Allen Steele: The Zoo Team

We were somewhere over Australia, about a quarter of the way to Mars, when Miguel flipped out. Ron and I had a lot to do with his breakdown, and when it was all over we were quite proud of ourselves.

A good, full-blown mental collapse takes time and effort, of course, and we’d spent the last few weeks laying the groundwork. Ron-Jon had a tendency to snore, so we picked that as the starting point; he and I shifted our schedules so that he’d sack out at the same time as Miguel, giving him the full benefit of Ron’s nasal performances. Truth be told, Miguel could probably sleep through a train wreck, but he pretended restlessness, twisting around in his bag while Ron made like Branford Marsalis with a broken reed. After a couple of weeks, Miguel was appropriately twitchy; he griped and complained, and made such a show of being surly that it was hard to tell whether he meant it or not.

By then, I’d started up the paddleball. I smuggled one up to the Mess in my flight bag, not really intending it to be part of the act, but because fooling around with it always helped me relax. So I’d float around the station—pardon me, the Mars Expedition Simulator—bouncing that little red ball on its elastic string, making sure that I was always in the same compartment with Miguel when I was the most active. It got on his nerves, and after awhile he had something else to bitch about.

The most cunning bit, though, were the chess games. The fold-down table in the personnel module had a built-in chessboard, its surface and the bottom of the pieces fitted with Velcro to prevent anything from floating away. Miguel was a hell of a player—I knew that for a fact, because he’d outfoxed me time and again when we were training together in Alabama—but over the course of several weeks he deliberately threw games to both me and Ron, signaling us that he was about to make a bad move by prodding us beneath the table. So I’d take his queen or Ron-Jon would knock off a knight, and Miguel would snarl something obscene before pushing himself away from the table and through the module hatch. And every time he lost, Miguel would make sure that his anger was just a little worse; no full-blown tantrums, just indications that, day by day, he was losing his shit.

When any of these things happened—the snoring, the paddleball, the lost chess games, all the other scenes the three of us staged over the course of eight weeks—we’d have to restrain the occasional impulse to glance at one of the camera lenses not very well concealed in the bulkheads or ceilings. They wouldn’t have shown us anything, of course, but at times like those, we would’ve loved to know what the NASA and Skycorp shrinks were making of the little scenarios we were putting on for their benefit.

We played to those cameras right up to the end. The day before Miguel went bonzo, Ron and I slipped away to the Personal Hygiene Area—in non-technical parlance, the head—while Miguel remained on watch in the command module. To make it even more convincing, we muted our headsets, and even stuck a piece of tape over the ceiling camera. There was another lens concealed within the passageway, though, along with a hidden mic, so we played to that, making sure that we didn’t close the hatch while we had a private chat. It lasted only a minute or so, but it gave Dr. Heinemann and his people something else to write up. Like they didn’t have enough already.

So when Miguel flamed out, it wasn’t spontaneous human combustion; we’d spent a lot of time stoking the furnace. But he was the leading man in our little melodrama, so we let him pick the time and place.

Tuesday, June 8, 2023; 0915 GMT:

“Will you knock it off with that thing?”

“What thing?” I hung upside-down in the service module, feet anchored to a restraint bar, bouncing the red ball off my racket. Bonka-bonka-bonka-bonka … “This thing?”

“Yeah, that thing. Cut it out.” Miguel hovered above the atmosphere control console, e-book in hand, trying to take accurate readings from the various flatscreens. All of them displayed false data, of course, just as the plasma displays behind what would have been normal portholes showed us Mars as we would’ve seen it from twenty-four million miles away. Nice work, really; whatever Hollywood special-effects outfit Skycorp had subcontracted for this part of the Mess had definitely earned their money.

“Sorry. Didn’t know it was bugging you.” I caught the ball, tied it against the paddle, slipped it into the back pocket of my jumpsuit. Miguel glanced at me, and when he did, his right eyelid twitched a little as a very subtle wink. A signal: do something else.

“So… how’s your family?”

“They’re fine.” Terse, staring at the panel again. Little red numbers on little blue screens.

“Great. Glad to hear it.” I unhooked my feet from the bar. “How’s your sister?”

“Fine.” He touched his e-book screen again; I noticed some crude, hand-drawn circles in the margins. Doodles. Good. Shrinks love doodles. “Why’re you asking?”

I somersaulted, came down behind him, and grabbed a wall rung. “Just asking. Seems like a nice girl, that’s all.”

He didn’t look back at me. “So why do you want to know?”

“He’s just asking a question.” Ron was coming through the hatch from the personnel module, hair still wet from the sponge-bath he’d just taken. “What’s the big deal?”

“Yeah, that’s all.” Then I turned away from Miguel and muttered something nasty about what I’d like to do with his sister.

He caught it, as I knew he would; I’m sure the people in Huntsville did, too, because I said it just loud enough for the hidden mics. In the next instant, Miguel dropped the e-book and came at me, launching himself across the narrow compartment. I turned around just as he grabbed me by the collar and rammed me against a bulkhead.

“Say that again,” he snarled in my face, “and I’ll kill you!”

So I grinned and said it again.

As I said, we’d planned the whole thing in advance, before we’d even left the ground. In his pocket, Miguel had a stage knife: a six-inch switchblade, pearl handle and everything, just like the ones the L.A. street gangs carry, only this one had a phony blade that couldn’t cut cheese and, when pushed against a solid surface, retracted straight back into the handle. Skycorp wasn’t the only one to use Hollywood magic; Miguel had a friend who worked for a prop supply company.

Miguel yanked the knife out of his breast pocket, flicked it open. My eyes widened, and I yelled, “Whoa, man, waitamminit… !”

“What the hell are you doing?” Ron shouted. “Leggo of him!”

He pushed himself toward us, but Miguel kicked him out of the way. Ron flew across the compartment, flailing his arms helplessly. And then Miguel turned to me again and, muttering a Latino obscenity, shoved the blade into my chest.

Ron’s aim was perfect—at that instant, he landed next to the main communications panel. One swipe of his elbow across a pair of toggle switches, and the Ku-band transceiver was down. He quickly checked the radio, then looked back at Miguel and me.

“Okay, that’s a wrap,” he said. “We’re off the air.”

Miguel still had his knife thrust up to its hilt in my heart. Hearing Ron, he pulled the knife away. Sproing, the blade reappeared. “You okay?” he asked.

I looked down at myself. I wasn’t even nicked. “I’m good.”

“Didn’t mean to slam you so hard,” he added, genuinely concerned.

“Don’t worry about it.” In zero-gee, any action like that can be enough to hurt. Considering that I’d been lethally stabbed, though, I was feeling pretty good. “Does this mean I can have a date with your sister?”