EARTH
HOUSTON: It had taken Edith two days to make up her mind. Two days and all her courage.
When she had watched Jamie utter his Navaho greeting from the surface of Mars she had smiled to herself. Standing in the jam-packed KHTV newsroom that morning, she had no premonition of the uproar his few words would cause. One of her co-workers nudged her shoulder slightly as the picture on the screen focused on his sky-blue space suit.
"That’s your significant other, isn’t it?" the woman whispered to Edith.
She nodded, thinking, He used to be. Used to be.
Edith was surprised when the network news show that evening spent so much time on the fact that an American Indian was on Mars. The next morning, on her own, she called several of her contacts at the Johnson Space Center and found that there was considerable consternation among the NASA brass about Jamie’s impromptu little speech.
"The guys upstairs are goin’ apeshit," one of her informers told her. "But you didn’t hear anything from me, understand?"
By the second day there were rumbles that the Space Council in Washington was reviewing the Indian’s refusal to speak the words NASA had prepared for him. The Vice-President was up in arms, rumor had it. What she did was news. Everyone knew that she wanted to be the party’s choice for their presidential candidate next year.
Edith reviewed tapes of boringly standard interviews with Jamie’s parents in Berkeley and blandly evasive NASA officials. She went to sleep that second night thinking about what she should do.
She awoke the next morning, her mind made up. She called the station and told her flabbergasted news director that she was taking the rest of the week off.
"You can’t do that! I don’t…"
"I have two weeks’ vacation and a whole moss of sick days I never took," Edith said sweetly into the phone. "I’ll be back by Monday."
"Goddammit, Edie, they’ll fire your ass! You know what they’re like upstairs!"
She made a sigh that he could not help but hear. "Then they’ll have to fire me and give me my severance pay, I guess."
She hung up, then immediately called for a plane reservation to New York.
Now, winging thirty-five thousand feet above the Appalachians, Edith rehearsed in her mind what she would tell the network news chief. I can get to James Waterman’s parents. And his grandfather. And the people he trained with who were not selected to go to Mars. I know his story and I know the inner workings of the Mars Project. I can produce you a story of how this thing works, from the inside. The human story of the Mars Project. Not just shining science, but the infighting, the competition, the guts and blood of it all.
As she went through her mental preparation she thought of Jamie. He’ll hate me for doing this. He’ll absolutely hate me.
But it’s my ticket to a job with the network. He’s got Mars. He left me for Mars. Now I can use Mars my own way, for myself.
THE DEPARTURE
1
The personnel chosen for the Mars expedition were shuttled to the assembly station riding in low orbit a scant three hundred kilometers above the surface of the Earth. At that altitude, the ponderous bulk of the planet curved huge and incredibly beautiful, filling the sky, overwhelming the senses with broad expanses of blue oceans decked with gleaming white clouds, a world rich and vibrant with life glowing against the cold black emptiness of space.
Mars was a distant pinpoint in that blackness, a steady ruddy beacon beckoning across the gulf that separates worlds.
The assembly station itself was a composite habitat made out of a Soviet Mir space station linked to a reconditioned external propellant tank from an American space shuttle, bigger than a twenty-room house. The Mir part of the assembly station was attached to the shuttle tank about midway along the tank’s long curving flank, looking like a tiny green gondola on a huge matte tan blimp. The Soviet hardware contained three docking ports for shuttles or the smaller orbital tugs.
Here the sixteen chosen scientists would live and work for more than a month before they departed for Mars, getting accustomed to one another and to their expedition commander, Dr. Li. And to the eight astronauts and cosmonauts who would operate the Mars spacecraft and be in command of the ground teams.
Hanging in the black emptiness a few hundred meters from the assembly station were the two long, narrow Mars spacecraft, gleaming white in the harsh sunlight, attended by swarms of orbital tugs and massive shuttles while tiny figures in space suits hovered around them, dwarfed to the size of ants, buzzing back and forth constantly, transferring supplies and equipment every day, every hour. Compared to the bulbous dull brown and green shapes of the assembly station the Mars craft looked like sleek racing shells.
In orbit the entire assemblage of vehicles and human beings was effectively in zero gravity, weightless. Jamie felt his guts dropping away the instant the shuttle rocket engines cut off. His inner ears were telling him that he was falling, falling endlessly. Yet he could see that he was strapped firmly in his seat down in the crowded middeck compartment of the shuttle, jammed in with five technicians on their way to a week’s work. Their coveralls were stained and frayed from hard use; Jamie’s were so new there were still creases on his sleeves.
All the scientist-candidates had spent at least a few days in orbit during their years of training. Jamie had also flown three flights on the Vomit Comet, the big jet transport plane that simulated zero g by diving from high altitude, then pulling up into a long parabolic arc that produced about half a minute of gut-wrenching weightlessness. He knew what to expect and he did not panic. Still he could feel his stomach churning and his head going woozy.
Jamie felt all the classic symptoms of space adaptation syndrome as he followed the veteran technicians past the shuttle’s hatch, through the narrow metal chambers of the Mir, and into the more spacious receiving area of the huge shuttle tank. It was not like seasickness, not exactly. His head felt stuffy as his body fluids shifted within him, free of gravity’s pull. He felt slightly nauseous, disoriented, almost dizzy. As if he had come down with a heavy dose of flu.
Medical personnel took him in tow, literally, and after a perfunctory examination cheerfully pronounced him normal. They gave him a slow-release medication patch to stick behind his ear and told him that all the Mars scientists were assembling in the main briefing area. Jamie started to nod, found that the head motion made him feel as if he wanted to upchuck, and settled for asking directions to the main briefing area.
He knew enough to go slowly up the central passageway, pulling himself along easily on the ladder rungs that studded all four walls, like a swimmer working his way along the hull of a sunken ship. It was difficult to think of ceiling and floor when up and down had no objective meaning. Jamie began to think of the passageway as a deep well with metal walls that he was climbing, floating weightlessly as he made his way in dreamy slow motion toward the top.
"Ah, there you are! You made it."
Jamie turned at the sound of the voice behind him and instantly wished he hadn’t as his stomach lurched uneasily.
It was Tony Reed, smiling as if he had been born in zero gravity, gliding effortlessly along the passageway like a grinning dolphin.
Jamie tried to smile.
"Glad to see you here," Reed said, extending his hand as he rose to Jamie’s level, "even though you do look a bit green."
"I’ll adjust," Jamie said, hanging on to one ladder rung while his feet floated free.
"Of course you will. We’re all delighted that Brumado talked the powers that be into giving you the geology slot."
Reed started off along the passageway again and Jamie pushed against a rung to keep up with him. "I’m still kind of dazed… it all happened so fast."