Chapter 28
Before Agamemnon had even begun descending from orbit, they had teleported over two hundred robots to the surface of Mars.
There, in an area that would become known as New Town, the repair robots cleared, flattened, and smoothed a large rock area for the Fat Mermaid to land on, and for new domes.
They started 6 new domes, made of clear glass and two hundred feet in diameter each, for greenhouses.
They made them double-walled, with a space in-between the inner and outer dome shells, so the air could be pumped out of that space. That way the building would be like a giant Thermos, using the near-vacuum in-between inner and outer domes to insulate against heat loss.
The average temperature of Mars was -85 degrees Fahrenheit, so thermal insulation was important, even though Mars Colony had been built in a warm spot on the equator, where temperatures sometimes reached as high as 70 degrees Fahrenheit. The spot was being warmed further both by huge mirrors in the planet's La Grange points focusing more sunlight on it, as well as by the 'waste heat' that always accompanies human civilization and especially industrial civilization.
Under the domes, the robots shaped the rock into large caverns for storage. They sealed the walls so they'd be airtight, so humans could work there without spacesuits.
These caverns, like all other caverns and buildings on Mars, got at least two of their own airlocks, so in the event of an emergency, any damage would be limited: if something cracked walls and made buildings lose air pressure, each building would have it's own chance to resist and retain its air; they would not likely lose all of them at once.
When the Fat Mermaid landed a hundred feet from the nearest dome, the robots made a road between the ship and the dome, wide enough for two bulldozers to drive abreast. Then they roofed it - shaping stone into a continuous arch above the 25 foot wide roadway, and reaching from the airlock at one end to the airlock at the other.
Then they heated it and filled it with breathable air.
In the short term, this road would allow unloading the Fat Mermaid without exposing either the workers, or the cargo, to the extremely thin cold martian air.
In the long term, it could be converted for use as any other kind of living or working space the Martians needed.
They wanted that flexibility, since they had not yet decided what to do with the Fat Mermaid.
There were proposals to use it as housing space, storage space, spare parts and raw materials, or even an orbiting space-station.
As soon as the roadway to the ship was completed, other robots began unloading it.
The truckload of grains and beans, the shipping containers - now un-shrunken - full of wheat, the coconuts, and other fruits, they moved into the new storage caverns.
This was very welcome, as was the promise of more in a couple of days.
They had enough food stored to get them until the first harvest was expected, plus a little safety margin.
But as any farmer will tell you, harvests are never a sure thing. Many factors can ruin them. And that would have been a disaster.
For any other failure, the Martians had some possible things to fall back to. If power or heat failed from any source, they had other sources. If they ran low on oxygen or water, they could get more from local sources - mining ice from below-ground if necessary.
But they couldn't get food in similar ways. If they didn't grow it, then they only lasted as long as the stored food held out.
So more storage was very welcome.
Also welcome were the leftovers from the Luau that Agamemnon's crew had held in the Virgin Islands.
This had been cooked by experts, and carefully preserved. It was now unloaded, re-heated and shared out. There was enough for a good meal for everybody. Boz donated this food, as well as the coir, to the people of Mars.
It became a DE-facto going-away party for the 312 who were leaving.
While all the colonists partied, the robots kept working.
They'd taken orders for what people wanted their share of the coir to be shaped into, and now began turning it into mattresses, mats, draperies,blankets and whatnot.
Other robots shaped native stone into tables with growing trays in the new greenhouses.
Still more robots moved the silt from the Fat Mermaid down the new road and into those new trays in the greenhouses. They separated out the salt and other pollutants as they moved the silt.
These were stored for other uses - even a 'pollutant' is just useful materials to the right chemist.
Also stored for later use - once they figured how to adapt it to run on Mars - was the armored personnel carrier taken from the PRT.
Where the robots left off in setting up the greenhouses, local experts took over.
Lastly, the robots moved the seawater from the Fat Mermaid to the sixth new greenhouse, which had been prepared for hydroponics. Local experts would see if they could culture some sea-life in there, and perhaps grow things like crabs. There were varieties of crabs that laid over 3 million eggs at a time. By arranging the right circumstances for their growth, they hoped it would be an abundant food source.
The Martian colonists had been selected for the skills they had, in addition to their willingness to come, and their ability to cope with the circumstances inherent in building a new colony inconceivably far distant from home.
So among the colonists, many skills were present, including gardening, greenhouse operation, hydroponics, all sorts of engineering and more.
By the time the party was over and the Agamemnon lifted off to go take care of other errands, the robots were caught up on other projects and had already begun the big one that Boz called "the park".
When Agamemnon had arrived, they'd used their lasers to melt a large area of sand into glass for use in making domes. Repair robots had been moving that, 2 tons at a time, to where the finished domes went.
One hundred repair robots were working on shaping that glass into a large dome, a mile in diameter, and up to 200 feet high, with plenty of support columns, also made of clear glass.
It was estimated that they'd complete that part in 9 hours, then start on other features, like airlocks, air ducts water pipes and channels and so forth.
This huge dome was to be double-walled like the others, and it was placed on a large area of solid rock, to support all that weight.
Boz wanted it planted with many different sorts of plants and set up as a park which people could take walks in and just hang out in, so they would not feel 'cabin fever' or 'stir-crazy'.
Of course, the plants in it would be useful too - not just pretty greenery to look at.
For example, most parks on Earth favored flowering versions of fruit trees that did not actually produce fruit. That made them pretty and eliminated the need to clean up fallen fruit.
But the park in New Town, or, as many people had started calling it after hearing about it, 'The Land of Boz', would have trees that produced fruit, had edible leaves, or useful bark, or all of the above at once, if that could be arranged.
Ron was secretly arranging for the park to have a yellow-brick road leading to a statue of Boz's grandfather Issac Fields, labeled "The Wizard of Boz". He thought that would be deliciously funny.
Simon got involved and, after their collaboration, it would have several interesting features, including a waterfall, a swimming pool, and a 'lazy river'. It would have raised walkways at various heights above the ground, so people could walk among the treetops. These would be made of transparent Plexiglas and attached to the many support pillars. And its support pillars would have planters all up and down their heights, along all sides, which could be raised or lowered by ropes.
Abe heard that idea and added more ropes for "Tarzan swings'.
And they figured the watering system could make it rain every day at the same time.
But they weren't the only one making arrangements.
Mars One still existed as a company on Earth.
It had income from selling the various entertainment and other broadcasts sent to it from Mars.
They'd been told as soon as possible, to go looking for certain things, and had found some.
Consequently, Boz's park would start off with a bang, since Mars One had found, and purchased, and entire Nursery - also known as a garden center - complete with all its potted plants, sacks of fertilizer, seeds, manuals, tools etc. They'd even arranged a contract by which 6 of their expert gardeners had agreed to go live on Mars for a month and help with gardening there.
Transport was to be provided, there and back, by Agamemnon, and was just one of several things they had on their to-do list.
The nursery had been cheap - it had been failing due to bad management.
So the good folks at Mars One had more money left than anticipated, and went looking for other failing businesses that could be useful to Mars.
They'd found one too - a "Prototyping Lab". This was a sort of small factory specialized in not specializing. They were generalists who could make anything, from any material. They usually made the prototype for other, specialized factories, as 'proof-of-concept' efforts to prove a new design worked. Sometimes they'd make just one or a few prototypes and be done. Sometimes they'd make a second version as the other factories worked out revisions and improvements in the design. Then, once the prototype was approved, the other, specialized, factories, would gear up for making thousands or millions of copies of the prototype for sale.
This particular prototyping lab was also failing due to bad management. So Mars One bought them out, arranged similar contracts with some of their experts, and would have it packed up and ready for transport once Agamemnon got to Earth.
They also arranged 2 contracts with experts on sea-water hydroponics.
And those experts would not be the only ones going to Mars.
Several of the colonists' friends and relatives, who had stayed behind on Earth, now wanted to go live on Mars.
There were 516 of them.
Some had changed their minds for, being human, all of the usual bewildering array of personal reasons.
And some wanted to go because local governments were oppressing them as a way to manipulate the Mars colonists.
Picking them all up was on the Agamemnon's To-Do list.
Then there was another group also coming to Mars.
It came about because Brenda - a crew member leaving Agamemnon to stay on Mars - had reached out to her grandpa who lived in a nursing home in Canada, to try to help him.
Canada had free health care, and had always struggled to have enough supply to meet demand. Nothing they'd done had solved the problem, and consequently they'd had long wait lists for everything medical.
Some argued that supply - doctor time, nurse time, medicines, medical machines etc - could never match demand. They pointed out that supply was inherently limited, since many factors all worked to keep it limited - including various costs, and medical school graduation rates, among other things.
They said that as long as nothing limited demand, every cough and sniffle could demand some of their supply of medical resources. Most countries limited demand by cost - if your cough didn't worry you enough to justify paying for a doctor visit, you didn't go.
Canada still paid all those costs, indirectly via taxes, but that was hidden enough from the consumer that medical care appeared to be free, so cost was not a reason not to go to the doctor.
So, in practical terms, Canada's long waiting lists for medical care was the primary limiter to demand - if your symptoms were not bad enough to motivate you to get on a waiting list, you didn't bother.
And of course, many tried to skip the waiting lists by pretending their systems were worse than they actually were - enough worse to get emergency treatment.
Many Canadians were tired of that, and the latest attempt to fix it was known as the "Time's Up Law", though in fact it was not a law but rather a decision within their government bureaucracy.
The "Time's Up Law" basically said that if you're past a certain point in a complicated "age plus health" calculation, then you were about to die anyway and any further medical treatment would, at best, prolong that time by an insignificant amount, so the government judged it as not worth it.
In other words, the government denied any further medical care to people it judged were about to die anyway.
Brenda's grandfather Felix was on the list of folks who would no longer receive medical care, and she wanted him to spend his remaining time with her. She also argued that the lower gravity on Mars would put less strain on his heart and probably extend his life.
She also pointed out that, with transport via Agamemnon, there was no problem from being transported to Mars. Agamemnon didn't subject its passengers to the extreme G-forces that a rocket launch did.
She'd persuaded her grandpa.
He, in turn, had persuaded his friends.
He wasn't the only one in that nursing home whose "time was up".
He was a social guy and made friends easily, so ended up convincing 27 old residents of the nursing home, plus a doctor that was nearing retirement age and had a weak heart, and 3 nurses in similar situations who both wanted to protest the "Time's Up Law" and also keep taking care of their patients who were also their friends..
The next step was to convince the Martians.
Mars was a new colony, requiring vast amounts of work to get 'up and running' properly. Everybody there had to contribute - they had no leeway to use in carrying non-contributors.
Just to stay alive, humans regularly consume food, water, oxygen, and other things. They need clothes, buildings, heat, light and many other things, which wear out and need replacing.
And none of those things came for free on Mars. They all came from human labor in some way.
So some of the Mars colonists, facing the brutal practical realities head-on, said that anyone on Mars who could not labor to support themselves was a burden they could not afford, since someone else would have to labor to support them, and their resources did not yet have the kind of safety margin to be able to afford that. Meeting their own needs already took almost all of the labor they had available.
Others pointed out that, due to help from Agamemnon, they had a lot more resources and safety margin than they'd have had otherwise. They also pointed out that physical labor wasn't the only type of useful work, and that several of the nursing home residents who wanted to immigrate had decades of skills in useful fields. They included a chemical engineer, a structural engineer, and almost four centuries of gardening experience between them.
In the end, Boz had settled the debate by committing to support the 27 nursing home residents, plus their doctor and 3 nurses, so they'd have time available to take care of the 27.
Nobody doubted he would bring in the extra food water and other supplies shortly.
Repair robots on Mars got to work making housing for them immediately.
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HMS Agamemnon - with it's Obscurement Console running to generate a dust cloud hiding them from radar and the like - pulled into orbit around Earth and started opening teleportation portals.
First, they let off the 312 former Martian colonists who couldn't handle a colonists' lifestyle and were returning to Earth.
Agamemnon put these wherever they wanted to go.
Some went incognito into places where they thought they could hide. They did this to avoid fame and to just live normal lives.
Others wanted to go back to the lives they'd left, despite being warned that with their new fame would come various forms of harassment, as well as possibly some pressure from the various governments which had decided they'd like to take control of HMS Agamemnon if they could.
It seemed to Boz like a bad idea to risk that kind of government pressure, but the former colonists were free to do as they liked.
Next they brought aboard the garden center and factory they'd purchased - all the goods and hired staff from each of those, plus the experts in hydroponics they'd hired.
While they were at it, Boz realized that some of the trees on the grounds of the garden center, and even two of the trees on the factory's land, were fruit trees or nut trees - just what he wanted for his park.
They put their heads together, came up with a plan, and pretty soon had used the Shrink Console to turn 50-foot tall trees into 50-inch tall trees.
They did this to make them easier to handle, but mainly to preserve their root systems as intact as possible - as the trees shrunk, so did the roots, effectively retracting them through the soil. So after shrinking, the whole root system lifted easily out of the now-softened dirt they'd been in.
These shrunken trees they lifted with telekinesis into new pots, and teleported them onto the ship, under the care of their new gardening experts from the garden center.
Not wanting to put any more stress on the trees than necessary, they then sped back to Mars.
The trip took less than half a second at full speed.
In Mars orbit, they opened teleportation portals to set down all the stuff they'd brought, which turned out to be more than Boz had thought they had.
Ron had been busy with the Telekinesis Console while in Earth Orbit. He'd used it to "tidy up a bit" as he'd put it. Earth orbit had a lot of junk of various types, from dead, burned-out satellites, to old used-up rocket booster stages on the larger end of the spectrum, to tiny fragments of many miscellaneous things.
All of these were navigation hazards, which complicated new space launches because they had to be avoided.
In the short time they'd been in Earth orbit, Ron had used telekinesis to capture, decelerate, grab, and store on the ship's deck, just over 3 tons of this miscellaneous junk.
He did it both to clean up as a public service, and also to collect it as a source of useful raw materials.
Space launches were expensive, so people spared no expense when building the things they launched into space. They used whatever materials were best - no matter how rare - in making, for instance, satellites. And when that satellite eventually ceased to function, all those materials were still there.
Mars could use aluminum, germanium, phosphorous, and many other materials that were hard to mine there, so Ron had grabbed some orbiting junk as a source of those, and other materials.
Even if the stuff just sat piled in a cavern for a few years, it would be there when they needed it.
Once Ron had explained, everybody had had a 'facepalm moment', where they realized how obvious that was and that they should have been doing that all along.
They resolved that all future trips to Earth could include what 'orbital cleanup' they could.
So Ron's collected space junk got stored in an underground storage cavern, as did some of the items from the nursery.
Most of the items from the garden center - and all the trees - went straight to one of the new greenhouse domes, where it would wait a few hours, in hospitable conditions, until it could be moved to the new park dome.
When the trees did get moved to the park, it was planned that repair robots would dig holes appropriate for the new trees and their root systems. Garden experts would prepare those holes, then the trees would be placed in them, held in position with telekinesis, and un-shrunk. Then dirt would be filled in around the root systems, and garden experts would get to work on them making sure all was, and would remain well with them before the stabilizing telekinesis was removed.
Mars would then have its first trees, full-grown and sheltered in a new park dome.
But that had to wait for the dome to be completed, then filled with much more air.
For now, they unloaded the prototyping factory into it's own new dome, left some more repair robots to help set things up, then sped back to Earth.
On the way, they had their sensors watching to see if they passed by any asteroids. They were looking for certain kinds, such as nickel-iron.
They did not see any on this trip, but would also watch on future trips, while taking slightly different paths.
Again in Earth orbit, they began using teleport portals to collect people headed to Mars, starting with the 516 friends and family of current Mars colonists.
These were scattered over several nations, though that didn't matter with the portals - they had plenty of range to reach any spot on Earth.
They were not gathered in a group - the last time they'd done that, Agamemnon had been shot at as they left and had had to defend themselves - so they collected folks in ones and two's, even though that took a while.
While they were doing that, Ron was again collecting orbiting space junk, starting with big stuff like dead satellites.
And the various space agencies that track space junk, to keep track of the navigational hazard it presented, were noticing that some of it was disappearing.
Soon, there began to be broadcasts along the lines of "we know you are out there, HMS Agamemnon. Give yourself up and nobody needs to get hurt."
They ignored these warnings, but sped up the collection of the immigrants.
A few of the 516 had been seized by their local governments and put in prison, not charged with any crimes, just as a way to try to manipulate Mars Colony and HMS Agamemnon.
These were only a little harder to get than the rest. Instead of making a portal to their home and collecting them and their luggage, they made the portal right into their prison cell, after Beth first checked the sensors for other people and, if necessary, waiting for a time when nobody else was nearby. Then they made a second portal to the person's home for their luggage.
It worked smoothly except for once.
That time, Beth announced that a prison guard was in the middle of torturing the person, named Dan, who the Agamemnon was looking to collect. The torturer was cutting off body parts.
This got everybody angry, so they immediately collected both the guard and Dan the new colonist.
The guard got scanned with the right console, which showed he did indeed have a high affinity for hurting others, as it had seemed. They'd wanted to be sure he couldn't use the "I'm just doing my job" excuse.
Dan went on a quick trip to the ship's hospital, and the guard was made to walk the plank.
They set up a simple plank at the edge of the ship's deck, bound the guard, and forced him, at the point of two bayonets - one held by Abe and one by Dan, who had wanted to be a part of this - to walk it until he fell off. It was a long fall, since the Agamemnon was in low Earth orbit - 100 miles up - at the time.
The guard could have stayed in orbit, but the initial velocity he got while falling within Agamemnon's gravity field gave him enough momentum to continue falling out of orbit and all the way down to Earth.
Ron used the ship's telekinesis to aim the falling guard at the same prison he'd worked at. But he didn't hit the target - the guard burned up entirely during re-entry.
He remarked that if they ever had to do this again, the next one should get covered in silicon tiles like the Space Shuttle used to protect it from heat. That way he may stay intact and make a satisfying crater in the ground.
The general sense among the crew - reduced to just a few now that most had stayed at Mars- was that torturers were a blight on humanity and it was best to remove them.
Dan, the new colonist, even got his missing fingers regrown.
The ships hospital had the ability to regrow limbs, organs, and similar, with the Regeneration setting turned on.
That could regrow teeth too, but Boz's grandpa invented that after learning of the toothache problem with duplication. So, since he was by that time, already used to having no teeth, he never regrew his. He had it on his to-do list to fix the toothache problem with the duplication machine, then regrow his teeth, but never got around to it.
Once they had the 516 and their luggage on the ship, Boz took a moment for a business opportunity.
Lisa had given them several UAV's - Unmanned Aerial Vehicles - plus schematics for them. There was currently nothing like these on Earth in Dimension 1, yet it was within their capability to build them. And they were potentially very useful. So Boz sent a few copies, and the schematics, to Mars One, who planned to set up another corporation to manufacture and sell them.
This should, over time, provide income to buy things for Mars and help out the colony there.
Next they opened a portal to collect the 27 nursing home patients and their 3 nurses and doctor, plus all their luggage.
While that was open, Boz went through, then went around the nursing home with the Replicator's portable scanning unit, scanning all the medicines and medical machines and apparatus he could find.
He wanted to be able to provide appropriate support for the old folks, as well as the other Martian colonists.
When the doctor, Nick, saw what Boz was doing and got an explanation, he offered to help.
Doctor Nick had access to a nearby hospital, and used it to get himself and Boz in, and to all the areas where the machines, medicines, apparatus and such were kept.
Once they had good scans of all of that, Boz and the doctor went back to the ship.
There they found Albert,one of the nursing home patients just beginning to go into cardiac arrest from all the excitement.
Doctor Nick wanted to go to work on him, and would not listen to alternatives, so Abe restrained the doctor while Boz got the patient to the ship's hospital.
In under a minute, Boz and Albert both walked back out of the hospital with Albert looking quite healthy and acting a couple decades younger.
Doctor Nick, and everybody else, wanted explanations, and got them.
Boz concluded his impromptu exposition on the capabilities of the ship's hospital with the words, "don't worry, you will all get a turn in there, to get you as healthy as we can before we leave again. I don't know why I didn't think of it before. Possibly because there is only the one. I've failed to Replicate it when I tried. Grandpa could do that kind of thing, and did, several times, like the robots we can Replicate, or the shuttles. But it takes something extra - what exactly I don't know - to Replicate special tech like this. So, while I'd like to leave a hospital like this on Mars, for example, I can't and you'll have to make do with regular medicine once you're there and we've gone again. But for now let's get you all healed."
He didn't have to ask them twice.
When they were done, and the doctor and nurses had gone through too, Abe pulled Boz aside for a request.
"Hey Boz, seeing Albert going in there so weak,frail, and used-up, and coming out so spry, healthy, and chipper, gave me an idea. I used to hang out at the VFW - Veterans of Foreign Wars - and made some good friends among the other former soldiers there. Some of them are bored with retirement and always talking about the good old days when they could make a difference and help take down bad guys. I think you can see where I'm going here..."
"Yup," Boz nodded, "and whether or not our hospital could make them spry again to military standards, they don't have to run or jump or carry things - just man our consoles. Yah, I agree with what you seem to be thinking - they'd be a great way to fill out the crew a little. Ask some and we'll see."
Abe got right on it.
Some of the 'Old Codgers' as Abe's friends from the VFW called themselves were decisive and had no attachments.
Before Agamemnon left Earth to fly back to Mars, 6 of these veterans were aboard, healed up in the hospital, and - now feeling more vigorous and spry than they had in years - contracted as crew.