December 3, 2025
On the twenty-eighth of November (for those of you who just joined, I’m finishing up an earlier story), the other two ships were to dock together and switch captives, while we of the Excelsior were far, far away, gliding through the vacuum between the third and fourth planets, toward a projected touchdown almost four weeks off. What I’m about to report comes from what I’ve learned since. It’s reconstructed. You can subject these spontaneous musings to the enthusiastic skepticism that you bring to everything else I write. Maybe I’m composing these lines in Lahore or Mumbai, at one of those subcontinental computer-processing facilities, faking the prose style of an American astronaut, so that the heartbroken and fiscally challenged young of the heartland will believe in something.
The problem was that the best pilot on the Pequod, the aforementioned Brandon Lepper, was strapped down during the jury-rigged docking maneuver. We had learned how to dock ships during our years of Mars mission training, in case of a difficulty like the one you are reading about right now. But that didn’t mean that docking was routine or without danger. It was all meant to be done with thrusters, minutely controlled bursts of the thrusters, and these were to be operated remotely by computers from the home planet. At least, this was how Mission Control framed its agenda when describing what was going to take place. Brandon was not of particular importance to the docking event, they said. Computer piloting, they said, was a fail-safe method.
Maybe they were saying these things in order to try to keep Laurie Corelli calm, because Laurie Corelli was no great pilot. Arnie Gilmore, meanwhile, was the mission doctor. Any damage to the Pequod would adversely impact the mission. Since the Geronimo had launched an hour and a half before the Pequod, and from halfway across the continent, Mission Control actually needed to dramatically slow the former capsule, which was a demanding proposition, in terms of fuel use. Because once the Geronimo was slowed, assuming it didn’t collide with the oncoming Pequod, and once the docking mission was accomplished, the Geronimo would have to be restarted. That’s a lot of fuel right there. If I was reading the projections correctly, when they came through from Mission Control, there was enough fuel to do all of this, but just. Not a lot more. There was no room for any further mistakes. Did Brandon Lepper know what he had done? In feeling like he wanted to prove that he was the big man over on the Pequod, the man in control, he had nearly crippled humankind’s first trip out of Earth’s backyard, to the tune of billions and billions of dollars.
In fact, as 0500 hours approached on the twenty-eighth, Brandon Lepper, who had, it was believed, used various performance enhancers during his training days, and who may have been suffering from a steroid-related mood disorder, in lockstep with Planetary Exile Syndrome, awoke from his narcotic slumber and began screaming at Laurie and Arnie through the intercom, “What the fuck is going on here? How come I’m strapped down? You all better get me the hell off this table. You think you can leave a man for a month in a capsule with a beautiful woman who dresses provocatively? You think a man can withstand that kind of treatment? You’re crazy, that’s what I’m telling you, you people aren’t human. It’s just a natural thing, to have inclinations, and if a woman is not able to deal with it, then a woman shouldn’t be on this mission in the first place. Women always think they’re tough, but then when it boils down to it, they go running to Daddy, because they can’t actually take it. I’ve been in battle; I was in Uzbekistan when the tacticals were raining down from both sides. I was in Malaysia. You think I don’t know what tough is? You women think you’re tough, but the only weapon you know how to operate is a manual. I was there where bodies were scorched, where all the flesh was burned right off; I saw all of that. I saw it! Depleted uranium in the water supply. Radiation sickness. I went and rescued women and children. I treated their burns. So don’t say that I don’t know anything about compassion and about gratitude; don’t say I haven’t done anything for women. Women need me; they need a man to help them through this world….”
It was all just a misunderstanding, a joke, a good laugh, according to Brandon, but at this point Laurie and Arnie disabled the intercom, and they busied themselves about the directions from Mission Control. There was the surge of the reverse thrusters slowing their great haste. It wouldn’t be long now before they would be able to see the other ship.
Meanwhile, in the Geronimo, Steve Watanabe and Abu Jmil had slowed their own craft, and they were now sitting ducks, to use the old phrase, in the middle of the superhighway between Mars and Earth. Thirty-two or — three million miles from Earth, and if there was any miscalculation by Mission Control, they would be crushed like interstellar ice, vaporized, spread into some belt of man-made debris. Steve and Abu, while waiting as the Pequod appeared on their instruments, spent some of the time reaching out to their families. Steve’s wife, Danielle, a mediation specialist, was home that day looking after their son, who had antibiotic-resistant strep throat. She answered the fuzzy, distorted signal on her digital wrist assistant. She knew just where this kind of message came from. Houston was patching her husband through. She also knew how long it would take to reply.
“Sweetheart,” Steve said, “we have this complicated maneuver we’re going to try to bring off today, because of some problems they’re having over on the Pequod. Some personnel problems.”
Danielle was a wise and seasoned mediation specialist, short, with red ringlets of hair, freckles, and never without a dark, sublime lipstick, nearly Victorian in its perfect elegance. Nothing surprised her, and she smiled when she really meant it. During this time-consuming video uplink, intermittent and fuzzy, her face, through the white noise of video transmission, was impassive as she waited. “What’s the maneuver? Will it be safe? Are you worried?” And then the delay.