Ginger didn’t say anything. No one was going to let on about where the fib started and ended. That was how Debbie Quartz was. Generous, but also impenetrable. Wasn’t a couple of weeks later, when I leased out the Stark-Richards house to cover mortgage payments and child support, that I started sleeping on her couch.
It was in this vein that Dr. Anatoly Thatcher went on about how great Debbie was, saying, “She was an absolutely committed astronaut.” And then he started in with the guff that was designed to indemnify the agency against legal action. This line of reasoning had to do with Space Panic: “Ladies and gentlemen, you all know how unpredictable a deep-space voyage is, and how uncertain we are about the long-term effects of weightlessness, exposure to gamma rays, and so forth. In addition to these risks, there is another subject about which we previously knew very little, and that is the psychological effects of increasing distance from the home planet. Since the first sign of trouble with Deborah Quartz, which occurred soon after launch at t-zero, the psychology team here at Mission Control began profiling Debbie and the rest of the crew and have begun projecting our revised mission expectations. What we want to present to you is the possibility that there may, in fact, be a sort of disinhibiting disorder that comes from interplanetary travel. We don’t know how this is going to play out over the course of a very long mission, but we do know that none of you, according to our evaluations so far, has been free of affective overreaction to mission stimuli. We solicit your opinions on this subject, naturally, but this is our sense of things. Earlier missions have suggested this possibility to us, and we are not surprised to find that the symptoms are exaggerated the longer and more distant the flight. Remember the mutiny on Spacelab, for example, or the incident of interspecies violence on the Mir. You will recall that these events were summarized in some of your prelaunch reading. All we want to say about this is that under the circumstances, you are the ones who are going to have to adapt and facilitate treatment and remediation of these mental-health complaints. You are the ones who can make your interpersonal experiences more agreeable, more harmonious. If you are unable to remember that your own motivation may be somewhat clouded by Space Panic, or interplanetary disinhibitory disorder, as we are now calling it here, perhaps you can nonetheless extend your sympathy and understanding to your fellow crew members, and in this way we can prevent further difficulty. The mission has lost one of its best, finest, and most trusted astronauts, and we cannot afford to lose anyone else. We are willing to sacrifice the odd satellite; we are willing to lose an unmanned rocket here and there. Hardware is expensive, but there is always something learned from the reversals. We are not, however, willing to lose manpower. NASA is about humankind’s aspirations. Not about technology. We protect our people. You should do the same. I urge you all to be mindful of what I’ve brought up tonight. Over and out.”
Jim Rose and I sat there as the screen went blue again, and in stunned silence we pondered the meanings of this communication. Everything was so much worse than they knew on the ground, but maybe Dr. Anatoly Thatcher had a point. Maybe there was some kind of interplanetary menarche, some periodic self-slaughtering impulse, and now we were at its mercy. The question was whether we could survive the experience. If our bodies could survive, might it be our personalities, our hearts, that gave out? Did terms like heart and soul have any meaning beyond the surface of the home planet? Were these convenient metaphors dependent on a certain level of atmospheric pressure? A water-based ecosystem?
Jim said, “That certainly did not make a public servant feel confident about his job.” He had these worry lines. At the corners of the eyes. If anything, they had become worse on the Mars mission. Additionally, there was the tendency, with weightlessness, for a body to hold water above the waist. Whatever the cause, in times of great stress, worry lines broke out on Jim like a series of fermatas over the symphonic score of his personality.
“Do you notice any of it?” I asked.
“What? Disinhibitory whatever?”
“Roger that.”
“I notice that I am not sleeping,” he said, and fell into a conspiratorial whisper. “I notice that certain people here in our neighborhood do not seem trustworthy any longer to me, and I notice that I cannot shake the idea that we are just going to Mars to pick up the minerals necessary for some new kind of explosive something-or-other. And I don’t know if that’s what I signed up for, or if I want to be a part of that. I still don’t know what I want to do about it. What do you think?”
“About the disinhibitory excuses? Or about the military-industrial complex? I never believed we were up to any good. I only believed I wanted to travel. I like to see the lines of the superhighway disappear beneath me.”
“But do you notice any symptoms of interplanetary disinhibitory disorder?”
“I would have to have strong feelings about my character in the first place,” I said. “And I do not. Disinhibition might make me less ill-tempered. This might improve my outlook.”
The video game we played blinked away on the screen on the table in front of us. I unhooked myself from the seat where I had been perched and allowed myself to roam freely across the capsule, the better to avoid his eyes, which seemed to have some probing quality.
Despite a wish to avoid further disclosure, I went on. “I’m the perfect astronaut. I have no native qualities. I’m the guy you want to have on your team because I have no needs. I take the orders. If you want to know the truth, the only disinhibiting I’ve noticed concerns my dislike of José. It blossoms.”
Perhaps I thought I was winning Jim over with this remark.
Jim Rose unhooked himself from the table and swam toward me. Despite my blue mood, my poor conversational skills, the dark forecasts from home, his presence beside me lightened my mood. He said, “You aren’t afraid?”
“Of what’s to come?” I said.
“Well,” said Captain Jim Rose, the linebacker, the most-likely-to-succeed astronaut, the pilot, the future political candidate, the hero to the economically deprived young men of the Wild West, “I am. I am afraid.”
That was when he first took my hand.
December 26, 2025
We just celebrated the first Christmas of the Mars mission! Only one or two more to go! Before we’re back on Terran terra firma! I have to say it was good to have ham. I’d almost forgotten what ham was like. It had a voluptuous stink that was just unlike anything else we had here on the Excelsior. Oh, the little frivolities of life. They enabled you to go on. We called over to the Pequod, to wish them a very merry holiday. So far no response. I contacted Houston not long after to ask if everything was all right on the other ships, and then I waited. To be sure, things were hard on the Pequod. They were shorthanded. Arnie Gilmore wasn’t meant to be doing the first officer stuff, the management stuff, but he was trying to do it, and Laurie was brushing up on piloting, which involved some daily lessons from Mission Control. Talk about your steep learning curve. She had three days, now, to figure out how to coordinate landing the Pequod, which was meant to be the last ship to land. Before that, we needed to secure the location of the cargo that had been launched at Mars in the last couple years, like the liquid hydrogen, so as to avoid losing the hardware components of the Earth Return Vehicle that were in the Pequod cargo hold, and which would be assembled into that craft for our trip home. Maybe the stress of piloting explained why Laurie wasn’t communicating. And yet the same was true of the Geronimo. I gave a yell over to Steve, to see how he was holding up, how his son’s strep throat was.