Geoffrey Landis - Mars Crossing

Indecisive Decisions

It was a wild idea, and John Radkowski distrusted wild ideas. A desperate journey to the pole, on an unlikely chance that they could salvage the Brazilian ship? Ryan Martin was a danger. He was too young, and had too strong a tendency to go off on a wild idea without paying attention to caution.

The cautious thing to do would be to stay right where they were.

But they would die.

They would probably die if they headed to the pole.

It was an impossible dilemma. John Radkowski didn’t like dilemmas. For every problem, he had always believed, there was one right solution. But this problem didn’t seem to have a right solution.

Radkowski still wondered if it had been some error of Ryan’s that had killed Chamlong. He would have to hold Ryan Martin back. It might be tough; Ryan had a great feel for machines but no common sense.

With his right hand, John Radkowski rubbed the place where three fingers were missing on his left hand. He often did this when he was uncertain or worried; he didn’t even notice that he was doing it. Caressing the rough scar tissue gave him a sort of tactile comfort: Whatever came, he could survive it.

The crew was looking to him for guidance, but he didn’t have any better solutions to offer. He knew that of all the things that a commander could do, the decision that was always wrong was to be indecisive. Better to be wrong, and boldly wrong, than to dither over the right solution.

But that didn’t mean to act without learning the facts. “Check the maps and orbital photographs, and give me a briefing in two days,” he’d told Martin.

But now the two days were over, and he was no closer to an idea of what to do than when he’d started.

They would die if they stayed.

There really wasn’t a choice. Desperate and stupid as the idea was, it was their only chance. They had to go.

He let nothing of his feelings show when he called the crew together.

“Engineer Martin has explained his plan to you,” he said. “I’m not going to lie to you and say that it’s going to be easy; it’s not. It’s a tough haul, and it’s not clear whether it’s even possible at all.

“You have discussed it among yourselves. Ryan has come up with some refinements of his plan, but before we go any further, I want to hear from you. All I want from you is one single word. Do we accept his plan or not? Yes or no.

“Martin, we know your opinion. Doctor Jackson?”

Tana nodded.

“Say it,” Radkowski said.

“It’s our only chance.”

“I take that for yes. Ms. Conselheiro?”

Her eyes were shadowed. “We die here. I don’t like that choice.”

“Your vote?”

“I vote to live.”

“Mr. Whitman?”

“I haven’t heard any better of a choice, have you? Hell, let’s stomp.”

Radkowski nodded. The decision was made, and they had bought into it. He didn’t even have to vote himself.

Under the circumstances, that was the best he could hope for.

“Then it’s decided,” he said. “Get yourselves ready. We leave tomorrow at first light.”

There is a visceral feeling to piloting a jet fighter that can never quite be described. It is a feeling of power and of control, of riding a bestial strength tamed just barely enough to respond with fury to your least suggestion of stick pressure. John Radkowski would never admit it, but if there had ever been a choice between the two, he would rather fly than have sex. In its way, piloting the F-22 fighter was better than sex.

Two years at the Eastthorpe Military Academy, paid for by his brother’s drug dealing, and four years of ROTC at New York University had changed Johnny Radkowski. He was no longer the rebellious punk from the projects. He had learned caution and discipline. His classmates admired him, but none of them were particularly close to him.

He’s got the killer instinct, his Air Force flight instructor wrote in his recommendation for him to move on to train on fighters. He was not, in actual point of fact, a spectacularly good pilot; he was more than competent, but he would never reach that mystic fusion of the machine with his own nervous system, the unity with the machine that marks the very best pilots. But what he lacked in finesse, he made up for in sheer determination. The kid has guts, his flight instructor wrote.

So John Radkowski, bad boy from the bad side of Queens, became a fighter pilot. A year later he was flying fighter escort for the relief missions in Africa.

It was a stupid, dirty little war, or rather, a tangled matrix of wars, all linked together in hard-to-understand ways. Nobody in the fighter corps really knew what they were fighting for, or why.

“We’re talking a mix of colonialism, neocolonialism, tribalism, religious conflicts, foreign troops, modern weapons, economic decline, political aspirations, international debts, racism, nationalism and pan-nationalism,” the briefing officer had told them, before they had first shipped out for Africa.

He was reading from a list that had been prepared in a book. “Don’t even try to understand it. We’ve got a job to do, and we’re going to do the best we can.”

That evening he had been flying escort for a bomber. Columns of greasy black smoke rose from burning rebel camps like signal fires to reticulate the African sky. However many camps, or purported camps, they had bombed, there were always more.

The African unification wars were going badly for all sides.

He had been enjoying the flying, coming back from a run over territory that had been cleared as friendly. He was not paying any attention to anything in particular when an antique Russian heatseeking SAM leaped away from a crag below and homed in on his wingman. He cued his mike. “Bravo, Alpha, looks like you’ve picked up a hitchhiker.”

A laconic reply. “I got him.” The jet next to him hit afterburners and rocketed upward, trailing flame. The missile, outclassed, fell away and then curved off to crash somewhere distant in the African twilight.

By luck, Radkowski had been looking in the right direction and had gotten a good fix on the hilltop the missile had come from. He made a wide turn and came back around and down, holding close to the treetops and then pulling up into position to rake the mountaintop with cannon fire. He cued his mike. “I’m gonna teach the bastards a brief lesson,” he said.

“Teach ’em good, Radko,” his wingman replied.

Only at the last minute did he see the face in his sights, a boy who could not have been any older than nine, frightened and alone, the empty missile launcher discarded at his feet. And then his cannon fire blew apart the hilltop, and the face disappeared into smoke and rock dust.

The face continued to haunt his nights for years.

After that night, he put in a transfer to fly evacuation transports. It was a lower prestige job, and the word that spread in the fighter squadron was that he’d lost his nerve. Nobody said that to his face, though.

Flying evacuation was better. He could at least pretend that he was helping people, ferrying endless planeloads of refugees, pencil-thin and nearly naked, each one carrying all of their belongings held wrapped up in a cloth or in a molded plastic basket balanced precariously on his head. The refugee camps outside Bangalore were not paradise, but they were better than the war zone. He could tell himself that he was saving lives.

It was no safer than flying fighters, and already he had been hit twice. The first one was a lucky rifle shot from the ground that had penetrated the transport’s sheet-metal skin right between his feet and ricocheted around the cabin. It had shattered the glass on his instruments, but done no actual damage. The second hit was from a surface-to-air missile that had detonated close enough to rip his right aileron to shreds. Despite the loss of control, he had babied the transport down to a flawless landing right on the numbers at the Diego Garcia airfield. After that, with no injuries from either hit, his ground crew started called him by a new nickname: Lucky Radkowski.