There had been delays. Two more thruster engines and a fuel pump had failed inspections, and they had had to be replaced. The supplier for the probe’s monopropellant fuel had come up short, delaying fueling by a critical thirty-six hours. Parts were put in backwards by half-asleep technicians, costing the next shift more sleep when they had to be removed and remounted correctly.

But the technicians, the assembly people, the engineers of Jet Propulsion Laboratory persevered. Shifts ran round the clock. Then, as it became obvious the original schedule wasn’t going to happen, shifts were abandoned, and people worked almost until they dropped. People bunked in the cafeteria, in conference rooms, in offices, any place with sufficient horizontal surface and dim lighting to allow sleep.

The local businesses that served JPL employees knew what drove this, and they responded. Popular restaurants got together and organized catering, meals and beverages available virtually around the clock, with the owners picking up the tab. Laundries coordinated with workers to swap out clean changes of clothing fetched from their homes and washed the old ones, without charge. And one supermarket manager, who had attended the California Institute of Technology but dropped out a year before graduation, arranged to have half a pallet of liquid soap and air freshener “fall off a truck” near the JPL loading dock early one morning.

And now, four days past schedule, at just past four in the morning, it was done- barely in time, a mere six days before launch.

Bruce Ng, his polo shirt smudged and slightly torn, his eyes almost totally shut from exhaustion, held a ratchet wrench in his hand. Behind him sat two special shipping containers, one already labeled for special flight to Cape Canaveral, Florida, the other bound for China’s space center in Inner Mongolia. Behind him stood the massive freight doors of the Spacecraft Assembly Building, and behind them freight handlers waited to transfer the containers onto trucks, drive them to the airfield, and load the containers on two NASA aircraft for immediate transport to their destinations.

In front of him, and around him, stood hundreds of workers- every permanent or temporary JPL worker who’d so much as lifted a wrench, fired a welding torch, or drawn a line with a pencil. There were even people present from Accounting, who hadn’t needed to put in overtime, but who wanted to be in at the end.

When the three probes of Sleipnir 1, 2, and 3 had been delivered, only about half as many people had been in the room. Now, with assembly done on Sleipnir 4 and 5, everyone who could get in had done so, to witness the completion of their supreme effort.

“People,” Bruce said in the almost totally silent room, “in the past several months you’ve made history. You’ve set records for building probes. We’ve made mistakes, and we’ve corrected them. We’ve hit obstacles, and we’ve worked through them. And as a result, the probes we’ve delivered have functioned perfectly.

“And you know why we did this. Not for the money. Not for the line on the resume. Not for the extra month of paid vacation time. We did it to preserve the lives of eleven very special people. Thanks to you, those eleven people will have a fighting chance to make it home. They’re not here to thank you right now, but I am. Thank you all.”

There was some applause, if perhaps not all that was deserved. The workers were both proud and grateful, but beyond that, they were exhausted.

Bruce took the wrench and ceremonially tightened one bolt in the doors of each container. With that gesture, so far as the builders of JPL were concerned, Project Sleipnir was complete. What happened afterwards was in NASA’s hands.

Bruce turned back to the crowd and said quietly, “Go home.”

They did. When three of them were pulled over by Pasadena police officers for erratic driving, the officers took one look at the employee parking stickers on their cars and said the exact same thing.

And for all practical purposes JPL ceased to exist for the following two days, at least as a collection of conscious human beings in a vertical position.

Meanwhile, Hermes grew closer.

Author's Notes:

All I have today. I apparently slept poorly last night, since I've been sleepy and a bit spacey all day today.