“Irene,” Venkat asked, “what is going on with my astronauts?”

“You’ll have to be more specific,” Dr. Irene Shields said, slipping into a chair in Venkat’s office. “Hermes or Mars?”

“Mars. The Hermes crew appears to be fine for now.”

“Well,” Dr. Shields said, ticking off points on her fingers, “they’re stranded on a planet hostile to all forms of life. They’re eating a diet so monotonous a lot of people would give up and starve themselves to death rather than continue it. Their life support infrastructure has failed in one way or another on multiple occasions. One of their number is effectively comatose and might die. Their nerves are shot, they’re heartsick, they’re homesick, they’re miserable, they’re taking it out on each other… oh,” she said, holding up the thumb on her left hand, the last finger she had remaining. “And some bright boy decided, while the crew was having a catastrophic social breakdown, to order them to do the single most mind-numbing chore imaginable short of inspecting Hab canvas for weak spots.”

“Well,” Venkat shrugged, “at least it united them again. They all bitched me out and then went on strike.”

“Venkat, I’ve spent the last two days using the Pathfinder connection to play email ping-pong with all of them,” Dr. Shields said. “They’re not united. They’re as far from united as they can get. And they don’t understand why.”

“Can you at least give me some pointers?” Venkat asked.

“Well, part of it is that the alien crew was more or less thrown together,” Dr. Shields said. “You read the reports, you know that. It was going to be a short, simple mission. Half the crew were veterans from the first days of their world’s space flight. So their bosses put them together more based on politics than crew dynamics, and in the process they pretty much ignored long-term personality compatibility.”

“I remember all this from your earlier reports, yes,” Venkat said. “But that was months and months ago. They pulled together as a team since. Why did it fall apart like this?”

“Two reasons,” Dr. Shields said. “First, they lost the bug. I can send you the raw emails, but to sum it up, Dragonfly was actively working to hold the crew together. So was Mark, but he’s not trained for it. He does it naturally, when he has the mental energy. Dragonfly, by contrast, was literally born and bred to be an emotional manipulator. The others knew this, and knew they were being manipulated, but she made it work anyway.

“But when Dragonfly collapsed, that left Mark alone to smooth over the rough edges. He’s not trained. He gets along very well with people. He’s friendly to a fault. But he doesn’t manipulate. He doesn’t counsel. And when he hits confrontation or anger or hostility, he pretty much shuts down.

“Which leads into the second part- they’re all tired, Venkat. They’re mentally and emotionally exhausted. They’re lashing out at each other for no apparent reason, and my guess is it’s because they’re too tired for normal socialization. They have full work days between farming, caring for Dragonfly’s cocoon, working on the Whinnybago project, and generally staying alive. They’ve had one close brush with death after another in close succession and they haven’t been given any down time.”

“Their EVA time averages about six hours,” Venkat began.

“Don’t measure it in hours, dammit,” Dr. Shields said. “They need days, not minutes. They need some time to feel a little safe again. And that means not worrying about the MAV or Schiaparelli or the next Martian disaster.”

Venkat opened his mouth to deliver another defense of the current schedule, then shut it again. “How bad is it really?” he asked.

“All of them are exhibiting signs of mental and emotional exhaustion,” Dr. Shields said. “Mark’s too tired and upset to even snark anymore. That alone should tell you it’s serious. He says he feels like he’s shutting himself off from the aliens, which means he probably is. In fact, the past two days he says he just doesn’t feel like doing anything, like someone’s tied weights to his body. That’s clinical depression, and if there was one member of the Ares III crew I would have certified as immune to depression, it would have been Watney. So I’m worried about him the most right now.

“Fireball writes like a teenager, right down to the bad English. He says everyone hates him, and he hates everyone, but that’s fine because he’s pretty much useless anyway. He feels the guiltiest about being mad at the others.

“Spitfire says she has two modes now- pure rage and indifference. She diagnoses the problem well enough, again allowing for bad English. She compares it to soldiers who have just come through a bad battle, which is a fair way of describing living on Mars long-term. But she has no useful ideas for coping with it, since back home the cure was R&R as far away from the sources of stress as possible.

“Starlight thinks the others are looking for reasons to be mad at each other, and it makes her mad. She has this notion that if the others just tried hard and focused on their work, they wouldn’t get on each other’s nerves. She’s not seeing them as people right now, and that’s a bad sign. In her current mental state she’s going to be toxic to the others.

“And Cherry Berry sees all of it going on and feels like she’s the only one trying to hold things together. The general breakdown three days ago revived her feelings that she’s not qualified for command. She sees this as her failure, and she keeps asking me to tell her how she can fix it all.

“The one thing they all have in common are symptoms of exhaustion- inability to concentrate, lack of energy, lack of willpower. In their condition, the last thing they needed was a request from JPL to go back and re-do the full inventory of all spare parts and scrap metal down to the fasteners in the trimmed-off portions of the alien ship.”

“They’re going to have to do it eventually,” Venkat said. “JPL needs that information for the MAV modification sims.”

“Now is not the time. They need a few sols to rest- no duties aside from their daily cave trip. Ideally they need a break from each other, but that’s not possible. Keep the email channels open- I can continue to counsel them until they’re ready to deal with each other again. But aside from that, let them alone, Venkat. They’re not far from something really bad if you keep pushing them.”

Venkat considered this. “In about two months we go into solar blackout,” he said. “Three weeks with no communication with Mars, maybe more depending on solar activity. Data transfer to and from Pathfinder is pretty ratty already. We don’t know how much guidance they’ll need on the conversion protocols. And then there’s the question of what Mars will throw at them next.”

“Venkat, if you push them any more there’s a chance they’ll just roll over and die,” Dr. Shields insisted. “It’s time to let them set the pace. And don’t make any requests for a few days. I’ll work on getting the band back together.”

“I’ll try,” Venkat said. “I can’t make any promises, though.”

“You’re director of Mars operations,” Dr. Shields said, standing. “You report directly to Teddy Sanders. I think you can find the authority somewhere to make at least one or two small promises.”

Venkat watched the Project Ares psychologist depart. Then, after a few moments of thought, he picked up the phone. “Annie?” he said as soon as the line picked up. “Strip today’s Pathfinder logs out of the press releases. All of it. File it under ‘personal matters.’ It’s not as amusing as I thought it was…”

Author's Notes:

One show after another wears me out.

I may go back and fill in the sols I skipped with the email chains to Irene. This is telling and not showing, a cardinal writing sin. But, again, this is all I could think of to write just now.

Tomorrow it's on the road to Wichita for Wichicon, the geeky part of Riverfest in Wichita, Kansas.