I spent a lot of time in the fitness center, training on the ARED, the Advanced Resistive Exercise Device, which was how we were going to keep fit in space and on Mars. It’s a really cool machine that uses piston-driven vacuum cylinders to create resistance and has a flywheel system to simulate free-weight exercises in normal g. We had to become familiar with it on Earth and get as fit as possible, then use the machines every day to maintain muscle tone and bone density. Our ARED system would be installed on a section of the transit vehicle called the “wheel,” which was a ring that spun in order to provide limited gravity. Only for that part of the ship, though. The wheel was there to train us for Martian gravity, to help with our fitness, and to use in case anyone on board needed surgery—’cause you do not want to do surgery in micro-g.
In microgravity astronauts lose 1 to 2 percent of their bone and muscle mass per month. Some of the astronauts who stayed for months on the ISS lost mass permanently and were never able to get back to normal. That’s dangerous, and for those of us who were going to be in spaceships for seven months, it could be fatal. And it didn’t get much better for people planning to live the rest of our lives on a planet with a third of Earth’s gravity. If we couldn’t counter those negative effects, then leaving Earth would kill us in less than two years. The ARED was part of our survival.
I was streaming sweat when I got a call from Herc. I looked at my watch and was surprised because it was way early in the morning where he was.
“Hey, man,” he said, his voice tight and filled with anger, “something happened.”
“What’s wrong? Are you okay?”
“It’s not me,” he said. “It’s Izzy. Whoa, wait, it’s not like it sounds. She’s okay, she’s fine. It’s just something weird happened.”
He told me. It was weird. And by the time he was finished I was angry too.
The Drake family had all been in bed sleeping when they heard the downstairs front window shatter. They ran downstairs with Mr. Drake leading the way with a baseball bat. There was glass everywhere and a big rock lying on the carpet. Through the smashed window they could see long streamers of red and white fluttering in the branches of the tree by the curb. They went outside to find that the house, bushes, porch, and tree had been covered with streamers. And a big stick had been driven into the ground with a poster stapled to it.
EARTH IS OUR MOTHER
MARS IS FOR THE DEAD
There was no one on the street except for neighbors who’d come out to investigate the noise. None of them had seen anyone, of course. No one saw anything.
But we all knew.
Especially when the other reports came in. This didn’t just happen with Izzy. There were other kinds of vandalism outside the houses and apartments of mission members all over the globe. Not everyone’s family or friends got targeted because not everyone on the mission had family or friends. So between the forty of us going there was a total of thirty-one incidents of what the media called “protest.”
Protest? Really? I can think of better words. Not printable words, but better.
The fact that this wasn’t just directed at Izzy didn’t make me feel any better. Actually it scared me ten times worse because it showed how well-coordinated this stuff was. Thirty-one incidents, all done around the same time, all pulled off so quickly and smoothly that no one was spotted, no one was arrested.
I made a call to Frack and told him about it. He and Frick were back in Wisconsin. I asked him if he could maybe check on Izzy and her folks. He laughed, which was something he almost never did.
“What’s funny?” I asked.
“Where do you think we are right now?” he said.