Mars One

by Jonathan Maberry

  Sophie Enfers caught up to me afterward and we stood talking for a few minutes.

  “Hey, Sophie,” I said as she joined me, and I nodded to Marcel, who was standing apart from the rest of the crowd, as if not wanting to become dirty by touching the unwashed. He saw my nod but instead of responding like a normal person he gave me a flat, cold, and completely hostile stare, like I was something he noticed on the ground and was glad he hadn’t stepped in. He’s a real sweetheart. “You better watch out. I don’t think your boyfriend digs me all that much.”

  She turned to consider Marcel, shrugged, and smiled at me. “Don’t worry about Marcel. He’s like that with everyone. And . . . he’s not my boyfriend.”

  Her accent was really thick but I was used to it by then and could understand her.

  “He looks pissed,” I said.

  “He always looks like that. Just ignore him.” She said it almost loud enough for Marcel to hear.

  “Maybe he’s mad ’cause you guys will be on different ships.”

  “Perhaps.”

  “You could have put in a request to be on the same ship, you know.”

  Sophie shook her head. “No, this will work out much better for everyone, trust me.”

  “Um, okay.”

  She touched my arm. “By the way, you haven’t forgotten that you promised to teach me how to do some basic repairs, have you? Once we’re in flight, I mean.”

  “Huh? Oh, sure. No problem. Anytime.”

  Lansdorp entered the room, his arm interlaced with Dr. Aukes’s, and there was another round of applause. Then the physicist was swarmed by reporters.

  “That was some speech, non?” Sophie said.

  “Yeah,” I agreed, “Dr. Aukes is a rock star.”

  “She could sell coal to the devil,” she said, nodding.

  “She’s not trying to con anyone,” I said, rising to what sounded like a challenge in her tone. “She really believes in what we’re doing. She knows it’s the right thing.”

  She studied me. “The right thing for whom?”

  “Weren’t you listening to what she said? For us. For humanity. You know, that whole pushing the limits of science, finding new places for people to live, all of that . . .”

  “Couldn’t all the billions being spent on space exploration—not just with Mars One but with SpaceX and NASA and every other space program—be put to better use here on Earth? There are billions living at or below the poverty line. There are droughts and famines. There is a need for advanced science. Imagine what could be done with a few hundred billion. New kinds of agriculture, improved water purification systems, repairs to rail, road, dams, and shipyards. Literacy programs and education . . .”

  Her voice trailed off and she cleared her throat.

  “If you feel like that, Sophie,” I said, “why are you going at all?”

  I gave her a moment to come up with an answer. While she’d ranted her cheeks had flushed red and odd lights began burning in her eyes. “I’m going because we are going.”

  “Sorry . . . you lost me. What?”

  She adjusted one of the fastenings on her suit. “These rockets are going to Mars. You and I and all of the others. That is happening. That is certain. Why am I going? Because I’m needed. I believe that I have been called to go. Destiny is not an abstraction. Besides . . . I have skills that are crucial to this mission.”

  She was mostly a cook, not a mission specialist, but I thought it’d be the wrong time to point that out.

  “Everyone’s bringing game,” I said, “but everyone else seems to think Mars One is a good idea.”

  “Do they?”

  “Sure.”

  “Do you?”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” I demanded.

  “Iseult,” said Sophie. “I’ve been watching your show. Tristan and Izzy. I’ve seen the pain in your eyes when that witch of a host asks you questions about leaving your pretty girl behind. I saw the episode where she ambushed you with old friends. That hurt you.”

  “Of course it hurt . . .”

  “No,” she said, shushing me gently. “If you were one hundred percent committed to this mission and to all that it implies—leaving your friends, leaving a future, denying yourself the chance to start a family, probably living a shorter life, the possibility of diseases and medical conditions unique to space travel, the uncertainty of what we’ll find, the risk of never really being happy . . . should I go on?”

  I had to grit my teeth as I said, “I know the risks.”

  “I have no doubt. I saw that in your eyes during every episode of that show. It’s there in the carefully worded love letters to Iseult . . . the ones the producers probably asked you to write. I wonder what is in the letters no one but your girl reads. Do you tell her your true feelings? Or do you keep all of that bottled up because it would sour the great sacrifice you are making?”

  “You don’t have a right to say that to me.”

  “We will be a community of inmates on a metal ship, Tristan. It will be like living inside a confessional. Do you think any of our secrets will remain hidden? Or should?”

  “I don’t have secrets,” I lied.

  She laughed. Soft and low. “You are a terrible liar, Monsieur Hart.”

  With that she walked away and joined a conversation group, kissed cheeks, shook hands, laughed. From then on she and Marcel were never more than a few feet apart. But every once in a while I caught her looking back at me.

  Chapter 49

  * * *

  Feeling weird and uncomfortable after that bizarro conversation with Sophie, I coasted the edges of the party. But I wasn’t really into it now. So I used every second I could to text Izzy and Herc—sending them celebrity pictures and trying to be normal with them.

  Normal was another thing we were leaving behind. Though, I guess I already had.

  Then Izzy sent me a text that really hit me hard.

  Izzy: Tristan . . . will you forget me?

  I immediately texted back that I wouldn’t. Ever. Never ever. Her answer was a knife that went deep and turned slowly.

  Izzy: You probably should.

  Before I could compose an answer a shadow fell across the cell phone screen and I looked up to see Nirti standing there. She was looking at me, not trying to peek at the screen, but from the expression on her face I think she might have read what Izzy wrote.

  “Are you okay?” she asked.

  I made myself grin. “Um . . . sure. Never better. Going to Mars tomorrow.”

  When she wandered off I texted Izzy back, my thumbs flying over the little keys.

  Me: Nothing in the universe could make me forget you.

  There was no response.

  Me: I love you.

  Nothing.

  Me: Love you forever.

  No matter how hard you stare at a cell phone and will it to show a text, sometimes it simply refuses. Sometimes the world is that cruel.

  The crowd swirled around me and I felt like a toy boat bobbing in the current. People talked to me and I tuned out as much of it as I could. Eventually I washed up against the wall farthest from the action. After a while Luther, Zoé, and Nirti drifted to stand with me, and for a long time we said nothing, just stood and watched. We all said the right things when someone from the media shoved a mic at us, and we smiled pretty because we’d been schooled on how to give good interviews. But we weren’t there. Not really. All four of us were already on board the rocket. Or maybe we were already deep in the black and heading to our new red home.

  Nirti told Luther and me to behave ourselves, and we did.

  At one point Luther punched me on the shoulder and ticked his head toward the door to the restrooms.

  “I don’t need to pee,” I growled.

  “Yes you do,” said Zoé. Nirti nodded. And then I got it.

  I followed them through the door, down the hall, past the men’s and women’s rooms, and out the service door to a storage yard closed in by a chain-link fence. We wai
ted until the door closed and then everyone let out a sigh. We sat on packing cases, watching the sun set on the far side of the launch site. The four massive rockets were silhouetted against the red sky.

  “The pillars of heaven,” murmured Nirti.

  “What?” I asked, and she pointed to the ships.

  “They look like they’re pillars holding up the sky.”

  We all looked and nodded. Even Zoé, who didn’t much believe in heaven or anything. My guess was that she was mentally doing mass-versus-thrust calculations. That was how she relaxed.

  The western sky was still streaked with red when the first stars ignited overhead, and Luther began naming them. Zoé corrected him twice. And Nirti gave us the Hindu names of the constellations they belonged to. Luther, not to be outdone, gave the Zulu names. I gave them names from old science-fiction stuff. Gallifrey, Arrakis, Skaro, Mongo, Tatooine. Zoé started looking those up on her cell, apparently unnerved that I knew something she didn’t. She didn’t watch old movies or read fiction. At all. When she found the entries she punched me. Not hard.

  The very last of the sunlight gleamed so intensely on the ships that they seemed to catch fire.

  Not the most encouraging image the night before takeoff.

  Nirti must have felt it too, because her small brown hand slipped into mine and squeezed. She wasn’t coming on to me. She was hanging on.

  Was it fear? Doubt? Excitement? All of that?

  Yes.

  That’s exactly what it was.

  Chapter 50

  * * *

  Launch day.

  Even though we’d been planning this forever and it was the only thing I’d been able to think about, I couldn’t believe it was about to happen.

  Our ride into orbit would be aboard a reusable Falcon heavy-payload rocket, one of four that would rise in sequence from the launch site. My dad and I were in the second rocket. Luther and his folks were in number one, Nirti’s family was in three, and Zoé in four. It wasn’t actually intended that way. Seating was based on random computer selection.

  We had to wear the latest generation of bright orange space suits called ACES (Advanced Crew Escape Suit), which included suit, boots, gloves, a helmet, and a bunch of emergency gear shoved into pockets. This was what we’d wear during our ascent into space. Space programs began using these types of suits after the space shuttle Challenger tore itself to pieces back in 1986. They were designed to keep people alive in the event of what they called a “survivable bailout” from an unsafe or failing spacecraft. This meant that we might—and “might” is an iffy word—stay alive if the rocket were to fall into water. If it actually blew up, we’d be dust. If it crashed to the ground, we’d be roadkill. Basically, the suits were nasty. They were heavy and hot, but what we wore underneath was a lot worse—because we had to wear frigging diapers. Okay, they called them Maximum Absorbency Garments, or MAGs, but they were diapers. You can’t unzip and take a leak while you’re on a rocket. Can’t drop trou and dump your cargo either, if you get my drift. They made us wear space-age Pampers. If you’re going into outer space you leave your personal dignity back home along with your sense of privacy.

  Over the MAGs we wore long underwear made somewhere in Switzerland by, I can only assume, people who hated the thought of astronauts being comfortable. Add to that thick socks, and we were baking. But over all that we wore a liquid-cooling garment, so you had sweaty heat and a cooling system. It was a wonder storms didn’t form inside the space suit.

  We went through ten zillion kinds of system checks and equipment checks and suit telemetry checks and prelaunch prep checks. After a while it felt like we were doing the same thing, checking the same stuff over and over again. And we were passengers. We weren’t flying anything. Personally, I thought some of it was actually fake—but it gave us something to do because sitting on a rocket and waiting for it to launch or blow up can kind of work the nerves. Trust me on this.

  The pilots were not part of our mission—they worked for SpaceX and they came with the lease on the four reusable rockets. Chauffeurs to take us off world. Our pilots were as unsmiling as Frick and Frack. Total professionals who could hit the hold button on their emotions while they did their job. Like Mom, I guess, though she left that button pressed most of the time.

  The twenty colonists on my ship were seated in rows of five, all of us facing the same wall of screens, watching the live feeds from ten different cameras. Four of the screens showed the interiors of the passenger cabins. I could see myself there, second row back, middle seat. Another four screens showed the exterior of our ship as it sat on launch pad. The ninth camera showed a satellite view of the four rockets in a row, each separated by half a mile, like a picket fence in a giant’s yard. And the last camera showed another satellite view, but this was facing out rather than down, and there, snugged into the hoops that formed the Lucky Eight, were the two transit vehicles, the Huginn and the Muninn. The two largest spacecraft ever built. No one had ever even attempted to construct ships capable of carrying a crew like ours. Plus supplies, crew’s quarters, a gym, a galley, and other chambers, all built like cells in a beehive. Every inch of space had been planned for multiple uses, and every possible comfort was provided—but “comfort” in space travel didn’t mean the same thing as it did on Earth. Comfort was a tiny screened-in cubbyhole so you could take a zero-gravity poop. Comfort was a VR helmet so you could step off the ship and back onto Earth while you worked out. Comfort was a common room built without a thought about gravity. All twenty people on each ship could crowd into that room and sit on the walls, floor, ceiling, all at once, or they could float around between everyone else.

  The mission specialist, a woman with a hard mouth but kind eyes, came into the crew capsule to do a safety check. She made sure all of the right wires, tubes, cables, and feeds were attached to each of us. Some of those would monitor our vitals during the flight. I can only imagine what my pulse was in those last minutes before final countdown. I’m pretty sure that my blood pressure could have launched all four ships.

  “You okay?” asked Dad.

  “Oh, sure,” I said. “Why wouldn’t I be?”

  He frowned. “I’m serious, Tristan. You’re flushed.”

  “Prelaunch jitters,” I said. “It’s all good.”

  He studied me for a moment longer, the frown still etched around his mouth, and then he patted my knee and turned away to watch the screens. Then the voice of the mission controller at the launch center filled the air around us—through speakers on the wall and the earbuds we all wore.

  “We are cleared for launch.”

  Oh my God, I thought.

  The mission specialist left the crew chamber and sealed the door. On the screen the countdown began. The voices of the pilot and copilot were as calm as if they were two guys talking sports over coffee at Starbucks, but they were running through the last prelaunch steps.

  Then the voice from the launch center spoke again.

  “We are T-minus ten.”

  This was it.

  “Nine.”

  I thought of Herc and all the great things he could and would do with the Hart Foundation.

  “Eight.”

  I thought of my friends at school. Kids I grew up with and kids I’d just met.

  “Seven.”

  I thought of our house. The yard outside, my room, my dad’s botany lab in the garage, the machine shop and engineering workspace my mom and I shared in the basement. My old bicycle. The cat, goldfish, and box turtle we’d had to bury in the backyard over the years. The boxes of Halloween and Christmas decorations in the closet. The marks of my height penciled against the kitchen door frame. All of it gone. Not even history, because another family would change everything about that house. They were only memories now, and it hurt me to think that they would fade and vanish the farther I got from that place.

  “Six.”

  I thought of all the people who were watching this. The thousands standing or sitting on
the grass on the hills outside. What were they thinking? How many of them wished us well? How many—like those freaks in the Neo-Luddites—hoped that we’d blow up on liftoff? How many thought we were wrong, or crazy?

  “Five.”

  I thought of the millions who were seeing the countdown on computers and tablets, on TV and on their phones. Millions, maybe billions. What Sophie had said came back to me. These ships cost billions and there were starving kids, people scrambling for a cup of polluted water from a dying well, farmers who were being foreclosed on because they couldn’t afford to buy seed. All of that was true. All of that maybe mattered more than what we were doing. No, not maybe. Definitely. And yet I believed in what Dr. Aukes said, in what we all knew was true. And, who knows, maybe in leaving Earth we’d see it differently. It’s all about how you look at it. Perspective changes everything; it lets you see more and maybe put a higher value on things than you might otherwise do. It was a great lesson. We, those of us on these ships, were about to get a huge perspective check.

  “Four.”

  I thought of where we were going. Mars, the red planet. Named after a god of war. Would it be a place of peace? Would the different nations of Earth manage to colonize it and live together on that new world without bringing hate and prejudice and war with them? Was that even possible?

  “Three.”

  I thought about the world we were about to leave. Earth. Birthplace of the entire human race. Everything that’s ever been, everything that defines us as human, as civilized, as people was born there. Every single thing.

  “Two.”

  I thought of the things we were leaving behind. Too many to count. Maybe too many to risk thinking about. So many precious, important things that we would never see again.