Return to Mars (9 page)

NO MATTER HOW HARD HE TRIED, JAMIE FOUND THE LIVING QUARTERS ON the Mars-bound spacecraft small, cramped and stifling.

He knew his compartment was actually a bit larger than the quarters he had occupied in the first expedition’s craft. But that space vehicle had been equipped with a wardroom spacious enough to accommodate all twelve of the scientists and astronauts aboard. And there had been an observation center as well, a place where Jamie could get away from everyone else, at least for a little while.

The second expedition’s craft was laid out in a circular plan. Each of the eight compartments was a pie-shaped cubicle; each precisely the same size as all the others. A passageway ran along the outer perimeter, giving access to each cubicle. It also served as Trudy Hall’s running track. Every morning, for the entire five months of the flight to Mars, Jamie was awakened by her remorseless thumping, round and round, for at least a full hour.

In each compartment the door at the wide end of the pie wedge opened onto the passageway. The door at the narrow end opened onto one of the ship’s two lavatories; the three women shared one lav, the five men shared the other.

There were no observation ports. The ship’s designers had placed a Hat display screen on one wall of each living compartment, an electronic “window” that could show outside views or videos, at the whim of the occupant. It could also be used as a computer display.

Their cylindrical spacecraft swung at the end of a five-kilometer-long tether composed of microscopic-sized tubules of Buckyballs, man-made molecules of carbon atoms shaped like geodesic spheres. Tough, light and pliable, the Buckyball tethers had a greater tensile strength than the strongest metal alloys. On the other end of the tether was the nuclear rocket system and its radiation shield. The two modules swung around their common center to give a feeling of gravity to the explorers: a full terrestrial g when they left Earth orbit, slowly winding down to the one-third g of Mars as they crossed the gulf between the planets. Thus the explorers would be adapted to Martian gravity when they landed.

Despite the electronic window, Jamie felt like a penned animal, a convict in jail. The spacecraft was never quiet; pumps chugged, air fans buzzed, computers beeped. He could hear people talking from three or lour compartments away, livery day Trudy Mall’s endless jogging around the outer passageway sounded like a Chinese water torture, padding incessantly at her precise trotting pace.

Jamie spent as little time in his quarters as possible, preferring the galley on the level above. At least it was large enough to hold all eight of them at once, although it was something of a squeeze. They were always bumping shoulders up there, literally. “Good morning” was inevitably followed by, “Oops, sorry.”

The galley doubled as a conference room. There was no other room available. Their spacecraft had been designed to minimize cost, not maximize crew comforts.

Despite the crowding, or perhaps because of it, everyone was extremely polite. Most of the time. No one complained about body odors or stale jokes. No one played disks or videos without using an earplug, unless everyone agreed to listen or watch. If any of them paired off for sex, they kept quiet about it, both during the lovemaking and afterward. Most of the time.

But there were tensions. Possum Craig took some teasing about his nose, but to Jamie’s eye he was sensitive about his status as the team’s repairman. He’s a professional scientist, Jamie knew, but he’s spent his career working for petroleum companies rather than universities. The other scientists unconsciously looked down at him.

Vijay Shektar seemed constantly on guard against sexual advances. She had seemed like an attractive young woman when Jamie had first met her, but after the months of being confined in the spacecraft she began to look to him like one of the voluptuous dancing girls carved on the face of a Hindu temple. And the other men obviously felt the same way. But with her Aussie caustic wit she shriveled any man who tried to come on to her. It took several weeks before Tomas Rodriguez finally admitted defeat to himself.

Fuchida was more difficult for Jamie to fathom. He was exquisitely polite at all times and seemed totally at ease in the crowded living spaces. Yet his eyes seemed sad, melancholy, as if he longed for an Eden that was forever lost. Jamie wondered what preoccupied the Japanese biologist: was it something in his past that was bothering him, or something in the future he was worried about?

The other biologist, Trudy Hall, seemed to be quite self-contained: pleasant almost all the time, intelligent, but certainly not outgoing. She went her own way and spent most of her time working with Fuchida.

Anastasia Dezhurova was just the opposite: Stacy looked gloomy, scowling, forbidding, but once you began talking with her she opened up into a friendly, likeable, utterly competent woman. She was big-boned, thick in the middle, slow in movement, but her reflexes were lightning-fast. During a mandatory training session out in the badlands of Dakota, Jamie had seen her snatch a field mouse in her hare hand when it came sniffing into her tent. Then she tenderly carried the terrified rodent out to the brush and set it free.

Dezhurova was the senior of the team’s two astronauts, with more than a dozen flights into space for the Russians; she was second in command to Jamie. She worked with Rodriguez and, as the weeks went by, more and more with Craig on maintaining the equipment and running the astronomical experiments at the behest of astronomers back on Earth.

If being subordinate to her threatened Rodriguez’s machismo, he gave no outward sign of it. Tomas seemed to be an amiable, easygoing sort, although Jamie wondered how long he could remain cooped up with the three women without causing a problem.

It was Dex Trumball who gave Jamie the most irritation. Dex with his cocky, handsome smile and smooth manners. A young man born to money, who’d never had to struggle for anything in his life. His father had been a major force in funding this expedition, yet Dex would have been chosen to go anyway, he was that good a geophysicist. Degrees from Yale and a doctorate from Berkeley, no less, plus brilliant work on the lunar mascons.