Mars Crossing

by Geoffrey A. Landis

  But for a moment she would be happy, showing off for João, identifying rocks and landforms for him. “That’s gabbro,” she might say, trying to sound completely confident.

  “Close. Andesite, I’d say. What’s that outcrop there?”

  She looked at it. A rounded ridge, with an abrupt scarp at one end. “Anticline?” she imagined saying. “Dip and scarp.”

  João shook his head, almost in pity at her ignorance. “Sheepback rock, I’d say,” he said. “There was a glacier here once, I’d bet on it.”

  But João was gone.

  They stopped for a break, and to Estrela’s complete surprise, Tana pulled her over and wanted to talk. They had been walking in silence for so long that it came as a surprise.

  “Say, Estrela, you want to know something?”

  Tana didn’t wait for Estrela to answer.

  “Even with the chance that we won’t make it home,” Tana said, “you know, I’m still glad I came. This is the adventure that most people will never make in a lifetime; if it means my life, this is the price that we always knew we might have to pay. Sometimes I still can’t believe how lucky we are. Even with everything that’s happened—we’re on Mars. Nobody else can say that.”

  Tana fell silent, staring off into the distance.

  She is crazy, Estrela thought. She is completely crazy.

  17

  DEVILS IN THE SAND

  The next day they saw the first dust devil at ten in the morning. Brandon watched two of them dance together like mating birds, circling each other, approaching in toward each other warily and then suddenly darting away, finally twisting around each other and then merging together into a single column that marched off over the horizon and vanished.

  More followed. By noon there were a dozen at once.

  When one passed directly over him, Brandon closed his eyes, but nothing happened. He could feel the wind as it passed, but it was a feeble push, barely enough to be noticeable by Earth standards. He was afraid that the scouring sand would sandblast his helmet, but when he mentioned that, Ryan quickly put him straight.

  “What’s getting picked up is dust, not sand,” he said. “It’s fine particles. More like talcum powder than grit. It’s harmless. If you want to worry about grit, worry about the stuff we kick up walking, not about the stuff in the air.”

  “It’s gotten noticeably dimmer,” Tana said.

  Ryan looked up. The sky was a deep pale yellow. The sun was, in fact, dimmer. He could almost look directly at it without blinking. “Yeah.”

  “Think it’s a dust storm?”

  “Wrong season.” Ryan thought about it. “Not the season for a planetary dust storm, anyway. Maybe a local storm.” He thought about it some more. “That makes sense. We’re right about at the subsolar point; we’re getting maximum solar heating right about now. The heat is making a lot of thermals. I guess it’s not surprising it might pick up some dust. In fact, I bet this is how the dust gets into the atmosphere in the first place.”

  “Is it dangerous?”

  “Not that I can see.” Ryan pointed forward. “Let’s keep moving.”

  They had made fifty kilometers the first day of walking; fifty-five the second. Over sixty miles, Brandon calculated. No wonder his legs were aching. But that was sixty miles closer to the abandoned base at Acidalia, where Ryan hoped they could find supplies.

  And then what, Brandon wondered? What it they did find supplies? Would there be enough to get them to the pole?

  As the sun set and their eyes adjusted to the dusk, they noticed an odd phenomenon. The bases of the dust devils were surrounded by pale sheets of blue flame.

  “I don’t believe it,” Brandon said. “They’re on fire.”

  All of them stared. The pale fire brightened and flickered. Sometimes it wrapped around and then in a flash coiled all the way up the dust devil, a column of light disappearing into the heavens. For a moment it would vanish, and then flicker back to life, a blue glow dancing at the base of the column of dust.

  “Plasma discharge,” Ryan said.

  “What?”

  “Static electricity,” he said. “The wind blowing over the dust must generate an electric potential. Like, like rubbing over a carpet on a dry day. Something like lightning, but the pressure is too low for an arc. They’re natural fluorescent lights.”

  “Is it dangerous?”

  “I don’t know.” Ryan pointed ahead. “But I think we’re about to find out.”

  Brandon stepped back involuntarily as the dust devil raced forward. It seemed fixated on Ryan, and enveloped him. For a moment it hovered over him, dust swirling all around. Ryan began to glow, first with blue light from his fingertips, then the blue glow jumping to his helmet, his backpack, and then for a moment he was entirely outlined in blue fire.

  “Ryan!” came Tana’s voice over the radio. “Are you okay?”

  For an answer there was only a burst of static. And then, almost reluctantly, the dust devil peeled away. The sheet of pale fire clung to Ryan for an instant and then faded.

  Ryan looked down, then up, and then his voice came across the radio. “Testing, one, two. You hear me?”

  “Coming through fine,” Tana said.

  Ryan flexed his fingers, and then laughed. “Well. I guess that answers your question.”

  Ryan’s suit, a moment ago covered with a film of brick-colored dust, was as clean as if it had been through the laundry.

  “Still,” he said. “I think that maybe it’s time we should get inside.”

  18

  THE STORM

  The next day they were in the middle of a fully developed dust storm. There were no more dust devils; now the dust was all around them.

  The landscape was odd. It was dimmer than before, lit by a soft, indirect light that was easy on the eyes. The sun was a fuzzy bright patch in the yellow sky. It was the exact color of the gravy on the creamed chicken that the high school cafeteria served, Brandon thought. Babyshit yellow, that was what the kids called it.

  Brandon wondered what the kids back at his school were doing right now. He looked at the clock, but then realized that it wouldn’t help him; it was set for Martian time, for a twenty-four-hour-and-thirty-nine-minute Martian sol, not for an Earth day. He could ask Ryan—Ryan always seemed to be able to calculate that kind of stuff in his head—but what would be the point?

  The training they had done on Earth before the flight had told him all about Martian dust storms. Mostly they talked about the global dust storms, storms that covered the entire planet for months at a time. But now that he thought about it, he remembered that they had told him about smaller dust storms too. How long did they last, a week?

  “How bad is it going to get?” he asked Ryan.

  Ryan lifted his wrist and made a measurement of the sun. His wrist carried a tiny sensor designed for a spot check of the illumination for virtual reality photography. He looked at the reading and then did some calculation in his head. “I’d say that this is about the peak of it,” he said. “Optical depth right now is about as high as it’s ever measured.”

  “This is it?” Brandon was incredulous. “This is a great Martian sandstorm?”

  “Sand? No.” Ryan shook his head. “It’s not a sand storm. I don’t even know if Mars has sandstorms. I doubt it. It’s just dust. And, yes, this is as bad as it gets.”

  This wasn’t had. Above him, he could see the occasional flicker of blue light across the sky. It flashed in sheets, like an aurora, darting in silent splendor from horizon to horizon. It was like walking on a slightly hazy day, like a Los Angeles smog. The air seemed clear around them, but their shadows were blurred. Rocks far away in the distance were a little less sharp, and the horizon was blurred. Mountains in the distance were indistinct, blending smoothly into the yellow of the sky.

  “This is a dust storm?” he said. “Heck, I’ve been through worse than this on Earth.”

  Ryan shrugged. “Guess they’re a bit overrated,” he said.
/>   19

  WALKABOUT

  The morning was Brandon’s time alone, the only time, really, that he could be by himself. He had never needed much sleep, and the adults just took too long to get moving in the morning.

  The others had at last come to accept the fact that he wanted to go out exploring first thing in the morning, and let him. Mostly he didn’t even really explore, just found a rock to sit behind, where he was out of sight of the others, where he could look out in the distance, pretend he wasn’t locked up inside a tiny awful suit, pretend that his friends and his music and his virtual reality were just around the corner, and that in just a few moments he would go inside, and everything would be there.

  But mostly he just wanted some time to be by himself. When he had wanted to join the Mars expedition, nobody had ever warned him that going to Mars would take away his privacy. On the whole expedition, he was never far away from the others. Even when he jerked off, it had to be in a hurry, something quick and furtive in the tiny bathroom cubicle, and he was sure that half of the others were talking behind his back while he was in there, asking just exactly what he was doing that was taking so long.

  Being out on Mars in the morning was simply a chance to be alone.

  The dust storm was still going, but he was used to it now and hardly noticed. One side of the habitat was covered with a fine layer of dust; it was peculiar how it had deposited on just one side. The downwind side.

  The terrain he walked over still looked like sand, but the sand was cemented together, firm as concrete. Indurated soil. The phrase came back to him from the hours of geology briefings. Martian duricrust.

  He didn’t feel like sitting, so he picked the most interesting landmark, a miniature butte perhaps half a mile away, and climbed up to the top. It was smaller than it looked, only about twenty feet high.

  From the flat top, he could see other buttes, all seeming to be the same height, twenty feet or so above the ground. It was just like the southwest, he thought. He knew this territory. The original surface had been higher, where he was standing, and over the millennia, the winds had eroded down the surface, leaving slightly harder rock, like what he was standing on, behind to stand up above.

  It must have been dust storms just like the one that was happening now that did it. So much for Ryan’s confident prediction that the dust was too fine a powder to erode anything. But then, he thought, it may have taken millions of years to erode. Billions, even. Even pretty fine dust might be able to carve down rock over a billion years.

  Still, the dust storm was somewhat of a disappointment. He had pictured a storm like something from one of the songs, howling winds and sand: “the naked whip of a vengeful god / that cleanses flesh to alabaster bone.” He had pictured coming out of a tent and finding themselves buried. Something a little more than a smoggy day with heat lightning.

  Looking back the way he had come, he could see the habitat. They had picked the bottom of a gentle dip in the ground to put up the bubble, and inside it he could see the shadows of the other three Mars-nauts just beginning to stir about. They weren’t even breakfasting yet, he thought. Slowpokes.

  He thought about giving them a call on the radio, just to check in, but decided they just might ask him to come back in and help deflate the habitat. It would be ages before they would be ready to move on, and he didn’t feel like coming back yet.

  He scrambled down the edge of the miniature butte and walked over to climb the next one.

  There was still plenty of time to explore.

  20

  MORNING CALL

  The habitat was deflated and packed away. Tana and Estrela were suited up, as was Ryan, and they were ready to go.

  “Ryan Martin to Brandon,” Ryan broadcast, once again. “Calling Brandon. Calling Brandon. Come in.”

  Where the hell was Brandon?

  “Possibly his suit radio is malfunctioning,” Tana said. “Maybe he hears you, but can’t respond.”

  If his radio had failed, it didn’t seem likely that he wouldn’t return immediately, but maybe he had found something interesting. “Brandon, we’re not receiving you. If you’re hearing this, return immediately. Brandon, return immediately.”

  In the worst case, even if his radio had completely failed, he would trigger his emergency beacon, which ran from a separate thermal battery, completely separated from the rest of the systems. The suit could fail completely and the emergency beacon would work.

  But where was he?

  The wind and the settling dust had thoroughly erased his footprints. Ryan had no guess even which direction to look. He had vanished without a trace.

  “Brandon, come home,” Ryan broadcast. “Brandon, we’re here. Brandon, come home.”

  There was no answer.

  21

  COMING HOME LATE

  Brandon Weber wasn’t worried, not yet. He had been waiting for the call for him to return to the campsite, and enjoying the chance to walk during their delay. He mildly wondered what the others were doing that was taking them so long to get moving, and wandered a little farther than he had planned.

  He checked the time, and with a shock realized that it was after nine. Where the heck were they doing? Where was that radio call, anyway?

  He toggled his radio. “Brandon, ah, Whitman, checking in. What’s up, guys?”

  No answer. He toggled his radio again, and then with a sinking feeling noticed that the red light didn’t come on.

  Uh-oh. The suit radio wasn’t working. No wonder they hadn’t called; they’d probably been calling for an hour and were going to be as mad as hell.

  He toggled it a couple more times. Was it was possible that it was the light that had failed, not the radio? “Hello, camp. Brandon here? Are you there?”

  Nothing.

  “Uh, I’m coming back. Wait for me, okay?”

  They were going to be pissed.

  A radio check was part of the space-suit checkout, but nobody else had been around when he went through the check list. He couldn’t recall if the red light had come on or not.

  It didn’t matter now. He had better get back to camp, pronto.

  They were going to be mad as hell.

  22

  MISSING

  Ryan started the search by climbing to the top of one of the mesa formations nearby. From that height, he could see much farther, but no Brandon.

  The dust storm was continuing at full vigor, but the suspended dust barely impeded his visibility. The wind had completely vanished, and there was no trace of motion anywhere to be seen. The sky was flat, as uniform as if it had been spray-painted onto smooth plaster no more than an arm’s length away.

  From up here the horizon must be four or five kilometers away, but it was only slightly blurred from the dust. Brandon was nowhere in sight. The countryside was like a maze, Ryan thought. There were almost a hundred of the little mesas in view, and lots of places he couldn’t see. Brandon could be behind any one of them.

  He tried the radio again. “Brandon! Come in, Brandon!”

  It was impossible that he could be lost. He had an inertial compass. And, if he got completely lost, why didn’t he trigger his emergency beacon?

  “Brandon! Report immediately! Brandon!”

  23

  WALK

  For the last hour, Brandon had been thinking, with rising uneasiness, the habitat must be just behind that next butte. No, it’s the next one. The next one.

  At last he stopped. It couldn’t be this far. He must have, somehow, walked past it.

  Okay, don’t panic.

  For the tenth time since realizing that he was due back at the habitat, he scrambled up one of the little buttes and looked around. For miles around, nothing.

  Don’t panic, don’t panic.

  The dust was like a smooth brick dome over his head, circumscribing the world.

  He must have gone too far. It was easy to get confused here. All of the little buttes looked so much alike. He should have paid more attent
ion to the landscape. Don’t panic, it will be okay.

  He must have gone right past, somehow missed seeing it. Okay, he wasn’t lost. He’d have to backtrack. He still had his sense of direction. He looked up at the sun, but it was little help, just a slightly brighter patch of sunlight almost directly overhead.

  Maybe he should to trigger his emergency beacon, he thought. It wasn’t an emergency, not really, but the others would be worried. If he triggered his beacon it would show them that he was all right.

  And it would give them a radio signal to locate him.

  No, it wasn’t really an emergency, but it would be prudent to be safe, he thought. They wouldn’t blame him for being cautious, would they? The emergency beacon was mounted at the back of his suit, where his hip pocket would be, if it had a pocket. The thermal battery required that you break a seal, then pull a trigger tab that mixed the chemicals that reacted to power the signal.

  He could feel the emergency beacon, right where it was supposed to be, but he couldn’t find the trigger tab. He twisted around to look. The socket that should have held the battery was empty. Don’t panic, don’t panic. Brandon Weber began to run.

  24

  SEARCH PARTIES

  They searched all day, fanning out in widening spirals away from the base. Over and over Tana or Estrela saw what they thought were footprints, that on close examination turned out to be just weathered depressions in the rock. The hardpan soil did not take tracks, or if it had, the wind and the gently settling dust had erased them. And dust had settled over everything, erasing contrast, making the rocks almost indistinguishable from the soil or the sky.

  After they had searched for a kilometer in every direction from the dome, they searched again, this time more meticulously, checking each notch between rocks, every narrow cleft, every crack, fracture, or ravine where Brandon might be lying injured or unconscious.