Raoul shrugged. “Just another comm satellite glitch.”
“Does seem to happen more with boss’s vids,” said Viktor.
“Well, he is on the horn more than anyone else. So it would happen more to his vids.”
Julia knew what all four of them were thinking. That if he had followed the original mission plan, the one they had all signed on to, they wouldn’t be in this fix.
The original Mars Direct plan included a second ERV. This spacecraft would be launched about a month after the crew, on a slower trajectory. On arrival, it would land about 1,000 kilometers from the first mission, refuel itself, deploy its robot probes to recon the area, and await the second manned hab. Or, it could be used as a backup in case of trouble with the first ERV, and land at the first base.
But there was no second ERV at Mars Base. Or even an awkward 1,000 klicks away.
The nearest ERV was at a distance of 40 million miles, safely stowed in a NASA warehouse at Cape Canaveral.
Viktor had been handling the comm that evening, about a month into their outward journey, when Axelrod’s squirt came through.
At a delay of about a minute and a half, it was more like verbal e-mail with both parties on-line than a conversation. This the psych team had not anticipated—these almost-conversations, surrealistic, displaced.
So they worked it out by themselves. Only one of them responded to Axelrod at a time, although the others felt free to suggest things to say.
“Hi up there, crew! How’s the weather? Oh, yeah, that’s right—no windows.”
After this ritual joke, Axelrod was brisk, efficient, upbeat—sending along hails and tributes from various countries and luminaries. Somehow these fixtures of his messages never ebbed. Julia suspected the psych advisors of massaging them.
They let him run down. “Hey, we can read the calendar, even a minute behind time,” Raoul said to the camera on their callback. “We’re waiting to hear about the backup ERV launch. It’s today, right?”
Somehow the delay seemed to stretch unbearably. They had all picked up something in Axelrod’s breezy manner. When he came on again his face was sober, studied, wary. “I been meaning to tell you, but things get in the way. Mostly, money. Or lack of it. Right, the lack of money is the real root of evil.” A sigh. Eyes veered away, then back. “I couldn’t get it off the ground. Couldn’t get the funding. I mean, I tried. Thing is, I’m down to nickels and dimes here. No reserves, running off income from the ads and promotions and all. I was never as rich as people said, y’know. Plenty of my holdings, they were mortgaged one way or another…”
He paused, took a sip of what looked like water. Julia wondered if it could be gin. She had seen him drink it that way before. Champagne for public, gin off to the side.
He freshened. “See, NASA kept pilin’ on more costs, and it was always up front, too, no cost deferment. I tried everythin’, bonds, floatin’ a dummy corporation for future proceeds, the whole damn game. It just wasn’t there. I couldn’t get the capital together. My backers wanted out, even. So to cut costs and hold it together here on the ground for you guys up there…well, we missed the launch window.”
Very slowly, as Axelrod went on with his rambling confession, Raoul said, “Son…of…a…bitch.”
It came out like an angry prayer.
They took a week to work off their anger. Plenty of gym time.
NASA had organized itself for decades around the implicit assumption that astronaut safety was not just the first rule, it was the only rule. But they weren’t NASAnauts anymore.
They all spent more time in the exercise circle. Marc ran for hours on the treadmill, so much that Raoul complained that he was going to wear out the bearings. Since the treadmill would turn into a conveyor belt for off-loading at the landing site, this was not an idle complaint. Julia used the stationary bicycle, but worked out a lot of her feelings in push-ups, isotonics, and chin-ups. They all liked to exercise alone—time spent away from the others was getting steadily more precious—and though none of them was a very verbal type, they had to talk it out, too.
The second ERV was backup. It was to have come screaming in after they had settled in on the ground, providing perhaps a more distant base camp for far forays. The extra ERV wasn’t necessary, in the day-to-day sense. Without it, nothing in their mission profile altered.
But the reassurance of having another way to get off the planet—that would be gone, for the whole 1.5 years they spent on the ground.
Not that they could do anything, of course.
But talk they did. They had to arrive at a consensus statement about the “unfortunate shortfall” the Consortium had suffered, how they “fully understood the difficult choices that the corporation had to make,” and that they “would shoulder these new burdens with a sense of confidence in the long-term outcome of the mission.”
It took a week more before they could all say such things to the camera.
There was help, though. Before leaving they had each sat for hours of “template setting” for a hotshot new software. Facial Management could cover for you if you were agitated, naked, fresh from the shower, or just hungover. The media managers reassured the crew that their slips and errors would be smoothed over and made better by the software. All their errors would be morphed and toned long before it went into the lucrative media mix that was paying many of the Consortium’s daily expenses.
And they could review the results, if they wished, before release. They all did at first. Few did after a few months. It was eerie, watching yourself say things more confidently, with tones that carried the right accents and emphasis, complete with expressive and seemingly sincere lip movements, lifts of eyebrows, and utterly believable looks of complete candor.
“Old joke about what prostitute says to customer,” Viktor observed. “Sincerity, it costs extra.”
It got them through the roughest patch.
But they never forgot.
She brought up the unthinkable as a way of edging her way around to her own agenda.
What the hell, they were all exhausted from laboring on the repairs, and it had been three days since she had last mentioned the vent. Long days. And then a grand failure. Time to think the unthinkable again and do some planning.
As they were finishing lunch, Julia turned to face her three crewmates. “Okay, suppose we can’t get this thing fixed. Then what?”
Raoul’s face darkened, but he said nothing.
“Have to hitch ride home,” said Viktor.
“But when are they getting here?”
The Airbus mission had been well cloaked, Chinese style. Publicly, Airbus said only that their crew had launched more than a year after the Consortium, and would arrive at Mars “soon.” Some sketchy bio stuff about the crew of three, nothing more. A few “under wraps” leaks, but those proved to be planted.
The Germans at Airbus let their Chinese partners play the inscrutable card. Secrecy only heightened suspense.
Axelrod’s moles had confirmed that it was indeed a nuclear rocket, put up on a Chinese three-stager, into a two-hundred-kilometer-high orbit. There, systems checkout took eight days—which meant they either had some minor trouble or were being very, very careful; maybe both.
