Return to Mars by Ben Bova

self-contained: pleasant almost all the time, intelligent, but certainly not outgoing. She went her own way and spent most of her time working with Fuchida.
    Anastasia Dezhurova was just the opposite: Stacy looked gloomy, scowling, forbidding, but once you began talking with her she opened up into a friendly, likeable, utterly competent woman. She was big-boned, thick in the middle, slow in movement, but her reflexes were lightning-fast. During a mandatory training session out in the badlands of Dakota, Jamie had seen her snatch a field mouse in her hare hand when it came sniffing into her tent. Then she tenderly carried the terrified rodent out to the brush and set it free.
    Dezhurova was the senior of the team’s two astronauts, with more than a dozen flights into space for the Russians; she was second in command to Jamie. She worked with Rodriguez and, as the weeks went by, more and more with Craig on maintaining the equipment and running the astronomical experiments at the behest of astronomers back on Earth.
    If being subordinate to her threatened Rodriguez’s machismo, he gave no outward sign of it. Tomas seemed to be an amiable, easygoing sort, although Jamie wondered how long he could remain cooped up with the three women without causing a problem.
    It was Dex Trumball who gave Jamie the most irritation. Dex with his cocky, handsome smile and smooth manners. A young man born to money, who’d never had to struggle for anything in his life. His father had been a major force in funding this expedition, yet Dex would have been chosen to go anyway, he was that good a geophysicist. Degrees from Yale and a doctorate from Berkeley, no less, plus brilliant work on the lunar mascons.
    The long months of the journey to Mars went smoothly enough, except for a communications breakdown when the main comm antenna responded to a faulty computer command and pointed itself away from Earth. For a whole day Dezhurova and Rodriguez tried every programming trick they knew to unlock the antenna, to no avail. At last the Russian and Craig had to suit up and go EVA to physically remove the antenna’s steering system and reprogram it inside the spacecraft, then go out and reinstall it. No damage done, and no one got hurt, although everyone was jittery until they reestablished contact with mission control on Tarawa.
    Jamie noticed, though, that Trudy Hall was ashen-faced with tension. When he asked Vijay about her, Shektar told him she had given the biologist tranquilizers to calm her down.
    The only other incident came when a solar flare erupted and they had to spend fifty-three hours in the spacecraft’s shielded storm cellar. Hall hyperventilated from anxiety, but otherwise everyone was all right. Trudy took a good deal of teasing about having to clap a retch bag over her face and breathe into it for almost twenty minutes.
    Then late one night, when they were halfway to Mars, as he prepared for bed, Jamie heard muffled laughter from the next compartment: Dex’s quarters.
    “What’s he ever done?” Through the thin partition between their compartments, Trumball’s voice sounded accusing, almost angry. “I mean, what’s he ever contributed to the field of geology?”
    The answering voice was too low, too muffled for Jamie to make out cither the words or the speaker. It sounded like a woman’s voice, he thought.
    “I’ll tell you what scientific contributions our big Injun chief has made,” Trumball went on, loud and clear. “Nothing. Zip. Nada. Zero.”
    He’s talking about me! Jamie realized.
    The woman said something; the tone sounded as if it might have been a protest.
    “Oh, yeah, sure, he drove the first expedition to go to the Grand Canyon and they found the lichen there. But he didn’t make the discovery, the biologists did. He might have married one of ‘em, but he couldn’t even make that work.”
    The woman spoke again, lower still.
    “If he weren’t a redskin he wouldn’t be the mission director, I can tell