10

OCTOBER 2015

MARC ARRIVED, GRINNING MADLY FOR THE BATTERIES OF CAMERAS, AND fit right in.

Julia looked at him across the room. After the space of several months, she was impressed again by his gorgeous profile. He looked like an astronaut with the right stuff. Wide, guileless grin, perfect teeth, square jaw. Blue eyes, of course, and dark blond hair, slightly tousled. No wonder Axelrod's PR gang wanted him on the crew. He had the kind of looks that could kill at fifty feet. If they had fan clubs, she figured his would get the most mail, hands down.

And, of course, they did. But nobody let the crew see the numbers …

Raoul was compact and muscular, striking in a dark, Latin way—hell, all the astronauts were easy on the eyes. No coincidence. NASA didn't train people the public wouldn't want to watch. Katherine had been a knockout, and Viktor—well, she just couldn't judge. To her he looked simply wonderful. Objectively she knew he couldn't match Marc, but she was so much more drawn to him. He caught her eye and winked. She felt a stab of emotion. Despite her training, she flushed.

The new crew went out for beers and Mexican the first evening.

“Axelrod didn't need to offer the million-dollar bonus, either, tell you the truth,” Marc revealed with a grin.

“Don't ever tell him that,” Viktor said, smiling. Some part of him still liked the games and bargaining of what he called “late capitalism”—though what might replace it, he admittedly had no idea.

Raoul slurped his Dos Equis with relish. “Yeah, it would make him grind his teeth down faster.”

“You would have come back on even terms?” Julia asked.

“Easy. I wasn't crazy about living in China, even at the top of the heap. Jammed, smelly, air so thick you could cut it.”

“I hear you trained in Germany some, though,” Viktor said.

“That was okay, but the leftover ESA gear they had was clunky. And the team Airbus had put together, it didn't jell.”

“Chen?” Julia guessed.

“Him and me, we never got along real well.”

Julia had a fond spot for Lee Chen, who had helped train her in practical exobiology. “He's old school discipline,” she admitted.

“Autocrat prima donna, more like it.”

“More German than Germans,” Viktor snorted. He and Chen had not exactly hit it off, either, when they were all in the NASA Astronaut Office.

“Too true. I missed this Dos Equis, that's for sure.”

Raoul joined him in a long pull. “We won't be getting any for a while, might as well enjoy the best.”

“Ol’ Chen-boy, he made it real clear. All his opera, and we're spear carriers.”

“With Airbus supplying the Wagnerian music?” Julia asked lightly.

To her relief, between her and Marc there was no trace of the anger he had shown when he stormed out months before. He probably still blamed her for bumping him in favor of Viktor—rightly, of course, even though she had not planned it that way. Sometime it would come out and she would have to be ready. Viktor, too; Marc would see it as completely logical that they had hatched up the whole scheme. She realized that the two of them probably enjoyed a reputation for sly maneuver that was quite undeserved.

“Yeah, and the Germans hating living there so much, alcohol was one of the major food groups.”

“Hard to keep sharp that way.” Raoul's tongue was getting a little sloppy, probably from the effect he was criticizing.

“Yes. We heard there were plenty malfs,” Viktor prodded.

“More than plenty, a surplus. From the first day, I had big doubts about the Chinese and Germans and French being able to put together a nuclear rocket in time. First time I saw their test-bed results, I was sure.”

Julia dutifully drank some more of her light ale, aware that this was a male ritual she had better get the hang of, though knowing that some of the subtleties of barhopping would elude her. “They had all that old Russian data.”

“Sure, and some from the old American Nerva project. Kept quiet about how they got that. But putting it all together with the avionics and control systems—not so easy.”

“Data we have says are far more efficient rockets than LOX,” Viktor observed.

“But still …” Marc leaned forward, almost whispering, “You wanna sit on top of that hot a pile?”

“If it got me to Mars and back pronto, sure,” Raoul said.

“If. They're having trouble getting the fuel flow—liquid hydrogen when they boost from two hundred klicks up—to go through that cylindrical plutonium pile they're using. It gets too hot, then it gives them back pressure, heats up some more, and—whammo—the whole damned shebang can run away into—well, they dunno.”

“I could fix it.” Raoul looked bland, unconcerned.

“Welcome to, my friend,” Marc toasted him.

Viktor said carefully, “They are on schedule?”

“No, that's the point,” Marc said. “Fallin’ behind every day now.”

“Can they make the window?” Julia pressed.

“Don't see how.”

They all beamed at their new crewmate.

Axelrod did too, the next day. He listened to all this technical detail with barely suppressed glee. “They won't be riding on our tail after all!” Handshakes all around.

But five minutes later his attention was elsewhere.

Now his PR people were worried about the publicity impact. Would people hate Raoul? He tried this out on Julia, “looking for the woman's angle”—as if there would be only one. “After all, he's leaving behind his wife, and child, to come. He won't see the baby until it's two years old.”

“Maybe never,” Julia said flatly, to see if Axelrod would react. Nothing. Well, maybe matters felt differently if your own rear was not going to be in an acceleration couch.

Axelrod was right, however. Some commentators took this up. People magazine did a big weepy feature on the issue. But by now the Consortium had made firm connections to a lot of media figures, those distant enough to look objective. They ran a counteroffensive, following a plausible line: Raoul was portrayed as a modern Odysseus going off on a voyage into the unknown to fulfill his destiny, no matter what it cost him personally. (Never mind that Odysseus had gone to war, won, then gotten sidetracked on the trip back in his involuntary odyssey, taking decades to hole up on various islands of the Aegean, several times with women not his wife.) This line seemed to work with the public.

Then the oddity of a lone woman going to Mars for two and a half years caught their imagination, deflecting attention from Raoul. The endless speculation—some quite ribald, and ignorantly assuming they would go to Mars in zero g—appalled Julia. She stopped reading the press entirely and never turned on the trivid anymore.

Still, there was relentless attention, and Axelrod had to let a tiny fraction of it focus on her. If all humanity was going to Mars along with the four, “We must know our companions,” as one commentator put it. She was glad that she didn't have to get to know many on the immediate other side of the membrane, thank you, for she developed an instant dislike to most of the media mavens, who chose to wear their ignorance of Mars, space, and technology like a badge marking them as one with the Common Man.

Julia had to admit there was some point to the interviews, profiles, even in the lapel-hugging shows like A Day in the Life Of, and the like. There had been so many faceless astronauts among the hundred-plus needed to keep the space station aloft. From the old days the public knew John Glenn and Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong and maybe Sally Ride, but from the station nobody remembered names, just grinning guys and gals riding rockets. Now there were only four to care about, and she was the singular figure.

She had the intelligence not to manufacture a public persona. Astronauts were by design sharp, crisp, automatically outgoing, shining with health, and always pressured. This she let carry her, staying inside her friendly but reserved carapace.

The worst of the public angle was the curveballs the media kept throwing her. In the middle of an absolutely innocuous talk with a worldwide morning magazine show, the kind-faced, motherly interviewer suddenly turned sharklike with, “And what do you say to those Asians who believe the Consortium is indulging in the worst sort of racism?”—apparently, by not having an Asian in the crew. Raoul, she was told, didn't really offset the Caucasian bias since he was an American citizen.

She countered by pointing out that Latinos were really mixtures of Caucasoids and Mongoloids, two of the three major racial groups. The interviewer shot back that the Consortium had no Negroid, the new “in” word for black.

Most embarrassing was the way she learned that Airbus was suing the Consortium over some tiny technicality. This took advantage of the legendary American habit of settling issues in court rather than by negotiation. A judge handed down a restraining order commanding Axelrod to stop development of the Venture—Axelrod's choice for the name—pending some obscure legal finding.

Julia had to field a probing, sneering interviewer who trotted out this news, hinting that the Consortium had stolen technology from both NASA and from the poor, media-neglected Airbus team.

He ignored the fact that, in classic Chinese form, Airbus was letting few media teams within miles of their facilities. Julia somehow managed to stutter and fake her way into a commercial break, then was missing when they came back on the air.

The order was dissolved within a week beneath the media glare. NASA gave a press conference to confirm that Axelrod was paying for everything the Consortium mission used. Airbus was thrown out of court.

Though Axelrod could not prove it, Airbus was still tying the Consortium in legal knots.

Suddenly the Securities and Exchange Commission was investigating Axelrod's finances.

A senator started complaining about technology transfer and safety. The Consortium vehicles were being launched on private rockets that were developed with NASA, right down to the solid launch assist boosters. Some vital U.S. secrets could leak—to whom, the senator did not say.

Since the primary international antagonist of the United States was the Chinese, who were half of Airbus, this made no real sense—but got lots of coverage anyway.

The tension between the two sides spilled out into the open, with tit-for-tat press conferences and incessant mike-in-the-face goading. The media had one great axiom: You fight it, we write it.

Axelrod proved too smart for them, though, by trotting his “Marsnauts” out when they were obviously tired, gaining sympathy. He even went along with the media term “NASAnauts” for the bland astronauts who were criticizing the Consortium. In all, Julia was grateful to be kept out of the fray, which just kept building.

Still, it had not escaped anyone that many Europeans and Chinese would like to take all that Mars Prize money away from the Consortium. And from the U.S., since the Americans put the most in the pot.

Nationalist rivalry got worse, like a grudge soccer match between whole continents.

Axelrod didn't find everything he needed on NASA's shelves. The Consortium had to fabricate important components. That proved comparatively easy, though expensive. Axelrod grumbled and paid. Mating the fresh cut-metal parts with the conventional wisdom of decades proved harder.

The NASA designs were pricey, the engineering incomplete, and what hardware that did exist needed modification. The habitat had to be cut down, reengineered, and simplified—after all, they were no longer running under the ludicrous zero-g orthodoxy, which complicated everything from the kitchen to the toilets. Flying with 0.38 g made life simpler, but many standing NASA methods developed for the space station now had to be scrapped. Connectors, electronics, systems integration—all had to be done with a fresh vision, to meet a stepped-up deadline.

It was legendary in aerospace that gear got built faster in the dry, lonely techno-outposts where there was nothing else for the engineers to do: China Lake, Rockman, Palmdale, White Sands, other forlorn dustbowls. So Axelrod's teams had bought space and people in all those places, and the metal and composites grew apace in splendid dry isolation.

Crews for the space station were normally selected ten to twelve months before launch. Fine, so long as the equipment was ready. Here it wasn't. More headaches.

The Consortium had to squash together development and training, a feat unheard of since the Apollo days.

Single-system training came first, weeks of working with instructors who were building the payload and landing systems while they trained the astronauts. It was a field day for overachievers.

The confusions would have been comic if lives had not been on the line.

Mission simulations came next, bringing all four crew together in the habitat-cockpit mock-up. Here they practiced everything that could go wrong and the few things that could go right—endlessly.

For starters, nobody had ever built a combo habitat and cockpit. The two functions had diametrically opposed demands. Habitats should be comfy and convey largeness; cockpits should be rugged and tight. They had to fly the bulky hab and land it on Mars, but return would be in the ERV, already in place.

The habitat-lander was a big aluminum and steel tuna can with a central cylinder that served to reach the air lock at its base. The top level was living quarters, the bottom held their Mars exploration equipment and the cockpit. There were no side windows, nothing looking straight ahead, where the craft would slam into the Martian atmosphere at speeds of several kilometers per second. Viktor would have to fly using TV screens alone. Fair enough; aerobraking required senses of flow speeds, spiking temperatures, and pressures, not eye-balling.

Four months before nominal launch date, joint integrated simulations began in earnest. To this grueling party everybody got invited: operation control, flight director, habitat monitors, techs—eighty-six people in all.

In a way, a whole-systems exercise was a game. The crew wanted to make no errors, while the flight director tried to make them die in dozens of different ways.

Their flight director, the ever-smiling Brad Fowler, had left NASA three years before for private consulting and many more bucks. Axelrod had topped whatever he was getting and then some, by all accounts. Brad was happy to be back running a real program of exploration, though he tried hard not to show that too much.

“Must admit,” Viktor said, “systems personnel are best money can buy.”

Julia countered, “Best, period. Half these guys quit NASA to come here.”

The others were from private corporations that were essentially NASA feeder outfits. It was an open secret that NASA's stand-down from Mars had sent the whole organization into a tailspin from which morale might never recover. If not Mars, what was the point of having a space agency? That had simplified Axelrod's problems immensely. People would sign on just to have a hand in getting to Mars, even for jobs that were below their capability ratings.

So here they all were, one happy gang all wanting to go to Mars, and a dozen times a day dying in the simulators. Brad Fowler smiled at them every day, obeying a standard NASA commandment: Thou shalt smile, but not grin. Confidence, not arrogance. His teeth shone like a white flag against skin as weathered as beef jerky, from decades in the Houston heat. He gave them the same opening mantra, “Morning, all. The tougher we are on you here, the easier it'll be on Mars.”

Each time Julia thought to herself, Yeah, right, you sadist. Even though she knew what he said was true.

The rules of the simulation game were, no Challenger-level disasters. Nothing beyond their control, when the only response possible was to say your prayers. Sure, those events could happen, but there was no point in simulating them.

Instead, they got what Julia thought of as instant obstacles.

Failure of a subsection of the electronics board. Fuel pump shutdown. Cryo malf. Leak in the vector-keeping system lines. Big-time pressure drop.

Miss the first sign and that wedged you against the clock, trying to restart a procedure while fluids spurted out into space or pumps locked up nice and tight. One of these—or all three—come at you while the habitat is scooping deep on its first gulp of the Martian upper atmosphere.

In a typical “exercise,” Viktor was trying to fly an avionics structure that more nearly resembled a refrigerator than an airplane. Raoul was performing mechanical CPR on the fuel feeds that had just redlined. Julia and Marc were running backup, taking over problems that the others had discarded as nonessential.

That didn't mean they couldn't kill you, only that they wouldn't do so right now.

Like, say, a pesky waffle in their aerodynamic trim. Sure, there was plenty of theoretical backup on this, books full of Navier-Stokes three-dimensional flow-field solutions for their aeroshell shape. They also inherited thick studies of how the reacting flows of appropriate CO₂ chemistry worked out with the preliminary thermal protection system (TPS, in NASAspeak). No problem there.

But when Viktor handed off the problem to Julia as he struggled with the Mach window, she couldn't find the right operating regime for their vector-control jets. Viktor had to take it over and fly the bird by hand, not even looking at the overshoot trajectory plots that an anxious ship computer kept flashing up on his right-hand screen.

No matter that they had bought from NASA a “robust 3-D Conceptual Fluid Dynamic code capable of radiating, turbulent, and dusty flow simulations.” Viktor had fifty-eight tons at his back and no wings to lift them out of trouble. He had to skate on the filmy upper blanket of CO₂ by feel more than by numbers.

So when the vector problem grew to fatal levels, he snatched it back from her and tried to correct the sliding yaw the whole craft was developing. The simulation was good. It yanked them around, buffeted them like a bad roller coaster, meanwhile yowling in their ears like a drumroll from hell. Not a great aid to abstract thinking.

Running out of luck got to be a habit. Engines went out at just the worst moment, when they were pulling maximum g's. Headwinds maxed up to kill their lifting speed. Boards went dead, running lights and all, just before a critical command had to pass through them.

Nothing in nature said that only one thing had to go wrong at once, after all.

Brad reminded them of that far more often than he needed to. Maybe there was a bit of the smiling sadist in him.

Maybe NASA had selected him for that. Or Axelrod had.

Every time they failed to recover from a malf, they looked at each other, knowing that the feed camera was showing their dismay to the whole goddamn team outside. Everybody was thinking the same thing: if this were Mars, they'd be dead. Little chunks of red stuff spattered across the already red planet.

They needed their coffee breaks.

A few months of this and maybe the magic point would come. NASA termed it “crystallization”—when a crew thought as one, knowing when and how to do the right things at just the right times. So that they didn't get in one other's way, blundering through the complex, interacting systems commanded from the tight little cockpit.

Crystallize too early and a crew got cocky, bored. Too late and they couldn't fly at all, because they weren't seasoned.

Hitting the right point as the launch window started to open was why Brad Fowler's job was more like an artist's than an engineer's.

Or a psychotherapist's.

Viktor had started his career during the slow revival of the Russian space program, post-Mir. His father had worked on keeping Mir aloft, laboring in the mission control center that was a brooding mausoleum hulking beside a pothole avenue. Though his father had been a flight controller, to make ends meet he had to drive a taxi in his off hours.

After Mir, Russian cosmonauts had lawyers and contracts and agents, in a parody of neocapitalism. They got bonuses for doing EVAs and running orbital experiments. Viktor was already used to doing telecasts from orbit endorsing snack foods and sweaters. Russian institutions had a long habit of covering over embarrassing lapses and outright failures, so the Consortium's up-front attitude—if it doesn't work, let's hear pronto, then fix it—had been delightful.

At night he lay in bed with Julia and could talk about things like this, things that to another, ordinary woman would have been petrifyingly dull. But to Julia it was the world she lived in, his experience in it different and strange and movingly sad. What she thought of it did not matter. What did was that she heard and felt through his halting, awkward English the pain of a life lived in tougher places, harder times.

Hearing it helped him. And her.

But all the wonderful, warm communication only served to offset the complexity and strain of their working days, which now stretched to fill all but sleep. And sometimes it invaded sleep itself. She would awaken to find Viktor pacing, moody and unable to speak. Sometimes she felt that way herself, for reasons she could not name.

But they helped each other through those times and emerged in the morning whole and sometimes even rested. Able to smile for the cameras that sometimes got through security and dogged their footsteps as they fetched the morning Houston Times.

The tragedy of Mir and the International Space Station alike was that they did not confront the deep problem of living in space.

Instead, they camped in space. They used disposables, taking in food and air and dumping their waste, never closing the loop.

Only when it became embarrassingly obvious that the ISS had nothing much to do did NASA's attention turn to the obvious next goal: systems for true exploration, Mars. Recycling water and air, separation of solid waste, air chemistry—these had gotten worked out in orbit with painful slowness.

Centrifugal gravity was a simpler matter. In 2008 the method got a simple trial in orbit, standing off the ISS a few kilometers for safety, keeping astronauts—NASAnauts—in fractional g for a year.

They performed so well that the zero-g faction in the JSC Life Science Directorate had tried to suppress further work, fearing for their jobs. All they had learned from four decades of endless study of zero g was that it was a bad idea. But after the fractional-g trials the cat was out of the zero-g bag. There were at least some 0.38 g orbital studies to support Axelrod's leap to the simple configuration they would fly to Mars and back.

After all, this wasn't even what the media called rocket science— an interesting cliché misnomer, for rockets are engineering miracles, not scientific ones—tricky but not exactly challenging the limits of knowledge. It was Newtonian mechanics, and as long as the cable deployed all right between the upper stage of the booster and the habitat, all that remained to do was give each a burst from the hydrazine thrusters and spin the habitat about the dead weight of the empty upper stage shell at a few revolutions per minute.

Maybe the best fresh aspect of the Consortium was the absence of paperwork. In Julia's experience, every flight up to the space station produced more paperwork mass than the payload weight. Axelrod cut all that.

“No point in a bunch of Cover Your Ass memos if we fail,” he said happily. “Point isn't the paper we generate, but the paper we lose— thirty billion dollar bills.”

Then, as far as Julia was concerned, petty geopolitical and personnel matters lost their importance. Harry, her father, collapsed in a golf game.

He was diagnosed with one of the newly emerging killer viral diseases, the zoonosis class that migrated from animals to humans, fresh out of the African cauldron. They traced it back to the hunter's camp in west Africa he and the park rangers had found—Harry's spite trip. The animals the poachers were butchering harbored a viral disease ready to make the leap to humans. Harry's prognosis, in the long term, was grim—five years at best. Short term? Nobody knew. He could be dead in a month, if myriad details of blood chem went wrong on him. For starters, he was embarking on an intensive drug regime.

She got the news from her mother, Robbie. Julia had been lucky to have a mother who had dreamed of space and had married a biologist. Not just a loving, loyal husband, but one whose mind wandered to other planets. In those ancient days, the 1970s, the manned space program was solely short shuttle trips. Harry had enthusiastically supported Robbie's astronaut training, postponed his academic future so they could live near JSC, and worked for the exobiology group at NASA.

Her concession to the family was to return to Australia for the birth of Bill, then Julia. Toward the end of her leave for Julia, her mind full of the upcoming resumption of her career, she turned the wrong way into the path of a pickup truck. In the accident, the top of her femur was pushed through her shattered hip joint. Five months in hospital and then a long rehab.

After that she walked with a limp. The folks at NASA were sorry, and offered her a desk job, but her career in space was finished. She was repelled by the idea of becoming a bureaucrat, and with Harry, decided to stay in Australia. Harry snagged a position at the University of Adelaide and they settled into the academic life.

Julia had caught the space bug early on from her mother. An old videotape of the “Martian Chronicles” was her favorite movie. When grown-ups asked what she wanted to do when she grew up, she always said primly, “I'm going to swim in the canals of Mars.” That earned her little amused murmurs and a pat on the head. By the time she learned that there were no canals, it had become her mantra.

When she was fourteen, Harry and Robbie's old NASA connections got them invited to the celebrations surrounding the July 1997 Mars Pathfinder probe arrival: Back to the Red Planet!

Live video feed from Mars was piped into a makeshift auditorium, looming enormously real on a huge screen. Around her she had felt the press of excited bodies. A group enthusiasm filled the room, actually a screened-off portion of the giant exhibition hall. There in the buzzing dark she was mesmerized. Later on, they went upstairs to a small room where she spent twenty minutes driving a radio-controlled rover toy around a patch of sand and rocks. Tacky, really, just plastic. But it was enough. After that, she read everything about the mission, put up posters of the Sojourner rock garden on her wall.

And her parents had gone not just for her, but for themselves.

Julia considered dropping out of the team to be with her father. She went through a hard night, thinking about it. She had not been able to rush to his bedside because there were some aerobraking trials on for tomorrow and she had to be there. And through the long night she was fully aware of the damage she would cause to the Consortium plans. None of it helped her sleep.

But when she talked to her parents on visiphone, Harry wouldn't hear of it. “Mars has always been your dream, sweetie!” he had exclaimed, frowning at her with Old Testament fury. “Mine, too.”

“And mine,” her mother said wistfully.

So during a long, intermittently awkward call, they reached a negotiated cease-fire. Harry would take his experimental drug treatment. They would all stay linked closely throughout the two-and-a-half-year flight. And, Harry added, “I'll be the first to kiss you when you come prancing down the gangplank. I'll push that Katherine out of the way, I swear I will.” Harry had decided opinions about the whole Raoul-baby-Katherine business. “I damn well promise.”

February 2016.

Time ticked on.

Launch readiness review. Nobody wanted to hear anything but the crisp, can-do NASA style. But this was seat-of-your-pants private sector, and in the eyes of everybody, especially leathery old hands like Brad Fowler, there were too many open items, too much unrehearsed.

NASA flights were like grand operas, the score and cast selected long before, the outcome ordained. This was more like a musical comedy they improvised as the band was warming up.

The solid rocket motors were time-honored technology, and still just a tad tricky. Maybe more than a tad. Stacking the whole assembly, booster and solids, had an uncomfortable resemblance to building a house of cards. Axelrod had paid the better part of a billion bucks to get full use of the Cape's facilities, right up to and including the Vehicle Assembly Building.

The crew flew into Runway 33, right next to the soaring square profile of the biggest building in the world. They marched out in their Consortium uniforms—Axelrod had insisted on the red-blue spandex suits—and stood there staring up at the VAB. They milled around like insects beneath the building's bulk until the press corps arrived, halting at the Axelrod-commanded respectful distance.

In the shimmering Cape heat the reporters and their big sun-shaded cameras looked a lot like old 1950s movie Martians, and Julia treated them pretty much that way—as objects of loathing. She had enjoyed enough exposure, thank you. The best thing about Mars, right then, was not the exploration and frontier and unknown and all that, but the fact that there would be nobody else there.

All four lined up behind a single microphone and spoke a few platitudes for what a PR type called “footage effect”—just enough to get a flash-recognition on the news, not enough to actually make a story out of it.

And what story could there be? Astronauts on their way uphill to the Big Empty. Luckily the reporters and VIP guests alike had to keep the twenty feet distance commanded by the quarantine rules, to avoid the crew picking up a head cold. Not a good way to go into a launch. No viruses to Mars either, couldn't have that.

Once they were into the hab and belted in by the ground crew to the adjustable acceleration couches, the checkoffs went smoothly and then the waiting began.

Julia had been through this already, they all had, and so she knew that the worst moment was before they lit the Roman candle under her. It was right now, when there was only waiting and too much thinking with not a damn thing to do. Astronauts were people built to be busy, not at their best when stuck immobile. When the prickly fears could come inching up the spine.

Tick, tick, tick.

Her whole life did not flash before her, but pieces of it flapped by like anxious seagulls as her attention darted around the cockpit. Voices buzzed in her headphones and she tried not to think of sitting on top of two million kilograms of supercold hydrogen and oxygen, two basic molecules yearning to kiss each other and explode in their elemental passion, to fling them at the empty eggshell blue sky.

They were all alone out here in the rippling tropical heat, all their relatives and friends and public standing a respectful five kilometers away because if anything went wrong …

Liftoff.

There was nothing about lift in it. Instead, there was huge noise and rattling and shaking and then a hard hammering and a pressing weight. The hab was being shaken profoundly, as if by an angry giant that could jar and jiggle in all directions at once.

She had done it before, but every time there was the same momentary terror, far too late. Why am I here?

They spent a day in near Earth orbit, checking out systems before casting off into the deep.

Microgravity bothered the brain. The perception of primordial primate unease busied the mind with the business of trying to offset shifting fluids in the skull. Senses kept screaming to the mind that we're falling!—all the time. Fretting about survival led to dumb astronauts. Julia found, just as on space station flights, that her reflexes were doughy, her thoughts muddy.

Plus, half those in zero g got sick. No matter if they had been there before, as all four had. This time it was Julia's turn. She had always felt a bit superior to her NASAnaut companions on space station flights, as they grew woozy.

She felt odd, then ill, then a lurching, hideous nausea. The “queasy cruds” struck arbitrarily, with an impartiality she found insulting. She was an old space hand! On her way to more important destinations than crummy old orbit! Her stomach was betraying her.

The medicos still couldn't prevent it or predict it. This proved to be of little comfort. But there were little pills that got it under control within a day. You turned green, threw up, weren't much good for anything, and then you got okay. Yippee ti yi yay, space cowboys!

Or cowgirls. As fluctuations would have it, the men were fine.

Hurried preparations went on all around her in the cockpit/hab while she lolled in her g-couch, following Viktor's orders and not thinking about the food he offered and looking out the port at the big creamy world she was about to leave. The return ship was full of fuel, waiting for them on Mars.

Planets perform a grand gavotte, forcing humans to dance to the same grave rhythms. Viktor checked and rechecked their ship. The most fuel-stingy method of reaching Mars, or any other world, started by slipping away from Earth's nearly circular orbit on a long, slow tangent. Their boost would start them on this glide, an ellipse that paralleled Earth's orbit at one end and that of Mars at the other. Sliding like a bead along this smooth course, they would swoop near Mars at a velocity very nearly that of the planets.

But getting there meant hitting the window. Leave a month late and the fuel cost ran up enormously. Leave half a year late and no rocket imaginable could get you around the long loop in time; you would chase Mars all around its orbit—watching the blue-green world dwindle away, as every second, that oasis of air and water fell behind another 33 kilometers. Even moving that fast, a thousand times the speed of the Apollo missions to the moon, it would take six months to ride the 400 million kilometers.

Axelrod did a ‘cast with them, saying confidently, “We're going to Mars!” to big background applause. She tried not to throw up, for several reasons.

All systems were go. So they went.