"I’m feeling as if I’m in a zoo," Ilona muttered. "In a cage."
"Steady on," Tony said in his best British stiff-upper-lip manner. But he looked tight to Jamie, tense, his smile forced.
"How much longer will it be?" Joanna’s sleepy voice came from behind Jamie.
It was a rhetorical question. She pushed past them and went into the lavatory.
"Ever wonder why they always put the pisser next to the water fountain?" O’Hara asked no one in particular.
"Plumbing," Jamie said.
"Or recycling?" suggested Reed.
Jamie walked the length of the compartment, as much to stretch his legs and get some circulation going as to reach the pilots up by the comm console and equipment monitors. Katrin Diels, the German physicist, was deep in earnest conversation, a headset clamped over her blonde curls.
"When did the intensity peak?" she asked into the pin-sized microphone in front of her lips.
Jamie almost smiled at the fierce intensity on her snub-nosed freckled face. She was slight of frame, as butter blonde and blue-eyed as the people you would see in a travel poster advertising Oktoberfest. The pilots had made room for her and she sat on the end of the bench where she could operate the communications console.
She whipped the headset off and sprang to her feet.
"Good news, everybody!" she called out. "The lunar observatory reports that the storm’s intensity peaked there almost an hour ago."
Smiles broke out. Heads nodded. Everyone murmured happily.
"According to the orbiting magnetosphere observatories," Diels continued, "the storm should be over in another twelve to sixteen hours."
Groans. "Another sixteen hours in here?"
Tony Reed raised his arms for silence. "Now don’t complain. As long as the toilet works we should be perfectly fine."
Ilona was not amused. "Sixteen more hours. Ugh!"
"Try to relax," Reed urged. "Take a nap."
"Would you like to play a game of bridge?" asked the Greek biologist.
"Not with you," O’Hara snapped. "It’s like swimming with a bloody shark."
Xenophanes laughed, but to Jamie it seemed strained.
Vosnesensky said, "We should not sit idly for another fourteen hours."
Ilona’s lips curled into the start of a sneering reply, but before she could say anything Reed jumped in.
"What would you suggest, Mikhail Andreivitch?" the Englishman asked.
"A workers’ council," the Russian replied. "We are all here. None of us has pressing duties to perform. Now is the time for a self-analysis session."
"A quality circle, like the Japanese?" asked Tad Sliwa, the backup biochemist.
"More like a self-criticism circle," said Ilona, "like prisoners in Siberia."
Vosnesensky’s beefy face flushed slightly, but he did not reply to her. Ivshenko, lean in face and body, darkly handsome in an almost Levantine way, said, "Self-analysis can be a very useful way to examine interpersonal problems."
There was some argument, but Vosnesensky was determined and none of the others really had any suggestion to offer as an alternative. So the twelve men and women sat along the benches facing one another.
"How do we start?" asked Ollie Zieman.
"I will start," Vosnesensky said. "This was my idea, so I will be the first volunteer."
"Go right ahead," said Reed, sitting across the central aisle from the Russian.
Vosnesensky glanced at Ilona, then turned his gaze to sweep the men and women on the bench opposite him. "I feel resentment from some of you. Resentment that I am in command. Resentment, perhaps, that a Russian is in command."
"That’s rather natural, is it not?" asked Katrin Diels. "There is bound to be some resentment against any authority figure."
That started the discussion, and around and around it went. Jamie watched in silence, noticing that Ilona sat leaning back against the wall like a cat, her eyes following from one speaker to the next, her lips slightly curled in what might have been a smile. But she did not volunteer a word.
Like meetings of the student council, Jamie thought, remembering his undergraduate days. The ones who did most of the talking were the ones who were already in charge. The ones who needed to talk the most were the ones who stayed silent and kept their anger bottled up inside them.
After nearly an hour Jamie was startled to hear O’Hara say, "Well, if we’re baring our souls and all that — I don’t particularly like the idea that I’m going to be sitting up in orbit all during our stay at Mars while my esteemed colleague here," he jabbed a thumb in Jamie’s direction, "gets to spend the whole seven weeks down on the surface. I don’t think that’s fair."
"I agree with you," Jamie heard himself say. "It’s not fair." But, he added silently, that’s the way the mission plan has been written and that’s the way it’s going to be.
O’Hara’s gripe launched another hour’s debate on why the mission had been planned the way it had been, and whether or not they could appeal to Dr. Li to change the procedure so that the backup teams could spend some time on the surface.
"It would be useless," Vosnesensky said flatly. "All these procedures were examined very thoroughly for years. One team stays on the surface and the backup team remains in orbit. That will not be changed. I know this for a fact."
"I agree with George," Ollie Zieman grumbled. "It’s not fair."
"But more efficient," Vosnesensky countered, with the flat finality of a man who had decided the subject was closed.
"Why must the leader of each team be a Russian?" Ilona asked, her throaty voice purring, almost sleepy.
Everyone turned toward her.
"I mean, we have men and women of every nationality on this mission. Yet of the four teams, each group is headed by a Russian. A Russian male, at that."
For a long moment there was absolute silence. Jamie could hear the electrical hum of the ship’s equipment and the quiet hiss of the air fans.
"I can answer that," said Pete Connors.
"Please do," Ilona said.
The black astronaut was sitting beside Vosnesensky, who had the other cosmonaut, Ivshenko, on his other side. Connors gave them a small grin, then turned back to Ilona.
"First," he raised a long finger, "the commander of each team must be a pilot. A man from the military, accustomed to giving orders and having them obeyed. Accustomed to receiving orders from higher authority and carrying them out. Without discipline we could all get killed. This is no weekend hiking trip we’re on."
"You said a man," Katrin Diels interrupted. "Why not a woman?"
Connors made an elaborate shrug. "Guess they couldn’t find any women with the necessary qualifications."
All three women hooted at him. Even most of the men laughed.
Once they calmed down, Connors resumed, "Second, the Soviet Federation has provided the boosters and the life-support equipment for this mission. Soviet cosmonauts have more experience in spaceflight than anyone on Earth; they’ve been doing long-term missions aboard their space station since 1971, for god’s sake!"
"Because you Americans waited twenty-five years before you put up a permanent space station," Xenophanes said, practically sneering.
"Yeah, that’s true," Connors agreed. "So when we started planning the Mars mission, the American government agreed that the team leaders would be picked from military pilots who had the most experience in spaceflight."
"Meaning Russians," said Xenophanes.
"That’s the way it worked out."
Sliwa huffed, "The Russians outsmarted you at the very start of the program. They have always been clever at negotiations."