“You should get a squint at the ski contract we’re about to sign.”
“Ski?” She laughed. “That’s one product we certainly can’t use.”
“Look, the way we figure, some sponsors don’t want in on something that could fail big-time. Fine, let ’em sell to the cotton-top market. But the young male market—they’ll go for goods that look ballsy, just being associated with goin’ to Mars.”
“I have to give you this—you have audacity.”
“Just market sense, is all. I’m gonna make you all rich and famous, you watch.”
The crew began to feel rushed. They were coming down to the wire on training routines and nothing was converging right.
Viktor spent twelve-hour days in the simulator doing endless aero-braking trials. The avionics crews were having trouble getting the parachutes to deploy. The tests carried out at 80,000 feet kept finding that the chutes got snarled in the tumbling turbulence of Mach 3. Even the aeroshell, built by Martin Marietta to NASA specs, was showing dangerous signs of pitting and cracking as it slammed into the tenuous Martian carbon dioxide—all as simulated in wind tunnels, of course—at hypervelocities typical of their entry. All these problems had to be dealt with, and fast.
Axelrod had the astronauts running from one problem to the next, saying laconically, “I don’t want you all to get stale, y’know.” Then he would wink. At first Julia liked that gesture. After a dozen or so of them, they became supremely irritating.
Compared with the Consortium, the NASA style was infinite pains, infinitely prolonged. Katherine in particular was concerned that they were sacrificing safety to make the next launch window in just five months. As backup pilot she and Julia were training together, in simulators side by side with Viktor and Raoul. Julia had to keep track of shear and heating diagnostics while Katherine tracked their height, velocity, pitch and yaw, compensating for deviations from the flight path in a time-allowance window only two or three seconds wide. The work was usually difficult, often impossible, and always harrowing.
Axelrod was always around somehow, checking, cheerleading, and expecting more. One day Julia and Katherine crawled out of the sim pod at the end of a seemingly endless day, stiff and tired and reeking, and Axelrod had been there with some empty advice. He hung around the work areas a lot more than any NASA exec ever had, and Julia rather liked the effect. Everybody was more on their toes, and felt part of an effort that ran on zeal, not just money.
But today Axelrod’s banter somehow seemed vacuous and Katherine whirled on him, spitting out, “You and your chatter! Running off to close more deals on rights while we bust ass here. We’re putting our lives on the line and you talk profit, profit, profit.”
Julia was shocked. Into the dead silence Axelrod smiled very slightly, as if he had been expecting this, and said mildly, “I put in three billion of my own. You lose your ass out there, I lose mine down here.”
Katherine had calmed down then, but only for a while. Something was gnawing at her, Julia could feel it in the tremor of her voice and flickering of her eyelids. But Katherine would say nothing of it. The astronaut hardass carapace was not restricted to men. To get far at NASA the women had acquired it—including, Julia realized, herself. But she hoped she knew when to turn it off.
The psych boys were briefing them all in private about Extreme Crew Dynamics Challenges, as one of the lectures titled it, but here the whole idea of the tight-knit, teamwork crew fell apart: Katherine wouldn’t talk. Julia’s counselor believed that the two women were essential in defusing the tensions that inevitably would develop. But somehow the chemistry between the two was wrong. Julia didn’t quite know why, not in a way she could describe, but she sensed it. Katherine dismissed the problem with a snort.
Pilots were often like that. Astronauts were superior pilots, and super-superstitious, far more so than ordinary air pilots ever were. Parts of the training grid had to follow just so, or it was bad luck. Never mind that they all counted on impersonal laws to get them through the harsh accelerations and intricate orbital maneuvers of deep space; they were still brooding primates afraid of nature’s quixotic tricks, underneath it all.
Katherine, always super-rational in her manner, was no different. But she would not talk about anything personal, would not establish the links that would fend off trouble when they all lived in the same tin can.
So when Katherine took Julia aside for a stroll in the park near their simulation training building at Johnson Space Center, munching on an apple, Julia got her hopes up. No alarm bells went off, though Katherine’s stiff-backed pace seemed odd.
“I wanted you to be the first to hear,” Katherine said. “Even before Raoul.”
“Well, I appreciate whatever—”
“This is big. Big.”
“I sensed—”
“I’m pregnant.”
“What!”
“It happens.”
“But you—nobody—how could—”
“It happened.”
“But medical won’t like an abortion this close to—”
“No abortion.”
“Huh?” Not brilliant, but Julia could not quite believe the conversation was taking place.
“Raoul and I are good Catholics.”
“Abortion is out?”
“That’s the way I feel.”
“But my God, no astronaut gets pregnant accidentally.”
“I did.” Katherine’s gaze was steady, almost blank, as if she were watching Julia’s reaction under a microscope.
“So you’re off the crew.”
“I don’t want to take the baby to Mars, no.”
“My God.”
“I told you first because I thought you’d be the most sympathetic.”
“What are you going to do?” A useless question, of course.
“Raoul…”
