Aurora by David A. Hardy Page A

ends, but it is not always easy to beat swords into ploughshares. There were many stories about what had happened when manufacturers of military rockets turned to making bathroom fittings and suchlike; the results had been disastrous, with poor-quality equipment being made by workers with low morale and no real interest in the product. How much better to put such expertise into making the power-plants for the motors of a Mars mission.
    Yes, Mars was the answer. But this time, to satisfy the world, the mission had to be no mere Apollo-like landing—pick up a few rocks and return to Earth within a few days. That would in any case have been impossible, due to the orbital dynamics of such a mission—though, thanks to the development, mainly by the Johnson Space Center, of a new plasma drive that achieved a temperature of one million degrees Celsius contained by a magnetic bottle, the journey could take three months instead of the six or more that years earlier had been envisaged by planners whose horizons had been limited to chemical propellants. Chemical propellants would still be needed to take the ships above the Earth’s atmosphere and to land on Mars, but the plasma drive would be effective for the journey in between. The higher acceleration possible with the plasma drive also solved the very serious zero-gravity problem. The crew would be constantly under one-third gravity, since they would be under power all the way. And neither would they need to depend upon solar panels for electricity.
    Even the first flight would be a long-stay mission of over two years. Also, a commitment had to be made to establish a permanent base, small at first but eventually self-supporting. Robot landers would be sent ahead to set up a base, and to deposit supplies. Another incentive was that Mars could then become a staging post for the asteroids, where Earth’s industry would find mountains of minerals, such as almost pure nickel–iron, there for the taking. Further valuable materials would be available from Mars’s two moons and from the surface of Mars itself. Martian soil contains forty per cent oxygen chemically bound up with iron (hence the rusty color of much of Mars), plus magnesium, sodium, sulfur and chlorine, while the atmosphere contains nitrogen. Carbon is available aplenty from the asteroids and from Phobos, the nearer satellite.
    Aurora had found the whole prospect completely exciting, and impossible to resist. It was as if there were something—something stronger than herself—dictating to her that she must take part in the great Martian adventure, and doing so became her obsession. She had had little difficulty in obtaining a position back at NASA, and quickly she got to know all the right people.... She had made sure she passed all the fitness and aptitude tests—which she did with no problems—and ended up as a member of the geology team. Not as a British member, of course; she had become an American citizen years ago. She wasn’t the only one in this situation: the Canadian member, Dr. Bryan Beaumont, a volcanologist as well as co-pilot of the Lander, was also of English descent, his parents having emigrated just before he was born.
    So here she was, on Mars. Now known as Dr. Anne Pryor, she was seventy-eight and looked perhaps thirty-five.
    She had come up with the theory that she must be one of a new breed of human, resistant to both time and disease. What other answer could there be? She took to scanning the media and the more specialist journals for reports or even hints that others of her kind existed, but with increasing disappointment and puzzlement. If they did, they were keeping as quiet as herself. Sometimes she felt a deep loneliness, but she knew no way to relieve it.
    * * * *
    Anne Pryor, Aurora, came out of her reverie, suddenly dazzled by low evening sunlight blazing through a cleft between two lava outcrops. Near the shrunken Sun the sky was a washed-out blue, but