“Helen’s the bolt whisperer,” says a utility diver, when they are back on deck. “I heard you had the best hands in the business.” He offers Helen a fist bump of approval.
The time to review her performance is in debriefing, and the praise is not appropriate. Still, to refuse a fist bump would look surly, not modest, and so she fist bumps. A trainer removes the shoulder pads from Helen’s Liquid Cooling Ventilation Garment, and Helen tries not to wince. After crawling out of the spacesuit, Helen had been offered a chair and a Snickers bar, and refused both. She is not confident that after a few minutes of sitting she will be able to go from sitting to standing in an effortless way, and it’s easier for the Nutrition Team if she only snacks on what they give her to snack, at appointed snacking time. The chlorinated fug of the lab’s atmosphere stings her eyes after the sterile confines of the spacesuit. Helen swings her arms and assesses the level of stiffness in the rest of her body. She forces herself to chat and joke for a few minutes more before sliding her feet into paper slippers and making her way to the donning cubicle at the far end of the pool, trying not to look like a person who is running for the bathroom.
Helen talks to herself, naming the things she is doing as she does them, a trick for letting her body know who is running the show. I am unzipping the LCVG and hanging it up, peeling off the long underwear and folding it neatly before tucking it into the laundry bin. I am making a triangle of the diaper I thankfully did not have to use and placing it in the trash along with the paper slippers. I am grabbing a few cleansing wipes and sweeping them up and down my body. I see that there is a toilet adjacent to the Donning Cubicle, and I will use it now.
Once she is seated, she lets her interior monologue and body collapse, curving her spine forward and spreading her knees so that her head can hang between them. She places her hands on her cold feet and allows herself five deep breaths. Her body is doing what it has always done, which is to exceed expectations, but it costs her a fraction more than it has in the past, and this must be concealed.
It is funny that Prime, whose VR simulators are realer than real, would have them training in something as old-fashioned and flawed as a pool. You got drag in water the way you never did in space, and tools stayed put if you let go of them. It was, however, a good way not just to train an astronaut, but to test her: the two verbs being more or less synonymous. The day Helen stops being tested is the day no one needs her.
Last night, Helen had her first dream of walking on Mars. It was a very silly dream—she had been holding up an umbrella over her spacesuit to “keep the sun off”—but the atmosphere of the dream had been cheerful.
On Earth, Helen has had many dreams about being in space, but usually these involve minor aggravations, spooled out slowly. Failing to cap off her squeeze bottle properly in microgravity and spending hours cleaning up her soup. Realizing at step seventy of a hundred-step checklist that she missed step five and must begin again. An alarm bell that will not stop ringing no matter what she does.
She has never dreamed, on Earth, of walking in space. This is a source of frustration: why does her subconscious not give her the best thing she knows? The perfect thing, the incorruptible thing. The thing you wanted to get into your speeches about why space exploration is important but never quite could. You always had to fight against bad human history when trying to make people understand what is important. If only the telescope had been invented a few hundred years earlier, it might have been Science, not God, and Michelangelo could have filled an Observatory with images of the cosmos, and Mozart would have written a requiem for a star, and you wouldn’t have to explain anything.
After she had completed her first spacewalk, her commander had said to her, “Helen, you’ve just walked in space, and that’s something no one will ever be able to take away from you.”
The phrase is funny. “Something that no one will ever be able to take away from you”? It should be “something that you will not be able to lose due to your own negligence or poor decision making or the endless interference of nonessentials.” Helen sees the value in occasionally giving others inaccurate reassurances, but holds herself to a different standard. Everything is something that can be taken away from you.
Her five seconds are up.
After debrief, Helen meets Sergei and Yoshi at E-Lab. The two have spent the morning in launch simulations for Red Dawn. If all goes well, Helen will never do a solo Extravehicular Activity, like the one she practiced today. If all goes well, Sergei and Yoshi will never launch from Mars without her. These are contingency plans: situations that must be rehearsed in case something critical fails or one of the three astronauts is dead.
For the next four hours, Helen, Sergei, and Yoshi practice medical techniques on a synthetic androgynous human figure they have christened Sam. The astronauts are watched over by a team of doctors who take turns announcing a different medical emergency, and complicating Sam’s condition midtreatment. On the space station, situations like toxic exposure or kidney stones or appendicitis are considered evacuating conditions, but there can be no evacuation on a mission to Mars.
Today, Sam suffers burns, fractures a hip, needs a tooth pulled, has a heart attack, requires CPR, receives the Heimlich, and loses an eye. The astronauts do not pretend to offer Sam anything like a realistic bedside manner, but indicate at what moments they might engage in something like a bedside manner.
“At this point, I encourage Sam to take shallow breaths.”
“I am now telling Sam to stay calm and focus on my voice.”