Mars Slapstick

Nobody can hear a scream in the vacuum of space, or so they say. Nobody can hear you weep. Clint wept. Tears streamed. He could feel them pool near the corners of his nose. His nose began to run and that was a problem. He couldn’t blow his nose. He could only snort and swallow.

No tissue. No handkerchief.

You can’t blow your nose in Comfort Assurance Resource Environment Suit (CARE Suit) helmet. The face shield prevented it. The mouth and nose piece didn’t deal with it.

They had assured him the passengers had never needed a helmet, mouth or nose piece. There had never been a loss of pressure event (they called it LOPE) in any of Starship Mark 4 launches or transits. But, full CARE Suits were required for launch. Clint wished he could use his own suit. ”Comfort Assurance” - what a crock!

This wasn’t even his first time. It was his second.

He had been to Earth’s moon; spent enough time to rejected it as a place to prospect after what he saw and heard from individual prospectors.

Individual prospectors could never really own a tract of land on the moon. They could only be a minority share holder; nation-states and industrial giants owned the majority share. It was too much like the split-estate wrangling his family had to deal with in Wyoming.

So he was going somewhere else. Prospecting on a tract that would be his. His stake. His land.

Like so many prospectors he looked forward to this potential, yet to be discovered, in the unknown.

But that meant leaving.

Leaving behind his land, his friends, and the still too recent graves.

Preparation for departure took months. It might have taken years. Clint used the family trustees to speed things up. Men and women he could trust - his father had trusted, his family had trusted. I was mutual. These families had known each other for generations.

The trustees knew his need to leave. They accepted it. They tried to talk him out of it. But the memories, the loss was too raw, too deep. Everywhere he went was a raw memory.

So he was going somewhere else. Somewhere his family, let alone any family had ever been.

And it took money. Lots of money. Oh he could have volunteered like a common grunt and indentured himself to some consortium. But he had the resources, the money, the education and now, sadly, no ties to family.

He was the last of his line. It wasn’t so a few years ago, but it was now. And the sad story was something he had re-live everywhere he went

So he had to escape. Start new. Invest in something different. Wild. Crazy.

Clint was going to prospect for minerals, water, oil, anything useful for building a civilization on Mars, for Mars.

Clint had trained for a moon visit. Lunar visits were getting a bit simpler than decades earlier, but there was still months of training involved. The lunar surface was unforgiving. The vacuum of space is unforgiving. So training was an imperative. And so was health.

Clint had been checked out, inoculated, poked, prodded. The worst part was getting your teeth permanently fixed. Dental work was crude on the moon, and even cruder on Mars. So, if you were going to go, then better have good teeth. It was worse than having braces, much worse. But now he wouldn’t have to think about that anymore - check box.

Clint’s biggest effort was lists of what to bring. And then subtracting from the list so he had enough, but not too much.

Personal affects were easy. He’d been to the moon for a time, so he could reflect on what was needed, nice and make for normal, what ever normal would mean. It was the machinery he had to keep going over.

He was bringing prospecting robots. They weren’t humanoid. They were tracked crawlers adapted from earth and moon prospecting robots. He had to bring enough machinery to support and maintain them. How many spares should he bring? What parts could he manufacture with his laser sinter? What could not be manufactured? It was exhausting, thrilling and scary. And he didn’t share his list, because it was a competitive advantage.

Clint knew he was the only guy going off half-cocked to prospect on Mars. And he wasn’t about to give anyone else an advantage while on earth.

The robots were equipped with the latest AI. Clint had augmented them with Mars geology and safety attributes, like gravity parameters. Clint expected he would have to do continuous updates to the AI once he made it to Mars. He established a communication trust with the trustees and described what he would expect of them to assist with the periodic updates.

What Clint didn’t know, what was what no one knew. Events would make drastic changes for all the Starships in transit, all the communication satellites, especially the QLs - Quantum Lagrange satellites, and earth, and Mars. The most trivial result was Clint’s three prospecting robots got named, most appropriately, Larry, Moe and Curly.