“It got made at your instigation,” Katherine said mildly, not looking at Julia.
“I was going to quit—”
“So you say,” Katherine shot back. “It sounded a little Machiavellian to me and—”
“I just didn’t want to leave Viktor,” Julia sputtered. “You have no right—”
“I’m only saying what a lot of people around here—”
Julia jumped to her feet. “Damn it, I had no idea—”
“Oh, come on—”
“Quiet!” Axelrod’s booming voice cut through. “Sit.” Julia sat.
Viktor held up both hands, palms out, and said to all, “We do not run this show, remember.”
Axelrod sat back, watching the strained faces slowly rotate toward him. “Right. I take responsibility. At the time I sure didn’t think I was making things easier for a competitor, but that’s how business works. There’s always somebody coming in on your blind side.”
Julia seethed inwardly at Katherine’s remark. She felt guilty enough about her part in Marc’s dismissal, but to be accused of having planned it… Still, her training told her to put the conversation back on a less emotional plane. “Marc is determined to get to Mars any way he can. They can’t possibly carry out the trials we would have to just getting a nuclear rocket to a reliable state. He and Claudine and whoever else—they’re risking their lives, big time.”
Raoul sat back, folded his arms. “We all know that the Chinese have been cutting corners on space for decades. This is new, cutting a corner nobody else has before.”
Viktor’s mouth twisted into sour agreement. “They are good. Skipped building space station, gained a lot of advantage. But nuclear!”
Axelrod’s incisive gaze momentarily rested upon each astronaut in turn. “So you all think this is a credible threat?”
They all nodded.
“Dangerous,” Katherine said, “but credible.”
“Could work. A big advance, if it does,” Raoul said.
“But we get to Mars first,” Viktor said. “Tell Airbus, fine. We will leave a light on the porch for you.”
They all laughed, but to Julia’s ear there was a hollow ring to the sound.
7
JANUARY 11, 2018
AFTER DINNER IT WAS TIME FOR THEIR REGULAR VIDEO TRANSMISSION. No groaning allowed.
They pulled Consortium logo shirts over their waffle-weave long johns and prepared to look presentable. In fact, they wore as little as possible when in the hab—loose clothing didn’t aggravate the skin abrasions and frostbite spots they suffered in the suits. They kept the heat cranked up to compensate, but then nobody had to pay the electric bill, Marc pointed out. Competition was keen for creams and ointments for their dry skin rashes.
“My turn, I think,” said Marc.
Julia smiled. “Janet on the other end tonight, then?”
Janet Conover was a former test pilot who had trained with them, and clearly had hoped to make the trip. Janet was a good mechanic, but Raoul was better. The Consortium had made a careful selection: individual talents balanced with strategic redundancy. The crew of four had to cover all the basics: mission technical, scientific, and medical. They fit together like an intricately cut jigsaw puzzle.
Tonight’s broadcast was going to be somewhat sticky. They were going to have to describe Viktor’s injury while reassuring their millions of regular viewers that they were okay and the mission was still on track. A considerable feat of bravado would be required. Maybe they would reassure themselves at the same time.
“Let’s play up the water angle, not the ankle,” Viktor said.
“Drama plays better than science,” Julia said.
“So we must educate, yes?” Viktor jabbed his chin at Marc.
But Marc wasn’t listening. The brief description of Viktor’s accident had been squirted to Earth earlier, and he was downloading the reply. Due to the present time delay of six minutes each way, normal back and forth conversations were not possible, and communications were more like an exchange of verbal letters. At times the round-trip delay was only a matter of four minutes, sometimes it was forty. Mars’s distance from Earth varies by more than two hundred million miles from closest to farthest approach in the course of each Earth year. Still, it was a big advance over earlier missions.
In the Sojourner era, it took twenty-four hours to execute a single command. NASA used solar panels on its robot vehicles, so when Sojourner was in Mars night, it was unresponsive. And part of the time Earth’s giant antennae were on the wrong side of the planet to receive signals from Mars. The new comm satellites circling both planets ensured that they were always in contact with Earth, but there was still the delay time.
Early on, Earth and Mars teams agreed on a download at a specified time, to preserve the semblance of a conversation. At the short delay times Marc and Janet tended to handle the bulk of the communications. And there was a little spark in the transmissions.
They did a short, live video sequence at the same time each Mars day, after the crew’s dinner. Because Earth’s day is twenty minutes shorter, they drifted in and out of synchrony with various listening stations on Earth. But they didn’t worry about it. That was Axelrod’s end of the business. The “Nightly Report from Mars” was great theater, but the Consortium also had a team of doctors scrutinize the footage.
The crew gathered around the screen to watch the latest video from Earth. It was Janet, all right, gesturing with a red Mars Bar. Mars, Inc., the candy manufacturer, had become a mission underwriter. Cautiously waiting until after the successful landing, they’d released a special commemorative wrapper—a red number featuring the four of them against a “Martian” backdrop. On Earth they had taken about twenty shots of the crew in their colored pressure suits—one each in blue, yellow, green, and purple—holding up a standard Mars Bar before scenic backdrops. They each got $5,000 per shot, and the Mars Bar people paid ten thousand dollars per pound to ship a box of the bars out for the follow-up ad campaign. It would have been irritating after a while, except that they came to relish the damned things, keeping one for exterior shots, where it quickly got peroxide-contaminated, and eating the rest as desserts. The cold sopped up calories and the zest of sugar was like a drug to Julia. She was quite sure she would never eat another, Earthside, even if she did get an endorsement contract out of the deal.
Julia had dubbed the red-wrapped candy the Ego Bar, unwilling to honor it with the name of a planet and an ancient god, and the team adopted the name. There had been some talk early on about producing another wrapper with Mars life pictured, but rocks with wavy lines weren’t exciting enough, so the manufacturer had decided to just stick with the Ego Bar.
Somehow, the commercialism of it all still grated on her. But she had signed on with eyes open, all the same. She had known that market-minded execs ran the Consortium, but going in she had thought that meant something like, If we do this, people will like it. Soon enough she learned that even exploring Mars was seen by the execs as If we do this, we’ll maximize our global audience share and/or optimize near-term profitability. Such were the thoughts and motivations on Earth.
Still, Mars the raw and unknown survived, unsullied. And deadly.
They all snorted when the expected question came in from Janet. She looked embarrassed, but what could she do? “And how are you feeling, with Airbus getting nearer and your own launch—”
Marc started before Janet was finished. “We’ll wave to them as we head home.”
