rebuffing all of Kayman’s offers to sympathize with a smile through tears. In some ways Hesburgh had the lousiest job aboard; seven months coming, seven months going and in between three months of nothing. He would be all alone in orbit while Kayman, Brad and Roger were disporting themselves on the surface. He would be lonely, and he would be bored.
He would be worse than that. Seventeen months in space was a practical guarantee that for the last few decades of his life he would be plagued by a hundred different muscle, bone and circulatory disorders. They exercised faithfully, wrestling each other and struggling against springs, flailing their arms and pumping their legs; that would not be enough. There was inevitably calcium resorption from the bone, and there was loss of muscle tone. For those who landed, the three months on Mars would make a great difference. In that time they would repair much of the damage and be in better shape for the return. For Hesburgh there was no such break. His seventeen months in zero-G would be uninterrupted, and the experience of previous spacefarers had made the consequences clear. It meant lowering his life expectancy by a decade or more. And if he wept once in a while, there was no one who had better reason.
Time passed, time passed. A month, two months, six months. Beyond them in the skies the capsule with the 3070 was climbing after them; behind it, the magnetohydrodynamic power plant with its crew of two. When they were two weeks out they ceremoniously switched watches, changing to new quartz-crystal timepieces set to the Martian day. From then on they lived by the Martian clock. It made little enough practical difference; the day for Mars is just a bit more than thirty-seven minutes longer than Earth’s; but the difference was significant in their minds.
One week before arrival, they began to speed Roger up.
For Roger the seven months had felt like thirty hours, subjective time. It had been time enough. He had eaten a few meals, exchanged several dozen communications with the rest of the crew. He had received messages from Earth and returned a few of them. He had asked for his guitar, been refused it on the grounds that he couldn’t play it, asked for it anyway out of curiosity and found that that was quite true: he could pluck a string, but he could not hear the note that resulted from it. In fact, apart from the specially slowed-down tapes, he could hear nothing at all most of the time, and only a sort of high-pitched scurrying sound ever. Air did not conduct the sort of vibrations he could perceive. When the tape recorder was out of contact with the metal frame to which he was bound, he could not hear even it, nor could his own voice be made to record.
They warned him they were beginning to accelerate his perceptions. They left the curtain to his cubicle open, and he began to notice flickers of motion. He caught a glimpse of Hesburgh dozing nearby, then saw figures actually moving; after a time he even recognized who they were. Then they put him to sleep, to make final adjustments on his backpack, and when he woke up he was alone, the curtain was drawn—and he heard voices.
He pushed the curtain aside and looked out, and there was the smiling face of his wife’s lover greeting him. “Good morning, Roger! Nice to have you with us again.”
…And eighteen minutes later, twelve travel time and the rest decoding and relaying, the President watched it happen from more than a hundred million miles away, on the screen in the Oval Office.
He was not the only one. The TV nets put the scene on the air, and the satellites rebroadcast it all over the world. They were watching in the Under Palace in Peking, and inside the Kremlin; on Downing Street and the Champs Élysées and Ginza.
“Son of a bitch,” said Dash historically, “they’ve made it.”
Vern Scanyon was with him. “Son of a bitch,” he echoed. Then he said, “Well, almost made it. They’ve still got to land.”
“Any problem about that?”
Cautiously: “Not as far as I know—”
“God,” said the President positively, “would not be so unfair. I think you and I are going to taste some bourbon right now; it’s about that time.”
They stayed and watched for half an hour, and a quarter of a bottle. On and off over the next few days they watched