“But still…” Marc leaned forward, almost whispering, “You wanna sit on top of that hot a pile?”
“If it got me to Mars and back pronto, sure,” Raoul said.
“If. They’re having trouble getting the fuel flow—liquid hydrogen when they boost from two hundred klicks up—to go through that cylindrical plutonium pile they’re using. It gets too hot, then it gives them back pressure, heats up some more, and—whammo—the whole damned shebang can run away into—well, they dunno.”
“I could fix it.” Raoul looked bland, unconcerned.
“Welcome to, my friend,” Marc toasted him.
Viktor said carefully, “They are on schedule?”
“No, that’s the point,” Marc said. “Fallin’ behind every day now.”
“Can they make the window?” Julia pressed.
“Don’t see how.”
They all beamed at their new crewmate.
Axelrod did too, the next day. He listened to all this technical detail with barely suppressed glee. “They won’t be riding on our tail after all!” Handshakes all around.
But five minutes later his attention was elsewhere.
Now his PR people were worried about the publicity impact. Would people hate Raoul? He tried this out on Julia, “looking for the woman’s angle”—as if there would be only one. “After all, he’s leaving behind his wife, and child, to come. He won’t see the baby until it’s two years old.”
“Maybe never,” Julia said flatly, to see if Axelrod would react. Nothing. Well, maybe matters felt differently if your own rear was not going to be in an acceleration couch.
Axelrod was right, however. Some commentators took this up. People magazine did a big weepy feature on the issue. But by now the Consortium had made firm connections to a lot of media figures, those distant enough to look objective. They ran a counteroffensive, following a plausible line: Raoul was portrayed as a modern Odysseus going off on a voyage into the unknown to fulfill his destiny, no matter what it cost him personally. (Never mind that Odysseus had gone to war, won, then gotten sidetracked on the trip back in his involuntary odyssey, taking decades to hole up on various islands of the Aegean, several times with women not his wife.) This line seemed to work with the public.
Then the oddity of a lone woman going to Mars for two and a half years caught their imagination, deflecting attention from Raoul. The endless speculation—some quite ribald, and ignorantly assuming they would go to Mars in zero g—appalled Julia. She stopped reading the press entirely and never turned on the trivid anymore.
Still, there was relentless attention, and Axelrod had to let a tiny fraction of it focus on her. If all humanity was going to Mars along with the four, “We must know our companions,” as one commentator put it. She was glad that she didn’t have to get to know many on the immediate other side of the membrane, thank you, for she developed an instant dislike to most of the media mavens, who chose to wear their ignorance of Mars, space, and technology like a badge marking them as one with the Common Man.
Julia had to admit there was some point to the interviews, profiles, even in the lapel-hugging shows like A Day in the Life Of, and the like. There had been so many faceless astronauts among the hundred-plus needed to keep the space station aloft. From the old days the public knew John Glenn and Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong and maybe Sally Ride, but from the station nobody remembered names, just grinning guys and gals riding rockets. Now there were only four to care about, and she was the singular figure.
She had the intelligence not to manufacture a public persona. Astronauts were by design sharp, crisp, automatically outgoing, shining with health, and always pressured. This she let carry her, staying inside her friendly but reserved carapace.
The worst of the public angle was the curveballs the media kept throwing her. In the middle of an absolutely innocuous talk with a worldwide morning magazine show, the kind-faced, motherly interviewer suddenly turned sharklike with, “And what do you say to those Asians who believe the Consortium is indulging in the worst sort of racism?”—apparently, by not having an Asian in the crew. Raoul, she was told, didn’t really offset the Caucasian bias since he was an American citizen.
She countered by pointing out that Latinos were really mixtures of Caucasoids and Mongoloids, two of the three major racial groups. The interviewer shot back that the Consortium had no Negroid, the new “in” word for black.
Most embarrassing was the way she learned that Airbus was suing the Consortium over some tiny technicality. This took advantage of the legendary American habit of settling issues in court rather than by negotiation. A judge handed down a restraining order commanding Axelrod to stop development of the Venture—Axelrod’s choice for the name—pending some obscure legal finding.
Julia had to field a probing, sneering interviewer who trotted out this news, hinting that the Consortium had stolen technology from both NASA and from the poor, media-neglected Airbus team.
He ignored the fact that, in classic Chinese form, Airbus was letting few media teams within miles of their facilities. Julia somehow managed to stutter and fake her way into a commercial break, then was missing when they came back on the air.
The order was dissolved within a week beneath the media glare. NASA gave a press conference to confirm that Axelrod was paying for everything the Consortium mission used. Airbus was thrown out of court.
Though Axelrod could not prove it, Airbus was still tying the Consortium in legal knots.
Suddenly the Securities and Exchange Commission was investigating Axelrod’s finances.
A senator started complaining about technology transfer and safety. The Consortium vehicles were being launched on private rockets that were developed with NASA, right down to the solid launch assist boosters. Some vital U.S. secrets could leak—to whom, the senator did not say.
Since the primary international antagonist of the United States was the Chinese, who were half of Airbus, this made no real sense—but got lots of coverage anyway.
The tension between the two sides spilled out into the open, with tit-for-tat press conferences and incessant mike-in-the-face goading. The media had one great axiom: You fight it, we write it.
Axelrod proved too smart for them, though, by trotting his “Marsnauts” out when they were obviously tired, gaining sympathy. He even went along with the media term “NASAnauts” for the bland astronauts who were criticizing the Consortium. In all, Julia was grateful to be kept out of the fray, which just kept building.
Still, it had not escaped anyone that many Europeans and Chinese would like to take all that Mars Prize money away from the Consortium. And from the U.S., since the Americans put the most in the pot.
Nationalist rivalry got worse, like a grudge soccer match between whole continents.
Axelrod didn’t find everything he needed on NASA’s shelves. The Consortium had to fabricate important components. That proved comparatively easy, though expensive. Axelrod grumbled and paid. Mating the fresh cut-metal parts with the conventional wisdom of decades proved harder.
The NASA designs were pricey, the engineering incomplete, and what hardware that did exist needed modification. The habitat had to be cut down, reengineered, and simplified—after all, they were no longer running under the ludicrous zero-g orthodoxy, which complicated everything from the kitchen to the toilets. Flying with 0.38 g made life simpler, but many standing NASA methods developed for the space station now had to be scrapped. Connectors, electronics, systems integration—all had to be done with a fresh vision, to meet a stepped-up deadline.
It was legendary in aerospace that gear got built faster in the dry, lonely techno-outposts where there was nothing else for the engineers to do: China Lake, Rockman, Palmdale, White Sands, other forlorn dustbowls. So Axelrod’s teams had bought space and people in all those places, and the metal and composites grew apace in splendid dry isolation.
Crews for the space station were normally selected ten to twelve months before launch. Fine, so long as the equipment was ready. Here it wasn’t. More headaches.
The Consortium had to squash together development and training, a feat unheard of since the Apollo days.
Single-system training came first, weeks of working with instructors who were building the payload and landing systems while they trained the astronauts. It was a field day for overachievers.
The confusions would have been comic if lives had not been on the line.
