The Pyramids of Elysium

By John Gibson

Dr James Cameron’s obsession with Mars began when he was just thirteen and a half years old. That was when he met Ken: an extraordinary, enigmatic and charismatic man with an incredible tale to tell. A tale of Barsoom and of pyramids and of flying saucers in the desert.
Now, aged 52, Jim heads up project Endeavour, a team of scientists using a robotic rover to search for evidence of life on the red planet. And Endeavour is starting to find strange things up there on the Martian surface...

• Language: English
• Publisher: John Gibson
• Release date: Jun 10, 2015
• ISBN: 9781310772030

John Gibson

John Gibson is the author of several short stories. He is fifty-three years old and lives in the north-west of England with his long-suffering partner Sue and their two pet rabbits Dominic and Doodle.

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The Pyramids of Elysium

by

John Gibson

All rights reserved

Copyright 2014 by John Gibson

15th September 2019

The seven minutes of terror had begun. Fifteen miles up a dull metallic disc, perhaps ten feet in diameter, fell silently towards the Martian surface. As it descended the tenuous atmosphere gently tickled its convex underside, warming it, tugging at it, slowing it down. Every now and again a small jet of flame would erupt from one of the circular holes that ringed its upper surface, nudging it left or right, up or down, adjusting its attitude, its angle of attack. Down it fell, down and down towards the barren red desert below.

Dr James Campbell, Senior Mission Scientist on the Endeavour Lander Project, was standing in the ‘Centre of the Universe’. That was the unofficial name that Jet Propulsion Laboratory employees gave to the small balcony at the rear of the Mission Control Centre. In front of him lay the banks of monitors, each topped with a small plaque carrying an enigmatic little acronym. Some he understood; FIDO was the Flight Dynamics Officer. But others: INCO, EGIL, who knew? GPO, Surely not General Post Office, he thought sardonically. The technicians manning the monitors all wore crisp, white, short-sleeved shirts, each one adorned with the NASA logo. Beyond the technicians lay the giant floor to ceiling screens displaying the current mission status: ‘CONTACT LOST’.

The seven minutes of terror they called it, and Jim thought that sounded about right. He couldn’t recall having ever been so scared before in his life. Endeavour had begun its descent into the Martian atmosphere and they wouldn’t hear from it again for seven minutes. For at least seven minutes, he corrected himself. At the end of that long, long, seven minutes, if all had gone well, the lander would be sitting safely on the Martian surface and it would send them a message, via the Endeavour Orbiter and the Parkes Radio Telescope in Australia, to let them know that all was well. Of course the other possibility, too horrible to contemplate, was that they wouldn’t get a message after seven minutes, that they wouldn’t get a message at all. That the lander would be lying in a million pieces in the bottom of its own, freshly excavated impact crater.

Jim ran a slightly shaky hand though his greying hair. His palms were sweaty and he could feel his heart thudding away in his chest. He took a deep breath and exhaled slowly, trying to calm himself down. And, of course, he thought, there was one more thing. One more little thing. And this one was the kicker! This one could really mess with your head! Because whatever was going to happen had already happened! It took seventeen and a half minutes for the radio signals to get bounced from Earth to Mars and back again. In reality Endeavour had begun its descent about a quarter of an hour ago. It might already be sitting pretty on the Martian surface, or it might have crashed and burned over ten minutes ago. There was no way to tell. Not yet.

Eight miles up now. The atmosphere was thicker here, it no longer tickled at the falling vehicle, it now tore at it, ripped at it, impeded its progress. It was like falling through treacle. Its bulging underbelly, heated by friction with the thin Martian air, burned hotter than the Sun - it was vaporised and glowed with a fierce orange light as it burned a supersonic trail across the salmon-pink skies.

On Jim’s left stood Helen Peterson, the Flight Controller. She was a tall, attractive woman, maybe thirty-five years old, with dark shoulder-length hair. She wore a smart powder blue dress and a NASA lanyard from which about half a dozen security passes hung. Helen had spent ten years as a Navy Test pilot and she had, Jim thought, that cool calm confident can-do attitude you only see in pilots. It was an attitude you saw a lot in the NASA people, it seemed to say, ‘give me a job to do and I’ll do it, you don’t need to come check on me, it’ll be done. Then I’ll come right back and say what next boss?’

Jim liked Helen. He trusted her. Had confidence in her. He thought, if anyone could get his lander safely down on the red-planet, it was her. But right now Helen was staring at the big board with its ‘CONTACT LOST’ message and she was wearing a tight-lipped little frown.

Six miles above the desolate red plain, and now a giant, red and white, silk canopy bloomed above the falling craft, arresting its downwards motion. A few seconds later its underside, the scorched and blackened heat-shield, fell away. It would smash into the desert about a minute later. Now, for the first time, the lander itself was exposed, six insect-like legs, each terminating in a stubby wheel, dangled from beneath the upper portion of the disc. The parachute flapped lazily in the thin Martian air with its ungainly burden swinging, pendulum like, beneath it. The ground came up to meet it. Fast...too fast!

On Jim’s other side, his left, stood Hank Pasco. Hank was a big likeable Texan and was dressed today, as always, in check shirt, faded blue jeans and cowboy boots. Around his neck, along with the standard NASA lanyard weighed down with passes, he wore a boot-lace tie. The brown leather belt at his waist sported a large silver buckle carrying the legend ‘Don’t Mess with Texas’. Jim thought he looked nervous. To be fair, everyone in the room looked nervous to some degree now, but he thought Hank looked haggard. He looked tired, Jim thought, like he might not have slept well for the last few nights.

Hank was head of the Lander Engineering Team. He and his hundred and fifty strong team of engineers, the brightest and best that NASA could find, had been responsible for coming up with a plan for getting Endeavour safely down on the Martian surface. And what a plan they had come up with! It was bold plan. It was an audacious plan. It was, as Hank himself had told Jim, slapping him on the back and giving him the benefit of his big, wide Texas grin, ‘a balls-out, bug-eyed, crazy motherfucker of a plan!’ But Hank wasn’t grinning now. Like everyone else he was looking at the big board. ‘CONTACT LOST’.

Only two miles to go now. There was a sudden report, the sound of eight explosive bolts all blowing in unison, and now the lander fell from beneath the upper hemisphere and its supporting parachute. It was an ungainly looking contraption. The six insectile legs hung from a squat rectangular body with numerous protuberances housing instruments and experiments. At one end a stubby cylinder supported the rectangular metal ‘head’ bristling with cameras and other sensors. Attached to the top of the vehicle was a hexagonal metal framework which Hank had dubbed ‘The Flying Bedstead.’ It had a rocket-motor at each corner.

The whole assembly was in free-fall now. It fell for over half a mile towards the desolate red landscape below. Then the rocket-motors fired up.

His Lander. Jim always thought of Endeavour as his lander. He couldn’t help it. He’d been Senior Mission Scientist on the project since its inception eighteen years ago. Eighteen Years, he thought, he’d been a relatively young man, a mere thirty-four years of age back then. The Endeavour Lander had been a major part of his life for nearly two decades. Indeed, since the death of Dianne, his wife, eleven years ago, it had been his whole life. If Endeavour failed to make a safe landing he didn’t know what he’d do. He was fifty-five years old now but in poor health. Nobody on the project knew it, but last year he’d been diagnosed with a liposarcoma, the doctors had given him less than two years. So, if the mission failed, he thought, there would probably be nothing for it but to go home and wait to die. But if it were a success, if the lander made it down, if all the systems fired up, if everything worked as it should: then there would be data, work to do, a reason to live. He could probably carry on for another year at least, maybe more, before his symptoms became too bad, before they became noticeable.

And of course there was always the other thing. The thing Jim thought of as his real mission objective. The