“Reasonable.”
“You must’ve felt the same.”
“Not actually. I like kids, but other people’s are fine. Enough. I can return them afterward.”
He laughed—a quick, light chuckle, and then the words came out fast again. “So she’s getting rattled, too, I think.”
“Rattled.”
“I mean, this isn’t NASA. Not today’s NASA. It’s like the NASA of the sixties, doing stuff for the first time, every time. People died then and everybody was sorry, sure, and they just kept going. Not like now. Somebody breaks a leg in the space station, there’s people talking about it in Congress.”
“You think she was scared.”
He sighed, and to her surprise, lowered his head with a tired sadness. “Yeah, I think.”
“Afraid of Mars, of the uncertainty.” She was stalling. Plain old fear had not occurred to her.
“Maybe it got all scrambled up inside her. She’s been an astronaut, a damn good one. Now she wants to be a mother. Doesn’t need Mars.” His head came up and he drew in a long breath. Something more coming. “And yeah, the way she was holding me at night all these months, the bad dreams and all—yeah, I think she was scared.”
He was telling her as much as he was ever going to tell anyone. That Katherine had mixed motives—who didn’t?—and one was the gut-squeezer nobody in the astronaut corps ever talked about.
“I… I see.” Wow, real therapist stuff, here. “I’ve felt the same way. It is dangerous.”
Raoul grabbed at this like a life preserver. “We all do, damn right. Only reasonable, I guess. Only with her, it got mingled in with the baby thing.”
“No shame in that.” She was trying to find a way to back away from this. She had no idea what to say to him.
“A woman like you, that’s different. You aren’t scared.”
Now she really didn’t know what to say. “I get by.”
“Hey, they call you the Iron Girl, you know that?”
She had heard it, but only as a joke. Did any of the support crews really think that? As others see us… If only they knew.
She shook her head. “Undeserved.”
“Well, coulda fooled me.”
“I get scared about going this way, too.” There, out with it. “It ain’t NASA.”
“Sure.” Relief in his face, raised eyebrows. “Me, too.”
“But it’s the only way. For us, anyway. Give them a decade, Congress might get behind it again.”
He nodded vigorously. “But not for us.”
“And not for Katherine, not now.”
His face suddenly filled with sadness. It softened and she wondered if he would cry. She saw the sacrifice he now glimpsed up ahead. Not only the danger, which had kept them all awake some nights or else they wouldn’t be human. Piled on top of that was losing Katherine for years, not seeing his baby born, or maybe ever. She could not imagine what that was like for Raoul, a man who grew up in the shadow of the Latino community in SoCal.
“Katherine, she is strong.” His face now firmed up after all that came through it in these moments. She saw a new Raoul, one who abruptly saw that he had a role to play, not a weepy soft one, but a solid part in a play he knew.
“Strong enough to get what she wants,” she said helpfully.
“She will be strong while I am gone.” He straightened, chin up, finding himself.
“Of course.” And he was incredibly right. She got to be the tearful mother, he got to be the resolute father, the adventurous man, bringing home fame and fortune. And it would work.
“She’s making the choice she wants.” He nodded to himself.
“We all are. You, too.” She managed a wobbly smile.
He jerked a thumb up. “Mars or Bust.”
Katherine’s glacial silence was puzzling, vexing. But nobody spent time worrying. They all had a far larger problem: replacing her, pronto.
Axelrod held a meeting that night, most pointedly not including the astronauts. They found out about it only the next morning, in a staffwide meeting. Brad Fowler thought that he could not bring another pilot up to speed in time to meet the launch window. Katherine was geologist and backup pilot, but the entire skill-set she had carefully built for years was now integrated with the still-building mission technology. She had influenced avionics and control systems designs herself.
And now time was crushingly short: five months. Axelrod could not just pick some other astronaut left over from the NASA program and get him or her up to speed.
The all-staff meeting broke up in moody silence. Axelrod left the room without talking to anybody, the wind visibly gone from his customary billowing sails.
Julia was working on systems integration problems with a room full of engineers when the call came. They were about ready to break for lunch, so she grabbed a coffee, trotted to the main building and took the special VIP elevator to Axelrod’s office. Viktor was there with Raoul and absolutely nobody else. Her pulse quickened. Axelrod liked dramatic announcements, and there was a urgent air in the room. Raoul and Viktor looked at her with relief, hoping to now get to business.
She refused a seat, took a sip of bitter coffee, and said flatly, “What? Don’t string it out like the nuke surprise.”
“That’s my Julia, always subtle,” Axelrod said, utterly at ease. He even straightened his tie.
