“How beautiful,” I said, “the unseen majority of things in the universe,” pointing out Phobos to Jim, but he was still performing calculations and typing status updates. It didn’t seem long before my clipboard lit up with a text message from Houston, asking for more details about the injury.
“Okay, go have a look,” Jim said. “We’re as stable as we’re going to be before the touchdown.”
José was right about the banister, in fact. It was tacky with some foreign substance, though I couldn’t precisely identify this compound. It could have been anything at this point. Long-term confinement brought out these residues.
When I rappelled myself down to José’s floor, meanwhile, I confronted a very disturbing sight. A sight that would have limitless and unforeseeable implications for the mission. José, that is, lay on the floor with his leg dislocated to a remarkable angle, an impossible angle. And the belt loop of his reentry gear was hooked around a gaffing tool that was intended to be used to load out the ultralight on the surface. He didn’t respond to my repeated attempts to rouse him. I depressed the nearby intercom on button.
“He’s unconscious. And it looks like he has a broken leg.”
“You kidding? How the hell?” Jim’s tinny voice rebounded.
“You saw him. He wasn’t prepared. Better get Arnie. I’m going to go ahead and revive him.”
However, that wasn’t what I did immediately. There was an odd peacefulness in the cargo bay. I considered my surroundings. I noticed that José’s grow-light garden was doing very well. There were even blossoms on some of the tomato plants. We could have fresh tomatoes on Mars in a few weeks. An unimaginable treat. Maybe soybeans too. I took the opportunity, in that silence, to say a little prayer for José, because even though I disliked the man, I didn’t want to see him disabled on Mars, or unable to contribute further to the mission. Did God even answer prayers from space? Maybe we were out of bounds. Nonetheless, it was in a spirit of gentleness and affection for the sleeping wretch that I drifted over to the first aid station and fetched out the smelling salts.
He was not very happy when he woke, that was for sure, and based on the cries of pain, it was evident that José was not in shock, which, in any event, is oversold as a medium of pain relief. José resorted to a syntactical bonanza of Spanish-language curses.
“What happened?” he kept asking. “What happened?”
“I think we hit the orbit very hard, and a lot sooner than we were supposed to, and everything that was loose went flying. You were one of the loose things.”
“Orbit?” he said.
“Orbit.”
“You mean?”
The implications of this question took a moment to sink in.
“You know where you are, right? You’re on the Excelsior, and we’re on our way to Mars.”
He stared at me. In disbelief.
“Jim, are you hearing this?” I called.
From intercom: “I’m hearing it.”
There was a penlight in the first aid box. I took it out and shone it in his eyes. The pupils were not entirely responsive to the stimulus. Not really a good sign.
“How much pain are you in?”
I went to touch the leg, and José began crying out immediately.
“I’m going to administer an injection, José,” I said, “which will help with the pain. But we’re going to have to try to splint your leg a little later. I have to warn you that that is not going to be very pleasant.” José blanched at what was taking place, as though he were uncertain about all of it, and yet he still held out his arm. I squeezed a little OxyPlus out of the hypodermic to make sure there were no air bubbles, and then I dosed him up. He went slack within seconds. So I lugged him and his gravity-enhanced bulk up from cargo and strapped him to his chair, where he should have been anyway, and climbed back up to command and control.
At 2000 hours, the Pequod also went into orbit, not long after the Geronimo, but I was busy elsewhere. It was a long twelve hours of sitting with José and his mangled leg, asleep and awake, attempting to keep his leg immobile, explaining a lot of things to him, explaining that we were close personal friends and had been since early on in the years of training that it took to prepare for the Mars mission, explaining that he had an exalted position in the mission, as science officer on the first capsule that was going to touch down on the planet. I also had to brush him up on some recent global history, like the fact that NAFTA, by virtue of repeated cycles of inflation and stagflation and the exporting of all manufacturing jobs to Asia, was no longer the economic powerhouse he remembered.
I explained to José my personal theory that the Mars mission was the last great story that the NAFTA signatories had remaining in their arsenal. It was the good yarn we could tell the people of the world. Now that the Sino-Indian economic cooperative pact was in control of the show, their profiteers were able to engage in the kind of miserly fiscal policy that would prevent a government from the spending necessary to promote aggressive space travel. The rich wanted to get richer, I counseled José, and so the rich didn’t approve of the profligacy of a Mars mission, especially one involving three ships and no less than twelve additional preflight unmanned missions in order to deliver various kinds of modules that would be required by the crew when it touched down. The Mars mission was the last act of the leadership in Washington as we knew it, I told him. There was a Hail Mary desperation to our labors. That was why so many things had gone wrong, that was why the aerobrakes had fired without warning, that was why his guess was as good as mine if we would make it to the surface, and forget about getting home.
If we controlled the surface of Mars, I told José, meaning NAFTA in general, or the USA in particular, then we controlled the next phase of human development, of human history. The winnings accrue to the winners, I told him, but we had been on a losing streak of a decade or more. We’d lurched from one ill-advised police action to another. As to the mission itself, I said, “All you need to know is that we lost one astronaut, and we’re not going to lose another.”
“What?” José said, groggy with the pain.
“You don’t remember?”
“Starting to come back,” he said. Which meant it wasn’t.
“She jettisoned herself into space.”
It occurred to me to wonder if he could be falsifying the severity of his amnesiac symptoms. Perhaps in concert with military subcontractors who were paying him additional sums. The only thing I could think to do was to probe around the limits of his awareness.
“She did say something, you know, before her accident, about a bacteria on the surface that she thought might be a little dangerous,” I said. “It might have had a military application. This was probably something she was just making up, don’t you think?”
“Bacteria?”
“You were briefed by subcommittees of the agency I know nothing about.”
“What are you asking?”
“I’m saying that if there’s something on the surface that I don’t know anything about, you would now be in a position to tell me.”
“I remember something about a bacteria, but it’s not very clear.”
“When you do remember, feel free. Don’t forget that we’re in this together. We’re not on Earth anymore, José. We’re Martians, or very soon we will be.”
At this point, just a few hours from our purported landing, Jim Rose finally appeared in the cargo bay. Jim was sweaty, worried, and he had trouble sticking with the conversation for more than a couple of sentences. He kept inspecting unimportant bits of machinery.