Lifeline

She grasped his bicep and jabbed the needle into his arm. Deep behind the man’s eyes, Tripolk could see a startled wince, but the man himself did not cringe.

The next person came up, a thin woman, silent and looking very frightened. Tripolk gave her the injection.

At the other end of the wide, echoing room, several people looked groggy and disoriented—the first visible effects of the drug. A team of de facto orderlies wheeled them out of the room before they could grow cold and still.

More workers came and went, each receiving an injection, not daring to let pride slip while in the presence of comrades.

Tripolk looked down at the medical cart beside her. She had known of a slaughterhouse just south of Moscow; as a child she had often thought of the lines of animals marching in ignorance to their deaths, trusting and unconcerned. Now, the Kibalchich seemed like that slaughterhouse to her: lines of workers in the vast infirmary, waiting for a pinprick to send them off on a single hopeless chance.

On the supply cart, she saw so many vials left, so many people. A film of tears flashed across her eyes and she looked down, not daring to meet anyone’s gaze. She drew a deep breath and tried to burn the moisture away with determination.

As the hours ticked by, the numbers of people in the infirmary room diminished. She knew this was going to require more than a day. She and two assistants had been working without a break, but the strain was growing. Tripolk found her hands shaking. The large chamber began to take on a funereal air.

When a tech named Orvinskad went into convulsions after receiving the injection, Tripolk found herself startled and scared. That was not supposed to happen, she thought. It is supposed to be peaceful and painless. But considering the circumstances, how pushed to the edge they all were, there were bound to be surprises.

Two men wrestled Orvinskad to the ground and held him still until the seizure left him drained and motionless. They hauled him out. After a few nervous moments, the remaining people fell into an uneasy quiet again, and shuffled forward to face Tripolk’s needle. She wished they would start singing again.

The war on Earth had put an abrupt end to her project, her life’s work. It had vanished, never to be completed. Tripolk felt like a starving man who’d had a fine roasted chicken snatched out of his grasp.

ARES 2 would be indefinitely postponed now. Tripolk might never see cosmonauts land on Mars. She had wanted to watch the live transmissions, to shake her fist in triumph and know that she, Anna Tripolk, had helped her people get there. But not anymore. Patriotic accomplishments for the pride and glory of the Soviet people had fallen by the wayside.

Mars—how she longed to go there. But that would never happen.

The first Soviet manned Mars mission, ARES 1, had been launched seven years previously, before Tripolk had become involved with the program. But that first mission had ended in disaster.

Though the flight time was long, Soviet cosmonauts had spent many times that duration alone in orbit in their own stations. No one expected the isolation to be a factor. But when the small crew of ARES 1 had reached interplanetary space, they had crumbled.

It seemed that in an Earth-orbiting station or in one of the Lagrange colonies, people still had a sense of perspective, a feeling of home. They could look out the window and see the Earth sitting there in space, filling a huge portion of their view. They could still see the Moon, accompanying them.

But in the deep space between Earth and Mars, the cosmonauts had no such landmark. Earth shrank to a bright blue-green light, with the Moon a much smaller dot beside it. Mars itself was only a reddish disk. Even the Sun itself grew smaller, while the blackness of space grew bigger. Everything seemed a yawning ocean of vacuum, infinity itself staring them in the face—with no place they could go to get away from it all.

Transmissions had grown sporadic and baffling, hard to interpret. The ARES 1 crew had severed communication. The captain’s final transmission, accompanied by nervous laughter from her crew mates, had said that they were abandoning their ship.…

But the Soviet Union still needed to put a manned mission on Mars—for their own glory, for international prestige. It was mankind’s next logical step, and the United States had never bothered even to make the attempt. The Soviet people would be the ones to push forward, to take that step.

Tripolk, a biophysicist, had thrown herself at the task. Somehow, the trip to Mars had to be shortened—either the distance, the actual flight time, or the time perceived by the cosmonauts. The mission planners could not screen candidates for the disorientation and pick psychologically stronger crew members; that held too few guarantees.