Despite all the precautions, though, Stone was developing a classic case of chicken legs, as astronauts called them, as his leg muscles atrophied. The soles of his feet were as soft as an infant’s. And the parts of his body which got most tired, every day, were his hands. His hands worked constantly, in ways they didn’t have to on Earth, hauling him around the module, braking his mass. [Hr:Min:Sec] 11:43:24

Today was Stone’s shower day. Each of them was allowed one shower a week.

He stripped off his vest and shorts and swung his legs over into the collapsible shower. It was a cylinder of white cloth, like a big concertina. He pulled the curtain up around him and hooked it to a metal lid fixed to the ceiling. He soaped up and rinsed himself with a spray; airflow, rather than gravity, drained away the water.

He felt as if layers of skin were coming off as he worked; the sponge baths that were all that was possible between showers just weren’t sufficient. And the shower seemed to be getting some of the stiffness out of his muscles.

Actually, with the way the water hung suspended in the air, it was more like a sauna than a shower.

He thought about his crew.

They had all been trained by NASA psychologists on how people behave during long periods of isolation. Stone saw himself, after his several flights, as pretty level-headed and robust. But he could recognize, at one time or another, most of the signs of isolation in his crew: sleep disturbance, boredom, restlessness, anxiety, anger, depression, headaches, irritability, reduced concentration, a loss of the sense of time and space.

Ares was bombarded daily with messages from well-wishers, families and friends, but the time lag was so great that it was impossible to conduct a meaningful conversation. And, somehow, hearing those familiar voices calling from behind a lightspeed barrier made the crew’s isolation that much more poignant.

All of that was telling on the crew.

Gershon seemed the less affected, on the surface. He was still the bullshitting jock, always there with the jokes. But there was an increasingly jagged edge. Gershon was basically a pilot, used to short, sharp bursts of adrenaline-pumping action.

Still, in Stone’s judgment Ralph would be fine. Gershon knew he would get his chance when he took the lander down to the surface. Stone saw his job as being to keep the guy together until they reached Mars.

York was different, though.

York was uptight, a stickler, a little reclusive. A lot arrogant and patronizing. And a civilian at that. Gershon’s jokes and gotchas irritated the hell out of her, clearly, but she wouldn’t say a word about it; instead she kept it to herself and just kind of smoldered. Which didn’t do anyone any good.

York was like a lot of professional women Stone had met before, he thought. That is, she had one hell of a chip on her shoulder.

But he envied and admired her inner resources.

To him, Stone was ready to admit, the mission was everything: flying the craft, doing his job when they eventually hit the Martian dirt, getting home again.

York, by contrast, had an awareness of the grandeur of it all: that remarkable experience, the interplanetary flight. There were depths inside her which York was able to tap, and — as she’d come out of her shell during the mission — to articulate to others.

She was almost poetic, at times.

Stone felt he understood how important that was. He’d hoped it would work out that way. And according to Houston, even the ratings for their weekly TV briefings — which had dipped pretty fast after the excitement of the launch — were reviving again, mainly thanks to York.

He dried himself off with a towel, and then he had to suck up stray drops inside the shower with a vacuum hose. It was fiddly and time-consuming.

In the end, as usual, by the time he was able to dismantle the shower and fold it away he felt frustrated and tense once more, the benefits of the shower lost. [Hr:Min:Sec] 13:12:51

Stone set himself at the Mission Module’s control station. He ran quickly through the parameters of the cluster’s operation: consumables usage, attitude control propellant usage, cryogenic store boiloff…

Most of it looked nominal.

But the big solar panels, sticking out like wings from the sides of the S-IVB booster, were getting too hot. The panels could tilt through twenty-five degrees, so that the sun’s radiation would come in on them at a slant, reducing their temperature. Stone put together a recommendation that Mission Control should think about performing the tilt a few days ahead of schedule; minutes later, Houston replied that they would evaluate the proposal.

Then there was a problem with the feed system of one of the steerable dish antennae, which was targeted back at Earth. There was a three-decibel loss in downlink signal strength: maybe some part of the system had cracked under thermal stress. That was a potentially serious problem; it would reduce the bit rate at which high-quality images could be sent back to Earth. The ground said they wouldn’t take any action on that one at this time, but would do some simulations and analysis first.

And he found a problem with some of the module’s seventeen chargeable battery regulator modules. One of them, number fifteen, had malfunctioned days before, and then number three went off-line. All that cut the power available in the module by around two hundred watts. Houston thought there might be a low-voltage trip occurring somewhere, which was switching out the regulators too often, and Stone had to go around the module firing up systems and calling out power consumption numbers to the specialists in the back rooms behind the MOCR.

It was slow, dull, almost mindless work. The routine stuff really ground you down; it was a hazard of long-duration missions. But all of it was essential to keep this handcrafted bucket of bolts flying. [Hr:Min:Sec] 15:49:01

At last he could get to his interplanetary navigation.

He headed down to the wardroom, to the picture window there, and dug out his optical kit.

The kit contained a one-power telescope and a twenty-eight-power sextant. The sextant was a chunky little gadget with an eyepiece and a calibrated semicircular dial, to measure angles between stars. They were nice devices, compact, heavy things of brass, which Stone enjoyed handling. If he was going to take away any one souvenir of the flight, then to hell with a Mars rock; it would be this little kit.

Stone set to work by the picture window.

First he measured the apparent size of the sun’s disk, which would give him a good measure of how far the craft was from the sun, and then he measured the angles between Venus and a fixed star, and the Earth and a fixed star. Those three basic measurements would fix him in three-dimensional space. He would finish up with a few more redundant measurements.

He’d found he couldn’t hold the optical equipment steady in the microgravity. But the way around that was to set the gadgets floating in the air, as well aligned as possible; then he could bring his eye up to the eyepiece and make an accurate reading.

The first TCM — Trajectory Correction Maneuver — had taken place ten days after leaving Earth. At that time the flight path had been pretty badly misaligned. The trajectory planners back in Houston had sent corrective burn parameters chattering up the line to Ares, and the MS-II stage’s maneuvering propulsion system — two modified Lunar Module engines — had applied a hefty velocity change of twenty-five feet per second. But, according to the latest data, the craft was still on a slightly divergent trajectory. Today Stone would check the craft’s position and velocity, and the track would be recomputed; and tomorrow, if they could get it right, the second TCM burn would fix the trajectory’s small remaining anomaly.