. Versatile, generally. But they are cold, soul-less. They can have an identity, but can never have a heart. The photographs they send back are taken without thinking, as a result of programming. They take photos because their software tells them to, not because they are moved to. There’s something missing.
We open our hands and set free our precious metal butterlies, watch them flutter away, carried on the solar wind towards a blood-red orchid of a world, and can do nothing except cross our fingers. And all too often Mars devours them, leaving nothing behind but lost dreams and broken promises. We curse, and sigh, then pick up our tools and start to build another butterfly. But each time something inside us is lost.
Enough.
We need to make Mars a real place, a real world, to give it an identity in the minds of 21st century humanity. At the moment it is just an elaborate rock-strewn film set, photographed and roamed by robots; Capricorn One without the limited budget. We need more. We need to stop people thinking of it an an alien world and make it a real one. And the only way we can do that is to go there in person, to actually see it, actually hear it, actually touch the rocks and the dust on which they lay.
We need people on Mars.
Because as scientifically valuable as they are, robot photos of rocks are just that. We need descriptions of the surface of Mars written by people who have been there. We need to look at photos taken by men and women with real, hand-held cameras. We need a martian Mary Chapin Carpenter to write us haunting ballads describing what it’s like to lie in bed and hear the desert winds whispering in the night. We need an Albert Bierstadt to capture in paint the glory of dawn breaking through the canyons of Valles Marineris. We need a 21st century John Muir to capture in words the heart-aching beauty of watching Earth rise up from behind the slopes of Olympus Mons.
We need to hear the beating of human hearts on Mars, not the hissing of hydraulics and gears. Then, and *only* then, will it be Real.
The Mars Polar Lander – my “Butterfly” – may be lost to us, along with its discoveries and potential rewards, but we should take comfort in the knowledge that it will not be lost forever. In some unknown future year an explorer, colonist or Settler will stumble upon the landing site, and whatever she finds – a craterful of rusted debris, a turned-turtle husk or an erect, wind-eroded monument – she’ll kneel down beside it in the orange dust and shake her head in wonder at how such a frail, fragile-looking thing could reach Mars at all.
And as she radios in her discovery, to the delight of the members of Mars Heritage back at the Settlement, she’ll touch its metal skeleton with her gloved hand, and feel pride, and joy… and immense gratitude. Gratitude that, in spite of heart-wounding failures and crushing disappointments, the very first martians, back in the closing years of the most bloody century in human history, held on to their dream and tried again. And again. And again. Until they triumphed.
That triumph will come when the first man or woman on Mars stamps their bootprint into the icy duricrust, but there is much work to do before then. So, when you think about what we’ve lost, shout by all means. Punch the wall if you want to, if it’ll make you feel better. Do whatever you have to do to vent your frustrations and disappointment. And when you’re done, pull on a coat, go outside and look for Mars, and when you find it tell it this: Nothing Ends here. You want to test us, make us prove ourselves worthy? Fine, go ahead. Take your best shot. But we’ll beat you. One day, we’ll beat you.
Then take a deep breath, turn away from that red flame, go home, and do what you can to Make It Happen.
Stuart Atkinson
Copyright© 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002 Stuart Atkinson, sffworld.com. All rights reserved. No part of this may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the author.
