CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
THE VOICE DELAY
The communications network, 1980 to early 1981
The communications room was the only place on Mars where Earth felt close.
It was also the place where Earth’s distance became impossible to ignore.
Banks of equipment filled a pressure module near the central spine. Antenna control, signal processing, message queues and tracking displays occupied every wall. Technicians worked in headsets beneath clocks showing Houston, Moscow, Tokyo, Beijing, Paris, London, Earth Orbit and Mars Orbit.
The clocks were mostly decorative.
The delay mattered more.
A question left Mars.
Minutes passed.
Earth received it.
Someone answered.
Minutes passed again.
The answer returned to a situation that might already have changed.
For routine traffic, the system worked well enough. Personal messages were recorded, compressed, queued and transmitted. Technical files moved continuously. News arrived in blocks.
Conversation did not exist.
Not real conversation.
People learned to speak to Earth in paragraphs.
Valdés recorded a message to his sister Ana in Valparaíso.
He sat in front of a camera and looked at the red recording light.
“Hola, Ana. I got your message. Yes, I’m eating. No, I’m not thin. The camera makes everybody look bad up here.”
He paused.
There was no one on the other end to laugh.
That was the difficult part.
A joke crossed space alone.
A confession crossed alone.
Bad news crossed alone.
People on Mars became careful with messages because they could not immediately repair what they said.
The communications relay expanded as the colony expanded. New antennas were placed on higher ground. Redundant links connected Camp One to the spaceport, agriculture, the outer technical structures and the mining outposts.
The equipment had not all been designed to work together.
Some units had been brought from Earth for the original landing. Others arrived with later cargo missions. There were American receivers, Soviet power supplies, Japanese control boards and several experimental assemblies whose manufacturers had never expected them to operate outside a laboratory.
The technicians had made them work.
Most of the time, they continued to work.
The first serious problem came during a dust event.
A relay serving the eastern prospecting area stopped responding. The communications room tried the backup channel, but the signal came back broken and full of interference.
The outer prospecting team disappeared from the network.
Shaw was informed after the third unsuccessful attempt to establish contact.
“When did we last hear from them?”
“Forty minutes ago. Routine position report. Everything normal.”
“Can we reach them through the spaceport?”
“We're trying.”
The technician adjusted the receiver again. The speakers produced a burst of static, followed by a few seconds of something that might have been a voice.
“Was that them?”
“Could have been our own transmission bouncing back.”
The spaceport relay was operating, but its antenna was pointed in the wrong direction for a reliable connection to the prospecting site. Repositioning it meant interrupting another link.
Shaw authorised the interruption.
For the next two hours, the communications crew worked through every available frequency. They transmitted instructions for the prospectors to remain where they were and acknowledge by any means available.
There was no answer.
The trouble was eventually traced to a failed amplifier in the eastern relay station. Its power supply was still functioning, and the control system continued to report that the station was operational. The signal itself was going nowhere.
The nearest maintenance crew was sent out with a replacement assembly.
The first replacement failed its self-test.
The second had the wrong connector.
The technician responsible for the repair removed the connector from the original unit, fitted it to the replacement and secured the joint with parts from the emergency repair kit.
Nine hours after the last position report, the prospecting team's voice returned to Camp One.
Petrov's first words were, “Why is everyone shouting?”
Shaw took the microphone.
“Because we like you.”
There was a pause.
“Please stop.”
The prospectors had been following their normal schedule. They had received some of the transmissions, but their replies had not been reaching Camp One.
The maintenance crew brought the failed amplifier back for examination.
It was placed on a workbench beside two receivers that had stopped working the previous month.
A communications technician removed the amplifier cover and found a scorched section of the circuit board.
“That's finished.”
His supervisor looked at the remaining components.
“The whole board?”
“The amplifier stage.”
“Then mark the amplifier stage. Don't throw away the rest.”
A label was attached to the casing.
FAILED — PARTS ONLY.
The unit went onto a storage rack.
Over the following weeks, the communications department had more trouble.
A tracking display began losing its picture whenever the cooling fan reached full speed. A receiver at the spaceport developed a fault that made it drift away from its assigned frequency. One of the older message-recording machines started eating its tapes.
The recording machine was particularly unpopular.
It had been intended as a backup for the digital message system, but some departments still used it to store voice reports. The machine worked perfectly until it had been running for about twenty minutes. Then the transport mechanism would slow, the tape would catch and the recording would be ruined.
After the third repair, the technicians stopped trusting it.
The communications supervisor requested a replacement from Earth.
The answer came back with the next supply allocation.
No replacement was available on the current manifest.
The machine was removed from service. Its tape heads, motors, switches and audio circuits were tested separately. Most still worked.
They went into storage.
The rest of the casing joined the scrap collection.
By the beginning of 1981, the communications stores contained several shelves of equipment that nobody wanted to discard.
There were receivers with broken tuning mechanisms, amplifiers with damaged power sections, old switching panels, cable drums, connectors, meters, speakers and circuit boards stripped from machines that could no longer be repaired.
The technicians kept an inventory, although it was not always accurate. A component might be taken from one shelf to repair a machine in another department and never returned. Sometimes a technician would discover that a part marked defective worked perfectly after its contacts had been cleaned.
The supervisor complained about the space the collection occupied.
Then he requested another rack.
The problem was no longer simply the age of the equipment.
Every new outpost required a connection. Every additional habitat needed access to the message network. Vehicles moving between the domes depended on local radio, and the approaching civilian mission would add another set of communication requirements.
The existing technicians understood the equipment. They had designed much of the network and could repair almost anything in it.
But there were not enough of them.
A specialist might spend half a day travelling to a relay station to replace a component that took ten minutes to fit. Someone else would have to cover the communications room in the meantime.
The supervisor submitted a staffing request.
He asked for another communications engineer, preferably someone familiar with radio electronics, signal processing and field maintenance.
Earth acknowledged the request.
There was no immediate assignment.
For the moment, the department continued with the personnel it had. The old equipment remained on the racks. The new equipment was added to the network. And whenever another component failed, someone took it apart to see what could still be used.