Katrina ran her fingernails down Karl’s back as he unclipped her bra. She liked dreams that travelled at a slow, well-defined pace. One of his hands ran around the nape of her neck, pulling her lips towards his, when the emergency alarm screamed in the sleeping capsule, pulling her out of the dream by the ears.

The ship’s computer’s barked in a shrill female voice, ‘course error, course error’ as Katrina threw on an old t-shirt and pulled herself along to the bridge. Commander Helena Riccobono and Engineer Tim Kurtz floated in front of the hologram star chart. Tim wore his three-day old underwear, scratched his groin then ran his fingers though his thick black beard. Katrina knew he was only seconds away from sniffing them.

She quickly computed Integrity’s position. They were 54 million kilometres from Earth with Mars filling the starboard porthole like a red balloon. A false alarm. The third since leaving six weeks ago.

“Doesn’t make any sense,” Katrina said. “I’ve checked all the systems and there’s no errors.”

“Must be human error,” Tim said with a smile, “or maybe you’re distracted.”

Katrina Sedgewick was an outstanding choice for mission navigator. She had piloted the third Hermes mission to the moon to establish the scientific colony on Taurus Littrow. She also invented the navigational mathematics to account for Mar’s elliptical orbit. It was like landing a fly on a fast cricket ball. You only got one chance.

Katrina disliked Tim. It wasn’t the fact he was standing before her hiking up his underwear and smiling like an idiot. She had four older brothers. She knew how gross men could be. There was something untrustworthy about him. He had messy boundaries. He also knew about Karl.

“There’s no error Kurtz, baby,” Katrina said with more venom than she expected, “unlike the problem we had when the course correction engine didn’t fire putting us five days behind schedule. You’re the engineer, so blow that out of your jets.”

Tim’s smile dropped and he was about to spit a reply back when Helena clapped her hands. It was her way of saying ‘enough’. It made the crew feel they were school children being reprimanded by the class teacher.

“Thank you, Tim and Katrina. Tim, would you tell the others I’m calling a meeting on the bridge in an hour’s time. I’d like to see every one dressed in regulation uniforms. Katrina, would you please do another navigation check and ask the computer to provide a log of all its course computations for the last 24 hours. Would you then contact mission control and ensure those figures are correct.”

Tim made a little pig snuffling sound as he walked past Katrina.

“See ya later, porky,” she whispered out of the side of her mouth.

Integrity was the first manned mission to land on Mars. Everything depended on Katrina getting the entry angle right. She looked at her chewed fingernails and realised she was wearing fluffy pink slippers. Four hours to go before landing. She went back to her cabin but the taste of the dream was still in her head. She knew her obsession with Karl Tasker, the mission geologist, was unhealthy but she couldn’t help herself.

Helena plonked herself down in the pilot’s chair and muttered, “Men, God help us.”

Three weeks ago, she had turned off the internal communications feed to earth so mission control couldn’t hear the bitching. The crew were consummate professionals on Earth. Tim and Katrina had been close friends. Now they couldn’t stand each other.

In civilian life, Helena was a first class astrophysist who had written two important papers on dark matter. Her real claim to fame was being the great granddaughter of one of the Gemini astronauts. She lived and breathed space travel and knew every system on the ship. She stared at Mars and an image flashed through her mind. She was back on earth soaking in a bath with a glass of crisp Californian white wine with cucumber slices on her eyes.

xxxxxxx

When the history of psychometrics is written, Dr Priscilla Khandra will have a chapter dedicated to her work. Her vision drove the psychometrics program at NASA. The hallmark of her fame was her testimony at the Supreme Court hearing of ‘Kryon versus the State’, which convinced the full bench that psychometrics was a valid and exacting science, which could correctly interpret the deepest workings of the mind. Airport bookshops across the world sold her best seller, The Cultural Fit.

Dr Khandra now awoke at 2.25am on the dot every night. She had selected the Mars flight crew. She had invented many of the numerical and verbal reasoning tests, the situational judgement tests and the personality tests. Her report on the final six astronauts was exhaustive. NASA was pleased and the six astronauts were pleased. Now doubts crept in like unwanted guests at a party.

She had boyfriend trouble when she interpreted the results. The little weasel was sleeping with her younger sister. She took comfort in the dead of night, that her work was checked and cross-checked by her three post-doctoral female staff, who worshipped her. But only two weeks in to the mission, there were reports of ‘health issues’ amongst the crew. NASA code for bitching. No one at Houston expected six weeks of sweetness and light but the level of antagonism was unprecedented. Confidential reports from Commander Riccobono even alluded to a romance between two of the crew.

Dr Khandra sent the candidate results to her old professor at MIT. Alan Turning was in his late 60s and nearing retirement. He was a global expert on psychometric data. They’d had an affair many years ago, when she was an undergraduate psychology student. Something restive still pulled at her heart when she saw his picture on his website. Those blue piercing eyes sunk their hooks deep. She wrote a brief, light-hearted cover note, along the lines of ‘…a funny thing happened on the way to Mars,’ attached the data and hit ‘send’. If she was guilty of investing her own emotions in the test results, Turning would back her up. She hoped.

xxxxxxxx

The six-crew sat around the bridge in various states of undress. Only the pilot Tanya Retallick and Helena wore their uniforms. Dr Christina Ronaldo was nodding off in a chair. She had taken a vow of silence until her surgical Stetson pliers and a box of Amyl Nitrate were returned to the surgery. Katrina knew Tim was using the pliers to pluck his nasal hairs. Now wasn’t the time to raise that.

She looked at Karl and blushed. Karl was handsome and knew he was handsome, which made him less handsome and in being so conceited, inordinately appealed to her. There was only one thing stopping her from jumping on him – apart from a lack of gravity and the fact they were on a historical mission to Mars. He was screwing Tanya. She of the blonde hair and cheerleader smile; the pearly white teeth, luscious lips and perfect finger nails.

Tanya looked like a young Farah Fawcett-Majors and Katrina hated her. Her hair was pulled back in a plait and her cheek bones were stratospheric. She didn’t care that Tanya was one of the youngest physics graduates in the history of MIT. She didn’t care if she had won a Presidential citation for her work on deep space travel. She knew Karl had stolen the Amyl Nitrate and was sharing it with that blonde bitch to take their sex to intergalactic heights.

Katrina watched as Tim pared his nails. She struggled to remember why they’d been best buddies. They shared one secret. They discovered in astronaut training, that the spray used to clean the space suits caused hallucinations when injected in to one’s coffee tube. It guaranteed a kaleidoscope of visual and aural hallucinations for an hour.

Helena would have given anything to look like Tanya. She’d been plagued by acne and a protruding lower jaw, which made her look like a marsupial. Last week she’d caught Tanya and Karl coming out of the mist shower together – a unit designed for one – but had said nothing. She should have hauled them over the coals but all she felt was embarrassment and longing. Her husband wasn’t interested in sex. He worked in real estate and his idea of foreplay was driving a ‘For Sale’ sign deep into a client’s front lawn.

Helena clapped her hands again although no one was talking.

“Look, the countdown is on. Mars is looming large in the window and I want to say a few things. We’re all professionals and apart from a few minor issues, it has been a flawless mission.”

Christina’s head fell to her chest. Kurtz knew that their medical officer was whacking away the pethidine like M&Ms. She had told him on the morning of the launch, that her husband of seven years had left her and taken their two kids. It had come out of the blue. Yet Christina’s psychometric report came back with scores in the top five per cent across seven major categories. She was born to fly long distances in space – although maybe not with other people.

“I just want to say how proud I am of all of you,” Helena said. “In a few hours, we’ll enter the Martian atmosphere. We’ve run through the entry and landing procedure a thousand times…”

Karl raised his hand.

“Yes, Karl.”

“How come you get to walk on Mars first? As the chief scientist on board, shouldn’t that responsibility fall to me?”

Helena stared at Karl for a moment, took a deep breath and smiled.

“That’s a good question but as I’m the commander and space flight is not a democracy, I’ll be going first. You’re second. Try to think of something profound to say as you step off Integrity on to Martian soil. ‘Holy Shit’ won’t cut it for the folks back home.”

The crew made their way back to their pods to prepare for landing.

Katrina opened her inflight diary and added another spleen-filled entry about Tanya. She would have to be dealt with, one way or the other.

xxxxxxxx

Dr Khandra lay in bed staring at the ceiling. Integrity was due to land on Mars in two hours. Another sleepless night. She’d been awake for three hours when the phone rang on the bedside table.

“Priscilla, it’s Alan. Sorry to wake you so early.”

“I wasn’t asleep.”

“I’ve gone over the test results and I’m afraid they throw up more questions than answers.”

“I’m only really in the mood for answers now.”

“Of course, so I will cut to the chase. When you assessed the tests, you had a lot on your mind, what with your sister …

“Yes, yes, I addressed all of that…”

“You did so afterwards, but you missed some important data. You and I know that contrary to the Kryon judgement, psychometrics can only provide insight in to the most general of individual traits. When you cram six people in to a metal capsule, not much bigger than a bus, and hurl them millions of kilometres from earth, you are liable to get blow back.”

“Blowback?”

“I’m afraid so. While the astronauts presented excellent individual psychological profiles, you did not factor in group interactions.”

“I most certainly did. The Bion equations were categorical. The team performance yields were extraordinarily high.”

“They were high but there were errors in the responses of one of the astronauts – Katrina Sedgewick. Her behaviour has affected the other crew members. When the questions on love and relationships were rephrased and asked again, she only achieved a score of 34 – a fail.”

“That’s impossible. How can that be?”

“She lied.”

xxxxxxx

Tanya lined up the bow of the craft with the Martian equator. Due to the computer glitches, she decided to land Integrity herself. She put the stomach flips and the tingling in her fingers down to nerves. She knew millions of people on Earth were watching. It promised to be spectacular. Helena sat next to her and gave her a light pat on her hand.

“Go for it, girl. She’s all yours.”

xxxxxxx

“Unfortunately, the problems don’t end there,” Alan said. “While no one doubt’s Sedgewick’s excellent academic record, she failed one other very important test. She’s a ‘brewer’.”

“A what?” she asked.

“A brewer. Do you remember my friend David Reischbeth? It was a long time ago … when you and me were … close.”

“I vaguely remember him. He became a psychiatrist, didn’t he?”

“A very good one but he had one major problem. When he fell in love, he fell hard. If he couldn’t have a woman, he’d stalk her.”

“And he’s a shrink?” she said.

“He was a shrink. He fell in love with a patient. She rejected his advances but here’s the kicker. She kept coming to see him. Every consultation was an arrow through his heart. It went on for two years. One night he went around to her apartment, blew her head off and then jumped from the 43^rd floor of her building.”

“David was a brewer,” she said.

“And so is Sedgewick.”

xxxxxxx

Tim whistled an old David Bowie song about a starman when Helena cut off his microphone. Tanya thought the control panel looked pretty. All of those yellow, red and green lights. They were blinking too. She could hear people talking in her head. Voices wrapped in static from far away. One of them sounded like her father’s voice: soft, calming and assured, ‘it’s a cinch kid, nothing to it’ as she ran on to the basketball court, her pigtails flying and the school song playing. Then a gloved hand waved in slow motion in front of her face.

“Are you okay, Tanya?” Helena said. “You look a bit off colour. The computer can take it if you want to sit this out.”

“No, no. I’m as right as rain, which falls mainly on the sane.”

She gave the retro rocket a three second burst and the craft came to a standstill, 110 nautical kilometres above the Martian surface. And then, like a roller coaster reaching the top of its climb, it plummeted towards the red planet.

“Trajectory looks good. A tad shallow. It’s GO,” Katrina called.

“On the money, honey,” Helena said.

Tanya could see fire-filled plasma stream past her port hole. That’s real pretty, she thought. There were reds and greens. Swirling out of the colours she could faintly make out a face. It looked like her mother’s face, as she lay dying from lung cancer. Then it morphed in to Tanya’s face and then Karl’s and then it turned in to the Devil’s face, complete with horns and pointy black beard. He was leering at her, telling her to do dirty things.

“Integrity, this is Houston, we have a small problem, do you read?”

“This is Integrity Houston, we copy.”

“You’re coming in three degrees too shallow.”

“Katrina, how’s that angle now?”

“A bit shallow but there’s not much we can do about it now.”

Helena glanced at the temperature of the heatshields. 4000 centigrade and rising. Too high. Katrina’s eyes rolled back in to her head. She kept jabbering, “the angle of the dangle equals the heat of the meat. The angle of the dangle equals the heat of the meat. The angle…”

“You wouldn’t believe Katrina’s heart rate,” Christina yelled over the intercom. “it’s right off the bloody scale.”

Helena glanced at the trajectory readings. Way too steep. The entry angle was now five degrees below the curve and getting worse. Then Integrity did something entirely unexpected. It started to tumble end-over-end.

“Houston, we have a major problem here,” Helena yelled. “Pilot Retallick has lost control and we are hurtling towards the Martian surface. I’m going to try the Titan manoeuvre.”

The Titan manoeuvre was very risky. It required the engines to be fired at full thrust, while the pilot tried to point the craft towards the north pole and hopefully, sling shot it out of the atmosphere. A Soviet cosmonaut back in the 1960s had tried it when re-entering Earth and smashed in to the Siberian tundra at 700 miles an hour.

“Tim, I’m going to give the main rocket a ten second burn at 100 per cent, do you copy? … Tim! Tim! This is not time to be fucking around! Do you read me?”

Christina hit the intercom button.

“You turned off his microphone. For Christ’s sake, stop these spins or we’re dead.”

The instrument panel swirled in and out of focus as Helena’s hand grabbed the throttle.

“We don’t have the time … here goes…”

The rockets fired and for three seconds the space craft began to stabilise, then Newton’s Third Law kicked in, flicked Integrity on the tail and ploughed it in to the Martian surface. A seismograph on Mars relayed the impact back to the Houston control room.

xxxxxxx

Dr Khandra’s television screen at home went to black but that was expected as Integrity entered the Martian atmosphere. There would be no communications for five minutes.

She opened up an old student exercise book she had found when clearing out the attic. She’d taken Alan’s class notes in it 30 years ago. In elegant cursive, she’d written ‘Dr Priscilla Turning’, half a dozen times on a blank right hand page, followed by a dozen kisses.

Dr Khandra turned the page and wrote in thick black texta, ‘Counselling for the crew of Integrity on Mars.’