Mars Crossing

by Geoffrey Landis

  Trevor was beginning to hate the commander. It seemed to him that Ryan and Estrela were having the time of their lives riding the dirt bikes, and piloting the enormous rockhopper vehicle looked like it would be a blast. He had practiced it enough times in the virtual reality simulation; he bet he could pilot it a whole lot better than the commander could. But, no, he had to stay inside while the adults played.

  Tana was inside with him, but that hardly made it any more fun. She was wearing a set of headphones to monitor the conversation from the outside, and meanwhile was calling up Mars maps from the computer, seated at the copilot's station with her back to him. Quite pointedly ignoring him.

  So screw her.

  Yeah, if only he could do just that. Tana was, in fact, a bit reticent about showing off her body to the men on the crew. Quote unlike Estrela, who sometimes seemed to be deliberately showing off her curves. Nevertheless, in the months together on the ship, when he thought she wasn't looking, he had seen plenty of Tana's body while she was exercising or changing. Lean and muscular, with dark brown skin that was—when she was exercising, anyway—shiny with sweat, he could just imagine her legs wrapped around him, his hands caressing the slippery chocolate skin—

  Yeah, sure. As if she had ever looked at him twice. Not likely. Time to think about something else, guy. Think about music, how about.

  Trevor sang stomp songs inside his head. The stomp lyrics were as if they were spoken directly to him, only to him. Negative Ions was his favorite band, and no one else could ever understand how their songs were beamed directly to him:

  Abbas abd'el Sami, he's the sultan of the sands He's the prince over the desert, he's a prophet in his land His only home's a silken tent, he wanders with the wind With the sighing of the lonely desert wind

  That's me, Trevor thought. I'm Abbas abd'el Sami; wandering with the wind.

  "Stop it," Tana said without turning around.

  Was she talking to him? "Stop what?"

  "Stop your bouncing around. You're shaking the whole spacecraft."

  He had been tapping his toes to the music in his head. Well, he'd been dancing, just a little. Yeah? So, suffer, he thought, but he knew better than to say it. Tana outranked him on the crew—everybody here seemed to outrank him—and it would be unwise to cross her openly. If he did, he might never get a chance to ride one of the dirtbikes.

  Trevor knew that he was, in fact, the celebrity on board. Estrela had her half-hour recording session every day to send her messages to her fans in Brazil back on Earth, and Chamlong had recorded his messages in Thai and in Cantonese to send back to his supporters, but as for the rest of the crew, whenever there was an interview, Trevor got more questions than the rest of the crew put together. Even the potatoes born in the last century knew who he was, not to mention the fame he had among the stompers and the bubblerazz generation. If things got really bad, he might be able to use his popularity back on Earth as a tool to get what he wanted. But he wasn't ready to try that quite yet.

  The others had gotten onto the expedition due to hard work, exhaustive training, and study. Trevor's place on the Don Quijote was the result of luck.

  After the catastrophe of the Agamemnon expedition, there had been a series of investigations and a sharp backlash against space. The public pressure to shut down the program meant that there was no possibility of paying for a launch with public funds.

  But the ships for a second Mars expedition—the ships that would later be named Don Quijote and Dulcinea—had already been built. Dulcinea was already waiting, already on Mars; it had been launched to Mars at the same time as the Ulysses, a backup in case of a failure. And Don Quijote was all but finished and ready for launch.

  The result had been a compromise. The ship could be completed and outfitted for a second expedition, as long as no government money was used.

  As a result, the Don Quijote expedition was an unusual mixture of high and low technology. The expensive one-of-a-kind payload of the Agamemnon expedition had not been duplicated. There would be no billion-dollar Mars airplane such as the fragile Butterfly that the Agamemnon had taken to Mars but never used. Instead, the rockhopper and dirt-rover vehicles had been designed and donated by Mitsubishi America and by Mercedes-Ford. But even with such donations from around the world, the expedition needed almost four billion dollars in hard currency to launch.

  Thailand, the economic giant of Asia ever since the collapse of the Chinese government in 2011, had contributed a billion dollars in exchange for their participation. Brazil, poorer but still ambitious, had contributed an equal amount. The remaining money had come from a lottery.

  One crew slot on the expedition was allocated for the winner of the lottery. Anybody could enter. If they were over twenty-one and under sixty, could pass the Class IV pilot's physical, and could make it all the way through the training process, the grand prize winner would get to be picked to go on the mission.

  A ticket in the lottery cost one thousand dollars. Nearly two million tickets had been sold. Trevor Whitman and his little brother Brandon had each bought thirty.

  The winner of the lottery had been a fifty-seven-year-old woman from Long Island. She had been given a ticket as an anniversary gift by her grandchildren. When she was told that the prize was not transferable, and she couldn't let her son take her place on the expedition, she chose to take the ten-million-dollar second-place prize instead. "Goodness," she had said. "It's quite an honor, and I'm sure that it would be a lot of fun, but two years away from my home and my family? I couldn't possibly."

  The second drawing picked a personal-injury lawyer in Cincinnati. He failed to pass the physical: He was overweight and had a minor heart arrhythmia, either of which factors would have precluded him from flying. He was given another ten-million-dollar consolation prize, and a third drawing was held.

  The winner of the third drawing was an adolescent from Scottsdale, Arizona, named Trevor Whitman. Over the course of an hour, he went from being an obscure rich kid to being the most famous boy in the world.

  If there was any person who seemed born for the expedition, it was Trevor Whitman. He was an Eagle scout, an adept horseman, skilled in rock climbing, and an amateur musician. More important, he was in perfect health. Despite this, though, through the whole training sequence he had felt that the rest of the crew viewed him as not really qualified for the mission—an impostor. None of the other crew members said anything of the sort, of course, but he knew what they must be thinking it. Every time he screwed up a suit check, or crashed the ship in one of the emergency scenarios that they practiced continuously (not that they would ever let him fly the ship, even in an emergency)—whenever he failed a task, he could imagine them watching him, judging. He was an impostor. They were waiting for—even expecting—him to tail.

  It made him nervous, and being nervous made him screw up even more. There was nothing he could do about it.

  23

  IN TRAINING

  "Why are we so interested in going to Mars?" the lecturer had asked. He was a tall man with a potbelly and a huge black beard who waved his hands around as if he were washing invisible windows with his thumbs. He talked as if he were trying to keep up with thoughts that raced faster than he could speak; sometimes he tried to go too fast, and his words jumbled and stuck like cars in a traffic jam.

  "Because it's stomping cool," Trevor answered.

  "Right!" the lecturer said. "Right, right right! It's way cool. But just why is it way cool?"

  "Giant volcanoes," Angie Kovalcik said. Angie was Trevor's backup. She had won the second-place drawing. If Trevor screwed up, got sick, or for some reason was washed out of the mission, she would take his place. She was a forty-year-old housewife from New Jersey, the wife of a dentist, and in Trevor's opinion had no right to even be considered for the mission. But when she had been told—on international television—that the second-place winner in the lottery could chose to train as a backup for the mission instead of taking the two-million-dollar
second-place consolation prize, she'd said yes without even a heartbeat's worth of hesitation.

  She worked out in the gym for an hour and a half each day, and her dedication and physical shape made Trevor look like a slacker. Worse, everybody liked her. She had a knack for getting along with people, a skill that Trevor had never quite learned, and her two teenaged boys—cheering, "Go, mom, go!"—played well on television, getting almost as much air time as Trevor himself did.

  Trevor hated her.

  She was a constant threat at his back, seeming to whisper to him that if there's anything wrong, if they find out that you're not qualified, if you screw up ... He knew that if they ever found out his secret, they would boot him off the team, and it was eating him away to be constantly reminded that he had a rival who would slide into his place in an instant.

  Even worse, she honestly seemed to like him. She was constantly smiling, giving him advice and asking him for his, even baking cookies and acting as though she were his mom. Didn't she realize that they were worst enemies?

  They were in Houston, training, taking a crash course that was meant to bring them up to date on everything known about Mars. The instructor who was drilling them right now, Alexander Volynskji, was a biologist or a geologist or something. They were in a large lecture hall at the Lunar and Planetary Institute, although Trevor and Angie were his only two students.

  "Volcanoes, sure," he said, waving his hands dismissively. "Sure, everybody loves volcanoes. But we're not going to Mars to look for volcanoes. Why are we going? One word: life!"

  "But there is no life on Mars," Trevor said.

  "No life on Mars?" The lecturer looked at Trevor as if he were a second grader who had just confidently stated that the sun revolved around the Earth. Then he seemed to change his mind, bobbing his head and then shrugging. "Well, okay. Certainly that's what most scientists think. I guess I'm just a heretic, an old-fashioned Percival Lowell who just refuses to see the evidence.

  "But answer me this, young man. We know that life started on Earth damn near just as soon as the crust had cooled down enough to allow liquid water to pool. Now, we know that Mars was once a warmer and wetter planet. Sure, it's a cold dry desert now, but it once had liquid water, maybe even oceans. So why shouldn't we think that it once had life?"

  "So you're saying that we will be looking for fossils?" Angie said.

  I will be looking for fossils, Trevor corrected, not we. But he kept that to himself.

  "Well, sure," Volynskji said. "Absolutely, no question, certainly. Look for fossils, yes indeed. But that's not all you should keep your eyes out for. Look, what do we know about life on Earth? We know it's tenacious. It lives in hot springs, at bottoms of glaciers, even on the insides of rocks. Every possible niche, what do you find? You find life.

  "If there was ever life on Mars—and I tell you there was, there had to have been!—If there was life, I say it is still there. Life is tenacious. Once it got a toehold, it's going to survive, it is going to adapt and evolve and find a way to hold on.

  "Mars is dead? Sure, sure, that's the conventional wisdom. But I, Alexander Volynskji, tell you, don't be so sure. Maybe the robot probes couldn't find life. But don't close your eyes.

  "Somewhere, maybe in hot springs hidden away deep inside caverns, maybe inside some volcanic crevice, maybe buried beneath the surface— somewhere, there will be life.

  "Now, let me tell you about a rock from Antarctica..."

  24

  PROBLEMS

  There were too many problems with his plan. Ryan started to write them down on a sheet of paper.

  One, he wrote. We don't know if Jesus do Sul even still works.

  Two. It could save only three of the crew.

  The Brazilian expedition had only sent two astronauts, and their return ship had not been designed with any thought of carrying a five-person crew. If they left out the Martian rocks and ice samples that the Brazilian expedition would have carried back, Ryan calculated, they would be able to easily get three of them onto the ship. But not, by any calculation, five.

  He thought for a moment, then scratched it off his list. The others hadn't been forced to face it yet, but Ryan knew that every one of them would die if they tried to stay here. Saving three of them was a step forward, not a drawback. He looked up to make sure that nobody was watching him, then went over it and obliterated the note he had written with heavy black lines until it was completely illegible. The Jesus do Sul was their only chance, and if they could only save three, it would be best to just not mention that fact until they actually made it to the pole. If they got to the pole.

  Two, he wrote. Valles Marineris.

  The enormous Valles Marineris stretched like a huge barrier across their path. They would have to cross it to get to the northern hemisphere. But the key to the expedition would be the rockhopper, the six-wheeled, pressurized Mars rover, and how would they carry the rockhopper up and down a vertical cliff two miles high?

  They'd have to deal with it somehow.

  Three, he wrote. Can we carry enough consumables?

  Oxygen would come from the zirconia cells in their suits and the larger zirconia electrolyzer built into the rockhopper; as long as they had power, they would be able to break down carbon dioxide for oxygen to breathe.

  But what if they malfed? Could they carry enough spare parts? Could they carry enough food?

  Four, he wrote, Breakdowns. The rock hopper would eventually break down; it had an expected time before failure of only one thousand kilometers. When it failed—

  Five, he wrote. Not enough range.

  That was the killer problem: simple distance. Ryan Martin plotted it, and came up short. They didn't have enough range. He replotted, and even with more optimistic assumptions, there was simply no way that they could make it to the north pole. They just didn't have the range. It was just impossible.

  He leaned back and rubbed his eyes to think. There was only one other place on Mars that humans had been. Acidalia.

  The landing site of the ill-fated second expedition to Mars.

  Painstakingly, Ryan began to plot the path to Acidalia.

  25

  INDECISIVE DECISIONS

  It was a wild idea, and John Radkowski distrusted wild ideas. A desperate journey to the pole, on an unlikely chance that they could salvage the Brazilian ship? Ryan Martin was a danger. He was too young, and had too strong a tendency to go off on a wild idea without paying attention to caution.

  The cautious thing to do would be to stay right where they were.

  But they would die.

  They would probably die if they headed to the pole.

  It was an impossible dilemma. John Radkowski didn't like dilemmas. For every problem, he had always believed, there was one right solution. But this problem didn't seem to have a right solution.

  Radkowski still wondered if it had been some error of Ryan's that had killed Chamlong. He would have to hold Ryan Martin back. It might be tough; Ryan had a great feel for machines but no common sense.

  With his right hand, John Radkowski rubbed the place where three fingers were missing on his left hand. He often did this when he was uncertain or worried; he didn't even notice that he was doing it. Caressing the rough scar tissue gave him a sort of tactile comfort: Whatever came, he could survive it.

  The crew was looking to him for guidance, but he didn't have any better solutions to offer. He knew that of all the things that a commander could do, the decision that was always wrong was to be indecisive. Better to be wrong, and boldly wrong, than to dither over the right solution.

  But that didn't mean to act without learning the facts. "Check the maps and orbital photographs, and give me a briefing in two days," he'd told Martin.

  But now the two days were over, and he was no closer to an idea of what to do than when he'd started.

  They would die if they stayed.

  There really wasn't a choice. Desperate and stupid as the idea was, it was their only chance. They had
to go.

  He let nothing of his feelings show when he called the crew together.

  "Engineer Martin has explained his plan to you," he said. "I'm not going to lie to you and say that it's going to be easy; it's not. It's a tough haul, and it's not clear whether it's even possible at all.

  "You have discussed it among yourselves. Ryan has come up with some refinements of his plan, but before we go any further, I want to hear from you. All I want from you is one single word. Do we accept his plan or not? Yes or no.

  "Martin, we know your opinion. Doctor Jackson?"

  Tana nodded.

  "Say it," Radkowski said.

  "It's our only chance."

  "I take that for yes. Ms. Conselheiro?"

  Her eyes were shadowed. "We die here. I don't like that choice."

  "Your vote?"

  "I vote to live."

  "Mr. Whitman?"

  "I haven't heard any better of a choice, have you? Hell, let's stomp."

  Radkowski nodded. The decision was made, and they had bought into it. He didn't even have to vote himself.

  Under the circumstances, that was the best he could hope for.

  "Then it's decided," he said. "Get yourselves ready. We leave tomorrow at first light."

  26

  AFRICA

  There is a visceral feeling to piloting a jet fighter that can never quite be described. It is a feeling of power and of control, of riding a bestial strength tamed just barely enough to respond with fury to your least suggestion of stick pressure. John Radkowski would never admit it, but if there had ever been a choice between the two, he would rather fly than have sex. In its way, piloting the F-22 fighter was better than sex.

  Two years at the Eastthorpe Military Academy, paid for by his brother's drug dealing, and four years of ROTC at New York University had changed Johnny Radkowski. He was no longer the rebellious punk from the projects. He had learned caution and discipline. His classmates admired him, but none of them were particularly close to him.