Mars Crossing

by Geoffrey A. Landis

  Tana looked around. “Wow,” she said. “Pretty neat. So, where’s the Pathfinder itself? It wouldn’t have moved, would it? So it must be here.”

  “Let’s find it!” Ryan said.

  “Wait a second,” Tana said. “You said that we weren’t going to make any stops, we weren’t going to go exploring.”

  “It won’t take long,” Ryan said. “We must be standing practically right on top of it. It’s gotta be right around here. It’s got to stick out like a sore thumb in this.”

  But it didn’t. After an hour of searching, Ryan finally had to admit that the Pathfinder was invisible. Even the inertial navigation system he had scavenged from the dirt-rover was no help; it told them exactly where on the planet they were, but the navigation system of the ancient spacecraft had only given its position on the planet to within a few kilometers. But they should be able to see it. “We know it’s here,” Ryan said. “So why can’t we find it?”

  “Dust,” Tana said. “Think about it. How long ago did that land? Thirty years ago? How many dust storms have there been since then?” She thought for a second. “It’ll be so covered with dust that it will blend right in. Just a funny, lumpy patch of the soil.”

  “Dust,” Ryan said, dejected. “You’re right. I didn’t think of that. Shit. We probably walked right past it and couldn’t see it. What now?”

  “Onward,” Tana said. She quoted his own words back to him. “No sidetracks, no exploration, no sight-seeing, just speed. Agamemnon, or bust.”

  “Agamemnon or bust,” Ryan echoed. “Okay. Let’s get a move on!”

  2

  THE ARROW

  Ryan Martin could not even remember a time when he had not wanted to be an astronaut. He could remember being six, and riding on his father’s shoulders. The Canadian night had been cool and clear, and he had leaned back and just gazed at the stars blazing above him, tiny lighthouses on the road to infinity. He could imagine that he was falling upward, endlessly falling among the stars, and thought, there. I’m going out there. He had leaned back, farther and farther on his father’s shoulders, and then let go, to feel himself falling upward.

  His father had caught him by the legs before he hit the ground—his father had always had incredible reflexes—and all that he had felt was disappointment.

  In the Scouts, he had been on the archery range. He hadn’t cared much about target shooting, and unlike the other boys, he had no secret longing to hunt and kill. But the bow itself seemed to him a thing of perfect beauty, an object that could not have been more elegantly designed. He marveled over its clean and simple design. One day he took his bow, drew it back as far as he could, and aimed it directly upward into the sky.

  The arrow flew up, straight and true, and vanished with a whisper into the aching blue above, and he stared after it, his bow arm still extended in the air, mesmerized by the beauty of the flight.

  “Martin!” the scoutmaster shouted. “What the hell are you—”

  The arrow came down, so fast it was only a streak, and with a soft whickersnack buried itself to the feathers in the Earth.

  The scoutmaster turned pale, his eyes bulging, and then he exploded. “Martin! Get over here!” He grabbed him, his fingers digging painfully into his shoulder, and ripped the bow out of his hands.

  Ryan had almost forgotten he still held it.

  None of the other boys had been watching when Ryan had launched his arrow skyward, and they all turned to stare, battled at the sudden inexplicable fury of the scoutmaster.

  “You—you—” The scoutmaster was completely incoherent, and slowly, almost as if from a dream, Ryan came to his senses and realized, yes, it might have killed someone. It might have killed him. It had been a dangerous thing to do.

  But in his mind’s eye he could still see it, that one perfect moment when the arrow hangs in the air, quivering, straining, longing to go higher, and then falls, defeated.

  And he realized, that is me, the arrow is me. That is where I want to go.

  To go upward, forever upward, and to never come down.

  3

  CAMP AGAMEMNON

  They were tired, and then more than tired, a complete weariness that transcended all consciousness. The world compressed down to one step, then another, then another. The landscape had changed color, darkening from the light, almost orange color of their original landing site to a dark burned-brick color. They were walking on bare bedrock. But none of them looked at the landscape, none of them focused any farther ahead than the next step.

  Ryan kept a readout of their position using the inertial navigation system from the dirt-rover. Occasionally he would read out their progress—“Three hundred kilometers to go”—until at last Tana told him to stop; it was too depressing. None of them dared to think of what would happen if the inertial navigation failed, if they were unable to find the Agamemnon site as they had been earlier unable to find the Pathfinder.

  Two hundred kilometers to go.

  One hundred kilometers.

  When they came to the edges of the Agamemnon camp, it took them several minutes before they even recognized it. A discarded drilling-lubricant cylinder. Not far past that, a seismic recording station. They were beyond curiosity now, and the technological detritus went unremarked.

  They crested a dune, and started down the far side, and none of them looked up until they almost stumbled over the camp.

  Agamemnon lay before them.

  “We’re here,” Tana said, almost in a whisper.

  Ryan looked up. “We’re here. It’s here!”

  Estrela, trailing behind, echoed in a whisper, “Here. Here!”

  The Agamemnon camp was spread out. The Agamemnon lander itself sat a kilometer off to the east, a squashed hemispherical shell sitting on its heat shield and surrounded by the shreds of its airbag cushion like a half-melted mushroom. Spread all around were the remains of the encampment: the abandoned fuel-manufacturing plant and its electrical generator plant; two bubble habitats, long deflated; a toolshed; a domed greenhouse module; a half dozen scientific stations; communications antennae; a sheet metal quonset hut; piles of trash and discarded equipment; electrical and data cables spread spaghetti-style across the ground. No one from the doomed Agamemnon had bothered to be neat; they were too worried about survival.

  Every horizontal surface was covered with a layer of dust.

  There was no hope that Agamemnon’s electrical generating plant would still work, but the bubble habitats both seemed intact. Over the six years they had been on Mars the gas that had originally inflated them had slowly leaked away, but when Ryan checked, they were still intact.

  Using the Agamemnon camp was a risk. If any of the original fungus had survived the six years on Mars and was still viable, and still virulent, they could face a repeat of the runaway infection that had ultimately led to the Agamemnon disaster. In theory it would not survive the six years without a host. In theory, even if it survived, it would not colonize healthy humans. In theory, even if it did, they had the pharmaceuticals to be prepared for it this time. In theory.

  But they had little choice.

  Ryan salvaged several solar array panels from the lander, and after cleaning away the dust layers, found them still functioning. It would be enough power to provide heat and light for the habitat.

  And, if the transmitters still functioned, enough to communicate with Earth.

  “We’ve got a new camp, crew,” Ryan announced. He should have felt triumph. Instead, all he felt was weary. “And it looks like everything still works.”

  4

  THE MINIONS

  Through grade school Ryan had built model rockets, taught himself calculus and aerodynamics, built his own telescope and a special tracking platform for it so he could watch the Russian space station Mir when it passed overhead and plan for the day when he, too, would be up there, looking down on Canada from above. In high school his science fair project, a gyroscopic stability system for a model rocket, had won a prize and a
scholarship, enough that, along with earnings from an outside job programming computers to recognize speech, he could afford to go to MIT.

  To Ryan, being an undergraduate at MIT had been like being at a banquet with each course more appetizing than the last. Finally he was stimulated to stretch his limits, and sometimes to exceed them.

  At the end of his freshman year, Ryan got involved with a project to fly a student-designed satellite. He volunteered for the task of building the control system. It was a small but intensely dedicated team.

  They had two unofficial mottoes. The first was, “It doesn’t have to be good—it does have to be done.” The second was, “We don’t need no stinkin’ sleep!” Everybody else called them the satellite gang, but to one another, they were the Minions of the Satellite God. They made a pact with each other: The satellite came first. Everything else—their sleep, their health, their grades, their lives—came second.

  Their satellite flew as a secondary payload on a Delta rocket, hitchhiking its way into space with a free ride on the third stage of a rocket whose main mission was to put a communications satellite into geosynchronous orbit. The entire gang went to Florida for the launch, crammed into a battered Volvo station wagon. They stayed, eight of them in one room, at a cheap hotel on Cocoa Beach. It was the first time Ryan had ever been so far south.

  The launch was on a cold and cloudy day. The wind was so high that they had been certain that the launch would be canceled, but they went out to the public beach with their binoculars, their cameras, and a small battery-powdered radio. The tide line was covered with seaweed and the drying corpses of Portuguese men-of-war, improbably bright blue balloons slowly deflating in the air.

  The Delta had launched on the exact second the launch window opened. It climbed silently into the air, the light of the solid rocket boosters sparkling a trail across the choppy water, almost too bright to look directly at, and then vanished into the clouds. For a few seconds the cloud glowed with the light of the booster, and then it faded, and there was nothing left but the empty pad and the white smoke.

  Only then did the sound come rolling across the water, a roar so intense that you could feel it as well as hear it. And then that, too, faded into the distance, and there was only the surf and the seagulls.

  Not one of the Minions was old enough to drink, so when the announcement came that the launch had been a success, they celebrated by pouring grape juice over each other.

  The satellite—and more particularly Ryan’s control systems—worked perfectly, taking photographs of the polar aurorae for over a year.

  Ryan spent that year going to classes when he had to, but never far enough away from the satellite control center that he could not be paged to return at an instant’s notice.

  The control center consisted of a few computers and a fast Internet connection hooked up in a windowless room in the basement of the wind tunnel building. With the launch, the tight group of the Minions began to drift away to other projects and other concerns. Dave left for a year in Israel, Darlene got involved in a new project in the physics department, Anu quit to start up a software firm and become a millionaire, Steve got married and stopped coming around, and Ted simply declared that he needed to spend time on coursework, and wasn’t about to let the satellite run his life.

  There were new undergraduates to help out, bright-eyed and eager, but of the original Minions, only Ryan stayed with the project to the end. Whenever anything went wrong, Ryan was there to debug the problem and design a work-around for it. They found that he had a talent for visualizing orbital mechanics, and an almost mystical understanding of the secret world of torque wheels and magnetic dampers and predictive control systems. He could figure out, from the slightest bump in a chart, which part was failing, how the underperformance was affecting the satellite, and what was needed to write a software patch to keep the satellite running.

  For Ryan, it was not just a student project. It was his life.

  5

  CALLING HOME

  It was a task that Ryan dreaded, but there was no help for it. Agamemnon expedition had left behind a complete set of high-bandwidth communications gear and a gimbaled high-gain antenna. He had to call Earth.

  After inflating the Agamemnon’s main operations habitat, it took him an hour to get the communications gear powered up and to reset the computer to calculate the position of the Earth and adjust the antenna to track it. He almost hoped that the antenna would fail to lock on to the Earth; fixing that would give him another few hours to avoid making the connection. But no such luck.

  At least he didn’t have to do it alone. He called in Estrela and Tana. “We’re all in this together,” he said. “Ready?”

  Estrela nodded, tossed her hair, and attempted a wan smile. Tana said, “Ready.”

  He flicked on the camera and began transmitting.

  “Earth, Don Quijote. This is Ryan Martin, Tanisha Jackson, and Estrela Conselheiro, calling in. We’ve reached the Agamemnon site at Acidalia Planitia.” He paused. That was the easy part. “It is with great regret,” he said, and then stopped. He didn’t even know what to say. He looked over at Tana, but she shook her head infinitesimally and mouthed silently, “you.” He turned back to the camera. “I regret to inform you that, uh, we’ve killed off—I mean, we’ve had some casualties here. Uh, that is, we. Shit. I hate doing this. Look, it’s like this.” He took a deep breath, and then said quickly, “We’ve had a bit of a hard time here, and Captain Radkowski and Bran—Trevor Whitman are dead. Got that?”

  He turned off the camera, and slumped down. “Okay, it’s done.”

  “We’re not done with the broadcast, are we?” Tana said. “We have to tell them more than that. And I thought we were going to ask for advice.”

  Ryan shook his head. “No. I mean, yes, no we’re not done.”

  “Then—”

  “It will be half an hour before we get a reply from Earth,” he said. “It’ll probably be a while after that before we get anybody who can give us anything we need. Don’t worry. We have time.” He composed himself, turned the transmitter back on, and then gave them a brief synopsis of how Captain Radkowski and Trevor Whitman had died. He kept it strictly to the facts, with nothing about Trevor Whitman actually being Brandon Weber, nor about their conjecture that Radkowski had been murdered.

  The person who appeared on the monitor looked startled. He looked like he’d just woken up. “Uh, Don Quijote, Houston. We got you.” Ryan didn’t recognize him; he wasn’t one of the regular communicators. “Uh, this is great. Wow, it’s really great to hear from you. We were worried—” Just at the moment the news about Radkowski and Trevor must have arrived; the technician looked startled. “Wait one,” he said.

  Ryan calculated the time on Earth. 05:45 Greenwich; that would make it 12:45 at night in Toronto, 11:45 at the space center in Houston. Late; they were transmitting to the second shift. No wonder they had to wait, probably had to go wake somebody up.

  It was a slow conversation. Ryan and Tana talked for a while, answering some of the questions from Earth and ignoring others. Then they would break and listen to the feed from Earth, replies to their queries of half an hour ago.

  First, they learned there was still no hope of a rescue mission. Ryan had never expected one; he’d asked just out of a perverse sense that he had to check the obvious. Second, they were told that the engineers on Earth had not come up with any unexpected new ideas, although not for lack of trying. Their only chance was still the Brazilian Jesus do Sul return rocket, at the pole. There were now hundreds of news reporters asking for interviews; Houston was holding them off, but did they want to talk to reporters? When their “no” answer came through, nobody seemed surprised.

  “Copy that,” was the reply. “One more thing for you. Hold on a moment. I think you may want to hear this directly from our orbital mechanics guy.”

  The orbital mechanics guy, as it turned out, was a middle-aged woman. Ryan recognized her; what was her name, Lorentz?
She had a reputation for being both hard-working and smart. She spoke in a Texas accent, launching in without bothering to say hello first. “We tracked down the complete specs on that Brazilian rocket, checked it out against a matrix of trajectories available for your launch window. Here’s the lowdown. Stripped to the bone, no rock samples, dump all the spare supplies, no margin for underperformance: You’ll have fuel for one hundred and forty kilograms of human payload. That’s top; you’d be wise to leave a little margin.”

  “Copy,” Ryan said. “What if we—” Then he stopped. If they what?

  What could they think of that the ground engineers hadn’t already thought of? If she said one hundred and forty kilograms, that was the end of it.

  One hundred and forty kilograms.

  Now they knew.

  Only two of them were going back.

  6

  RYAN IN LOVE

  In his own little social world, Ryan was boisterous, talkative, and outgoing. Outside of the nearly vanished circle of the Minions, though, the guidance counselors labeled him withdrawn and introverted. He hadn’t paid any attention to the tall, talkative girl who chanced to sit near him in the cafeteria whenever he came down for a meal, not even when she began to talk to him, and slowly but patiently drew him out. It didn’t occur to him that she might be interested in more than a lunchtime companionship until she invited him to her dorm room, closed the door, put a Nirvana CD to play on her stereo, and started to take off his clothes. “It was the only way I could get your attention,” she told him.