Things did go wrong. The suits had been sitting on the shelf for a long time, which wasn’t good for them. My very first training session, when I was supposed to be learning the use of a NASA-surplus zero-gravity power wrench, I spent the first fifteen minutes shivering as the suit cooling system brought me down almost to the freezing point, and when I had that adjusted right, my left glove sprung a leak and we had to abort.
We were at one of our regular Sunday meetings. Kelly was surrounded by stacks of paper and no less than three digital assistants, spread out on the picnic table at the Rancho. Each Sunday she handed each of us a small booklet detailing our every task, every movement for the coming week.
I looked around. Dak seemed to have lost weight, which he couldn’t afford. Alicia wasn’t smiling much. We had all been daunted to find how leaky the suits were.
“One more arm, and one more leg, and I think we’ll have five completely sound space suits,” she was telling us. She looked up at Travis. It was his money.
“Go for it,” he said. But he didn’t look happy. Donating the suits was turning out to be more expensive than he’d bargained for.
We spent an hour talking. When that was done Kelly opened the big cardboard box she’d brought to the meeting. She pulled something out of it.
“Bomber jacket?” Travis asked, with a grin.
“They had a special at Banana Republic,” Kelly said. She stood up and put the jacket on. She looked great in it, but that was no surprise, she looked great in everything.
Dak and Alicia were out of their chairs, finding their jackets and putting them on. Kelly tossed one to me. I looked it over before putting it on. It looked used, but with leather jackets that was good. Somehow they stress the leather without weakening it, so it becomes supple and [273] soft. I put it on and liked the feel of it, though it was far too warm for a Florida summer day. On the front, where a soldier would wear his medals, there was a name strip: garcia. Below that was an embroidered triangular mission patch. It showed the ship blasting in orbit around Mars, with Red Thunder written along the bottom. The patch was on the back, too, but larger.
“Did you do this?” Travis asked, pointing to the logo on the back of his jacket.
“I’m not that artistic. I’ve got a friend who’s a graphic designer. Do you like it?”
We all did. Nobody had any objections to the jackets, either. They beat the hell out of NASA’s tired old blue jumpsuits.
“Who’s the friend?” I asked.
“A guy named 2Loose.”
I was delighted. “You know 2Loose, too?”
“He did a mural on the new women’s center,” Alicia said.
Henry “2Loose” La Beck was an old classmate of mine, the Tagger King of Central Florida. In his outlaw days he must have painted a thousand walls and two thousand railroad cars. He did a little time for it, but often the owner of the violated building dropped charges after studying his work for a while, he was that good. Plus, he could run very fast.
Last I’d heard of him he’d cleaned up his act, gone legit, formed his own company and was doing pretty well. A lightbulb went on inside my head.
“Hey, how about we get him to paint Red Thunder!”
All I got at first were blank looks.
“It’s already painted,” Travis said.
“Yeah, but not like 2Loose can paint it,” Dak said, with a grin. “He did some work on Blue Thunder. Just the pinstripes, I didn’t want no Sistine Chapel ceiling.”
“But he could do the Sistine Chapel,” I said, “if you didn’t mind God driving around in a low-rider and Jesus with spiky hair and tattoos.”
“I like it,” Alicia said.
“Me, too,” Kelly laughed. “Let’s ask him.”
[274] “Hey, wait a minute,” Travis said. But we voted him down and, true to his word, this was still a democracy until we took off. So we decided to offer 2Loose the commission.
ANOTHER WEEK OF hard work, and we gained another day on the timetable.
It was becoming clear that the sticking point would be in the last week. Travis had scheduled a full-blown systems test for that week. For seven days, all of us but Travis and Jubal would be sealed into the ship, totally isolated from the outside environment. We would drink the stored water, breathe the canned air, and eat the frozen food, all the while we were training, training, training.
He was adamant that it had to be seven days.
“Seven days is already a compromise,” he told us. “I’d be a lot happier taking a full month. The only reason I’m settling for seven is that Red Thunder is so powerful and so fast that we’ll never be more than three and a half days away from Earth. I figure most things can be patched up well enough to last three and a half days.”
WE GAINED ANOTHER day by cutting out hours of sleep. With three days until M-day minus seven, the day we had to begin the long-duration systems tests, we bolted down the top of tank seven, the central module, and Red Thunder was complete… from the outside. But we still had five days of work that had to be done before the test could begin.
On that day the Chinese Heavenly Harmony ship arrived at Mars and began its aerobraking maneuvers. Aerobraking had been used by all but the earliest unmanned Mars missions. Instead of firing rockets to achieve an orbit around Mars, a spacecraft would dip into the upper reaches of the Martian atmosphere. Friction would slow the ship enough that it would fall into a highly elliptical orbit; that is, one that looped far away from Mars-to what was called apoapsis-before curving back down to the orbital low point, the periapsis. Once there, it [275] would dip into the atmosphere again, slowing more and making the orbit less elliptical. After half a dozen orbits of decreasing size the ship would settle into a circular orbit, and proceed to the Martian surface from there.
This all took time. The first long, looping orbit would take Heavenly Harmony a full six days. The next orbit would be four days, and so on. But who cared? Nobody was in a big hurry. The American Ares Seven was far behind.
“Maybe they’d hustle a little more if they knew we were here,” Dak said, but his heart wasn’t in it.
We were all watching the big television set in the warehouse, feeling defeated. On the screen, a million Chinese had packed Tien-an-men Square, shouting and chanting. Billions of firecrackers were going off. Dragon dancers snaked through the crowds. Somebody was waving a big sign, which the CNN anchorman told us translated as
THE EAST IS RED!
CHINA IS RED!
MARS IS RED!
“I’d like to give ’em something red,” Dak muttered.
We had known this would happen, but it didn’t lessen the impact. The Chinese were the first humans to reach Mars. But we kept bearing in mind that the first humans to reach the moon were Jim Lovell and the crew of Apollo 8, not Apollo 11.
“Travis,” I said, “are we really going to lose… because of two lousy days?”
He kept shaking his head and I thought he wasn’t going to answer. But when he looked up, his face was anguished.
“Manny, I made promises. To you, to your parents, and to myself. I think we need a full seven-day test. I can’t back off from that.”
“For myself,” I said, “I release you from that promise. I think we won’t know anything more after seven days than we’d know after five.”
“Me, too,” Alicia said. “Five days is enough.”
[276] “You want my vote?” Dak said. “I’m with them.”
“I don’t get a vote on this,” Kelly said, “but I think they’re right.”
“Let ’em go, cher,” Jubal said quietly. “Two days… it don’t signify.”