Mars Crossing

by Geoffrey A. Landis

  Everybody was hoarse, everybody’s eyes were red and itching.

  The rockhopper was showing wear; on the second day out of the canyon, red warning lights flashed in the cockpit of the rockhopper. The front left wheel had seized up.

  Ryan examined it. The wheel was frozen, and he pulled it off to examine it. He traced the problem to abrasion due to grit leaking through the seal and into the bearing. It was far beyond any possible repair—the friction of the wheel seizing up had melted parts of the bearing, and then when it froze, twisted it into scrap. Feedback circuitry on the drive motor should have shut it off when the motor current increased; instead, it had burned out the motor as well.

  There was nothing Ryan could do about it, and there no spare. He picked up the useless wheel, and hurled it as far away from the rockhopper as he could. It careened off of a rock and spun to a stop in a sand drift.

  “Shouldn’t we save it?” Brandon asked. “What if we need it later?”

  “For what?” Ryan said. “Nothing here can fix it, that’s for sure. It’s just dead weight.”

  He cannibalized the motor and the wheel from the middle left side and moved it to the front to replace the one that had frozen. “This one isn’t in mint condition either, but it should do,” he said. It was fortunate that the six-wheeled rockhopper had a lot of redundancy; the wheels were designed to be independent and interchangeable precisely so that the loss of any one of them would not cripple the rover.

  “Can you fix the seals?”

  Ryan shook his head. “They just weren’t made for this much constant use. Okay, we’re ready to roll. Let’s go.”

  They switched drivers. Tana, who’d had the last shift running scout on the dirt-rover, dismounted to take over driving the rockhopper.

  As Tana walked toward him, Brandon noticed something odd. Through the dusty faceplate of the helmet, it was hard to tell, but he inspected her again, carefully; it wasn’t an illusion. “You’re blond,” he said.

  “What?” Tana laughed. “Not by a long shot, boy.”

  He peered through the faceplate of her helmet. She looked funny; the light hair stood out in stark contrast to her dark skin. “That’s what’s different. You’re a blond.”

  “No way, guy.”

  “Yes! Really.” Brandon looked around. There was nothing like a mirror anywhere around. Finally he went to the rockhopper. He scrubbed the dust off of one of the windows until he could see his own reflection, and invited Tana over to look. “Look.”

  Tana looked at her reflection for a long time. Her hair, although not exactly golden, had turned to a light shade of brown, like wheat. “You’re right. There aren’t any mirrors around, or I would have noticed it.” She turned and looked at Brandon. “You’re blond, too. Take a look at yourself. And, come to think of it, so is Estrela. I’ve been thinking that she was doing something to her hair—it was just so gradual that I couldn’t quite put my finger on it. She used to have dark black hair.”

  “What is it?” Brandon whispered.

  “Peroxides in the soil,” she said. “It’s a natural bleach. No matter how we try to keep the dust out, we can’t help getting a little exposure to the soil every time we put on and take off our suits. We’re all getting a peroxide job.”

  Suddenly Brandon put it together. “That’s why our eyes are so itchy all the time.”

  “Yours too? I thought it was just me. Yeah, that’s probably it.”

  “What do we do about it?”

  “Aren’t blonds supposed to have more fun? So, let’s have some fun.” She laughed. “The dust sure isn’t going to go away, I can tell you that. So we’d better learn to adapt.” Tana looked at Brandon. “Say, are you all right? You look a little run-down.”

  “I’m fine,” Brandon said. I’m stuck on Mars with psychotics, he thought. Half of us aren’t going to make it back. And there’s nothing to do, nothing to distract us. I’m going to go nuts. “Fine, fine, fine, fine.”

  7

  BROTHERS’ PACT

  At first meeting, Brandon hated his newfound brother Trevor. They fought like cats, backs arched, hissing at each other and threatening to scratch. “No use bitching about it, Branny,” his mother told him. “Like it or no, he’s going to stay your brother.” And so every vacation, every summer, every holiday they were together.

  But it was eerie how similar they were. Trevor liked the same virtual reality world that Brandon did, Dirt City Blue. He loved history and hated algebra, like Brandon did, and had a crush on the same virtual actor, Tiffany Li, the one that all the other kids thought was flat-chested and ugly. Brandon could quote a single word from the lyrics of a stomp song, and Trevor would know what song it was. He would complete the quote and toss a single word back, and just like he could read Trevor’s mind, Brandon always knew which song Trevor was thinking of, even if it was a stupid dumb word like “love” or “night” or even, once, “the.”

  Despite the difference in their ages, they looked so much alike that sometimes when Trevor was visiting Colorado, people would think he was Brandon, and when Brandon went down to Arizona, people would talk to him as though he were Trevor, especially when he wore some of Trevor’s outgrown clothes.

  Trevor was a shade more obedient, Brandon just a little more rebellious toward authority, and Brandon’s mother considered Trevor a good influence on him. Trevor was a Scout, and knew about rock climbing, something Brandon had always wanted to do. So Trevor taught him, and after that every summer they would go out rock climbing.

  And when the announcement came out about the expedition to Mars, they both looked at each other. Trevor was twenty now, a junior at Arizona State. They didn’t see each other as often—Brandon was just applying to colleges—but when they did, they still instantly clicked together, as if they’d never been separated.

  “You’re thinking what I’m thinking,” Trevor said. It was a statement, nut a question.

  “Yeah.”

  “Too young.”

  “Yeah.”

  Trevor thought about it for a moment, and then nodded. “Okay,” he said.

  “Great!” Brandon broke into an enormous grin. He didn’t need to ask what Trevor was talking about; as always, they were thinking the same way. “Thanks a lot!”

  Tickets to the Mars lottery were a thousand dollars. They bought thirty tickets each.

  Brandon reached his hand over his head, and Trevor clasped it. “Brothers forever!” Their words were spoken so nearly simultaneously that, had there been anybody else there, they would have thought it was a single voice.

  It hadn’t occurred to Brandon to doubt Trevor for even a moment; his single word—okay—was as good as a vow. The problem had been simple: Brandon was too young for the Mars lottery. Trevor would be twenty-one by the time the tickets were drawn, but Brandon would barely be turning eighteen. The rules were clear: If your ticket won the lottery, if you were over twenty-one and could pass the health screening, you got a slot on the Mars crew. If you were too young, or too old, or couldn’t pass the health exam, you had to take an alternative prize.

  Brandon was too young to go to Mars But Brandon could pass for Trevor; he’d done it dozens of times.

  What Trevor had agreed to, with barely a moment’s contemplation, was a substitution. If Brandon won the lottery, he could take Trevor’s identification. They were genetically identical; the identity tests would show a perfect five-sigma identity match to Trevor Whitman.

  Brandon Weber could become Trevor Whitman, and take the trip to Mars.

  8

  OVER THE LINE

  The next day was no better. The horizon dropped away on their right, and they found themselves paralleling the rim of another enormous chasm. “Gangis Chasma,” Ryan announced. “The orbital views show some large landslides from the rim. They’re over on the north side, but I don’t know if we can trust how stable the rim is.” He was beginning to lose his voice and continued in almost a whisper. “We’d best not venture too close.”

&nbs
p; Brandon wanted to ask how serious the danger really was—Mars had been around for billions of years, was it really likely that there would be a landslide at the exact moment they were passing by? But by now all of their throats hurt, and nobody talked more than necessary. They kept moving.

  And the following day a second wheel of the rockhopper jammed and had to be pulled off and junked.

  The part that Brandon liked most was when he had a shift driving the dirt-rover. They all traded off on the dirt-rover, except for Estrela, who still had one arm in a sling. It allowed him to be alone, to play his music in his head and remind himself of what it would be like when he got back home. Home seemed farther and farther away, though, and it was hard for him to remember what it had been like. It seemed as though he’d been here, driving across Mars, for forever, and the idea that he would return home seemed like something far away and unobtainable.

  Driving as the trailbreaker, it was his task to find the easiest route, and it was quite a while before he realized that, for several hours now, the gentle valley that they had been following was the path of a long dried-up riverbed. Once he realized it, it was easy enough to spot. The ancient river had cut into the rock on either side, exposing the strata in parallel stripes of the darker rock. When they stopped for a break, and to trade off drivers, Brandon walked to the embankment to examine the rock in more detail.

  To his disappointment, it was not the sandstone or shale they had seen in the canyon, but apparently some volcanic rock.

  No place to look for more fossils.

  The closer they got to the equator, the stronger the wind blew. The rockhopper had been designed for a scientific exploration and had a science instrumentation panel set in a position in front of the copilot’s seat. Brandon happened to glance at the science panel, and saw that the record of wind gusts was hitting a hundred kilometers per hour. He mentally converted—

  “That’s over sixty miles an hour,” he said out loud.

  Ryan glanced over at the panel. “Yep,” he said. He didn’t seem surprised.

  “But that’s, like, almost hurricane speed.”

  Ryan shook his head. “Not on Mars.”

  It was true. The next time they stopped, he stood out in the wind with his arms outstretched. He could feel the breeze, but barely. The sand didn’t move.

  In another day they approached the equator itself.

  “Shouldn’t there be some sort of ceremony?” Brandon asked.

  “Like what, exactly?” Ryan said.

  “I don’t know. Champagne?”

  “Yeah, you wish.”

  “Well, something, then. At least we could stop and look at it,” Brandon said.

  “Why? How’s it going to look any different than any other spot? It’s just an imaginary line—there’s nothing to see.”

  “I don’t know. Just because.”

  Ryan checked the time, and the readout from the laser-gyro navigation system. “We should reach the equator in about twenty minutes, if we keep up our average rate. Well, it’s nearly time to stop somewhere for the change of shift anyway. If you really insist, then we’ll stop at the equator.” He radioed ahead with instructions to Tana, who was piloting the dirt-rover, to stop and meet them for the change of shift.

  The land was rough where they stopped, low broken hills and loose rock. At Brandon’s insistence, Ryan found a spot where sand had accumulated in a small hollow, checked the navigation, and drew a line in the dirt. “Okay,” he said. “There it is.”

  “Are you sure?” Brandon asked.

  “As best I can figure it.”

  Brandon stood just south of the line, and with great ceremony stepped over it. Then he stepped back. “One,” he said.

  “In olden times, sailors used to pierce their ears the first time they crossed the equator,” Tana said. “You want we should pierce yours?”

  “Already pierced,” he said. He stepped over the line again, and back, and then did it again. “Two. Three.”

  “We could do it again,” Tana said.

  “Already pierced again,” he said, stepping across the line again. “And again. Five. Six.”

  “What the heck are you doing?”

  “Nine. Ten.” Brandon kept on stepping back and forth over the line. He looked up at Tana. “Setting a record, what do you think? Most equator crossings on Mars.” He gave up on stepping, and started to hop from one foot to the other, each foot coming down on the opposite side of the line. “Fourteen fifteen sixteen seventeen eighteen nineteen twenty.”

  “Shit,” Tana said. “I don’t believe it.”

  Ryan shook his head. “Well, at least he’s getting rid of his excess energy,” he said.

  After a few minutes, Brandon stopped.

  “That’s it?” Ryan asked.

  “I think so. A hundred and twenty. You think that record will last?”

  Ryan nodded. To every direction, the landscape was barren, sterile rock. Nobody was here. Nobody had ever been here before, and if the expedition failed to reach the return rocket, probably no humans would ever return. “Yes,” he said. “I expect it will last quite a while.”

  9

  BREAKDOWN

  The riverbed they had been following had merged into another, larger riverbed, and other riverbeds had joined it, until it was the dry course of some enormous river, a Mississippi of Mars. Under the ubiquitous dust, the riverbed seemed to be made of some form of dried mud, smoother than the surrounding terrain. It flowed in approximately the right direction, and so they drove along it, grateful for the highway.

  Until four days later, without warning, the rockhopper broke down.

  This time there was nothing they could fix. The entire right side had completely frozen, and there were simply no longer enough parts to cannibalize to repair it.

  “We’re dead,” Brandon said. “We’re dead.”

  Ryan was working on the dirt-rover. He had taken off one of the rockhopper wheels and was disassembling two aluminum beams from the wheel-frame truss of the rockhopper to use for a makeshift trailer that could be pulled by the dirt-rover. “No.”

  The riverbed they were following had widened out until it was a broad, flat plain. There was nothing to see from horizon to horizon in either direction except pale yellow-orange dust. The rockhopper lay on its side, where it had tipped and skidded to a halt, the pressurized cabin crumpled in on one side. The unbreakable carbide window hadn’t shattered, but it had buckled free of its frame and was half-embedded in the sand where it had hit. They were all clustered around Ryan, working on the dirt-rover as if there were some way that, by continuing to work, he could put off the inevitable.

  “Don’t lie, I can read a map,” Brandon said. “It’s over three thousand miles to the pole.”

  “It is too far,” Estrela added. “Even if we were athletes.”

  Ryan pressed down on the wheel, looked at the amount of flex in the joint, and lashed three more wraps of superfiber around it. “So we go to plan B.” He looked up at Brandon. “It’s been obvious that we were going to have to make a change in plans for days. This just makes it official.”

  “What?” said Brandon.

  “What is this plan B?” Estrela said.

  “You never talked about any plan B,” Tana said.

  “Six hundred kilometers,” Ryan said. “Six hundred kilometers to go.”

  “You are crazy,” Estrela said.

  “I can’t do kilometers in my head,” Brandon said. “How far in miles?”

  “About four hundred,” Ryan said. “A little less.”

  “You’re completely crazy,” Estrela said. “We can’t get to the pole in six hundred kilometers.”

  “We’re not going for the pole,” Ryan said. “Acidalia. What we have to do now is get to Acidalia.”

  “Acidalia?” Estrela asked.

  Tana replied for him. It was obvious to her now. “Acidalia Planitia. Of course, the Acidalia rim. Where else could we go?”

  “I don’t know what you’
re talking about,” Estrela said. “Where?”

  “The landing site of the Agamemnon.”

  10

  TREVOR’S WINNING TICKET

  All that summer before the Mars lottery, Brandon and Trevor spent together in Arizona. A ten-million-dollar consolation prize might have been a big temptation to some other boy, but for Brandon and his brother, there was only one prize: the trip to Mars.

  They both knew that, even if they won, they would still have to make the final crew selection cut. It would mean nothing if they won the lottery, and then at the final cut, the mission commander—

  Brandon and Trevor studied the fine print of the lottery like they had studied for no other exam in their lives. And there was a lot of fine print. The mission commander, as they discovered, had the final decision in the choice of crew. Trevor could win the lottery, and pass all the health screenings, and go through all the training—and if the mission commander said out, he would be out. There would be no appeal.

  The expedition had already named the mission commander, some old-fart war hero, name of Radkowski. It was the mission commander that they would have to impress, and it looked from the dossier that this would be difficult. He was a hardnose, or so it seemed, one of those types who did everything by the book and expected everybody else to do likewise. Lots of flights to the space station, including one that they couldn’t get any information on. Apparently he had done something, broken some rule or other, something to do with the leak on the failed Russian Mirusha space station. It had apparently earned him some sort of reprimand. But they couldn’t find any details.

  They spent the summer working to make sure that their credentials were so solid that he would say yes. Brandon finished his Eagle scout work, the sort of thing that would impress an Air Force guy. They worked out in the gym together and practiced rock climbing, and survival skills, backpacking for days in the desert.