by Ben Bova
“Please!” Saxby shouted at them. “Mr. Goldstein has the floor.”
“Does that mean they’re going to die before they can get back to Earth?”
“It means,” Saxby said, raising his voice again to quiet the buzzing chatter among the reporters. “It means that we haven’t worked out a solution to the problem. We’re still looking at all the possibilities.”
A reporter from the European Union jumped to his feet. “Cannot the water recycling system be repaired? Can they use parts from the habitat on Mars to fix the recycling system?”
Saxby felt grateful for the question. Nodding to the European, he explained, “The Fermi habitat does have a water recycling system, but it isn’t designed to work without gravity. Recall that Mars has a gravity roughly one-third of Earth’s, but the Arrow spacecraft is effectively in zero gravity.”
He paused and realized that every eye was on him. Even the others along the table were focused on him.
“The recycling system on the Arrow was designed to work with or without gravity, since we knew that the ship would be in zero gee for a portion of its flight, but we intended to rotate the ship to give it a Martian gravity level for most of the mission. The ship’s recycling system and the system on the Fermi simply are not compatible. We saw no reason to add to the Fermi habitat’s complexity by making it capable of operating under weightless conditions. That would be like designing an automobile to operate under water. It just doesn’t make engineering sense.”
Saxby was tempted to hide the real reason, but could not. “Don’t forget the cost. We could have made all the Arrow’s systems fully redundant and cross-compatible with the Fermi habitat if we’d had the money. The engineers would have enjoyed the challenge and the safety people would have loved the inherent redundancy. But there was never enough money.”
Saxby sagged back in his chair and half-listened to the rest of the questions. The propellant leak. The increased risk of radiation exposure from the ship’s water loss. How will the repairs to the truss hold up?
Saxby had asked himself those questions thousands of times since the accident. And the answer was always, I don’t know. I just do not know.
The woman from Quebec roused him by asking directly, “Mr. Saxby, what about the crew’s mental health? I know that many psychology experts were worried about the crew’s ability to maintain their sanity for such a long trip under the stressful conditions of deep space flight. But with this accident and the rather bleak prospects for their safe return home, how are they holding up?”
Saxby knew the official answer. And the crew had put on good faces during their ongoing interviews with Steven Treadway. But he also knew what the realities were.
“Ms. Marquez,” he replied, “that’s a question that hits home with me personally. I know these people. They’ve all had dinners in my home, and of course we’ve been working together professionally for years. I personally recruited Amanda Lynn to join the agency.”
He hesitated, then plunged ahead. “I’ve been in space. I have some idea of the stress they’re under. We have a team of experts watching them all very closely, and the ship’s medical officer, Dr. Nomura, is also a licensed psychologist. To answer your question—they are responding very well to the pressure. In fact, they’re holding up as well or better than the experts have predicted. They’re doing their jobs, day by day, and we’re providing them with all the support we can. I would like to ask each of you in the media to do the same and report what’s going on in that spacecraft fairly and honestly. Please remember that they have access to the news nets out there and they can hear, watch and read whatever you report. So please make it accurate and be sensitive to who will be receiving your words.”
Then Saxby pushed his chair from the table and got wearily to his feet. “Thank you all very much. That’s all for today.”
As he walked slowly away, he heard the reporters behind him getting to their feet. No applause, but no calls for more answers, either.
Okay, Saxby thought, rubbing his chest. That’s over and done with. Time to get back to work.
August 12, 2035
Mars Arrival Minus 75 Days
13:10 Universal Time
The Arrow
Amanda Lynn glided through the access tube, avoiding using the handrails as much as she could because she liked the sensation of flying that weightlessness provided. Using the handrails seemed like cheating to her.
When her head popped through the hatch at the end of the tube she saw Bee, Virginia and Taki gathered at one of the galley tables, engaged in animated conversation. She launched herself toward them.
“Hey guys, may I join you?”
“It’s the human torpedo!” Virginia laughed and held up her hands as if trying to protect herself.
Amanda stopped herself by grabbing one of the unoccupied chairs. “Whassup?”
Virginia grasped her bottle of rehydrated smoothie as Amanda pulled herself down onto the chair and reached for the ends of the safety belt.
“We were just talking about how bored we are,” Gonzalez said. “You know things are bad when some of the smartest people in the world traveling to Mars on a crippled spaceship start complaining that they don’t have enough to do.”
Taki Nomura said, “We knew that boredom was a risk, but we didn’t expect it after the accident. Boredom combined with a sense of helplessness can be a serious issue.”
“Helplessness?” Amanda asked. “I don’t feel helpless. Do you?”
“Come on now, Mandy,” Virginia countered. “Be honest. Don’t you feel . . . well, trapped?”
Amanda looked at them for several heartbeats, trying to sort out just what it was that she did feel, deep down in her soul. At last she replied, “Not trapped, exactly. Worried, certainly. I mean, I wish we hadn’t hit that damned chunk of rock, but we seem to be limping along okay. So far.”
“So far,” Benson agreed.
“It’s Ted I’m worried about,” Nomura said. “We all run the risk of depression, but Ted’s lost his family. I know it’s hit him hard, but he’s going about his business as if nothing’s happened.”
“You want him to break down and cry?” Benson snapped.
“Maybe it would be better if he didn’t hold his feelings in.”
Virginia said, “What worries me is the water problem.”
“Says the lady with the smoothie in front of her,” Amanda teased.
“I’m staying within my water ration,” Virginia answered.
Benson said, “The brain trust back home is looking at workarounds for our water problem.”
“But so far they haven’t come up with anything,” Virginia pointed out.
“Not yet,” Bee conceded.
Taki said, “The psychologists back home tell me that worrying that we’re going to die, combined with all this time on our hands with nothing to do, nothing productive to accomplish, is just ripe for negative thinking. And in Ted’s case, with the extra emotional load he must be carrying, they’re getting pretty worried.”
“I’m not worried about Ted,” Bee told them. “He’s strong. He’ll be okay.”
“Or he’ll crack up and walk out an airlock,” Taki said.
Virginia took another sip of her smoothie. “So, Mandy, with all this talk of suicidal depression and death, do you still want to join us?”
Amanda looked at the three of them and saw a mixture of emotions on their faces. Taki looked worried, but then she always looked worried. Maybe it was the bone structure of her face. Or her personality. Doesn’t matter, she thought. She has a damned good reason to be worried.
Bee looked stolid, impassive, like a statue carved out of granite. He wouldn’t show any fear at the edge of hell. The “captain’s burden” is what she’d heard it called. Like the skippers of those old-time vessels who went down with their ships.
And finally there was Virginia, with her striking good looks and her superior attitude. She was the only one of the three of them that might crack, Aman
da reckoned. She wondered if Virginia’s smoothie might be spiked.
“I’ll join you, but you’ll have to change the topic of conversation. I hate depressing talk. When I was growing up in Detroit I heard a lot of ‘you can’t do that’ or ‘it’ll never work’ or ‘they’ll never let a black woman do that.’ I just decided to ignore such talk and get on with what I wanted to do.”
“And you succeeded so well,” Virginia sneered, “that here you are, on a crippled spacecraft heading for Mars.”
“Beats Detroit,” Amanda countered.
They all laughed.
“Seriously,” Amanda told them. “I mean it. No more negative talk! Please!”
“Okay,” said Benson. “We’ll put aside the negative talk and deal with the boredom. What would you like to do today?”
Taki suggested, “How about taking your weekly physicals a couple of days early?”
That elicited a chorus of boos.
“I know,” Amanda said. “Why don’t we download one of those murder mystery games? You know, where each of us playacts as one of the characters, and we try to figure out which one is really the killer.”
No one objected. Amanda felt good: she’d found a way to get them focused on the positive. For her, this made it a good and productive day.
August 22, 2035
Mars Arrival Minus 65 Days
13:09 Universal Time
Galley, the Arrow
Benson was strapped into his seat at the galley table, finishing the last scraps of his late lunch, when Dr. Nomura glided into the galley and bent over him.
“May I speak with you privately?” she whispered.
There was no one else in the galley, and Benson could see from the troubled expression on the physician’s face that something was bothering her.
“Sure, Taki,” he said, trying to put her at her ease. “Have a seat, or a float, whichever you prefer.”
Nomura pulled herself down onto the chair closest to Benson and strapped herself in, glancing around the empty galley like a conspirator afraid that someone was eavesdropping.
“Mikhail is very sick,” she said, her voice low.
“Mikhail?”
“I’m certain that he has gastric cancer.”
“Cancer?” Benson yelped.
Nomura nodded, her expression miserable.
“Are you sure? I know he’s been troubled with persistent nausea, but I thought he was just having trouble adapting to weightlessness.”
“That’s what I thought, too, but it’s been months and space adaptation syndrome just doesn’t last that long. He’s lost weight, which isn’t surprising because he’s not eating much. But his abdomen is swollen.”
“Appendicitis maybe?”
Taki shook her head. “After I realized it wasn’t SAS, I checked that out. He presented some of the symptoms of appendicitis so I drew some blood to see if he had an elevated white cell count. Nada. But he showed anemia. Then I checked his stool. He’s passing blood and the DNA sampling confirms he has cancer.”
“Lord almighty,” Benson groaned.
“It’s worse. He knew it before we left.”
That bit of news made Benson sit up straighter and look squarely into Taki’s earth-brown eyes. “Explain.”
“The stool sampler is supposed to catch things like this. Every time we have a bowel movement it automatically screens for over a thousand metabolic disorders, cancers, markers for inflammation that could indicate heart disease, etc. I’m supposed to be alerted if anything turns up. He found a way to turn it off. He said he found out about the cancer a few months before we left and decided to hide it.”
“Did he tell you this?”
“Yes. And he said that dying out here was infinitely preferable to dying back on Earth—alone in a hospital bed. His personal life is a mess. His wife even left him.”
“Poor bastard. What can you do to help him?”
“Out here there’s nothing I can do except try to make him comfortable.”
“He doesn’t have any vital duties until we get a lot closer to Mars,” Benson mused. “I thought he was just moping because he didn’t have much to do.”
“If we were back on Earth he’d be under the care of a specialist, have a complete CT scan, then surgery followed by chemotherapy.”
“Will he survive until we get home?”
“I’ve spoken with Mikhail’s personal physician back in St. Petersburg and he’s pulling together some specialists who can make a better prognosis than I can.”
“Best guess.”
Taki hesitated before answering, “Doubtful.”
“What about the stool sampler? Have you fixed it? And what about everyone else? If it’s been turned off, then none of us have been screened lately.”
“He told me how he turned it off and yes, I turned it back on. Instead of waiting on the passive scans to notify me of a problem, I set the system to send me a complete diagnostic on everyone for the next week. I’ll look at them closely and make sure nothing else is happening.”
Benson grimaced and cursed inwardly. “I’m not superstitious,” he muttered, “but it looks like we’re God’s dartboard. First Ted’s family gets wiped out, then the damned meteoroid hits us. Now this. Is this ship jinxed?”
Taki Nomura had no answer for him.
September 4, 2035
Mars Arrival Minus fifty-two Days
16:48 Universal Time
Washington, D.C.
The Labor Day weekend had just ended, and Congress’ summer recess was over. Washington was still hot and muggy, though, as Senator William Donaldson stepped briskly from his air-conditioned limousine to the ground-level door of the Capitol building.
The first meeting of his subcommittee on Space, Aeronautics and Related Sciences was due to convene in twelve minutes. Plenty of time to ride the elevator up to his office, check with his personal assistant for any urgent business that might have come up overnight, take a quick leak in his private lavatory, and then get to the subcommittee meeting room.
Donaldson mentally counted the votes he could rely on. With Yañez in his pocket he had a solid majority. A bipartisan majority, at that. A rarity these days. Good material for next year, he thought. Show the voters that Bill Donaldson can get the opposing party to cooperate with his initiatives.
He chuckled to himself as he left his office suite, followed by a half-dozen aides, and strode down the corridor toward the conference room. Donaldson exuded an air of competence and cordiality; he was a smiling, handsome, vigorous man, lean and fit, his white hair swept back off his forehead, his dark pinstripe suit proclaiming a man of conservative tastes who nonetheless had a sense of style.
Yes, Donaldson said to himself, this is going to be a good day. Let Bob Harper choke on it.
The subcommittee’s conference room was actually filled. Every member was present, a surprising turnout for the first day of Congress’ return from its summer recess. Donaldson was pleased. He had made certain every member of the subcommittee knew in advance what the day’s agenda would be. They had all responded as he’d hoped they would.
He gladhanded his way around the table, smiling broadly at his fellow members, working his way along the opposition’s side of the table before moving to his own party’s side. Everyone was cordial, warm and friendly, while the cameras clicked away.
As soon as the photographers left the room, however, the smiles vanished. All except Donaldson’s.
“I’m delighted that each and every one of you is here,” he began. Tapping the agenda laid out on the tablet screen before him, he went on, “We have a very important decision to make this morning, a very important decision.”
Every lawyer knows never to ask a question in court that he doesn’t already know the answer to. Donaldson went one step farther: he never asked his subcommittee for a decision that he didn’t know they had already decided.
But one of the women on the other side of the table, a middle-aged, sour-faced African American from
Texas—where the Johnson Space Center directed NASA’s human spaceflight program—looked decidedly unhappy.
“William,” she said in a tone that was almost combative, “we can’t recommend to the full committee that we stop all crewed space missions.”
“Why not?” Donaldson asked, knowing what the answer would be.
“It would put an end to an American dream,” she said.
“That’s not so, Judine. Americans are flying into space on private rockets. Americans are working in the International Space Station and on the Moon.”
“But what about Mars? What about going farther, pushing the envelope, exploring new worlds?”
“What about the risks of human lives?” Donaldson countered. “What about those eight men and women who are never going to return from Mars alive?”
A senator from Donaldson’s own side of the table shook his head. “That’s a terribly negative way of looking at it.”
“No, it’s the accurate way of looking at it,” Donaldson insisted. “We’ve spent billions of the taxpayers’ dollars on this Mars fiasco and all it’s going to get us is eight corpses.”
Dead silence fell on the room.
Then the Texan said, softly, “There’s still a chance that they’ll make it.”
Donaldson held up his thumb and forefinger a hair’s breadth apart. “That much of a chance.”
The woman sat there stolidly. “I still can’t vote to cut out NASA’s entire human spaceflight program.”
“Because?”
“Because it’ll mean closing down the Johnson Center. We’ll lose thousands of jobs! I’d get booted out on my butt next November.”
They’d finally arrived at the real reason, Donaldson knew, smiling inwardly.
“The Johnson Space Center could turn its talents to supporting all those private companies that are doing human space flights,” he said, a trifle smugly.
“That won’t add up to a fraction of the Center’s present budget.”
Shrugging, Donaldson said, “But it would reduce NASA’s overall budget, save the taxpayers billions per year.”