Mars Maze (Short Story)

by Deborah Jackson

  Episode 3

  “Okay, are you going to stop sulking and show me this body, or are we going to sit here all day?” said Matt.

  “I thought you were injured,” snapped Sarah, hunched over on a rock. A miserable red rock. “And I thought you were nice, too, but you never warned me before you dropped me into what could have been a kilometre-deep canyon.”

  “It was a 1½-metre crater. You were almost at the bottom. Well, maybe not quite.”

  “Was that a short joke? Because if it was—”

  “Sarah,” said Matt. “After all we’ve been through, do you think I would have let you get hurt?”

  Sarah pondered his remark, thinking of all the crazy places he’d dragged her to and the even crazier situations, dinosaurs being the least of their near-death experiences. But then she thought of all the times he’d saved her. Hmm. There was the time they were ejected into the river in a canoe while being assailed by arrows. No, that was her saving him. Well, there was the time that Nazis nearly discovered them in a wagon and they were distracted by an uproar of farm animals. Yeah, her again. There was the time that Albertasauras nearly took . . . Matt’s head off . . . and she dove on top of him. Okay, what about the time he pushed her out of the way of gunfire? Yeah, that was Matt saving her. Hmm. Was there only one?

  “Matt, I’m starting to think that you’re not as reliable as you make yourself out to be.”

  “Ouch,” he said.

  “I’m sorry, but you have to consider the dangers—”

  “I wasn’t saying ‘ouch’ because you don’t trust me, although that is a little insulting. I was saying ‘ouch’ because I rolled about fifty times when I flew up from the canyon and I have bruises over ninety percent of my body.”

  Sarah eyed him. He was still encased in a rotund EMU suit that had at least twelve layers of padding. “I think you have bruises on ten percent of your body, if that.”

  He gazed at her through the oversized bubble on his head, pursed his lips, then abruptly changed the subject. “So where did you say this body was? I need to make sure it isn’t Dad.”

  “Over there,” she said, pointing to the north, near the lip of the canyon. The haze had grown thicker, like the clouds that engulfed Niagara Falls. They could see only a dim outline of a human shape. Well, not really human, because it was encased in a bulging suit and was mostly mush.

  “Matt, I thought your dad wouldn’t have a suit. That’s why you were so worried and wanted to yank him out of here before he . . . exploded.”

  “You’re right. It can’t be my dad.” He scrambled to his feet anyway, teetering on his perhaps-a-little injured legs. “But that means there are people here, if it was a person? Do you think it was a person?”

  Sarah shrugged. “What else would it be?”

  He didn’t answer.

  “Matt, you’re not suggesting it’s an alien.”

  “Little green men,” he said.

  “Matt, the rovers didn’t find any life, other than bacteria.”

  “In our universe. Weren’t you the one who thought that our myths came from other universes? Maybe it’s a vampire.” He chuckled and the urge to make his perhaps-a-little injured leg into a perhaps-you-need-a-cast injury rippled through her.

  “Come on,” she said. “Find out for yourself. Do some CSI investigating. Get your hands dirty.” She’d love to see him cringe.

  She grabbed his arm and yanked him toward the shape. But as they approached and the mist cleared away, her anger at Matt’s teasing was replaced with appropriate heart-stopping fear. She’d seen enough movies to know you don’t go investigate the strange sound, or approach the mysterious person, particularly if the mysterious person is dead and ripped apart and splintering in front your eyes. You run the other way.

  Matt even seemed to be hesitating.

  The body was just as she’d seen it, without a nose or eyes or a face. It looked like a mass of milk curds.

  “Yeah, not a pretty picture. Don’t think it’s my dad. Looks like Nadine, though. The suit is weird, a lot thinner than what NASA makes. Maybe that’s why he’s dead. It ripped open on a rock, or he fell jumping out of a canyon and really banged up his body,” he emphasized, massaging his leg with gloves that couldn’t massage anything, “tearing open the suit that way. Or it could have been a micrometeorite, penetrating the helmet. Could have been anything.”

  “But who is he? Why is he here? We’re not very far in the future.”

  “Isabelle didn’t really specify which universe she was sending us to. Maybe the Mars Mission started way before our time in another universe.”

  “So this is an astronaut. But his skin, if it is skin, doesn’t look the right colour. It looks like silvery scales over white stuff.”

  “Hmm,” said Matt. “Fishy.”

  “Now you’re just making fun of me again.”

  “No, it really does look weird. Maybe if we open the suit . . .” He stepped forward. Was he crazy?

  “Matt, don’t touch—”

  He touched. The flesh flaked away but some white residue attached itself to his glove. “You know,” she said, furious now, “I thought skydiving and interfering in history until you almost erase yourself was the ultimate in idiocy, but I think you just took the cake. What did I tell you they found on Mars?

  “Huh?” He was still examining the sticky substance.

  “Bacteria. That’s what I said. Now you just touched what could be dangerous, flesh-eating bacteria.”

  “What if humans evolved differently?” he said, ignoring her while he pondered and studied and nearly killed himself, just like his dad. “What if they never made it out of the ocean in this universe, and became some sort of intelligent fish?”

  “Fish that could build rockets and travel to Mars? Oh, what am I saying? Matt, did you hear a word? That could be deadly and you just touched it.”

  “Isabelle will fix me if I start getting sick.”

  That was his answer to everything. The darn computer can fix it. She can repair DNA, so who cares if we get shot, or trampled, or nearly eaten by lions. Who cares?

  “She won’t be able to repair that.” She pointed at the body, or the remnants of what looked like it might be a body.

  “You worry too much. We’re in our suits.”

  Just then, the suit on the pseudo-body began pulsating. Sarah froze, her mind and body suddenly locked. Matt stepped back, pulling her with and touching her suit with the jelly-like stuff on his hand.

  The Martian’s suit split open down the middle and a torrent of fluid escaped. Fluid that was tinged blue and green, even in the red glow of the dust-smothered sun. The suit fragmented in various locations, the arms fell away and the legs disintegrated. The suit was dissolving.

  “Matt,” shrieked Sarah. She couldn’t help it. I mean, she’d been through a lot and most of the time she didn’t cry (well, maybe a little) or yell or scream (unless she was falling out of an airplane), but who could expect her not to shriek when confronted with a fragmenting fishy body on a blood-boiling planet that might or might not be predicting their fate.

  “It’s okay, Sarah,” he said. “It’s not going to bite. It’s just decaying, I guess.” He didn’t sound nearly as reassuring as he was trying to be. Maybe because his teeth were chattering.

  She looked at him. She looked at his fingers, which were bluish green, and didn’t his gloves look thinner?

  “Matt,” she said. “I think your suit is dissolving.”