Marc nodded. “Can’t put it off forever.” He started to get up.
“Before we call we should have the solution,” said Viktor. “I have decided. Captain should stay with his ship. Claudine leaves with hers, I stay here with mine.”
“You sure?” Raoul gaped. “We could find some other way to decide.”
Viktor shrugged. “Besides, someone needs to keep Julia out of trouble.”
Julia’s heart soared. Quick tears stung her eyes, spilled over and started down her cheeks. She bent her head and furtively brushed them away with her napkin. She desperately wanted to rush over and hug him, but made herself sit still.
She really was going to stay. Another two years! Until this moment the idea had seemed remote, unreal.
“Okay. Are we agreed?” Marc looked around the table. Heads nodded in assent. “Then let’s call Earth.”
The others walked to the comm center. Julia and Viktor stayed. She took his hand, pressed it to her cheek. It felt so good to touch him.
“Are you sure you want to do this? I didn’t mean to maneuver you—”
“You wouldn’t come here without me, back on Earth. How do you say it? Is payback time.”
“Is that your only reason? You don’t want to stay even a little bit for Mars?”
He shrugged, then smiled. “Is only a little worse than Siberia in winter. We belong together, in Siberia or Arctic or Mars.”
She looked at him. “I didn’t want to stay without you.” She realized her cheeks were wet again.
The moment stretched between them.
“Is truly settled then. We stay.”
She nodded. “Mars City.”
“Now comes hard part. We have to convince Earth.”
“You thought this was easy?” She blew her nose.
“No. Was not easy. But Earth will be harder. You’ll see.”
Viktor was right. Axelrod demanded that “his” crew commandeer the nuke so the Consortium could win. His battery of lawyers would argue that it was like marine salvage, he said.
When the crew resisted he became infuriated. Claudine relayed this to Airbus, who called it the first instance of Martian piracy. They argued that it was the reverse, and the Consortium had lost.
Legions of lawyers began arming for their paper wars.
All five were stunned, debating over a long dinner how to handle it. Julia argued forcefully that they reject all “Earth way” solutions with only one winner, and propose the “Mars way”: cooperation. But they couldn’t just ignore Earth’s wishes. Someone had to send a rescue mission.
They told Axelrod to find some angle in the rescue trip to profit by.
“More drama,” Marc said dryly. “Gotta sell.”
Finally, they got Axelrod and Airbus to understand that the Consortium crew couldn’t fly the nuke alone, but neither could Claudine. Both teams would lose without some middle ground. Axelrod and Airbus had to work things out amicably.
Then, in a daring trivid message, all five announced their solution to Earth, and declared that the true Mars Prize was the cooperation. Through this they hoped to appeal directly to the public.
They broadcast a little ceremony of them rechristening the nuke The Spirit of Ares with melted water from the pingos, in Viktor’s used vodka bottle. It seemed to work.
But they needed an end run. Through her father, the one route Axelrod could not “creatively edit,” Julia got to the Mars Accords board. She explained the compromise in detail: It was truly a joint mission coming home.
Two days on tenterhooks followed.
Then a U.N. emergency panel agreed to help sponsor the rescue mission.
Once more, Viktor turned out to be right: What seemed so logical and neat on Mars, amidst the stark desert isolation, turned out to be horribly complicated in the festering media-driven swamp of Earth.
Mars had become a Rorschach test. Every faction with the most tenuous axe to grind instantly jumped into the fray. Religious leaders decried three unmarried people alone in the return ship. The Mars Protection Society, a Mars faction of the animal rights lobby, demanded they sterilize their landing site and leave immediately. The Terraform Today Society wanted the Marsmat destroyed. Two cult groups—one in India, the other holed up in Montana—tried to commit mass suicide to avoid the incoming Mars plague.
“Let ’em,” Marc said.
Media bloomed with florid discussions between completely uninformed people about every detail imaginable. Their entire lives were dissected, their predicament analyzed, philosophized over, chewed at.
Julia came to believe in the ensuing weeks that she and Viktor had, in fact, chosen the easy way out. They would just hang out quietly on Mars while Claudine, Marc, and Raoul took the brunt of the hysteria on their return.
39
IT HAD BECOME SO SIMPLE, MUSED JULIA, ONCE THEY HAD UNDERSTOOD the Mars way.
They were now a crew of five. Claudine was incorporated smoothly and as a whole they prepared for the departure. Cooperation ruled. They’d swapped expertise for space, and everybody won.
Just like the Marsmat. Just like bacteria on Earth.
