Mars

EARTH

HOUSTON: It had taken Edith two days to make up her mind. Two days and all her courage.

When she had watched Jamie utter his Navaho greeting from the surface of Mars she had smiled to herself. Standing in the jam-packed KHTV newsroom that morning, she had no premonition of the uproar his few words would cause. One of her co-workers nudged her shoulder slightly as the picture on the screen focused on his sky-blue space suit.

“That’s your significant other, isn’t it?” the woman whispered to Edith.

She nodded, thinking, He used to be. Used to be.

Edith was surprised when the network news show that evening spent so much time on the fact that an American Indian was on Mars. The next morning, on her own, she called several of her contacts at the Johnson Space Center and found that there was considerable consternation among the NASA brass about Jamie’s impromptu little speech.

“The guys upstairs are goin’ apeshit,” one of her informers told her. “But you didn’t hear anything from me, understand?”

By the second day there were rumbles that the Space Council in Washington was reviewing the Indian’s refusal to speak the words NASA had prepared for him. The Vice-President was up in arms, rumor had it. What she did was news. Everyone knew that she wanted to be the party’s choice for their presidential candidate next year.

Edith reviewed tapes of boringly standard interviews with Jamie’s parents in Berkeley and blandly evasive NASA officials. She went to sleep that second night thinking about what she should do.

She awoke the next morning, her mind made up. She called the station and told her flabbergasted news director that she was taking the rest of the week off.

“You can’t do that! I don’t…”

“I have two weeks’ vacation and a whole moss of sick days I never took,” Edith said sweetly into the phone. “I’ll be back by Monday.”

“Goddammit, Edie, they’ll fire your ass! You know what they’re like upstairs!”

She made a sigh that he could not help but hear. “Then they’ll have to fire me and give me my severance pay, I guess.”

She hung up, then immediately called for a plane reservation to New York.

Now, winging thirty-five thousand feet above the Appalachians, Edith rehearsed in her mind what she would tell the network news chief. I can get to James Waterman’s parents. And his grandfather. And the people he trained with who were not selected to go to Mars. I know his story and I know the inner workings of the Mars Project. I can produce you a story of how this thing works, from the inside. The human story of the Mars Project. Not just shining science, but the infighting, the competition, the guts and blood of it all.

As she went through her mental preparation she thought of Jamie. He’ll hate me for doing this. He’ll absolutely hate me.

But it’s my ticket to a job with the network. He’s got Mars. He left me for Mars. Now I can use Mars my own way, for myself.