Page 117 - An Evening with Maxwell's Daemons

You Can’t Go Home Again
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“Okay, I have another,” said Brad Razeberry. “This is your basic
down-to-the-wire life-or-death space opera thriller. The first team
of Mars colonizers has been assembled, trained and launched. This
group of young married couples will primarily be passengers until
their vessel approaches its destination, a dry lake bed with
subsurface water detected by earlier missions. Then they will take
command and pilot their ship the rest of the way down. Off they
go, to great fanfare, the first humans to colonize another planet.
Typical stuff, been around for decades; that means I can minimize
the build-up to the real story here: a crisis occurring a quarter of the
way to Mars.”
“Suddenly they lose radio contact with Earth. No signals in, and
their transmissions aren’t getting any response. They call a meeting
of the entire complement, twenty highly-trained astronauts,
engineers and scientists. They are not easily panicked—nervous
types don’t volunteer or are rejected for such missions, after all. So
it will not, at least at first, be an emotionally strained discussion.
The leader of the expedition, Captain Carson, lays out the facts to
make sure everyone is on the same page. The ship is operating
normally and they are on track to land as scheduled, but they
cannot communicate with their base. Radio gear is packed in the
hold, but they cannot access it until they land. He asks the other
nineteen for suggestions—hang on, I’ll be soliciting yours in a
minute. Unexpected problems, particularly those not threatening
their immediate safety, are within their competence to solve. The
electronics experts want to go over the radio to see if any of the
accessible components have failed and can be replaced with spares
in their kit. The captain agrees, and calls for another meeting in two
hours. The techs return to that assembly with a shocking discovery:
the radio had been disabled intentionally, its circuitry burned out by
a battery-operated device attached to a timer.”

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