Red Mars (10 page)

Everyone laughed. Even Frank, looking surprised. “But of course I lied!” Arkady shouted, a big upside-down grin splitting his red beard. “How else could I get here? I want to go to Mars to do what I want, and the selection committee wanted people to go and do what they were told. You know that!” He pointed down at them and shouted, “You all lied, you know you did!”

Frank was laughing harder than ever. Sax wore his usual Buster Keaton, but he raised a finger and said, “The Revised Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory,” and a great jeer went up from them all. They had all been required to take this exam; it was the world’s most widely used psychological test, and well regarded by experts. Respondents agreed or disagreed to 556 statements, and a profile was formed from the replies; but the judgments concerning what the answers meant were based on the earlier responses of a sample group of 2,600 white, married, middle-class Minnesota farmers of the 1930s. Despite all subsequent revisions, the pervading bias created by the nature of that first test group was still deeply ingrained in the test— or at least some of them thought so. “Minnesota!” Arkady shouted, rolling his eyes. “Farmers! Farmers from Minnesota! I tell you this now, I lied in answer to every single question! I answered exactly
opposite
to what I really felt, and
this
is what allowed me to score as normal!”

Wild cheers greeted this announcement. “Hell,” John said, “I’m
from
Minnesota and I had to lie.”

More cheers. Frank, Maya noted, was crimson with hilarity, incapable of speech, hands clutching his stomach, nodding, giggling, helpless to stop himself. She had never seen him laugh like that.

Sax said, “The test made you lie.”

“What, not you?” Arkady demanded. “Didn’t you lie too?”

“Well, no,” Sax said, blinking as if the concept had never occurred to him before. “I told the truth to every question.”

They laughed harder than ever. Sax looked startled at their response, but that only made him look funnier.

Someone shouted, “What do you say, Michel? How do you account for yourself?”

Michel Duval spread his hands. “You may be underestimating the sophistication of the RMMPI. There are questions which test how honest you are being.”

This statement brought down a rain of questions on his head, a methodological inquisition. What were his controls? How did the testers make their theories falsifiable? How did they repeat them? How did they eliminate alternative explanations of the data? How could they claim to be scientific in
any
sense of the word
whatsoever
? Clearly a lot of them considered psychology a pseudoscience, and many had considerable resentment for the hoops they had been forced to jump through to get aboard. The years of competition had taken their toll. And the discovery of this shared feeling sparked a score of voluble conversations. The tension raised by Arkady’s political talk disappeared.

Perhaps, Maya thought, Arkady had defused the one with the other. If so it had been cleverly done, but Arkady was a clever man. She thought back. Actually it had been John Boone who had changed the subject. He had in effect flown to the ceiling and come to Arkady’s rescue, and Arkady had seized the chance. They were both clever men. And it seemed possible they were in some sort of collusion. Forming a kind of alternative leadership, perhaps, one American, one Russian. Something would have to be done about that.

She said to Michel, “Do you think it’s a bad sign we all consider ourselves such liars?”

Michel shrugged. “It’s been healthy to talk about it. Now we realize we’re more alike than we thought. No one has to feel they were unusually dishonest to get aboard.”

“And you?” Arkady asked. “Did you present yourself as a most rational and balanced psychologist, hiding the strange mind we have come to know and love?”

A small smile from Michel. “You’re the expert in strange minds, Arkady.”

Then the few still watching the screens called out. The radiation count had started to fall. After a while it slipped back to just a little above normal.

Someone returned the
Pastoral
to the moment of the horn call. The last movement of the symphony, “Glad and Grateful Feelings After the Storm,” poured from the speaker system, and as they left the shelter and fanned out through the ship like dandelion seeds on a breeze, the beautiful old folk melody was broadcast throughout the
Ares
, elaborating itself in all its Brucknerian richness. While it played, they found that the ship’s hardened systems had survived intact. The thicker walls of the farm and the forest biome had afforded the plants some protection, and although there would be some die-offs, the seed stocks were not harmed. The animals could not be eaten either, but presumably would give birth to a healthy next generation. The only casualties were some uncaptured songbirds from D’s dining hall; they found a scattering of them dead on the floor.

As for the crew, the shelter’s protection had shielded them from all but about six rem. That was bad for a mere three hours, but it could have been worse. The exterior of the ship had taken over 140 rem, a lethal dose.

Six months inside a hotel, with never a walk outside. Inside it was late summer, and the days were long. Green dominated the walls and ceilings, and people went barefoot. Quiet conversations were nearly inaudible in the hum of machinery, the whoosh of ventilators. The ship seemed empty somehow, whole sections of it abandoned as the crew settled down to wait. Small knots of people sat in the halls in toruses B and D, talking. Some stopped their conversations when Maya wandered by, which she naturally found disturbing. She was having trouble falling asleep, trouble waking up. Work made her restless; all the engineers were only waiting, after all, and the simulations had gotten nearly intolerable. She had trouble gauging the passage of time. She stumbled more than she used to. She had gone to see Vlad, and he had recommended overhydration, more running, more swimming.

Hiroko told her to spend more time on the farm. She gave it a try, spending hours weeding, harvesting, trimming, fertilizing, watering, talking, sitting on a bench, looking at leaves. Spacing out. The farm rooms were max chambers, their barrel roofs lined with bright sunstrips. The multi-leveled floors were crowded with crops, many new since the storm. There was not enough space to feed the crew entirely on farm food, but Hiroko disliked that fact and struggled against it, converting storage rooms as they emptied out. Dwarf strains of wheat, rice, soy, and barley grew in stacked trays; above the trays were hanging rows of hydroponic vegetables, and enormous clear jars of green and yellow algae, used to help regulate the gas exchange.

Some days Maya did nothing but watch the farm team work. Hiroko and her assistant Iwao were always tinkering at the endless project of maximizing the closure of their biological life-support system, and they had a crew of other regulars working on it: Raul, Rya, Gene, Evgenia, Andrea, Roger, Ellen, Bob, and Tasha. Success in the closure attempt was measured in K values, K representing closure itself. Thus for every substance they recycled,

where
E
was the rate of consumption in the system,
e
the rate of (incomplete) closure, and
I
a constant for which Hiroko, earlier in her career, had established a corrected value. The goal, K = I - 1, was unreachable, but asymptotically approaching it was the farm biologists’ favorite game, and more than that, critical to their eventual existence on Mars. So conversations about it could extend over days, spiraling off into complexities that no one really understood. In essence the farm team was already at their real work, which Maya envied. She was so sick of simulations!

Hiroko was an enigma to Maya. Aloof and serious, she always seemed absorbed in her work, and her team tended always to be around her, as if she was the queen of a realm that had nothing to do with the rest of the ship. Maya didn’t like that, but there was nothing she could do about it. And something in Hiroko’s attitude made it not so threatening; it was just a fact, the farm was a separate place, its crew a separate society. And it was possible that Maya could use them to counterbalance the influence of Arkady and John, somehow; so she did not worry about their separate realm. In fact she joined them more than ever before. Sometimes she went with them up to the hub at the end of a work session, to play a game they had invented called tunneljump. There was a jump tube down the central shaft, where all the joints between cylinders had been expanded to the same width as the cylinders themselves, making a single smooth tube. There were rails to facilitate quick movement back and forth along this tube, but in their game, jumpers stood on the storm-shelter hatch, and tried to leap up the tube to the bubble-dome hatch, a full 500 meters away, without bumping into the walls or railings. Coriolis forces made this effectively impossible, and flying even halfway would usually win a game. But one day Hiroko came by on her way to check an experimental crop in the bubble dome, and after greeting them she crouched on the shelter hatch and jumped, and slowly floated the full length of the tunnel, rotating as she flew, and stopping herself at the bubble-dome hatch with a single outstretched hand.

The players stared up the tunnel in stunned silence.

“Hey!” Rya called to Hiroko. “How did you do that?”

“Do what?”

They explained the game to her. She smiled, and Maya was suddenly certain she had already known the rules. “So how did you do it?” Rya repeated.

“You jump straight!” Hiroko explained, and disappeared into the bubble dome.

That night at dinner the story got around. Frank said to Hiroko, “Maybe you just got lucky.”

Hiroko smiled. “Maybe you and I should total twenty jumps and see who wins.”

“Sounds good to me.”

“What’ll we bet?”

“Money, of course.”

Hiroko shook her head. “Do you really think money matters anymore?”

A few days later Maya floated under the curve of the bubble dome with Frank and John, looking ahead at Mars, which was now a gibbous orb the size of a dime.

“A lot of arguments these days,” John remarked casually. “I hear Alex and Mary got into an actual fight. Michel says it’s to be expected, but still . . .”

“Maybe we brought too many leaders,” Maya said.

“Maybe you should have been the only one,” Frank jibed.

“Too many chiefs?” said John.

Frank shook his head. “That’s not it.”

“No? There are a lot of stars on board.”

“The urge to excel and the urge to lead aren’t the same. Sometimes I think they may be opposites.”

“I leave the judgment to you, Captain.” John grinned at Frank’s scowl. He was, Maya thought, the only relaxed person left among them.

“The shrinks saw the problem,” Frank went on, “it was obvious enough even for them. They used the Harvard solution.”

“The Harvard solution,” John repeated, savoring the phrase.

“Long ago Harvard’s administrators noticed that if they accepted only straight-A high school students, and then gave out the whole range of grades to freshmen, a distressing number of them were getting unhappy at their Ds and Fs and messing up the Yard by blowing their brains out on it.”

“Couldn’t have that,” John said.

Maya rolled her eyes. “You two must have gone to trade schools, eh?”

“The trick to avoiding this unpleasantness, they found, was to accept a certain percentage of students who were used to getting mediocre grades, but had distinguished themselves in some other way—”

“Like having the nerve to apply to Harvard with mediocre grades—”

“— used to the bottom of the grade curve, and happy just to be at Harvard at all.”

“How did you hear of this?” Maya asked.

Frank smiled. “I was one of them.”

“We don’t have any mediocrities on this ship,” John said.

Frank looked dubious. “We do have a lot of smart scientists with no interest in running things. Many of them consider it boring. Administration, you know. They’re glad to hand it over to people like us.”

“Beta males,” John said, mocking Frank and his interest in sociobiology. “Brilliant sheep.” The way they mocked each other . . .

“You’re wrong,” Maya said to Frank.

“Maybe so. Anyway, they’re the body politic. They have at least the power to follow.” He said this as if the idea depressed him.

John, due for a shift on the bridge, said good-bye and left.

Frank floated over to Maya’s side, and she shifted nervously. They had never discussed their brief affair, and it hadn’t come up, even indirectly, in quite a while. She had thought about what to say, if it ever did: she would say that she occasionally indulged herself with men she liked. That it had been something done on the spur of the moment.

But he only pointed to the red dot in the sky. “I wonder why we’re going.”

Maya shrugged. Probably he meant not
we
, but
I
. “Everyone has their reasons,” she said.

He glanced at her. “That’s so true.”

She ignored his tone of voice. “Maybe it’s our genes,” she said. “Maybe they felt things going wrong on Earth. Felt an increased speed of mutation, or something like that.”

“So they struck out for a clean start.”

“Yes.”

“The selfish gene theory. Intelligence only a tool to aid successful reproduction.”

“I suppose.”

“But this trip endangers successful reproduction,” Frank said. “It isn’t safe out here.”

“But it isn’t safe on Earth either. Waste, radiation, other people. . . .”

Frank shook his head. “No. I don’t think the selfishness is in the genes. I think it’s somewhere else.” He reached out with a forefinger and tapped her between the breasts— a solid tap on the sternum, causing him to drift back to the floor. Staring at her the whole while, he touched himself in the same place. “Good night, Maya.”

A week or two later Maya was in the farm harvesting cabbages, walking down an aisle between long stacked trays of them. She had the room to herself. The cabbages looked like rows of brains, pulsing with thought in the bright afternoon light.