"I’m very glad to be here," Jamie repeated. "For whatever part in this you played, muchas gracias."
She smiled, faintly, and replied in Portuguese, "Por que?"
Then she turned away from him and went to stand beside Ilona Malater, tall and regal-looking even in plain beige coveralls. The scientists attached their feet to the loops on the floor with the clumsy care of newcomers. The Russian cosmonaut and American astronaut, both dressed in tan slacks and pullovers, hovered effortlessly before them.
The four scientists — geologist, microbiologist, biochemist, and physician — finally got themselves settled in the foot restraints and focused their attention on the astronaut and cosmonaut who would be their team commanders.
"I am Mikhail Andreivitch Vosnesensky," the cosmonaut introduced himself. "I am command pilot of the first landing team." He spoke English perfectly, without any trace of an accent, in a heavy voice almost in a bass register.
He looked to Jamie like Hollywood’s version of a Russian. Short, thick torso and heavy limbs, dark reddish-brown hair, beefy face with skin so fair it was almost pink. He reminded Jamie more of a stubby character actor than a hotshot rocket jockey. I’ll have to check his biography in the mission records, Jamie said to himself. While Vosnesensky’s eyes were the clear bright blue of a summer sky, innocent, almost childlike, the expression on his chunky face was dour and brooding.
"And I’m T. Peter Connors," said the black American astronaut, with a good-natured grin. "My official position is pilot, safety officer, and second-in-command."
Connors’s smile was charming, but his red-rimmed eyes looked somehow sad, wary. Not more than a centimeter taller than the Russian, Connors was much slimmer, sleeker. It made him look almost lanky compared to Vosnesensky. Like a racing thoroughbred standing beside a plow horse. His voice was not as deep as the Russian’s, but richer, more resonant, like a singer’s.
"I want to make one thing clear at the outset," Vosnesensky told the four scientists, almost growling. "I am not here to be your friend. I will be in command of your group from the instant we enter the Mars 1 spacecraft here in Earth orbit until the instant we leave it, once safely back here in Earth orbit. Especially during the time we are on the surface of Mars my responsibility will be to see that all mission objectives are met and no one is hurt. I will expect my orders to be carried out without delay and without argument. Mars is not a university campus. We will maintain military discipline at all times. Is that clear?"
"Quite clear," answered Tony Reed.
"Any questions?"
No one spoke. No one even moved as they stood anchored to the floor by the foot restraints.
"Good," said Vosnesensky.
Connors added, "If you have any problems, we can always talk them over. We’ll be in transit for more than nine months. That’s the time to go over the mission plan in as much detail as we can and hash over any changes you want to make."
So they’re going to be good cop and bad cop, Jamie thought. I wonder if they’ve planned that out or if it’s just their natural dispositions?
The four scientists glanced uneasily at each other. Vosnesensky motioned to Connors and the two pilots glided off, heading toward the hatch.
"Well," said Reed once they were out of earshot, "it looks as if we got rid of Hoffman only to get the Russian version of a drill sergeant."
3
Jamie was surprised at how difficult it was for him to make the mental transition. His body became accustomed to zero gravity in a couple of days. But he still had a hard time convincing himself that he was really going to Mars, actually part of the first team.
It did not help when all the Mars mission members began sneezing and coughing and blaming it on him.
"The rest of us have been confined together for more than two weeks at Star City," Tony Reed explained, almost jovially. "You’re the serpent in our garden; you’ve brought some new cold viruses with you that we haven’t grown accustomed to as yet."
Jamie felt miserable, more from the accusing stares his bleary-eyed comrades gave him whenever they sneezed than from his own stuffed head and wheezing chest.
Like the first week of school, he told himself. Everybody catches everything. Yet it made him feel more the outsider than ever before. Even after the colds ran their course and everyone returned to good health Jamie still kept mostly to himself, alone and unhappy — until he remembered that he was going to Mars.
4
Space and time are two aspects of the same thing, dimensions of the universe. There was a keyhole in spacetime, or as the engineers of mission control phrased it, a window. The two Mars craft had to be launched out of Earth orbit through that keyhole, through that window, at a certain time and in a precise direction with exactly the proper velocity, if they were to reach the moving pinpoint of light that was their destination.
For twenty-three days the two dozen men and women of the Mars mission, plus their expedition commander, Dr. Li, checked and re-checked every piece of equipment stowed aboard the long sleek Mars spacecraft. While they did so, specialist teams of technicians and robots attached bulky ovoid tanks of propellants around the aft end of each craft. The spacecraft began to look like thin white pencils surrounded by clusters of matte-gray lozenges at their eraser end.
The propellants had been manufactured on the moon and catapulted from the airless lunar surface to rendezvous with the spacecraft waiting in Earth orbit. The mission to Mars required not only Earth’s resources, but the mining and processing centers on the moon as well.
On the twenty-fourth day the Mars-bound personnel left the assembly station for good and transferred their personal gear to the spacecraft. Twelve men and women aboard the habitat module of Mars 1, twelve plus Dr. Li in Mars 2. No one made a single mention of the fact that there would be thirteen aboard Mars 2. None of the scientists or pilots would admit to being superstitious; still, no one spoke the word "thirteen."
Space-suited technicians attached the long tethers that connected the two assembled spacecraft. Manufactured in the microgravity environment of a space station facility, the tethers had a tensile strength many times greater than that of any material that could be made on Earth.
Once they were on their way to Mars, tiny cold-gas thrusters would spurt in a precisely programmed order and the spacecraft would begin to spin up in a stately, graceful rotation. The tethers would stretch to their full five-kilometer length, and inside the connected Mars spacecraft a feeling of normal gravity would return, while the universe outside would start to revolve slowly past their observation ports.
A cluster of astronomical telescopes and high-energy radiation sensors was carefully placed at the midpoint of the long tethers, where they would be effectively weightless and could maintain precise pointing accuracy for the astronomers who would operate them remotely from Earth.
Other thrusters would later do-spin the spacecraft enough to reduce the internal gravity to the Martian level. By the time they arrived at Mars the explorers would be fully accustomed to the low Martian gravity. On the nine-month flight back home the spacecraft would spin up to a normal terrestrial g once again.
The interior of the habitat module was like the interior of every spacecraft Jamie had ever been in: a central corridor flanked either by the closed doors of privacy compartments or the open benches and equipment racks of workstations.
Up forward was the command section where a Russian cosmonaut and American astronaut copiloted the spacecraft. Just behind it was a sort of passenger compartment with seats for all the personnel, which could also serve as an informal lounge or conference room.