After that, she found excuses to stay away from the counseling sessions. The whole idea of having to assume a passive role was repugnant.
And ultimately, they just didn’t get it: a few bruised egos would be survivable. Pussyfooting around stupid mistakes would not be. Mars never forgave.
6
AUGUST 2015
SHE HAD FELT TROUBLED, AFTER SHE HAD GOTTEN VIKTOR ONTO THE CREW.
She had gone into the meeting with Axelrod without a thought of pushing Marc off—she’d been prepared to resign. Her NASA experience should have warned her. Crew selection was the most Byzantine of all the rotations at NASA, fraught with personality and pull. Nothing was ever done for just one reason. In the Missions Operations Directorate there had been an intricate promenade of personalities and rank and “pull,” traits that now seemed as distant and stylized as the mating dance of birds.
Still, at NASA, the art of picking crews took time and much influence-peddling, government style, and there was time to second-guess. Not here. Axelrod had done his calculations and acted with only a moment’s thought. She lacked such decisiveness about people. Quite acutely she felt the soft inner squishiness of them, how easily damaged. With Viktor she shared a hesitant vagueness about emotional matters. This was the standard astronaut profile—strong on externals, weak on communication of internals, as current psych-talk had it. But that did not mean that she was unaware of people’s feelings. Wounding Marc had been painful, even if she was not the primary decider.
There was precious little time to brood about it, though. After Marc left, they all swung into relentless mission training.
Using centrifugal gravity simplified many tricky engineering points. Plumbing and structural designs were far easier to make work with gravity to help. But there were plenty of new techniques to master. Despite this being a private venture, work got sliced into the same pigeonholes as at NASA: operations planning, robotics, computers, flight support, vehicle systems, operations managing, payload, habitats, EVA.
Axelrod had imported NASA veterans to run these, too. Soon the air was thick with acronyms, clipped sentences, and can-do mannerisms.
Then Axelrod called them into another astronauts-only meeting in his office, with thirty minutes notice. He sat on his desk again, carefully arranging the creases in his dark blue tailored suit before beginning.
“We’re a team, right?”
Nods all around. Julia nodded enthusiastically. She liked these conditions. The NASA Astronaut Office had been a perpetual playground of primate rivalry. Pilots looked down on mission specialists. Veterans lifted eyebrows at the newbies. Military thought the civilians were soft. Doctorate holders felt themselves above all others; they were in it for the science, not the ride.
“I’ve got something to tell you that will demand that you pull together.” Axelrod was savoring this, for some reason she could not detect. Then she saw: he was in the team, too. As close as he would ever get to being an astronaut. Luckily, he was more important than just another team element. He knew how to cut through layers of NASA fatty tissue.
The special demands of going to Mars with just four astronauts had disrupted the NASA style. Ideally astronauts were supposed to be interchangeable. That broke down somewhat under the space station’s pressure for detailed specialists, and disintegrated under the work specs for Mars. Crews of four or six could not explore a whole world without a lot of special knowledge and techniques. So this team had few overlapping abilities.
“This is entirely top secret. Not even a hint to the press or anybody else, even inside the Consortium. Clear?”
They all nodded. Axelrod’s assistants all left the room as if on signal.
“Remember that Mars flight gear I tried to buy? One-of-a-kind hardware? Well, NASA turned me down, then the ESA people. So I put some industrial espionage people onto tracing where it had disappeared to.” He lifted eyebrows. “Guess.”
Nobody did.
“I always like mysteries, just about the only kinda book I read. I go for the real detection stories, with clues you piece together. So let me give you an intercept my spy guys decoded. Engineering stuff.” He arched eyebrows, apparently to warn them of approaching jargon. “It says, ‘Configured in bi-modal, we can run after launch in ‘idle mode’ with thermal power output of one hundred kilowatts. Therms are removed and routed to a turbo-alternator-compressor Brayton power conversion unit using a helium-xenon working fluid. A finned radiator system (expendable on aeroassist braking) rejects waste heat. This also reduces decay heat propellant loss following propulsive burns.’ Whew!”
Viktor said very quietly, “My Lord.”
Axelrod took no notice. “So that clue led us to—”
“Someone is building a nuke,” Viktor said.
Axelrod blinked, and for the first time in Julia’s experience an uncertain smile flickered. “How’d you know?”
“That is describing how to use a nuclear thermal rocket to give electrical power,” Viktor explained slowly. “After boost phase, still have solid core propulsion system. There is plenty more energy left in the Uranium-235 plates. Run it at low level, circulate water or some other fluid, make all electricity ship needs.”
The others nodded. To Julia it made sense. But Axelrod stared at Viktor, startled. “Damn it all, you’re right. My spy guys took another three weeks to work that out.”
“Do not know rockets.”
“Well, they said they did. My staff thought so, too.”
“Get new spies. I know couple Russians could do this job better.”
“Y’know, I just might.” Axelrod breathed in sharply and started with fresh momentum. “Maybe Viktor can guess who’s behind that message.”
Viktor frowned. He was not the kind of engineer who speculated, much less made guesses. “I smell some Russian work, but that makes no sense as only player.”
“Right, kinda,” Axelrod said. “They got some old Russian gear. A set of plates to lodge the U-235 in, plus a containment vessel.”
“From old Soviet program? I heard the team at Semipalitinsk ran a nuclear thermal rocket in fixed mode for a thousand hours.”
Axelrod nodded. “That checks. No environmental controls then, I guess.”
Viktor snorted. “Was when people not scared of anything nuclear—bomb, rocket, or nuclear family, too.”
Axelrod smiled uncertainly at this little joke. “My background report says that Soviet job worked just fine.”
“Ran it underground, like nuclear test.” Viktor tilted his head, in his typical thoughtful pose. “No venting of exhaust gases to surface. Not much radiation count in the exhaust anyway.”
Axelrod gazed around at his team, obviously liking his guessing game. “So who’s doing it, guys?”
Nobody spoke. Julia knew that Axelrod thought in financial terms first, so she said, “Someone who thinks they can beat us to Mars and not spend thirty billion doing it. With all the new work a nuclear rocket requires, I don’t think they can keep prices down.”
Raoul said carefully, “There is enormous development work required. Nobody ever actually flew a nuke, y’know.”
