The Martian

One Associated Press camera team was permitted. The rest of the media would have to satisfy themselves with the live AP feed, and await a press conference.

Venkat turned to Bruce. “God damn, Bruce. You really pulled a rabbit out of your hat this time! Good work!”

 “I’m just the director,” Bruce said modestly. “Thank the guys who got all this shit working.”

“Oh I will!” Venkat beamed. “But first I have to talk to my new best friend!”

Turning to the headsetted man at the communications console, Venkat asked “What’s you’re name, new best friend?”

“Tim,” he said, not taking his eyes off the screen.

“What now?” Venkat asked.

“We sent the return telemetry automatically. It’ll get there in just over 11 minutes. Once it does, Pathfinder will start high-gain transmissions. So it’ll be 22 minutes till we hear from it again.”

“Venkat’s got a doctorate in physics, Tim,” Bruce said, “You don’t need to explain transmission time to him.”

Tim shrugged. “You can never tell with managers.”

“What was in the transmission we got?” Venkat asked.

“Just the bare bones. A hardware self check. It’s got a lot of “nonfunctional” systems, cause they were on the panels Watney removed.”

“What about the camera?”

“It says the imager’s working. We’ll have it take a panorama as soon as we can.”

LOG ENTRY: SOL 97

It worked!

Holy fucking shit it worked!

I just checked the Lander. The high gain antenna is angled directly at Earth! Pathfinder has no way of knowing where it is, so it has no way of knowing where Earth is. The only way for it to find out is getting a signal.

They know I’m alive!

Happy dance, happy dance, I’m doin’ the happy dance!

All right. Enough happy dance. Time to make with the communicatin’!

“We received the high-gain response just over half an hour ago,” Venkat said to the assembled press. “We immediately directed Pathfinder to take a panoramic image. Hopefully, Watney has some kind of message for us. Questions?”

The sea of reporters raised their hands.

“Cathy, let’s start with you,” Venkat said, pointing her out.

“Thanks,” she said. “Have you had any contact with the Sojourner rover?”

“Unfortunately, no,” he replied. “The Lander hasn’t been able to connect to Sojourner, and we have no way to contact it directly.”

“What might be wrong with Sojourner?”

“I can’t even speculate,” Venkat said. “After spending that long on Mars, anything could be wrong with it.”

“Best guess?”

“Our best guess is he took it in to the Hab. The Lander’s signal wouldn’t be able to reach Sojourner through Hab canvas.” Pointing to another reporter, he said “You, there.”

“Marty West, NBC News,” Marty said. “How will you communicate with Watney once everything’s up and running?”

“That’ll be up to Watney,” said Venkat. “All we have to work with is the camera. He can write notes and hold them up. But how we talk back is trickier.”

“How so?” Marty asked.

“Because all we have is the camera platform. That’s the only moving part. There are plenty of ways to get information across with just the platform’s rotation, but no way to tell Watney about them. He’ll have to come up with something and tell us. We’ll follow his lead.”

Pointing to the next reporter, he said, “Go ahead.”

“Jill Holbrook, BBC. With a 32 minute round trip, and nothing but a single rotating platform to talk with, it’ll be a dreadfully slow conversation, won’t it?”

“Yes it will,” Venkat confirmed. “It’s early morning in Acidalia Planitia right now, and just past 3am here in Pasadena. We’ll be here all night, and that’s just for a start. No more questions for now, the panorama is due back in a few minutes. We’ll keep you posted.”

Quickly leaving the press room, Venkat hurried down the hall to the makeshift Pathfinder control center. He pressed through the throng to the communications console.

“Anything, Tim?”

“Totally,” he replied. “But we’re staring at this black screen because it’s way more interesting than pictures from Mars.”

“You’re a smart-ass, Tim,” Venkat said.

“Noted.”

Bruce pushed his way forward. “Still another few seconds on the clock,” he said.

The time passed in silence.

“Getting something,” Tim said. “Yup. It’s the panoramic.”

A general loosening of tension coruscated through the room as the image slowly came through, one vertical stripe at a time.

“Martian surface…” Venkat said as the lines displayed. “More surface…”

“Edge of the Hab!” Bruce said, pointing to the screen.

“Hab,” Venkat smiled. “More Hab now… more Hab… is that a message? That’s a message!”

The vertical stripes revealed a handwritten note, suspended at the camera’s height by a thin metal rod.

“We got a note from Mark!” Venkat announced to the room.

Applause filled the room, then quickly died down. “What’s it say?” someone asked.

Venkat leaned closer to the screen. “It says …‘I’ll write questions here – Are you receiving?’”

“Ok…?” said Bruce.

“That’s what it says,” Venkat shrugged.

“Another note,” said Tim, pointing to the screen as the slow march of data revealed itself.

Venkat leaned in again. “This one says ‘Point here for yes’.”