“Well, you know how it is. You don’t find the souvenirs you want until the end of your vacation.”
“Do you see any more?”
“Let me look.” Alex stood up and panned around at the other rocks. “Yeah,” he said. “Five or six patches of it. No, more than that. Oh, there’s a big one. Must be three inches across.”
“Get samples,” Mary told him.
“Duh,” he said. His voice barely betrayed the excitement he had to be feeling, but the biomonitors in his suit told a different story. His heart was racing, and his skin temperature had risen a couple of degrees. He knew he’d just made the history books again, and this entry would dwarf the one about Drier’s syndrome or even the first mission to Mars. He was now the man who had discovered the first indisputable evidence of extraterrestrial life.
He spent the next two days scraping stuff off rocks, digging in the ground for other organisms, and climbing up and down the hill looking for anything else he could find. He even bagged up one entire rock a couple of feet across because it had four different kinds of growth on it and he thought maybe it would provide some idea of how the Martian ecosystem worked.
And then it was time to head back. He packed his samples in the plane, strapped everything down, and lifted off for home. He took the plane up a few hundred feet, tilted the engines forward—and dropped like a rock.
And kept dropping. Long after the wings should have caught enough air to start flying, the plane still generated no lift. “Shit,” Alex said, “there must be a downdraft. Increasing thrust to max.”
The plane kept dropping. In one-third gee, he had plenty of time to watch the ground come up at him, but his biomonitors showed his pulse rate barely rising. “It’s not going to work in flight mode,” he said. “Transitioning back to hover mode.” He angled the engines back. “Come on, you dirty bitch. Come on, come on!”
We heard the impact. It sounded like someone had dropped a dictionary on a beer can.
“Alex?” Mary called out. “Alex, are you okay?”
“Well, I’m down,” he said, “but I wouldn’t say I’m okay. Both engines broke loose in the crash. They’re doing cartwheels across the rocks now. There, one of ’em stopped. The other one’s still rolling around like a pinwheel.” He coughed. “Damn. Bit my tongue.”
“Are you…can you…?”
“Fix the plane? I don’t see how. Even if the engines still work, the wings are crumpled like tin foil. But it looks like I’m going to have to figure something out, doesn’t it?” He didn’t state the obvious: there was no backup plane to come get him.
He got out of the wreckage and hiked through the rocks to the closest engine. It had been battered so badly that it was barely recognizable. The other one had tried to suck in a rock as it was winding down, and what was left of the turbine lay scattered all around it.
“Looks like time for plan B,” Alex said.
Space Boy Mutiny!!
Did He Intend to Stay on Mars All Along?
There was no plan B. Everyone wracked their brains for a way to get an astronaut two thousand miles back to base without a plane, but there just wasn’t any. He wouldn’t make a tenth that distance on foot. Dave suggested going for him in the landing vehicle, but Alex vetoed that idea right away.
“It’s not designed for suborbital flight,” he said. “Besides, even if you could restart the lower stage and fly it, you’d have to rob fuel from the upper stage, and then all four of us would be stuck on the ground until our food and air ran out. If we don’t get back into orbit within the week we’ll miss our launch window.”
“We can’t just leave you there,” Dave said.
“I’m all for rescue if you’ve got a realistic plan, but using the lander isn’t going to work.”
At Mission Control, we had to concur. That was the hardest decision I ever made in my life, even though I was just part of the engineering group and even though I knew there wasn’t a real decision. We might have risked the other three for a chance to save Alex, but we wouldn’t doom all four of them just to make a vain attempt.
I wasn’t the capcom on this mission, but I was Alex’s best friend, so I got to deliver the bad news. There was no way to hold a conversation with the speed of light lag what it was, so I just made a short speech and had my voice synthesizer remove all the pauses before transmitting it. I won’t transcribe it here; all the radio messages from the mission are on file for the curious. There’s only one thing to say in a situation like that anyway. You say you’re sorry that things worked out the way they did, and you’re going to miss your best friend very much, but you want your other friends to come back home safe, dammit, so don’t try anything stupid.
There were a lot of tearful goodbyes. Alex’s mom and dad talked with him a couple of times, and he told them not to worry, that he’d had a pretty full life and no regrets. “I’d have come here even if I knew in advance that this was how it would end,” he said. The newspapers made quite a deal out of that, and for the first time since Alex was born some of them ran an entire article without once mentioning his physical appearance.
Mary wasn’t ready to give up. She cursed us all, including Alex, and tried to convince Dave and Shawnee to defy orders and try the lander anyway, but Dave had backed off from that idea after he’d seen how impossible it was, and Shawnee merely said, “Over my dead body. No offense, Alex.”
Alex said, “None taken.”
Launch time came, and with a great deal of argument but no real hope left, Mary and Dave and Shawnee climbed aboard the lander and rode it back into orbit. The transfer vehicle was still waiting, snug and warm, to take them back to Earth.
And Alex? He did the only thing left for him to do. He studied the lifeforms he had found and transmitted his findings back to us. He told us how the organisms’ cupped tops followed the sun, how they closed up at night, and how the whole colony moved, ever so slowly, around the face of the rocks over the course of the day. They weren’t quite plants, and they weren’t quite animals. They were something else entirely. Alex’s description of them was incredible, exciting like nothing else humanity had ever experienced, but we couldn’t forget that we were learning it from a man whose time was rapidly running out.
He couldn’t either. Occasionally his voice would crack, and he would stay quiet for a few minutes while he got his emotions under control again. Those of us listening were sniffling and wiping our eyes as well. By then we numbered at least half the people on Earth, since the TV networks as well as the NASA channel had started live coverage. I was pissed that they hadn’t bothered until someone was about to die, but that’s the way the media do things. Science by itself isn’t interesting; human drama is what gets the ratings.
Alex knew that. He hadn’t spent a lifetime under the media bug-lens without learning what played well and what didn’t. He must have been planning his final speech since the moment he knew he was stranded. It wasn’t a long one—he knew the average viewer’s attention span, too—but he said what he wanted to say at the one moment in his life when he knew people would hear it. And maybe even listen.
It came in the middle of day five. He had had a hard time the previous night, nearly freezing in the crumpled ultralight’s tiny cabin when the outside temperature had dropped to minus-sixty. The plane’s batteries were dead and his suit batteries were nearly gone as well; he kept from freezing by exercising constantly, which burned up air faster than his recycler could keep up with it. He was down to practically nothing by morning; it was clear he wouldn’t survive another night.
He spent half the day finishing up what observations he could make, describing what microscopic details of the “planimals” he could see with the portable sampling kit, but just a little after noon, Cydonia time, he stopped and said, “I think it’s time we all had a little talk.”
The video camera was dead by then, so all we have to go on are the radio signals and the orbital camera’s pictures of his footprints, but it seems apparent that he clim
bed up the flank of the hill above the ultralight, stopping at the “chin” and looking south as he spoke.
“I am standing here on an alien world,” he said. “I’ve been called an alien myself over the years, so maybe it’s appropriate that this is where I wound up. I certainly can’t ignore the irony of my final resting place, a hill with some craters on it that made so many people think there was life on Mars. And so there is, but it has nothing to do with mysterious monuments to anthropocentric thinking.”
He laughed softly. “Anthropocentric. Look it up. It’s a dirty word, but it’s in the dictionary.” He must have sat down on a rock; we could hear his pressure suit creak. “I wish each and every one of you could see what I see here. Mars is nothing like Earth. It’s got a volcano the size of the United States and a canyon so wide that you can stand in the bottom and not see either side. When I woke up this morning there was dry ice on the ground. Frozen carbon dioxide. The air froze here last night. It’s like that everywhere I turn. There are more wonders here than we could even begin to imagine…and I’m here to see them because we were crazy enough to come look.”
He sighed. “Why can’t that be the thing that excites our imaginations? Why must we waste our minds and our energy on delusions that we should have put aside long ago? Faces on Mars. Alien abductions. Imaginary beings dictating our lives at every turn. What’s wrong with us? We have brains, we have senses; why can’t we use them to understand the universe around us rather than make up elaborate fantasies and pretend they’re the truth?”
“;Well, here’s a truth for you. I am Alexander Drier. Like the rest of you, I’m a human being. And from this moment on, like the rest of you, I’m a Martian. We all became Martians the second humanity set foot on this world, and because of what we’ve learned here we’ll all carry a little bit of Mars around with us for the rest of our lives.”
“Does that somehow diminish our humanity? Of course not. It means we’re more human. Because only human beings could have gotten here. We dreamt it, we wanted it, we built it, and we did it. And Mars will always be here, a beckoning light in the sky for anyone else with a dream and the determination to see it through.”
“I want you to remember that, when you look at the new face on Mars.” He stood up and walked back down the hill, out into the sandy plain beyond.
“New face?” asked Mary, in equatorial orbit a third of the way around the planet.
“You’ll see,” Alex replied.
They didn’t see for several hours, until the polar mapping satellite made its pass over him. By then he’d made most of one circuit and he was well into a second one, scuffing up the soil with his boots like a kid making designs in fresh snow.
It was a bit lopsided, as patterns drawn on the ground without surveying instruments often are, but it was perfectly recognizable. A long oval, ballooning out on one end and narrowing down to a pointy chin on the other. Big, almond-shaped eyes filling nearly half the enclosed space. Two little dots for a nose and a single line for a mouth, bent upward at the ends in a goofy grin. Alexander Drier’s own caricature.
“Alex, what the hell is that for?” Mary asked when she saw it.
“A…reminder,” he said. His voice was ragged and he was panting hard. “Besides, people wanted…a face. Who am I to deny them?”
She laughed, but it turned into a sob. “I’m sorry, Alex. I’m sorry it has to end like this.”
“Me too,” he said, “but believe me, it’s better than it might have been. At least I got here. Oof!” There was a thump over the radio.
“Alex?”
“S’all right. Tripped on a rock. It’s getting hard to see. Look, I don’t have much daylight left, or air either, and I don’t really want to make people listen to me die, so I’m going to shut off my radio.”
“No! Alex, you don’t have to die alone.”
“I’m not alone. I’ve got you, and Mom and Dad, and Colin, and Uncle George, and everybody. I’ve got all these little whatever-they-ares growing on the rocks all around me. I’ve got the whole universe right over my head. I’m not alone.”
“That’s not what I meant. I meant—”
“I know what you meant, but that’s not the way I want to go. Look, it’s time. Everyone out there, I love you. Try to love each other, too, okay? This is Alexander Drier, signing off.”
There was a click as he switched off his radio.
Mars Mission a Hoax!
Space Boy Spotted Pumping Gas In Wyoming
The next pass showed where he had fallen. He had made it back around to the chin, and had lain down with his arms and legs outstretched, a tiny body to go with the face he had drawn. The orbital camera’s resolution wasn’t good enough to tell if he had opened his suit or not, but he wouldn’t have lasted long either way. With night falling and the temperature plummeting, he would have frozen to death in minutes.
The face didn’t last a month, of course. The next windstorm obliterated his tracks, leaving only his body and the crumpled remains of the ultralight airplane as evidence that anyone had ever been there.
But we knew. Alex’s last days wouldn’t fade from our memory, not for as long as anyone looked up in the night sky and wondered what was out there.
Mary and Dave and Shawnee made it back to Earth with only the usual harrowing adventures. Congress cut NASA’s budget the next year, but not as bad as we had been afraid they would, so we cautiously began work on our next phase in exploring our solar system: an orbital habitat that people can actually live in long enough to travel to the outer planets. The first prototype will be tested for a couple of years in Earth orbit, then leased out to the highest bidder for living space. I figure I might just survive long enough to rent some cubic there myself. It won’t be Heinlein’s Waldo, but it’ll be something for an old man who can barely move here on Earth.
In the meantime, life lurches along the way it usually does. The newspapers still carry horoscopes, but they’re not on the front page anymore. Government scandals and student unrest have taken up that space again.
And of course the latest Alien Shocker.
Three months ago a boy was born in Mississipi with Drier’s Syndrome. His parents are good but simple people who hadn’t expected a media feeding frenzy at their front door, but they knew opportunity when they saw it. They’ve been portrayed as country hicks who ran afoul of an alien mad scientist, but they’ve already bought a house on fifty acres, fenced and guarded by a dozen rent-a-cops until they can find enough rottweilers and dobermans to do the job for free.
That solved their external problem, but internally they’re still going through the same thing Mark and Faye went through nearly thirty years ago.
The Driers aren’t answering their mail, so the mother wrote me a plaintive letter, begging me to help her understand her child. Among the things she asked was a simple, straightforward question: Is my son a spaceman?
I intend to answer with the only truth I know, taught to me by my friend, the astronaut from Wyoming.
That’s up to him.
PRIDE, by Mary A. Turzillo
The hot fur thing under Kevin’s shirt clawed at his chest. Nice going, he thought. First the bum rap for weed, and now if I don’t get caught stealing lab animals, I’ll get rabies from this freak.
Frankenlab, at Franken U, AKA Franklin Agricultural College, was messing with animals, electrodes in their brains, cloning them like Dolly the Sheep, except not regular animals. Dead animals from frozen meat. And they were going to kill the animals.
He couldn’t save them all. Those fuzzy orange-furred mice, most wouldn’t make it. Those guys from Animals Our Brethren had pried open cages, and when the mice wouldn’t come out, they shook them out, and when the mice squeed, cowering under lab tables, they kicked them until they ran into corners, and from there may God have mercy on their itty souls.
Kevin petted the little monster through his shirt, but it writhed around and gummed him. “I’m saving your life, dumb-ox!” He dashed out of the bu
ilding minutes before alarms brought the fire department.
Kevin had been in trouble before. A year ago, his girl friend’s cousin Ed and he had been cruising around in Ed’s van, which had expired plates. Kevin didn’t know about the baggie of pot under the driver’s seat. When the state patrol started following, Ed asked Kevin to switch places. His license, like the plates, was expired, he said. They switched, veering madly, on a lonely stretch of 422. When they finally stopped and the cops asked to search the van, Kevin shrugged and said okay.
“And whose is this?” Ed said, not me. Kevin was too surprised to look properly surprised, and this was a zero-tolerance state. So Ed got off with a warning, and Kevin, stuck with court-appointed counsel, served thirty days.
* * * *
Kevin had been looking for a job to pay for college, when local papers broke the story that some thousand-odd animals (mostly, admittedly, mice) would be killed because their experiment was over. What was he thinking of? He wasn’t an animal-rights kind of dude. Still, he felt panicked exultation fleeing the scene of the crime.
He struggled to control his Pinto while driving with the squirming thing scratching inside his shirt. He fumbled the back door key and pounded downstairs to the basement, where he pulled the light cord above the laundry tub and took the furball out of his shirt.
“Oh God, what have they done to you?” It was deformed: big head, chopped-off tail. Cat? Dog? A mix?
He deposited it in the laundry tub. Boggling at the size of its mouth, he realized it needed food. Now.
Forward pointing eyes. Meat-eater. He ran upstairs and grabbed a raw chicken breast from the fridge. He held it out to the cub.
The cub flopped down on its belly in the tub, and tried to howl. All that came out was a squeak.
He tried to stuff the meat into its mouth, but it flinched away and lay looking at him, sides heaving.
Maybe the mother chewed the food up for it. Mother? Not hardly. This thing didn’t have a mother. It was fucking hatched in Frankenlab.
Raised in farm country, Kevin liked animals. He sometimes even petted Rosebud, the town pit bull, when Rosebud wasn’t into tearing people’s arms off. If his parents had been rich, he’d be pre-veterinary at FrankenU. Or a cattle rancher, or a discoverer of rare snakes.
The Sixth Science Fiction Megapack Page 22
