Ben Bova - Appointment in Sinai

Illustration by Todd Lockwood

“No, I am not going to plug in,” Debbie Kettering said firmly. “I’m much too busy.”

Her husband gave her his patented lazy smile. “Come on, Deb, you don’t have anything to do that can’t wait a half-hour or so.”

His smile had always been her undoing. But this time she intended to stand firm. “No!” she insisted. “I won’t.”

She was not a small woman, but standing in their living room next to Doug made her look tiny. A stranger might think they were the school football hero and the cutest cheerleader on the squad, twenty years afterward. In reality, Doug was a propulsion engineer (a real rocket scientist) and Deborah an astronaut.

An ex-astronaut. Her resignation was on the computer screen in her bedroom office, ready to be e-mailed to her boss at the Johnson Space Center.

“What’ve you got to do that’s so blasted important?” Doug asked, still grinning at her as he headed for the sofa, his favorite Saturday afternoon haunt.

“A mountain of work that’s been accumulating for weeks,” Debbie answered. “Now’s the time to tackle it, while all the others are busy and won’t be able to bother me.”

His smile faded as he realized how miserable his wife really was. “Come on, Deb. We both know what’s eating you.”

“I won’t plug in, Doug.”

“Be a shame to miss it,” he insisted.

Suddenly she was close to tears. “Those bastards even rotated me off the shift. They don’t want me there!”

“But that doesn’t mean—”

“No, Doug! They put everybody else in ahead of me. I’m on the bottom of their pecking order. So to hell with them! I won’t even watch it on TV. And that’s final!”

“It’s all set up, man. All we need’s a guy who’s good with the ’lectronics. And that’s you, Chico.”

Luis Mendez shifted unhappily in his desk chair. Up at the front of the room Mr. Ricardo was trying to light up some enthusiasm in the class. Nobody was interested in algebra, though. Except Luis, but he had Jorge leaning over from the next desk, whispering in his ear.

Luis didn’t much like Jorge, not since first grade when Jorge used to beat him up at least once a week for his lunch money. The guy was dangerous. Now he was into coke and designer drugs and burglary to support his habit. And he wanted Luis to help him.

“I don’t do locks,” Luis whispered back, out of the side of his mouth, keeping his eyes on Mr. Ricardo’s patient, earnest face.

“It’s all ’lectronics, man. You do one kind you can do the other. Don’t try to mess with me, Chico.”

“We’ll get caught. They’ll send us to Alcatraz.”

Jorge stifled a laugh. “I got a line on a whole friggin’ warehouse full of VR sets and you’re worryin’ about Alcatraz? Even if they sent you there you’d be livin’ better than here.”

Luis grimaced. Life in the hood was no picnic, but Alcatraz? More than once Mr. Ricardo had sorrowfully complained, “Maybe you bufónes would be better off in Alcatraz. At least there they make you learn.”

Yeah, Luis knew. They also fry your brains and turn you into a zombie.

“Hey,” Jorge jabbed at Luis’s shoulder. “I ain’t askin’ you, Chico. I’m tellin’ you. You’re gonna do the locks for me or you’re gonna be in the hospital. Comprendes? ”

Luis understood. Trying to fight against Jorge was useless. He had learned that lesson years ago. Better to do what Jorge wanted than to get a vicious beating.

Senator Theodore O’Hara fumed quietly as he rolled his powerchair down the long corridor to his office. The trio of aides trotting behind him were puffing too hard to speak; the only sound in the marble-walled corridor was the slight whir of the powerchair’s electric motor and the faint throb of the senator’s artificial heart pump. And obedient panting.

He leaned on the toggle to make the chair go a bit faster. Two of his aides fell behind but Kaiser, overweight and prematurely balding, broke into a sprint to keep up.

Fat little yes-man, O’Hara thought. Still, Kaiser was uncanny when it came to predicting trends. O’Hara scrupulously followed all the polls, as any politician must if he wants to stay in office. But when the polls said one thing and Kaiser something else, the tubby little butterball was inevitably right.

Chairman Pastorini had recessed the committee session so everybody could plug into the landing. Set aside the important business of the Senate Appropriations Committee, O’Hara grumbled to himself, so we can all see a half-dozen astronauts plant their gold-plated boots on Mars.

What a waste of time, he thought. And money.

It’s all Pastorini’s doing. He’s using the landing. Timed the damned committee session to meet just on this particular afternoon. Knew it all along. Thinks I’ll cave in because the other idiots on the committee are going to get all stirred up.

I’ll cave them in. All of them. This isn’t the first manned landing on Mars, he thought grimly. It’s the last.

Jerome Zacharias—Zack to everyone who knew him—paced nervously up and down the big room. Part library, part entertainment center, part bar, the room was packed with friends and well-wishers and media reporters who had made the trek to Phoenix to be with him at this historic moment.

They were drinking champagne already, Zack saw. Toasting our success. Speculating on what they’ll find on Mars.

But it could all fail, he knew. It could be a disaster. The last systems check before breaking orbit had shown that the lander’s damned fuel cells still weren’t charged up to full capacity. All right, the backups are OK, there’s plenty of redundancy, but it just takes one glitch to ruin everything. People have been killed in space and those kids are more than a hundred million miles from home.

If anything happens to them it’ll be my fault, Zack knew. They’re going to give me the credit if it all works out OK, but it’ll be my fault if they crash and burn.

Twenty years he’d sweated and schemed and connived with government leaders, industrial giants, bureaucrats of every stripe. All to get a team of twelve men and women to Mars.

For what? he asked himself, suddenly terrified that he had no real answer. To satisfy my own ego? Is that why? Spend all this money and time, change the lives of thousands of engineers and scientists and technicians and all their support people, just so I can go to my grave saying that I pushed the human race to Mars?

Suppose somebody gets killed? Then a truly wrenching thought hit him. Suppose they don’t find anything there that’s worth it all? Suppose Mars is just the empty ball of rusty sand and rocks that the unmanned landers have shown us? No life, not even traces of fossils?

A wasted life. That’s what I’ll have accomplished. Wasted my own life and the lives of all the others. Wasted.

She was sorting through all the paperwork from her years with the agency. Letters, reports, memos, the works. Funny how we still call it paperwork, Debbie thought as she toiled through her computer files.

Her heart clutched inside her when the official notification came up on her screen. The final selection of the six astronauts who would be the American part of the Mars team. Her name was conspicuously absent.