“No it’s . . . not messed up . . . ,” I puffed. “I modified it.”
He shot me a look. “You did this?”
“Yeah . . . it wasn’t enough . . . so I fixed it.”
Luther shook his head, air toasted me with his cup, and sat back down. “They teach that in shop class at the slow school?”
“Bite me, rock boy.”
“ ‘Rock boy’? That’s the best you can do?”
I flipped him the bird. “It’s been a long morning. I’ll come up with a crushing reply when I’m hydrated.”
We drank. He said, “You want to tell me why you look like someone stole your puppy?”
I pulled myself up to a sitting position against the wall, my knees up to my chin, sweat running in lines down my calves.
“You really want to hear this?” I asked.
He shrugged. “Why not?”
Luther wasn’t Herc, and maybe he wasn’t even a friend, but I told him anyway. Or, some of it. Not about the mechanical problem. Instead I told him about Izzy. He already knew about the window, the sign, and the streamers at the Drake house. That was all over the news. No, what I told him about were the conversations I’d been having with Izzy. About how they made me feel. Luther nodded a few times but didn’t interrupt. When I was done he thought about it for a moment, then nodded.
“Did you ever watch the videos of the first candidates?” he asked. “The interviews they did to ask them why they were going?”
“I watched a lot of them. We all did.”
“Remember the one with the kind of nerdy kid who said that he’d never been kissed and didn’t expect to ever have sex? Remember him?”
I did. He was still in the program, though not on the first wave. “What about him?”
Instead of answering, Luther asked, “Remember the doctor from Mozambique, the one who said that it would be okay if he died on Mars because there was too much hate and pain down here?”
“That’s not exactly what he said.”
“Close enough. He said he wanted to see a better world than this one.”
I took another sip, gagged, and pointed at him with the cup. “You getting somewhere or just talking?”
He started to say something, then stopped. He looked momentarily confused, and then he smiled. “Maybe I don’t know what I’m trying to say.”
“Yeah, well, that’s kind of my point,” I said. “No one’s ever had this kind of conversation before, so we got nothing to go on.”
Luther’s smile lingered for a bit, but it changed. Less of a happy-go-lucky smile. More ironic. We sipped our raw sewage drinks and said nothing. I was pretty sure Luther was going somewhere with what he’d said, but it felt like one of those conversations that maybe we weren’t ready for yet.
Chapter 40
* * *
I guess I should explain about why I didn’t dig Luther all that much. There was this thing going on between us. He started it. Or, I think he started. Pretty sure he did.
Anyway . . . it was all about this meritocracy thing. Someone was going to be picked to be the first person to step down from the landing vehicle and put the first human foot on Mars. At government-funded programs like NASA the obvious choice would be the mission commander, but with Mars One it was different. They wanted it to be completely fair; they wanted to make sure that everyone who volunteered had an equal chance of being chosen to be the one to take that step. Officially we’d been told it would be a lottery, with a name selected randomly by computer, but Luther had somehow convinced himself that the selection was really going to be based on merit, on an evaluation of what we did on the mission.
I tried to convince him he was nuts. I mean, how would someone like, say, Sophie, who was mostly our cook on the flight, shine brighter than someone like my mom, who was the chief engineer? But Luther just smiled and said I was being naive. I thought he was nuts, but he really seemed to believe it, and everything he did was a competition. He tried too hard to be the best at training, games, evaluations, performance, citizenship, blah-blah-blah. . . . He was also doing a pretty good job of making sure I looked like a loser.
They say competition is healthy.
We were doing a mini–fitness marathon last year. He and I competed against each other because we were the only two boys. The adults were put in teams and the girls were their own team for strength events and short-distance running. For the first four rounds of the one-hundred-meter races, Luther and I were even. I won two, he won two, and neither of us showed any real superiority. Something like half a second differences. But in the tiebreaker, we were tearing down the track at the training center in Brussels. Luther was half a step ahead when suddenly I felt like an extra lung opened up and I could feel new energy flooding in. I turned the dials all the way up and was starting to pull even with him when he seemed to stumble a bit and his elbow jerked up as he fought for balance. The point of his elbow caught me dead center in the deltoid. Not hard, but enough to send me sideways for one full step. I corrected and poured it on, but by then the finish line was right there and Luther motored across it a quarter second before I did.
I didn’t say anything at the time because I thought it was an accident.
Until it happened again.
Next time was an underwater safety drill and there was a malfunction on my air regulator that made me have to surface halfway through a timed drill. Luther wound up with the winning time for the exercise and I was disqualified.
Stuff like that.
Could I prove that Luther messed with my gear? Of course not. He, Sophie, Nirti, and two other mission people were all there at the time. I couldn’t even prove anyone messed with it. Accidents do happen. If I could have pinned it on Luther I’d have beaten him into his component molecules. Or maybe told Colpeys and gotten him and his family cut from the program and the history books.
I thought about it too. Boy, did I think about it.
Suspicion isn’t proof, though
But that was the point at which Luther and I began to treat each other like enemies.
No.
That’s the wrong word. Too strong, and “rivals” is maybe too weak. For my part it was a trust issue. I guess I never really trusted him after that.
Chapter 41
* * *
Mom left three days later.
Not the program . . . she left the planet to head up to do her review of the mechanical issues on the transit vehicles. Colpeys apparently took her threats and demands seriously. He did, however, finesse the schedule for other things so that the launch date would be pushed back only two days instead of four.
Mom could pretty much take each of those transit vehicles apart, down to the last nut and screw, and then put them back together again. Perfectly. She was the absolute queen of type-A detail-oriented control freaks. If she were going to check your homework, you’d better not have fudged the math or forgotten to dot an i. Been there, done that, have the psychological scars. Believe me, you didn’t ever want her to give you a long, unsmiling stare and then tell you that she was “disappointed in you.” Much better to be devoured by piranhas, and it would hurt less.
In orbit the assembly crews had everything bolted together up at the Lucky Eight, including the fuel stages. Don’t get me wrong, those guys were top engineers, and they’d all logged a lot of hours working on the ISS, on satellites, setting up the mining rigs, repairing the Hubble and other telescopes . . . but Mom didn’t trust anyone else. Not completely. She took her handpicked technical crew up there to make sure every rivet, weld, seam, and connection was triple-checked and perfect by her standards. Like I said, God help anyone who made even the smallest mistake.
The day before Mom left, Nirti Sikarwar arrived. Not counting Sophie, Nirti was the fourth teen on our mission and the last person to join the colony training team here in Amsterdam. She’d been mourning her grandmother, who’d been very sick for a long time. The funeral was two days ago, but when she found me in the gym she gave me a huge smile
and a hug. We sat and talked for hours.
She told me about her grandmother, who’d been a pediatric surgeon for forty-two years and then a teacher at a medical college in India. Then we talked about my mom and what she was going into orbit to do.
It was a good, long talk. About people, and about heroes. About sacrifice and commitment. I told her about the Hart Foundation and she told me about the Sikarwar College Fund she’d started to give girls from poor families a chance to go to college.
“Isn’t it weird that we’re making the world a better place by leaving it?” she said. It was intended as a joke, but neither of us laughed. It’s not that the conversation depressed me or anything.
Kind of the opposite.
I gave her another hug and drifted off to find my folks.
I had only one more chance to be alone with Mom before her flight to the launch center. It was in the hall leading to the back door where her car was waiting.
“You’ll be careful up there, right?” I asked, mostly because I didn’t know what else to say.
I caught the tiniest flicker of an expression that looked like annoyance. Maybe I was reading it wrong.
“Of course I’ll be careful, Tristan,” she said. “I’ve done this before, you know.”
That was true enough—Mom had logged more hours in space than anyone but the two pilots. Which didn’t matter a bit to me.
“I know, but—”
She cut me off. “Tristan, you’re sixteen, not six. Please try and act it.”
Ouch.
“No,” I insisted, “I’m not being a needy little kid.”
“Then what?”
“Um . . .”
She straightened. “Ah. You’ve been surfing the Internet again, reading those conspiracy stories about the Neo-Luddites.”
“It’s not all theories. They were saying on the news that the Neo-Luddite extremists have been making threats again.”
“Specific threats or the usual vague stuff?” asked Mom.
“Um . . . vague. But scary.”
“Don’t dwell on it,” she said. “After what happened to Izzy’s house and everywhere else they’ve really stepped up the security, and a lot of law enforcement agencies around the world are working on this. Your job is the mission. We all need you to become the best possible mechanical engineer. Which means it’s on you to get better than me and to reach that level at a younger age than I did. We’ve had this conversation too many times. Pay attention to your studies. I left you some, um, problems to solve back in our apartment. Concentrate on that and your mission training and leave the politics to the people who enjoy that kind of crap.”
Then Mom smiled—half-cold, half-loving—hugged me for two seconds, kissed my cheek, turned, and left. As she went through the door she said, over her shoulder, “I’ll see you soon.”
And she was gone, just like that.
I tried really hard not to let her words hit me like I was six. Though, maybe sixteen wasn’t as old as she thought it was. While I stood there I hated her, loved her, needed her, and never wanted to see her again. All in equal amounts.
Two things occurred to me, though. The first was that she changed the subject rather than actually make a statement about the Neo-Luddites. And the other thing was that she didn’t meet my eyes when she did that.
Chapter 42
* * *
When I got back to our apartment I found out what Mom meant when she said she’d left me some problems to solve. I don’t know how she did it in the time she had after I left for that morning’s classes and training, but she’d taken everything apart.
The TV, the music system—complete with speakers—the shower nozzle, my bed, and even the toilet. I almost sat down on the living room floor and cried.
Instead . . .
I burst out laughing.
I rebuilt the sound system first, put Izzy’s playlist on, and cranked it up loud enough to sterilize a yak, stripped down to boxers and tank top, and set to work putting everything back together again.
Oh, and I increased the spray on the shower and reset the color values on the TV. Extra mile, baby. Maybe I wouldn’t win the Hogwarts House Cup from Luther for being the best at everything, but I was at least going to make myself comfortable.
Chapter 43
* * *
Dad and I sat in the mission control room and watched Mom blast off.
During the long wait before the countdown we talked like it was any other day. “You see the game last night?” he asked.
“Which game?”
“Any game.”
“No.”
He sighed. “Me neither.”
That’s the kind of conversation we had. No jokes that made either of us laugh. No topics that drew our interest enough to make time pass. And nothing at all about Mom. It was weird because we were both clearly avoiding talking about the obvious, but it was obvious that neither of us wanted to start the conversation we should have been having.
When the countdown started, Dad took my hand the way he did when I was little. He needed to. I needed to hold on to him, too. We sat there watching the dual image of the exterior view of the rocket and the interior-cockpit live stream of the technical crew aboard the transit rocket, all of them in their color-coded space suits. With each tick of the clock, each number counted down audibly by the mission control officer, Dad and I clutched each other harder.
“We have liftoff,” said the controller, and that froze us there, holding hands as if our combined strength could hoist the rocket up and fling it safely into orbit.
The command vehicle sat on one of the Falcon rockets leased from SpaceX. This was a pressurized capsule and payload hull resting atop a reusable rocket that needed to reach a minimum orbital speed of at least 9,300 meters per second in order to beat the pull of gravity and aerodynamic drag. To lift all of that mass that high and that fast the rocket burned a lot of very flammable fuel. Which meant Mom was sitting on top of a big bomb.
If things went bad.
If things went the right way, the rocket was a well-designed and well-constructed machine that would carry her safely into orbit.
The fact is that “we do this all the time” is a comfort all the time except when you’re sitting there watching one of those big sticks of dynamite take your mother away from you.
Dad squeezed my hand, I squeezed his, and both of us wore these stupid grins that probably looked like happy smiles to anyone with the IQ or insight of a garden slug. We watched as the huge first stage burned through its fuel. Then there was that moment when the controller’s voice said, very clinically and dry, “Detaching first stage.”
The launch stage dropped away as the second stage fired. I knew there was nothing left in the first stage, but it was somehow weird and scary to see it suddenly stall and then fall back to Earth. Then the big parachutes deployed and the dead fall jerked to a stop and the empty rocket began drifting down. It descended slowly out of shot, falling onto someone else’s screens over at SpaceX. It was their rocket; they’d recover and reuse it.
My eyes were glued on the second stage, watching it push up and up and up. The image switched from ground-based cameras to a satellite keyed to track it. So instead of it moving away from our point of view, it was suddenly coming toward us. The atmosphere thinned around the ship as it rose and then it crossed that line of sixty-two miles from the surface. It’s not an official marker, but most people say that’s where Earth’s atmosphere ends and space begins. It’s the point at which you can say that you’ve left the planet.
The ship kept going, though. No longer up but “out.”
Then, almost as if this was just a normal day at work, the controller said, “Orbit achieved.”
Dad held my hand for another two seconds, then let it go and rubbed both his palms on his thighs to dry off the sweat.
“Well,” he said, “that was fun.”
“Yeah,” I said.
We sat there for a few minutes, staring at nothing. Fina
lly Dad turned to me. “You, um, want to do something? Grab lunch? Talk? Whatever . . . ?”
I shook my head. He looked relieved, I think. I know I was. Dad stood up, stretched, patted me on the shoulder, and left the room. I watched him go. He was as tall as me but not as muscular. Wiry and thin. A happy man who was having an unhappy day.
I sat there for a long time, alone with my thoughts.
Chapter 44
* * *
Halfway back to my room, Herc texted me.
Herc: Dude, ur mom is a total badass.
Me: I’ll tell her.
Herc: U okay about her going?
Me: Sure.
Herc: Liar
I walked back to my quarters. Everyone I met along the way stopped to shake my hand. Mission support team, mission public-relations crew, other colonists. Anyone with a pulse. As if I’d been the one riding the rocket instead of Mom.
Izzy texted me.
Izzy: You okay?
I didn’t lie to her.
Me: No. Scared.
Izzy: That’s normal.
Me: I guess.
Izzy: Call me later?
Me: Yes.
Izzy: I love you.
Me: I love you.
I wasn’t living with Dad at the moment. A few days ago they moved me into a tiny room with Luther. It was a little bigger than what each of us would have on the Huginn. In flight we’d have private pods, but for now they put us in a glorified closet. Partly it was a bonding thing, and also because they figured it would help us get used to confined spaces. It was nice to have the room to myself. Luther wasn’t back yet.
So I crawled into my bunk and watched the mission feed on my phone, wondering how many kids around the world would be doing something like this when the big rockets went up. Watching us on their phones or on their tablets. Maybe wondering what we were feeling and trying to understand why we were going. Or maybe thinking about going, too. To Mars, to the moon, to one of the space stations. This new space race wasn’t slowing down. I saw one scientist from NASA on TV saying that it was likely for there to be a million people living in space by the end of the century. Maybe that was true, but if so there was still a lot of science to figure out. I mean, most people—even a lot of the NASA people—thought that everyone on Mars One was going to die in the first year or two. Any one of ten thousand mechanical failures could kill us. We could die on landing. We could run out of food or oxygen if we couldn’t produce it on the planet. We could all get cancer from the high radiation. There were all sorts of medical dangers, not to mention the ones we didn’t know about because nobody had ever done what we were doing. Or we could discover that there are bacteria and viruses on Mars—which everyone thought was likely—and maybe that could kill us.