Green Mars - Kim Stanley Robinson [86]
But Lindholm, now: he was a congenial fellow. He knew how to get along. Someone who could partake of a bottle of Utopian zinfandel, someone who could do his part to make a dinner party festive. Someone who understood intuitively the hidden algorithms of good fellowship, so that he would be able to operate the system without even thinking about it.
So Sax ran a forefinger up and down the bridge of his new nose, and drank the wine which did indeed suppress his parasympathetic nervous system to the point of making him less inhibited and more voluble, and he chattered away very successfully, he thought, although several times he was alarmed by the way he was drawn into conversation by Phyllis, sitting across the table from him— and by the way she looked at him— and by the way he looked back! There were protocols for this kind of thing too, but he had never understood them in the slightest. Now he recalled the way Jessica had leaned on him at the Lowen, and drank another half glass and smiled, and nodded, thinking uneasily about sexual attraction and its causes.
Someone asked Phyllis the inevitable question about the escape from Clarke, and as she launched into the tale she glanced frequently at Sax, seeming to assure him that she was telling the story principally to him. He attended politely, resisting a certain tendency to go cross-eyed, which might indicate his dismay.
“There was no warning of any kind,” Phyllis said to the questioner. “One minute we were orbiting Mars at the top of the elevator, just sick at what was happening down on the surface, and doing our best to figure out some way to stop the unrest, and then the next minute there was a jerk like an earthquake, and we were on our way out of the solar system.” She smiled and paused for the laugh that followed, and Sax saw that she had told the story many times before in just this way.
“You must have been terrified!” someone said.
“Well,” Phyllis said, “it’s strange how in an emergency there isn’t really time for any of that. As soon as we understood what had happened, we knew that every second we stayed on Clarke diminished our chances of surviving by hundreds of kilometers. So we convened in the command center and counted heads and talked it over and took stock of what we had available. It was hectic but not panicked, if you see what I mean. Anyway, there turned out to be about the usual number of Earth-to-Mars freighters in the hangars, and the AI calculations indicated we would need the thrust of almost all of them to get ourselves back down into the plane of the ecliptic in time to intersect the Jovian system. We were on our way out as well as up, and in the general direction of Jupiter, which was a blessing. Anyway, that was when it got crazy. We had to get all the freighters outside the hangars and flying beside Clarke, and then link them together and stock them with everything they could hold of Clarke’s air and fuel and so on. And we were off in that jury-rigged lifeboat only thirty hours after launching, which now that I look back on it, is almost unbelievable. Those thirty hours . . .”
She shook her head, and Sax thought he saw a real memory suddenly invade her tale, shaking her slightly. Thirty hours was a remarkably fast evacuation, and no doubt the time had flashed by in a dreamlike rush of action, in a state of mind so different from ordinary time that it might pass for transcendence.
“After that it was just a matter of cramming into a couple of crew quarters— two hundred and eighty-six of us, there were— and going out on EVAs to cut away inessential parts of the freighters. And hoping there would be enough fuel to get us on course down to Jupiter. It was more than two months before we could be positive we would intercept the Jovian system, and ten weeks before we actually did. We used Jupiter itself as a gravity handle, and swung around toward Earth, which at that time was closer than Mars. And we swung so hard around Jupiter that we needed Earth’s atmosphere and Luna’s gravity