by Rob Dircks
You're Going to Mars!
Rob Dircks
Published by Goldfinch Publishing
An Imprint of SARK Industries, Inc.
www.goldfinchpublishing.com
Publisher’s Note:
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright 2018 Rob Dircks.
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without permission in writing from the author, except for the inclusion of brief quotations in a review.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Rob Dircks, 1967-
You’re Going to Mars!
by Rob Dircks
p. cm.
ISBN 9781733017909
For Mom
Contents
1. From the Beginning
2. Start the Countdown
3. The Story of the Three Sisters
4. The City of Gold
5. Pork Dumplings
6. The Red Scarab
7. Light a Fire in the Sky
8. I’m Going for a Walk.
9. My What?!
10. Goodbyes
11. Come on, Chuck. Have a look.
12. How I Met My Mother
13. Bologna Sandwiches
14. Clank, Clank, Clank
15. Awful Long Way from New Jersey
16. Cheat
17. Hold On to Something
18. I Have Some Questions.
19. Martha
20. Welcome to the Show!
21. The Luxurious Accomodations
22. Pushups
23. The Big Board
24. Robenji
25. It’s My Mother.
26. Slip-N-Die
27. Good Luck. You’ll Need It.
28. I Need to Get Back and Destroy Everything.
29. Stage Two
30. We’re Trapped.
31. Start Putting Shit Together.
32. The Pit
33. Beets
34. Hamburger
35. You’re Playing With Fire.
36. Secret Weapon
37. This is Going to Be Some Finale.
38. Second Place
39. Like a Sister, You Idiots!
40. Sabotage
41. Trust Me.
42. FILL R UP
43. The Smoking Gitano
44. Good Cop
45. Tennis Prison
46. The Largest Umbrella I’ve Ever Seen
47. There is No Way This is Going to Work.
48. Dead Man Walking
49. What Kind of Name is Paper Anyway?
50. The Butter Woman
51. Paper 2.0
52. Old School Game Show
53. Yes, There is a Wedding.
54. The Biggest Day
55. Launch
56. Agent Burke
57. On Live Television?!
58. A Rip In Your Suit
59. The Idea Philanderer
60. Goodnight, Martha.
61. Don’t You Trust Me?
62. The Grand Finale
63. Tied
64. Did You Miss Me, Larson?
65. The Dream
66. Tesla
67. How Much Do You Trust Aurora?
68. Mars
69. The Prodigal Daughter
70. Drill
71. You?
72. It’s Over.
73. I Have One More Secret.
74. Sausage Links
75. Food
76. Itching to Get Home
77. The Leak
78. The Light Flashed Green.
Also by Rob Dircks
Also by Rob Dircks
Also by Rob Dircks
Also by Rob Dircks
About the Author
1
From the Beginning
“Tell me everything, Paper. From the beginning.”
“It’s a lot. You sure you want to me to go all the way back?”
“Yes.”
“Okay, well, the day I was born– wait, hold on.”
I look over to the display across the two-tank chamber I’m trapped in. In ninety-two minutes, it’ll either light up green, indicating I’m going to live, or it’ll light up red, indicating this ship – and me – will explode into teeny pieces no bigger than 50 microns in diameter. So no, I don’t think I have time to go all the way back to the day I was born. (Although that story is pretty darn cute, if I do say so myself, and it’s relevant to this whole mess, so I’ll try to sneak it in somewhere.) I’ll have to start somewhere closer to the present so I don’t run out of time, so that they can hear the truth about Mars, the incredible truth – they have no idea. But where to start?
Wait, I know: I’ll start with the subway poster we found. The ad for You’re Going to Mars! It was that exact moment that I gave up my childhood dream. The day I knew for sure I’d never be going to Mars.
It’s funny, thinking about it now. How my dream laughed back at me and said, “Oh, not going to Mars, are we? We’ll see about that.”
2
Start the Countdown
It’s the perfect day out, cloudless blue skies, very light winds from the northeast (the Everpresent Stink isn’t even that bad), so we’re good to go with launch. This cardboard subway poster we found is the perfect size and thickness, so we’re using it as the launch platform.
“Duggie, okay, you ready? Start the countdown.”
Duggie claps. Counting is his thing. “Tee minus five… four… three…
“Ignition.”
“…two… one…”
“Lift off!”
We jump back to avoid the blast, and peer up in wonder as my two-foot-tall homemade rocket, Mark 76, shoots up into the sky, becoming a little dot in just a few seconds. For the seventy-sixth time, my eyes well up and I have that magical feeling: that’s me in there, a little me escaping the Earth’s clutches, shooting up where I really belong, into the unknown, free, with a little know-how, a little imagination, and a lot of luck.
“Talk about luck. Duggie, do you remember how many failure points there were in the last Mars rover mission?”
“Um… not sure, Paper…”
“Thirty thousand four hundred eighty-nine. If you really think about all the ways a mission can fail, it’s a miracle it ever works.”
“Um, did it work?”
“Don’t you remember?” Sometimes memories just slip through the cracks in Duggie’s brain, including every single Mars story I’ve told him. “Mars Inquisitor, July 2065. Perfect launch. Perfect landing. Not only did it work, it’s still sending back data twelve years longer than it was supposed to.”
“So… what happens to Mark 76?”
“Come on, Duggie, try. I know you can do it. Remember.”
“It… it comes back?”
“See? Who said you weren’t smart?”
He grins and scratches his beard, flipping his trucker hat backward and pointing his binoculars up into the blue. I slowly pull him back with me another hundred feet or so, just in case. He doesn’t remember what happened the last time we tried this.
“Paper? I don’t see anythi-”
“Duggie!”
I lunge at him, throwing us both just out of the way as the harmless-rocket-turned-supersonic-death-missile crashes into the landfill three feet from where we were standing. The impact crushes the fuselage, releasing the methane composite fuel. And BOOM! it explodes into a fireball, singeing our shoelaces.
Duggie immediately shoots to his feet and resumes clapping. �
�Let’s do that again!”
“No. It wasn’t supposed to do that. It was supposed to perform a soft landing, right back there.” I point to the subway poster. I can still make out, under the methane scorch marks, the words on the poster screaming up at me in purple letters: You’re Going to Mars! It’s cruel, the way the picture of silver-haired Zach Larson, world’s first trillionaire, points a finger at my face and taunts me. Like he knows I want nothing more than to run away screaming from Fill City One, to break out of this suffocating hellhole, suck some fresh air into my lungs for once in my life. Wait. That’s not true. I have, on rare occasions, on a cool spring day here and there, caught a fresh whiff of “clean” on a breeze. Just enough to remind me that the Everpresent Stink is not all there is. I’ve inhaled clean air just enough to learn that things smelling bad is not normal or shouldn’t be taken for granted and forgotten, like a train that passes by so often that you don’t hear its thunderous rattle any longer.
In any case, I look down at the poster, and the remains of Mark 76, and realize: it’s over. Time to grow up. Give up my rocket hobby. It’s been all failure points and no miracles, and that’s all it’ll ever be. I’ll never get where I’m supposed to be. I look deep into Zach Larson’s paper eyes, with his still-running-triathlons-at-sixty-years-old confidence, and whisper, “Your little sweepstakes is over in a week. You got any miracles left up that sleeve?” Larson just keeps smiling, smug, so I give him the finger. “I didn’t think so.”
“You talking to me, Paper?”
“No, Duggie.” I walk over to a discarded French armoire wedged into the mud. “Okay. Show’s over. Back to work. This piece looks like a re-new. Pick up the other end and let’s get it on the lift.”
As Duggie dutifully ambles over and bends down to help me heft the monster furniture, I dart back and snatch the poster, roll it up and slip it into my satchel. Obsessions die hard.
“You know, Paper. I saw what you did there, just now.” Duggie shoots me his goofy three-teeth-missing smile, picking up two clawed oak feet and grunting with effort.
“Oh, you saw, did you? What exactly did you see?”
“You’re Going to Mars, it says. The poster you picked up there. From that TV show. Printed four-color process, nice heavy cardboard for a rocket platform, probably two-hundred point stock. Too contaminated to recycle, though.” He thinks about it for a second, looks back up into the sky. “I’d like to go to Mars.”
Poor Duggie. He’s like the trash savant of Fill City One, smarter than any ten Hunters combined when it comes to sifting the piles, but certain memories, and basic facts, like every space story I’ve ever told him, or that it’s virtually impossible to find a winning scarab medallion to land a spot on You’re Going to Mars!, or the fact that there’s only a week left in the sweepstakes anyway, or the fact that you can never leave Fill City One even if you want to, escape him. I think it was a bowling ball that did him in, bonked him in the noggin. Stupid mainlanders throwing out perfectly good bowling balls.
“I’m pretty sure neither one of us is going to Mars, Duggie.”
“Why not?”
Ugh. I don’t want to get into it. But he’s tracking the scent. I need to distract him. I pat the armoire. “Hey. Give me the specs on this thing.”
“Oooh. I like this game. Lessee…” he looks the massive piece of furniture over, scratching his beard. “…it’s definitely Ethan Allen. French Country collection, yes. I think they call the color ‘brie.’ Isn’t brie cheese?”
“Yes. They painted this the color of cheese.”
“And it’s solid oak frame, drawers are poplar with oak veneers. And the SKU is…”
“You don’t remember the failure points on Mars Inquisitor, but you remember the SKU on this armoire?”
“…135321603. I think.”
I still don’t know how he does that. “You’re amazing, Duggie. And to think, you’re just a wee lad. Twenty-one years young.”
He tucks his chin into his chest, like he always does when paid a compliment. “Thanks, Paper.” Then he looks up. “I’m twenty-one?”
“Yes, Duggie. We’re the same age. Come on, you have to remember that. We were born on the same day.”
His eyes widen. “Oooh. Yes! Tell me the story! The story of the three sisters!”
“No. Not again. Please.”
But it’s too late. I guess I knew it was too late the moment the words left my mouth. He loves hearing the story about my two sisters and me, mostly because he’s not-so-secretly in love with Scissors, the youngest of us by five minutes. Although it might also be that he likes to hear a woman’s voice, not having a woman in his own life, a mother or a sister or a lover. And thinking that thought always triggers my weakness for him, that mixture of pity and simpatico that I can never shake, so of course I tell him the story again.
“Okay, Duggie. But this is the last time.” I wink at him, like it’s ever the last time. “Once upon a time…”
3
The Story of the Three Sisters
So I tell Duggie the story I was told again:
My father brought us home, in shock, still not believing that he had three girls instead of one, and that his soon-to-be ex-wife wouldn’t be coming along for the ride. “Good luck, Harlon” were the last words she said before climbing into the transport cab in her hospital gown and disappearing forever.
My Nana, on the other hand, was giddy with delight as she swung open the screen door. “Oooh!! Look at them! They’re just like three buttons on a shirt! What are their names?”
“Names?”
“Names, Harlon, names!” She plucked the nearest one, I like to think it was me, from Dad’s armpit and raised me up and looked me in the eyes. “Well?”
“I, uh, listen, it’s been a long…”
“These children will not cross my threshold without names, Harlon James Maxwell Farris.”
The always-ready twinkle sparked in Dad's eyes and he grinned. “Okay. How about we do Rock-Paper-Scissors?”
Nana didn’t understand, had somehow never heard of the game Rock-Paper-Scissors in her entire seventy-six-year-old life, or more likely had forgotten decades ago. So she didn’t understand that he meant to play the old game with her to determine who would pick each girl’s name. (Dad’s got an idiotic sense of humor. Actually, they both do. They’re quite a pair.) Bouncing me around a bit, turning me this way and that, looking me over, Nana, instead of asking for a little clarity, just said, “Paper. This one looks like a Paper.”
“No, Mom. That’s not what I meant. What I meant was-“
“Rock. That one under your left arm is Rock. Looks solid. Solid as a three-week-old loaf of bread.” She squinted at my last sister and let out a laugh. “And Scissors. Oh, yes, this one’s going to be sharp. You’ll see, Harlon.”
“Mom. No. That isn’t how this works. You can’t just-“
But Nana was already shooing Dad away, and making a nest for the three of us right there in the middle of her double-wide trailer, flapping her bingo wings, making a fuss over every little peep and squeak and fart and, I imagine, already planning the designs for the three custom-knit sweaters with our ridiculous new names emblazoned across the front.
Dad technically won the argument, making sure that our actual, real-life names – Becca, Robin, and Nance – were recorded on whatever semi-official birth documents they kept stuffed in an old drawer somewhere here in Fill City One. But practically it would make no difference, because from those first moments forward, Nana ruled the roost, and took to calling us Rock, Paper, and Scissors, and well, when Nana gets an opinion in her head, it ceases being an opinion and becomes cold, hard fact.
4
The City of Gold
See? I told you I would sneak that story in here somewhere.
Anyway, Duggie has fallen asleep listening, as always, with a sloppy grin on his face and a beer in his hand. I shake his shoulder. “Come on. Up. You can nap later. Close up your cooler and let’s get this over to
the Body Shop.”
We finish strapping the armoire to the lift’s forks, climb into the cab, and buckle in. Wrenching the ancient vehicle into gear, I tap the dashboard. “Autodrive. Destination Body Shop.” Static fills the cabin, as usual, and I hear affzzmtth, which I translate as “Affirmative.”
As we head, for the zillionth time in my life, out to the Body Shop, I ponder once again how miserable and boring and smelly my existence is here, but how genius the Gitano family was in creating Fill City One. Take this one junk armoire: it’ll require a single hour to repair, it’s only missing one leg, and some of the veneers are lifting, and within a second hour it’ll be back on a flatbed, ready to deliver to an Ethan Allen in New Hampshire, for sale as new. Cash from trash.