Assimilated

by Nick Webb

  In a moment of panic, he tentatively approached a blanket-draped figure lying prone nearby. The thick cloth covered the entire body, head and all, and Frank felt the confusing chorus of emotion that alternated between grief for the victim underneath, and rage that he’d missed his chance. Dammit! He’d waited too long. He’d dithered and puttered and postponed his plan for weeks, and now it was too late. Someone else would be the first man to die on Mars. He half-hoped it was that smug self-righteous Su, before he remembered the first man on Mars wasn’t slated to arrive for another six months, at least.

  He crouched down and, slowly, mournfully—for himself and for the stranger—rested a hand on the blanket-covered head.

  “Agh!”

  His heart jumped up into his throat and he yanked his hand away from the blanket, which soon flew off the head as the woman underneath brushed it away in a fit. “You scared the shit out of me!”

  He grimaced. “Sorry! I’m so sorry, I thought … well, I thought—”

  Her face changed, and he recognized the look. The look of an expression changing from ‘who the hell is this angry old bastard’ to ‘Oh my god, it’s Frank Bickham’. “Mr. Bickham! I’m sorry I snapped. I’m just in a daze. Very tired. Very….” She started crying.

  Looking up at the frantic scene all around him—first responders were just now carrying another dazed, bloody victim from the smoking entrance to the habitation module—he realized he’d be next to useless in the actual emergency response, so he knelt down and reached for the woman’s hand. “No, I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have startled you. Are you hurt? Can I help you?”

  “Just frightened,” she managed to choke out in between heaving sobs. “I—i—it was so horrible!”

  “It’ll be alright,” he said, stroking her hand, wanting to believe his own words. Please be alright. Please don’t die. Nobody die. That’s my job. You people better not mess this up for me….

  He lost track of how long he knelt there with the woman, but eventually a medic stood over them both. “Mr. Bickham? Thank you so much for your assistance. Mrs. Doughby here was just in shock. We’ll take her into the medical center now, but I expect she’ll be just fine.”

  Frank tried to keep his expression neutral, but concerned. “How is everyone else? Any casualties? Everyone alive?”

  The question seemed to hang in the air for an eternity. Answer the damn question, man!

  “Miraculously, everyone is alive. A few are in serious condition, and one in critical, but we’re hoping for the best.”

  Frank struggled to suppress his glee, doing his best ‘concerned old guy’ look. “Please let me know how I can help. Consider me at your disposal.”

  “Is that Frank Bickham?” said a loud voice nearby. To his chagrin, someone holding a large news camera swiveled his way, and the same anchorwoman he’d seen on TV earlier rushed over, cameraman in tow. “Mr. Bickham!”

  “He’s been sitting with Mrs. Doughby here, consoling her,” said the medic.

  The anchorwoman beamed at him. “Oh! Of course!” She turned to the camera. “Scarlet Paredes here with our own Mr. Frank Bickham, resident hero, and, if I may say so, an inspiration to us all. I’ve just been informed that Mr. Bickham responded immediately to the incident, and has been sitting here with a wounded colonist for the past hour,” she glanced down at his hand, still holding the trembling Mrs. Doughby’s, “consoling her in what must have been a chaotic and unthinkable situation. Mr. Bickham? Do you have something to say to our fellow Martians?”

  He was speechless. “Ah…” he began.

  Mrs. Doughby filled in for him. “He’s my knight in shining armor! He could be sitting comfortably in his penthouse over in Huygens, but instead he knelt here and s—s—stroked my hand until I stopped crying. G—g—god bless you, Mr. Bickham!” she said through sniffs and tremblings.

  Oh, god.

  Six days after that

  The medal ceremony seemed to take for frickin’ ever, and Frank thought it was in poor taste, since there were people still being treated for their injuries at the medical center. But Governor Ladro had insisted, and blathered on for what must have been for over an hour about the heroics and compassion of Mr. Frank Bickham, Martian Citizen Number One—according to the inscription on the medal—before hastily adding thanks to the rest of the emergency responders, who all sat in the first row gazing up adoringly at Frank sitting next to the governor at the podium.

  That was earlier in the day—making him miss his morning coffee on Bickam Boulevard, dammit—and now he was back at the bedside of the youngest victim of the blast, Wixam Hanuman, age six. Exactly the same age as little Samantha. “Did you miss me?” he said, leaning over from the bedside chair, waggling his ears—Wixam always laughed hysterically when he did that.

  “You were here in the morning, Grumpy.” The boy’s eyes drifted to the medal hanging against Frank’s chest, and grew wide. “Ooo! Is that for saving Mrs. Doughby?”

  “I didn’t save Doughby, kid. She wasn’t even hurt.” He handled the medal and fingered the inscription. Martian Citizen Number One. “No idea why they gave me this sh….” He trailed off, catching his profanity.

  “Shit?”

  “What? Uh … no! Shamwow!”

  Wixam eyed him skeptically. “Grumpy, that’s not even a word.”

  “What the hell do you know? You’re six.” He lazily traced the ‘Number One’ on the medal with a finger, the phrase reminding him that if he was going to be successful, if he was going to win the race, he needed to act soon. Very soon. All the survivors of the blast were doing very, very well—even Wixam, who’d developed a few mysterious complications the day after the accident, was looking like he’d be just fine. But he couldn’t afford to wait any longer. The next accident might be worse. Or there was Ed Smith. The man claimed he was in perfect health, but looked more frail by the day. The old welder might just keel over and buy the farm the next time he tripped on the sidewalk. And where would that put Frank’s meticulous plan? Tits up. That’s where.

  “You shouldn’t swear around a six-year-old, Grumpy.”

  Frank let the medal drop to his chest and grinned a lopsided smile. “You said ‘shit’ first. I only said ‘hell’.”

  “Hell’s bad too,” Wixam said, earnestly.

  “It’s in the bible. It can’t be bad.” Before the kid could respond, Frank reached over to his chart and perused it, nodding approvingly. Any other person would be kicked out of the hospital for looking over the chart of a non-relative, but he was Frank frickin’ Bickham. “Looking good here, kid. I bet they’ll get you out of here later today. Tomorrow, tops.” He set the chart down. “Where are your parents, anyway?”

  Wixam shrugged. “Getting sissy from school,” he said, probably referring to his sister.

  “Good, then they’ll be here any minute—school’s only a block away.” Frank stood up, and formally extended a hand. “Mr. Hanuman, it’s been a pleasure.”

  “Bye, Grumpy.” Frank turned to leave, but Wixam added, “You know, you’re not really grumpy.”

  Frank turned back, raising an eyebrow. “What did you say?”

  “You’re not really grumpy.”

  “All my grandkids and great-grandkids call me Grumpy. It’s my nickname. Don’t you like it?”

  “You’re just pretending to be grumpy. I can tell.”

  Frank had no response to this, so he frowned, and gave a small mock-salute. “Catch you later, kid.”

  The walk back to Huygens Dome would only take ten minutes, and he didn’t need to be anywhere until his noon meeting with the city council and the corporate board, so he decided to head to the emergency airlock just outside the city park. The site of his plan’s impending execution. The place he’d find his way into the history books. Second man on Mars? Screw that. First man to die on Mars, coming right up, baby.

  Only a few people strolled the green park grounds under the huge transparent dome of the city park. Red light filtered down through the foliag
e from the inhospitable paper-thin atmosphere beyond the composite glass. The atmosphere that would kill him. The atmosphere that he’d be hailed as a hero for saving the population from.

  Once inside the emergency airlock, he checked the automatic visitor log. Sure enough, no one had been there since the last time he’d checked his handiwork. No one would have noticed the imperfection in the inner airlock’s door, which would surely cause a major spark when shut in an emergency. No one would have noticed the constant background drain on the outer airlock door’s battery, which, inexplicably, was not connected to the central computer—Interplanetary’s singular focus on the stock price knew no bounds, apparently. And no one would have noticed the fact that the oxygen line over in the corner was clogged. And several other pieces of the Rube Goldberg-esque series of technical problems that would culminate in the appearance of the colony being put at grave threat of catastrophe, and his own death as he sacrificed himself to save them all.

  It would be glorious.

  And by all accounts, quite painless, given that the near vacuum would put him to sleep far sooner than it would kill him.

  He double checked his handiwork, before exiting the room, being sure to use his special security access to erase the record of his visit. The perks of being a hero—they trusted him with top secret security clearance and all-system access.

  Lunchtime was approaching fast and he hurried to Huygens Dome, but a glance at his watch told him he still had twenty minutes to burn before the meeting. According to the street sign he was just a block from Ed Smith’s apartment, and so he decided to make an unscheduled visit—the unannounced kind, where the visitor peers in through the window from under a bush rather than take the more obvious route of knocking on the door.

  Before long he found himself on the flimsy plastic sidewalk staring up at the apartment building. Luckily, it was surrounded by bushes, and Ed’s unit was on the ground floor, so with a surreptitious glance to either side he wandered around the side of the building, and assuring himself no one was watching, plunged into a hydrangea bush under what he supposed was Ed’s kitchen window.

  “—told you, Marie, there’s nothing to be done about it. Look, sweetie, yes, I could come back to Earth and have the operation. But what would it get me? Three more years? Five? And if a new aortic valve lasts twenty more years, it’ll be the diabetes that gets me. And if that doesn’t, the prostate. We talked about this before I left, and I thought we understood that I was mortal, and I was old, and that this was a one-way trip. Plus, I signed the contract. No one leaves unless congress approves a spending authorization to shuttle someone back, and that ain’t happening for some eighty-year-old welder who—”

  Frank yelped and almost jumped as his pocket started chirping with an incoming call. He breathed a curse, jabbing it through the cloth of his pants to silence it.

  “—hold on, sweetie….” Frank could hear the other man in the kitchen stand up from his chair with a labored grunt, and approach the window. He squeezed up against the siding underneath as best he could and held his breath. A creak from above told him the old man was leaning against the window sill. Labored breathing filtered down through the leaves of the hydrangea.

  “Move along, nothing to see here,” mouthed Frank.

  “Sorry, Sweetie, thought I heard something out the window. Probably one of the feral squirrels we’ve got around here. Now, as I was saying—”

  Frank crawled away military-style, and once he’d passed another unit’s window he stood up.

  “Frank Bickham?”

  He recognized the voice. His face was turned away from her, so he allowed himself a grimace. “Mrs. Doughby?” He turned to face her. She was leaning out her window. Did she really live right next to Ed Smith? Shit. Just his luck.

  “Mr. Bickham!” she said again, excitedly, grinning from ear to ear. “What are you doing here?”

  “Uh, just checking on you, my dear. To see if you were doing ok after your terrible ordeal.”

  She covered her mouth with her hands, looking as if she was about to cry. “So thoughtful! What a wonderful man you are!” She paused. “Through the window?”

  “I … uh…” he stammered, searching for words. “Yes. Through the window. Didn’t want to bother you.”

  The awkward conversation took far longer to extricate himself from than he would have liked, and he half suspected that the house call would make it onto Scarlet Paredes’ evening news broadcast as another heroic example of Frank Bickham’s care for the common man, or ferret-faced woman in this instance. But he finally made it the final few blocks to his lunch meeting, worrying the entire time about Ed Smith’s message to his daughter, or whoever Marie was.

  The man needed an aortic valve replacement. Frank was no doctor, but it sounded terminal. And by the time he was shaking hands with the corporate board and the city council, he’d made his decision.

  Tonight was one for the history books.

  Later that evening

  The preparations were made. He’d rechecked the Rube-Goldberg sequence of planned systems failures in the auxiliary air-lock that would result in the appearance of the colony being placed at grave risk and result in his heroic death.

  He’d had a close one. Habitation module twelve—the site of the explosion and decompression last week—was still leaking a minute amount of atmosphere that the engineering team couldn’t lock down, and it led to him nearly being discovered at the auxiliary airlock during the team’s extra safety walkdowns of the rest of the colony. But he managed to slip out just in time, and when he returned later, none of his preparations had been disturbed.

  And now he was sitting in his usual chair at the cafe on Bickam Boulevard, enjoying his last cup of coffee.

  It tasted like victory.

  He typed the final few lines of one of the last messages he’d write.

  Anyway, Su, it really is great up here. But I have some unhappy news for you. I’ve been feeling ill lately. Not sure how long I’ll last. Could be years. Could be days. Just thought you’d like to know.

  Signed,

  Frank Bickham, First Man to Die on Mars, baby.

  He tapped send, glanced up at the tv monitor hanging nearby. Scarlet Paredes was talking earnestly into the camera, with a grave expression on her face. Hell, what now?

  Before he could turn the volume up, his hand device started beeping with an incoming call. The screen showed Doctor Pratt’s face—the medical center’s chief.

  “Frank,” he said, tapping the line open.

  “Mr. Bickham, I’m afraid we have terrible news.”

  Oh. Shit. He was too late.

  He was too late.

  Ed Smith must have gravely overestimated how much time he had left. And Frank had fiddled and twiddled and now….

  He’d lost. The second man on Mars would always just be that. The Second.

  “Yes?” he said, tentatively.

  “You know the boy? Wixam Hanuman? He’s taken a turn for the worse.”

  Frank jumped up with a start. “Wix? What’s wrong?”

  “The injuries he sustained are healing, but they’ve revealed an underlying condition that has now been aggravated by what he’s been through. Long story short, he’s in desperate need of a blood transfusion.”

  “Damn,” he said, shaking his head. “I’m so sorry. I’ll be by to visit him in the morning, if that’s ok. Please tell his parents that if there’s anything I can do—”

  “Actually, there is something you can do, Mr. Bickham. It turns out that our Wixam has a very rare blood type, rendering all our blood stores we have on hand useless for him.”

  Shit.

  “And…?” he asked, tentatively, though he knew, and feared, the answer.

  “And it turns out that the only other person with that blood type on Mars is a Mr. Frank Bickham. I’m afraid that Wix doesn’t have the three months it will take the next shipment to arrive from Earth. He needs the transfusion, Frank, and he needs it now.”

&nb
sp; Shit.

  But there was no internal debate. The response was automatic. “I’ll be there in five minutes.”

  He tapped the channel closed, and collapsed back into his chair.

  Shit.

  Poor Wix. He’d only known the boy for a few days, but he’d visited with him for hours already. He was just another one of his great-grandkids now. Like Samantha.

  The history books would have to wait. And he might have to put a twenty-four hour watch on Ed Smith. Possibly put him on precautionary life-support. He could arrange for that, right? He was Frank frickin’ Bickham.

  His handset beeped again, indicating an incoming message. It was from Su. He’d received Frank’s message and must have immediately fired off a reply.

  Bickham. Great news. My status as Mariner Valley colony member #10,451 is approved. See you soon!

  Signed, Jerry Su, First Man to Walk on Mars, etc., etc.

  Etcetera? That was a shot across his bow. Su was taunting him. And he’d be here in three months.

  Shit.

  Thirty minutes later

  The blood transfusion was quick and painless. But the baggy circles under little Wixam’s eyes were disconcerting. Frank glanced nervously from Wix to his parents sitting nearby. His mother, a small, pretty woman, was making a valiant effort to contain her despair. She tousled the boy’s hair, forcing a thin smile. His father sat stoically in the corner.

  “Are you feeling ok, Grumpy?” said the boy.

  “Me? You’re asking me if I’m feeling ok? You’re the one in the hospital bed, kid. Have you looked in a mirror lately?” he said with a good-natured smile. He’d gotten the impression early on from little Wix that he was the type of kid that appreciated a gentle ribbing, and his giggle confirmed it.