She was a tiny gossamer aircraft, as light as plastic ribs and Mylar skin could make her. The heaviest part of the soarplane was the miniature electric engine that drove her lazily purring propeller. The engine was powered by solar cells of plastic and silicon that hugged the curves of the soarplane’s broad long wings, converting the plentiful Martian sunlight into electricity steadily, noiselessly, as she flew through the clean, bright, thin atmosphere of Mars.
The soarplane’s official designation was RPV-1. There was an RPV-2 stowed in the cargo bay of one of the unmanned landers, wings folded, patiently waiting its turn to fly. Connors had his own name for the plane, however. He called it Little Beauty. And that is the way he thought of her.
To him, Little Beauty was a thing of delight. Connors luxuriated in the feel of her controls in his hands, the broad beautiful expansive views of the passing Martian landscape he could see in panorama all around him.
One section of the view suddenly went blank. The video screen there hinged upward and Paul Abell’s frog-eyed face appeared, high forehead wrinkled quizzically.
“Aren’t you coming out for lunch?” Abell asked his fellow astronaut.
Connors shook his head. “Naw, I’m having too much fun with her. Could you make me a sandwich?”
Abell glanced at the control panel and the other video screens with their views of the distant Martian landscape. “Okay. But I want a turn with her, too, you know.”
“Later,” Connors muttered. “You can fly her on the leg back.”
Abell looked doubtful, but he lowered the screen back down into its place. Connors felt alone again, as if he were actually soaring over Chryse Planitia, the Plain of Gold, instead of sitting inside the dome of the base in the teleoperator mockup of the soarplane’s cockpit.
In an electronic sense Connors truly was flying his Little Beauty. He was linked so thoroughly to the remotely piloted vehicle that he felt every tremor of her slender frame, every slight gust of air buoying up her gossamer wings. Nearly a thousand kilometers separated plane from pilot, but Connors was as much in control of RPV-1 as if the tiny plane actually were carrying him through the sky.
The engineers called it teleoperation, the technique of linking man and machine electronically even though they were not physically together. Thanks to teleoperation, an aircraft could range thousands of kilometers across Mars without the need to carry a pilot and all the life-support equipment that a human operator requires. The pilot could remain safely on the ground or in one of the orbiting spacecraft while the plane braved the unknown dangers of the unexplored planet.
Deep in his mind Connors felt almost the exact opposite of the symptoms of space adaptation syndrome. In zero gravity your ears screamed that you were falling while your eyes told you that you were safely bundled inside a spacecraft cabin. Flying Little Beauty, Connors’s eyes told him he was soaring ten miles high, but his butt and all his other body senses reminded him that he was sitting on the ground.
Never mind. He smiled boyishly to himself. This is as good as it’s going to get here on this rust ball. Good enough for now. Not bad for a minister’s son. He remembered his first flights in the backseat of an ancient crop duster’s biplane over the flat wheat fields of Nebraska. Everything square and neat, precise. The barren red ground below him now had never known the touch of human purpose.
Abell opened the hatch abruptly and stuck in a badly made sandwich as he asked again for a turn at the controls. Connors put him off and once more shut himself inside the cockpit.
Far down below he saw a shadow of darker red inching across the barren land. He banked the little plane slightly to get a better view of the ground.
A dust storm. Big one. Must be several hundred kilometers across its front. Connors knew that whatever his cameras saw was automatically relayed to the ships up in orbit and, through them, back to Earth. He made some mental calculations of his own, anyway, and spoke into the microphone of his headset. Toshima would appreciate all the information he could get; the Japanese meteorologist was trying to build a network of weather sensors all around the planet.