The Countdown

A biologist makes a return trip to a fledgling colony on Mars while carrying precious, life-saving cargo.

The rocket peels away, falling back toward Earth as we hurtle into blackness, and the countdown begins.

Seven months, two days, twenty-one hours. 300 million miles.

I glance at the tiny refrigerator, stuffed with vials of clear liquid.

Crammed in with the other emergency cargo are centrifuges, pipettes, and yeast so that we won’t have to make another hasty, arduous trip back to Earth.

Seven months each way, from the colony to Earth and back. Fourteen months round trip. Before the centrifuge broke in a wind storm, I made insulin obsessively – and there was just enough to stretch, with careful rationing, fourteen months.

But if we’re delayed, even by a few days, he’ll die before we return.

The still moments are the hardest, when the equipment has been checked and rechecked, when tasks are completed and everything is running perfectly, when there is nothing left to do but stare at the blackness of space or the claustrophobic capsule. Every inch of it reminds me of him, a torture that I crave each waking minute.

Numbers scroll across a screen on the fridge door: 37 °F/2.8 °C.

Years ago there was another fridge, a smart fridge. One of our first training exercises was to swim in a flight suit, and I failed miserably, trying to keep my head up while the rest of my body sank under the weight of the equipment. Don’t let your butt sink, Flaherty, the training officer hollered at me from the side of the pool.

The next day, when I opened the fridge, its screen flickered to life with a video of me flailing in the training pool. Don’t let your butt sink, Flaherty!

Any time the fridge opened, Don’t let your butt sink, Flaherty! blared through the common room.

It didn’t take me long to ferret out the culprit: Andrew Morris, a computer engineer who thought hacking fridge firmware was a clever prank. That day, and for many days afterward, I hated Andrew Morris.

I try to look away from the refrigerator and out at the stars, but the millions of miles of enveloping nothingness close in, suffocating me. I undo my straps and push off my seat, floating to the exercise corner.

I maneuver myself into the weightlifting machine and position the bar on my shoulders, and suddenly my weightlessness is gone. It’s odd, greeting gravity like an old friend.

I was practicing the “astronaut workout” on the day that Cortez, the team physicist, erupted. The stress of training intensified everybody’s quirks, and suddenly Cortez let loose a barrage of complaints against every member of the team. But when he lit into me, something happened.

Andrew Morris stepped in. But he didn’t raise his voice. He deflected Cortez with humor – not the sarcastic kind, but good-natured humor – until the team devolved into laughter and Cortez sheepishly apologized. Then Andrew winked at me. Don’t let your butt sink, Flaherty, he said. It had become our team’s code – Keep your chin up. If Flaherty can learn to swim in a flight suit, then you can handle this.

On that day, I didn’t quite hate Andrew Morris anymore.

I hated him even less when he goaded me into doing a somersault during a zero-gravity practice flight.

And I began to admit that I didn’t really hate him at all when he took me on a midnight picnic on the roof of the research building, and we drank cheap wine, laid on a blanket, and talked about water and its scarcity, about frontiers and exploration and hope. Then we looked for Mars, the little red dot in the sky.

I finish a grueling set of squats, and my gaze lands on the pressure-sealed door.

I haven’t smiled in months, not since the wind storm. My face has forgotten how – perhaps the muscles have atrophied. But I almost want to smile as a memory pushes into my thoughts. How, after a six-month mission to the International Space Station, I clambered out of the reentry capsule – desperate for a proper shower, my hair a mess – to find Andrew on one knee. It was crazy, and I told him so. The mission to Mars was rapidly approaching. It was no time for a wedding. But I didn’t say no.

I rub my wedding band with my thumb.

The hasty wedding was squeezed in between briefings and research and training, with no one but a chaplain, our parents, and our mission team. I wore a white cotton dress; he wore a borrowed suit.

As they do a thousand times a day, my eyes move back to the refrigerator and the rows of clear vials.

The virus, hardly more than a cold, swept through our fledgling colony, but after his fever faded, Andrew was insatiably thirsty, shedding weight like a starving person, confused and exhausted. A liability.

How could we have known that Andrew had diabetes hiding inside his genes, waiting to be activated by a stray virus?

I worked furiously, rushing to produce insulin to keep him alive – and then the wind storm came.

When I saw the wrecked centrifuge, I panicked, but Andrew didn’t. He kissed my forehead. Don’t let your butt sink, Flaherty.

I lay my head in my hands and try to slow my breathing. I look through my fingers at the fridge, then freeze.

Words, not numbers, roll across the refrigerator screen:

Don’t let your butt sink, Flaherty.

I gasp. “Cortez, look.”

Cortez turns, squints, chuckles. “Morris must have gotten his hands on the fridge before we left the colony.”

I almost chose to stay with Andrew, to spend what could be his last days with him on Mars, waiting for the capsule to return.

But I’m the biologist. I’m his wife. And I’ll move heaven and Earth and the vacuum of space to get this capsule back in time for him.

Don’t let your butt sink, Flaherty. What was it with Andrew and hacking refrigerators?

A smile breaks across my face.

Seven months, two days, nineteen hours. 329,869,048 miles to go.

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