Scouts on Mars
How the Discoveries of One Young Scout Rocked the Planets!
Troop #1, literally the very first Scout troop on Mars, has had a long and exciting history. Founded by Tycho Musk, grandson to the chief mover and shaker of Martian colonization, Tycho had made a name for himself as the driving force for Martian independence. Although he didn’t live to see it, his work as the creator of the current Martian education system left his mark by forming the youth who eventually grew up to fight for independence.
The war would have been short and anything but sweet, with a crushing defeat for the people of Mars, were it not for Youth Scout Troop #1. Their discovery, or the discovery by one of their scouts, changed everything. We’ll get to that, but first a little clarification for you Earthlings about the way things work on Mars.
The first thing to know has to do with time. Mars takes about twice as long to circle the sun, so the Martian calendars has 24 months, rather than 12. Like Earth, there are four seasons: spring, summer, autumn and winter, but unlike Earth, where each season is approximately 3 months long, on Mars each season lasts for 6 months.
On Mars, the year begins in the middle of spring, the first month of the year being Chunfen, and the first month of spring being Lichun, which is the 22nd month of the 24-month year. So New Years Sol is the 1st of Chunfen, smack dab in the middle of spring. Had it been in the middle of summer, say the 1st of Qiufen, it would at least been familiar to those from Earth’s southern hemisphere, but Mars just has a way of being different.
Another thing to know about the Martian calendar, is that each month is 28 sols, which is what a day is called on Mars — every month except the 6th month, which has only 27 sols, and on leap years, the last month of the year, Jingzhe, adds a sol, making it 28 sols that year.
Also, a Martian sol is 88,775.245 seconds long, while an Earth day is 86,400, making a sol about 40 minutes longer.
So why do I tell you this? Because the sols are long and the nights are cold — really cold — on Mars. Winters seem to last forever, and truly, you don’t know winter until you’ve experienced a Martian winter. At the Martian poles, winter temperatures drop to a stunning minus 123 degrees Celsius (minus 190 degrees Fahrenheit). Now you might say these numbers are before all the terraforming took place, but believe me when I tell you, we’ll be terraforming long after anyone ever remembers who built the first Martian settlement. At this point, a mere Martian century after terraforming began, it has had little to no effect. If it weren’t for the technology to build massive structures underground and beneath surface domes, there’d be no Martian civilization.
Maybe we will become green one sol. Maybe we won’t. Humanity would have to last that long, or remain in this solar system, both of those prospects are similarly remote.
As for school, you can imagine with a calendar like ours, school runs a bit differently here. The winter months are so bitterly cold that it is impossible for anyone to do anything outdoors, except for those industrial workers who have the proper gear and equipment to brave the environment.
Truth be told, spring and autumn aren’t much better. Temperatures in those two seasons are more like a mild to normal winter on Earth in the temperate zones. That leaves summer as a Martian’s best chance to stretch one’s legs and enjoy time out of doors.
So it was in the summer, back in the year 2080/1, in the month of Dashu, just as summer was beginning to fade into autumn, that Troop #1 found itself exploring the Philadelphia Crater in the norther hemisphere, west of Musk City. It’s really just a tiny impact crater only 1.65 kilometers in diameter. There are thousands just like it, as well as tens of thousands more that are either smaller or larger. This particular crater was being considered by the Youth Scouts of Mars as a possible location of a new Youth Scout Base Camp. Troop #1 had the honor of checking it out ahead of any other troops.
Scoutmaster Derrick Dyson, great-grandson of one of Mar’s first explorers, Tracy Caldwell Dyson, had the kids set up camp on the crater’s south-eastern rim, where they would get the maximum amount of solar heat, with the least loss of distance to Musk City. A camp consist of foamcrete domes, which were created using inflatable bladders, which were then crisscrossed with wire, for structural integrity, then encased in the quick setting spray on foamcrete, after which the bladders were deflated by recompressing the bladders. Tubing for electric and life support were run along the interior surface, before the inside was sealed with a second application of foamcrete from the inside. After than an airlock was added, and air pump installed. The entire troop could fit in one of these, but following the rules, a minimum of two were built, a distance apart, and the troop divided into two. This meant that if something should fail in one dome, there was a safe place to go, or at least, someone would live to tell the story.
Setting up base took two entire sols, which was really the second and third sols, because the first one had been spent traveling. They’d slept that night in the four rovers they’d ridden in.
So on sol four, they entered the crater itself, which takes its name from the American city of Philadelphia, all the way back in 1979. As far as Tycho knew, theirs were the first boots on the ground here. He’d chosen Philadelphia because he liked the name, and because his mother had gone to school there when she attended the University of Pennsylvania. His mother was an Earthling by birth, while his father’s family descended from the Founders. They’d met on some shuttle flight back when his father used to crew the shuttles. She had been part of a delegation to Amazonia as part of the Martian Free Trade Initiative. While the talks were a bust, the budding romance was not and the rest, as they say, is history.
Now the scouts single-filed off the ridge, choosing their steps carefully. Dyson had chosen a challenging, but safe entrance down to the crater floor. The incline was steep, but not sheer, and there were plenty of switchbacks. He sent one of the rovers ahead to meet them at the bottom. It wouldn’t do to have a kiddo critically injured and no way to get out of the crater in a hurry.
It took them the better part of two hours to reach the crater floor, but, at last, they arrived, in need of a break before they began to explore. Troop #1 consisted of five patrols of about 8 or 9 boys and girls, each with a senior patrol leader, and assistant senior patrol leader, a patrol leader and his or her assistant. At that rate, everyone in the patrol had a position and a title to go with it. Raymond Miller was the sole scout in the Ganymede Patrol who had neither title nor position. It wasn’t that he wasn’t capable, it was that he was always inside his own head. Any question put to him would have to be asked multiple times, to solicit a response. When at last he did respond, he bore the expression of one returning from some far off place.
Some thought him stupid, and they were dreadfully wrong. Some few suspected that he might be brilliant, but had nothing to substantiate their hunch. It was no wonder, as he spoke but little, and when he did, the things he said made no sense to most of the boys around him. The truth was that Raymond’s IQ was off the charts, but so were his shyness and social awkwardness. His single mother, the lead scientist on the Martian Genesis Project, had lured him into the scouts with the promise of access to whatever heady reading material he might want. Her hope was that the scouts would help Raymond learn to socialize. It did not.
Raymond was no athlete. His sedentary lifestyle of spending hours on end reading, put him at the bottom of any team roster. So, on this sol, he was the last one to set foot upon Philadelphia’s rocky floor. The other boys of the troop, had hunkered down to rest, each in their own patrol.
One advantage to coming down slowly was that Raymond, unlike his compatriots, was not exhausted, and the wonder of being in a previously unexplored place filled him with renewed energy. So he began to drift, slowly, farther and farther from the resting troop, as he explored the amazing geography that was Philadelphia.
He had wandered a couple of click from the rest, when he first noticed the seam of oddly iridescent rock formed in the side of the crater. It was not a rock or mineral he recognized, which is saying something, as Raymond had a large collection of data stored in his head and perfect recall to access it. The seam was above his head, with no ready access to reach it. He had no tool to chip away, in order to retrieve a sample. So, scanning the ground, he was relieved to find a few loose rocks with the same iridescence. Stooping down he lifted the surprisingly heavy rock, which was not bigger than his hand, and placed it in his sample bag.
When the troop caught up with him, Raymond was duly scolded for wandering off by himself, and for the rest of the trip, Scoutmaster Dyson kept him on a short leash. It never occurred to Raymond to share his find with Dyson, or anyone else in his patrol or in the troop. Once they’d collected the data Dyson was seeking, they secured their campsite, and headed back to Musk City. Dyson liked what he saw and fully intended to develop Philadelphia as a scouting facility. however, Raymond’s little discovery changed everything. Not just for Dyson and his Troop #1, but for every Martian going forward.
At home, Raymond shared his rock with his mother, who, although not as brilliant as her son, was no slacker either, recognized it as something unknown. She asked Raymond if she could share it with her colleagues. He agreed, but only if he could be part of the study. She agreed.
So, the rock was brought to work, as was Raymond, and soon became all the buzz. Geologist were brought in, and began analyzing the rock. The first discovery was that it was, in fact, not a rock at all. It was a Martian gemstone or mineral, more akin to a diamond. It was found to contain properties making it even more valuable than a diamond — harder, stronger, heavier, more durable, and to many, much more beautiful. where a diamond shone in simple colors, raymonds, which is what they came to be called, shone in multiple colors at once — a rainbow of colors.
Over time, this stone became the chief export of the Martian colonies, and perhaps, one of the chief forces behind their demand of independence. Raymonds funded the revolution, and as the focal point and magnifier for lasers, developed first on Mars, it gave them superior weaponry and a great advantage in the struggle for freedom.
In the year 2105/6, the Martian colonies managed to beat the combined forces of Earth and Luna, with the help of the Belt and several of the moons of Jupiter. Raymond Chandler, by that time a brilliant scientist in his own right, had built his entire career around his research of raymonds. He was the one who found that they intensified laser beams on a exponential scale, and he helped develop the first laser pistols, using yet another mineral that he discovered on subsequent field trips. This one proved to be able to store incredible amounts of energy and mind bogglingly, put out more energy than it received. As this was previously thought impossible, Miller dubbed that new mineral vis inpossibilis , or or impossible power, but most people referred to it a donatus from the Greek for strong. These two discoveries and their subsequent technologies were both born of one Young Scout from Troop #1. Combined, they made the Martian forces formidable in the field, and they were enough to convince the powers that be it would be better to pursue peace than war. So it was, in month of Jingzhe, that Earth called for a permanent ceasefire, and diplomats did their thing, forging not only peace, but creating a new peace organization, the United Planets, the solar equivalent of the United Nations.
So, Earthling, when you cough up the big bucks to buy that raymond ring for your loved one, or strap on your laser side arm, or even drive in your electric drone that comes fully charged from the factory and never requires another charge for as long as you own it, remember Raymond Miller and the Young Scouts of Mars, Troop #1. And when you get a chance, take a vacation on Mars. It may not be green, but it is definitely an adventure!
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