Welcome Aboard Air Marineris
Chapter Thirteen: The Zeppelin Trip

Lou had finished his prep work for the ride. It was early in the morning. The sun had just cleared the rise at the end of the Valles, and we had at least eleven hours of daylight ahead of us. No dust storms were in the offing, and the weather was as it always was, moderately clear, and tolerably sunny. We were ready with all the arches for the Quonsets at Lowell, and all the associated equipment. After he was finished with the tow to the train, Lou would use the hoists to load his own constructor onto the ship. We still had a few drones back at our mining base, but they were prospectors, not constructors. They had different peripherals and would need to be adapted to constructor configuration. It was time to start our move. Lou was the announcer.

“So, let’s fire it up. First, I’m going to bring my tractor around to the tow hitch on the ship. There’s no wind to blow it around once I get it into place at the end of the track, but there’s no percentage in taking chances, so I will leave the ship tied down and release it remotely after it’s tied up to the tow. I won’t even try to float it until it’s secured.

“The last time we did this, we had two constructors to tow it. It can lift its tow so easily that I’m going to leave it minimally evacuated to generate just enough lift to keep it safely elevated. I’ve also put a load of ore in the cargo bed of my constructor to give it some more heft. It practically doubles the weight, but it’s still only eight tonnes. The ship can lift sixty tonnes with full vacuum, so I’m going to need to be very careful. I have stress gauges at either end of the tow line to warn me. Even if it doesn’t lift it, it could still tug it enough to reduce its traction dangerously. It wouldn’t be disaster if it did, but it could drift off a bit and then I would need to set it down on the emergency legs, go get it, and start all over again with a new plan. Embarrassing. All assuming I wasn’t careless enough to let it lift my constructor right off the ground. The path I have chosen is clear of big obstacles, but it’s all broken country around there. So, I’m going to do it very slowly. The kilometer will take me two hours.”

I couldn’t have agreed more. He was no cowboy when it got to business, no matter the bravado he showed off the jobsite. That’s one of the main reasons I like him as an assistant. Just like Chantelle, he was not only good at what he did, but careful and judicious in doing it. What could be better? Starward watch out, Air Marineris is coming through!

“You go, boy. You got it on the cams, Chantelle?”

“You couldn’t keep me from it, Mo. I’m a vid director, and I’m on it. Every scene and every pearly word. Do you happen to have a megaphone and one of those director’s chairs I see in the pics of movie production from the dawn of time when you were born?”

“I’m not Boris, you know. I’m only ten years older than you are. Save the codger jokes for him. See how much he likes them.”

“I wouldn’t dare tease him. It’s indecent, and he wouldn’t even react. He’s too sweet.”

“You wouldn’t have thought so if you were at the other end of his Plaser a few years ago. He can be a fierce old guy when it’s called for. Let’s get on with this, Lou.”

He showed it on the monitors he had in his little cubby, and I stuffed myself into the only chair he had. Because he had a lot to do in addition to the driving, he used a virtual console on one of his monitors and a plugin hand controller to operate the constructor. He also needed another control panel for the ship. He had to manage them both at the same time. It was convenient to have them under tandem control, but it was a difficult feat of coordination. Chantelle would see it relayed to her own monitor. She had a lot to do on it, too.

We were agreed that we would post the arrangements for the tow as soon as possible after we had done it. Of course, it could not be simultaneous to the event. We had to have a delay in case we messed it up. I was willing to be transparent, but this wasn’t about performance. We had a purpose for our fanpage beyond self-promotion. We felt invested with the project, and we wanted it to be the best line that could be built. Events had proven that they needed us.

The wide angle scene from the flyeye on the constructor roof took it in with the ship. The ship sat on its cradle. It was an inelegant rectangular box with none of the swoopy lines you associate with airships. There was no need for streamlining on a planet with almost no air pressure. It was far more important to maximize floor space. Above the box was the cylinder of thin steel plates where the magic took place. That was the familiar cylinder shape which took advantage of the strength of the sphere. It was big. A little over two hundred meters long, and over one hundred meters wide. It had to be big to displace enough air. A vacuum pump would empty the cylinder, creating lift from the nothingness that was more gossamer than even the wispy atmosphere of Mars. The more intense the vacuum was the greater the lift would be. Since the ship was designed to lift great weights, the tow by the miniscule constructor would be a very delicate operation.

The left half of the screen showed the familiar manipulator of the constructor with its tool tray at the base of the view window. It displayed the scene directly in front of the constructor without any distracting wide angle so that you could concentrate on manipulation. On the right screen was the virtualized control panel of the airship. It was strictly minimal because the only controls, other than status of the bag chambers, altitude, attitude, and such, were the pump controls and the stress gauge readings. That was reasonable because the ship had never been designed to steer itself. That was close to impossible in the thin air of Mars. No ailerons, rudders or flaps would work against the minimal pressure they produced. You could lift it, or lower it, but you couldn’t turn it without a rocket, or a huge version of the elaborate propellors of the ’copters. Pointless. We did have one emergency ship with anemic rockets, but it couldn’t carry much because of the heavy pumps it needed. The name of the game was freight, so the only practical way was to tow them where we were going.

Oh, there were plans for other ships, free roaming ones to explore, but not then. When you confront an empty planet, you need patience.

As he started the vacuum pump, he turned on the external mike, and we heard the whine of the pumps unnaturally quiet in the thin air, as they started their extraction of the cylinder. Under that was the amplified swoosh of the wind rising and falling like the water in a mountain stream. Then, as the pressure in the steel cylinder fell, and the thin air pressed in, you could hear the protesting flex of metal. It reminded me of the sounds of the truss in the Rockship as it stressed when building up to speed. It could have been a bit scary, but I knew that the envelope had been designed for it. I had done that. It was stronger than the maximum pressure it was likely to meet. I had never heard it before because I was too busy when we first launched the ships at the mine. Bee and Lou had stood by for that.

Lou continued his running commentary of the operation for Chantelle’s vlog:

“I am starting up the vacuum pump on the Marineris now. It is a small pump for economy reasons, just big enough to maintain vacuum, so it will take a while before we get flotation. In the meantime, I am running the constructor over to position it in front of the hitch we will use to tow it. I am keeping the stays in place so that it remains solidly on the crib until I get enough vacuum for minimum flotation. That will keep everything stable and ensure that the ship rises evenly when I release the clamps. They are spring loaded, and the electromagnets open them. Passive safety, that’s the ticket. They outperform active ones where it counts. There is always a chance for power to fail, but physical properties don’t. Less is more.”

You could see the little constructor wheel up to the huge ship, but you couldn’t see anything happening by looking at the tube that loomed over the grey box, shallow in comparison to the huge cylinder. Changes in internal pressure were invisible to the observer. Under that plain box was the deck of the load bed with its perimeter retaining walls. Piled on the freight bed and restrained by tiedowns was the cargo. Huge arches, packs of pylons, bags of concrete, rails, and all the other constituents of the first few kilometers of track. It was a trifling load for our huge freight mover. It was not fancy. Nothing was painted. Everything was utilitarian. The fancy touches were for Chantelle. She was applying the software skins which would show the ship in glorious color with its distinctive lettering when it appeared on the blog. For maneuvering purposes, that is an unnecessary distraction.

“I have now connected the cable we will be using to tow the ship to the hitch, and I am using the winch to tighten the cable. I will wait until the strain gauge and pressure sensors inside the cylinder indicate that we have flotation. The cables have strain gauges on them, so I can tell when the bag is ready to lift. I can’t let it go too far or it will lift my little drone up off its wheels before I am even aware of it. It’s a heavy-duty lifter when you put it through its paces. We are not going to be doing that today. All we want to do is tow it to the anchor at the end of the train track so that we can connect it to the train for the trip to Lowell.

“I’m watching the gauges and it’s almost ready to lift. This is the test. If I disappear into the stratosphere, you’ll know I did it wrong.”

Lou was a natural showman. There was no chance he would lift off. Even if he did, he wasn’t in the constructor anyway. We had gone through the whole operation several times in the simulator, and we knew we had planned it right. He was injecting some suspense into his story. It’s funny how many people you think are undemonstrative become entertainers once you mount them on the stage. The urge to impress others seems to be innate in most people.

He hooked up that huge ship, let it rise smoothly off its crib, and he pulled it like a toddler will pull a large, inflated toy. This time, though, the size was so disproportionate that the picture of the tiny constructor and the enormous ship defied belief. On Earth, with a hundred times the air pressure, any slight breeze would have blown that huge cylinder with so much force that the tiny constructor would have been overwhelmed. He still needed to cope with inertia, which was the same on Mars as anywhere. That made it necessary to do everything very slowly to maintain control. Here, on Mars, pulling a large, wind sensitive object with a small tractor was possible. The winds here were kitten weak. It would make an arresting image for our viewers on Earth. Damn, I designed it and I could hardly believe what we could do. What a picture it would make behind the train!

“Now I am tensioning the tow rope with my winch, and simultaneously raising the ship off its moorings. If you listen carefully, you will hear the clamps flip open in a ragged shot after the electromagnets pull out the bolts and open the clamps. Now, the ship is rising smoothly and evenly, according to plan. I am going to dial back the vacuum pump to maintain pressure when the ship gets to five meters off the ground. Then I will lock my wheels and pull the ship straight ahead with the winch. That’s good. It has taken a bit to counter its inertia. I will unlock my brakes and pull it slowly now that it is moving. I will keep it moving slowly and lock the cable to ease the strain on the winch. It’s moving nicely, and you see it’s not affected by the wind like it would be on Earth. You might think I am being overly cautious moving this behemoth so slowly, but I must always think of how much heavier it is than my little engine. You saw how hard it was to get it moving. It is equally hard to stop it. That’s the reason for the care I take. We are going so slow that I won’t bore you with the whole journey. It will take an hour, with this thing creeping along ever so slowly. I will catch you at the end of the trip.”

Then he shut down the vid to concentrate on moving his ship. For almost an hour he carefully manipulated it until it was approaching the mooring mast we had set up at the end of the train tracks. I stood in Lou’s doorway and watched its movements. Although I had seen the towing process many times during the building and mining operations for Mars Mining, I had never had the opportunity to observe a free riding ship for such a long time. It seemed to me to be too good a research opportunity to miss. I was going to be designing a line of twenty such ships to travel great distances with the precious lives of the passengers at stake, and I needed to know whether there were instabilities in its movement. What I saw gave me no cause to worry that prevailing weather conditions would pose any problem. The ship moved straight and sure after the tiny tractor. I posed that question to him.

“Lou, it seems to be going exactly according to plan. Can you feel any turbulence from the wind or any wobbling or shifting due to the movement of cargo?”

The tone of his reply was distracted. But its timing was prompt and positive.

“The strain gauges are flat, the pump is easily capable of maintaining the vacuum for lift, and the thing moves predictably and evenly. There has been no shifting of the cargo. None. The only concern I have is that it’s a lot of mass for my little baby to pull. If something happens, I can’t stop it. That’s why it is taking me so long. I am now changing the pace from slow to glacial. As we pull up to the hitching post, and I need to slow to a stop, we will replace out whether this will turn out well. Stopping, not going, is the challenge.”

We watched, Chantelle suddenly interested, bunched up beside me in the doorway to Lou’s tiny screen filled cubby. The ship floated like an iceberg, inching slowly up to the reinforced pylon that was its hitching post. Lou extended the telescoping pole of his remote manipulator and slid the clip into the grommet at the top. We could hear the loud click as its spring closure secured it to the eye of the pylon. The ship continued inexorably forward ever so slowly until its nose bumped up against the sturdy post. We had calculated what force it would need to arrest, and we had set the pylon in concrete and cinched together several of them to agglomerate their strength.

It still wasn’t enough. No matter how slowly the ship was moving, it was still a very weighty object. It had the inertia of that mass, so when it bumped against the posts, it bent them slightly in a screech of metal. Nothing was broken, but there was a lot of flexing. Then, gradually, the tail of the ship swung around to its right and continued rear first. It flowed forward, still skewing slowly counterclockwise until it was arrested by the deforming grommet after it had made a half rotation. It pulled on the post, then, in the other direction, with more sounds of tortured metal until it stopped. It floated innocently in place, as if nothing had happened, like a dog that had crapped inside.

Because of the possibility of looming catastrophe if the ship broke free, I was exhilarated when it stopped. We hadn’t broken anything. There was never danger of personal injury because there were no people there, and even if there had been, the post wasn’t precisely at the end of the track. I had followed standard practices and isolated a potentially dangerous operation. There were five hundred meters of leeway between it and the Junction. It had been placed beside the track with clearance to draw up the train beside it. Our simulations were incomplete. We were very lucky that there were no structures in necessary proximity as there would be at Lowell.

Many times, in my career, I had learned that luck was just as good as foresight. We were the beneficiaries of fool’s luck there, perhaps, but results were what counted. This world had demonstrated to us that we had forgotten many of the lessons that our ancestors had so painfully learned. We had loaded the trusses symmetrically, piled on top of one another with the preponderance of the weight, the arches of the trusses, aligned to the right. That had saved us time and materials, but although they were well secured, there was more weight to the right than to the left. We had piled the cement, pylons, and such on the left, but, although the imbalance wasn’t extreme, there was a difference. Added to that, I thought, was the picayune Martian wind on a vast surface that I, and my colleagues, had discounted. We had forgotten that, while it might have negligible force, it was still there.

We would probably replace, in analysis, that multiple factors had rotated our ship when it was restrained. We would need to run wind tunnel tests before we settled on the final configuration of our ships. We might replace that streamlining was necessary after all, in addition to a strict loading protocol. Maybe there was documentation surviving from the age of Zeppelins that would help teach us those long-forgotten lessons.

We had built the same kind of line for the mine. We were the experts. It’s when you think you have nothing to learn that you can learn the most. There was a new minefield of problems revealed by this little accident. We had run a low-speed line for bulk materials, and we thought that a high-speed mixed-use line using the same technology would be much the same.

Lou was contrite:

“What went wrong, Mo? It was supposed to be easy. Did I mess it up?”

“Don’t worry about it, Lou. No harm done. A practically free reminder that we haven’t learned all the lessons. You did well. Just right. It’s bad luck that turned good. It’s probably due to balance, loading and the wind. We’ll replace out when we test the design. We had prevailing westerlies that were strong today. Usually, that would make no difference. It never has, but we have almost always been working with captive ships controlled at both ends. Today we were pulling from the front and there was no restraint at the rear. Small forces that were added together did it. All you need to do now is install a rear pylon and secure it with another cable pulling from the pylon. No traction problems this time. In the meantime, it’s not going anyplace.”

“Are we going to redo the approach so that we can get a clean picture for Chantelle? This one doesn’t make us look so good.”

“We’re never going to do that, Lou. It’s straight down the centre for us. I learned long ago that you can’t hide anything these days. Especially if people want to replace something on you. It’s way better to be out in front so you can give them your version. It looks much worse to try to hide it than just to admit it. And most of the time, like this time, it’s not so bad. People will accept it. We didn’t suffer a setback today. We got a bonus. This is going to let us run a safer, more reliable line. Let’s run it as it happened. Trying a redo might give us other problems. You would need to turn the ship around in the wind two times. Let’s not. It’s even a plus for us from an image standpoint. So much is falsified these days that we’ll be more credible if we admit a few faults. Minor ones. If they try to slam us, we have an answer. Care and preparation will do it.”

Chantelle, just beside me, and ever willing to offer an opinion, agreed.

“She’s right, Lou. If you’ve ever read the fanpages and sites, you will see that every possible rumor gets airing. We have two thousand people here. We’re streaming this locally. You think it’s impossible that any one of them won’t see that we are straightening the pylons we bent or putting another set in at the rear and pipe up? If you think someone won’t ask why or come up with another answer, you’re not the smart guy you are. The only way to avoid that is to be up front always, even when it’s embarrassing. Especially when it’s embarrassing. If they think we’re faking our videopac, no-one will watch us. And you won’t get them back. It’s never worth the risk, even if you are willing to do stuff like that.”

“That’s that, then.” I said. “Let’s get on with it.”