Allen Steele: The Zoo Team

“No.” He gave me a wry grin. “She’s married.”

“Nice job, gentlemen,” Ron-Jon said. “I think that’ll keep ’em busy for a while.”

“How long do you want to stay dark?” Pushing myself away from Miguel, I floated into the command module, and checked the simulator com panel. Although Ron had knocked off the real-time wireless link, the Mess’s time-delay communications system was still operational. No text messages from Huntsville, or at least not yet; we were still on fifteen-minute delay. The longer we played possum, though, the more likely the boys in Huntsville would believe that something had seriously gone bad up here. No doubt, Dr. Heiney was already on the phone with the flight director, telling him that Team Zulu had cracked.

“Let ’em stew a bit.” Miguel said as Ron-Jon disappeared through the hatch leading to the personnel module. “I’d like to have a drink first.”

Ron had gone to fetch the fifth of tequila we’d been saving for this moment. It was concealed in a locker, where it had been hidden ever since we’d arrived on the Mess two and half months ago. We’d have to use squeezebulbs, of course, but at this point none of us minded. If we were going to get booted from the Mars program, we’d might as well go out in proper Zoo Team style.

“Suits me.” I said, and was turning to go get my pack of Bicycles when we heard a loud bang! and felt a hard thump against the hull.

That’s when the joke ended.

The joke started about four months earlier, when NASA picked the crews for Skycorp’s Mars Exploration Simulator and it turned out that Miguel, Ron, and I would be on Zulu Team. But if you want to understand the punch line, you have to go a little farther back, to when NASA decided that they needed to do orbital flight simulations before they sent a second mission to Mars, and contracted Skycorp to handle the logistics.

Everyone has seen the pictures that Ares I sent back from Mars, of course: American and Japanese astronauts walking across the cold red landscape, raising their respective flags and making awestruck comments about the Arsia Mons volcano. But what most people didn’t know is that those were the mission’s best moments, carefully selected and edited for public consumption. Most haven’t seen the more tawdry incidents witnessed by flight controllers in Houston: the abusive remarks, loud arguments, sexual harassment, fist-fights, and so forth that had half the six-person crew no longer on a casual speaking basis with the other half—and all but two on anti-depressants—by the time the ship reached Mars.

But NASA and NASDA officials noticed, as did the committees of both Congress and the Diet that had oversight over the respective space agencies of their two countries. And since Ares I produced less scientific data than expected, the shortfall was blamed on low crew morale. So the government committees issued a mandate: before Ares II could be funded any further, mission planners would spend more time learning how to keep astronauts from going chimp during long-duration flights.

NASA turned to its major contractor, Skycorp, to carry out a new round of psychological testing. Skycorp had already learned a lot about space crew psychology from its powersat construction program, and one important thing they’d discovered was that the results that came from ground-based simulators were questionable at best. Sure, there had already been several studies in which groups of people had been sealed within small, spacecraft-like habitats for months at a time. But the results of those experiments weren’t totally reliable, mainly because the men and women in those simulators knew they weren’t really in space. The presence of gravity couldn’t be avoided, and there were other subtle hints that the millions of miles that supposedly separated them from Earth were only a fiction, and on the other side of the airlock hatch was a great big world full of pizza and beer and sex and all the elbowroom you could want.

The psychologist in charge of the Skycorp studies was one Joseph Heinemann, Ph.D., late of the Harvard medical school. It was Dr. Heinemann’s contention that the only way Skycorp could reliably test, train, and select the crews for Mars missions would be to build a small space station whose interior would resemble an Ares spacecraft as much as possible. Placed in low orbit above the Earth, the Mars Expedition Simulator—which, naturally, became nicknamed the Mess—would have fake portholes that were actually video screens, and all space-to-ground communications would be subject to delays that would become increasingly longer as the test went on.

Dr. Heinemann then devised a two-part program. In Phase 1, four teams of astronauts, with three persons in each team, would spend ninety days—that is, about half the time it’d take a ship to get to Mars—aboard the Mess, doing everything that an Ares crew would do during the outbound leg of their mission, while ground controllers studied their conduct through hidden cameras and mics. Once those four teams—designated Alpha, Gamma, Theta, and Zulu—completed their turns in the Mess, the results would be studied and the findings would be the basis for Phase 2, when the six astronauts who’d done best during the Phase 1 test would be the ones selected for Ares II, and would hence go into training for the mission itself.

To be sure, this was an expensive and rather time-consuming way of determining who’d be most likely to crack under pressure. On the other hand, no one ever again wanted to see footage of an astronaut threatening to gouge out another guy’s eyes with a plastic spork. So Dr. Heinemann’s proposal was approved, the Mess was built, and an announcement was made that the window was now open for applications to the Ares II training program.

I wanted to get on the next Mars mission, as did just about everyone else in the space business. It was like offering a climb up K2 to hardcore mountaineers: who can resist? But I knew my chances of being picked were somewhere between nil and zip. Sure, I’d spent a year working on Skycorp’s SPS-1 project, but my company record was… well, questionable, to put it mildly. “Disciplinary problems” is the expression most often used in my performance reports. Oh, I did my job well, and my safety record was unblemished. But I had a tendency to talk back to the boss, and bureaucrats give me a real pain in the neck. That sort of thing doesn’t fly well in NASA’s buttondown, no-nonsense culture, and even though I sent in my application, I figured that, a year or two later, I’d still be parked on a barstool at the Cape, waiting for my union rep to find me another low-orbit construction gig.

So I was surprised when Skycorp invited me in for interviews and physicals, and even more surprised when I made it to the short list. Face it: I was a space monkey, a grunt with some technical skills and the ability to bolt two pieces of metal together while floating upside down. And I had an attitude. I had little business being in the same room with NASA and NASDA astronauts who had doctorates like I have calluses and who’d been first in everything they’d done since childhood. Next to these purebred Best Of Show champs, I was some mutt who’d managed to sneak in through the dog door.

As it turned out, though, I wasn’t the only one. It wasn’t long before I realized that two other Phase 1 candidates weren’t Boy Scouts either. Miguel LaCosta was another former Skycorp contract worker, and before that he’d worked for one of the space tourism companies. He was a USAF-trained left-seater who knew his way around the cockpit of anything that had wings and a hydrazine engine, but a rep for practical jokes had made him persona non grata with most of the privates. NASA had no more room for him than they did for one of their own: Ronald Johnson, a former Navy flyboy who’d been something of a star in the astronaut corps before he’d gotten caught in a Texas whorehouse with a girl in his lap—yes, I said that right—and a whiskey bottle on his knee. Bye-bye Ron-Jon… or at least until he had the temerity to apply for the Mars program and, like Miguel and me, was astonished to find himself on the short list.