I really don't feel like having pants on right now. That's one of the perks of having your own place...sort of. What I mean to say is that it's only sort of my place. I definitely don't have any pants on. I'm not going dissy yet. I'd rather not go dissy. Hopefully writing this will help.
Technically, I'm living in the
cooperative multi-governmental Coalition for Intensive
Extraterrestrial Research's place. (They insist on pronouncing it
like “seer,” obviously.) These crawlers were not cheap, and
getting them here was really expensive. They would have been cheaper
if they didn't have to hold people, but they would not have been
cheap.
The governments, of course, really
wanted them to hold people. India wasn't part of the last Coalition,
and no Indian has ever landed on another planet. They didn't want to
be left out. The US, and a couple of other Coalition nations, put
the Coalition on their tax forms as a voluntary contribution.
Apparently it's much harder to get voluntary contributions for this
sort of thing if no people go, especially in the States.
The engineers justified it to
themselves by saying that the presence of an emergency human operator
could help save or salvage equipment that would have become disabled
or been destroyed otherwise. They also told us that even with all
the censors on the exterior of the crawlers, and even with the
cameras taking pictures with a dozen different filters, it's possible
that a person might see something that would otherwise be missed.
They say that humans are better at seeing patterns than almost any
kind of human technology. “They” being people in general. I'm
sure the Coalition's engineers said it, too, while they were having
to build life-support into the crawlers.
So the Coalition is putting me up in
the tiny little cabin of this bigger-than-it-had-to-be crawler, and I
technically live on government property. Still, I'm a significant
fraction of the government presence on this planet. I can see the
crawler to the right of me and to the left of me easily. A few hours
ago, I could see another on each side if I strained. Still, they
don't have a lot of authority over me. They probably don't even
speak the same language as me. Even if they do, it's not all that
likely that either of them is one of the officers. Even if they are
both officers, the radios are only for emergencies. Keeping battery
power in reserve on a spacecraft is expensive. Hell, I bet those
guys probably aren't wearing any pants right now, either. There's probably not a man on this planet wearing pants.
They might be, if they're armed forces
guys. Those AF guys tend not to think creatively until something
goes wrong, and being uncomfortable never counted as something going
wrong to AF guys. But most of us are just civilians who passed the
tests, and were willing to accept the risks and the inconveniences if
it meant getting to hold a non-firing, do-nothing job for most of the
rest of our lives. They tested us for vision, to see if we're
observant, and to see if we could function on very little sleep.
They triple-checked the records to make sure we weren't running out
on any dependents. Most importantly, they tested us to see if we can
be alone and uncommunicative (except for listening to a disembodied
computer voice that refers to us as “human life forms”) for most
of a year without forgetting who we are, or where we are, or becoming
irrational or destructive–you know, going dissy.
They also scored our handwriting speed,
because the most important part of our job is to record our
observations, and it turns out that it's more efficient just to send
a high-tech pen and a big stack of paper than it is to send any sort
of computer with the input systems and batteries it would take to run
it. I graded out as “exceptionally overqualified” on handwriting
speed, and that's why I can write this.
That and the fact that there isn't much
to see. In the briefing, we were told that the areas that we were
mostly likely to find life were in the equatorial zone and about
three-quarters of the way to the opposite pole. Right now, we're
only a little more than halfway to the equator from the near pole.
The Coalition would have preferred to start us out on the opposite
pole, so that we would reach the hotspots when we were saner and our
senses were keener, but it turns out that landing on that pole is
somewhat problematic. There are systems to return the data to the
ship, and perhaps even rescue the people, without a landing, but
landing was obviously necessary to deploy the crawlers.
But to be honest, I really don't know
if we're going to find anything or not. I'm not a biologist. They
don't send scientists out in these things. Sending a really good
scientist would be too big a risk, and sending lesser scientist would
kind of defeat the purpose of sending one. The scientists they need are
the ones who know what to do with unfamiliar data, the brilliant
ones. I do remember ten years ago, when a crew came back from a
planet that everyone said looked a lot more promising than this one.
Before landing, they sent back pictures of a beautiful green marble.
And all they found there was some CO2 vapor and enough
copper to put every hobo back home out of business permanently.
This planet is not considered as
promising as the green marble was. We aren't here because it's one
of the most promising known planets. It's not. We're here because
it's one of three planets we believe are possibilities, that can be
reached with the technology we have. Truth be told, almost all its
water has drained into the vents in the crust, and we knew that
before we got here. The media was billing it as “ancient Mars”
when the project was preparing to leave. I imagine the media will
wish they'd run a campaign to slowly lower expectations before we
return. Then again, who knows? There used to be life on Mars.
What I do know is that if you're
reading this account, the project has ended. Either it ended in
discovery, and you are one of a billion people reading a wildly
successful bestseller, or it ended in disappointment, and you somehow
dug this up out of the biography section, which is little-browsed
even by the standards of web libraries. I hope we found something.
With the money from a bestseller, I could get my own place again, and
I wouldn't have to wear any pants if I don't want to.
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