“What did you see, precisely?” Raphael returned calmly. “A dark blur rushing at the camera. A screen that went black. These phenomena are easy enough to explain away. Equipment malfunctions, the same reason why they aborted the mission and returned to Earth. As for plotting their return trip, any mission such as this has backup plans. Contingencies. They came home early because a malfunction bled away most of their oxygen supplies. Problem solved.”
There had to be about a million ways to poke holes in his plan, but as I was not a mission specialist at NASA, I didn’t really know what any of those ways might be. Besides, the important thing was to get the astronauts out of there, wasn’t it? We could worry about explanations later. It would be pretty hard to point a finger at any of us, sinc
