How to Mars

by David Ebenbach

  “I’m just trying to be a team member,” Tiago said.

  “Well, I’m cold in the ass,” Stefan said after all.

  “Boys,” Mary said.

  Stefan plunged his shovel into the hole with considerable force, and there was a cracking sound, and Mary yelped.

  In the hole they were digging, which was now perhaps a meter deep, Stefan’s shovel had hit something. Something hard and yellowish whitish brownish. In fact, more than that—his shovel had cleaved that yellowish whitish brownish hard something in two. A small thing, a small ridge of a thing, in two. Tiago and Stefan leaned closer, blocking out the sun until Mary shoved them back again. It almost looked like—

  “What the bother?” Stefan said under his breath.

  They all wordlessly switched from shovels to brushes, the kind of brushes that archaeologists used. But it felt like they all already knew what they were about to find. Stefan didn’t articulate it in his mind, but he knew all the same.

  And so it was. After a while of brushing away at the dirt, there it was.

  A skull. A human skull.

  With a shovel in it.

  “Oh, bollocks,” Stefan said.

  Mary sent Stefan and Tiago back to the base, standing watch over the skull herself, as though it was going to be snatched up the minute their backs were turned, or perhaps, Stefan reflected, as though she worried that Stefan would break it further if he was the one who was left to keep an eye on things.

  Over the lunette, back across the dry lakebed, panting in the heat—they moved as fast as they could while still using the simulated big, slow Mars steps. The cameras were always watching.

  Or would the producers want them to drop all that pretense, because of the drama of finding a body? Maybe the producers would have preferred them to abandon the façade in the face of something surprising. Or maybe they preferred the absurdity of them maintaining the façade.

  Stefan was getting very tired of wondering what the cameras wanted.

  Back at the base, everybody already knew the news because the three diggers had radioed ahead with that news. Stefan and Tiago had only come back because it seemed like the thing to do. In a situation like this, you had to come back and, with hand gestures and facial expressions, convey the significance of the moment.

  “Oh, wow, my friends,” Tiago said, holding his helmet out in front of him like he was the prince of Denmark or something. “We’ve really found something.”

  Everybody was already getting their spacesuits on. Well, Orna and Jackson were getting their spacesuits on. Eric was still in his bunk, still waiting for it all to be over.

  “Have we heard from Mission Control?” Stefan said. “Do we know what they want us to do?” If the team was meant to ignore emus as unmarsly, perhaps the same logic was meant to apply to human skeletons.

  “We haven’t heard a damn thing,” Jackson said. “We’re on our own with this one.”

  “I hear you broke the skull,” Orna said, winking at Stefan as she wrestled her hair up into a massive and chaotic bun so that she could get her helmet on.

  “Well—”

  Tiago freed up one hand so that he could lay it on Stefan’s shoulder. “It was an accident,” he said.

  For a very brief and unexpected moment, Stefan pictured himself grabbing that hand and giving it a good, hard twist.

  “I guess it’s the cow’s birthday after all,” Jackson said.

  On the way back to the skull, still walking Mars-style—there was apparently implicit agreement that the façade should be maintained—Stefan thought about the sound-more-Danish email he’d gotten that morning, which had been just one more thing piled onto the big pile, under which he was struggling to keep it together. A terrible thought had occurred to him: What if they had asked him to be more Danish because they believed that the TV audience hated Danish people? There was a difference between messing with him and actual sabotage. Stefan’s breath felt hot in his throat.

  After another undignified tumble down the far side of the lunette, they all assembled around the hole. Mary had done a bit more excavating, had brushed away the rest of the dirt surrounding the fractured skull, which was now essentially out in the open under the enormous sky. Both empty eyes looked up at them. And what looked like another bone—collarbone, maybe?—was starting to show through the dirt alongside.

  “I think we’ve found something truly remarkable,” Mary said, shaking her head. Re-mah-kah-ble.

  They all shook their heads, including Stefan. It was remarkable. The sun stared down all over everything.

  “Do you think it’s recent?” Tiago said.

  Orna squatted down by the hole and carefully picked up half of the skull. “It’s heavy,” she said after a moment. “And you see how dark it is?”

  Everybody nodded.

  “This is fossilized bone,” Orna said.

  “Now, hold on,” Jackson said. “You’re saying we’ve found a fossil?”

  “Homo shovelensis,” Orna said, probably winking from inside her helmet.

  “Now, see here—” Stefan started.

  Jackson held a hand up to shush him. “Really, Orna? A fossil?”

  A sandy wind swept over them all, and Orna set the skull-piece back down in the hole, very carefully, where she’d picked it up. “I’m not a paleontologist,” she said. “But I don’t think it’s bone. I think it’s fossil.”

  “Remarkable,” Mary said.

  “This is the park where they found Mungo Man, after all,” Orna said. “And Mungo Lady.”

  “Mungo Lady?” Tiago said.

  “More fossils. The oldest humans discovered in Australia, I think.”

  “Wow,” Tiago said.

  Jackson stepped back from the hole, clapped his hands against each other as though wiping dust off. “We really shouldn’t be messing with this. We’ve already broken one piece—” Stefan started to protest, and Jackson cut him off again. “It’s probably not your fault, okay, but this could be a major discovery. I know we’re not supposed to knock down the fourth wall—” he meant the TV show, and in fact he started talking to the people watching, which is something the candidates never did—“but hey, somebody out there, it seems like this is a major find, and it’d be good to send some experts in here, wouldn’t it, which we are definitely not.”

  “Maybe we should go back to the base,” Tiago said. “Wait and see.”

  “But we found this,” Mary said, almost mournfully.

  Suddenly Stefan felt possessive, too. “It’s ours,” he said.

  “None of this is ours,” Jackson said.

  Back at the base again, Stefan took a long shower to get at least most of the sand off. The water was an unpredictable mess of very hot and very cold, as usual. Still he stayed in there. There wasn’t anything else to do for the moment, with the digging mission cut short and Jackson off in the video journal dome, trying to communicate with Mission Control. So Stefan tried to get the sand off, and tried to calm himself, too. He was starting to feel a bit paranoid about the TV people and their control over things, and he wasn’t keen on the feeling. Unfortunately, the wild temperature swings didn’t help him calm down.

  After, Stefan went back to the bunkroom to grab his sleepsack; he was going to shake it out once and for all. Eric was there, on the bunk above his own, staring straight up at the ceiling.

  “Hey,” Eric said, or maybe he just sighed loudly. He was an unshaven, unshowered, and underfed man with very pale skin. He hadn’t started out that way, but, three months in, he was that way now.

  “Did you hear?” Stefan said. “We found a fossil.”

  Eric didn’t take his eyes off the ceiling. “That’s bullshit.”

  “No, truly,” Stefan said. “We were digging, and we turned up this skull. And Orna says it’s a proper fossil.”

  “That’s bullshit,�
�� Eric said, his voice completely flat.

  Stefan felt another surge of anger. “What are you going on about? I’m telling you what happened.”

  Eric turned his head in Stefan’s direction. The turning was geologically slow, but eventually he met Stefan’s eyes with his own gray ones. “They probably just put it there, you dipshit,” he said.

  “Who?”

  Eric just stared at him.

  Stefan’s jaw fell open. “The TV people?”

  Eric turned slowly back up to the ceiling.

  They—they—could they have planted a fossil?

  Our hero was beginning to wonder what was even real.

  Stefan, gobsmacked, left the bunkroom.

  Orna, Tiago, and Mary were all out in the sitting dome, their arms crossed, feet tapping, watching the door to the airlock.

  “What’s going on?” Stefan said.

  Orna nodded at the door. “They told Jackson to go by himself back to the hole. I guess they’re going to meet him there.”

  “They argued for a long time first,” Tiago said. “They wanted him to forget about it, but he insisted.”

  “He did,” Orna said.

  “Are we going to tune in to his radio channel?” Stefan asked. “To hear what happens?”

  “They told him to turn it off,” Mary said.

  “Oh. Really?”

  “Yeah.”

  Still gobsmacked, Stefan sat down, too.

  Maybe fifteen quiet minutes went by. And then there was a ping from a variety of sources—the main control panel, the PA system, and the individual tablets scattered around—which was the ping of an important official communication from Mission Control. They all picked up tablets, and there was the message.

  Our condolences. We understand that, while on a solo mission for the good of the colony, Jackson Thomas’ spacesuit developed a catastrophic rupture, and he rapidly depressurized and suffocated in the Martian atmosphere.

  There was a fresh, stunned silence.

  “Wait,” Tiago said. “They don’t mean—did they kill him?”

  Orna shook her head. “Um, no,” she said. “Couldn’t be. They probably just took him out of the running. That’s all.”

  “Right, right,” Tiago said.

  “Nonetheless,” Mary said. “That is really, really something.” She sounded even more Nigerian than usual.

  Stefan thought the thing they were probably all thinking: It was not a good idea to break the fourth wall.

  “Baruch dayan ha-emet,” Orna said in quiet Hebrew. It sounded like a very small prayer.

  Dinner that night was quiet. Eric was in back, and otherwise it was just the four of them. Orna was eating a falafel sandwich, Tiago a black bean and beef stew, Mary pepper soup with a side of yams, and Stefan a smoked herring, and they ate it all in near silence.

  At one point Tiago piped up. “Should we have some kind of funeral ceremony?”

  “We don’t have a—” Mary said, stopping short of the word body.

  “We could say a few words,” Orna said. “But I don’t know much about Christian funerals.”

  “May he rest in peace with God,” Tiago said.

  Orna put down her sandwich. “Sure,” she said. “Be well on your journey, Jackson.”

  “God bless,” Mary said.

  For his part, Stefan sat there fuming. Jackson wasn’t dead—he was only expelled. But of course you couldn’t acknowledge that. There were many things you couldn’t do, and many things you were meant to do. The pile was bigger and bigger all the time. How was a person meant to carry a pile like this one?

  “God bless,” he said, fork and knife in hand.

  That night, while everyone else slept, Stefan lay awake in his sleepsack, which—God damn it—still had sand in it, or had sand in it again, or whatever it was. His whole world was itchy.

  Eventually he got up and went out into the common domes, and to the airlock, where he put on his spacesuit, mainly just so he would have the boots on; they were his only boot options. But he put the helmet on, too. Probably the cameras were running. He had to assume they were running.

  It was quite dark outside, once Stefan was outside the range of the dome lights. This was the Outback, after all. So he turned on his helmet flashlight, which opened up a beam of visible landscape in front of him, all familiar barren landscape without the color, and off he went. The stupid man was on the move again, he narrated.

  He found the lunette. He went over it.

  And there on the other side was the hole. It was the same hole, of course, though it was now quite a lot larger than it had been. And—Stefan stepped up to it and shone his helmet light down into the opening—it was perfectly empty. There was no skull, no edge of collarbone, nothing at all. Just a big emptiness.

  He wondered where Jackson was at that moment. Most likely headed back to America, or possibly in some long or even endless debrief with the TV people at Destination Mars! It was conceivable that the TV part never ended. Maybe they followed the ejected candidates for the rest of their lives, making them do things and say things.

  It was an increasingly unbearable thought.

  He now did something he was definitely not meant to do: he took off his helmet—cool air for a moment, the first fresh air he’d felt on his face in months, like a miracle. Should he keep it off forever? Should he walk off the set, so to speak?

  Stefan looked up. Somewhere up there, or out there, was Mars. Where they could watch you if they wanted, but they couldn’t do anything to you.

  He bent down to the hole. The sandy soil was loose, and it was easy to scoop up a handful. It was easy to pour it down the neck of his suit. He felt the sand go all the way down his overheated body, into his clothes; he put another scoop into his helmet. And then he put that helmet back on, sealing all the heat and itchiness inside. From the roots of his hair to his sweating feet.

  “Jeg er her stadig,” he said, directly into the helmet-cam, before turning to head back to the lunette, the dry lake bed, the base, his uncomfortable sleepsack.

  I’m still here.

  Ghost Martians at the Baby Shower

  The first-ever Martian baby shower seemed like it was doomed from the start.

  At least, that was how it looked on television. What the viewers on Planet Earth saw was an edited version of the events, a couple of weeks pared down to fit into two hour-long episodes of the Destination Mars! reality TV show. Certainly there would be some manipulation on the part of the producers in order to get the maximum drama out of the situation, particularly given that the show, which had started off with such a huge audience—people living on Mars!—had actually gotten so dull after a while (it turns out there’s not much to do on that planet) that it had been canceled, and was only back on now that one of the Marsonauts was pregnant. So the producers had to be feeling pressure to make sure it was good TV.

  But in fact it may not have required much effort. Even before things started going wrong in the planning and execution of the baby shower, consider that:

  1. The Marsonauts were not supposed to be having sex at all, but two of them—Jenny and Josh—had apparently left that rule behind after the series’ first run. Some viewers had picked up on romantic tension between them, but nothing actually happened, which was part of the reason the show was canceled; it seemed like another will-they-won’t-they scenario, a well-worn television cliché that lost its appeal pretty fast. And then it turned out that they got together once the cameras were off. A lot of people were annoyed about missing that. But the news did make folks want to start watching again. (Some people on Earth got themselves T-shirts featuring a picture of a red planet on which was superimposed an even redder heart, and underneath were the words I want a Mars love.) Anyway, the reason they weren’t supposed to be having sex was because it could lead to pregnancy, which wasn’t thought
to be safe on Mars—and now here Jenny was, dangerously pregnant. The commercials for the show all had voiceovers that said things like, Have these men and women traveled farther than anyone else ever before . . . only to reach tragedy??? (You could hear the extra question marks in the way that they asked it.)

  2. Another thing was the fact that, as viewers learned when the show started up again, Jenny had been told her whole life that she was biologically incapable of becoming pregnant. When she managed it anyway, totally by accident, a whole new set of T-shirts (and bumper stickers, and so on) cropped up, this time with a religious message: God is Great—on Every Planet. But those were met, as most religious messages are, with religious counter-messages, in this case from people who felt that other people were turning Jenny into some kind of immaculate conceiver, even though she was in fact a completely secular scientist who had gotten pregnant having—they were careful to point out—premarital sex.

  3. And meanwhile there was the way that the impending birth was affecting all the Marsonauts. Jenny and Josh, who had both experienced tragedies back on Earth, were going through psychological turbulence throughout the pregnancy, the kind of turbulence that made for good close-up shots of conflicted faces and additional ominous voiceovers at the end of the show. For example, after the first of the two baby shower episodes: Next time on Destination Mars!: Can the two lovebirds survive what’s to come? And meanwhile one of the doctors—Trixie—had gotten kind of obsessive in her prenatal attentions, developing something of a manic vibe, or maybe even slightly mad-scientist-esque—at least until Josh talked her down a little. Everybody wondered if that talk-down would stick. Meanwhile the engineer who had in the first season demonstrated a tendency toward violence was getting more antisocial by the minute. There were a lot of closeups of him muttering unsettlingly.