The Meeting

Nobody volunteers in the first hour. Yusuf had read about expedition crises, the famous ones, and the accounts always skipped the first hour, the part where four reasonable adults sit very still and look at the table and discover that survival instinct is not a noble feeling, it is just a feeling, low and animal and embarrassing. Priya asked the obvious question first, which was whether the survey samples could be jettisoned for mass. They could, a little. It bought hours, not a person. Tomas asked whether a slower trajectory existed, and Yusuf walked him through the orbital mechanics until Tomas stopped asking, not because he was convinced but because he was tired. Ren said nothing at all. Ren had said nothing for most of the mission, which Yusuf had taken for shyness and now suspected was something else, something more like a person keeping accounts. When the meeting broke up, no decision had been made. That, Yusuf thought, was its own kind of decision.