“Crushed peanuts,” Helen reads. “I can never see how these things are going to come together. I don’t have a good food imagination.”
Variety and pleasure in food is meant to be a major factor in their psychological health. Prime will challenge chefs on Earth in a competition to make a delicious and nutritious meal from the list of Red Dawn pantry items. The contestants will need to keep in mind that supplies are limited, and while the occupants of Red Dawn will be enjoying artificial gravity, the craft is designed for emergency microgravity conditions: it has no oven, and no stovetop, only a rehydration station and a forced air convection oven. Prime plans on producing a filmed series of professional chefs, cooking schools, and enthusiastic amateurs taking on this challenge. Right now the recipes are coming from, it’s to be assumed, Prime’s own Food Science Lab.
“I once contributed recipes to a cookbook,” Sergei says. “Did I tell you this?”
He has not told them, it is totally new information. (The astronauts have developed a way of letting one another know when an anecdote has been repeated too often. They say: “I love it when you tell that story.”)
“Sergei, was it a cosmonaut cookbook?” Yoshi asks.
“No. It was called The Engineer’s Cookbook. I explained the slow-cooked rib roast.” Sergei shapes a rotisserie motion with his hands. “This is a place where many mistakes are made.”
“I cannot believe I don’t have a copy of that,” Helen says. “I can’t believe every single member of my family didn’t give it to me for Christmas. No one ever knows what to get.”
“Do you think people will understand this is important?” Sergei points with his chin at the recipe on the console. “People might think, ‘Oh, this is not a problem, to always eat the same food. People think, maybe, of prisoners, or soldiers, always eating the same food, food that is not good. Why should we need special variety? Why all these things for our comfort? If you are person who goes crazy after eating the same menu, or from not having fun things to do, then you are not person strong enough to go to space.”
He is anxious, Helen thinks, that he is not suffering enough. The man who has gone to Mars should not emerge from his spacecraft pink and healthy and having enjoyed special recipes concocted by space enthusiasts at Le Cordon Bleu.
“I think the general assumption is that going to space is really hard and most people don’t imagine it to be something they could tolerate,” Helen says, though it had been years before she realized this was true. It had been difficult for her to comprehend that there were people in the world who didn’t want to go to space, that not everyone was her competition for a seat, that some people didn’t even see space travel as the most glorious expression of human capability.
“Last night I dreamed of the first apartment Talia and I had together,” Sergei says. “The cupboards in the kitchen had been painted so many times that they would not close.”
Helen has a high tolerance for non sequiturs now. She herself wants to talk and talk. Not out of a desire to communicate with others; she just wants to hear all the things she might say, if she were to go on talking.
“How funny. I dreamed about a garden café where my daughter took me when I was visiting Los Angeles,” Helen says. “I must have been hungry.”
What’s funny is that she is making this up. She has, at last, begun to dream of walking in space: gorgeous, drifting dreams, without sentences, pure sensation. In her Prime logs she says: I dreamed I was playing in my high school marching band. I dreamed I was shopping for a new refrigerator. I dreamed I was watching my daughter in a production of Romeo and Juliet. These, she feels, are the dreams of the person Prime selected for this mission.
Yoshi does not say what he dreamed. He is opening a further communication from Prime. This contains an announcement: their backup crew has been selected. The names of the astronauts and short biographies have been included. This crew will begin training in Japan next month.
Yoshi, Helen, and Sergei gather around the main console, silent, reading. This is unexpected news; she had not given much thought to their backups, though of course, of course.
The backup crew is all American. One female, two males. They are all engineers, all possessing the same sorts of specialty skill sets as the three of them. This other crew is a slightly scrambled version of themselves.
“You must know them?” Sergei says to Helen. “I haven’t met Ty. I know Dev, of course. Also, Nora, though more by reputation.”
“Dev and I were in the same astronaut candidate class,” Helen says. “I’ve known him my whole career. He’s been my family liaison, and I’ve been his. We’ve been each other’s CAPCOMs. Ty is great, though I don’t know him well. And Nora. Gosh, I wouldn’t have thought to put these three together, but the more I think about it, the more sense it makes.” Prime will be watching her reaction. “What an amazing crew. This is very cool.”
Helen studies the backups, making comparisons. Nora is the sole female, so Nora must also be the supplier of the female element that contains some quality discounting her from becoming an object of sexual attraction to her crewmates. Nora is not in her fifties, but she is gay.
“But Nora’s more the Yoshi of her crew,” Helen says. “In temperament. She paints, or does something artistic, and she’s very well read.”
“You do artistic things,” Yoshi says.
“Maybe I mean she also likes old-fashioned things.”
“That’s the opposite of creative.”
Helen realizes she has offended Yoshi in some way. “You’re right,” she says. “That’s a sloppy comparison.” There is tension in the room. A new presence: others who might be as good as they are, might be better.