Frightened.
Jamie closed his eyes in the darkness and remembered the first time he had met Joanna Brumado. She had been frightened then, too.
All the trainees had been required to pass an ocean survival test. “There’s a small but finite chance that your return to the Earth will end in an emergency landing at sea,” said the grizzled old chief petty officer they had borrowed from a U.S. Navy aquanaut team. Although their return flight was planned to terminate at the space station in low Earth orbit, if something went wrong the command module of their spacecraft could be detached and enter the Earth’s atmosphere to splash down in the ocean, much as the old Apollo spacecraft had done.
“You could be in a raft for several hours or even several days,” the chief had said cheerily. “My job is to get you prepared for that contingency.”
So they spent three days in an open raft several miles off the coast of the main island of Hawaii. Eight men and women, including the leather-skinned chief. Joanna had been one of them.
Jamie recalled how she spent the whole time sick and scared, her face white, her fists clenched so hard that her fingernails cut into her palms.
He had felt seasick too for the first few hours, bobbing incessantly on the dark, towering swells. In the trough of the waves they could see nothing but deep blue water and the pale sky. When they rose to a crest, the horizon slanted and weaved nauseatingly.
They each wore personal life preservers, puffy inflated vests that were too hot in the sun but not warm at night. The chief would not let them roll up their coverall sleeves or pants. They also had to wear floppy-brimmed hats. “Sunstroke,” the chief said knowingly. No one argued.
“Be a helluva thing to go all the way to Mars and then drown coming home,” said one of the trainees, a grinning tanned blond from California with the build of a weight lifter.
“Right now,” said one of the other women, “I wouldn’t mind drowning. It would be a relief.”
The chief made each one of them slide over the raft’s round gunnel and into the water for an hour at a time. “You won’t sink, not with your flotation gear inflated. Only thing you gotta worry about is sharks.”
Jamie spent his entire hour in the water worrying about sharks while the chief explained how to watch the water for their telltale dorsal fins. ” ‘Course, if one comes up from deep we won’t see him until it’s prob’ly too late. Not much you can do about that.”
The water seemed warm at first, but as the minutes plodded by Jamie felt the heat leaching out of his body. I’m raising the temperature of the Pacific Ocean, he told himself. I hope the sharks appreciate it.
Joanna’s hour came near sunset. She seemed rigid with terror, but she managed to swing her legs stiffly up on the water-slicked gunnel and slide almost noiselessly into the sea. She hung in the water almost like a corpse, legs unmoving, arms stretched out tensely, her eyes staring, her lips pressed into a tight bloodless line.
She drifted away from the raft time and again without making the slightest effort to swim back toward it. The chief yelled and bellowed at her, but each time he ended by hauling on the umbilical line to bring her closer.
As Jamie lay on his bunk in the darkened rover, the Martian wind calling to him, he saw Joanna once again alone in the cold black sea, terrified, enduring the chief’s exasperated hollering and the embarrassed attention of the other trainees until finally the chief pulled her back aboard the raft. Shivering, Joanna wrapped a blanket around herself and crept to a corner of the raft. There she huddled into a fetal position without speaking a word to anyone.
Why would she endure such fear? Jamie asked himself. Why has she pushed herself to get through all the rigors of training and come here to Mars?
Then he remembered their foray onto the glacier at McMurdo and he finally realized what Joanna was truly afraid of.