“We have been sent here by our governments, and all of our governments are flawed, most of them disastrously. It’s why history is such a bloody mess. Now we are on our own, and I for one have no intention of repeating all of Earth’s mistakes just because of conventional thinking. We are the first Martian colonists! We are scientists! It is our job to think things new, to make them new!”
The arguments broke out again, louder than ever. Maya turned away and cursed Arkady under her breath, dismayed at how angry people were getting. She saw that John Boone was grinning. He pushed off the floor toward Arkady, came to a stop by piling into him, and then shook Arkady’s hand, which action swung them both around in the air, in an awkward kind of dance. This gesture of support immediately set people to thinking again, Maya could see it on their surprised faces; along with John’s fame he had a reputation for being moderate and low-keyed, and if he approved of Arkady’s ideas, then it was a different matter.
“Goddammit, Ark,” John said. “First those crazy problem runs, and now this — you’re a wild man, you really are! How in the hell did you get them to let you on board this ship, anyway?”
Exactly my question, thought Maya.
“I lied,” Arkady said.
Everyone laughed. Even Frank, looking surprised. “But of course I lied!” Arkady shouted, a big upside-down grin splitting his red beard. “How else could I get here? I want to go to Mars to do what I want, and selection committee wanted people to go and do what they were told. You know that!” He pointed down at them, shouted: “You all lied, you know you did!”
Frank was laughing harder than ever. Sax wore his usual Buster Keaton, but he raised a finger and said, “The Revised Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory,” and a great jeer went up from them all. They had all been required to take this exam, it was the world’s most widely used psychological test, and well regarded by experts. Respondents agreed or disagreed to five hundred and fifty-six statements, and a profile was formed from the replies; but the judgements concerning what the answers meant were based on the earlier responses of a sample group of 2,600 white, married, middle class Minnesota farmers of the 1930s. Despite all subsequent revisions, the pervading bias created by the nature of that first test group was still deeply engrained in the test; or at least some of them thought so. “Minnesota!” Arkady shouted, rolling his eyes. “Farmers! Farmers from Minnesota! I tell you this now, I lied in answer to every single question! I answered exactly opposite to what I really felt, and this is what allowed me to score as normal!”
Wild cheers greeted this announcement. “Hell,” John said, “I’m from Minnesota and I had to lie.”
More cheers. Frank, Maya noted, was crimson with hilarity, incapable of speech, hands clutching his stomach, nodding, giggling, helpless to stop himself. She had never seen him laugh like that.
Sax said, “The test made you lie.”
“What, not you?” Arkady demanded. “Didn’t you lie too?”
“Well, no,” Sax said, blinking as if the concept had never occurred to him before. “I told the truth to every question.”
They laughed harder than ever. Sax looked startled at their response, but that only made him look funnier.
Someone shouted, “What do you say, Michel? How do you account for yourself?”
Michel Duval spread his hands. “You may be underestimating the sophistication of the RMMPI. There are questions which test how honest you are being.”
This statement brought down a rain of questions on his head, a methodological inquisition. What were his controls? How did the testers make their theories falsifiable? How did they repeat them? How did they eliminate alternative explanations of the data? How could they claim to be scientific in any sense of the word whatsoever? Clearly a lot of them considered psychology a pseudoscience, and many had considerable resentment for the hoops they had been forced to jump through to get aboard. The years of competition had taken their toll. And the discovery of this shared feeling sparked a score of voluble conversations. The tension raised by Arkady’s political talk disappeared.
Perhaps, Maya thought, Arkady had defused the one with the other. If so it had been cleverly done, but Arkady was a clever man. She thought back. Actually it had been John Boone who had changed the subject. He had in effect flown to the ceiling and come to Arkady’s rescue, and Arkady had seized the chance. They were both clever men. And it seemed possible they were in some sort of collusion. Forming a kind of alternative leadership, perhaps, one American, one Russian. Something would have to be done about that.
She said to Michel, “Do you think it’s a bad sign we all consider ourselves such liars?”
Michel shrugged. “It’s been healthy to talk about it. Now we realize we’re more alike than we thought. No one has to feel they were unusually dishonest to get aboard.”
“And you?” Arkady asked. “Did you present yourself as most rational and balanced psychologist, hiding the strange mind we have come to know and love?”
A small smile from Michel. “You’re the expert in strange minds, Arkady.”
Then the few still watching the screens called out. The radiation count had started to fall. After a while it slipped back to just a little above normal.
Someone returned the Pastoral to the moment of the horn call. The last movement of the symphony, “Glad and Grateful Feelings After the Storm,” poured over the speaker system, and as they left the shelter and fanned out through the ship like dandelion seeds on a breeze, the beautiful old folk melody was broadcast thoughout the Ares, elaborating itself in all its Brucknerian richness. While it played, they found that the ship’s hardened systems had survived intact. The thicker walls of the farm and the forest biome had afforded the plants some protection, and although there would be some die-offs, and an entire crop they could not eat, the seed stocks were not harmed. The animals could not be eaten either, but presumably would give birth to a healthy next generation. The only casualties were some uncaptured songbirds from D’s dining hall; they found a scattering of them dead on the floor.
As for the crew, the shelter’s protection had shielded them from all but sixty-odd rem. That was the equivalent of two years of normal work in space, bad for a mere three hours; but it could have been worse. Outside the shelter it would have a lethal dose.
Six months inside a hotel, with never a walk outside. Inside it was late summer, and the days were long. Green dominated the walls and ceilings, and people went barefoot. Quiet conversations were nearly inaudible in the hum of machinery, the whoosh of ventilators. The ship seemed empty somehow, whole sections of it abandoned as the crew settled down to wait. Small knots of people sat in the halls in Toruses B and D, talking. Some stopped their conversations when Maya wandered by, which she naturally found disturbing. She was having trouble falling asleep, trouble waking up. Work made her restless; all the engineers were only waiting, after all, and the simulations had gotten nearly intolerable. She had trouble gauging the passage of time. She stumbled more than she used to. She had gone to see Vlad, and he had recommended over-hydration, more running, more swimming.
Hiroko told her to spend more time on the farm. She gave it a try, spending hours weeding, harvesting, trimming, fertilizing, watering, talking, sitting on a bench, looking at leaves; spacing out. The farm rooms were max chambers, their barrel roofs lined with bright sunstrips. The multi-leveled floors were crowded with crops, many new since the storm. There was not enough space to feed the crew entirely on farm food, but Hiroko disliked that fact and struggled against it, converting storage rooms as they emptied out. Dwarf strains of wheat, rice, soy, and barley grew in stacked trays; above the trays were hanging rows of hydroponic vegetables, and enormous clear jars of green and yellow algae, used to help regulate the gas exchange.