Allen Steele: The Zoo Team

Making matters worse were our colleagues. A finer group of stiffs, there never has been. Six men, three women, each looking as if they’d just marched off the Liberty University campus: eager, well-scrubbed—I swear, I think some of them brushed their teeth four times a day—and utterly lacking any individuality. One guy insisted on opening our morning briefing with a prayer, another was proud of the fact that, at age 29, he was still a virgin, and one of the women blushed whenever toilet paper was mentioned. They didn’t drink, smoke, or say anything more harsh than “gosh darn”… and it goes without saying that none had a decent sense of humor.

You have to give Zulu Team some credit: we actually made it through the first four days of Phase 1 without cracking a joke or pulling some sort of gag. But there was no way we could’ve continued our training without screwing around one way or another; otherwise, we would’ve lost our minds. So first came the muttered wisecracks, which were met with cold glares and whispered shushes that only encouraged us, and then came the straight-faced innuendos and disguised insults, which usually went over the heads of their intended targets, and finally the practical jokes, like rigging the eight-ball of the cockpit simulator so that it was always upside-down, or slipping a couple of drops of lubricant to the front zippers of the women’s jumpsuits so that they’d constantly slide down when we went out for our morning jog.

A few weeks of this, though, and we began to wonder whether we were pushing our luck. The Zoo Team was having fun, sure, but while it seemed peculiar that no one ever gave us a serious reprimand or threatened to bounce us from the program, we knew it was all too possible that we’d go too far and end up being left behind when the final crew selection for Ares II was made. So Ron, Miguel, and I talked it over during a Saturday night beer run, and decided to cool it for a while.

Yet it didn’t matter. We eventually found out that the Zoo Team was never meant to go any farther than Earth orbit.

Our information didn’t come from a memo or a conference room, but from a pillow. Ron-Jon never lacked for girlfriends, and his latest was a young lady who worked as an assistant to one of our specialist associates. One evening, while she and Ron-Jon were in bed, she told him something that he promised to keep to himself, and then revealed to Miguel and me the very next morning.

“We’ve been set up,” Ron said quietly, once he was sure that there was no one else in the training facility locker room. “Our team, I mean… there’s no way any of us are going to Mars.”

Miguel stared at him. “Want to run that again?”

“The other nine are the final candidates for the mission,” Ron said. “Six will be on Ares II, and the other three will be back-ups. But once Zulu Team comes back from the Mess, our job will be done… because our job is to screw up. That’s why they picked us in the first place.”

What Ron learned from his cute little fink was that the three of us were on Zulu Team specifically because we were bad apples. Dr. Heinemann—a.k.a. Dr. Heiney, as Miguel had dubbed him because of his rather large posterior—privately believed that it was unlikely that Skycorp would ever be able to select a final crew which would not to have psychological problems of one sort or another. But since NASA and NASDA had invested a considerable amount of money in the Mess program, he didn’t want to admit that to them, nor did he want to be held responsible if the Ares II crew had the same problems as Ares I. So he’d figured out a way to shave the odds just a little bit.

“Zulu Team is expected to screw up,” Ron-Jon said. “In fact, they want us to screw up. That’s our mission… to botch our flight so badly that we’ll make the other three teams look good. So if Ares II fails because there’s another crew crack-up, Skycorp can always point to the results of all the Mess missions and say, ‘Well, see, we always knew there was a chance things would go wrong…’ ”

“So they’re grading on a curve.” Miguel nodded. “That’s why they’re sending us up there first. They’re figuring that our flight will fail and the next three missions will succeed, and once they lump all the results together…”

“They’ll have a set of statistics showing an increased probability of crew failure simply because one of the four test teams was a bunch of goofballs,” I said.

“You got it.” Ron-Jon’s expression was unusually dour; he didn’t mind being a jester, but he didn’t like being played as a fool. “So we’re not going to Mars, no matter how well we do up there. In fact, my guess is that, even if we do a perfect job, they’ll throw some sort of no-win scenario at us.”

“And use the results of that as the info they need.” I slowly nodded. “Yeah, I see what you’re saying. Once we’re in the Mess, they can manipulate the scenario however they want. Solar flare. Meteor collision. Reactor meltdown. Any sort of catastrophe you can think of…”

“Unless we come up with our own scenario first,” Miguel murmured.

I looked at him, saw a crafty glimmer in his eyes. “Come again?”

“We’re not going to Mars,” he went on. “We know that now. But that doesn’t mean we have to be puppets, either.” A smile crept across his face. “They want us to fail? Okay, fine… but maybe we can fail on our terms.”

That’s when we started coming up with our little practical joke. Four months later, though, I didn’t feel much like laughing. Not as I looked out the airlock porthole to see Earth spinning around and around like a towel in a laundry dryer.

But it wasn’t the planet that was tumbling end over end; it was the Mess. The blowout had been sufficiently violent to cause the station’s escaping air to act like a jet, causing the entire station to pitch forward in an axial roll. And although we hadn’t yet felt any physiological effects of the spin—our fake portholes and instrument read-outs, in fact, had ensured that we wouldn’t know what was going on—I knew that it was only a matter of time before the g-force increased to the point that we’d lose consciousness and black out.

But that wasn’t the worst of it. My suspicions were confirmed a few seconds later, when Capcom’s voice came online again. “Zulu, this is Huntsville. Samoa Tracking indicates that your orbit appears to be deteriorating. Can you confirm?”

“Roger that, Huntsville,” Miguel said. “My instruments show that the accident has caused a change in our attitude and altitude.”

“Affirmative,” I said. “I confirm through visual sighting.”

From elsewhere in the Mess, Ron-Jon chimed in. “Huntsville, I’ve found the location of the decompression. It’s a small hole, approximately half a centimeter in diameter, located on the upper port side of the personnel compartment. I’ve plugged the hole with a T-shirt and I’m about to use the seal kit to make emergency repairs.”

This was good news, at least. Now that Ron-Jon put a stopper in the hole, the Mess no longer had a pressure leak and we could concentrate on our larger problem: namely, stopping the station from cartwheeling into Earth’s upper atmosphere.

A long pause. “We copy, Zulu,” Capcom said at last. “Please be advised that you’re coming within range of Monterey Tracking, and we’re prepared to hand you off to an associate who’s standing by to assume emergency flight control.”

Oh, how wonderful. Skycorp was going put our fate in the hands of someone who’d probably learned how to fly a spacecraft from playing a desktop flight simulator video games. “Um… negatory on that, Huntsville,” Miguel said. “We’re going to execute Code Whiskey Tango Foxtrot instead.”