Losing Mars

by Peter Cawdron

  In the silence that follows, everyone takes a sip. No one’s sure how to respond to Hedy. She’s not joking. The temperature within the module seems to plummet to match the negative 140 outside as the Martian evening descends. Scott doesn’t smile or laugh. He just nods and changes the subject.

  “Do you know what keeps me awake at night?”

  One by one, we offer our thoughts, focusing on our specialities—everyone but Hedy.

  “Hull integrity?”

  “Power failure?”

  “Resupply overshoot?”

  “Crop loss?”

  Scott nods at each suggestion. It seems I’m not the only one with insomnia. He sips his drink, replying from the edge of the glass.

  “Losing Mars.”

  With the exception of Hedy, the crew is confused. I’m the first one to speak. “How do you lose an entire planet?”

  “We lost the Moon.” Scott sips at his drink again, pausing before continuing. “Six out of the nine Apollo missions made it to the lunar surface and then we said, enough. And I understand why. NASA had other priorities—Voyager, the Shuttle, Hubble, the International Space Station, Curiosity, Cassini, Juno. Bigger bang for bucks.

  “It cost five hundred billion dollars to put us on the surface of Mars, not counting resupply missions and the cost of bringing us home. Five hundred billion. For that, we could have a robotic mission exploring every moon around Jupiter and Saturn, and still have spare change for a dozen robotic missions back here.”

  We’re silent.

  “As much as I love our mission, all the eggs are in one basket. And my fear, what I worry about most, isn’t falling off a goddamn cliff or running out of oxygen, it’s being the last commander on Mars for the next century. If we screw this up, there won’t be another mission.”

  Hedy nods in agreement. Even though the alcohol is going to my head, I feel sobered by Scott’s comments. Sue stares at her glass. Scott knocks back the rest of his drink in one last swig.

  “Damn, I wish you had more of that.”

  The main console chimes, indicating an incoming message from Houston. Given the round trip communications delay between Earth and Mars is currently almost an hour, they can’t have seen us drinking—yet. Nevertheless, I flinch a little as Sue brings up the communications package. It’s nighttime on Mars, but the duty controller has a brilliant blue sky behind him.

  “We’re sending you a mission assessment based on the events of today, along with an assortment of public responses and reactions. Take your time. Let us know when you’ve reviewed them.”

  Time.

  On Mars, time is always slipping into the future. As a day on Mars lasts 24 hours, 39 minutes and 35 seconds, the time difference with Earth is constantly shifting, drifting, so the team in Houston live and work on Martian time, just like us at Shepard base. Every thirty-six days, the two planets are in sync, with midnight occurring at roughly the same time. From there, the slight difference after a couple of days is no big deal, but three weeks later, midnight on Mars has become 1PM in the afternoon in Houston. Even for us astronauts, living on Martian time is a bit like suffering from perpetual jet lag. The idea of the night lasting an extra forty minutes sounds idyllic, but our circadian rhythms are constantly being thrown out of whack. I find there are only about two weeks out of each month where I get a decent night’s sleep, and the REM monitors we each wear seem to agree. A week either side of synchronicity is the spot for sweet dreams.

  “Who wants to go first?” Scott gestures to the main console. There’s a folder with each of our names. Our doppelgängers on Earth would have tried to replicate our decision making process during the crisis, and have made observations and recommendations. Post-mission assessments are normal, but given what just happened there’s likely to be some stinging rebuke. It’ll be moderated, run past mission psychologists and a bunch of our peers, but it doesn’t take much to read between the lines. Hedy was right. Blind luck got us through, but luck really is dumb. Like a coin toss, today we ended up with heads, but for the rest of the week it could be tails. Relying on luck is stupid.

  Hedy points at the screen.

  “Open the public response.”

  It seems even she’s reluctant to look at her report. No doubt everyone will go through them in private before they turn in, but no one wants to look at theirs in front of the others. Negative critiques are framed with a positive spin, but we’ve learned to see through that. News reports tend to be more palatable.

  Scott opens the folder and a series of browser tabs appear, loading the various stories. Public responses are moderated by machine learning, a simple form of artificial intelligence that ranks news reports by importance and uniqueness of content, while avoiding duplicates and fringe outliers. The filter is programmed to ignore conspiracy theories. Although the screen looks like a web browser loading in real time, it’s using the cache of information that just arrived from Earth. Connecting to the internet itself is impossible because of timeouts. The various hyperlinks and images on the screen lead nowhere. Click on any of them and the page will go blank.

  Lisa reads the titles aloud even though we can all read them in silence. I find her involvement unusual. Lisa’s quiet by nature. Prior to our launch, she was criticized by the media for being a wallflower. The press said she was only included because of Hedy, and that she shouldn’t be on the crew. Right wing media was cruel. They said her selection was the result of cucks capitulating to political correctness. Lesbians were an appeal to the Left, and affront to the Right—apparently. No one looked at her actual ability. No one except the NASA astronaut selection office.

  Out of all the mission assessments, hers is probably the only one that’s positive as her role in the rescue was crucial. Even though the boomer collided with the wreckage on its first approach, she was blind to that and reacted without panicking. It could have been two boomers falling on us, not one.

  “Daring Rescue on Mars… Martian Astronauts Plummet Over Cliff… Crashes and Collisions on Mars… Red Planet Blues… Mars Mayhem… Planet of Women.”

  “What the?” Jen isn’t impressed by the last one.

  “Oh, yeah, this looks good.” Lisa brings up the last article on her tablet and reads it aloud.

  “Much has been written about Shepard and the six astronauts on a sixteen month mission to explore the canyons of Mars, but disaster almost claimed the lives of the only two men on the crew.”

  Hedy can’t help herself, interjecting with, “You’re kidding me, right? This is what they’re focusing on back there? That there aren’t enough men? Are they still hung up on this old crap?”

  Lisa continues. “For a brief moment, it looked as though Mars was going to become the Planet of Women, with a lesbian in charge of Shepard base.”

  “Oh for fffff—” Hedy stops herself mid-stride, probably because she knows she’s on the public mic and her reaction will be replayed back on Earth. Her eyes close for a moment as she shakes her head.

  I speak up. I feel awkward, but I have to say something. To leave it up to Hedy and Lisa to defend themselves is wrong. Maybe my reaction is a little contrived, driven by social pressure, but then again, maybe it’s not. In that exact moment, even I’m not sure. I just want to do what’s right.

  “Seriously, you don’t have to read that crap.”

  Am I grandstanding? Playing to the audience back home? Trying to appear helpful? Having cameras on us always leaves me feeling a little self-conscious.

  The feed from Shepard is moderated by the NASA Public Relations Office, but the transcripts are largely open to the public. As with all of our communication, it’s primarily sent as transcribed text, with occasional sound bites and still images used to try to douse the inevitable conspiracies theories that surround a mission to Mars. There are no bug-eyed green alien monsters hiding under the red rocks, but the overactive imagination of Homo sapiens is not so easily persuaded.

  NASA provides almost complete transparency into the interactions in th
e common room to avoid hype, but even that’s not enough. NASA didn’t intend on setting up the reality TV show Big Brother on Mars, with astronauts being voted out and all the other silliness that goes with flamboyant television, but that was the general effect. If they cut the feed for any reason, no matter how small, Twitter freaks out, Facebook goes into meltdown It’s like throwing gasoline on a fire, so they leave it alone for the most part. We’ve become used to the three ring circus.

  The main feed only comes from a couple of cameras, and is normally so banal as to put even me to sleep, but occasionally there’s something that gets some traction with the tin-foil hat brigade.

  My alcoholic concoction was a calculated act, one NASA won’t approve of, but one I hope most regular, reasonable people will relate to and understand. We’re not drunk—not even close. We’re decompressing after a rough day, but this…

  “The content filter must be on the fritz.”

  Lisa seems to appreciate my attempt at deflecting from the article, but she sees it differently. The intensity of her gaze betrays how personal this is to her and how hurt she feels that a narrative like this could be popular back home.

  “Two point three million views. Almost nine hundred thousand likes. Five hundred thousand retweets. Six hundred and eighty thousand comments. This isn’t some crackpot yelling on a street corner.”

  She continues reading aloud.

  “Hedy Washington assumed command of the base for more than four hours, directing a rescue effort that almost ended in disaster. Her butch, bombastic manner—”

  Jen interrupts her. “You don’t have to.”

  Lisa has tears in the corners of her eyes, but like Hedy, she’s tough. “No. I do… Don’t you get it? This is us. These are the people we represent up here. This is our history, our culture, our legacy. I can’t ignore this. This is who we collectively are. Conspiracy nuts and haters.”

  Jen says, “It’s not everyone. Not even close. It’s such a small, disproportionate group.”

  “But it’s there nonetheless.” Lisa skips through the article, determined to go on. “NASA director Janet Blumenthal, a closet lesbian, refused to be drawn on the—”

  Scott snaps. “Oh, no, no, no. Janet’s not… She—She’s nor—” His voice trails away. He shakes his head, failing to complete his sentence.

  Hedy senses his reluctance to use the word lesbian in one breath and his stutter in the next. She’s incensed, feeling defensive after what she’s heard. Given Scott’s blunder, I can’t blame her for wondering what the rest of us really think about her and Lisa.

  “Janet’s not what? A lesbian? So what is she, Scott? Normal? Is that what you were going to say?”

  Scott sighs. “You know I didn’t mean that.”

  “We’re not normal?”

  “It’s not like that.”

  A tear runs down Hedy’s cheek, curling slowly around her jaw and sliding down her chin. “What is it like?”

  Scott’s head hangs as he stares at the table. I feel for him as his comment was a blunder. Mistakes are easy to come by, impossible to erase. The news article has left Hedy and Lisa reeling, feeling vulnerable and exposed. In any other context they’d have no doubt about his support, but perhaps that’s the problem. His acceptance shouldn’t be necessary. I keep quiet.

  Scott looks up at the ceiling, surprising everyone with what he says next.

  “I—I fucking love lesbians.”

  His wife’s eyes aren’t the only ones that go wide. Susan sits back, as do Lisa and Hedy. I straighten in my seat. Jen looks at me. I shrug. Hedy and Lisa have a sense of trepidation, glancing sideways at each other. Although neither of them say anything, they clearly want more context to work with. Scott obliges, waving with his hand as he speaks, trying to dispel yet another misunderstanding.

  “I mean, not like that. Not in the sexual sense. It’s the concept I like or love or whatever—it’s what it signifies.”

  He looks to me for support, but my raised eyebrows suggest I’m not sure how I can help. He seems determine to fit his size twelve feet right inside his mouth.

  Scott gestures to Hedy, saying, “You’re absolutely right. It’s all about being normal… but the thing people don’t get is there is no normal.

  “Back in the 1950s, the air force took a dozen measurements from roughly four thousand airmen. They wanted to develop a standard cockpit, something that could act as the norm. To their surprise, when they normalized and averaged all their measurements there wasn’t a single pilot that fit in the seat! Finally, they gave up and made cockpit seats adjustable.

  “A decade later, in the 60s, the fashion industry did the same thing with the dimensions of thousands of women and their conclusion was the same. There’s no norm.

  “We’re all roughly the same, and yet we’re all different. It’s called the jagged edge. There’s no neat fit. No one-size-fits-all.”

  Hedy turns a little. She still has her eyes set on him, but it’s clear the wheels are grinding within her mind as she considers his reasoning.

  Scott says, “Normal is whatever you are—that’s the point. Your height is normal for you. Your hair, your eyes, the things you find interesting, the people you love. They’re all entirely normal.”

  I pick up on what he means, saying, “What’s normal for the spider is torture for the fly.”

  “Exactly,” Scott replies, pointing at me.

  Jen looks at me sideways, wondering where that quip came from, so I quote my source. “Morticia from The Addams Family.” Jen may shake her head at the unorthodox source of my moral compass, but she can’t help but smile at how it’s helped defuse the pressure.

  Hedy is still a little suspicious.

  Scott clarifies further, “We’re human—that’s it. That’s all that’s necessary. We shouldn’t need anything else. No other categories apply, really. Nothing else matters. But we want our neat little boxes, our pigeonholes and norms. Only since there are no norms, we get all pissed when someone else isn’t exactly the same as us. It’s stupid. Petulant, really. Utterly childish.

  “We’re like ostriches sticking our heads in the sand, pretending to be something we’re not. So, yeah, if people are going to draw these distinctions, I say, we own them—so—I love lesbians.” He points are the article on the tablet. “I love how that makes those guys squirm. I love being able to look at something like that and say—I don’t care!

  “I don’t give a damn that this bothers anyone else. I love everything about how that one word confronts this kind of short-sighted stupidity.”

  The wave of emotion sweeping over Hedy is clear. Her cheeks flush. She looks down at the table, feeling overwhelmed. Scott is kind.

  “I’m serious. If we ever make contact with another intelligent species out there, they’re going to scratch their heads at how utterly ridiculous we are with all the meaningless distinctions we make. Straight/Gay. Black/White. Male/Female. Rich/Poor. And what’s more, we use these to ignore the things that are really important—compassion, kindness, consideration. We should build each other up instead of tearing each other down.”

  Hedy nudges his shoulder. “Don’t you go all Martin Luther King on me.”

  Scott nudges her back. “I hate to break it to you, but you’re as normal as the rest of us clowns.”

  Lisa smiles.

  Jen adds, “I want to say, they’re idiots, but they’re not. They’re misguided.”

  I’m still thinking about Scott’s original comment. “We should get t-shirts made up.”

  Jen hits me playfully, shaking her head at my irreverent attitude.

  Sue says, “Who cares what they say? They’re wrong. Stereotypes are dumb.”

  I wave my hand between Jen and me, saying, “Yeah, no one looks at us and says, well, he’s clearly the butch one.”

  Jen clarifies with “Because you’re not.”

  Sue spits her Bloody Mary/Martian Bunny Hop across the table, spraying the side of the empty pitcher. Hedy and Lisa laugh, breakin
g the tension.

  Everything’s so damn serious on Mars. Although I would never admit it, the reason I broke out the alcohol tonight was because of the pressure I felt building within the crew. After we got back from the Eos Chaos, things were frosty. I could feel a storm brewing. Then when Hedy called out our dumb blind stupid luck, it confirmed my thinking. She was right, of course, but how do you recover from that? You can’t hit rewind and replay the moment. You can’t change the past.

  Scott looks Hedy in the eye.

  “I’ve got to say, being here with you—with all of you—is the greatest privilege of my life. I wouldn’t change a thing.”

  One by one, we acknowledge his point, nodding in agreement.

  “Space lesbians rocking Mars.” Scott smiles in admiration. “Yeah, that’s kinda cool. Man, I so hope that’s on the front page of The New York Times tomorrow.”

  Jen tries to stifle a yawn. I think it’s a little fake, but I get why. It’s late and time to wrap things up. There’s nothing that can’t wait ‘til tomorrow—especially the evaluations.

  Sue rests her hand on Scott’s shoulder. “Let’s get you to bed.” He nods, slowly getting to his feet, using an improvised crutch to walk.

  Jen and I get up as well. “Good night all.”

  “Yes,” Hedy replies, nodding. “It is a good night.”

  The Chinese

  The next couple of weeks are a blur. Routines consume our time. I find myself looking forward to even the slightest deviation in our schedule as though it were Christmas. Anything to break the monotony of one day drifting into the next.

  Green leaves shift around me as I squeeze between corn stalks with a camera mounted on the side of my head, talking into a microphone fitted beneath my oxygen mask.

  “We grow a dwarf variety of corn here on Mars, genetically modified to produce multiple ears without reaching more than four to five feet in height—which is important as these plants don’t have deep roots digging into soil. Like the spinach, they’re mounted on plastic racks with nutrient feed running over their roots. Nothing is wasted on Mars. These stalks might look inefficient, but they’ll become nutrient for other plants.”