José just came up from his hatch to discuss the latest results in X-treme lacrosse, the contest sweeping the nation. I wasn’t sure who was playing.
“Come on, my man,” said José. “You aren’t telling me that you don’t know who’s playing in the finals of X-treme lacrosse?”
José looked disappointed, because we still had two months and a few weeks before we even reached the Red Planet, and then a year while we waited for the orbits of Mars and Earth to near each other again, and then six months back. If we had nothing to say to one another in all that time, if we actively despised one another, it was going to be a long trip. But there was a season for discord and a season for rapprochement.
I could tell there was something going on in José’s science lab that he wasn’t telling us. We were supposed to be making crystals for use in satellite navigation, telemetry, and so forth. Crystals are better manufactured in the vacuum of space, as you know. We were intending to create the groundwork for a crystal-manufacturing laboratory in space, in fact, that would be staffed sort of like the oil wells in the Gulf of Mexico. Workers would have tours of duty. This was another attempt by NASA to turn a profit. José claimed that he was doing these kinds of experiments, but he showed no results. Just yesterday, when Jim was asleep, José scuttled up the hatch to say, “Look, brother, you know that the search for life beneath the poles is the military priority of the trip, right?”
Why did he keep saying this sort of thing? He stood there looking at me, and his eyebrows were so grown together that they looked like they could take flight from his forehead. And that unsightly scar of his constituted a second smile, a malevolent, snickering intention.
“José, you do your job and I’ll do mine. I may have to smell you, but that doesn’t mean I have to make small talk with you.”
“Hey, they’re listening in Houston! Show a man some respect!”
“They won’t hear this conversation for, oh, about ten minutes. If they are awake and taking an interest.” Because that’s how long it takes radio waves to get back to Earth, ten minutes. From this distance. By the time you read this blog, José might very well have moved on to another topic entirely. Though he had so few. In fact, when the conversation didn’t go any further, he turned his back on me and rappelled back down the ladder to his warren of scientific contraptions, which may or may not be about the search for life under the ice caps at the poles, depending on your level of twenty-first-century paranoia.
And now some more facts. Our craft is called the Excelsior, and as I’ve said, is one of three ships. Each night at 1700 hours, Earth time, I was accorded the good fortune, as communications officer, to talk to the astronauts from the other vessels, namely the Pequod and the Geronimo. The total number of astronauts on those vessels, as you would expect, was six, two of them being women — the science officer on the Geronimo, Debbie Quartz, and the first officer on the Pequod, Laurie Corelli. Without being offensive, if at all possible, I would like to note that after a week of having failed to see a single woman up close, I did start to have little fantasies about each of them, in my naps, and in my semi-sleep. Did Debbie and Laurie really exist? Were they as soft as I remembered? Yes, there was something soft in my recollections, and let us say that this thing was a woman! It was only occasionally that they were brisk and peremptory and did their jobs better than the rest of us.
On the night I want to tell you about, it was Laurie who signed on first from the Pequod. She hailed in the usual way, before asking how I was doing.
“Not bad,” I replied. Actually, my wife, who, as I have indicated, had lately been cohabiting with her restaurateur brother, had remarked in a recent message that she was proud of me, though I tend to think that this message was staged by the people at NASA. This note actually made me feel a little lonelier than before.
“The novelty has kind of worn off,” I remarked to Laurie, “but what’s new over there? Still looking at our taillights?”
“We haven’t picked up any speed on you yet,” Laurie said. This kind of scripted banter nauseated me. Laurie looked, on the video screen, as if she hadn’t been able to wash her hair much. It was dark brown and pulled back, a little disarranged. Behind her, in the rear of the camera’s fish-eye view of the Pequod, I could see that Brandon Lepper, the one guy on the mission I found even more suspect than José, was trying to edge into the shot. You know how in space movies there was always one guy who got eaten by the aliens? I hoped that Brandon Lepper would be that guy. In the videoconference uplink, he was doing curls with some free weights, which was stupid, because they didn’t actually weigh anything, and wouldn’t until we got to Mars. Laurie was elaborating on the virtues of Olympus Mons. She really wished we were landing there instead of near the southern pole. “It’d really be something to tell my son that I was going to be on a mountain that is 69,000 feet high.” This was a scripted comment, since I happen to know that Laurie’s son has some developmental problem, like many other kids these days, and despite his uncanny ability to compose serious orchestral music on his computer, he wants, by all accounts, almost no interaction with his mother.
I said: “I’m with you there, Laurie. If we can get enough fuel for one of the ultralights, maybe we can make it over there. For recon, if nothing else.” There had been a time when the Mission Control decision makers were thinking about landing there, because the caldera is so far across that you might not be able to see the other side from the rim, because it’s three times as tall as Mount Everest, because it’s still active, because it could be releasing water vapor into the thin Martian atmosphere, because it’s there!
“There’s the risk of eruption, 15,000-foot cliff walls, and the increased threat of radiation, but I don’t intend to let that stop me.”
I know that she didn’t want to go to Olympus Mons. But I know she had an obligation to the audience back home. What did she really want to talk about? If she was anything like me, she was worrying about whether or not we were going to land on the Red Planet without getting squashed, and whether we were going to be able to grow anything in the greenhouse, whether we would be able to generate sufficient oxygen, and so forth. Come on, who gave a shit where we landed?
Laurie looked behind her, and for a second, I saw a look of unmitigated horror flicker across her face, as Brandon basically pushed past her to edge into the shot. “You’ve got to admit we’d have excellent bragging privileges if we were to see the largest volcano in the entire solar system.” Laurie tried to finish the thought with dignity. But it turned out Brandon had a few things to say.
“Jed,” he offered, “did I tell you about the time I was fighting welterweight back in the city, against a bunch of gangster kids from the—”
“You did,” I said. Because he had. It seems that Brandon felt he had nothing going for him but that he was not a hurricane transplant, like the waves of the disenfranchised who populated Houston, TX, his hometown, because of the mismanagement of successive generations of politicians. “As I recall, you had already been knocked down when—”
He said, “When I pulled out a technical knockout in the last—”
“Brandon, my shift’s almost over,” I said.
“What’s the word from the Geronimo?”
“They’re playing a lot of cards.”