Doubt

It’s late afternoon and the sun's glancing off the leaves of the tall trees as the breezes make the branches sway. I'm standing here in front of the launch complex's own temple waiting for Don. It's one of those occasions when I wish I could be somewhere else, and at the same time I want to do this. I need to say goodbye to Manish Sharma.

While I'm waiting, I cast a critical eye over the architecture. It's okay for an early Millenial effort at passive cooling with its unobtrusive air ducts and reflective white roof. India is spilling over with bright young civil engineers and architects. For the past month we've been refining our Mars habitat plans in our 'leisure time' each evening, and my head's swimming full of it. It's not so different from when I was a teenager. I would emerge from the latest action movie or from a bout of online gaming and every sense impression around me was bursting with the same adrenalined theme. Now when I even look at a pebble or a leaf I think architecture. This is like mental caffeine. It can take hours for me to come down from the high, so finding sleep can be hard, too.

Four or five more people arrive and enter the temple. They look like technicians or support staff from the ISRO project. I don't recognise any of them, but they seem to recognise me. I'm used to that, now that we've been here at the Satish Dhawan Space Centre for a few weeks.

The wind off the nearby Bay of Bengal sighs through the cactus-like euphorbia trees. Now there's something we won't have much of: natural shade from the sun. The lava tube idea sounds ingenious at first until you get into the practicalities and timescales of finding large, stable lava tubes, producing tons of concrete and sealant and doing site surveys and drilling test holes. We have enough kit to try a small-scale experiment, and that's all. So it's going to be digging a hole for a habitat, squeezing the iron-rich basaltic fines into bricks and covering the roof with about two metres of regolith and a sheet of ice or polyethylene to slow down the cosmic rays. Eventually we'll want to produce a higher performance polymer like polyetherimide. Either way, we will start out as cave dwellers. But then, who ever said that Mars would be easy?

A trio of pelicans arrive fussily in the top branches of a baobab tree. I've often seen kingfishers and herons closer to the water. There are too many species here to learn their names. I'm not sure if pelicans roost in trees. Don't they normally swim in lagoons or strut on beaches? These three almost seem to be peering down at the temple and scolding each other for not daring to flutter to the ground and join us. Perhaps they're old friends of Manish too. That wouldn't surprise me.

Here comes Don. He's squinting at everything, which I think is what he does when he's thinking hard and can't find the answer. He had an even harder day than me and wanted to get a shower first. In this climate I wonder if it's worth it. I'm constantly perspiring.

We don't say much. I nod and he grins quickly through his goatee, then we step inside the temple where the open-casket gathering is in full swing.

Many heads turn our way as we step through the door. There's Mohamed Zain, the logistics manager who flew in from Dubai just yesterday. He gives us a high-five kind of wave, then turns back to an Indian woman I've not met, who's wearing a fantastically patterned sari. There's the old man who cleans our guest house, now transformed in a cool cream cotton shirt and a dhoti down to his ankles. He doesn't notice us. He's standing by the casket with one hand on its rim, listening to a loud man across from him telling a story about how Manish rushed him to hospital once when he had a kidney stone.

I wander up to the casket and see Manish for the last time. His black mop of hair and thick moustache are immaculate, far tidier than they ever were in life, and his full-cheeked features are serene, which is not like him either. They've polished his face until he looks like he's made of wax. When I saw him a week ago, he was agitated about the Centre's facilities manager who wouldn't allow an Emirati camera crew to roam around the site. He cracked an easy joke about it, though, as I stood and listened to his tale, and we both laughed. Then he rushed off towards the Launch Control buildings for an interview with a hack from Mumbai, calling an invitation to me over his shoulder to join him and some others for a 'real Indian cuisine experience' that evening at his place. But I was swamped with mission prep work and didn't get away from my computer until midnight. And that bugs me. It bugs me very much. What kind of a person am I turning into?

"How did you know Mr Sharma?" asks the cleaning man from beside me in pretty good English. Once we're properly introduced – his name's Ranbir Singh – I tell him about meeting Manish when he first came to Dubai as the ISRO liaison to Sabir Space Industries. I tell him how we were stopped by police on the Dubai waterfront one night and almost arrested for drunken behaviour, mostly because of Manish's booming voice and manic howls of laughter, and the way he kept me laughing at his crazy-but-true stories from back home when he was a boy.

Ranbir is interested in the relationship between SSI and ISRO. So I tell him the unsullied version of how SSI was looking for a launch site for our mission while the facility in the UAE was being completed and commissioned, and how ISRO finally decided that they would benefit from the income as well as the skills transfer if they loaned their centre to us. Their own human spaceflight program is promising - I watched their second Raaj crew make orbit last week - but has been blowing in the fickle winds of India's politics and economics for so long. I don't mention that, and I leave out from the SSI-ISRO story all of the behind-the-scenes, third-hand tales of corruption, personality conflicts and political pressures. It has sickened me too many times already. And there are still plenty of good stories to tell, and Manish comes into many of them.

"I can't believe he's gone," says Ranbir.

I nod. "He was out early in the evening for a run," I say, passing on what I've heard, "when he just fell over."

"The weather that day was so humid, like a real scorcher," the old man says. He stares at nothing in particular. "Death claims the best of us." I run out of words to say, and Ranbir sighs and walks to the door.

I chat to Mohamed Zain and he tells me the latest from SSI Dubai, and later I end up leaning against the back wall of the room, watching people. Soon Don joins me. He's exhausted from talking to so many people, I can tell.

Don says, looking across the room at the people milling around near the casket and speaking ponderously, as if summing up his personal philosophy, "Life is precious."

I nod and try to find a reply. Is life that valuable? I used to think so. What reason do I now have to say that? What gives anything an intrinsic worth if there are no absolutes? "He will be greatly missed here," is all I can think of. We stand wordlessly for a couple of minutes. Turning Don's words over in my mind, I realise he wasn't talking about absolutes. He was echoing what we all feel: that life is worth clinging on to, and treasuring it wherever it is found, because we have nothing else. Maybe he's thinking of the search for traces of life on Mars.

"Ready to go?" I ask him, quietly. He nods, and we leave.

We're walking down the road away from the temple. The pelicans have vanished, but there are five or six songbirds in the baobab tree, some crimson with black-edged wings, and some a shiny electric blue. But they don't sing for us.

Then Don says, without looking at me, as if continuing a debate we've been having, "Now and again I think it must be comforting to believe in a god, and an afterlife. I can see the attraction, I really can. It would make a great many things in life so much easier." Like so many times before, I feel that there must be a big sign glued to me that reads, 'Son of a Pastor!' But he says it in a wistful, empathetic way, and I realise that he trusts me a great deal to say that, as much as he values his reputation as a serious scientist. He still thinks that I must believe in God. I don't say anything.

At one time I lived in a warm haze of belief that God was all around me, looking out for me and involved somehow in what I was doing. I was one small but significant part of a huge historic sweep of his story, and even if I messed up sometimes, well, he would forgive and put me back on my feet. It made sense of the world, for the most part, and also that faith connected me with others like me. I had a big family – a worldwide tribe of brothers and sisters heading the same way as me.

And why did it make sense? What was the basis for any of that? To be honest with myself, I can't dismiss it all as a leftover childhood superstition, as I've heard many outspoken atheists say in their anti-religion. There's great depth to the Bible story, I mean the whole sweep of it, the meta-narrative. It connected me to everything else. I started believing when I was a child, true enough, and my parents and teachers told me the Bible stories over and over. Perhaps that conditioned me. Perhaps I was able to accept it intellectually as a teenager because I had this deep trust of family and church – they are good people, after all, living good, humble lives serving the poor in the favelas – and it took quite a while of living apart from them for that uncritical acceptance to fade.

What happened? Did I lose something priceless? Or did I open my eyes and see what was real and what was false? That question has kept me awake at nights more times than I can count. Am I rejecting a free gift that would last forever, or am I just unwrapping it and finding the box was empty all along?

I could trust Don with my thoughts, but they make me too uneasy. There is too much uncertainty still.

We walk back towards the guest house, along the wide, treed avenues of concrete. The sun is going down, and the wind has hushed to less than a breath. We can hear the distant crashing beat of the waves on the shore.

I stand with Don on the roof of our guest house as the steaming world cools off a little. I can tell that he's tense, underneath his efforts to be sociable. Man, we're all tense. But I ask him what's up.

"I talked to Sergei at Budushchiya again," he says right away. "The oxygen recycling efficiency is shot. They're estimating... "

He stops. I've never seen him this far from his normal detached, scientific self. "They need to reach 95%, according to contract. Their latest estimate is down to 84%. That's over three times out of spec, Marco! The CO­­­₂ removal rate is only about 60 liters an hour. And we're running out of time!"

Don's been talking daily to this Russian contractor since he visited their plant two months ago. We all know that this is one of the most important jobs and it has to be done right, or we all suffocate. "They're most likely just giving you a pessimistic estimate," I try, lamely. I know this isn't true. I try again. "What's the problem, then?"

"They're saying the new outlet filter part needs some improved assembly technique. The seals didn't hold up under testing as well as they'd hoped. Their zeolite particle count is up, too."

"OK," I reply, as calmly as I can, "so let them do their assembly work. They have some good process engineers there. I think we'll be fine. These people cut their teeth on the latest generation of Vozdukh, didn't they?"

"But Vozdukh is a fossil, as great as it was thirty years ago. The original design is older than NASA's CDRA, right?"

"I'm not sure, Don. I'm just saying… Oh, and guess what? A.Q. said he's heading over there next week. He'll probably come up with some improvement to their techniques. The man's a genius."

Don nods. "Yeah, I had to argue him into that visit. He's on too many projects and committees. That might do the trick."

Good, he's calming down. "Man, but we should just have enough time to get those things rushed through testing and installed in the MTV before we launch. It's gonna be close." I think about what I just said. "Nobody likes rushing the tests. It's close to suicidal. But we've already pushed against the edge of the launch window for this opposition." Meaning: if we delay the launch any further, we won't be able to catch up with Mars as it swings within 56 million kilometres of Earth. "No way anyone wants to wait til next opposition, right?" Don doesn't answer. Twenty-six months is too long to defer our new life.

We catch the breeze and revel in it. "Here's another thing we won't be doing up there," he says, gesturing around at the dim evening and the view of the treetops and the white and golden flowers slowly closing up and the sunbirds and thrushes calling to each other. I ask him if he has any doubts about what we are doing. He shakes his head and thinks about it. "This is history, man," he finally says, making eye contact now. His gaze glimmers at me in the dusk, and I can tell he's totally sincere as he speaks. "I love the science too much to turn back now. I couldn't bear to miss out. Not even for 26 more months." Then he chuckles. "I expect when we get strapped in to that liquid-fuelled bomb I'll have plenty of doubts, but by then it will be too late."

What I want to put into words is that I am plagued by a fear I can't pin down. It is separate from the visceral terror of being thrown upwards into endless vacuum by a massive controlled explosion or choking on stale air. I can tell the difference: it's like tasting salt and vinegar at once, and knowing them apart. No, my fear is internal. Am I up to it? Am I doing what I was born to do? Surely the mission managers have serious doubts about putting me on the first crew. I am going to slip up in some technical detail, or forget a step in a procedure, and betray the whole team to an early death. Perhaps it's one of these, or a mixture, but I know that I also desperately want to reach Mars and explore its secrets.

Don sighs and wishes me a good night. He takes the steps down and I hear the door close behind him.

I stand for a long time, staring into the deepening darkness. My doubt, I decide on this rooftop, is whether I have chosen the right life, or if I have let this desperation for Mars take over. It seems like an irrelevant detail to say it like that – but some days it eats me up. Just like when I started having doubts about God. In my mind my life is a trail, and sometimes it forks, and sometimes it looks like there's no turning back if I take the wrong fork. That's what scares me.

- + - + - + -

I think I began to have serious doubts when I spent time with a guy in São Paulo named Joaquim Ferreira Nelson Molina. We Brazilians love our long names. American people seem so poor in comparison with their two or three names, of which they use only one normally and abbreviate or initialise as soon as they can.

But Joaquim and I roamed the city many an evening after working hours were done, and I got to know how he thought about life. He had never believed in God or the Bible or anything else – he had an unstoppable belief in himself. To him, the universe was a great stage set for him and anyone else who cared to join in the drama of life; there was no scriptwriter or director, just actors vying for a place in the play. When I asked him if natural selection had any effect on the way he treated other people, he said no, that was for animals, not humans. I think this was inconsistent of him, but I let it go. Obviously we don't want to go around living out Darwin's survival-of-the-fittest theory, but what's to stop us, if that's all that governs our lives?

Joaquim was making his own meaning, inventing himself day by day. So I found myself emulating him, except that I thought too much. I wanted to be sure this was true, that there was no God after all. I lingered a long while in the in-between. I feared what seemed like the emptiness of godlessness. I examined the presuppositions of each side of the argument and the chain of logic that led to each conclusion. I even went to lectures at the Philosophy department of the university, but that only confused me.

Atheism enlists scientific evidence on its side, but I thought for a long time that there could be no empirical evidence for or against God, since he would not be part of the material world where science operates. If God ever acted in our universe, surely the effects of that could be explainable using physical law. And I read books by main-stream scientists who are Christians and who see no conflict between the two.

As for Christians who I knew, they would talk about the miracles that proved that God was at work today amongst them, and I knew from experience that the unexplainable did sometimes happen when people prayed. Many times with my dad I heard eye-witness accounts and saw first-hand evidence of healings. People who were desperate found faith and their lives turned around. But then Joaquim pointed out how that sometimes happened in other faith-based systems too, so perhaps it could be explained in some psychic way, or like a life-force… he talked a great deal, and it was hard to sort out the wheat from the chaff. My dad also used to go on about the Bible and how it contained evidence of God intervening in people's lives and walking the Earth. Was that circular reasoning, a book that told you it was the One Truth? Is it possible to test that claim?

The more I thought about it all, the more discouraged I became, until after many months I just became used to hanging out with Joaquim and his friends when I wasn't at work or asleep, and it all made sense. The universe is not a grand vehicle with an invisible driver up the front, heading along a road to an elusive destination, but an ancient tangled jungle of immense proportions, and we step out of that forest and say, 'What shall we do today?' We make the jungle real by observing it. There are no rules – no ethics – no love or hate or meaning – except what we make ourselves. That was a heavy burden to pick up, but I was determined to face whatever seemed to be true. So I became depressed for a while, then it all became the new normal, and now here I am, taking it one day at a time, on my way to Mars.

Most days I'm energised by the work we're doing. I love the simulations and training, I can get my mind around learning the long procedures for launch and TMI and landing and base operations, I can get along with the team, and I can get along with the management. Everyone seems to like me. But days like today, when I crashed the sim into Arcadian Planitia three hundred k's short, and I got a fastener stuck during suiting-up, and we spent three hours repeating suit drills until we were all hoarse and mentally exhausted, and then one of our friends dies, well, then my whole body and soul are weary, and the universe begins to look like a hostile expanse of cold darkness. There's nobody looking out for me, and if I can't make it, I'll fall. I'm only here for a few decades at most, and then, blink! I'm gone. I mustn't waste my chances. And even if I make the most of my brief life, so what? It's over; and then: nothing. As far as we can tell, nothing but the hearsay of dreams and myths.

These are not the thoughts I want to be voicing to my team mates, or to anyone else. And these are not the worries that should cling to me when I go to live on another planet. I need to rest. I cast a final look at the night and take a deep breath as I head down the stairs. Tomorrow is another day.

We launch in five weeks.

Onwards to Launch: Don

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