But the three mules won’t delay the test even for a day!—and they won’t really consider another EVA until afterwards.
I mean, I want to go home as much as anyone, but mygawd we may have finally found it!! So here I am sitting on potentially the greatest discovery of the whole trip, and what am I doing? Hauling boxes!
OK. Enough of that.
Hope you liked the last vid. Dad, hope you’re doing well. Viktor is getting along okay with the bum ankle, but it’s touchy getting a pressure bandage tight enough to give him some support without interfering with his venous return. Mars grav doesn’t help at all with that end of it.
I keep wondering if he would’ve sprained it at all if we’d been under 1g all this time. Maybe we’re more delicate than we think.
Lots of grunt work getting ready for that #$%$ liftoff test. I feel like an Aboriginal woman. The guys are so caught up in it that they’ve forgotten everything else. If it weren’t such an old joke I’d say they really ARE from Mars.
Gotta go. My night to cook (that’ll fix ’em!).
Much luv,
Julia
10
OCTOBER 2015
MARC ARRIVED, GRINNING MADLY FOR THE BATTERIES OF CAMERAS, AND fit right in.
Julia looked at him across the room. After the space of several months, she was impressed again by his gorgeous profile. He looked like an astronaut with the right stuff. Wide, guileless grin, perfect teeth, square jaw. Blue eyes, of course, and dark blond hair, slightly tousled. No wonder Axelrod’s PR gang wanted him on the crew. He had the kind of looks that could kill at fifty feet. If they had fan clubs, she figured his would get the most mail, hands down.
And, of course, they did. But nobody let the crew see the numbers…
Raoul was compact and muscular, striking in a dark, Latin way—hell, all the astronauts were easy on the eyes. No coincidence. NASA didn’t train people the public wouldn’t want to watch. Katherine had been a knockout, and Viktor—well, she just couldn’t judge. To her he looked simply wonderful. Objectively she knew he couldn’t match Marc, but she was so much more drawn to him. He caught her eye and winked. She felt a stab of emotion. Despite her training, she flushed.
The new crew went out for beers and Mexican the first evening.
“Axelrod didn’t need to offer the million-dollar bonus, either, tell you the truth,” Marc revealed with a grin.
“Don’t ever tell him that,” Viktor said, smiling. Some part of him still liked the games and bargaining of what he called “late capitalism”—though what might replace it, he admittedly had no idea.
Raoul slurped his Dos Equis with relish. “Yeah, it would make him grind his teeth down faster.”
“You would have come back on even terms?” Julia asked.
“Easy. I wasn’t crazy about living in China, even at the top of the heap. Jammed, smelly, air so thick you could cut it.”
“I hear you trained in Germany some, though,” Viktor said.
“That was okay, but the leftover ESA gear they had was clunky. And the team Airbus had put together, it didn’t jell.”
“Chen?” Julia guessed.
“Him and me, we never got along real well.”
Julia had a fond spot for Lee Chen, who had helped train her in practical exobiology. “He’s old school discipline,” she admitted.
“Autocrat prima donna, more like it.”
“More German than Germans,” Viktor snorted. He and Chen had not exactly hit it off, either, when they were all in the NASA Astronaut Office.
“Too true. I missed this Dos Equis, that’s for sure.”
Raoul joined him in a long pull. “We won’t be getting any for a while, might as well enjoy the best.”
“Ol’ Chen-boy, he made it real clear. All his opera, and we’re spear carriers.”
“With Airbus supplying the Wagnerian music?” Julia asked lightly.
To her relief, between her and Marc there was no trace of the anger he had shown when he stormed out months before. He probably still blamed her for bumping him in favor of Viktor—rightly, of course, even though she had not planned it that way. Sometime it would come out and she would have to be ready. Viktor, too; Marc would see it as completely logical that they had hatched up the whole scheme. She realized that the two of them probably enjoyed a reputation for sly maneuver that was quite undeserved.
“Yeah, and the Germans hating living there so much, alcohol was one of the major food groups.”
“Hard to keep sharp that way.” Raoul’s tongue was getting a little sloppy, probably from the effect he was criticizing.
“Yes. We heard there were plenty malfs,” Viktor prodded.
“More than plenty, a surplus. From the first day, I had big doubts about the Chinese and Germans and French being able to put together a nuclear rocket in time. First time I saw their test-bed results, I was sure.”
Julia dutifully drank some more of her light ale, aware that this was a male ritual she had better get the hang of, though knowing that some of the subtleties of barhopping would elude her. “They had all that old Russian data.”
“Sure, and some from the old American Nerva project. Kept quiet about how they got that. But putting it all together with the avionics and control systems—not so easy.”
“Data we have says are far more efficient rockets than LOX,” Viktor observed.
