With Raoul’s external patch, the blockage from inside held.
She learned later that the entire drama had taken nearly two hours. It seemed like longer in memory. Nobody had noticed that the video cameras were following their motions, overridden by Earthside and slaved to Mission Control. The entire planet had anxiously watched Raoul and Viktor, or at least the portion of their helmets visible over the curve of the hull. And they had seen her scale the wall and drop the patch in. In an ordinary vid show this would have been boring stuff. In real time, it was high drama, living history.
Julia was upset at the vid coverage, at first. It was too much to ask that they star in a home movie that might have ended in their deaths.
Never mind that their losses meant that it was going to be a dry voyage. To keep adequate shielding water in the walls meant using less in the life cycle. Short showers, very careful cooking and cleaning. Finish all drinks. No wastage. Like living in a desert.
But their quick, efficient teamwork had enthralled the globe. It was the first time they’d confronted a real crisis together, not a training simulation.
Raoul emerged as an instant media hero, mostly because he was in camera range more of the time than the others.
When it was over they all slept most of the first week, not wholly from fatigue, but from the need to escape the sense of a closing vise around their lives. Recovery was slow. Each spent time talking to their Personal counselors.
Axelrod loved it. “The worst trips make the best stories,” he said, and meant it.
Stories—they realized that they were now immersed in what was, for everyone on Earth, an ongoing serial story. And in the long dull days following, they relaxed in the tiny social room of the circular hab and began to invent their own versions. They began writing their memoirs. There would be four solid best-sellers out of this, no problem, already under contract with fat advances paid.
Amateur writers all, they started out with titles which they tried out on each other.
“I think I’ll call mine Mars or Bust,” said Marc.
That got a laugh from Raoul. “More like Mars and Busted, don’t you think?”
“I know—Mars or and Busted.” They howled with laughter, delayed release from earlier terrors.
“Together on Mars,” suggested Viktor, grinning at Julia.
Axelrod had a surer sense of drama. Faster than the crew, he had long ago realized that folly was acceptable to the public if it was his money at stake. If the taxpayers were paying, they demanded certainty, safety—and then got bored if it was dull, dull, dull. Apollo 11 had been a perfect technical masterpiece. Apollo 13 the movie grossed hundreds of millions.
Some thought all this undignified. NASA had trained many to think that only emotionally repressed pilots spouting acronyms were The Real Stuff. Largely without planning, the Mars crew had become media icons, each standing for some faction of the metapopulation. Raoul was the Minority, Marc the Good Guy, Viktor the Lovable Foreigner.
Of course Julia had to play Stalwart Heroine, Feminist Pioneer. Of course; only she couldn’t remember her lines.
Long before the famous water crisis, they had gotten used to being celebs: the Bright Stuff. By the time they launched there were Mesh betting parlors on chances for a booster blowup just like the last one. (Not great odds, either: 23 percent for failure, Viktor reported.)
The analogy that seemed to frame it all was Antarctica. Scott, Amundsen, and Shackleton had made their classic races across frozen wastes, high drama in a place distant, hostile and worthless. Mars was a comparable canvas for the twenty-first century.
For Shackleton, self-promotion had been essential all the way. He had paid all his expenses with media tie-ins, one way or another: auctioning off news and picture rights before he left, taking special postage stamps along to be franked at the south pole. After he made it, his bestseller had nine translations. He spruced up his expedition ship into a museum and charged admission. With a lecture tour and a phonograph record, a first film of the Antarctic and countless newspaper interviews, he made his way into history—and prosperity. Even when he could not reach the pole, he returned to Europe with a sound bite: Death lay ahead and food behind, so I had to return.
By the time they actually reached Mars, the world had gotten used to this modern manifestation of the same phenomenon.
Name That Peak! Again, Shackleton had done it first, sticking the names of his patrons on spots in the Antarctic. Beardmore Glacier, its name bought for $34,000—big bucks, in those days. How about selling rights to name the Valles Marinaris, a 2,800-mile-long trench? Axelrod asked the question and there were plenty of takers lined up. In principle the lucky “donor” could then title the chasm for anything, but it seemed unlikely that the sort of hard driver who became a media tycoon or retailing genius would go for anything except his own place on the Martian map—price suitably adjusted to the size of the geographical object, of course.
The International Astronomical Union stiffly disputed him in court, since they had rights to name astronomical objects. But Axelrod claimed “explorers’ rights,” his lawyers basing their opinions on early eighteenth-century legal precedent. The case got bogged down in several courts. Axelrod kept selling anyway. He even published a map showing prominent craters, plains, and mounts with their proud new names. Olympus Mons became Gates Mountain.
Once on Mars, the beat went on.
Live from Mars, It’s Saturday Night!—she and Viktor had made millions by exchanging scripted lines before the camera, all to be duly synchronized with straight lines from Earthside pop stars. It was fun, in a way. There certainly wasn’t much to do on a Saturday night on the real Mars, a dead blackness a hundred degrees Centigrade below zero outside.
So in a way, the media frenzy that leaked through to them, as they labored on ERV repairs and rested in silence, had a familiar old-shoe flavor.
To Julia, it was a lifeline. They all needed one.
14
JANUARY 15, 2018
AS IT TURNED OUT, AXELROD ANTICIPATED JULIA’S SCENARIO. AFTER the ERV engine test failure, his NASAnaut detractors were quick to point out that their mission profile wouldn’t have left the crew without a backup.
“Your mission never left the ground,” was his widely reported response. This was a heavily edited version of his real retort, according to Janet, in a private correspondence to Marc. She had been in the comm center with Axelrod when the exchange took place.
In public, Axelrod defended his mission plan as conservative and downplayed the danger. Nevertheless, he told the crew, he was “feeling out” Airbus about “a possible cooperative strategy.”
For the first time in months, Julia saw glimpses of the old Axelrod in the vids he recorded. The rambling, overly familiar discourses to the crew were replaced by controlled, almost formal squirts. Delivered in measured tones and intended to be reassuring and supportive, these almost certainly had been heavily massaged by the psych advisors. And probably face-filtered for warm and fuzzy expressions, too.
Despite the crew’s dislike of having to rely on Airbus, even Raoul had to grudgingly admit that it was “good to know the bastard is working on getting us back.”
Axelrod’s actions seemed to Julia to be a glimmer at the end of the tunnel. Maybe candle-sized, and flickering in a high wind. For most of the day she thought about the negotiations taking place on Earth for their return, while she played gofer for Raoul and Viktor. She decided to try again.
After dinner she turned to Marc. “Okay, suppose we can get off at the launch window. With our ERV or with Airbus. What do you think we could do now with the highest impact?”
Marc looked surprised. Nobody answered for a very long time. In their weary faces she read a vast reluctance to face this issue. She realized with a start that the three men were already finished with the exploration part of the trip. They were completely focused on packing up and going home.
But she was not.
Finally Marc said slowly, “Geology, maybe.”
Viktor laughed sourly. “Scratch scientist, find fanatic.”
