The Sparrow - Mary Doria Russell [73]
Anne nosed the car into a parking space at that point and shut off the motor. There was a long silence, both of them sobered by the knowledge that casualties were likely. They were all being cross-trained, to build redundancy into the final crew of eight.
"The ship will just about fly itself on the way back," George said finally.
"That’s the part I like, Anne said firmly. "The ’on the way back’ part."
ANNE STILL PLAYED Official Skeptic, but the past eighteen months had worked a surprising internal change in her. Time after time, it looked as though the entire mission would be scrubbed; each time, Anne marveled as Jesuit industry and Jesuit prayer were brought to bear on the problems.
The first asteroid turned out to have a faultline likely to give way under one G of acceleration. The second appeared perfect until a remote assay showed too high an iron content, which would foul the engines over the long term. A few nights later, the evening prayers of a Jesuit physicist were interrupted by the sudden realization that his load-bearing calculations were unduly limited by the specification of a roughly cylindrical rock. He finished his prayers, rapidly rethought his assumptions, and woke up Jesuit colleagues in several different time zones. Twelve hours later, Sofia Mendes was authorized to contact Ian Sekizawa and instruct him to broaden the search to include asteroids of nearly any shape, as long as they were roughly symmetrical around the long axis. Within days, the reply from Ian came: he’d located a rock that was more or less ovoid, would that do? It did, nicely.
There was a similar crisis over the biphasic cladding for D.W.’s docker. The material used to sheathe spaceplanes had to function in the unimaginable cold of space as well as in the blast-furnace heat of entry and exit from an atmosphere. Military orders, being the most lucrative contracts, took precedence over civilian projects. Intense prayer, along with astute technical and diplomatic skill, was dedicated to this problem. Unexpectedly, the military government in Indonesia fell and the Indonesian Air Force’s order for a spaceplane was canceled, freeing up material for the private order that had been placed months earlier by Sofia Mendes on behalf of an anonymous group of investors.
After a while it became hard to ignore how, against odds, the dice kept coming up in favor of the mission. The crew members went on with their training, their work unaffected by the waxing and waning of confidence, but they all experienced varying degrees of amazement. Even the Jesuits were divided. Marc Robichaux and Emilio Sandoz smiled and said, "See? Deus vult," while D. W. Yarbrough and Andrej Jelačić shook their heads in wonder. George Edwards and Jimmy Quinn and Sofia Mendes remained agnostics on the question of whether these events were minor miracles or major coincidences.
Anne said nothing but as the months passed, it was increasingly difficult to resist the beauty of belief.
AND SO, AS fate or chance or God would have it, nineteen months and twelve days after Anne began compiling her list with "1. Bring nail clippers," she was able at last to cross off the wry final entry: "Vomit in zero G." Unable to stomach even playground swings as a child, she was resigned to the idea that having the contents of her abdomen drift lungward would probably be sufficient to set off the space sickness that still afflicted 15 percent of all travelers, despite medical advances. Not completely pessimistic about her chances of avoiding this, she wore the antinausea transdermal patch that D. W. Yarbrough swore by, and swore at it when she could breathe again.
On the whole, however, she was able to congratulate herself. Everyone had expected her to be frightened so, of course,