Then there was the roar all around me, infernal and eternal, as of the very forces that made space and time and all the secrets, and then there were the g-forces, which immediately pressed me into the most comfortable position in which to survive g-forces, the recumbent position. What must the Big Bang have sounded like? Well, kids, you’re probably correct if you answered that the Big Bang had no sound! Because there was no atmosphere in which it took place! And no time in which it began! As our rocket lifted off, however, I looked over at Captain James Rose, my companion in the front of the capsule, and we attempted to nod, or at least blink at each other. Perhaps there was not even a trace of this, and yet there was intent. We had attended to the various screens, where the computer was making decisions about temperatures, regenerative cooling, levels of cosmic radiation, and so forth. We had been given the option of shutting off the video feed of our liftoff, and I’d done exactly that on the screens nearest me. I would rather live this moment than watch the web coverage.
Part of our fuel assembly involved antimatter, the fuel of the stars, the fuel of creation, and it was incredible to think that back there in stage one, particles and their antimatter daughters were crashing together in order to generate the reactive force that would drive us into space, and I was near to saying something historical about this to Captain James Rose, but we were busy being fused to our recumbent workstations, and anyway he was a man of few words. All of this was happening so fast that the clouds of vapor and burned waste and radioactive material were already billowing away behind us. The launch assembly had fallen away, as in some kind of building collapse, and the intense trembling of the craft at the tail assembly, with its fins, moved us a millimeter from the launch pad. I could see across the capsule on Jim’s monitor the faces of the families on the viewing platform, the president’s wife, who was holding an umbrella to shield her pale skin from the harsh rays of the sun, Jim’s wife, his children. Then I averted my gaze. In the process, I suppose I missed the cheerleaders and marching bands, all wearing appliquéd depictions of the Red Planet.
In twelve minutes, we lost the first stage of the rocket assembly, which would incinerate in the atmosphere. We had, happily, already passed the moment in which two V-2 rockets, two space shuttles, three Thor missions, and one of the prior Mars shots had exploded over the Gulf of Mexico, causing loss of life for twenty-two or — three Americans, two chickens, three dogs, one rhesus monkey, and so it was likely, kids, that we were going to make it, at least, to the edge of Earth’s atmosphere. I am a praying man, because you couldn’t get a seat on this craft if you weren’t. And I was therefore willing to perform any petitionary ritual that might enable this rocket to achieve third-stage ignition (two million pounds of thrust). I would pray, I would dance (though I am a poor dancer), I would recite poetry backward, whatever it took.
Staring back at the Earth, at first, is like staring into the retina of a gigantic human eye. There were auroras flashing around us now, bright red auroras, as though this were the origin of the color red — which must come from somewhere, after all. Auroras just as they have been reported by the other astronauts. They were luminous, beautiful, arresting in a way that exceeds the capacity of your blogger to describe. Likewise, the oceans looked like the surface of a dime-store marble. And the clouds were a succession of veils. No nation, on this camera feed, resembled a nation. There were no borders from up here. The differences were simple, between land and sea, between the things that lived on the one or swam in the other. The clouds swept across each ineffectually. The storms harrowed the coasts, and at either end of our little dime-store superball was the ice. Like at the summit of an ice cream cone.
I was made better by seeing this. All the Apollo astronauts are dead, you know, and NASA has been underfunded for a good long while, and there just aren’t that many people who have seen what I have now seen. Jim and I are part of an elite group to whom this view has been given, the view of the superball Earth that is always on the brink of destroying itself. It was along these lines that I made my first remark into the intercom: “How do they manage to pack so much horseshit into such a small space?” and Rose nodded, in his sage way, and didn’t say anything at all. Mission Control came on, after a suitable delay, to remind me that we still had a ways to go until we were beyond orbit, and would I remember to leave the communications apparatus free for emergencies.
The second stage launched, detached, and then the third, and our inexorable progress was in the direction of the blackness between us and the next planet. This is perhaps the moment to remind you, kids, that we are embarked on what much of the world imagines is a fruitless endeavor. A spectacle of infotainment. Until we, the sojourners, can get our spacecrafts closer to the speed of light, until, e.g., we have a way of launching a self-sustaining ecosystem at Alpha Centauri or one of the other nearer stars, what is the point of this journey? This is the question asked by the naysayers and disbelievers. No stockholder is enriched by Richards and Rose, et al., going to Mars. No intractable human problem is resolved by it. We are the bottom-feeders of transnational astrophysics, but did we care? We didn’t care then, because gravity had given way to zero g’s, and I was floating against my restraining straps, and the splashy red lights of the auroras had come and gone, and the boosters expended themselves, and soon there would be silence, as during the Big Bang, just silence, because the sound of space was no sound, nothing. There was some onboard nausea, like you have probably heard, and that was kind of rough at first, almost as bad as the roiling of my bowels, which was only now subsiding.
It was just a speck, the Red Planet, one we couldn’t really even see, when Mission Control finally indicated, through the computer, that it was okay for us to unshackle ourselves. Jim called over: “In one piece?”
“Never felt better.”
“José, all right down there?”
Kids, this is perhaps the time to indicate that the third member of our crew was a late addition. Every jury has a few alternates in case one of those serving has been tampered with by an organized-crime figure or by members of the Russian secret service. Well, it’s just the same with your Mars shot. We had among us a young, vivacious woman by the name of Roseanne Kim, who studied astrophysics at UCLA, and who was also incredibly good at designing her own crossword puzzles. Roseanne was irrepressible about her role in the Mars mission, she was her own cheerleading squad, at least until she went to buy a quart of milk just a week ago, at which point she was the victim of a serious vehicular accident. The perpetrator, an intoxicated gentleman, had run a common red light. Kids, did you know that more than 50 percent of car accidents involve the running of red lights? Or something like that. Roseanne Kim fractured her collarbone, because of the severe jolt of the air bag in her Toyota Extreme-Mini. Because of the fracture, she was instantly scratched from the mission.
At which point we got José. José Rodrigues was our new science officer, and he was going to be doing a lot of the rock collecting and geological experiments on the Red Planet, particularly at the Martian poles, where we are bound to have, we believe, a supply of water at our disposal. José was going to be leading the charge. He was short, stocky, officious, superficially unpleasant, and seemed to feel like he had something to prove all the time, and I don’t mind saying so. Now that we’re in the air, all NASA can do is censor my remarks, but they can’t make me believe what I don’t believe. Therefore, let’s be clear: José had been in contact with some of the military types on the ground, the secretive types who were always orbiting around the Mars mission like vampire bats, and for these reasons we didn’t feel like we knew him very well. He never ate vegetables, and as a young man he was a minor figure in Mexican wrestling.