“I, uh, guess that’s it for now.We’ll be back in touch after we hear from you.” Kane heard him clear his throat, then saw the screen darken at the edge of his vision.
Morgan had, Kane thought, a lot to be worried about.The lander, for one thing.There hadn’t been a complete Mars Excursion Module left anywhere on Earth or in orbit, and even if there had been, there weren’t enough propellant stages to get it to Mars. Morgan had been willing to gamble that at least one of the abandoned landers on Deimos could be refitted. If not, it meant a nine-month trip back to Earth, empty-handed, and Kane didn’t think they’d make it without at least one murder or suicide.
Whatever their individual strengths, they didn’t seem to be able to function as a unit.Takahashi was distant and patronizing; he seemed always to be taking mental notes of the crew’s behavior, comparing them against some hypothetical limits of social and biological disrhythm. Kane felt he’d been singled out for the worst of it. He suspected paranoia on his own part, but couldn’t convince himself.
Lena considered the trip out just another nine wasted months to be added to the five years she’d spent looking for a chance to practice medicine again. She’d been the first to lose interest in the nasa regime of exercise and simulations; her moods shifted unpredictably within a narrow range of emotions.The one constant, since that early incident, seemed to be her fear and distrust of Kane.
If anyone could have pulled them together it should have been Reese. Even Takahashi had been a little awed by him at first.They all carried in their memories the image of Reese planting the American flag on Mars, back when there had still been an America, back when Mars had seemed like something important to everybody, if only because the Russians had gotten there first.
For Kane the memories had been even more potent, of adolescent weekends at nasa’s Johnson Space Center, Morgan’s privilege as a major government contractor buying Kane a ride in the shuttle trainer, a front-row seat inside Mission Control, lunch at the Central Cafeteria with the astronauts. Reese had seemed more than human then, a transcendent being who had actually touched an alien world.
Because of that Kane had expected some kind of spiritual leadership from him, a moral center that failed to materialize. Instead Reese had spent most of the nine months in his triangular sleeping area, floating in a lotus position, his circled thumb-and-forefingers just touching his knees. He never talked about his own reasons for going back to Mars, or why, at age 60, he was willing to risk aerobraking and nasa’s antique hardware for a man like Morgan, whom he clearly disliked.
Kane’s own motives were nearly as difficult for him to put into words. At one time being part of the Mars expedition seemed an obvious career move, a theatrical gesture to regain some of the momentum he’d lost after the war.The timing was right; he was unmarried and uninvolved, the doctors had cleared him, and his position in Labor Relations at Pulsystems was far from crucial.
Now it seemed a mistake, a costly retreat from the front line of the business, something near to professional suicide—or even a literal one.
North Africa had been the beginning, his head wound the sharp dividing line that separated him from the obvious and natural course his life had been following. He was lucky to be alive at all, they told him, said the headaches and the dizziness and the occasional failure of a motor nerve were minor side effects of a brain lesion that should have been fatal. He’d been unconscious for a month and had been kept in a private ward at the Pulsystems clinic for over a year.
What he couldn’t understand was the atrophy of his ambition, his sudden inability to reach a threshold of drive and desire that would bring him into the highest echelon of the company. His intelligence was unimpaired; his memory was perfect, frighteningly so at times.Yet in the three years that he’d been back at work, he’d hesitated over the smallest decisions, unable to focus his thoughts, intimidated by the endless chain of consequences that each one provoked.
And in those years Morgan had seemed to lose interest in him, had become cool, preoccupied, indifferent. Before the war, before the wound, there had been a moment, an instant, when Kane had seen fear in Morgan’s eyes, fear of what Kane was becoming, of his growing power in the company, of the physical strength and competence he’d developed in basic training.
But not since. Even when Morgan had first suggested the Mars mission, it was offhand, as if he didn’t care whether Kane went or not. Kane himself had brought it up the second time, and pursued it.
And so, he thought, this was where it had brought him. Lying on a canvas sling, a sack of raw nerve endings and sublimated combat training, knowing that if they couldn’t come up with a working lander, if they had to turn around for another endless, horizonless, destinationless trip, he would be the first to crack.
He closed his eyes again.
Sometime during the two hours it took them to catch up to Deimos, Reese recovered. He said he was unhurt, but to Kane his voice sounded old and strained.
Kane himself had developed a savage headache that burned the backs of his eyes and seemed to deform his skull. He’d had others like it over the past three years, but this was the worst yet.When he managed to find a few minutes of sleep, he was assailed by vivid dreams of a blue ocean and a hot wooden deck beneath his feet, the smells of salt and sunlight, a high murmuring of voices.
The gentle tug of braking rockets finally brought him back.The gravity of the tiny moon was negligible, less than a thousandth that of Earth, and Takahashi had to guide them in with dozens of tiny course adjustments, more of a docking maneuver than a landing.
Deimos occupied barely six cubic miles, and as they drifted toward the surface, Kane was reminded of the garbage dumps on the outskirts of Houston.With the exception of a melted patch near the domes and tunnels of the base, the entire visible surface was littered with castoff technology. Propellant tanks, some empty, some fully charged, lay around like oversized soup cans.Abandoned shelter halves were scattered randomly among plastic bags, tripods, and scraps of crumpled foil. The conical outline of one complete lander and the ruins of a second were visible from the ship, the exposed metal sparkling cleanly in the faint sunlight.
The ship bumped to a stop. For the first time in nine months, he was actually at rest compared to another object in the universe, but to Kane the change was imperceptible. It could have been no more than another trick of perspective, another elaborate simulation.
Lena moved him gingerly to Health Maintenance while Reese and Takahashi started closing down the ship.The sickbay was not designed for even the minimal gravity of Deimos, and Kane had to lean against a suddenly vertical wall while Lena took X-rays and taped his ribs.
“It’s not serious,” she said.“Comparatively.You’re going to be in a lot of pain, but it should heal up cleanly enough. I’d give you something for it if you didn’t still have all that Valium in your system.”
“Right,” Kane said. His voice had turned scratchy and his face glowed with a light fever. He had become excruciatingly aware of the structure of his chest, of the muscular contractions that raised his ribs as he inhaled, the flattening of his diaphragm, the abrupt collapse as his breath spurted out again.
Lena pulled herself back up to the Command Center and a moment later Reese and Takahashi came down the same ladder, carrying their suits. Reese’s face was the color of dirty concrete and he lagged behind as Takahashi disappeared below the level of the deck.
“You all night?” Reese asked.
Kane nodded.“You?”