I guess I should explain about why I didn’t dig Luther all that much. There was this thing going on between us. He started it. Or, I think he started. Pretty sure he did.
Anyway . . . it was all about this meritocracy thing. Someone was going to be picked to be the first person to step down from the landing vehicle and put the first human foot on Mars. At government-funded programs like NASA the obvious choice would be the mission commander, but with Mars One it was different. They wanted it to be completely fair; they wanted to make sure that everyone who volunteered had an equal chance of being chosen to be the one to take that step. Officially we’d been told it would be a lottery, with a name selected randomly by computer, but Luther had somehow convinced himself that the selection was really going to be based on merit, on an evaluation of what we did on the mission.
I tried to convince him he was nuts. I mean, how would someone like, say, Sophie, who was mostly our cook on the flight, shine brighter than someone like my mom, who was the chief engineer? But Luther just smiled and said I was being naive. I thought he was nuts, but he really seemed to believe it, and everything he did was a competition. He tried too hard to be the best at training, games, evaluations, performance, citizenship, blah-blah-blah. . . . He was also doing a pretty good job of making sure I looked like a loser.
They say competition is healthy.
We were doing a mini–fitness marathon last year. He and I competed against each other because we were the only two boys. The adults were put in teams and the girls were their own team for strength events and short-distance running. For the first four rounds of the one-hundred-meter races, Luther and I were even. I won two, he won two, and neither of us showed any real superiority. Something like half a second differences. But in the tiebreaker, we were tearing down the track at the training center in Brussels. Luther was half a step ahead when suddenly I felt like an extra lung opened up and I could feel new energy flooding in. I turned the dials all the way up and was starting to pull even with him when he seemed to stumble a bit and his elbow jerked up as he fought for balance. The point of his elbow caught me dead center in the deltoid. Not hard, but enough to send me sideways for one full step. I corrected and poured it on, but by then the finish line was right there and Luther motored across it a quarter second before I did.
I didn’t say anything at the time because I thought it was an accident.
Next time was an underwater safety drill and there was a malfunction on my air regulator that made me have to surface halfway through a timed drill. Luther wound up with the winning time for the exercise and I was disqualified.
Stuff like that.
Could I prove that Luther messed with my gear? Of course not. He, Sophie, Nirti, and two other mission people were all there at the time. I couldn’t even prove anyone messed with it. Accidents do happen. If I could have pinned it on Luther I’d have beaten him into his component molecules. Or maybe told Colpeys and gotten him and his family cut from the program and the history books.
I thought about it too. Boy, did I think about it.
Suspicion isn’t proof, though
But that was the point at which Luther and I began to treat each other like enemies.
No.
That’s the wrong word. Too strong, and “rivals” is maybe too weak. For my part it was a trust issue. I guess I never really trusted him after that.