Mars One

by Jonathan Maberry

A pause. “Want to come down and—I don’t know—talk . . . ?”

  I thought about it.

  “Tris . . . ?” called Luther.

  “Yeah, okay.” I hit the release on the sleep straps, wormed my way out of my cocoon, grabbed the rail, and pulled myself over, pushing downward so that I floated like a ghost in front of him. Up to that moment I kept thinking he was joking, that this was a setup, asking me if I was scared so he could make fun of me.

  But I was wrong. The lights were on low but not out. We weren’t experienced enough with micro-g to risk blackout conditions, even for sleep. I could see that Luther really was scared and for the first time since I’d known him—which was three years now.

  I said, “Yeah, I’m scared too.”

  We looked at each other for a while. He nodded, and so did I.

  “Move over, rock boy,” I said, and when he did I pulled myself in and wrapped one of the straps around my arm, anchoring myself to the foot of his bed. He scrunched into the corner by the pillow. It was the middle of the night. We were launching from the Lucky Eight tomorrow.

  “We should be trying to get some sleep,” he said.

  “Why exactly? We’re not flying the ship. We’re not part of the command crew.”

  He nodded. “Right. We’re luggage.”

  “Yup.”

  Outside we could hear people moving, the clank of metal, the crackle of radio chatter.

  “You say good-bye to your girlfriend?” asked Luther.

  “About a hundred times.”

  “You say good-bye for good?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Wow.”

  I sighed. “I know.”

  If I expected Luther to slam me for not breaking it off with Izzy, I guessed wrong. “It must be nice,” he said softly.

  “What?”

  “To have someone,” he said. “To be in love.”

  I cut him a look. “You’re going to be on a spaceship with two girls for seven months, dude. Odds are pretty good.”

  He shook his head.

  “Oh, come on, man.” I laughed. “Zoé? She knows you like her.”

  “Zoé thinks all I want is to get into her pants.”

  “Well, to be fair—”

  “It’s not like that,” he said, and I could hear something different in his voice. He was trying to be real. “I dig her. All of her, you know?”

  “You ever tell her that?”

  Luther looked down at his hands.

  “Oh, come on,” I said. “You’ve had girlfriends before. How’d you handle it?”

  He took a long time getting an answer out. “I’ve been out a couple of times. But . . . the mission, the training, getting ready . . . It’s not easy having a real conversation.”

  “Girls freaking fall all over you,” I said. “You have whole websites of girls saying they’d marry you. You could get laid every single day if you wanted to.”

  Again I expected him to make a joke, but once more he surprised me. “You think that’s real? You think that actually means anything? Nah, Tristan, it’s all nuts. It’s fantasy.” He shook his head. “It wouldn’t be what you have with Izzy.”

  “Maybe not,” I admitted. “But it would be easier to walk away from.”

  He laughed and shook his head. Then he cut me a look. “What’s going on with that French girl, Sophie? She seems to like you.”

  “I keep telling you, she’s just a friend.”

  Luther looked at me, then shrugged, giving it up for now. I thought he was totally off base about Sophie. She wasn’t into me at all. No, I think what it was—and maybe it was something Luther wasn’t capable of understanding—was that Sophie was lonely and just wanted a friend. Someone she could talk to. I’m easy to talk to, and maybe because I was so obviously—and, I guess, famously—in love with Izzy, that was as much of a comfortable buffer zone as our age difference. No, Sophie was maybe a little sad and a little scared. A friend. A neighbor. Besides, she wanted me to teach her how to fix things so she’d be more useful to the mission. That was all.

  Luther didn’t immediately let it go, though. “You’re going to have to stop being in love with Izzy sometime, you know. It’s drama now and the whole world watches your show, but it’s just a show. More now than ever. Definitely once we leave. I mean . . . even you’re smart enough to understand that, right?”

  “I understand it,” I said, the words coming out low and jagged. “Besides, even if I was single and interested, she already has a boyfriend.”

  He snorted. “Who? You mean that stiff Marcel? He’s not her boyfriend.”

  “How do you know?” I asked.

  “Marcel’s gay, Tristan.”

  “Really? How do you know that?”

  “Nirti told me.”

  “How would she know?”

  He stared at me. “You really are not bright, are you?”

  I think I said something clever like, “Oh.”

  We didn’t say much more to each other. Eventually Luther and I fell asleep, both of us sitting—hovering—inside our nest of straps. I wonder what he dreamed about.

  I dreamed of Izzy, but as the dream went on I realized that I wasn’t able to see her face. It became more and more blurred, and after I woke up it took me a long time to remember what she looked like.

  That scared me more than the fact that our ships were launching today.

  Chapter 57

  * * *

  Launch day.

  Last speeches. Special news coverage on every channel. Mindy’s network did a marathon of every episode of Tristan and Izzy.

  They gave us one hour to say all of our last good-byes. I called Herc and we talked about everything except the launch. He told me about a list of charities he was building for the Hart Foundation. Spice had really stepped up and was finding a whole bunch of small organizations that didn’t have the money to do the mass-mailing cash appeal stuff. Herc said he was also thinking about doing some kind of competition. His working title for it was Have a Heart, but we both thought that was corny, and because it wasn’t the spelling of my name, people might not get the joke. The idea was cool, though: launch a competition for Madison schools to come up with programs to help people in need.

  “If it flies,” he said, his voice filled with excitement, “we could have some nice prizes, do some PR on the web, maybe even get some kind of mention on your show. That would be easy if Izzy was down, and I’ll talk to her about it tomorrow. Spice said that we should talk to the lawyer about getting it set up through the school board.”

  It made me feel great that Herc was seriously into running the Hart Foundation. He was loud, crazy, always goofy, and had the biggest heart of anyone I knew. My dad once said that Herc acted like “an affable idiot” because he was embarrassed to let people see who he really was. Dad should know.

  After I was done talking with Herc I called Izzy and spent forty minutes with her. And . . . yeah, mostly we talked about nothing. Not about the launch. Not about Mars or Madison or much of anything. She told me that the cops never were able to get anywhere with the smashed window. We talked about her car and the fact that she named it Kermit because it was the same color as the Muppet. We talked about some of the best memories we had. The ones that made us laugh, the ones that made us hot, the ones that made us want to cry.

  After one long pause, Izzy said, “We have to stop saying good-bye.”

  I laughed because it was almost the same thing Nirti said the night before we left Amsterdam, but the laugh died right away when I saw the pain in her eyes. She wasn’t making a joke.

  “I’m sorry,” I said quickly.

  She shook her head. “Tristan, we have to stop saying good-bye because you’re already gone.”

  There was more, but that was what she’d wanted to say, and I was free to interpret that any way I could.

  None of my interpretations made me happy.

  Chapter 58

  * * *

  They told us to get some sleep but then wo
ke us up a few hours later. I had only just managed to drift off—pun intended—when the alarm went off. I still hadn’t made the adjustment of no real day or night. Sleep wasn’t going to be a “night” thing anymore. You slept when they told you it was time for sleep. A personal nighttime, completely subjective. And this time there simply wasn’t enough of it. Can’t say I felt very good. I woke with a jerk and felt like I was standing on the edge of a cliff, arms pinwheeling, fighting to keep from falling. My brain slipped gears for a couple of seconds and I didn’t know where I was.

  Then I remembered exactly where I was. And what was about to happen. My hands shook as I got dressed and there was a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach. We left all of our stuff behind. The sheets—well, cotton envelopes, really—pillows, clothes . . . that was all temporary stuff. Our actual gear was already aboard the ships. We got into pressure suits and went out into the hall.

  Mom and Dad were there, floating, waiting.

  For a moment I thought Mom was going to ignore me, but as soon as she saw me she kicked off from the opposite wall, grabbed me, and hugged me so hard I thought my ribs would snap. She kissed my face a dozen times. Fifty times. And smoothed my hair.

  It made me feel like I was six years old. It made me want to cry.

  But we all laughed instead. Not sure why. The three of us, with Dad closing in for the group hug as we floated in micro-g.

  Mom put her lips right against my ear and whispered.

  “Let’s go to Mars,” she said.

  Chapter 59

  * * *

  We’d practiced this part so many times it was like doing another run-through. We gathered in a big corridor for a short prayer from the mission interfaith chaplain, and then we shook hands all around. The Huginn crew and the Muninn crew. Handshakes, hugs, some kisses, a few jokes, good wishes. We wouldn’t see the other crew for seven months except on video.

  I watched Marcel and Sophie. They hugged for a long, long time. Maybe Luther and Nirti were right and Marcel was gay, but that hug had a heck of a lot of emotion in it. He kissed her cheeks and her hand for long while. Then it was time for all of us to go.

  So we went.

  I followed Mom and Dad through the airlock, into the Huginn. The ship was bright. Everything was white or off-white or eggshell white. Some kind of white. A few things weren’t. Trim, handles, signs. But mostly it was white.

  We gathered in the biggest part of the ship, the common room. It had a technical name, Central Colony Habitat Large Area Room. We all called it the common room. There were chairs lining the walls, each with straps. Nirti was in the seat to my left, my parents in the two seats to my right. Well, at least Dad was. Mom buckled us into place, then went around and checked everyone else. She was not the safety officer for the mission, but the safety officer was scared of her, so he didn’t make a scene when she double-checked his work. When everyone—including the safety officer—was strapped in, Mom launched herself across the common room, caught a handhold, swung around like a monkey, landed in her chair, and had the buckles clicked into place as if this were what she’d done every day for her whole life.

  Nirti leaned close. “Your mom is going to be a hard act to follow.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  Nirti’s smile was very pretty, her eyes filled with intelligence and laughter.

  “Are you okay, Tris?” she asked.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Just another day in the Mars One program. Why? Is anything going on I should know about?”

  “Idiot,” she said, shaking her head. She gave my hand a squeeze. Her hand was small and warm and sweaty with fear. I held on to it.

  Mom reached over and I thought she was going to hold my other hand, but instead she pressed something into my palm. It was a small high-capacity data stick. When I looked up she leaned close and said, “This has all of my inspection notes. I want you to review it and be ready to answer any question I have.”

  “Um, can it wait until after, you know, we take off?”

  Her smile was there and gone. “You’ll have plenty of time later today,” she said. “But read it today. Not tomorrow.”

  Dad, listening, closed his eyes and began humming an old hippie song. “California Dreamin’,” I think

  “Sure,” I told Mom, and thought to myself, I am the son of freaks.

  Mom turned away and nodded to Garcia, the safety officer, who called in that the crew was secure. Garcia also switched the audio and video feeds from the command capsule to the big screens on the walls. We all saw the pilot and copilot in one half of the screen and the Lucky Eight with the noses of both ships in the loops on the other half. Then a smaller window popped up, overlapping both screens. Bas Lansdorp’s face smiled at us.

  “On behalf of everyone at Mars One,” he said, “and everyone on Earth, we wish you Godspeed.”

  There was the sound of applause behind him. I knew he was on a podium down on Earth, surrounded by half a million people.

  Then his image was replaced by ours. One by one the face of each of the colonists filled the screen, with our names and countries of origin below us. They showed the crew of the Muninn first. I knew every face, every name, and almost every story about them. Some of them were friends. Others would become friends, I hoped. All of them were family, I guess.

  Marcel’s face was there. Even in his official project photo he was scowling. Maybe he’d be happier in the black, or down on the red planet.

  Then they began showing the faces of the Huginn crew.

  Luther and his parents. Sophie Enfers. Zoé and her family. Nirti and hers. Garcia. As each picture flashed on the screen I looked around to find the real person sitting in a padded chair. We smiled at each other. Sophie gave me a smile and a nod and her eyes lingered on mine for a few seconds. Then she closed her eyes and leaned back into her seat. For just a moment I wondered if maybe Luther was right and Sophie had a thing for me. I mean, sure, guys my age think about females of just about any age, that’s biology, that’s a given. I even had a weird ten-second fantasy about Mindy, but I came to my senses and threw up in my mouth a little. But Sophie . . . ? He had to be wrong.

  Besides, I loved Izzy and that was that.

  On the screen I saw Mom and Dad. Me. All the way to Director Colpeys. His photo vanished and was replaced by a live image of him. He was in the command capsule with the pilots. His face was a little sweaty and his eyes were so bright it looked like he had a fever. His face was as grave as someone giving a eulogy at a funeral. He cleared his throat and said the words that would become part of history.

  “What we do now,” he said slowly and heavily, “we do not for each of us but for all of us. What we do now we do not for one country but for all the nations and all the peoples of Earth. In the name of mankind and for the betterment of all, we go forth with a mission of hope for all of us.” He turned to the pilot, and the shot widened to include the whole cockpit. “Let’s go to Mars.”

  The engines rumbled, sending trembles through the ship and all the way down to my bones. On the screen we watched the Muninn explode out from the socket of the Lucky Eight like a bullet leaving a gun. Beside me Mom and Dad reached for each other’s hands.

  Like the Huginn, the Muninn was massive. Even without engines the size of grain silos, the ship was huge, a white spike of light. And yet in seconds it seemed to dwindle to nothing except for the glow of the constant rocket burn.

  That was actually scary. Maybe the scariest thing of all. I heard Nirti gasp and when I looked at her it was clear she was thinking—feeling—the same thing. The big black swallowed that ship and everyone aboard her just like that.

  And we were still close to Earth.

  There were millions and millions of miles to go. Farther away, deeper into space.

  I started to say, “It’s all going to be fine.”

  But the moment I opened my mouth the Huginn’s rockets fired. We were slammed back into our seats by the massive g-force. We blasted out of the Lucky Eight and van
ished into the big, big, big empty black.

  Chapter 60

  * * *

  The g-force lasted for only a few seconds. After that it got weirdly still all of a sudden. That’s because the ship, everything on board, and all of us were traveling through space at exactly the same speed. Sounds weird. It felt like nothing.

  Out here there was so little gravity that it was like floating in really salty seawater. Except it was dry. I know, that sounds stupid, but it’s the closest thing I can imagine. We did some training in the Dead Sea in Israel, and it was like this.

  A drop of water wouldn’t fall. It floated there in front of you, looking almost like a little planet.

  The downsides to micro-g are crazy. First, when all that body fluid rises to your head you get a headache. A killer headache. The mission docs wanted us to pee as much as we could because the body wants to compensate by getting rid of about a liter of extra fluid. So in the name of science and good health we took turns whizzing.

  About half the crew got sick to their stomachs. There’s a whole different kind of seasickness you can get in space travel. I dodged it, but it put Zoé, Tony Chu, my dad, and a bunch of others in a bad way.

  Mom taught us a good trick for helping the nausea go away. She said it was because of the loss of “up” and “down.” The eye keeps trying to settle on up and down and those eye movements trigger all sorts of chemical and neurological responses in the body. So as she put it: “Lose the ‘up.’ ” She said to focus on whatever direction we needed to go instead of trying to stick with normal up and down. It worked, too.

  Once Luther felt better he and I began racing through the hab, the corridors, and around the common room, pushing off from walls, spinning in the air, pulling ourselves along the handholds on the wall faster and faster.

  Until people started yelling at us.

  Oh, and here’s another downside that’s also kind of an upside. With the fluids going all wonky in your body, it affects your taste buds. I sneaked aboard some of the chocolate the kids at school sent me, but out here it tasted like socks. Bummer. The up part of that was the camel-vomit-tasting food they served on the ship tasted like socks, too. Which was a little better. Trust me.