by Allen Steele
A few seconds went by, during which I thrust my head through the suit’s neck ring and reached back with both hands to seal the back-hatch. I was reaching for my gloves when Skycorp Control came over the comlink. We were no longer in time-delay, so we heard Capcom at once.
“Ah, affirmative, Zulu, we copy. Is this Mission Commander LaCosta?”
Miguel must not have yet turned the cameras back on, and was relying on voice-only communications. “Affirmative, Huntsville,” he said.
“Commander LaCosta, weren’t you experiencing another in-flight emergency just a few minutes ago?”
“Negative, Huntsville.”
“Please explain.”
Oh, hell. I’d almost totally forgotten the little skit we’d performed for Skycorp Control’s benefit.
“Huntsville, we apologize,” Miguel said. “That was a practical joke on our part. I assure you that this is not another joke.”
Before Capcom could reply, Ron-Jon’s voice came on. “Huntsville, this is Lieutenant Commander Ronald Johnson. I have not been harmed. Commander LaCosta did not really stab me. And, no, this is not another joke. Over.”
I quickly activated my suit radio, switched over to the channel for the Mess’s long-range communications system. “Huntsville, this is Lieutenant Commander…”
“We copy, Zulu.” Capcom apparently didn’t want my side of the story; the fact that Ron-Jon was alive and well was enough for them. “We’ll discuss the earlier incident later. Please describe your current situation. Do you copy?”
“Roger that, Huntsville.” There was a hint of relief in Miguel’s voice; Skycorp Control no longer believed that he’d just planted a six-inch stiletto in Ron-Jon’s chest. “We’ve gotten a cabin leak message and are showing a DP/DT of .125 psi. We’re currently searching for the source, and we’re preparing the REV for Orbit Mal Proc.”
“We copy, Zulu.” A long pause, during which I imagined the scene in Skycorp Control: Capcom, Flight, and the rest of the ground team, hunched over their consoles as they muttered into one another’s headsets, trying to decide whether they should take the Zoo Team at their word. Because, let’s face it: we hadn’t exactly been anyone’s ideal astronauts, and this wasn’t the first stunt we’d pulled. Which is why Zulu Team was called the Zoo Team more often than not.
I was reaching for the rack holding my gloves and helmet when my gaze fell upon the one porthole in the Mess that didn’t have a fake image of Mars on the other side of the glass. From here, I could see Earth, 260 nautical miles below…and it didn’t look right. What should have been a steady view of a gently curved horizon was instead a starless black void. A couple of seconds later, the limb of the Earth appeared, the South Pacific a bright blue expanse shaded by misty white clouds. But then it turned upside-down and tumbled away, replaced once more by nothingness.
I hissed under my breath, then touched my mike wand. “Hate to say it, gentlemen, but our problems just got worse.”
The Mess had been placed in equatorial low orbit, and Zulu Team was about three weeks away from being sent up to it, when we learned the true nature of our mission.
By then, we were nicknamed the Zoo Team, and with good reason. Miguel, Ron, and I tried hard to be proper Space Cadets, but our mischievous ways kept coming back to us. Every morning for two months, the three of us arrived at the Skycorp training complex in Huntsville for ten-to-twelve hours of intensive exercises overseen by “technical associates” who’d never been in space themselves. So we’d find ourselves being lectured on orbital rendezvous techniques by a kid who’d never been in a cockpit—not a real one, at least—or receiving instructions on how to don a spacesuit from some dweeb who wore Velcro-strap sneakers because shoelaces were too much of a hassle.
Making matters worse were our colleagues. A finer group of stiffs, there never has been. Six men, three women, each looking as if they’d just marched off the Liberty University campus: eager, well-scrubbed—I swear, I think some of them brushed their teeth four times a day—and utterly lacking any individuality. One guy insisted on opening our morning briefing with a prayer, another was proud of the fact that, at age 29, he was still a virgin, and one of the women blushed whenever toilet paper was mentioned. They didn’t drink, smoke, or say anything more harsh than “gosh darn”…and it goes without saying that none had a decent sense of humor.
You have to give Zulu Team some credit: we actually made it through the first four days of Phase 1 without cracking a joke or pulling some sort of gag. But there was no way we could’ve continued our training without screwing around one way or another; otherwise, we would’ve lost our minds. So first came the muttered wisecracks, which were met with cold glares and whispered shushes that only encouraged us, and then came the straight-faced innuendos and disguised insults, which usually went over the heads of their intended targets, and finally the practical jokes, like rigging the eight-ball of the cockpit simulator so that it was always upside-down, or slipping a couple of drops of lubricant to the front zippers of the women’s jumpsuits so that they’d constantly slide down when we went out for our morning jog.
A few weeks of this, though, and we began to wonder whether we were pushing our luck. The Zoo Team was having fun, sure, but while it seemed peculiar that no one ever gave us a serious reprimand or threatened to bounce us from the program, we knew it was all too possible that we’d go too far and end up being left behind when the final crew selection for Ares II was made. So Ron, Miguel, and I talked it over during a Saturday night beer run, and decided to cool it for awhile.
Yet it didn’t matter. We eventually found out that the Zoo Team was never meant to go any farther than Earth orbit.
Our information didn’t come from a memo or a conference room, but from a pillow. Ron-Jon never lacked for girlfriends, and his latest was a young lady who worked as an assistant to one of our specialist associates. One evening, while she and Ron-Jon were in bed, she told him something that he promised to keep to himself, and then revealed to Miguel and me the very next morning.
“We’ve been set up,” Ron said quietly, once he was sure that there was no else in the training facility locker room. “Our team, I mean…there’s no way any of us are going to Mars.”
Miguel stared at him. “Want to run that again?”
“The other nine are the final candidates for the mission,” Ron said. “Six will be on Ares II, and the other three will be back-ups. But once Zulu Team comes back from the Mess, our job will be done…because our job is to screw up. That’s why they picked us in the first place.”
What Ron learned from his cute little fink was that the three of us were on Zulu Team specifically because we were bad apples. Dr. Heinemann—aka Dr. Heiney, as Miguel had dubbed him because of his rather large posterior—privately believed that it was unlikely that Skycorp would ever be able to select a final crew which would not have psychological problems of one sort or another. But since NASA and NASDA had invested a considerable amount of money in the Mess program, he didn’t want to admit that to them, nor did he want to be held responsible if the Ares II crew had the same problems as Ares I. So he’d figured out a way to shave the odds just a little bit.
“Zulu Team is expected to screw up,” Ron-Jon said. “In fact, they want us to screw up. That’s our mission: to botch our flight so badly that we’ll make the other three teams look good. So if Ares II fails because there’s another crew crack-up, Skycorp can always point to the results of all the Mess missions and say, ‘Well, see, we always knew there was a chance things would go wrong…’”
“So they’re grading on a curve.” Miguel nodded. “That’s why they’re sending us up there first. They’re figuring that our flight will fail and the next three missions will succeed, and once they lump all the results together…”
“They’ll have a set of statistics showing an increased probability of crew failure simply because one of the four test teams was a bunch of goofballs,” I said.
“You got it.” Ron-Jon’s expressio
n was unusually dour; he didn’t mind being a jester, but he didn’t like being played as a fool. “So we’re not going to Mars, no matter how well we do up there. In fact, my guess is that, even if we do a perfect job, they’ll throw some sort of no-win scenario at us.”
“And use the results of that as the info they need.” I slowly nodded. “Yeah, I see what you’re saying. Once we’re in the Mess, they can manipulate the scenario however they want. Solar flare. Meteor collision. Reactor meltdown. Any sort of catastrophe you can think of…”
“Unless we come up with our own scenario first,” Miguel murmured.
I looked at him, saw a crafty glimmer in his eyes. “Come again?”
“We’re not going to Mars,” he went on. “We know that now. But that doesn’t mean we have to be puppets, either.” A smile crept across his face. “They want us to fail? Okay, fine…but maybe we can fail on our terms.”
That’s when we started coming up with our little practical joke. Four months later, though, I didn’t feel much like laughing. Not as I looked out the airlock porthole to see Earth spinning around and around like a towel in a laundry dryer.
But it wasn’t the planet that was tumbling end over end; it was the Mess. The blowout had been sufficiently violent to cause the station’s escaping air to act like a jet, causing the entire station to pitch forward in an axial roll. And although we hadn’t yet felt any physiological effects of the spin—our fake portholes and instrument readouts, in fact, had ensured that we wouldn’t know what was going on—I knew that it was only a matter of time before the g-force increased to the point that we’d lose consciousness and black out.
But that wasn’t the worst of it. My suspicions were confirmed a few seconds later, when Capcom’s voice came online again. “Zulu, this is Huntsville. Samoa Tracking indicates that your orbit appears to be deteriorating. Can you confirm?”
“Roger that, Huntsville,” Miguel said. “My instruments show that the accident has caused a change in our attitude and altitude.”
“Affirmative,” I said. “I confirm through visual sighting.”
From elsewhere in the Mess, Ron-Jon chimed in. “Huntsville, I’ve found the location of the decompression. It’s a small hole, approximately half a centimeter in diameter, located on the upper port side of the personnel compartment. I’ve plugged the hole with a T-shirt and I’m about to use the seal kit to make emergency repairs.”
This was good news, at least. Now that Ron-Jon put a stopper in the hole, the Mess no longer had a pressure leak and we could concentrate on our larger problem: namely, stopping the station from cartwheeling into Earth’s upper atmosphere.
A long pause. “We copy, Zulu,” Capcom said at last. “Please be advised that you’re coming within range of Monterey Tracking, and we’re prepared to hand you off to an associate who’s standing by to assume emergency flight control.”
Oh, how wonderful. Skycorp was going to put our fate in the hands of someone who’d probably learned how to fly a spacecraft from playing a desktop flight simulator video game. “Um…negatory on that, Huntsville,” Miguel said. “We’re going to execute Code Whiskey Tango Foxtrot instead.”
Another pause. “Please repeat, Zulu. We don’t…”
“Copy that,” I said. I knew what Miguel meant even if Capcom didn’t; Code Whisky Tango Foxtrot was Zoo Team talk for I’m about to do something crazy; go to a private frequency so I can tell you what it is. So I switched to another freak and said, “What do you have in mind, Miguel?”
“I think we can take care of this ourselves. Can you enter the REV and commence ERO?”
“No sweat. Be ready in a minute.”
ERO stood for Emergency Re-Orbit, a maneuver we’d practiced during training exercises in Huntsville. The Mess had four reaction-control rocket clusters, with each RCR mounted on one of the service module’s four sides. They could be manually fired to re-adjust the station’s attitude, all right, but they lacked sufficient thrust to stop its spin or return the Mess to proper altitude. For that, they’d need a little help: namely, the REV’s big engine.
For this to work, though, the thrusters and the REV would have to be fired at exactly the same time, in exactly the right pattern. If we got it wrong, we actually increase the station’s spin, and make our problems worse. So it was a risky maneuver, yes…but better this than trusting some dude on the ground.
Discarding my gloves and helmet, I opened the docking hatch and pulled myself into the REV’s tiny cockpit, squeezing myself into the left-hand seat. Once I was strapped in, I switched on the instrument panel and warmed up the engine. As I did all this, I could hear Capcom nagging Miguel, demanding that we tell them what we intended to do up here.
“Ready when you are, Miguel,” I said, still using the private channel.
“Roger that,” he said, then muted the ground link so that Huntsville wouldn’t distract us. “I’ve got my eye on the screen. On my mark, fire the main engine at full thrust for two seconds. Copy?”
“Copy.” I rested my hand on the throttle bar. “On your mark.”
Through the narrow cockpit windows, I saw only darkness. Then Earth’s curved horizon came up from below, the South Pacific a couple of hundred miles below. Hawaii had just become visible when Miguel said, “Three…two…one…mark!”
I pushed up the throttle bar, heard the dull rumble of the REV’s engine behind me, felt a tremor pass through the Mess. I silently said One Mississippi, Two Mississippi, then hastily jerked the bar back down, cutting the thrust. “How was that?”
“Okay,” Miguel said, “but we’re still tumbling.”
“Hey, warn a fella next time, awright?” Ron-Jon squalled. “I’m about to puke back here.”
That was the first time any of us had cracked wise since the crisis began; we needed the laugh. “Let’s try again,” Miguel said. Once more, Earth had vanished through my windows. “Mark on three, three-quarters thrust this time.”
“Copy.”
“All right, get ready…three, two, one…mark.”
We went through the routine again, and three more times after that. And after each time I fired the main engine and he fired the RCRs, I could see that Earth was coming up a little more slowly and that it was a little farther away until, just as the Mess was passing over the coast of Ecuador, the station stopped spinning entirely and Capcom informed us that, according to Monterey Tracking, our altitude had returned to normal.
That was also when Huntsville informed us that a shuttle was on its way up from New Mexico to take us back down. I’d already figured that retrieval would be necessary; I’d used up nearly one-third of the REV’s fuel reserves in our EROM. Nonetheless, I was surprised to hear that Flight had decided to cut the rest of our mission short.
Ron-Jon wasn’t. “Better update your resumes, boys,” he said as soon the three of us met up again in the personnel module. “I think we’re going to be looking for work again.”
He was right, of course. Perhaps Team Zulu had displayed grace under pressure, not to mention no small amount of ingenuity, by saving both the Mess and ourselves from certain destruction, but we were hardly forgiven for the stunt we’d pulled just before that. And while it would be nice to say Dr. Heinemann was so impressed by our astronautical skills that he recommended that Zulu Team be assigned to Ares II, the sad fact is that exactly the opposite happened. Miguel, Ron, and I barely walked down the ladder from the Skycorp shuttle that had rendezvoused with the Mess two days after the accident when we were bundled into a waiting jet and flown to Huntsville, where we spent the next three days being grilled, together and separately, by so many different people that we must have been interviewed by half of Skycorp’s management by the time we were done.
Dr. Heinemann was among them, and while he wasn’t the worst of our interviewers, he made up for it with a persistent belief that there hadn’t really been a collision, but that we’d concocted the accident ourselves. Fortunately, on-site inspection of the Mess backed up our story; the hole in
the station had been made from the outside, not the inside. But Dr. Heiney had it in for us. We’d screwed up his experiment—never mind that we were supposed to screw it up, just not the way we did—and, in the end, he got his revenge.
Six days after the accident, the three of us were marched into a conference room on the top floor of the company’s offices, where a half-dozen or so suits and Dr. Heiney sat on either side of a long, black table, at the other end of which was seated Skycorp’s CEO and president. After spending the next ten minutes ripping us apart, he told us what we’d expected to hear anyway: we weren’t going to Mars, and we could collect our severance checks on the way out the door.
And that was it. Our space careers were over.
Or so we thought.
I still had friends in the company and at NASA, and over the next eighteen months or so, I heard about what happened to the Alpha, Gamma, and Theta teams. As it turned out, Team Zulu’s performance turned out to be the highwater mark. At least Miguel, Ron-Jon and I got along together; the other teams were so high-strung, their members were at each other’s throats before the first four weeks of their respective missions were over. And when Team Gamma had an accident of their own—an oxygen tank exploded—they panicked so badly that Huntsville had to order them into the REV, which was then piloted to the ground by remote control. Only three of the nine guys on those teams ended up going to Mars; NASA had to pull together the rest of the Ares II crew from other sources, and those people were not put aboard the Mess first. The station was deorbited shortly after that, and the last I heard of Dr. Heiney, the old quack was teaching Psych 101 at a community college somewhere in Louisiana.
Ares II got safely to Mars and back again, though, and so did Ares III. But after that, Skycorp took over the Mars exploration effort; together with a Japanese company, Uchu-Hiko, they announced their intent to establish a permanent settlement near Arsia Mons. I guess someone must have rethought the criteria by which they picked the people who’d colonize Mars, because about six months after that I got a call from Skycorp’s HR office, asking if I’d be interested in coming in for an interview.