I set the coffee down and stood up. I shrugged and spread my hands. "Ask me that seventy days from now, if you're still around to ask, and I'm still around to answer. Then maybe I can tell you 'yes.' Right now, I just don't know. This wasn't included in the plans!"
She didn't answer. I walked forward and stared out over the crushed cab at the blue-white CO2 ice of the Martian north polar cap.
Seventy days. That was the deadline—the physical deadline. It really didn't matter too much. Mechanically, we'd either make it to the equator and carve out a landing strip for the other two ships, or we wouldn't.
We might make that deadline and still miss the other one. The psychological one.
My wife was dead. So was Helene's husband. So were the Travises and the Leonards.
That left just me and Helene, and according to the reasonably well-proven theories of space-crew psychology, she would have to replace my wife and I her husband. It was supposed to be easy, since we wouldn't have been in the same crew if we weren't known to be more compatible than ninety-nine and nine-tenths percent of the world's married couples.
I pictured her in my mind and tried to superimpose "wife" on the image. It didn't work. I gave it up. Maybe later; it had all happened so fast....
Four days ago, the eight ships of Joint Martian Expedition One had gone into orbit around Mars.
Four men and four women in each ship; forty of the most stable marriages discoverable at the present state of the research which had resulted in using the "stabilizing influence" of marriage to stabilize space crews.