Free Legacy by David Lynn Golemon Page B

in front of him instead of the video being broadcast. “Jesus, according to my telemetry he’s … oh, there he goes.”
    Stan Nathan, the director of the mission, switched his view to that being broadcast by George , the closest beetle to Ringo . As he watched, he saw the 450-pound rover slowly start sliding off the edge of the crater.
    “Becky, stop that damn thing,” Nathan said, trying to be as calm as he could. “If it gets down inside of there, we’ll never be able to get its telemetry. Those crater walls will stop any signal from getting to it. Hurry up, because Houston’s going to start screaming in just about one minute.”
    Dr. Becky Gilickson, remote operator and programming technician in charge of Ringo , turned to her six-person team and frowned. There was nothing she could do. She tried sending out a command to reverse its track and override its program, but with the one-and-a-half-minute delay in communication, all she could do was watch as Ringo started a head-first run down the steep incline inside Shackleton Crater. Instead of typing in the remote command, she turned toward Nathan, who was standing in the middle of the darkened room.
    “Flight, our command just hit Ringo , but it’s too late, he’s starting to slide. We recommend we run with it. If he tries to reverse track now at that speed he may roll over.”
    Nathan hurriedly turned to the live shot of Ringo as it traversed the slope of the crater. For the moment it was running straight; its large six-limbed arms with the tri-rubber tracks seemed to be handling the rough terrain with ease.
    “I concur. Let him go. I want a command sent now that once it hits the bottom of the crater I want it to turn—”
    “Stan, Hugh Evans is on the line from Houston,” his assistant said as he looked up from the large phone console.
    “Put him on speaker.”
    “Stan, Hugh here,” said the senior flight director calling from his personal console at the Johnson Space Center. “Look, this could be very embarrassing. Let Ringo run and do not, I repeat, do not order it out of the crater. It’ll be down there, so let the press know that we decided to explore the base of Shackleton. Tell them it was my decision to send Ringo off mission, clear?”
    Nathan was relieved that the flight director for the Peregrine mission had taken control. With the press watching this, it was a potential public relations disaster in the making. If they couldn’t control their robots, how the hell could they keep men alive out there?
    “Clear. Ringo ’s running free. It looks like he’s going to make the half mile journey pretty quickly.”
    “Okay, get your press people out there and explain that we intentionally sent Ringo off on its own to explore the inside of the crater, nothing more. That ought to keep the dogs away until we can figure out how to recover the rover.”
    The phone line went dead as Nathan turned his attention back to George ’s video. The descending rover just went past its line of sight as it slipped and slid down the steep slope.
    “Switch main viewer to Ringo so we can see what it sees.” Nathan turned to his left at the last telemetry station in the long row. “REMCOM, start getting a communications relay established between George , John , and Paul . We have to align them so we can continue to receive telemetry from the little guy once it hits bottom, because it’ll never be able to broadcast out of the damn hole.”
    The remote control communications station began sending out signals interrupting the programming of the three remaining rovers. The scientists would introduce a “burp” in their existing program and send another order to span that gap. They would arrange the rovers around the edge of the crater to receive the telemetry signals from Ringo and then relay that signal to earth. It had never been done before, but that was the business they were in.
    “Estimate thirty-five feet, plus or minus a foot, until Ringo hits bottom,”