by Jack Dann
“Damn!” Wende Kirkshoff said. She was hanging from the top curve of their Wheel, holding a strut and looking at it disgustedly. She was a pretty blonde girl with freckles and a pleasant demeanor, but Geoff always thought she was avoiding him.
“What’s the matter?” Laci Thorens said. She was on the ground, assembling the engine into a subframe with a grim intensity.
“This strut doesn’t have the little fitting on the end,” Wende said. “It won’t stay in.”
“Aren’t there spares?”
“Uh, no, I don’t think so.”
Geoff shook his head and bent back to his work. Who cared about the prize? With his discovery, he would be so famous that he could name his price.
He’d set the IBM box in the lee of the transpo pod like the instructions said, digging down like they told him. He was supposed to let it go for a half hour, then take the whole thing with them.
Which was stupid. IBM was doing the same old thing, when all they had to do, really, was give him a bag and a microscope.
So he’d brought his own. Now it was just a matter of getting some dirt, throwing some water on it, putting it on the slide, and looking for wrigglies.
“There aren’t any spares,” Wende said.
“Shit. Let me see.” Laci hopped up to the top of the Wheel.
He fumbled the little vial of water out of the tiny pocket of his squeezesuit. The microscope was already out, sitting perched on top of a medium-sized rock, away from the dust and grit.
How had Viking done it? It had moved a rock, hadn’t it? And this new one from IBM was digging down. Probably best to just combine both techniques, Geoff thought, and shoved a medium-sized boulder out of the way.
He dug down into the dust with his fingers, feeling the chill seep through his squeezesuit. At about six inches down, he struck another rock and decided that was enough. The dust was clinging to his transparent header, and the front half of his suit was pink.
He took a pinch of dust from the shallow hole and dropped it onto a glass slide. The water had gone frosty around the top. He dropped a couple of drops on the slide and they froze almost instantly, making something that looked like red ice cream.
Damn, I didn’t think of that. There was no way he was going to see something with the microscope through all that gunk.
He sloshed some more water on it and pushed it around with the tip of his finger, trying to get the mixture thin enough to see through. After a couple of tries, he managed to get a thin pink film that looked reasonably transparent.
“Geoff!” Laci said. “We need your help!”
“Can’t,” he said. “In the middle of an experiment.”
“We need your help or we ain’t rolling anywhere!”
Geoff slid the slide into the microscope and looked at the watch embedded in his suit. “We have time.” And in fact, they did have almost twenty minutes left.
“We have to do it now!” Wende said.
“Wait a minute,” Geoff said. Slide in place. Microscope to eye. Nothing but fuzzy grey darkness. Focus. Dark, dark. Sliding into focus. Becoming great boulders.
“Geoff, now!” Laci said.
“Just a few seconds,” Geoff said. “Then you can have me.” Focus. Ah. Crystal-clear. Scan it over a bit and find a brighter area. There. Ah.
Water crystals. Boulders. Bright light. Nothing else.
Well, of course it wouldn’t move. But where was the rounded wall of a bacterium, or the jelly of an amoeba?
“Now,” Laci said, and strong hands picked him up. He felt his grip on the microscope slipping. He grabbed it tighter, and it popped from his hands. He was jerked back as he watched it fall, with agonizing slowness, into the dust and grit.
He wrenched out of Laci’s grip and scooped up the microscope. It was dusty, but looked okay. He looked through it. The slide was out of position, but he could still see. He reached for the focus knob…
The microscope was torn out of his hands. He looked up to see Laci standing in front of him, holding the microscope behind her back.
“Give it back!” he said. “This is important. I’m right…”
She punched his header. Hard. He could see the soft transparent plastic actually conform to her fist. It didn’t quite touch him, but the kinetic energy of the blow knocked him to the ground.
“Go,” she said. “Help Wende. You’ll get your toy back when you’re done.”
“Give it back!”
Laci raised the instrument and made as if to smash it on a boulder. Geoff lunged forward at her, but she danced away. “No,” she said. “Go help. I’ll give it back later.”
“Laci, this is important!”
“Yeah, and so is surviving. Go help.”
Geoff knew when he was beaten. He sighed and joined Wende atop the Wheel, where they quickly discovered another problem: the epoxy they’d provided for quick repairs wasn’t setting in the Martian cold.
“What do we do now?” Wende asked.
Geoff stopped looking longingly at the microscope-now sitting on top of their hydrazine engine-and inspected the problem. The strut was one of the main load-bearers that held them suspended under the top of the Wheel.
“What about the Kite?” Geoff said. “Doesn’t it share components with this? Maybe it has a strut with the right connector on it.”
“What about when we have to fly?”
“We make sure we don’t forget the damn thing.”
They dug into the bundle of struts and fabric. The components were the same, and many of them were the same length. When Geoff found one with the right connector on the end, he pulled it out and handed it to Wende.
“Just like Ikea,” he said.
“They aren’t the sponsor!”
“Same idea.”
Then he noticed that Laci was frantically tightening the straps that held the little engine in place. “We’re late!” she said. “Check the time! Come on come on come on! Let’s go!”
Laci started the engine. Near the Wheel, his microscope was still parked on top of a rock.
“Wait!” he said, running to get it.
The Wheel was already moving. “Hurry up!” Laci said.
He grabbed the microscope and ran back, throwing himself up the scaffold toward the perch by the cabin. The landscape sped by. The soft rim of the Wheel bounced over rocks and boulders.
But he had his microscope. Between that and the IBM package, he would surely find something. He would still be famous.
The IBM package!
Oh, shit, no! No no no!
He’d never picked it up.
“Stop! he cried. “You have to go back! I left the IBM package.”
Laci gave him a disgusted look. “How could you be that stupid?”
“Go back.”
She just looked at him. A slow smile spread on her face. “Sorry,” she said.
Geoff looked back at the remains of their transpo pod, but it had already disappeared over a hill. They were moving. And he was lost.
SPONSORS
“It seems like a lot of work for just a show,” said the shithead from P &G. He was looking at the model of the Can, sprouting its ring and eleven pods.
God save me from executives who think they’re smart, Jere thought. Send them to the golf course and the cocktail lounge, where the conversational bar is comfortably low.
They were in the Neteno boardroom, which had been transformed into a neomodern interpretation of a 70s NASA workroom, redone on a much greater scale and budget. A movingink banner was cycling though imagined Mars-scapes and the logo for Neteno’s Winning Mars, and models of the Can, the drop and transpo pods, the Kites and the Wheels and the Returns, hung from the ceiling or were suspended with cheap magnetic trickery.
But there were a lot more people than the P &G guy in today. There was Altria, and J &J, and Foodlink, and a whole bunch of other guys who wanted to have product placed on the show.
So he was playing to an audience when he answered:
“Not really,” he said. He pointed at the ring. “Take the ring. It’s a standard component of the new RusSpace orbital hotels. And we’re saving four module drops by incorporating all the Return pods into a single big softlander. The transpo pods are as simple and reliable as they get, just a big bouncing ball. We’re actually using a lot of proven technology for this, just in new ways.”
“Probably what they said about the Titanic,” P &G shithead said, grinning at the other execs. “Once you drop them on the surface, you have a road course, or something like that?”
“Five courses,” Jere said, changing the graphics on the movingink banner. “All of them have three phases of travel: on foot, rolling on a Wheel, and flying in a Kite. We’ve picked routes that will highlight some spectacular scenery, like parts of the Valles Marineris…”
“What?”
“Think Grand Canyon. Times ten.”
“Oh.”
“And we have a vertical climb of 2000 feet set for one group. We’re hoping to get some extreme-sports aficionados in the audience.”
“Is that safe?” the P &G guy asked.
“We don’t claim infallibility.” And you’re not complaining, Jere thought. Don’t think we don’t notice that.
“Who’s signed so far?” shithead asked.
“That’s confidential. If you want to buy a prospectus package, we’ll discuss that further.” And you aren’t saying anything about that, either, are you? Because you know this is the deal of the century.
“What you don’t see is the most important part,” Jere said. “The people who will actually make this happen.”
“You already have your team picked?”
“No. I just want to show you what the teams might look like. Because I know you have this idea of a bunch of spacesuit-clad guys hopping around on a dead planet. Boring, right? Well, no.”
At that moment, Evan McMaster entered the boardroom through the double doors at the back, accompanied by a trio of young women wearing cosmetic squeezesuits and headers. The suits hugged every one of their curves, making them seem impossibly perfect, unattainable, unreal.
There was a collective gasp from the execs, and Jere smiled. It always worked that way.
“I don’t see how it will work.” Not the asswipe. Another one. This one from Altria.
“Mars does have a thin atmosphere,” Evan said. “We can provide pressurized air through a small backpack only to the face. The pressure required to maintain body integrity is provided by the squeezesuit.”
“Showboating,” muttered the original P &G geek.
“Which would you rather look at-this, or some old Russian cosmonaut in a wrinkled-up body sock?”
“Your contestants may not look that good.”
Evan smiled. “The squeezesuit is of variable thickness. We can make a wide variety of body types look good. And it provides an excellent palette for logo placement.”
He snapped his fingers, and logos appeared at strategic spots on the suits. Spots with high visual magnetism, to use the geek phrase. One of the girls spun to reveal a P &G competitor’s logo emblazoned over her buttocks.
Oh, they loved it. Jere could see it in their eyes. They were sold. They would talk tough and haggle, but they had them. Just like Panasonic and Canon and Nikon fighting over the imaging rights, Sony and Nokia and Motorola fighting over the comms deal, Red Bull and Gatorade fighting over the energy drink part of it, hell, damn near every single nut and bolt was being fought over.
Go ahead, Jere thought. Talk. Then shut up and give us your fucking money.
ASCENT
They were halfway up the sheer face, and the way Alena was climbing, they were going to die. Glenn watched her almost literally fly up the rock, making twenty-foot jumps from handhold to handhold, reaching out and grasping the smallest outcropping and crevice with fluid grace and deceptive ease.
Dangerous ease, he thought. Climbing in the low gravity seemed childishly simple compared to climbing on Earth. Which meant it was easy to take one too many chances.
Alena made one last lunge and scrabbled for grip in a tiny crevice. Her feet skidded and she slid down the face for one terrible instant before catching on another tiny outcropping. Tiny pebbles and sand bounced off Glenn’s visor.
“Slow down!” he said.
“We need to keep moving!”
“Alena…”
Labored breathing over the comm. “Listen to them!” Alena said. “Laci’s team is already rolling, and that psycho guy is, too!”
Glenn cursed. The voices from the Can, when they weren’t giving orders, provided a blow-by-blow of what the other teams were doing. To get you doing something stupid.
Glenn pulled himself up nearer to Alena. She resumed climbing, too.
“Let me get nearer,” he said. “So we can safety each other.”
“We have to keep going.”
“The others have more time to roll. We aren’t falling behind.”
Alena stopped for a moment. “I know, but…”
“It’s hard not to think it, yeah,” Glenn finished for her. He pulled himself even higher. She stayed in place for once.
“We’ll make the top before nightfall,” he said. “Then we shelter and wait it out. We’ve got a short roll and a reasonable flight. We still have the best chance of winning, Alena.”
Pant, pant. He was close enough to be her failsafe now.
Alena looked back, gave him a thin smile, and pulled herself up again. For a while it was all by the book, then Alena began stretching it a bit, leaping a bit too far, aiming at crevices just a bit too small. With the sun below the cliff, the shadows were deep, purple-black, and the cliff was losing definition in the dying day.
When they reached a deep crevice in the rock, Glenn thought things had begun to get better. But the rock was fragile and crumbly, and rust-red chunks came off easily in his hands. Glenn was about to tell Alena that they should get out of there when she reached up and grabbed an outcropping that broke off in her hand.
From ten feet above Glenn, she began to fall, agonizingly slow. Glenn felt his heart thundering in his chest, and had a momentary vision of the two of them tumbling out of the crevice to fall thousands of feet to the rocks below. He tested his handholds and footholds, and a small cry escaped his lips when he realized they probably wouldn’t survive the impact of Alena.
Glenn jumped downward, seeking better purchase. Slip and slide. Nothing more. Down once again. Nope.
Down again, and then Alena piled into him, an amazingly strong shock in the weak gravity. Mass still works, Glenn thought, wildly, a moment after he’d lost all contact with the cliff face.
Alena flailed, trying to catch the rock surface as it skidded by. Glenn knew that soon they would be moving too fast to stop, and reached frantically himself. He slowed their fall, but didn’t stop it.
Where was the edge of the crevice?
He looked below him. Right here. But there was one outcropping that looked reasonably solid. If he could catch it…
He hit hard with his feet and felt a shooting pain go up his right leg. His knees buckled and his feet slid to the side, away from the outcropping, towards destruction.
One last thing. He reached out and caught the outcropping, keeping one hand around Alena’s waist. For a moment he thought their momentum was still too great, but he was able to hold on. Alena skidded within feet of the opening.
Glenn didn’t dare move. He could hear the harsh rasp of Alena’s breathing. Meaning they were both alive. Alive!
Alena looked up at him with something in her eyes that might almost have been gratitude. He looked down at her and smiled. For a brief instant, she smiled back and his heart soared.
They backed out of the crevice and continued on up the cliff face. Glenn’s right leg roared with pain, and he knew Alena could see that he was slowing down. But she didn’t run away from him. She didn’t take chances. She didn’t say anything at all until they had reached the top, and the last dying rays of the sun
painted them both blood-red.
“I’m sorry,” she said softly.
He was about to say something, but the Can blatted in his ear. “What an image! Pan slowly across the sunset.”
“Thanks,” he said, bitterly, as Alena turned away.
SCHEDULE
“What the hell does Timberland know about making space suits?” Evan said. He threw down the thick ream of printouts and rubbed his face, pulling it into a comic mask of fatigue and frustration.
“They’ll pay to do it,” Jere said.
“Another prime sponsor.” Sarcastically.
“What, like you’re suddenly worried about our contestants?”
Evan shrugged and stood up to pace. “RusSpace finally got back to me.”
“And?”
“And we’re fucked.”
For a moment, the word didn’t even register with Jere. Then he heard the phrase like a physical blow. “Fucked! What does fucked mean, like they won’t do it?”
“No, no.”
“They want more money.”
“It’s 2019 now, not 2018.”
No. They couldn’t move it out again. GM and Boeing pulled out when the schedule last slid. So now it was Kia and Cessna for the Wheels and the Kites. Good names, yeah, but not blue-chip. Maybe it would boost the ratings, that bit of risk, that added chance…
Evan nodded. “Yeah, it’s a crap cocktail, all right.”
“We can’t do this,” Jere said. His voice sounded hollow and faraway.
Evan shrugged. “We have to.”
“What’s the problem this time? They lied again? They fucked up? What?”
“No.” A sigh. “It’s the testing that’s killing us. Five drop modules, five backout pods, five Wheels, five Kites, the big package of Returns, a ship with a fucking centrifuge, for God’s sake, goddamn, it’s a lot of shit to do!”
“So what do we do?”
“We push. Or we scale it back.”
“What? Take it to three teams?”
“No. Scale back the build and the test. Leave out the backout pods, for example.”
“What happens if the team can’t make it to the Returns?”
