“You wanted to see me?” I said.

She looked up. Her eyes had bags. She hadn’t slept. “Yeah. Have a seat.”

I sat in the chair next to her. “You look terrible. What’s going on?”

“I have to make a decision. And it’s not easy.”

“How can I help?”

She offered me the gin. I shook my head. She topped off her own glass. “The Hail Mary is going to have a very small crew compartment—about 125 cubic meters.”

I cocked my head. “That’s actually kind of big as spaceships go, right?”

She wiggled her hand back and forth. “Big for a capsule like Soyuz or Orion. But tiny for a space station. It’s about one-tenth as big as the International Space Station’s crew compartment.”

“Okay,” I said. “What’s the problem?”

“The problem” —she picked up a manila folder and dropped it in front of me—“is that the crew will kill each other.”

“Huh?” I opened the folder. Inside were lots of typewritten pages. Actually, they were scans of typed pages. Some were in English, some in Russian. “What is all this?”

“During the Space Race, the Soviets briefly set their sights on Mars. They figured if they put people on Mars, the U. S. moon landing would be trivial in comparison.”

I closed the folder. The Cyrillic writing was nonsense to me. But my guess was Stratt could read it. She always seemed to know whatever language was being used.

She rested her chin on her hands. “Getting to Mars with 1970s technology would mean using a Hohmann transfer trajectory, which means the crew would have to spend just over eight months aboard a ship. So the Soviets tested out what happens when you put people together in a cramped, isolated environment for several months.”

“And?”

“After seventy-one days, the men inside were getting in fistfights every day. They stopped the experiment on day ninety-four because one of the subjects tried to stab another one to death with broken glass.”

“How big will the crew be for the mission?”

“The current plan is three,” she said.

“Okay,” I said. “So you’re worried what happens when we send three astronauts on a four-year trip in a 125-cubic-meter compartment?”

“It’s not just about them getting along. Each crew member would spend the whole trip knowing that they’re going to die in a few years. And that the few rooms on that ship are the only world they will know for the rest of their short lives. The psychiatrists I’ve talked to say that crushing depression is likely. And suicide is a real risk.”

“Yeah, that is some rough psychology,” I said. “But what else can we do?”

She picked up a stapled sheaf of papers and slid it toward me. I picked it up and read the title: “A Study of Long-Term Primate and Human Coma Patients and Detrimental Aftereffects—Srisuk et al.”

“Okay. What am I looking at here?”

“That’s a study by a failed company in Thailand.” She swirled the gin in her glass. “Their idea was to put cancer patients into induced comas for their chemotherapy treatments. The patient gets the chemo, but doesn’t have to be awake to suffer through the process. Wake them up when the cancer goes into remission. Or when it’s no longer treatable and it’s time for hospice. Either way, they skip a lot of misery.”