The Martian Race (11 page)

She waited and finally realized that he wasn't going to say anything. Couldn't. Maybe shouldn't.

“So, uh, how'd it go with her?” That was as much as she was going to give him. He had to come some of the distance himself, for Chris-sake.

“I … we talked. You know, I know,
everybody
knows that… that she had to know.”

“You said that.”

“Yeah.” A sigh of release, head lolling back.

“And she said … ?”

“She wouldn't really say, not right out.”

“Uh huh.” God,
other people's relationships.

“But, I mean, we knew what we were saying.”

More than I can say, but keep it coming, kid.
“She admitted that she got pregnant knowingly? Even though it meant Mars was out?”

“Like I say, she never said it clear like that. But I got her meaning.” He was opening now, his face less constricted, voice rushing on, tones more earnest yet less fevered. “Way I figure it, she was an astronaut all along, childhood dream and all that, like the rest of us. Only now she's done that. So it's a baby or Mars, and she wants the baby.”

“Reasonable.”

“You must've felt the same.”

“Not actually. I like kids, but other people's are fine. Enough. I can return them afterward.”

He laughed—a quick, light chuckle, and then the words came out fast again. “So she's getting rattled, too, I think.”

“Rattled.”

“I mean, this isn't NASA. Not today's NASA. It's like the NASA of the sixties, doing stuff for the first time,
every
time. People died then and everybody was sorry, sure, and they just kept going. Not like now. Somebody breaks a leg in the space station, there's people talking about it in Congress.”

“You think she was scared.”

He sighed, and to her surprise, lowered his head with a tired sadness. “Yeah, I think.”

“Afraid of Mars, of the uncertainty.” She was stalling. Plain old fear had not occurred to her.

“Maybe it got all scrambled up inside her. She's been an astronaut, a damn good one. Now she wants to be a mother. Doesn't need Mars.” His head came up and he drew in a long breath. Something more coming. “And yeah, the way she was holding me at night all these months, the bad dreams and all—yeah, I think she was scared.”

He was telling her as much as he was ever going to tell anyone. That Katherine had mixed motives—who didn't?—and one was the gut-squeezer nobody in the astronaut corps
ever
talked about.

“
I…
I see.” Wow, real therapist stuff, here. “I've felt the same way. It is dangerous.”

Raoul grabbed at this like a life preserver. “We all do, damn right. Only reasonable, I guess. Only with her, it got mingled in with the baby thing.”

“No shame in that.” She was trying to find a way to back away from this. She had no idea what to say to him.

“A woman like you, that's different. You aren't scared.”

Now she really didn't know what to say. “I get by.”

“Hey, they call you the Iron Girl, you know that?”

She had heard it, but only as a joke. Did any of the support crews really think that?
As others see us …
If only they knew.

She shook her head. “Undeserved.”

“Well, coulda fooled me.”

“I get scared about going this way, too.” There, out with it. “It ain't NASA.”

“Sure.” Relief in his face, raised eyebrows. “Me, too.”

“But it's the only way. For us, anyway. Give them a decade, Congress might get behind it again.”

He nodded vigorously. “But not for us.”

“And not for Katherine, not now.”

His face suddenly filled with sadness. It softened and she wondered if he would cry. She saw the sacrifice he now glimpsed up ahead. Not only the danger, which had kept them all awake some nights or else they wouldn't be human. Piled on top of that was losing Katherine for years, not seeing his baby born, or maybe
ever.
She could not imagine what that was like for Raoul, a man who grew up in the shadow of the Latino community in SoCal.

“Katherine, she is strong.” His face now firmed up after all that came through it in these moments. She saw a new Raoul, one who abruptly saw that he had a role to play, not a weepy soft one, but a solid part in a play he knew.

“Strong enough to get what she wants,” she said helpfully.

“She will be strong while I am gone.” He straightened, chin up, finding himself.

“Of course.” And he was incredibly right. She got to be the tearful mother, he got to be the resolute father, the adventurous man, bringing home fame and fortune. And it would work.

“She's making the choice she wants.” He nodded to himself.

“We all are. You, too.” She managed a wobbly smile.

He jerked a thumb up. “Mars or Bust.”

Katherine's glacial silence was puzzling, vexing. But nobody spent time worrying. They all had a far larger problem: replacing her, pronto.

Axelrod held a meeting that night, most pointedly not including the astronauts. They found out about it only the next morning, in a staffwide meeting. Brad Fowler thought that he could not bring another pilot up to speed in time to meet the launch window. Katherine was geologist and backup pilot, but the entire skill-set she had carefully built for years was now integrated with the still-building mission technology. She had influenced avionics and control systems designs herself.

And now time was crushingly short: five months. Axelrod could not just pick some other astronaut left over from the NASA program and get him or her up to speed.

The all-staff meeting broke up in moody silence. Axelrod left the room without talking to anybody, the wind visibly gone from his customary billowing sails.

Julia was working on systems integration problems with a room full of engineers when the call came. They were about ready to break for lunch, so she grabbed a coffee, trotted to the main building and took the special VIP elevator to Axelrod's office. Viktor was there with Raoul and absolutely nobody else. Her pulse quickened. Axelrod liked dramatic announcements, and there was a urgent air in the room. Raoul and Viktor looked at her with relief, hoping to now get to business.

She refused a seat, took a sip of bitter coffee, and said flatly, “What? Don't string it out like the nuke surprise.”

“That's my Julia, always subtle,” Axelrod said, utterly at ease. He even straightened his tie.

She felt her hopes rise. “I'm learning from you.”

“I just spent half a billion bucks to keep you all from worrying. We've got to have a crew member we can work with now, right away. And he has to have the right mix of skills. Geologist and backup pilot.”

A sudden suspicion dawned on Julia. “Marc?”

Axelrod looked startled, nodded vigorously. “He'll be here tonight. I've bought Marc back from Airbus.”

“What!” Viktor said.

“Just how a baseball manager buys an outfielder,” Axelrod said proudly. “The way I figured it was, they're a long time off from getting into the air. Hell, they don't have their main engines off the drawing board! These Chinese gentlemen—and a lot of Germans and French, too—they have time to train a replacement. We don't. So—money talks. Big surprise.”

“In this case,” Raoul said, “it must have shouted.”

“Marc got half a billion?” Viktor's incredulous mouth stayed open.

“No, Airbus. I bought his contract. He wasn't too happy, so I gave him a li'l bonus.” Quickly Axelrod held up both hands, palms up. “One I'm gonna give you three, of course. A clean million. Each.”

“Good lord,” Raoul said.

Julia felt the same. It wasn't the money, but the dizzying swirl of events. She could readily face danger, relentless drills, and high g's, but not the emotional wrenching of the last few days.

“You are the kind of capitalist we Russians do not know how to be,” Viktor said with grudging respect.

“I'll take that as a compliment. I kinda thought you'd all like to have this settled right away.” Axelrod grinned as if he had anticipated this; and he had. He snapped his fingers, and through a side door came three of his executives. Incongruously, they were carrying glasses. And champagne. “Figured we'd toast to the day, now that the Consortium crew is complete.”

Julia accepted a glass—then, somehow, another. She did not quite hear the rest of Axelrod's rambling toast, her mind was so abuzz.

She was going to Mars with three guys.

No girl talk or consolation, as she had rather vaguely assumed. Not that Ice Queen Katherine had ever been forthcoming. Still …

There came a moment when Raoul had taken in a tad too much champagne and he leaned over to Viktor and said, “You two will be playing grab-ass all the way to Mars and back?” He murmured it mildly, only the words carrying his barbed meaning.

She brushed it aside, knowing abstractly that there would be a reckoning on this somewhere downstream. The celebrations soon widened as people came into the office and more champagne showed up.

Then one of Axelrod's minions was saying grandly, “We all feel the same here, and that's what helped us get through this crisis. Leadership, yes. But there's no I in the word
team,”
he concluded with a flourish of champagne.

Julia had never liked these Consortium cheerleader types, with their solemn sayings. She especially didn't like them after a few glasses of what was actually a quite fine champagne. She wanted to applaud when Viktor stodgily replied, “There is in your word,
win.”

9

JANUARY 12,2018

T
HE NEXT MORNING SHE SUITED UP AND TOOK THE SAMPLE OUT TO THE
greenhouse. Under the protocols for handling possible Mars life, some of her equipment was set up outside of the hab. In a worst-case contamination scenario, they could abandon the greenhouse.

Attitudes about Mars life verged on schizophrenia. It was at once the most sought-after discovery and the most feared. Glory in the knowledge that we were not alone in the universe! Cringe in terror of the threat of alien life!

Using the portable glove box, she opened the sample bag. There was so little of the stuff, she decided to analyze it for Earth-like organic molecules by running it through the gas chromatograph. She didn't have enough to try multiple tests.

She was dying to try some quick and dirty chemical tests, assaying bits of the sample to see if the basic constituents of life—proteins, lipids, carbohydrates, nucleic acids—were the same here. Or at least close enough to respond to the same chemical tests.

But this way she'd find out if it was organic, and if it resembled Earth life in its components. It was a lot more work this way, and she'd have to wait to find out.
Oh well.

She immersed the wiper in methanol. Starting the extraction was all she had time to do just then. The rest would have to wait.

Tick. Tick. Tick.

There was plenty of grunt labor to get ready for the liftoff test. Gear they had used on the repairs, supplies dumped months ago in a hurry, scrap parts—all had to be hauled away from the Return Vehicle. On the long glide back to Earth, every extra kilogram they carried made their fuel margin that slimmer, and it wasn't that fat to begin with.

Julia didn't mind the heavy labor. The low gravity helped but the laws of inertia still governed. Manhandling gear into the unpressured rovers to stow it for the next expedition—if there was one—at least gave her a chance to think; simple jobs didn't absorb all her concentration. She hefted a bulky package onto the top of a pile, puffed—and that was when all her frustrations surfaced and she decided to do some pushing of her own.

Through their usual heavy-carbo lunch she planned. Right after, she found Marc in the hab's geology lab, packing a core for transport.

“So what do we do now?” she asked. “Just you and me?”

Their last, long expedition in the rover was out, that much was clear. Safety protocols demanded two in the rover. Both mechanics, Raoul and Viktor, had to be working on the Return Vehicle. Marc was the backup pilot, so he would be needed to help Viktor, at least through the liftoff trial.

“You're going to tell me, right?” He grinned.

“I'm not going to sit around twiddling my thumbs for my last two months on Mars. Not when I think we've finally found Martian biology.”

Marc said crisply, “You can't go out for a week by yourself, Julia.”

“I know. Come with me, Marc. There's enough time left for a vent trip. Maybe even more than one.”

The extensive Return Vehicle repairs had cut into all their schedules. For the weeklong rover trips, mission protocol decreed that one of the pair be a mechanic—Raoul or Viktor. When the two of them were tied up doing Return Vehicle repairs, Julia and Marc were restricted to day trips in the rover. Marc had filled his time setting off lots of small seismic blasts, and was surprised to discover extensive subterranean caverns several hundreds of meters down. So far they hadn't found a way into any of them, and Julia knew Marc was itching to get down there.

But Marc looked doubtful. “You did that already. I thought we agreed it was a bust. No life or fossils.”

“Yes, but we picked a vent that was a blind alley. It didn't go down deep enough. The one Viktor and I found yesterday may be it. Finally.”

Marc frowned, distracted by his chore. “You haven't proved it yet.”

“I'm working on it. For now, consider the possibility that we stumbled on the entranceway to an underground ecology,” she urged, caught up in her vision. “On Earth, anaerobes went underground or underwater to get away from the nasty poisonous oxygen atmosphere. They've thrived for billions of years in the most hostile places. Here on Mars, the anaerobes only had to fight the cold and drought. They must have followed the heat and gone underground.”

Marc frowned. He had heard pieces of this argument before, his scowl said. He thought most life-on-Mars theorizing was just a way of avoiding the really interesting geology—sorry, areology—of this place. “Uh, where d'you want to look?”

“If my tests show the sample is organic, then of course the vent Viktor and I found yesterday.”