Estrela nodded, tossed her hair, and attempted a wan smile. Tana said, “Ready.”
He flicked on the camera and began transmitting.
“Earth, Don Quijote. This is Ryan Martin, Tanisha Jackson, and Estrela Conselheiro, calling in. We’ve reached the Agamemnon site at Acidalia Planitia.” He paused. That was the easy part. “It is with great regret,” he said, and then stopped. He didn’t even know what to say. He looked over at Tana, but she shook her head infinitesimally and mouthed silently, “you.” He turned back to the camera. “I regret to inform you that, uh, we’ve killed off—I mean, we’ve had some casualties here. Uh, that is, we. Shit. I hate doing this. Look, it’s like this.” He took a deep breath, and then said quickly, “We’ve had a bit of a hard time here, and Captain Radkowski and Bran—Trevor Whitman are dead. Got that?”
He turned off the camera, and slumped down. “Okay, it’s done.”
“We’re not done with the broadcast, are we?” Tana said. “We have to tell them more than that. And I thought we were going to ask for advice.”
Ryan shook his head. “No. I mean, yes, no we’re not done.”
“Then—”
“It will be half an hour before we get a reply from Earth,” he said. “It’ll probably be a while after that before we get anybody who can give us anything we need. Don’t worry. We have time.” He composed himself, turned the transmitter back on, and then gave them a brief synopsis of how Captain Radkowski and Trevor Whitman had died. He kept it strictly to the facts, with nothing about Trevor Whitman actually being Brandon Weber, nor about their conjecture that Radkowski had been murdered.
The person who appeared on the monitor looked startled. He looked like he’d just woken up. “Uh, Don Quijote, Houston. We got you.” Ryan didn’t recognize him; he wasn’t one of the regular communicators. “Uh, this is great. Wow, it’s really great to hear from you. We were worried—” Just at the moment the news about Radkowski and Trevor must have arrived; the technician looked startled. “Wait one,” he said.
Ryan calculated the time on Earth. 05:45 Greenwich; that would make it 12:45 at night in Toronto, 11:45 at the space center in Houston. Late; they were transmitting to the second shift. No wonder they had to wait, probably had to go wake somebody up.
It was a slow conversation. Ryan and Tana talked for a while, answering some of the questions from Earth and ignoring others. Then they would break and listen to the feed from Earth, replies to their queries of half an hour ago.
First, they learned there was still no hope of a rescue mission. Ryan had never expected one; he’d asked just out of a perverse sense that he had to check the obvious. Second, they were told that the engineers on Earth had not come up with any unexpected new ideas, although not for lack of trying. Their only chance was still the Brazilian Jesus do Sul return rocket, at the pole. There were now hundreds of news reporters asking for interviews; Houston was holding them off, but did they want to talk to reporters? When their “no” answer came through, nobody seemed surprised.
“Copy that,” was the reply. “One more thing for you. Hold on a moment. I think you may want to hear this directly from our orbital mechanics guy.”
The orbital mechanics guy, as it turned out, was a middle-aged woman. Ryan recognized her; what was her name, Lorentz? She had a reputation for being both hard-working and smart. She spoke in a Texas accent, launching in without bothering to say hello first. “We tracked down the complete specs on that Brazilian rocket, checked it out against a matrix of trajectories available for your launch window. Here’s the lowdown. Stripped to the bone, no rock samples, dump all the spare supplies, no margin for underperformance: You’ll have fuel for one hundred and forty kilograms of human payload. That’s top; you’d be wise to leave a little margin.”
“Copy,” Ryan said. “What if we—” Then he stopped. If they what?
What could they think of that the ground engineers hadn’t already thought of? If she said one hundred and forty kilograms, that was the end of it.
One hundred and forty kilograms.
Now they knew.
Only two of them were going back.
6
Ryan in Love
In his own little social world, Ryan was boisterous, talkative, and outgoing. Outside of the nearly vanished circle of the Minions, though, the guidance counselors labeled him withdrawn and introverted. He hadn’t paid any attention to the tall, talkative girl who chanced to sit near him in the cafeteria whenever he came down for a meal, not even when she began to talk to him, and slowly but patiently drew him out. It didn’t occur to him that she might be interested in more than a lunchtime companionship until she invited him to her dorm room, closed the door, put a Nirvana CD to play on her stereo, and started to take off his clothes. “It was the only way I could get your attention,” she told him.
Kaitlyn was, he discovered, the smartest person he had ever met, and he was eternally baffled by what it was she saw in him. Sex, to her, was playful. They would take her Toyota Corolla on long weekends up to Maine, and they would take an old logging road far into the woods and camp, making love far into the night. “Let’s try something new,” was her catch-all phrase. Or they would tryst on one of the rooftops of the Institute, the altitude and the fear of somebody coming across them adding to the thrill of sex.
One summer they spent in urban spelunking. She showed up in his dorm room one day with two flashlights and a crowbar. The game was, find a manhole and see what was underneath it. Sometimes it was nothing. Sometimes it led to tunnels and pipes that seemed to go everywhere in Cambridge. “Hmm, guess you’re not claustrophobic,” Kaitlyn had said the first time he got stuck and had to wait in the dark while she went to fetch a block and tackle to pull him out. “You should be an astronaut.”
She was the first girl he ever fell in love with. A week after they both graduated—he in computer science, she in mathematics—Kaitlyn asked him to marry her. He hadn’t even told his parents yet—he was going to spring it on them when he went back home for the American Thanksgiving holiday when a pickup truck sideswiped her going around a curve, and her Corolla fishtailed and hit a lamppost.
It was hard for him to believe that she was really dead. For years afterward he would wake up with some thought in his head, and think, I’ll have to remember that to tell Kaitlyn.
It took him a long time to get over her. He moved back to Toronto and got a job working on software for an aerospace company. Eventually a quiet, patient girl named Sarah, who he kept running into at work, broke through his reserve and attracted his attention. She worked as a temp, adept at filling in at secretarial jobs when the company was shorthanded, but her real avocation was viola, which she played in a chamber orchestra in Toronto.
He had never heard a chamber music concert, he finally had to admit to her. He wasn’t really quite sure what kind of music it was. “Well, I guess I’ll just have to show you,” she told him.
And from then, his weekends were filled with music. Sarah was both patient and had a sense of humor; her musical tastes ran from Beethoven to Weird Al, and she was fond of pointing out little things to him. “Listen there. That’s a cowbell,” she might say, or, “See what you think of this, it’s written for glass harmonica. You play it by rubbing your finger on wine glasses.”
He got accustomed to her company, and when she went out of town for a performance, he missed her, and hung around his apartment, not knowing what to do with himself.