How to Mars

by David Ebenbach

  Contemplating peevishly the possibility of new life on Mars, Stefan looked at the rough and craggy landscape in front of them, which was dimming in the late Martian afternoon, the orange graying as the sun went down to their right. They could see the habitation center ahead of them by then—Stefan realized he was dreading going back in there—which was not a unified center so much as, again, a cluster of sort-of-shiny domes that didn’t at all fit into the general topography, even with the other abandoned landers and rovers scattered about from missions that happened long before the current one. They passed one called the Prakt. Swedish, Stefan thought with a kind of internal Danish-nationalist sneer.

  Nicole looked over at him. Conversations on Mars were slow, but Stefan had definitely crossed over into ignoring-the-question territory by this point. And Stefan was aware that Nicole already viewed him with suspicion. She was always checking him for signs of trouble, her military eyes narrow in the breadth of her face, her buzz cut almost bristling.

  In point of fact the child had already added itself to the commotion. Because monotony and calm used to be the norms on this planet. Once they’d gotten past the excitement of landing and surviving, they’d gradually settled into a slower and slower routine. But Jenny’s pregnancy had sped everyone up again. Had energized the lot of them—aside, Stefan knew, from Stefan. Even the people at Destination Mars!, for all their official disapproval, were excited. Specifically, they had started filming again; the aggravating reality show was now, with the pregnancy, back on. There were even cameras inside the rover, including one right over Nicole’s shoulder. Nicole, who was still looking at him. They went over a significant bump.

  Jenny getting close—was it exciting? Well, to be sure, exciting was an evaluatively neutral term that merely described an elevation in activation or energy level as compared to baseline. Animals felt it when they were mating or killing something or being chased.

  “Quite exciting,” he said, quite honestly.

  Nicole continued to eye him. The camera presumably did, too.

  As they pulled up to the habitation center, Stefan saw that the others were suited up and waiting for them, having tracked their progress back from the lander. Well, three others were there; Jenny, spacesuit-less, was indoors. Still it was a crowd, as three necessarily would be. Stefan sighed, and then, like Nicole, put his own helmet back on so that they could unseal the doors.

  A good deal of bustling ensued, everyone tripping over one another—tripping over Stefan, certainly—to help with the boxes. And Trixie whistled as she worked. Into her microphone, which was on, so that everyone heard the whistling. She had always been peppy, a trait that Stefan attributed to her Australian character. But the pregnancy had amplified it to a fever pitch, at least when she wasn’t in the workroom staring at her endlessly sterile water samples.

  When everything was in the airlock, which had been designed to comfortably hold perhaps three or four people at a time, they closed off the outer door and all took their suits off in the tiny space, jostling and accidentally elbowing. There was some laughing and general good-mood noise; it was as though Stefan and Nicole had just come back successful from a hunt whose spoils had been awaited by a desperate tribe.

  “Good work,” Josh said, clapping Stefan on the back. The effect of the pregnancy on Josh, the father, had been to make him occasionally hearty in a goofy way—heartier and goofier, in fact, as the pregnancy had progressed. He smiled with bright teeth and an open mouth, and the curls of his brown, curly hair seemed to be springier than they used to be.

  Stefan picked up a box and opened the inner door to the rest of the habitation center. And was greeted by some species of bouncy Top-40-type music coming from all the speakers. Loud. Which was again Trixie.

  “I thought it’d give us a boost,” she said, coming right past him with a box, her dyed-maroon hair down past her shoulders. Stefan gathered from her Japanese ancestry—and her eyebrows—that her natural hair color was black, which would have been easier on the eyes. But she kept it dyed different hot colors. “An unloading boost.”

  “Or a headache,” Stefan said.

  “Oh, you wowser,” she said, taking her cargo back to the kitchen. Almost skipping.

  Stefan sniffed the air. A few weeks earlier at the baby shower a terrible smell had cropped up in the common room for no discernible reason except that everything was going sort of wrong with the electricity and plumbing and so on in the habitation—and then everything had gone back to normal, also for no discernible reason. The air now smelled only like the usual air freshener mixture. The fresheners had been designed to smell like all the astronauts’ hometowns simultaneously—like flowers blended with car exhaust and asphalt in the summer and also maple syrup. It was not pleasant, but not like terrible spoiled eggs and mayonnaise, anyway.

  And then there was Jenny on one of the chaises longues in the common room, looking mountainous and guilty for not having been able to suit up, surrounded by snack food wrappers and saying, “Well, I might be able to help for this part,” as she struggled to get off the chaise. Her bathrobe was open and her shirt was not quite managing to cover her belly entirely.

  Josh and Nicole looked at one another with affectionate disapproval. The look said There goes that Jenny again. Nicole said, “Not advisable. You know you really shouldn’t do any heavy lifting the rest of the way.” Josh nodded.

  Roger accidentally bumped Stefan on the way past him to the workroom. In combination with the thumping, bouncing music and the loose socks on the floor and the fact that Stefan just didn’t like Roger, this almost made Stefan smack the box out of his hands. Maybe he would have done precisely that, had his own hands not been full. Instead he glared at Roger’s back.

  “I know what!” Trixie said as she bounced back to the airlock for more. “We should have a dance party tonight.”

  “Pardon me?” Stefan said. The cameras in the corners of the ceiling glinted down.

  “That’s a fun kind of idea,” Josh said.

  “Oh, ripper! We never have a dance party!” Trixie said, almost screaming. “You could chair-dance,” she said to Jenny in a slightly more reasonable voice. “Small, gentle movements.”

  “Um,” Stefan said. He still hadn’t taken his box where it needed to go.

  Jenny smiled. Josh did, too. Roger smiled shyly. Even Nicole did. In her case it was like a bear smiling.

  Back in the rover, this time behind the wheel and driving, Stefan wondered what he ought to do with himself. He had just told everyone that he was restless and wanted to make one more run to the lander to get some more things. Trixie had called him a wowser again, as she often did—he gathered it was Australian for party-pooper—but nobody had tried very hard to get him to stay, or even to convince him that someone should go with him, as was the standard practice, especially on night trips. Stefan was not an expert on human behavior, but he had managed to intuit the fact that the others didn’t particularly like him.

  The rocky landscape was definitely darkening now, and the moons, when they were in the sky, were too remote and little to illuminate anything. Stefan therefore navigated by headlights and drove slowly so that he wouldn’t bumble into any rocks or pits that the rover couldn’t handle. In any case he preferred when things moved slowly.

  Bumping along on rocks the rover could handle, Stefan was quite done with the whole situation. With Home Sweet, which was what they called the habitation center. And it was going to get much worse when Jenny finally popped.

  The stoic adventurer struck out on his own, Stefan thought, narrating himself for a moment.

  But actually he was only going to the lander.

  Stefan had applied to the Destination Mars! program with the conscious intention of spreading civilization beyond Earth to other worlds. He’d said something to that effect in his application video. But then, once they’d arrived on this wide-open planet, he realized that his sec
ret motivation had honestly been to get away from civilization, and he’d for a short time become an anarchist. Unsuccessfully. And since then he’d been gradually realizing that he wasn’t an anarchist so much as a person who found other people difficult and who therefore sometimes boiled over and tried to break their fingers, which he was expressly not allowed to do. They had made a rule about it.

  In sum, the situation was that he was a misanthrope who had traveled eighty million kilometers to get away from anthropes, but had foolishly brought five anthropes with him. Who were now about to become six.

  “Stefan?” someone said from right behind him.

  He swerved and stomped on the brakes.

  Fully stopped now, he looked over his shoulder, where there was, of course, nobody at all. He looked all about the rover: nobody. He checked his radio, even though it hadn’t been a familiar voice. “Did anybody call me?”

  After a minute, Roger, with the sound of a dance beat behind him: “We didn’t, Stefan. Is everything okay?”

  Stefan didn’t answer. He turned off his radio and glanced over at one of the cameras. The possibilities were grim: either the people at Destination Mars! were messing with him, or he was hearing things.

  “Lovely,” he said to himself. And perhaps to others.

  The lander was pretty close by Destination Mars! standards—five kilometers away from Home Sweet, as the crow flew, or ten kilometers as the rover traveled—which meant a trip of about an hour. During that time, Stefan thought about other planets. What if he could somehow re-engineer the rocket that had brought them here? Though it was not designed to be able to take off from Mars, with its different atmosphere and gravity and uneven surface, and there wasn’t anything like enough fuel to do it, and Stefan would need Jenny’s help to calculate the trajectory to go anywhere. And there was nowhere to go. Jupiter was 555 million kilometers away, and composed of gas; Venus was 120 million kilometers away but averaged 460 degrees Celsius and rained sulfuric acid; Earth was much closer than Jupiter or Venus, but was covered with people. You couldn’t get away from them, on Earth.

  Stefan had mused his way through these considerations quite a few times already.

  The lander was a little more than half full at this point. Stefan, out of the rover, the lander door open, shined his helmet-cam around at all the remaining boxes. There was nothing here that they needed at the habitation center right away—backup food for the food they’d already unloaded, spare parts, backup clothes for the clothes they were already wearing, a replacement chaise longue, extra towels they didn’t need, a new carbon dioxide splitter/oxygenator in case the current one were to give out, a couple of spare mini solar panels, and so on. The baby bottles and diapers and baby clothes—Stefan shuddered—were already back at Home Sweet.

  He turned on the lander’s interior light that Destination Mars! had put in for no mechanically defensible reason and climbed up into the space. It was actually somewhat roomy—you could stand up, and there was enough width to lie down, too, if you wanted to.

  As a compromise between standing and lying down, Stefan sat and leaned against one wall. He closed the lander door, which made the lander airtight. They had designed it that way, ridiculously, mainly to give the included goldfish a chance to survive, though, despite that thoughtfulness as well as the little warming unit that had come with it, the two unfortunates had frozen solid in their tank, of course. No goldfish had ever survived any of the supply trips. Still they kept sending them.

  In any case, it was very quiet in the lander. Very, very quiet. Heavenly.

  Oh.

  Stefan looked over at the extra carbon dioxide splitter, which was one of the things you used for making breathable air. He looked at the airtight lander door. He looked over at the food boxes. He looked up at the overhead light and thought about the solar panels on the top of the lander. He thought about the spare parts and the parts back at the habitation center that he could use to generate water from some of the stuff scattered as ice crystals through the soil. There was even a window, again for no good reason, in case you wanted to look out at orange Mars. It wasn’t as roomy as the rocket that had brought them all here, but it was at a much better distance—that is, farther—from Home Sweet.

  The lander, the placid little lander, had almost everything Stefan needed.

  Everyone was asleep by the time Stefan got back. Trixie snored deafeningly, but she wasn’t the only one sawing away, which suggested to Stefan that alcohol had been present at the dance party. He could, in fact, smell alcohol, over the unpleasant background air freshener mix.

  Stefan had only brought a few useless things back with him—some clothes and some kitchen appliance parts, mainly, removed from the lander to make more space in there—and now he loaded the rover up with various equipment and tools and water and personal items. It was nothing that the rest of them couldn’t spare. Backup things.

  Then he drove back to the lander and unloaded.

  Then he drove back to the habitation center to drop off the rover so that nobody would know where he was, though he did leave a vague note. In its entirety, it read: Everything’s lovely.

  Then he walked back to the lander, which was not a great deal slower than driving there.

  Then he took everything out of the lander that still needed to come out to make room, and he set it all on the ground outside, and he climbed inside, unrolled his bedroll, and, still in his spacesuit because naturally he hadn’t yet had time to set up the splitter properly, he looked around at the calm little space one more time, turned off the interior light, and he slept.

  He only woke up once in the night, when he once again heard someone call out “Stefan?” Or really it was more like Stefan? Because it sounded like it came from right next to him, and it also sounded like it came from inside his head. He sat quite upright in his bedding, half-asleep and spluttering, “Yes! It’s Stefan!” But of course there was no one there. After a moment he put his head back down. The night was entirely peaceful thereafter.

  In the morning, Stefan did get some radio calls, which he ignored.

  “Um,” said Roger while Stefan was eating a breakfast of rye bread paste and cheese paste through his helmet tube. “Are you . . . where are you?”

  “Hey, Stefan,” Josh said later that morning, while Stefan was integrating the carbon dioxide splitter into the lander’s circuitry. “We’re all wondering about you. Could you just give us a heads-up so we know you’re all right?”

  “Stefan,” Nicole said that afternoon as he was testing the splitter. “We need your position and status.”

  He tried to turn the volume down on the radio, but you could only do that in non-emergency situations, and apparently someone had designated the situation an emergency situation. There was nothing that forced him to respond, however. In any case, it was a considerable relief when the space heater was plugged in and the splitter and some other pieces had started generating breathable air so that he could remove the helmet and not hear from anyone any more.

  At the end of the day, Stefan looked around again. It had been very easy to make the space minimally livable, and he could start on the rest tomorrow—laying out and connecting additional solar panels, building an ice extractor and melter. No problem. The lander seemed ready to be converted, with its strange ports and outlets and sealable door and so on. It was almost as though the people at Destination Mars! had wanted this to happen.

  Stefan looked around again sharply. Were there cameras in here? Certainly there were in his helmet and spacesuit. He made sure to disable those before he turned in for the second night. The organization had made a practice of messing with him in the past.

  But now he was alone.

  Over the next few days, Stefan fixed up the place. He did attach the solar panels, and he set up a little box for silverware and plates and another one for clothes. A high-tech chamberpot that had been built for the rover
. He built the water extractor, the mini-desalinator. He crafted a tiny squeeze of an airlock out of stretchy but super-strong plastic, so that he didn’t have to reoxygenate the lander each time he went in or out. He even, miraculously, revived the goldfish, which he and Nicole had left behind in the box marked new goldfish when they saw that the tank water was frozen, but it turned out that the experience had just been a kind of accidental cryogenic experiment, and they started wiggling around as soon as the water in the tank had thawed. There were two of them, presumably male and female. Stefan refrained from naming them, in much the same way that you wouldn’t name flowers in a flower arrangement, but he enjoyed them and left them as the room’s only decoration.

  During meals he took out his tablet and watched What We Become and When Animals Dream and Under the Surface and other old Danish films. Anything where a town was being destroyed or the world was ending. Or he tried to read Kierkegaard and then gave up, as he had done many other times. Or he put on his spacesuit and went for a walk, eating from tubes, which was not as bad as one would have expected. Or he sat quietly in the lander, looking at the goldfish, or out through the little window at Mars. It was a chaotic surface—on some parts of the planet, it was literally called chaotic terrain, a geological term for, as he understood it, giant mismatched rocks all about, though here the landscape was chaotic only in a colloquial sense, as the rocks were littler. If Roger had been there, he could have explained the terms more exactly, and Stefan was pleased that Roger was not there.