Mars Crossing

by Geoffrey Landis

  "Mars, I love you," he shouted, ran up to the top of the nearest dune, and then slid down to the bottom on his butt.

  Mars was great.

  3

  MEMORIAL

  Tana Jackson wanted to run, to skip over the surface, to hop like a bunny. Adrenaline sang in her blood: I'm here, I'm here.

  The Mars landscape was just uncanny. It looked hyperreal, the horizons too close, the mountains too small, the sky looking like dirty paint. She could run to the horizon in a few minutes.

  She sat down on the surface and tried to scoop up a handful of the sand. It was surprisingly hard to scoop. There was a crusty layer on the surface, and when she scraped through that, the soil underneath was fine powder, like rouge, sticking together into clods that broke apart into nothing in her fingers.

  Commander Radkowski stood watching them all patiently. When he had given them all time to stretch out their legs and adapt to the surface, he went back to the lander and retrieved a small chest. Then he called them to gather around a boulder. The rock he had chosen was about chest high, dark in color, carved by the wind into almost a cubical shape. "Ryan, are you getting this?"

  From inside the lander, Ryan's voice said, "I'm taping, Captain. Go ahead."

  Radkowski opened the chest and removed a plaque. The plaque was a small rectangle of black-anodized aluminum, inscribed with seven names in gold. He turned to Estrela Conselheiro.

  She reached into the chest and took out a second plaque, identical in size and color to the first, but with only two names on it.

  Together they bent over and laid the plaques against the rock. This time Radkowski did not hesitate over his lines. "In honor and in memory of the explorers from the first and second expeditions to Mars, we place these memorials on the surface of Mars. As long as humankind dream of exploration, you will never be forgotten."

  Estrela repeated the words in Portuguese, and then added, in English. "Mars is for heroes."

  Commander Radkowski took a step back. "A moment of silence, please."

  Tana bowed her head and looked at the ground.

  "All right. As you were," Captain Radkowski said.

  Mars was just as beautiful, the colors still as intense, but after the memorial it seemed a little more sinister. If anything went wrong, they were a hundred million miles away from any help.

  Two expeditions had been to Mars before them. Neither one had returned to Earth.

  Tana suddenly shivered, although there was nothing wrong with her suit heater. She had known for a year that, if there was a failure on this mission, there would be no rescue.

  Mars was for heroes. But she was suddenly not so certain that she liked being a hero.

  4

  RADKOWSKI

  Commander Radkowski returned to the ship with the cloud of aimless disappointment still hanging over him.

  Ryan Martin and Chamlong Limpigomolchai were in the cabin. Out of habit, the first thing he did was to check the viewport, to see how his outside crew was doing. Tana and Estrela were working together on rock studies, Estrela chipping the outer surfaces off of rocks and Tana pressing the portable X-ray crystallography unit onto the freshly exposed surface to map the microcrystalline structure. He was glad to see them collaborating; during the voyage they had been at each other with their claws bared almost every week, and he had worried that they would be unable to work together. Chalk it up to confinement syndrome; now that there was some space to breathe, they were apparently getting along fine.

  Tana Jackson was a biologist, not a geologist, but they had all cross-trained at each other's specialties. Radkowski could see that they had taken the SIMS unit—the secondary ion mass spectroscope—out of its storage bin, but they had not yet set it up. He tuned to the general frequency, but they were apparently communicating on a private band. As commander, he could listen in, of course, but from long experience he had learned that it was best to give a crew its illusion of privacy unless there was a definite emergency.

  Trevor Martin was somewhere out of sight, possibly behind the dune-form. Radkowski worried about the kid; sometimes he acted as if he were younger than his twenty-one years. Still, the enthusiasm and sheer joy of living that the kid exuded—when he was caught unguarded and forgot to be sullen and uncommunicative—was almost contagious, a drug that lifted the spirits of the whole crew. Radkowski had opposed the whole idea of bringing a crew member as young as Trevor along, but he seemed to be working out, and his presence definitely gave the crew a lift in morale. Although they pretended not to, and possibly didn't even realize it themselves, everybody liked the kid and wanted the best for him. As long as he didn't manage to kill himself by being impatient, impetuous, ignorant, aggravating, and generally clumsy—in short, acting like an adolescent instead of an adult—he'd be fine.

  John Radkowski could hardly blame the kid for acting like a kid. When he was young, he had been a lot worse. It was only by a miracle of God that he had straightened out. Certainly none of his acquaintances, not even his own mother, would ever have guessed he would one day be the commander of the third expedition to Mars.

  There are good neighborhoods in Queens, but the one John Radkowski grew up in was not one of them. The Harry S. Truman public-assistance housing unit was an incubator for raising junior criminals, not young scientists. By the time he had reached age six, Johnny had already learned that you never show weakness, and you stay alive by being just as mean as the other guy.

  One time, when he was fourteen, he had been hanging around the apartment with his gang. It wasn't a real gang with colors, just the bunch of kids he hung around the neighborhood with. They kind of watched out for each other. Stinky and Fishface had been there, he remembered. His mother was gone, probably at work at one of a series of interchangeable jobs she held at fast-food restaurants. They were bored. They were usually bored.

  John and his older brother, Karl, shared a small bedroom. Karl was gone, probably hanging out with his gang—he was a member of the Skins, a real gang, the local white-boys' gang. Karl was way cool, but he never wanted Johnny to meet his gang buddies; said he wanted Johnny to have something better out of life.

  Stinky was smoking a cigarette he'd found in Johnny's mother's cupboard, and Fishface was sitting on Karl's bunk bed. Karl would have gone ballistic if he'd seen one of Johnny's friends on his bed, but Karl wasn't there, so fuck him. Fishface was picking at the wall, the cheap plasterboard coming loose from the studs. One end was already free, and Fishface, bored, wiggled and pried at it until he worked it loose enough to pull out and look at the ragged insulation underneath.

  "Shit, boy," Stinky said, "what the fuck you got there?"

  Fishface didn't bother to look up. "Nothing."

  "Nothing? Shit." Stinky dropped the cigarette on the floor, walked over, and reached down inside the hole. "You dogfucker, you call this nothing?"

  Stinky held up what he had found: a nine-millimeter automatic, gleaming dull gray and malignant in the feeble sunlight filtering through the dirty window.

  Johnny hadn't realized that his brother had it. "Hey, Stinky, I think you'd better put that back," he said, nervous.

  "What, are you a pussy? Afraid your badass brother gonna see?" Stinky held out the pistol, pointed it at Johnny's head, and squeezed the trigger.

  "Bang," he said.

  Johnny had flinched when he saw Stinky's finger whiten on the trigger. The trigger hadn't moved. "You faggot," he said.

  Stinky laughed and popped the safety. "Thought you bought it there, didn't you?" He turned the gun over, ejected the magazine, and looked at it. "Full load, too. Man, your brother is packing." His voice held a tone of envy.

  "Look, this isn't funny," Johnny said. "You'd better—"

  Stinky held the magazine in one hand and the automatic in the other. He pointed it at the window. "Bang," he said, and pulled the trigger again.

  The gun firing in the tiny room was louder than anything Johnny had heard in his entire life. It jumped in Stinky's hand, and
all four of the boys jumped.

  "Holy shit! You asshole!"

  There was a huge hole in the ceiling above the window. Plaster dust and gunpowder smoke swirled in the air.

  "Hey, how the fuck was I to know it was loaded?" Stinky shouted. "I took the clip out." As if to show it, he rammed the magazine back into the gun. "It was empty."

  "Put the safety back on, you asshole," Johnny said.

  The door kicked open, slamming against the wall. Johnny's brother was silhouetted in the doorway. "The hell you assholes are doing?"

  "Oh, shit," Johnny said. He stood up. "Hey, Karl, we was—"

  "Shut up," Karl said. He was looking at Stinky. "Asshole, give me my gun."

  Stinky pointed it at him. "Hey, man, be cool. We were—"

  Karl slapped the gun out of Stinky's hand with a move almost too fast for Johnny to see, and in the next instant he had Stinky by the throat. "You point that gun at me again, fat boy, and after I rip your balls off I'm going to shove them up your ass. Got it?" He didn't give Stinky a chance to answer, but reached down with the other hand, grabbed the crotch of Stinky's pants and picked him up and tossed him toward the door. Stinky staggered, bounced off the doorframe, and then caught his balance and ran.

  "I ever see you around here, they won't scrape up enough of you to fill a jockstrap," Karl shouted after him. Then he turned around and looked at Fishface. "You got some business here?"

  "No, sir," Fishface said.

  "Then get the fuck out."

  "Yes, sir!" Fishface said, and ran out of there so fast that Johnny wondered whether his feet even touched the ground.

  Karl didn't bother to look at Johnny, just reached down, picked up his gun, put the safety on and jammed it into his pants. Then he walked over and looked down on Johnny.

  "Hey, Karl," Johnny said, tentatively. He knew that he was going to get a pounding, but it was best to see if he could defuse his brother as much as he could. The sharp smell of powder and the dust from the ceiling seemed to choke all of the atmosphere out of the room. His ears were still ringing. "We didn't mean nothing."

  "I know that, kid." Karl sighed. "What are we doing to you, kiddo? Just what are we doing?"

  "It was an accident," Johnny said. "We just sort of found it by accident—"

  Karl slapped him. Johnny saw it coming and tried to dodge, but he wasn't near fast enough.

  "What was that for?" Karl said.

  Johnny's ears were ringing from the blow. He tried to frame his words. "For taking your gun—"

  Karl slapped him again, this time with no warning. "Asshole. I don't care about the gun." Karl raised his hand again, and Johnny cringed.

  "That's for having stupid friends," Karl said. "Your friends are stupid, and you're stupid, for having stupid friends. What the hell were you morons thinking about?"

  "I dunno. We weren't thinking about anything."

  "That's right, you weren't thinking. You've got a brain, but nobody would ever know, since you never bother to use it." Karl sat down on the bed, hard, and put his head in his hands. "Oh, shit, kid, what the hell are we doing to you? We've got to get you out of here."

  That had been a long time ago. John hardly ever thought about his brother Karl anymore, except sometimes when he got drunk, and he almost never got drunk. By the time he had gotten into high school, Karl had dropped out of school and had spent time in jail twice.

  Nobody else in the projects seemed to have noticed the shot, or if they had, they paid attention to their own business. The hole Stinky blew in the ceiling had seemed huge to Johnny, but nobody from the housing authority had ever noticed it, even when they came around once a year to do the inspection.

  Yeah, John Radkowski thought, Trevor can get a little annoying sometimes. But on the whole, he was okay. Not half the trouble that I'd been.

  Now that both he and Chamlong were back in the cabin, it was Ryan Martin's turn to go out on the surface. Ryan was deeply engrossed with the computer. Radkowski walked over and put his hand on Ryan's shoulder. "Hey, how's it going?" he said. "You ready to take a look around outside?"

  "I've been checking out the Dulcinea's systems," Ryan said.

  "So?" Radkowski said. "We checked her systems a dozen times during cruise. I can't think that anything's likely to have changed in the last four hours."

  "Well, sure, but now that we're on the surface, I have a higher bandwidth connection," Ryan said. "I can command sensors in real time now, get more than just the health check signal."

  "And?"

  "These readings are screwy." Ryan shook his head. "Take a look at this," he said. "Here. I'm looking at the fuel temperature. The tanks ought to be holding steady at about 90K, but they're up over 200K, both of them. Tank pressures are fine, both tanks are full, but I can't understand these thermal readings."

  Radkowski looked at the display. "Looks like a broken thermistor to me."

  "Both sensors on both tanks? Seems unlikely."

  "Shit," Radkowski said. "According to the mission plan, we're not supposed to check her out until the morning. Look, why don't you go on outside and take a walk around. If you think we need to check her out today, that's your call, but think about it for a while first, okay? We're all running a little bit on overload." The commander clapped him on the shoulder. "Anyway, it's clear to me—you need a break. Go on. You deserve it."

  "You got it, captain," Ryan said, and stood up. "I'm out of here."

  5

  RYAN

  To Ryan Martin, the Don Quijote looked like nothing so much as a mushroom pulled from the ground and sitting on its half-wilted cap. Getting to Mars was a great accomplishment, and cramped and smelly as the Don Quijote had been, Ryan Martin would regret abandoning the Don on Mars. Ugly it was, yeah, stinky and cramped, but it had done the job, a dependable workhorse.

  Getting back, though—getting back would be the real triumph. Dulcinea was their ride home, and if there was a problem, the sooner they found out what it was, the sooner they would be able to start fixing it.

  The screwy readings from Dulcinea continued to worry Ryan. Even when he was on the surface, while he was thrilled by the beauty of the landscape and enjoyed the freedom of walking on a planetary surface after being cooped up in a soup can for seven months, with a corner of his mind he could not leave Dulcinea alone.

  Anomalous readings are always a worry; they indicated something malfunctioning. There were other readings that looked wrong to him as well, readings that weren't obviously wrong, like the temperature reading, but still they had a wrong feeling. He hoped that the commander was right and it was a sensor failure. God knew that those happened often enough; sensors sometimes seemed like the practical jokers of space, always choosing the middle of the night or some equally inconvenient time to wake up a crew for what would invariably turn out to be a false alarm—but he would be more comfortable if he knew for sure.

  The timeline called for them to check out the return ship on the second day on Mars, when the crew was refreshed by a day's sleep after the long day spent in landing and surface preparations. The commander didn't want to alter the plan, and he respected that, but if it had been up to him, he would have gone to Dulcinea immediately.

  He couldn't help but glance over at the return ship, temptingly waiting for him just a kilometer away. Dulcinea looked not at all the way Ryan thought a rocket should look, a squat bullet shape aimed skyward. Instead, Dulcinea was a lumpy potato, with just the faintest wisp of white vapor trailing away from the oval tanks at the bottom of the first stage.

  At various times, the Dulcinea had been nicknamed by the engineers at the launch complex the pig, the turd, and the flying cow. It was low and fat. With only the near-vacuum of the Martian atmosphere to penetrate, streamlining had been sacrificed for efficiency, and Dulcinea had all of the aerodynamics of a fire hydrant. One of the launch technicians had accidentally referred to it as the "incredible flying turd" in the presence of a reporter. He had been reassigned to launch sounding rockets from Ko
diak Island, and the nickname had been hastily changed to "the amazing flying toad" for damage control. That nickname stuck, although in the presence of management or the press it was always, carefully, the Mars Return Launch Module.

  Ryan worried about Dulcinea. If there was something wrong, he wanted to know now.

  6

  THE FIRST EXPEDITION TO MARS

  Don Quijote had landed on the edge of a region of Mars known as Felis Dorsa—in Latin, "the cat's back," or, less literally the cat mountains, since dorsae was the term Mars geologists had given to flat plains broken by long, low ridges. The site had been chosen with great care. The sand between the ridges was smooth and level enough to make a safe landing, but it was an easy traverse by Mars buggy to the Valles Marineris, the feature that the geologists had picked as the highest priority exploration target. The dorsae themselves—low, rounded ridges a hundred miles or more long—made for an additional target for investigation, as geologists continued to argue over the geophysical origin of the ridges. In the Martian tropics south of the equator, the Felis Dorsa featured a relatively mild climate—or at least mild for Mars, where temperatures of a hundred below at night were normal.

  And, as a bonus, the two previous expeditions to Mars had both landed in the northern hemisphere, so while the crew of Don Quijote could not claim to be the first humans to the red planet, as a consolation, they could claim a new hemisphere.

  The crew, however, had a goal of achieving a different first. They planned to be the first crew to return from Mars alive.

  The American expedition to Mars had been planned for decades.