by Joe Haldeman
Then the screen went black for a few seconds, and a red rectangle opened slowly… it was the air-lock light at night, as the door slid open. I was looking at myself, just a little while ago, coming out and pulling the dog behind me.
The camera must have been like those flying bugs that Homeland Security spies use. I certainly hadn’t seen anything.
When the door closed, the picture changed to a ghostly blue, like moonlight on Earth. It followed me for a minute or so. Stumbling and then staring at the ground as I walked more cautiously.
Then it switched to another location, and I knew what was coming. The ground collapsed and the dog and I disappeared in a shower of dust, which the wind swept away in an instant.
The bug, or whatever it was, drifted down through the hole to hover over me as I writhed around in pain. A row of glowing symbols appeared at the bottom of the screen. There was a burst of white light when I found the dog and switched it on.
Then Big Red floated down—this was obviously the speeded-up version—wearing several layers of that wall plastic, it seemed; riding a thing that looked like a metal sawhorse with two sidecars. He put me in one and the dog in the other. Then he floated back up.
Then they skipped all the way to me lying on that pillow, naked and unlovely, in an embarrassing posture—I blushed, as if any of them cared—and then moved in close to my ankle, which was blue and swollen. Then a solid holo of a human skeleton, obviously mine, in the same position. The image moved in the same way as before. The fracture line glowed red, and then my foot, below the break, shifted slightly. The line glowed blue and disappeared.
Just then I noticed it wasn’t hurting anymore.
Green stepped over and gently took the staff away from me. I put weight on the foot, and it felt as good as new.
“How could you do that?” I said, not expecting an answer. No matter how good they were at healing themselves, how could they apply that to a human skeleton?
Well, a human vet could treat a broken bone in an animal she’d never seen before. But it wouldn’t heal in a matter of hours.
Two of the amber ones brought out my skinsuit and Mars suit, and put them at my feet.
Red pointed at me, then tapped on the screen, which again showed the surface parts of the colony. You could hardly see them for the dust, though; there was a strong storm blowing.
He made an up-and-down gesture with his small arms, then his large ones, obviously meaning “Get dressed.”
So with about a million potato eyes watching, I took off the tunic and got into the skinsuit. The diaper was missing, which made it feel kind of baggy. They must have thrown it away—or analyzed it, ugh.
The creatures stared in silence while I zipped that up, then climbed and wiggled into the Mars suit. I secured the boots and gloves and clamped the helmet into place, and automatically chinned the switch for an oxygen and power readout, but of course it was still broken. I guess that would be asking too much—you fixed my ankle, but you can’t fix a simple space suit? What kind of Martians are you?
It was obvious I wasn’t getting any air from the backpack, though. I’d need the dog’s backup supply.
I unshipped the helmet and faced Green, and made an exaggerated pantomime of breathing in and out. She didn’t react. Hell, they probably breathed by osmosis or something.
I turned to Red and crouched over, patting the air at the level of the dog. “Dog,” I said, and pointed back the way we’d come.
He leaned over and mimicked my gesture, and said, “Nog.” Pretty close. Then he turned to the crowd and croaked out a speech, which I think had both “Harn” and “nog” in it.
He must have understood, at least partly, because he made that four-armed “come along” motion at me, and went back to the place where we’d entered. I went through the plastic and looked back. Green was leading four others, it looked like one of each color, following us.
Red in the lead, we all went back by what seemed the same path we’d come. I counted my steps, so that when I told people about it I’d have at least one actual concrete number. The hydroponics room, or at least the part we cut through, was 185 steps wide; then it was another 204 steps from there to the “hospital” room. I get about 70 centimeters to a step, so the trip covered about 270 meters, allowing for a little dogleg in the middle. Of course it might go on for miles in every direction, but at least it was no smaller than that.
We went into the little room and they watched while I unreeled the dog’s umbilical and plugged it in. The cool air coming through the neck fitting was more than a relief. I put my helmet back on. Green stepped forward and did a pretty good imitation of my breathing pantomime.
I sort of didn’t want to go. I was looking forward to coming back and learning how to communicate with Red and Green. We had other people more qualified, though. I should have listened to Mother when she got after me to take a language in school. If I’d known this was going to happen, I would have taken Chinese and Latin and Body Noises.
The others stood away from the plastic, and Red gestured for me to follow. I pulled the dog along through the four plastic layers; this time we turned sharply to the right and started walking up a gently sloping ramp.
After a few minutes I could look down and get a sense of how large this place was. There was the edge of a lake—an immense amount of water even if it was only a few inches deep. From above, the buildings looked like domes of clay, or just dirt, with no windows, just the pale blue light that filtered through the door layers.
There were squares of different sizes and shades that were probably crops like the mushrooms and cigars, and one large square had trees that looked like six-foot-tall broccoli, which could explain the wooden splints.
We came to a level place, brightly lit, that had shelves full of bundles of the plastic stuff. Red walked straight to one shelf and pulled off a bundle. It was his Mars suit. Bending over at a strange angle, bobbing, he slid his feet into four opaque things like thick socks. His two large arms went into sleeves, ending in mittens. Then the whole thing seemed to come alive and ripple up and over him, sealing together, then inflating. It didn’t have anything that looked like an oxygen tank, but air was coming from somewhere.
He gestured for me to follow, and we went toward a dark corner. He hesitated there, and held out his hand to me. I took it, and we staggered slowly through dozens of layers of the stuff, toward a dim light.
It was obviously like a gradual air lock. We stopped at another flat area, which had one of the blue lights, and rested for a few minutes. Then he led me through another long series of layers, where it became completely dark—without him leading me, I might have gotten turned around—and then it lightened slightly, the light glowing pink this time.
When we came out, we were on the floor of a cave; the light was coming from a circle of Martian sky. When my eyes adjusted, I could see there was a smooth ramp leading uphill to the cave entrance.
I’d never seen the sky that color. We were looking up through a serious dust storm.
Red pulled a dust-covered sheet off his sawhorse-shaped vehicle. I helped him put the dog into one of the bowl-like sidecars, and I got in the other. There were two things like stubby handlebars in front, but no other controls that I could see.
He backed onto the thing, straddling it, and we rose off the ground a foot or so, and smoothly started forward.
The glide up the ramp was smooth. I expected to be buffeted around by the dust storm, but as impressive as it looked, it didn’t have much power. My umbilical tube did flap around in the wind, which made me nervous. If it snapped, a fail-safe would close off the tube so I wouldn’t immediately die. But I’d use up the air in the suit pretty fast.
I couldn’t see more than ten or twenty feet in any direction, but Red, I hoped, could see farther. He was moving very fast. Of course, he was unlikely to hit another vehicle, or a tree.
I settled down into the bowl—there wasn’t anything to see—and was fairly comfortable. I amused mys
elf by imagining the reaction of Dargo Solingen and Mother and Dad when I showed up with an actual Martian.
It felt like an hour or more before he slowed down, and we hit the ground and skidded to a stop. He got off his perch laboriously and came around to the dog’s side. I got out to help him lift it and was knocked off balance by a gust. Four legs were a definite advantage here.
He watched while I got the umbilical untangled, then pointed me in the direction we were headed. Then he made a shooing motion.
“You have to come with me,” I said, uselessly, and tried to translate it into arm motions. He pointed and shooed again, and then backed onto the sawhorse and took off in a slow U-turn.
I started to panic. What if I went in the wrong direction? I could miss the base by twenty feet and just keep walking on into the desert.
And maybe I wasn’t even near the base. Maybe Red had left me in the middle of nowhere, for some obscure Martian reason.
That wouldn’t make sense. Human sense, anyhow.
I stood alone in the swirling dust and felt helplessness turning into terror.
2
HOMECOMING
I took a few deep breaths. The dog was pointed in the right direction. I picked up its handle and looked straight ahead as far as I could see, through the swirling gloom. I saw a rock, directly ahead, and walked to it. Then another rock, maybe ten feet away. After the fourth rock, I looked up and saw I’d almost run into the air-lock door. I leaned on the big red button and the door slid open immediately. It closed behind the dog and the red light on the ceiling started blinking. It turned green and the inside door opened on a wide-eyed Emily.
“Carmen! You found your way back!”
“Well, um… not really…”
“Got to call the search party!” She bounded down the stairs, yelling for Howard.
I wondered how long they’d been searching for me. I would be in shit up to my chin.
I put the dog back in its place—there was only one other parked there, so three were out looking for me. Or my body.
Card came running in when I was half out of my skinsuit. “Sis!” He grabbed me and hugged me, which was moderately embarrassing. “We thought you were—”
“Yeah, okay. Let me get dressed? Before the shit hits the fan?” He let me turn around and step out of the skinsuit and into my coverall.
“What, you went out for a walk and got lost in that dust storm?”
For a long moment, I thought of saying yes. Who was going to believe my story? I looked at the clock and saw that it was 1900. If it was the same day, seventeen hours had passed. I could have wandered around that long without running out of air, using up the dog reserves.
“How long have I been gone?”
“You can’t remember? All foogly day, man. Were you derilious?”
“Delerious.” I kneaded my brow and rubbed my face hard with both hands. “Let me wait and tell it all when Mother and Dad get here.”
“That’ll be hours! They’re out looking for you.”
“Oh, that’s great. Who else?”
“I think it was Paul the pilot.”
“Well,” said a voice behind me. “You decided to come back after all.”
It was Dargo Solingen, of course. There was a quaver of emotion in her voice that I’d never heard. I think rage.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I don’t know what I was thinking.”
“I don’t think you were thinking at all. You were being a foolish girl, and you put more lives than your own into danger.”
About a dozen people were behind her. “Dargo,” Dr. Jefferson said. “She’s back; she’s alive. Let’s give her a little rest.”
“Has she given us any rest?” she barked.
“I’m sorry! I’ll do anything—”
“You will? Isn’t that pretty. What do you propose to do?”
Dr. Estrada put a hand on her shoulder. “Please let me talk to her.” Oh, good, a shrink. I needed a xenologist. But she would listen better than Solingen.
“Oh… do what you want. I’ll deal with her later.” She turned and walked through the small crowd.
Some people gathered around me, and I tried not to cry. I wouldn’t want her to think she had made me cry. But there were plenty of shoulders and arms for me to hide my eyes in.
“Carmen.” Dr. Estrada touched my forearm. “We ought to talk before your parents get back.”
“Okay.” A dress rehearsal. I followed her down to the middle of A.
She had a large room to herself, but it was her office as well as quarters. “Lie down here”—she indicated her single bunk—“and just try to relax. Begin at the beginning.”
“The beginning isn’t very interesting. Dargo Solingen embarrassed me in front of everybody. Not the first time, either. Sometimes I feel like I’m her little project. Let’s drive Carmen crazy.”
“So in going outside like that, you were getting back at her? Getting even in some way?”
“I didn’t think of it that way. I just had to get out, and that was the only way.”
“Maybe not, Carmen. We can work on ways to get away without physically leaving.”
“Like Dad’s zen thing, okay. But what I did, or why, isn’t really important. It’s what I found!”
“So what did you find?”
“Life. Intelligent life. They saved me.” I could hear my voice, and even I didn’t believe it.
“Hmm,” she said. “Go on.”
“I’d walked four kilometers or so and was about to turn around and go back. But I stepped on a place that wouldn’t support my weight. Me and the dog. We fell through. At least ten meters, maybe twenty.”
“And you weren’t hurt?”
“I was! I heard my ankle break. I broke a rib, maybe more than one, here.”
She pressed the area, gently. “But you’re walking.”
“They fixed… I’m getting ahead of myself.”
“So you fell through and broke your ankle?”
“Then I spent a long time finding the dog. My suit light went out when I hit the ground. But finally I found it, found the dog, and got my umbilical plugged in.”
“So you had plenty of oxygen.”
“But I was freezing. The circuit to my gloves and boots wasn’t working. I really thought that was it.”
“But you survived.”
“I was rescued. I was passing out and this, uh, this Martian came floating down, I saw him in the dog’s light. Then everything went black, and I woke up—”
“Carmen! You have to see that this was a dream. A hallucination.”
“Then how did I get here?”
Her mouth set in a stubborn line. “You were very lucky. You wandered around in the storm and came back here.”
“But there was no storm when I left! Just a little wind. The storm came up while I was… well, I was underground. Where the Martians live.”
“You’ve been through so much, Carmen…”
“This was not a dream!” I tried to stay calm. “Look. You can check the air left in the tanks. My suit and the dog. There will be hours unaccounted for. I was breathing the Martians’ air.”
“Carmen… be reasonable…”
“No, you be reasonable. I’m not saying anything more until—” There was one knock on the door, and Mother burst in, followed by Dad.
“My baby,” she said. When did she ever call me that? She hugged me so hard I could barely breathe. “You found your way back.”
“Mother… I was just telling Dr. Estrada… I didn’t find my way back. I was brought.”
“She had a dream about Martians. A hallucination.”
“No! Would you just listen?”
Dad sat down cross-legged, looking up at me. “Start at the beginning, honey.”
I did. I took a deep breath and started with taking the suit and the dog and going out to be alone. Falling and breaking my ankle. Waking up in the little hospital room. Red and Green and the others. Seeing the base on their screen. Bein
g healed and brought back.
There was an uncomfortable silence after I finished. “If it wasn’t for the dust storm,” Dad said, “it would be easy to verify your… your account. Nobody could see you from here, though, and the satellites won’t show anything, either.”
“Maybe that’s why he was in a rush to bring me back. If they’d waited for the storm to clear, they’d be exposed.”
“Why would they be afraid of that?” Dr. Estrada asked.
“Well, I don’t know. But I guess it’s obvious that they don’t want anything to do with us—”
“Except to rescue a lost girl,” Mother said.
“Is that so hard to believe? I mean, I couldn’t say three words to them, but they seemed to be friendly and good-hearted.”
“It just sounds so fantastic,” Dad said. “How would you feel in our position? By far the easiest explanation is that you were under extreme stress and—”
“No! Dad, do you really think I would do that? Come up with some elaborate lie?” I could see on his face that he did indeed. Maybe not a lie, but a fantasy. “There’s objective proof. Look at the dog. It has a huge dent where it hit the ground in the cave.”
“Maybe so; I haven’t seen it,” he said. “But being devil’s advocate, aren’t there many other ways that could have happened?”
“What about the air? The air in the dog! I didn’t use enough of it to have been out so long.”
He nodded. “That would be compelling. Did you dock it?”
Oh hell. “Yes. I wasn’t thinking I’d have to prove anything.” When you dock the dog it automatically starts to refill air and power.“There must be a record. How much oxygen a dog takes on when it recharges.”
They all looked at each other. “Not that I know of,” Dad said. “But you don’t need that. Let’s just do an MRI of your ankle. That’ll tell if it was recently broken.”
“But they fixed it. The break might not show.”
“It will show,” Dr. Estrada said. “Unless there was some kind of… magic involved.”
Mother’s face was getting red. “Would you both leave? I need to talk to Carmen alone.” They both nodded and went out.