How to Mars

by David Ebenbach

  This idea became a strange preoccupation for Stefan, thinking about everything he could do if he wanted to. He looked at the bunks in the bunkroom with their gray mattresses and comforters—they all slept in the same room—and thought, I could urinate on all these beds. He realized that he could knock everyone’s dinner to the floor and smash their tablets and pitch all their clothes outside into the sand. He watched Trixie, Australian Trixie with the dyed-red hair, playing cards with Jenny one night, and he thought, I could walk over there and pass gas in her face. Or he could smack Jenny’s head. And then there was Roger, who just for one reason or another rubbed Stefan the wrong way. Slow and steady Roger. Pale, gentle Roger. He was just so geologist, maybe. So Canadian. Stefan watched him and thought about the fact that he could poison Roger or stab him in the throat.

  Stefan was not used to such thoughts by any means. He had not been prone to fighting with other children in primary school, had in fact been praised by his teachers for his obedience and attention to detail. His fourth-form report on Knud Rasmussen, for example, earned him the comment Very neat work! from his teacher. He had made it through university and graduate school in the UK by virtue of careful planning and discipline. Certainly he had not spent his dissertation years planning urinating sprees and murder.

  Even here in the settlement Stefan was mainly focused on the machinery of the place—the workmanlike, logical devices and systems that gave them air and water and light and everything else they needed. The filters, the condenser, the outgassing machine, the seismography equipment, the portable synchrotron radiation linear accelerator, the fridge. Many, many things called out to be checked. He ran diagnostics meticulously and adjusted settings and tightened bolts, all quite steady and disciplined. There was plenty of order there—even the mini nuclear reactor out back was a plodding, sensible thing—and he appreciated it. Stefan was an engineer, after all. Though he did occasionally whisper to an exposed circuit board something like, I am unfettered.

  “Did you say something?” Josh asked once from where he was working nearby.

  Stefan said, “No,” and was keenly aware of his pulse.

  To be certain, even without police stations there were fetters, of a kind. There were those cameras, for one thing, and the people watching back on Earth. That was a sort of pressure. And he was not alone here, and the other people could probably stop things from happening if they had the will, and if they were strong enough. But did they? Were they?

  At lunch one day Stefan looked around the table whilst people ate their reconstituted freeze-dried dishes, each with his or her own. There was Jenny, the astrophysicist who was somewhat athletic, true, and some mix of African American and Puerto Rican—somehow that made him a little nervous, maybe because of what he’d seen in movies—but the top of her head came up to his chin, and that was when she was in space boots. There was Trixie, spunky and with that dramatic red hair but not very frightening. He gathered, again mainly from movies, that some Asian people knew martial arts, but did not believe she was one of them. In any case, there was also Josh, who was a Jewish psychologist—a naturally pacifist type—and, Stefan observed, a bit distracted by Jenny. Nicole was a question mark—she had been in the military and had a tight buzz cut and usually wore an expression that he would describe as stern. Also, she was African American herself. He had really seen quite a lot of movies. Finally, of course there was Roger. The man was soft-spoken—annoyingly so—though he did have access to rocks.

  The main thing, in any case, was that they were not a unified force. Nobody was in charge and nobody was teaming up about anything. They were eating, respectively, some curried rice situation, a pot pie, a burrito, a roast beef sandwich, and a bowl of soup. They were all over the place.

  If someone had asked him, Are you planning trouble? Stefan would have been shocked. He wasn’t planning anything. He was just thinking. You could think about something without actually doing something.

  One of the things he was thinking was that order, outside the world of machines, was a sort of arbitrary thing, and generally ridiculous. Out by the reactor one day, checking things in his puffy suit, he asked himself: Who had decided which side of the plate had the napkin on it, for example? Or driving—in Denmark they drove on the right side of the road, but in England they drove quite comfortably on the left, and the rate of traffic fatalities was more or less the same. When he’d visited the Space Research Institute in Bulgaria five years earlier, he found out that nodding your head in that country meant no. Or NASA in America—he shook his head (which meant yes in Bulgaria!) whenever he thought about America—NASA had mostly managed to make the transition to the superior metric system, but had for many years been hamstrung by Americans preferring twelve inches, whatever those were, in an equally unjustifiable foot. Or consider the cinnamon and pepper—in Denmark your friends poured these over you on your birthday if you were still single at twenty-five and thirty, respectively. That was a tradition that an entire country practiced. It had happened to Stefan, cinnamon at twenty-five and pepper at thirty. It was part of the Danish social order.

  Ultimately, when the incident occurred, there had been no forethought at all. It arose, almost naturally, out of the Red/Orange Debates; in the early weeks, they discovered disagreement among them as to whether Mars was, as reputation had held, a red planet—red dust, red rocks, et cetera—or whether it was actually orange. To Stefan it was obvious. They had already tracked orange dust all over their white floors, so the evidence was all about. But some of the people, looking straight at it, insisted that the color was red. They debated about it over meals, and while at first the argument had been friendly enough, eventually people became incredulous at one another, and voices were raised.

  “Have you been tested for color blindness, you mug?” Trixie said, wagging an olive loaf sandwich at Josh. It was lunchtime.

  “Have you?” Nicole said.

  “This is bizarre,” Jenny threw in. “You don’t have an argument. Check the spectrophotometer again.”

  Roger shrugged. “The songs will work better if we go with red. Songs about Mars. You can’t even rhyme anything with orange.”

  And that’s when Stefan reached over. He wasn’t even that cross. Well, he was a bit cross. But it was more that he had thought to himself, Right in this moment I could reach over there and grab one of his fingers. And so he did, grabbing hold of the middle finger of Roger’s left hand and twisting it sharply—there was a feeling of snapping and a yowl from Roger, and a surge of pleasure in Stefan’s chest—and then, before Roger could even recoil, Stefan grabbed the ring finger on that hand, with the same results, and then he sat back again in his chair. He was actually rather stunned. His body buzzed. The entire event had taken less than three seconds.

  Subsequently there was a certain amount of chaos. Roger’s yowl went on well past the three seconds, and people started leaping up from their chairs uselessly. Their eyes bounced like ping pong balls between the injured and the injurer, trying to make sense out of things. Trixie was the most on task, rounding the table to test Roger’s fingers and provoke more yowling.

  “They’re . . . broken,” she said, her voice broad with Australian vowels and wonder.

  “I know,” Stefan said. His voice was full of wonder, too.

  Of course they had to convene a group meeting in the common room once the fingers were splinted and Roger had been given some pain meds. He sat on the opposite side of the circle from Stefan—well, approximately a circle—staring at him warily.

  “So,” Josh said to Stefan. In role as the team psychologist now, he was sitting on the edge of his chaise, leaning forward, his hands clasped between his knees, his blue eyes attempting to be soothing. There was something quite odd about the somber tone of this gathering in counterpoint with most people sitting on chaises longues. “What happened there?”

  Stefan considered that for a moment. He wasn’t sure what he was f
eeling in the aftermath. That hadn’t become clear yet. “Well, I wasn’t keen on what Roger was saying,” he started, “and it occurred to me that I could do that instead of listening to him say more things.”

  “It occurred to you,” Josh said.

  “Yes.”

  “And then you did it.”

  “Yes,” Stefan said. “That’s what happened.”

  There was a pause. Then Trixie half-whispered to Nicole, “Has he gone crackers?”

  “Crackers,” Roger said quietly, almost to himself.

  Josh spoke again, his eyes steady on Stefan. “So, you know you can’t do that,” he said.

  The rest of the room nodded. “Too right,” Trixie said.

  But, “What exactly does that mean?” Stefan said. “I don’t know if I want to do that again, but I could do it again.”

  “Stefan—” Josh began.

  “Here—give me one of your fingers,” Stefan said, holding his hand out. “I’ll show you.”

  Nicole stood up abruptly, and Stefan retracted his hand.

  “He has gone crackers,” Trixie said.

  “Crackers,” Roger stage-whispered.

  “I’m not going to give you one of my fingers,” Josh said.

  “Still on your hand, I meant.”

  “Right. Still no.” Josh cleared his throat. “What I think I’m trying to say is that you’re not allowed to do that kind of thing.”

  “Not allowed by whom?” Stefan said, glancing uneasily at Nicole, who was settling back down on her chaise longue, her eyes locked on to him.

  At this, Josh looked around at the group. They nodded at him. Go on, their nods seemed to say. “By us,” he finally said. “By this group.”

  Stefan sat back in his chaise, as though about to start suntanning. This was the first law ever, on the planet of Mars: You cannot break the fingers of other people.

  Josh looked back around at everyone again. “I think,” he said, almost as though he could hear Stefan’s inner workings, “that maybe we need to establish some ground rules, here.”

  “I think that’s an excellent idea,” Nicole said with some intensity.

  “What rules, exactly?” Jenny said.

  Trixie tapped away on her tablet and then held it up for the group to see. “We could look at some of the classics,” she said. “For inspiration. I’ve pulled up the Ten Commandments.”

  “I’m not sure if religion’s going to help things,” Jenny said.

  “Thou shalt not,” Roger said quietly.

  Only Stefan seemed to be aware of the humor in these commandments being displayed on a tablet.

  “Hammurabi’s Code,” Trixie suggested, tapping away some more.

  “Ruuuuuuules,” Roger said at length. The pain meds were really settling in.

  “I’d like to make an observation,” Nicole said. She sat like a military person. She always sat like that, no matter how relaxing the chair. The tight buzz cut added to the effect. “We haven’t talked about enforcement.”

  “Enforcement?” Josh said.

  Nicole nodded crisply. “It’s one thing to say that people can’t do certain things, and it’s another to make sure that they don’t.”

  Stefan felt his heart going.

  “Because that’s what Stefan was saying earlier,” she said, indicating him. “It doesn’t mean anything to say something’s illegal unless you also have an enforcement plan.”

  “What does that mean, practically?” Jenny said.

  “It means two things,” Nicole said, and then she counted them off on her fingers—unbroken, of course. “It means figuring out what happens when people violate the rules, and it means figuring out who makes those consequences happen.”

  “I think we have to all be in charge,” Jenny said. General agreement ensued.

  “Okay,” Nicole said. “We all enforce the rules. That means we have to come together to do that. But what happens when the rules get broken?”

  “Well,” Trixie said, shrugging, “punishment, I reckon.”

  Stefan was definitely feeling alert at this point. But it wasn’t precisely fear. “Wait,” he said, just as Nicole was opening her mouth, clearly about to ask for specific punishment ideas. “There’s an alternative to this.”

  “An alternative?” Trixie asked.

  “Sure,” Stefan said. “We could just do what we want.”

  “We could do what we want?” Jenny said.

  “Right. We could not make rules. We could all be allowed to do what we want.”

  Trixie blinked. “But I’m pretty confident I don’t want you to do what you want, mate.”

  Stefan shrugged. “Then you could stop me, on an ad hoc basis. That would be you doing what you want in response to me trying to do what I want. And if you’re able to stop it, then it doesn’t happen. If you’re not able, it does happen.”

  “So, chaos,” Josh said. Over his shoulder there was a camera in the wall, passively filming this whole thing.

  “No,” Stefan said. “Anarchy. It’s a political philosophy,” he added, speculatively.

  “I don’t think that what you’re describing meets the definition of true anarchy,” Jenny said, raising one eyebrow.

  “I don’t think so, either,” Josh said.

  “Sure it does,” Stefan said. “In any case, listen to me: the point is that we’re on our own out here. We could be perfectly free.”

  Stefan spent the next twenty-four hours locked in the rocket that had brought them to Mars. He hadn’t known that the door could lock from the outside, but apparently it could. It was an odd feature.

  He was in a spacesuit—there wasn’t any power to the rocket anymore. So that was awkward, though there was air and there were food and water tubes in the helmet which mostly worked and the others had been thoughtful enough to put a diaper on him as well. They gave him a tablet so that he could read or watch movies if he liked. It wouldn’t be a terrible place to be if it had light and heat and oxygen. But it didn’t.

  “You’re essentially making me sit in the corner,” Stefan said. “So I can think about what I’ve done.”

  People shrugged and nodded. Pretty much.

  “We can talk about it more, after,” Josh said. “We probably should talk about it, after.”

  So at present he was in the rocket, in his puffy suit, sitting in the mostly dark in one of the navigation chairs. He buckled the seatbelt for no particular reason, and then he unbuckled it for no reason. Doing that a lot more times allowed a minute to pass by. Then he got up and looked out of one of the portholes.

  “That,” he said, looking at the obvious landscape, “is fucking orange.”

  Presumably the Destination Mars! camera and microphone in his helmet had picked that right up.

  It was actually sobering to be in the rocket, almost right away. Especially with the view of the landscape, which was, among other things, completely inhospitable to human life. It served as an effective reminder that a person couldn’t do all that much on his own here.

  Perhaps there was something to this time-out business after all.

  Stefan didn’t know what had been going on with him. Certainly he was not thinking or acting the way he had thought and acted on Earth, where he had had a very organized sock drawer and was scrupulous about traffic laws and taxes and had never broken anyone’s fingers. Not even his own. He had voted consistently for the Conservative People’s Party, had always preferred a leader who kept a grip on things. And now here he was, an anarchist on Mars. He had to admit that it was not necessarily a good sign about his character or, in fact, his mental well-being.

  There had been a lot of exposure to cosmic rays between Earth and Mars. Hard to say what that did to a person over nine months.

  On the other hand, he did have a bit of a point. After all, When in Rome; he had been
born into a place, so he’d acted as the Romans had. But now the situation was When in Mars. And there was no such thing as Doing as the Martians Do. The Marsonauts would have to invent that. And was there such a thing as an ethical imperative when you were no longer under the umbrella of society, so to speak?

  Of course, he could see where people wouldn’t want to have their fingers broken.

  Stefan gave himself a little squirt of applesauce from his food tube. Then he sat back in the chair with his tablet. He could basically read even with his helmet on, so he pulled up Søren Kierkegaard’s book Enten-Eller, which he had always meant to check out. After a short while, he fell asleep.

  When he woke up, though—he thought he heard somebody’s voice but nobody was there—it was still daytime. He checked his watch. It wasn’t even quite dinnertime yet.

  He turned on the radio in his helmet. He said, “Did you call me?”

  A minute went by and then Josh came on. “Nope,” he said.

  Stefan felt a strange pang of sadness. After a moment, he asked, “I genuinely have to stay here for twenty-four hours?”

  “We think it’s for the best, yeah,” Josh said.

  “It’s an arbitrary amount of time.” An hour wasn’t even the same thing here as it had been on Earth. They had just taken the Mars day and divided it into twenty-four pieces. Which were, he acknowledged to himself, actually fairly similar in size to Earth hours.

  “We can talk more tomorrow.”

  “You have to admit it’s arbitrary,” Stefan said.

  There was no response.

  He played solitaire for a bit on his tablet. And then he went back to the Kierkegaard, but didn’t get very far, and then he pulled up Hammurabi’s Code himself. If a woman who owns a tavern won’t take corn as payment for a drink, and she gets less money than the worth of the corn, she has to be thrown into the river. You see? That ridiculousness was civilization! Though some of the other ones about renting and marriage and inheritance did seem reasonable. Then back to Kierkegaard; the man was a Danish giant and you had to read him. Still Stefan didn’t get very far. He did a crossword puzzle in English, and there was a clue that went Two wrongs, for which the answer was obviously and irritatingly notright. He had more applesauce.