Allen Steele: The Zoo Team

Another pause. “Please repeat, Zulu. We don’t…”

“Copy that,” I said. I knew what Miguel meant even if Capcom didn’t; Code Whisky Tango Foxtrot was Zoo Team talk for I’m about to do something crazy; go to a private frequency so I can tell you what it is. So I switched to another freq and said, “What do you have in mind, Miguel?”

“I think we can take care of this ourselves. Can you enter the REV and commence ERO?”

“No sweat. Be ready in a minute.”

ERO stood for Emergency Re-Orbit, a maneuver we’d practiced during training exercises in Huntsville. The Mess had four reaction-control rocket clusters, with each RCR mounted on one of the service module’s four sides. They could be manually fired to re-adjust the station’s attitude, all right, but they lacked sufficient thrust to stop its spin or return the Mess to proper altitude. For that, they’d need a little help: namely, the REV’s big engine.

For this to work, though, the thrusters and the REV would have to be fired at exactly the same time, in exactly the right pattern. If we got it wrong, we’d actually increase the station’s spin, and make our problems worse. So it was a risky maneuver, yes… but better this than trusting some dude on the ground.

Discarding my gloves and helmet, I opened the docking hatch and pulled myself into the REV’s tiny cockpit, squeezing myself into the left-hand seat. Once I was strapped in, I switched on the instrument panel and warmed up the engine. As I did all this, I could hear Capcom nagging Miguel, demanding that we tell them what we intended to do up here.

“Ready when you are, Miguel,” I said, still using the private channel.

“Roger that,” he said, then muted the ground link so that Huntsville wouldn’t distract us. “I’ve got my eye on the screen. On my mark, fire the main engine at full thrust for two seconds. Copy?”

“Copy.” I rested my hand on the throttle bar. “On your mark.”

Through the narrow cockpit windows, I saw only darkness. Then Earth’s curved horizon came up from below, the South Pacific a couple of hundred miles below. Hawaii had just become visible when Miguel said, “Three… two… one… mark!”

I pushed up the throttle bar, heard the dull rumble of the REV’s engine behind me, felt a tremor pass through the Mess. I silently said One Mississippi, Two Mississippi , then hastily jerked the bar back down, cutting the thrust. “How was that?”

“Okay,” Miguel said, “but we’re still tumbling.”

“Hey, warn a fella next time, awright?” Ron-Jon squalled. “I’m about to puke back here.”

That was the first time any of us had cracked wise since the crisis began; we needed the laugh. “Let’s try again,” Miguel said. Once more, Earth had vanished through my windows. “Mark on three, three-quarters thrust this time.”

“Copy.”

“All right, get ready… three, two, one… mark.”

We went through the routine again, and three more times after that. And after each time I fired the main engine and he fired the RCRs, I could see that Earth was coming up a little more slowly and that it was a little farther away until, just as the Mess was passing over the coast of Ecuador, the station stopped spinning entirely and Capcom informed us that, according to Monterey Tracking, our altitude had returned to normal.

That was also when Huntsville informed us that a shuttle was on its way up from New Mexico to take us back down. I’d already figured that retrieval would be necessary; I’d used up nearly one-third of the REV’s fuel reserves in our ERO. Nonetheless, I was surprised to hear that Flight had decided to cut the rest of our mission short.

Ron-Jon wasn’t. “Better update your resumes, boys,” he said as soon as the three of us met up again in the personnel module. “I think we’re going to be looking for work again.”

He was right, of course. Perhaps Team Zulu had displayed grace under pressure, not to mention no small amount of ingenuity, by saving both the Mess and ourselves from certain destruction, but we were hardly forgiven for the stunt we’d pulled just before that. And while it would be nice to say Dr. Heinemann was so impressed by our astronautical skills that he recommended that Zulu Team be assigned to Ares II, the sad fact is that exactly the opposite happened. Miguel, Ron, and I barely walked down the ladder from the Skycorp shuttle that had rendezvoused with the Mess two days after the accident when we were bundled into a waiting jet and flown to Huntsville, where we spent the next three days being grilled, together and separately, by so many different people that we must have been interviewed by half of Skycorp’s management by the time we were done.

Dr. Heinemann was among them, and while he wasn’t the worst of our interviewers, he made up for it with a persistent belief that there hadn’t really been a collision, but that we’d concocted the accident ourselves. Fortunately, on-site inspection of the Mess backed up our story; the hole in the station had been made from the outside, not the inside. But Dr. Heiney had it in for us. We’d screwed up his experiment—never mind that we were supposed to screw it up, just not the way we did—and, in the end, he got his revenge.

Six days after the accident, the three of us were marched into a conference room on the top floor of the company’s offices, where a half-dozen or so suits and Dr. Heiney sat on either side of a long, black table, at the other end of which was seated Skycorp’s CEO and president. After spending the next ten minutes ripping us apart, he told us what we’d expected to hear anyway: we weren’t going to Mars, and we could collect our severance checks on the way out the door.

And that was it. Our space careers were over.

Or so we thought.

I still had friends in the company and at NASA, and over the next eighteen months or so, I heard about what happened to the Alpha, Gamma, and Theta teams. As it turned out, Team Zulu’s performance turned out to be the high-water mark. At least Miguel, Ron-Jon, and I got along together; the other teams were so high-strung, their members were at each other’s throats before the first four weeks of their respective missions were over. And when Team Gamma had an accident of their own—an oxygen tank exploded—they panicked so badly that Huntsville had to order them into the REV, which was then piloted to the ground by remote control. Only three of the nine guys on those teams ended up going to Mars; NASA had to pull together the rest of the Ares II crew from other sources, and those people were not put aboard the Mess first. The station was deorbited shortly after that, and the last I heard of Dr. Heiney, the old quack was teaching Psych 101 at a community college somewhere in Louisiana.

Ares II got safely to Mars and back again, though, and so did Ares III. But after that, Skycorp took over the Mars exploration effort. Together with a Japanese company, Uchu-Hiko, they announced their intent to establish a permanent settlement near Arsia Mons. I guess someone must have rethought the criteria by which they picked the people who’d colonize Mars, because about six months after that I got a call from Skycorp’s HR office, asking if I’d be interested in coming in for an interview.

I wasn’t. By then, I’d married and found a new career as a freelance writer. And to tell the truth, I was also still burned about the way we’d been treated. So I turned them down, albeit more politely than they deserved, and went on my way.

But Miguel and Ron-Jon didn’t. And that’s why today I received an e-card from them: a picture of the two guys, their hands around the other guy’s throat, their tongues hanging out of their mouths as they mug for the camera. The inscription is a cliché— Having a wonderful time, wish you were here —but it’s what is in the background that got my attention: a big window, and on the other side of it, a desert of red and rocky sand.