Behind us, watching the whole thing, was José, and he was doing some more of his strange Asian spiritual exercises, which at this point seemed to involve a lot of facial grimacing and isometric convulsions, unless his version of Planetary Exile Syndrome involved a tic douloureux.
“I can’t stand it when you loiter behind me,” I reminded him.
“That’s all you have to say after three months stuck in this aluminum can?” José replied.
“Six minutes to strap in,” I said.
“Jim, you got it under control?” said he.
“Late to be asking.”
“Maybe you didn’t sleep well last night,” José said. And when I looked back to catch his eye, he was grinning in a way both somber and knowing.
“Like a baby,” Jim said.
“Five and a half,” I said. “Don’t forget the ventilator.”
“I know what the MMPs are,” José said, as he retreated down the ladder to the cargo bay. “I know as much about the mission as you do. I have more to do than type away on a diary.” And then: “What is this gunk all over the banister?” The sound of his coyote laugh was muffled as he disappeared into his lair of science projects. I hadn’t been down there in days to see if his plants were still growing, and when you consider that the capsule is only 1,200 square feet, that’s saying something.
Kids, my large philosophical thought for today is that I know what the woman wants. I’m like Tiresias, who was each woman and man. What women observe, kids, what they have said to me often enough, is that with men there is the big crushing embrace of intimacy, from out of nowhere, when you are mushed in his arms, and you are more there, more useful than you have ever been, because you can complete this man, you can make him stronger, kinder, better, you can compel his softness to the surface, you can nurture it, until he is like a little lion cub, and all is good, all is sweet, up until the man’s desire crests, and he spills his frenzied self upon the earth, at which point man is revealed as faithless and unloving, as man waltzes off to go watch X-treme lacrosse and eat salty snack items. Like you were never there at all. Never there at all! Until fluid backs up in the vas deferens or the prostate, and suddenly he requires some kind of liquidy release and becomes willing again to need to crush you in his faithless bear hug.
It was supposed to be three minutes until the aerobrakes, and we could easily be as an asteroid falling to the surface, we could burn up on orbital insertion, or else, as I was saying earlier, we could bounce off the atmosphere and go end over end, ass over teakettle, out toward the next star system, and in this dramatic moment, Jim wouldn’t even make eye contact with me, just to acknowledge that some tenderness had taken place. Maybe there wasn’t time for sentimentality, truly, because just as I was going to remark volubly on his remoteness, something went very seriously wrong, something that Houston was not up to predicting. We hadn’t yet done our redundant flight-modeling tests, nor had we hooked up our ventilators, nor had we had any kind of countdown, when the rear thrusters nonetheless ignited, but still there was the scraping of large pieces of lightweight aluminum and flame-resistant heat shields moving into place on the outside of the capsule, and the explosion of combustion down in the engine room, and suddenly we went from however many miles per second we were going into an atmosphere-enhanced slowdown. We went from an interplanetary velocity, as fast as Earth itself hurtles around the sun, down to a couple thousand kilometers per hour. Everything that was not Velcro’d down in the cabin went shooting up into the soup of compressed oxygen, and we strained against our straps, and then, miracle of miracles, we heard sound! We heard sound! Earsplitting sound! Outside the capsule! We heard sound because, ahead of schedule, and without catching on fire, we had been captured by the Red Planet, kids, and this meant sound again! Ours was no longer a vacuum! There was, well, a lot of carbon dioxide, methane, and some nitrogen and stuff, not a lot of oxygen, but who’s quibbling? We were falling into an atmosphere! We had made it somewhere in the neighborhood of 40 million miles across nothingness, and we were in the blissful soup of atmosphere. Martian atmosphere! And there was another sound, besides the aerobrakes firing and the hull shuddering, and that was a sharp yelp of pain from downstairs, which was, apparently, José being thrown violently across the capsule as we began again to experience the great mystery of gravity. Because even this far out, where we were just being captured by that perpetual falling, which is orbit, even here the little Martian gravitrons were interacting with our gravitrons, and as a result it was becoming temporarily possible to feel ourselves in these chairs, to feel our limbs. What this conferred on me, after the months of zero g’s, was an intense nausea. It was a good thing that we didn’t have the ventilators on, because Jim, who was holding on to a throttle between us on the off chance that he was going to have to do something, leaned over and vomited. I had the zero-gravity reaction to this: now there was going to be vomit drifting around the capsule, like there had been vomit the first couple of days. But the amazing quality of Jim’s leftover, semi-dehydrated breakfast was that it kind of spilled. What a novelty! And I would have stopped to consider all this myself, had I not been vomiting.
There was a deceleration gradient (we were in search of a velocity of 9.8 m/s2), and Jim gathered himself up from his slumped-over position as the hull of the Excelsior shuddered again, to make sure we were on track for the stable orbit that Houston had planned for us. The surface of the planet rushed up to meet us.
“You want to give a yell to José?” Jim said to me, somewhat nervously.
On the intercom, I called to our science officer.
“All right down there?”
No answer.
“José, are you there?”
Still nothing.
“I think he’s down.” I got on the keyboard and typed the message to Houston: Code 8, science officer failed to buckle in. This was followed by some important acronyms that José himself would have used in this message. There wasn’t going to be a chance to get downstairs, however. Not in the midst of the landing. Not unless I manufactured one. “You want me to go look?”
“We’ll go around half a revolution to make sure we’re where we’re supposed to be. Let’s make sure we’re secure.”
I don’t think I have commented at any length on the tiny moons of Mars, Phobos and Deimos. They are scarcely moons in the normal sense, and some people think they are just hunks of Mars that got blown out by some impact. And yet from my earliest days of training for the Mars mission, I have had an unnatural excitement about seeing Phobos. Phobos goes around the Martian equator, more or less, which our orbit was not far from, and so I was keenly hoping we would have a chance to see Phobos up close. It orbits the Red Planet every seven hours and thirty-nine minutes. And while I was thinking about what to do with José, watching for the moon was what I was able to do. Phobos, kids, is not exactly circular, by any means; it looks like the handset of an old-fashioned telephone, oblong, and as we swept by it, under it, my first thought was how good it would be for some variety of advertising. No doubt a Sino-Indian conglomerate will come up with just this sort of plan, and they will get a telegenic actor to announce it, perhaps broadcasting the message on the side of Phobos itself, for the eventual Mars colonists to see: The little Martian moon Phobos is just how you want to feel about your investments as you approach your retirement — modest, predictable, reliable. That’s why we named the company after it. Call a Phobos financial planner today. Phobos, a world apart.