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She wondered what Estrela was seeing.

8

The Second Expedition to Mars

When the news came that the two astronauts of the Brazilian expedition to Mars had died, John Radkowski should have already been on the way to Mars. He had been picked to be the copilot of the Agamemnon.

Eleven days before launch, Jason, the nine-year-old son of the woman who lived in the duplex next door to Radkowski, had been doing his house chores. Radkowski had a lot of sympathy for Jason; he knew how hard it was to grow up without a father. When Jason went outside to empty the garbage, he had found a skunk in the garbage can. Apparently the skunk was foraging through the garbage, slipped into the can, and had been unable to get out.

The skunk had been sleeping on top of the garbage. Little Jason was old enough to have known that he should leave a wild animal strictly alone—let alone never to mess with a skunk—but the skunk had been so cute, and seemed so harmless, so pettable.

So he petted it.

Jason’s shrieks from next door fetched John immediately from his study, and with his first whiff, it was obvious that he had encountered a skunk. John told him to take all his clothes off, right there in the backyard, and when Jason had done that, he sprayed the screaming child with the hose. He followed that up with two gallons of tomato juice. It was only after he washed the tomato juice off with another spray of the hose that John discovered that not all of the color was juice; a part of it was blood. The boy had been bitten as well as sprayed.

John cleaned the wound as well as he could with soap and water and taped gauze over it, telling Jason over and over that everything would be okay. Then he doused him one more time with more tomato juice, and, ignoring the stink, took him to the hospital to have the bite sutured. Meanwhile, another neighbor called the animal control. The skunk that had bitten Jason had scrambled away when Jason knocked over the can after being sprayed. The animal-control officers shot three skunks in the area, and it was impossible to tell which one had bitten him.

One of the three had been rabid.

Even though it had been the child next door that had been bitten, not him, John Radkowski was taken off the crew roster for Agamemnon because of possible secondary exposure. The three-year trip to Mars was too long to take even the slightest chance, and there wasn’t enough time before the launch window to wait to see if he had actually been exposed to the disease.

Agamemnon, the ship that John Radkowski should have been on, had launched perfectly. It had flown the interplanetary traverse to Mars with no problems, except for one event so trivial and embarrassing that it wasn’t even mentioned in any of the videocasts with the Earth, but only on the private medical channels.

Shortly after launch, one of the crewmen complained of athlete’s foot.

It spread among the crew, and by the time Agamemnon was approaching Mars, everybody had it. Normally, natural skin bacteria keep fungus in check, but zealous biological contamination protocols had killed the natural bacteria, leaving the fungus to multiply unchecked.

A spacecraft provides an ideal environment for fungus to grow: crowded with people in close contact, and warm, and with the crew able to take only sponge baths.

Once they found that the fungus was beginning to eat their clothes, they took to placing their clothing in the airlocks to expose them to vacuum for an hour every day.

Agamemnon made a flawless landing on Mars, only a few hundred feet from the return ship Ulysses, waiting for them on the eastern edge of the Martian plain known as Acidalia. By this time, the fungus had spread to the air filters. One of the crewmen opened up a panel behind one of the navigation computers and found rot growing on the circuit boards. A quick inspection showed the entire electronic system of the ship cultivating slime.

On some of the crewmen, the fungus infection moved to the sinuses. They were treated with antihistamines to dry out the sinuses and make the nasal environment less hospitable, but it was almost impossible to combat the infection.

It was never declared on the public channels, but the Agamemnon expedition was rapidly turning from a triumph into a disaster.

They launched from the surface of Mars early, using up their safety margin of extra fuel to fly Ulysses on a faster trajectory that swung by Venus on its way back to Earth. The revised trajectory would shorten their return time by nearly a year but required an additional rocket burn at Venus to correct the orbital inclination. But by this time they were beginning to be desperate.

As Ulysses passed Venus, telemetry relayed to Earth from Ulysses sent down the data that the fuel valves were opening in preparation for the burn, and then Ulysses fell silent. After an hour, telescopes from Earth revealed an expanding cloud of lightly ionized gas, primarily oxygen, in the position where the spacecraft should have been.

A faint, miniature comet glowing in the sunlight marked all that was left of the Ulysses and her crew.

Much later, the accident investigation hoard determined that the fungus must have entered the fuel-controller electronics. Nothing had happened until the command was given for the engines to fire, and then far too much had happened. Instead of a smooth, controlled burn, the short circuit in the electronics had resulted in both fuel lines opening, but no ignition. The computer should have sensed this and shut down the engines, but the same short circuit had rebooted the computer, and fuel and oxidizer continued to pour into the combustion chamber. When the mixture of fuel and oxidizer finally did ignite, the result was not a rocket, but a bomb. Ulysses had been doomed.

John Radkowski should have been on that expedition. A rabid skunk had saved his life.

And now he was on the third expedition to Mars.

9

Transmission

This is station Trevor Whitman, broadcasting live, live, live to Earth from the red planet. Hello, Earth! I want to tell you, Mars is great! I really love it here, and I have to say that, you know all those months of training that I was complaining about, you know, well, just the thrill of being here has made it all worthwhile. It’s so great! Did I say that already? I think I said that. Anyway, it’s great.

“Today we landed, I guess you saw the descent pictures? From the lander camera? Okay, after we got down, we went outside, and I went out bouncing around. The colors, I guess you know that Mars is red, you know? But it’s really more than that. I can’t describe it, it’s more like a, well, yellowish reddish brown kind of color, sort of a caramel color, but there are so many shades, and it seems like the longer I look, you know, the more colors I can see, more shades of yellow and orange than you could ever name, and pinks and yellows and even some kinda purple colors, too.

“These space suits are great; you hardly know you’re wearing them, and the gravity’s so light it feels like you could jump up forever. I climbed up one of the sand dunes today. We haven’t seen any dust storms or anything yet, I mean, we just got here, you know? But it’s great. I think I said that. I can’t think of what else to tell you. There are mountains in the distance, sort of ridges. They aren’t really that far away, and doesn’t look like they will be so hard to climb, so maybe we’ll go climbing them after we check out the return spaceship tomorrow. I can’t wait.