Rescue Mode - eARC (23 page)

Taki suggested, “How about taking your weekly physicals a couple of days early?”

That elicited a chorus of boos.

“I know,” Amanda said. “Why don’t we download one of those murder mystery games? You know, where each of us playacts as one of the characters, and we try to figure out which one is really the killer.”

No one objected. Amanda felt good: she’d found a way to get them focused on the positive. For her, this made it a good and productive day.

August 22, 2035

13:09 Universal Time

Mars Arrival Minus 72 Days

The Galley

Benson was strapped into his seat at the galley table, finishing the last scraps of his late lunch, when Dr. Nomura glided into the galley and bent over him.

“May I speak with you privately?” she whispered.

There was no one else in the galley, and Benson could see from the troubled expression on the physician’s face that something was bothering her.

“Sure, Taki,” he said, trying to put her at her ease. “Have a seat, or a float, whichever you prefer.”

Nomura pulled herself down onto the chair closest to Benson and strapped herself in, glancing around the empty galley like a conspirator afraid that someone was eavesdropping.

“Mikhail is very sick,” she said, her voice low.

“Mikhail?”

“I’m certain that he has gastric cancer.”

“Cancer?” Benson yelped.

Nomura nodded, her expression miserable.

“Are you sure? I know he’s been troubled with persistent nausea, but I thought he was just having trouble adapting to weightlessness.”

“That’s what I thought, too, but it’s been months and space adaptation syndrome just doesn’t last that long. He’s lost weight, which isn’t surprising because he’s not eating much. But his abdomen is swollen.”

“Appendicitis maybe?”

Taki shook her head. “After I realized it wasn’t SAS, I checked that out. He presented some of the symptoms of appendicitis so I drew some blood to see if he had an elevated white cell count. Nada. But he showed anemia. Then I checked his stool. He’s passing blood and the DNA sampling confirms he has cancer.”

“Lord almighty,” Benson groaned.

“It’s worse. He knew it before we left.”

That bit of news made Benson sit up straighter and look squarely into Taki’s earth-brown eyes. “Explain.”

“The stool sampler is supposed to catch things like this. Every time we have a bowel movement it automatically screens for over a thousand metabolic disorders, cancers, markers for inflammation that could indicate heart disease, etc. I’m supposed to be alerted if anything turns up. He found a way to turn it off. He said he found out about the cancer a few months before we left and decided to hide it.”

“Did he tell you this?”

“Yes. And he said that dying out here was infinitely preferable to dying back on Earth—alone in a hospital bed. His personal life is a mess. His wife even left him.”

“Poor bastard. What can you do to help him?”

“Out here there’s nothing I can do except try to make him comfortable.”

“He doesn’t have any vital duties until we get a lot closer to Mars,” Benson mused. “I thought he was just moping because he didn’t have much to do.”

“If we were back on Earth he’d be under the care of a specialist, have a complete CT scan, then surgery followed by chemotherapy.”

“Will he survive until we get home?”

“I’ve spoken with Mikhail’s personal physician back in St. Petersburg and he’s pulling together some specialists who can make a better prognosis than I can.”

“Best guess.”

Taki hesitated before answering, “Doubtful.”

“What about the stool sampler? Have you fixed it? And what about everyone else? If it’s been turned off, then none of us have been screened lately.”

“He told me how he turned it off and yes, I turned it back on. Instead of waiting on the passive scans to notify me of a problem, I set the system to send me a complete diagnostic on everyone for the next week. I’ll look at them closely and make sure nothing else is happening.”

Benson grimaced and cursed inwardly. “I’m not superstitious,” he muttered, “but it looks like we’re God’s dartboard. First Ted’s family gets wiped out, then the damned meteoroid hits us. Now this. Is this ship jinxed?”

Taki Nomura had no answer for him.

September 4, 2035

Mars Arrival Minus 52 Days

16:48 Universal Time

Washington, D.C.

The Labor Day weekend had just ended, and Congress’ summer recess was over. Washington was still hot and muggy, though, as Senator William Donaldson stepped briskly from his air-conditioned limousine to the ground-level door of the Capitol building.

The first meeting of his subcommittee on Space, Aeronautics and Related Sciences was due to convene in twelve minutes. Plenty of time to ride the elevator up to his office, check with his personal assistant for any urgent business that might have come up overnight, take a quick leak in his private lavatory, and then get to the subcommittee meeting room.

Donaldson mentally counted the votes he could rely on. With Yañez in his pocket he had a solid majority. A bipartisan majority, at that. A rarity these days. Good material for next year, he thought. Show the voters that Bill Donaldson can get the opposing party to cooperate with his initiatives.

He chuckled to himself as he left his office suite, followed by a half-dozen aides, and strode down the corridor toward the conference room. Donaldson exuded an air of competence and cordiality; he was a smiling, handsome, vigorous man, lean and fit, his white hair swept back off his forehead, his dark pinstripe suit proclaiming a man of conservative tastes who nonetheless had a sense of style.

Yes,
Donaldson said to himself,
this is going to be a good day. Let Bob Harper choke on it.

The subcommittee’s conference room was actually filled. Every member was present, a surprising turnout for the first day of Congress’ return from its summer recess. Donaldson was pleased. He had made certain every member of the subcommittee knew in advance what the day’s agenda would be. They had all responded as he’d hoped they would.

He gladhanded his way around the table, smiling broadly at his fellow members, working his way along the opposition’s side of the table before moving to his own party’s side. Everyone was cordial, warm and friendly, while the cameras clicked away.

As soon as the photographers left the room, however, the smiles vanished. All except Donaldson’s.

“I’m delighted that each and every one of you is here,” he began. Tapping the agenda laid out on the tablet screen before him, he went on, “We have a very important decision to make this morning, a very important decision.”

Every lawyer knows never to ask a question in court that he doesn’t already know the answer to. Donaldson went one step farther: he never asked his subcommittee for a decision that he didn’t know they had already decided.

But one of the women on the other side of the table, a middle-aged, sour-faced African American from Texas—where the Johnson Space Center directed NASA’s human spaceflight program—looked decidedly unhappy.

“William,” she said in a tone that was almost combative, “we can’t recommend to the full committee that we stop all crewed space missions.”

“Why not?” Donaldson asked, knowing what the answer would be.

“It would put an end to an American dream,” she said.

“That’s not so, Judine. Americans are flying into space on private rockets. Americans are working in the International Space Station and on the Moon.”

“But what about Mars? What about going farther, pushing the envelope, exploring new worlds?”

“What about the risks of human lives?” Donaldson countered. “What about those eight men and women who are never going to return from Mars alive?”

A senator from Donaldson’s own side of the table shook his head. “That’s a terribly negative way of looking at it.”

“No, it’s the accurate way of looking at it,” Donaldson insisted. “We’ve spent billions of the taxpayers’ dollars on this Mars fiasco and all it’s going to get us is eight corpses.”

Dead silence fell on the room.

Then the Texan said, softly, “There’s still a chance that they’ll make it.”

Donaldson held up his thumb and forefinger a hair’s breadth apart. “That much of a chance.”

The woman sat there stolidly. “I still can’t vote to cut out NASA’s entire human spaceflight program.”

“Because?”

“Because it’ll mean closing down the Johnson center. We’ll lose thousands of jobs! I’d get booted out on my butt next November.”

They’d finally arrived at the real reason, Donaldson knew, smiling inwardly.

“The Johnson Space Center could turn its talents to supporting all those private companies that are doing human space flights,” he said, a trifle smugly.

“That won’t add up to a fraction of the center’s present budget.”

Shrugging, Donaldson said, “But it would reduce NASA’s overall budget, save the taxpayers billions per year.”

“And lose thousands of jobs in Texas.”

Donaldson looked up and down the table.
Pretty much as I expected,
he told himself
. States with NASA facilities don’t want to lose their federal funding. States without NASA facilities couldn’t care less.

He folded his hands on the table top and looked his Texan adversary in the eye. Time to be magnanimous, he told himself. Time to make a gesture.

“I see your problem, Judine,” he said. “I understand the difficulties you face. Maybe we can work out a compromise.”

The senator from Texas looked surprised, then hopeful. “A compromise?”

Over the next hour the subcommittee wrangled over several different possibilities. In the end, they decided not to recommend cutting NASA’s entire human spaceflight program. But they did agree—decisively—to cut all funding for the planned follow-on mission to Mars.

“All right,” Donaldson told them at last. “I think we’ve come to a good decision. There will be no more human missions to Mars. One disaster is enough.”

Nods of agreement up and down the table. Some were reluctant, others wholehearted. Donaldson sank back in his chair and put on a look of weary acceptance. He had gotten what he’d come for.
There won’t be any more human flights to Mars,
he said to himself.
That’ll gut NASA’s human spaceflight program. Once I’m in the White House we can cancel the whole program. Screw Texas!

October 25, 2035

18:11 Universal Time

Mars Arrival Minus One Day

The
Arrow

This was as close to heaven as Hiram McPherson could imagine. He was huddled in the
Arrow
’s observation blister looking out at Mars in all its ruddy glory, his arms wrapped around Catherine, holding her close.

His senses were on overload as he simultaneously saw what no other human being had ever seen so close, the planet Mars, and held the woman he’d come to hold so dear over the past two and a half years.

“It’s beautiful,” Catherine murmured, her head leaning back on his shoulder as she stared out at the red planet.

Hi nuzzled her neck with his beard. “Not as beautiful as you.”

“No,” she agreed lightly. “Perhaps not. Now, if there were canals, that would be different,
non
?”

“There could be cities and palaces,” he said, “but they still wouldn’t compare to you.”

“You’re very sweet, Hi.”

He looked out at the world they were rapidly approaching. “Is this how Adam and Eve felt, do you think?”

She glanced up at him. “I don’t know. I’m not particularly religious.”

“I’ve never been very religious either, but that doesn’t mean I don’t believe in God,” McPherson admitted. “To me, that planet out there is proof that God exists. And what I feel for you is proof positive.”

Catherine thought that over for a moment. “I suppose I would call myself a deist. I believe that there is a God, but I doubt very seriously that a God who could create something as vast and majestic as the universe could possibly take an interest in you or me, or anyone, for that matter. Even Jesus.”

“You don’t understand the concept of infinity. An infinite God can handle all that, and more.”

“Perhaps,” she conceded.

“I mean, I’ve had too many things happen in my life that I’ve attributed to God—good things and bad. I just can’t believe that we’re here on our own. Love, music, art, even science stare us in the face every day; I can’t believe that God didn’t have a hand in their existence. Let alone our self-awareness, our ability to do good and to do evil.”

“But what about the evil in the world, Hi? What about the evil out there? What happened to Ted, the loss of his wife and son, was that an act of your God? Was the rock that nearly killed us all part of some grand plan? How could an all-knowing, all-loving God possibly have allowed such things to happen?”

He shrugged, almost like a Frenchman. “You know, people have been debating those ideas since there have been people. We aren’t going to resolve them now and I’m not going to let this get between you and me while we’ve got Mars to look at.”

Catherine snuggled closer to him. “I agree. God or no God, this is a time to relish.”

“Look.” McPherson pointed. “That’s Olympus Mons. The biggest mountain in the Solar System.”

For long moments the two of them watched silently staring at the huge volcano and the trio of smaller ones lined up near it. Each one of them was taller than Everest.

“Look at Olympus’ base,” McPherson murmured, his geologist’s instincts aroused. “It’s bigger than the state of Idaho!”

But Catherine asked, “Hi, do you think we’ll make it home?”

Her sudden change of the subject caught him by surprise.
But it shouldn’t have,
he told himself.
That question is staring us in the face, just like Mars is.

“I honestly don’t know, Catherine. I’d like to think so. Mission control seems to think the truss repair will hold up when we go into orbit. We’ll find out tomorrow when we make our MOI burn.”

“Aren’t you frightened?”

McPherson blinked at the question. “Frightened? No. I don’t think I am. Concerned, sure. I don’t want to die. I don’t want any of us to die. But if it happens, I’m glad I’ll be with you when it does.”