The Red Planet
9781465683557
213 pages
Library of Alexandria
Overview
I got no sleep that Thursday night. I tossed and dozed and tossed again. Operation Jehad and Willy Zinder were on my mind. Operation Jehad was the designation given to the proposed first manned flight to Mars, and Willy was our last chance to fill the six man crew. If Willy didn't make it, Doc Spartan would be fit to be tied in a hangman's knot. More than anything else, he had insisted on a six man crew and, if he couldn't get six qualified astronauts, including himself, on the Jehad ship, he was as likely as not to postpone the voyage for 26 months, when Mars would be in the right spot again and by which time more men could be trained. While I rolled and tossed in my bed sheets, Willy Zinder was playing carousel in his Jupiter capsule three hundred miles above old Momma Earth. And I hated to speculate about what had happened to him. When I'd watched him get into the cherry picker Thursday morning, he'd been a poor, frightened kid. He'd probably been suffering ever since. And now, after this dreadful night, re entry was staring him in the face. Feeling scared was natural and nothing to be ashamed of, because we all got butterflies on our first solo orbit. But when I took my ASD tests, I'd managed to keep my teeth from chattering. Willy hadn't and somehow I got the feeling that he was suffering as much as all the rest of us combined. He looked so ready to collapse that I wondered what was holding him up. Finally I gave up trying to sleep. It was daylight anyhow and I dressed, hurried to a restaurant and had scrambled eggs and coffee. Then I went over to the reservation to see how things were going. Dr. Spartan probably had spent the night there, but the rest of us had knocked off when the midnight operations shift came on duty. If they'd all spent a night like I had, the other members of the Jehad crew would be on hand almost as soon as me. Besides Spartan, the others were Axel Ludkin, the big Swede from Minnesota; Dr. Warner Joel, who probably would hide his feelings by slapping people on the back and trying to joke about inconsequential things; and Morrie Grover, who was a pink cheeked kid. We, plus Dr. Lewis Spartan, had already qualified for the first manned trip to Mars. But plans had been made for six and Willy Zinder was our last candidate. To say we were scraping the bottom of the barrel would be selling Willy short. He was Number 12 out of 100 fine physical and mental specimens who had been selected for astronaut training three years before. Eighty eight others had been washed out, one way or another, before twelve were fingered for Operation Jehad—so named because Jehad means holy war to Moslems. We were going to Mars, which was named after the Roman war god, so that accounted for the war part of the name, but I don't know what was holy about it except that going to Mars would materialize an ancient dream of man to travel through space to another world.
