A Large Anthology of Science Fiction

by Jerry

  The ten of us introduced ourselves around the table—purely for etiquette’s sake, of course, as we were all familiar with each other’s dossiers. When it came to me, I told them how much I looked forward to posting my first blog from the surface of Mars, and showed off some of the exciting photos I’d gotten after the landing.

  “You can’t post those,” Dae-jung said.

  I stared at him. “Doesn’t the habitat have at least as much communications bandwidth as the ship?”

  “Not bandwidth,” he said, raising one finger. “Politics. We don’t let the public know about small problems that don’t seriously impact the mission.” All of the current crew nodded their heads in agreement.

  I wasn’t happy about the situation, but rather than provoke a conflict in my first day on Mars, I acquiesced. That night I posted a blog about our aerobraking, descent, and landing, emphasizing the noise and vibration; it wasn’t bad, but I really felt that it lacked something.

  It wasn’t until hours later, lying on my hard narrow bunk with a gluey rehydrated meal in my belly, that I realized I had no idea who had wound up being the sixty-seventh person to set foot on Mars.

  The next day, once we had breakfasted and unpacked our few personal items into our tiny, Spartan quarters, we found out we had a lot to learn.

  It turned out that all the training we had received before departure, and the manuals we had read on the trip out, were almost completely worthless. Just about every system in the habitat, from the surface suits to the sinks, had been repaired, modified, or updated. “Do not under any circumstances touch this button,” Dae-jung said, pointing to the toilet’s FLUSH button, which was crossed with an X of tape. He and the four new kids—as he called us—were all crammed into the habitat’s one tiny bathroom. “We don’t flush urine at all, and when it’s time to flush feces you wash it down with one liter of gray water.” On a shelf glued to the wall stood a scarred plastic pitcher, above which a tap hand-labeled GRAY WATER protruded from a hole that looked like it had been melted through the plastic wall with a soldering iron.

  “What happens if we push the button?” Lynne Ann asked, quite reasonably.

  “We call it the Blue Spew. And whoever pushes the button has to clean up the mess.”

  Kabir looked dubious. “So why don’t you just disconnect it?”

  Dae-jung gave a little smirk and pulled a panel off of the wall, revealing a disordered nest of variously-colored wires, conduits, and pipes. It didn’t look a thing like the tidy pictures in the training manuals. “The last time we tried it, we lost power in the kitchen for half a week. Best to leave well enough alone.”

  Despite the close quarters and hassles of the hab, I was excited by actually being on Mars after the boring months of travel. Just about every day I got to put on my surface suit and tromp around on the surface of Mars—Mars! Lifeless and airless though it might be, it had a desolate beauty to it; the low-gravity mineral formations were spectacular and their colors changed from hour to hour as the sun passed across the sky. We’d brought a supply of new weather balloons, ultra-light hydrogen-filled spheres that carried tiny instrument packages high into Mars’s thin atmosphere, and they brought back more great pictures and interesting scientific data. I supplemented the limited number of photographs I could post each day with text: moments of personal drama and exciting new findings in biology, climatology, paleontology, and geology. My blog’s ratings started to climb.

  You might think that science is inherently dull, but personally I was fascinated by the question of why Mars’s climate had changed from hospitable to inhospitable all those millions of years ago. I agreed with Secretary-General Zirinowski, who’d declared over twenty years ago that only through study of our dead sister planet could we find a way to reverse the climate change that was threatening to kill our own. I was thrilled by the opportunity to share my enthusiasm with the public, and I think that passion came through in my blog.

  We new kids made a lot of mistakes in our first few weeks in the habitat, though. Lynne Ann forgot to plug in her backpack after her first EVA, so the battery ran down overnight and she couldn’t go out at all the next day. (We called our outings EVAs because the hab was, technically, a vehicle—the first crewed vehicle to land on Mars, in fact—even though it wasn’t going anywhere any more.) Audra Miskinis, our Lithuanian paleobiologist, was the first of us to do a Blue Spew, but all four of us made the same mistake at least once in the first two weeks. Even Kabir the engineer managed to mess up, damaging the pressurized rover’s gearbox the first time he tried to shift it into reverse.

  I managed not to break any of the hab’s systems, but the error I made was much worse.

  The day Kabir stripped the rover’s gears, I was riding in the shotgun seat. When the horrendous grinding noise came vibrating through the rover’s frame, we looked at each other in horror, but it soon became clear what had happened—the exact same kind of boneheaded mistake any teen-aged driver might make with the family car. The necessary parts were just steps away in the hab, Kabir and I worked together to repair the damage, and by dinner that day the rover was again ready to go and we were both laughing our heads off at the whole incident. It made such a good story that I led off with it in my daily blog that evening, and I was still chuckling about it when my head hit the pillow.

  Nobody was laughing the next morning, though. While we’d slept, my humorous blog story had turned into a political scandal. A US Senator, one who’d been opposed to the Kasei program since its inception, had seized on the incident as yet another example of waste and mismanagement, with a racial slur for Kabir thrown in for good measure. Mission Control had managed to blunt the public-relations damage, but they were none too pleased with Kabir for breaking the rover or with me for mentioning it in my post.

  Dae-jung’s face was dark as a storm cloud when he came thundering into my narrow little room. “Give me one good reason not to shut you out of the network right now,” he said through clenched teeth.

  I looked him straight in the eye. “I was just doing my job!” I said. “I’m here to represent the average citizen and increase public interest in the mission. All I did was report a minor incident in a humorous way.”

  He didn’t back down. “I told you there are things we don’t share with Mission Control, never mind blabbing it all over the public nets! Your little blog has undone years of careful political maneuvering in the UNSA Council.”

  “It’s not my fault some senator used my blog to grind his own well-worn axe!”

  “It’s your fault for not thinking!” He slammed his fist against the cracked plastic wall. “Everything we do is being analyzed by people who want to shoot us down, and we can’t hand them any ammunition!”

  I had to look away. He was right—I’d been foolish to forget about how many political enemies the program had. “I’ll be more careful in the future.”

  “You’ll be more than careful,” Dae-jung said. “From now on, you will not mention anything in your blog that could cast this program in a negative light.”

  “Now wait just a—”

  “I will review your blogs before they are posted.”

  “You can’t do that!”

  He straightened, and even though he was at least ten centimeters shorter he managed to look down his nose at me. “I am the commander of this expedition,” he said. “You will obey my orders or you will be subject to discipline.”

  “I’ll go over your head!”

  In reply he gave me a smug little grin. “I’m sure Mission Control will give your protests the full attention they deserve.”

  I matched his grin with a level stare, jaw clenched and breathing hard through my nose. But he had the authority, he had the administrative passwords, and I was as certain as he was that in case of a dispute our superiors would side with him. They were already upset with me, and insubordination wouldn’t help my case. “All right,” I said after I had gotten my temper under control, “I’ll let you review my blogs. For a while.�
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  “We will see,” was all he said. He shut the door behind himself, leaving me seething in my narrow little stall like an angry bull with no rider.

  I came back to my quarters after a grueling geological EVA to find a blinking video-message indicator on my display. Even though I had red dust caked in every crease of my body, I played it right away—it wasn’t often anyone back home cared enough to spend the money on sending a video all the way to Mars.

  It was my agent. “I’ll get right to the point,” she said. “The syndicate isn’t happy.”

  Of course they weren’t. Dae-jung insisted that anything negative, controversial, or unprofessional—in other words, anything of interest to the average viewer—be removed from my blogs, and that the scientific content be accurate and complete. Thanks to his careful editing, my blogs had turned into the same snooze-inducing stream of technical bafflegab that all the non-Citizen Astronauts had produced before I’d come along. After almost two months of this, my ratings were in the toilet.

  “They’re giving you three weeks. If your ratings don’t improve substantially by the fifteenth of next month, they’re moving you off the front page.”

  I sighed and put my head in my hands. They couldn’t drop me completely—I had a contract through the end of my mission—but if my blog didn’t appear on the syndicate’s front page my already-puny ratings would vanish off the bottom of the chart. I’d come home to a tiny paycheck and a smoking hole where my career used to be. I’d have to start over from scratch.

  I sent my agent a text message reminding her of the censorship I was facing—not that it should be a surprise to her; I’d kept her in the loop all along—and promising that I’d do everything I could to make my blog more interesting. But after I’d sent the message I found myself sitting and staring disconsolately at the blank screen.

  I’d said I would do everything I could. But I’d already tried everything I could think of, including arguing with both Dae-jung and Mission Control, and nothing had helped.

  Just then came a knock on the door. It was Kabir. “Hey, can you give me a hand with something here?”

  I was still grimy and exhausted from my EVA, as well as depressed, but I knew Kabir wouldn’t ask for help unless he really needed it. “Yeah, sure,” I said.

  It was the electrical system again, of course.

  The small nuclear plant on the other side of Bathtub Ridge provided more than enough power for our needs. But the omnipresent dust, ultraviolet light, and extreme temperatures made insulation crack, switches short, fuses blow, and backup batteries fail, adding up to a rickety mess that could barely meet our needs on a good day.

  And today was not looking to be one of the good days. We’d lost power in half of deck 2 and none of the usual tricks had brought it back.

  Kabir’s legs protruded from an access panel in the ceiling of deck 1. “Try again,” came his muffled voice.

  I flipped the circuit breaker. It immediately tripped again. “Nope.”

  Kabir cursed and squirmed around, still looking for the short circuit. While he searched, I peered at the tangle of conduits leading upwards from the panel. I was trying to figure out where the problem wire came from and where it went, but they were all the same color and it was almost impossible to trace each one visually. “Hang on,” I said.

  “Mmph?”

  I ran my eyes along the wire again. “That wire you’re looking at isn’t even connected to anything. It just loops around.”

  Kabir pulled his upper torso out of the access panel. His hair was filthy with red dust. “So where’s the short?”

  “I don’t know, but . . .” If that wire was just a dead loop, then the short had to be on this one. I followed it away from the panel, peering closely as it snaked along where the wall met the floor.

  Then something caught at the back of my throat. “Huh.” I closed my eyes and sniffed.

  Yep. Burnt insulation.

  “Here it is.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “No. Look.” I pulled the conduit away from the wall, revealing a blackened spot and exposed wires.

  “How the hell . . .?”

  I smiled and tapped my nose.

  Kabir shook his head in admiration.

  Now that we’d found the short, fixing it only took about ten more minutes. Everyone cheered as the lights and fans came back on.

  But what we’d learned disturbed me. “If that whole conduit is just a dead loop,” I said, pointing, “that means the main and backup power systems are both routed through the main panel. Single point of failure.”

  Kabir shrugged. “Dae-jung told me the secondary panel blew out a couple years ago and they had to rewire it. But the systems are still completely separate . . . they’re just in the same place.”

  I sighed. Just another one of those things we didn’t tell Mission Control about. “It’ll have to do, I guess. Let’s get everything closed up.”

  After we finished, everyone who happened to be in the wardroom when we reported our achievement toasted us with tea, heated up with the newly-restored power.

  “Gary’s got the Magic Nose,” Kabir said.

  I waved a hand dismissively. “I was the ‘super’ of my apartment building for a few years in grad school. I didn’t get a lot of sleep, but the rent was cheap. I never dreamed I’d be using those same skills on Mars!”

  Just then Dae-jung came in, and we told him we’d fixed the electrical failure. He humphed and nodded. “Good work.”

  I decided to press my advantage, small though it was. “So can I blog about it?”

  He stared at me across the scuffed plastic table, while Suma and Kabir and the others looked on. Finally he blinked. “Very well. But you must emphasize the solution, not the problem, and I will still review your work before submission.”

  “Of course,” I said, and tried to be glad of the small victory. It wasn’t much, but it was a small note of human interest that I could use to leaven the usual scientific blah-blah-blah.

  It helped, but not as much as I’d hoped. Three weeks went by—twenty-one days, twenty-four-and-a-half hours each, filled with clambering over rocks in my sweaty space suit, sifting through endless samples looking for microfossils, and constant battles with balky, malfunctioning equipment—and though I emphasized the positive enough to get some of the interesting bits past Dae-jung my ratings remained less than stellar.

  At least I’d been able to make myself useful. After the incident of the Magic Nose I’d gradually taken over more and more of the small repair and maintenance tasks that took up so much of Kabir’s and Suma’s time, leaving them free to perform some major system upgrades that had been put off for far too long. It wasn’t how I’d planned to spend my time on Mars, but I found it more satisfying than working on blogs that I knew were going to get edited into mush and then ignored by most of my potential audience.

  On Monday night, washing dishes after yet another bland rehydrated meal, I reflected that when I woke up I would probably find my blog pulled from the front page and my ratings reduced to the low single digits. “I’m going out for a walk,” I said to Suma and Audra after I’d dried and put away the last plate.

  Technically, we weren’t supposed to go out on EVA alone, for safety’s sake. But that rule had been relaxed to the point that you could solo as long as you didn’t get out of sight of the hab. I suited up, got Suma to check me out, and cycled out to the surface.

  The thing about being on the surface of Mars is that it’s quiet. I’d grown accustomed to the many sounds of the hab, from the whir of fans to the hammering thud of the water pump; in fact, I’d gotten to the point that I noticed immediately if the sound changed, indicating that something wasn’t working the way it should. But out on the surface, even with the echo of my breath and the soft clack of valves in my helmet, I felt something relax in my neck and jaw and I realized just how badly I’d needed to get away from the constant barrage of noise.

  It was dark out there, too. I
climbed a slight rise a couple hundred meters from the hab, switched off my headlamp, and looked up at stars scattered thick as salt spilled on a dark tablecloth. Twinkling just slightly in the thin atmosphere, they burned bright against a background blacker than any on Earth. Even through my scuffed faceplate they were awe-inspiring.

  Then, as I turned back to the hab, it struck me hard that the few dim lights that shone from its windows were the only lights on the entire planet. We were alone here, entirely alone, and farther from home than any human beings had ever been before.

  That’s when I saw the flash.

  It was brief and silent, but quite bright, and for a moment afterwards I couldn’t see anything at all. But then the stars gradually reappeared, and I realized what I was seeing . . . or, more to the point, what I wasn’t seeing.

  The hab’s lights had gone out. There was nothing but blackness below the horizon.

  “Hello?” I called. Suma was on comms duty.

  No response came on the radio.

  I switched to channel 8. “This is Gary, on EVA, to anyone in the hab. Do you copy?”

  Nothing. Not even static. Digital comms give you perfection or nothing at all.

  I stood blinking into the endless dark. Heart pounding. Waiting.

  Communications on channel 8 were automatically routed to the main speakers. Everyone in the hab—every single human being on Mars—should have heard my call. If no one was responding . . .

  I switched on my headlamp and headed down the slope toward the hab, moving in a tiny rust-colored ellipse of illuminated soil. My breath was very loud in my helmet and I had to remind myself to take it slow and careful. Tripping and cracking my helmet would only make the problem worse. Whatever it was.

  When I got close enough to illuminate the hab with my headlamp, I couldn’t see any damage. The lights were still out, but as I walked around to the side where the main airlock was I could see flashlights moving around inside. That simultaneously reassured me and deepened my fears—some people at least were still alive, but what kind of failure could knock out both the primary and backup power systems?