Oh, getting back to the unmanned flights—a lot of them had crashed or gone missing, and we still hadn’t figured out why. That was very scary, and the result was that Mars One had gone way overboard on safety, efficiency, backups, and telemetry—which is information collected by sensors and sent back to Earth. A lot of experts would be watching all the time.
But those same smart people hadn’t figured out what happened to those unmanned probes. Hook that up to the fact that space—like I said before—is big. If something happened to the Chinese ship, we might never find them and never know what went wrong.
That was insanely scary for a bunch of people about to blast off to Mars.
Luther and I went over to Zoé, and then the three of us went through the building into the recreation yard out back. We grabbed bottles of water and sat in the shade beneath the leaves of a sweet cherry tree.
“It doesn’t mean they’re going to make it to Mars,” said Luther. “We’ll get there first, so it’s all fine.”
Zoé looked less certain. Her family was from right there in Amsterdam. Thick blond hair, ice-blue eyes, built like a gymnast with obvious muscles and rock-climbing calluses on her hands. All four of us kids on the mission were smart and got good grades, but Zoé left us in the dust in terms of sheer smarts. Actually, she left everybody in the dust. Everybody. She completed all of her high school courses by the time she was twelve and earned her PhD at seventeen. Some people can’t be accurately measured even with advanced IQ tests, but best guesses put her at around 190. From what I heard, the docs thought they shorted her by thirty or forty points. It ran in the family; both of her parents were math prodigies. Her dad was on a Nobel Prize team for astrophysics and her mom was one of the youngest PhDs from the Netherlands. The only person in her country to get that degree at a younger age was Zoé.
Zoé tried really hard not to make everyone else feel stupid around her, which was nice except that even in a group of geeks, nerds, and scientists, almost everyone did feel stupid around her. And I think she felt kind of stupid too, because smart as she was, Zoé was totally clueless when it came to how to be a normal kid. Not sure she ever had a chance at that. She wasn’t even nerd-girl cool. She called herself a freak and that was what she believed she’d always be. As far as I knew she had never been out on a date and probably hadn’t even been kissed.
Ever since Zoé hit puberty—and hit it hard—Luther had been dedicating a lot of his time to helping her come out of her shell. He’d been coming on to her, first in a subtle way, then more and more blatantly. He was about a step away from posting his intentions on a billboard. Either Zoé was actually clueless or she was pretending not to notice because she didn’t know how to react.
It was kind of fun to watch. They should have had their own reality show. Luther and Zoé Don’t Hook Up. I’d watch that show.
What was really cool and very, very interesting was Zoé’s tattoo. She had a string of numbers inked in spirals around her left leg, from hip to anklebone. The numbers were 3.1415926535897932384626433832795028841971693993751058209749445923078164062862089986280348253421170679.
I’m no mathematician but I know the value of pi when I see it. Why she had that done was a mystery she wouldn’t explain. On the pretense of having a great interest in tattoos, Luther had tried several times to examine those numbers very closely. Zoé, socially awkward as she was, had managed very nicely to chase him off.
Right now, though, she looked really scared. “I don’t want to be second to land on Mars,” she said. “One of the main reasons my family is going is to be first.”
Luther nodded. I didn’t.
“I mean,” Zoé continued, “everyone knows the names of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin because they were the first ones on the moon. How many people can name the next ones to land? Or even say how many Apollo astronauts went to the moon?”
I thought about it. I knew that there had been twelve astronauts who left footprints in the lunar dust. I could name all of them, but now didn’t seem like the time to show off.
“You’re right,” said Luther, shifting his attitude to concede to her point. “If the Chinese get there first then it’s going to hurt.”
“Exactly!” snapped Zoé. “And if that happens the whole mission could lose a lot of sponsors. And we need those sponsors.”
“Yeah,” I said glumly. The whole sponsorship thing still bugged me, mostly because of Tristan and Izzy, and because something as important as this shouldn’t have had to go begging for cash. “They only sent one ship, and from the size of the Wheel it couldn’t have been anywhere near as big as ours. It’s probably more like the four-seater ship we were going to use originally, or maybe a little bigger.”
Zoé swiveled around to give me an acid look. “So?”
“So even if we’re second we still get to establish the first real colony. We have families. We have . . . well . . . us.”
“There’s that,” agreed Luther. He tended to jump back and forth between agreeing with the girl he liked and siding with whoever was saying something optimistic.
But Zoé gave a firm shake of her head. “No. We have to be first.”
I opened my mouth to argue with her, to try and hit her with the Big Picture answer that the mission PR people used in a lot of their interviews—that the bottom line was colonizing Mars so that the human race had somewhere to go and somewhere to grow. That was on the tip of my tongue, but what I said was, “Zoé’s right. It’s got to be us.”
“Okay,” said Luther. “I hear you, but why? I’m playing devil’s advocate here. Why us and not anybody else? The Chinese—if they built a ship sooner, if they solved the science quicker than us, then why not them? What have you got against the Chinese?”
“I don’t have anything against the Chinese,” I said. “It’s not about where they’re from, what country or politics or any of that stuff.”
Zoé was nodding as I spoke.
“Then what?” insisted Luther.
I glanced at Zoé, then up at the dark blue of the afternoon sky, and then at Luther.
“I don’t know,” I said. “If there’s still a chance . . . any chance, then it’s got to be us.”
It wasn’t a good answer. It made no sense.
But we all nodded. Even Luther.
It had to be us.
Chapter 31
* * *
Herc texted me that night.
Herc: Did u see this crap?
He sent me a link to a Yahoo News article about a post from the Neo-Luddites’ freak squad. In big red letters on a white background it said . . .
FIRST TO FLY, FIRST TO DIE
BETRAY THE TRUST—PAY THE PRICE
The graphic they put with it was a spaceship blowing up. Photoshopped, but they made their point.
Herc: Did those freaks blow it up? [animated explosion emoji]
Me: No.
Herc: U sure . . . ?
Me: No. I don’t think so.
Herc: Y not?
Me: They’re saying it was an accident. Rogue satellite.
Herc: Even so. Watch ur butt.
Me: Yeah.
I didn’t get much sleep that night.
Chapter 32
* * *
Over breakfast with my folks I told them about the link Herc sent me. The extremist Neo-Luddites were still claiming they destroyed the Chinese ship. I expected Dad to make a joke, but instead he looked troubled and angry.
“What’s wrong with those people?” he muttered, and then he snatched up his tablet and swiped over to the comics page.
Mom waggled her fingers for me to hand her my phone. She clicked the link and read the article. She looked delicate because she was about a size nothing, but she was made of airline cable and could bench-press one or both of the Dakotas. I got some of my strength from her. Neither of us looked anywhere near as strong as we were. Or as fast.
The big difference between us, apart from gender and age, was that I smiled a lot and she almost never d
id. Right then she was actively frowning at the article, and then she made a small disgusted sound and slid the phone across the table so fast I had to lunge to catch it before it flew off. She had some choice words about the news story, and then she caught me grinning and pointed a finger at me. “You repeat one word of that and I will disassemble more than your laptop.”
“You never disassembled my laptop.”
Without looking up from the comics, Dad said, “You missed that, did you?”
I ran to my room, and sure, I actually did repeat some of what she said. And meant every word too. But I kept my voice down. She’d taken it apart and put the pieces in a bag that sat on my desk. The note on it read:
YOU HAVE HOMEWORK
XOXOXO
I stalked back into the kitchen and slumped down in my chair. Maybe there was a hint of a smile on Mom’s face. Dad, on the other hand, was shaking with the kind of laughter that’s so deep you can’t make a sound. The tablet was gripped tightly in his hands and his eyes were squeezed shut.
“I hate you both,” I said.
“I talked her out of burying the mother board in my zucchini beds,” said Dad when he could talk.
“I still hate you.”
He coughed, thought about it, nodded. “Fair enough.”
Mom gave me a sweet smile, the kind you’d expect from mothers who did not just disassemble your personal property. “Another pancake, Tristan?”
We didn’t talk about the laptop. What would be the point? She’d never put it back together. Not in a million years. That was on me if I ever wanted to use it again. So instead I tapped the screen on my phone.
“What about this?” I asked. “You think they did something to the Chinese? Do you think someone blew them all up?”
Mom’s mouth tightened and she cut a microglance at Dad.
“There have been some rumors about them stepping up their game,” she said slowly. “People think the extremist Neo-Luddites went away, but they’re like termites. You can smoke them out or fumigate the nest, but there are always more.”
“Wow. That’s optimistic,” I said.
She shot me a look. “You can be a realist or you can stick your head up your own—”
“Jean,” said my dad, still not looking up.
Mom sighed and drummed her fingers on the tabletop. “Okay, Tristan, you tell me. Do you think they blew up the Chinese ship?”
“No,” I said at once, surprising myself by how fast that answer came.
“Okay. Why not?”
“Because we’d know.”
She nodded as if pleased with my comment. “Why would we know? Support your opinion.”
“The Chinese went nuts when the Neo-Luddites hit their plant last year. They were all over the news yelling about it.”
“Yup,” agreed Dad.
Mom nodded. “Which means . . . ?”
“Which means they would yell even louder if those freaks blew up their spaceship.”
“Transit vehicle,” she corrected.
“Spaceship,” Dad said quietly, eyes fixed on the document on his tablet. Mom ignored him. She made a finger-twirling motion for me to continue.
I thought about it. “If anyone was taking that post seriously it would be the only story on the Internet.”
“Good,” she said. And that’s where she left it. “What about that other pancake?”
Chapter 33
* * *
The mission people gave us no chance to get any more stressed about the Chinese ship or about the Neo-Luddite Internet posts.
Most of the remaining team members arrived at the training center two hours after my family. Only Nirti’s family was still in India. The rest of us, though, kicked into high gear. The mission administration had one last chance to evaluate us working through simulations of everything from getting in and out of space suits to team-member rescue operations to assembling equipment under various harsh though simulated conditions. We wore biometric monitors so the medical team could make sure we were all in tip-top condition. It was rough, but as Colpeys pointed out, “You’ll have plenty of time to relax on the trip.”
So, once we got there everything moved fast. If my life were a movie this would be the montage part, complete with jump cuts and inspirational music heavy on the power chords.
We weren’t raw recruits or strangers. Sure, we didn’t know each other as well as we would once we were in the black, but we’d all trained together. So what we did was go into our own heads and tighten our games. They hit me with a lot of mechanical problems to solve, most of which had been designed by my mom; the woman who carried me, gave birth to me, nurtured me, and was clearly trying to drive me insane. She put my laptop, my external drives filled with my music and shows, and all of my pictures of Izzy in an airlock, and then set a small incendiary device in with it. The airlock mechanism was damaged—she did that, too—and she gave me a set of pocket tools and a timer. I had to wear a bulky EMU, or extravehicular mobility suit, which is a big, marshmallow-looking space getup while I repaired the mechanism to save all my stuff. And, get this, she reduced the amount of oxygen in my suit to match the timer on the burner. I mean, sure, she was right there and wouldn’t let me die, but she was all in when it came to all of my stuff being destroyed.
I started to yell at her, but she tapped my faceplate and pushed the button to start the clock.
“I rigged the timer so it can only be shut off from inside the airlock,” she told me. “Love you, honey.”
She was smiling, too. I was so glad we had a therapist on the mission.
The days were like that. And the trainers woke us up in the middle of the night for “emergencies.” Fake fires, fake collisions, hull breach simulations, and all of that stuff. They’d take us in small groups up on a big McDonnell Douglas C-9 transport jet, which flew high enough for gravity to drop way down. Then, while we were floating around like balloons, they’d give us challenges like changing in and out of pressure suits, collecting all the scattered tools from a kit designed for EVAs, making us work together to retrieve and assemble the components to a radio they’d tossed at us. That was fun, and the teams raced each other. Luther almost always came out on top for anything that involved coordination, but if it was a mechanical test I won. Every time. I even beat my mom’s best time on the radio reassembly, which got me an actual smile from her.
She got her revenge, though. After we went one three-day endurance period with no sleep at all Mom gave me another of her special challenges. She locked herself in a scale model of the engine room and turned the valve to gradually flood the room with CO2. I had to get her out even though I was dead on my feet and could barely spell my own name. The damage she’d done to the door-locking system was crazy. I had to remove a piece, measure and fabricate a new one, install it, and open the door. Dad tried to stand there and watch but he got so fritzed out that he started yelling at me and at Mom. That didn’t help.
Did I get her out?
What do you think?
Chapter 34
* * *
I talked to Izzy every day.
“How’s school?” I asked.
“Okay,” she said.
Every day.
“How’s training?” she asked.
“Okay,” I said.
Every single day.
Sometimes we’d have these long silences on the phone where we didn’t know what to say. Conversations between people who care about each other need optimism. You expect to see that person again. You expect to share something with them. But with us . . . where were our conversations supposed to go?
I’d been fishing around for comparisons to help me figure out what to say to her. Maybe this was like friends on the last day of school who want to stay in touch after they go to college or move away. But each of them knows down deep in their hearts that they won’t, or if they do they know that their friendship isn’t going to be the same. I had really close friends in grade school who I never talked to anymore. We went t
o different middle schools and different high schools. Our common ground kept getting smaller until there was nowhere for us to stand together.
I know that’s part of life, but it’s sad. And it’s sad in a way I don’t know how to define.
Maybe it’s like someone saying good-bye to someone they love who’s going off to fight a war in another country. Like during the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. People had to say good-bye, and most of them kept in touch, but some of those soldiers died. And some came back as different people from the ones who went away. They came back as strangers.
I’d never be coming back and everything about my life from here on was going to make me a stranger to Izzy. And everything she did back home was going to make her a stranger to me.
We could feel that starting already.
Sometimes the silence on the phone was because neither of us wanted to say “I love you,” which was what we always said when we hung up. When “I love you” becomes the same thing as “good-bye,” how do you force those words out of your mouth?
Chapter 35
* * *
I spent a lot of time in the fitness center, training on the ARED, the Advanced Resistive Exercise Device, which was how we were going to keep fit in space and on Mars. It’s a really cool machine that uses piston-driven vacuum cylinders to create resistance and has a flywheel system to simulate free-weight exercises in normal g. We had to become familiar with it on Earth and get as fit as possible, then use the machines every day to maintain muscle tone and bone density. Our ARED system would be installed on a section of the transit vehicle called the “wheel,” which was a ring that spun in order to provide limited gravity. Only for that part of the ship, though. The wheel was there to train us for Martian gravity, to help with our fitness, and to use in case anyone on board needed surgery—’cause you do not want to do surgery in micro-g.