Mars

Like a cloud of spirits of the dead scratching and moaning outside the door.

'Mars 2 is all right,' Vosnesensky announced. 'Everyone in the storm cellar with no trouble.'

They’ve got the extra man, Jamie thought. Dr. Li makes it thirteen they have to squeeze into their shelter.

Pete Connors got up and went to stand between Vosnesensky and the other Russian. 'All the ship’s systems are working okay?' he asked loudly.

'Yes, yes.' Vosnesensky pointed to the panels of lights that showed the condition of the rest of the ship. Most of the lights were green. 'The equipment was built to withstand radiation. It is only we fragile creatures of flesh and bone who need protection.'

Cheerful, Jamie thought. Very cheerful.

Fourteen hours later the radiation levels outside the shelter had not gone down discernibly. Jamie had dozed for a while, slumped back on the bench that lined the compartment’s wall. Joanna and the Polish biochemist who was Ilona’s backup had found enough room on the opposite bench to curl up and sleep. There were foldout cots built into the walls above the benches, but no one had bothered to use them.

Looking around with blurry eyes, Jamie saw that all four pilots were sitting up near the hatch and the comm console. The Christmas tree of monitoring panels still showed mostly green lights, although there were more red ones than before. Tony Reed was chatting amiably with Ilona and the Aussie geologist, George O’Hara, at the other end of the compartment, where food and drink dispensers were built into the rear wall.

Jamie pulled himself to his feet, feeling stiff and dull-headed. O’Hara was redhaired, rawboned, tall enough to need to stoop slightly unless he stood exactly in the midline of the compartment. Otherwise his head brushed the curving ceiling panels. He seemed an amiable enough sort. Jamie had not detected a trace of jealousy over the fact that O’Hara was to stay aboard the ship while he would be the one to go down to the surface.

'…in Coober Pedy the miners live underground most of the year,' O’Hara was saying. 'Too bloody hot to live up on the surface, so they’ve built a by-damn city down in the shafts and galleries. Swimming pools and everything.'

Ilona was not impressed. 'How much longer must we stay in here?'

'Don’t be so anxious to go out,' Tony said. 'This is the best place in the entire solar system to be, right now.'

'Except for Earth,' said Jamie.

'Ah well,' Reed admitted, 'we can’t have everything now, can we?'

'Reminds me of being stuck inside a bloody airliner,' O’Hara said, grinning down at Ilona. 'I remember once a couple years ago at Washington National, they had us buttoned up on the rampway and made us wait five bloody hours inside the bloody airplane before we could take off. Some mechanical problem they took their sweet time fixing. We drank all the booze on board and we still hadn’t moved a fucking inch. It was like a zoo by the time we actually took off.'

'I’m feeling as if I’m in a zoo,' Ilona muttered. 'In a cage.'

'Steady on,' Tony said in his best British stiff-upper-lip manner. But he looked tight to Jamie, tense, his smile forced.

'How much longer will it be?' Joanna’s sleepy voice came from behind Jamie.

It was a rhetorical question. She pushed past them and went into the lavatory.

'Ever wonder why they always put the pisser next to the water fountain?' O’Hara asked no one in particular.

'Plumbing,' Jamie said.

'Or recycling?' suggested Reed.

Jamie walked the length of the compartment, as much to stretch his legs and get some circulation going as to reach the pilots up by the comm console and equipment monitors. Katrin Diels, the German physicist, was deep in earnest conversation, a headset clamped over her blonde curls.

'When did the intensity peak?' she asked into the pin-sized microphone in front of her lips.

Jamie almost smiled at the fierce intensity on her snub-nosed freckled face. She was slight of frame, as butter blonde and blue-eyed as the people you would see in a travel poster advertising Oktoberfest. The pilots had made room for her and she sat on the end of the bench where she could operate the communications console.

She whipped the headset off and sprang to her feet.

'Good news, everybody!' she called out. 'The lunar observatory reports that the storm’s intensity peaked there almost an hour ago.'

Smiles broke out. Heads nodded. Everyone murmured happily.

'According to the orbiting magnetosphere observatories,' Diels continued, 'the storm should be over in another twelve to sixteen hours.'

Groans. 'Another sixteen hours in here?'

Tony Reed raised his arms for silence. 'Now don’t complain. As long as the toilet works we should be perfectly fine.'

Ilona was not amused. 'Sixteen more hours. Ugh!'

'Try to relax,' Reed urged. 'Take a nap.'

'Would you like to play a game of bridge?' asked the Greek biologist.

'Not with you,' O’Hara snapped. 'It’s like swimming with a bloody shark.'

Xenophanes laughed, but to Jamie it seemed strained.

Vosnesensky said, 'We should not sit idly for another fourteen hours.'

Ilona’s lips curled into the start of a sneering reply, but before she could say anything Reed jumped in.

'What would you suggest, Mikhail Andreivitch?' the Englishman asked.

'A workers’ council,' the Russian replied. 'We are all here. None of us has pressing duties to perform. Now is the time for a self-analysis session.'

'A quality circle, like the Japanese?' asked Tad Sliwa, the backup biochemist.

'More like a self-criticism circle,' said Ilona, 'like prisoners in Siberia.'

Vosnesensky’s beefy face flushed slightly, but he did not reply to her. Ivshenko, lean in face and body, darkly handsome in an almost Levantine way, said, 'Self-analysis can be a very useful way to examine interpersonal problems.'

There was some argument, but Vosnesensky was determined and none of the others really had any suggestion to offer as an alternative. So the twelve men and women sat along the benches facing one another.

'How do we start?' asked Ollie Zieman.

'I will start,' Vosnesensky said. 'This was my idea, so I will be the first volunteer.'

'Go right ahead,' said Reed, sitting across the central aisle from the Russian.

Vosnesensky glanced at Ilona, then turned his gaze to sweep the men and women on the bench opposite him. 'I feel resentment from some of you. Resentment that I am in command. Resentment, perhaps, that a Russian is in command.'

'That’s rather natural, is it not?' asked Katrin Diels. 'There is bound to be some resentment against any authority figure.'

That started the discussion, and around and around it went. Jamie watched in silence, noticing that Ilona sat leaning back against the wall like a cat, her eyes following from one speaker to the next, her lips slightly curled in what might have been a smile. But she did not volunteer a word.

Like meetings of the student council, Jamie thought, remembering his undergraduate days. The ones who did most of the talking were the ones who were already in charge. The ones who needed to talk the most were the ones who stayed silent and kept their anger bottled up inside them.

After nearly an hour Jamie was startled to hear O’Hara say, 'Well, if we’re baring our souls and all that — I don’t particularly like the idea that I’m going to be sitting up in orbit all during our stay at Mars while my esteemed colleague here,' he jabbed a thumb in Jamie’s direction, 'gets to spend the whole seven weeks down on the surface. I don’t think that’s fair.'

'I agree with you,' Jamie heard himself say. 'It’s not fair.' But, he added silently, that’s the way the mission plan has been written and that’s the way it’s going to be.