Nearly four months into the flight, Jamie suddenly asked, “How is Professor Hoffman? Is he involved in these analyses?”
It took several minutes for messages to travel the distance between the spacecraft and Earth. As he watched the little display screen of the communications console Jamie saw DiNardo’s swarthy face register surprise, then something else. Guilt? The priest ran a hand over his shaved scalp before answering.
“Professor Hoffman has apparently suffered a nervous breakdown. He is in a rest home in Vienna for the present.”
Jamie felt the same surprise flaring into guilt that seared his guts.
“I have visited him myself,” DiNardo went on. “His doctors assure me that he will be fine in a few weeks or so.”
I wonder how I’d have reacted to being yanked off the mission at the last minute, Jamie asked himself. He changed the subject back to geology and concluded his conversation with the priest as swiftly as he could.
He left the communications console up on the flight deck and rushed down the length of the habitat module toward the observation port. By common custom the section housing the port was considered private. Whenever someone entered it and closed the hatch that separated it from the rest of the module, no one else in the crew would enter. It was the one place aboard the Mars spacecraft where a person could be alone.
Jamie needed to be alone, to be away from all the others. Yet as he hurried down the narrow passageway he felt a sullen tide of anger rising within him. Not guilt. Not pity. Anger. They always have to take something away from you, he heard a voice in his mind complain. They can never let you have the whole cake; they always lick the icing off first. Or piss on it. So I’m on my way to Mars and Hoffman’s in a funny farm. Great.
Then he remembered his grandfather years ago, when Jamie had been an eager young high schooler bursting to show off how much he had learned in his science classes. He had tried to explain to Al the laws of thermodynamics, throwing in terms such as “entropy” and “heat flow” and “thermal equilibrium.”
“Aw, I know all about that stuff,” Al had said.
“You do?” Jamie had been extremely skeptical of his grandfather’s claim.
“Sure. Comes up every day in the store. Or when I play poker. What it boils down to is, you can’t win, you can’t even break even, and you can’t get out of the game.”
Jamie had gaped at his grandfather. Al had explained the concepts of thermodynamics as succinctly as he would ever hear.
“Main thing,” Al said, grinning at his surprised grandson, “is to stay in balance with life. That way no matter what happens it won’t throw you. Stay in balance. Never lean so far in one direction that a puff of wind can knock you over.”
What it boils down to is that you have to pay for everything you get, and the price is always more than the value of the thing you’re after. And you can’t get out of the game. Even millions of miles from Earth, you can’t get out of the game.
The hatch to the observation area was open. No one was there. Good.
The astronomers hated the spin that produced a feeling of gravity within the Mars-bound ships. It meant that their telescopes, even though placed outside the ships along the tethers connecting them, had to be mounted on complex motorized bearings that moved exactly opposite to the spin so that they could remain focused on the same distant speck of light for weeks or months at a time.
The spin had bothered Jamie, too, at first. The stars rotated past the oblong window in a slow steady procession instead of remaining fixed against the dark backdrop the way they did on Earth. But they don’t really stay still on Earth, Jamie told himself. They rotate around the sky too slow for you to notice. Out here we’ve just speeded things up. We’ve made our own little world and it spins around every two and a half minutes instead of every twenty-four hours.