Mars Crossing

by Geoffrey Landis

  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."

  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.

  They followed the first lottery drawing on an ancient television; the cabin in Arizona was too primitive to have the bandwidth for a good VR connection. They knew the odds, but still, with the number of tickets that they had bought between them, it just felt impossible that they could fail to be chosen. At first with hope, and then with disappointment, and then with rising glee, they watched the winner be drawn, and then accept the second place prize instead.

  "This is it, Brandon," Trevor said. "This one is us. For certain."

  They both concentrated. It was going to be one them. It had to be one of them. But which one?

  They called out the winning ticket number, and then an instant later, checked the name against the data bank. It was some lawyer in Cincinnati.

  "Oh, man, Brandon," Trevor said, when his description and picture were flashed across the world. "Look at that fat slob! Just look at him! How could he win, and we don't?"

  "It sure doesn't seem fair," Brandon said. "Don't seem fair."

  "All that money," Trevor said. "And what did we get? Nothing. Not a damn thing."

  That night they got drunk on beer stolen from Brandon's mother's refrigerator.

  "No sense staying inside and moping, boys," Brandon's mother said the next day. "Moping isn't going to do you any good. You boys get outside, go play. Climb your rocks or something."

  She had no idea how they felt, Brandon thought. No possible idea.

  Trevor looked at him. "You want to go climb?"

  Brandon shrugged. "Might as well."

  Trevor went out to get the gear and bring the car around, so Brandon took the time to log in to the outside world and check the news.

  The lawyer had washed out, for undisclosed reasons. Because he's a fat slob, Brandon thought. He'd never make it to Mars. The news was just breaking on the television and VR channels. They had made a third drawing. The ticket number was posted on the net: 11A26B7.

  The insides suddenly dissolved away from Brandon. They hadn't yet checked the database and announced the winner's name, but they didn't have to. He felt numb, like he wasn't really present in his body, as if there were a sudden void where his body should have been, or as if he had been suddenly glued in place. He sat down.

  He knew that number. All the tickets they had bought had been 11A series. That tagged the sale to eastern Arizona.

  And 26B7 was his brother, Trevor Whitman.

  11

  THE LONG WALK

  Ryan told them to leave everything that they didn't absolutely need behind with the rockhopper. Even so, the pile of stuff to be taken with them was enormous. The trailer towed behind the dirt-rover bulged out, three times the size of the dirt-rover itself. The vehicle looked like an ant attempting to pull an enormous beetle behind it.

  And so they began to walk. On foot, the land seemed a lot less flat. In a few minutes the rockhopper was hidden behind the folds of the terrain. When they crested a small ridge, a mile farther along, Brandon looked back and saw it. It was almost on the horizon. It looked like a toy, abandoned in the sand, the only patch of a color anything other than red in the entire landscape. He knew that they would never see it again and wanted to say something, but couldn't think of anything worth saying.

  Ryan looked back at him. "Come on, Trevor," he said. "We've got to keep the pace up."

  He looked back at it one more time, then turned forward to the long road ahead.

  A day later, the dirt-rover failed. They were on foot.

  They went through the pile again and cut it down by ten percent. It was still too much to carry. There were too many things that they needed: The inertial navigation system, for one. Repair parts for the suits. Vacuum-sealed ration bricks. Electrolyte-balance liquid for the suits' drinking bottles. The habitat bubble. They went through the list again.

  "What if we backpack some of the load?" Tana said.

  Ryan thought about it. "We might be able to carry thirty, maybe forty kilograms," he said. "The life-support packs are already twenty kilograms, so that's not much extra."

  "We could carry more than that," Tana said. "I've backpacked more than that on Earth."

  "Maybe. But we don't dare let the load slow us down. Better to travel light and travel fast."

  "The gravity is lower than Earth."

  Ryan nodded. "Low, but not that low. But it will help some."

  "It will help a lot," Tana said.

  "I figure we should target fifty kilometers per day," Ryan said. "I'm counting on the low gravity helping a lot."

  "Thirty miles a day," Tana said. "Should be doable."

  "If we're not overloaded, yes. Barring another accident, it will be twelve days to reach the Agamemnon."

  12

  THE FALL

  Brandon didn't tell Trevor. Nor his mother, nor anybody else, but especially not Trevor.

  Later, he couldn't precisely articulate why he didn't tell. Perhaps he wanted one more day together with Trevor, climbing rocks with his twin brother, before Trevor suddenly became the most famous boy in the world and they were ripped apart by the pressure of training for the mission. Brandon knew that, no matter how Trevor said that they would always be brothers, things would be different, and Trevor would never have time for him again.

  It wasn't much of a rock, really; just a small sandstone wall five miles outside of town that they sometimes liked to go practice on. It was barely thirty feet at the highest pinnacle.

  It wasn't technical climbing at all, just somethi
ng for them to do to keep their bodies active, while Trevor tried to forget that they had not been selected to go to Mars, and Brandon tried to think of what he should say to his brother. You're going to Mars, asshole, he thought. You don't even know it.

  You're going to Mars, and I'm not.

  Maybe it was the hangover. Maybe they were lax. Maybe Trevor didn't inspect the equipment well enough. They had been using the same rope for two years and had had more than a few falls; it was due for replacement.

  In any case, Trevor shouldn't have slipped in the first place.

  Brandon was on belay, and when Trevor suddenly called out "falling," he knew what to do. He braced himself, firmed his grip on the rope, got ready for the sudden tension as the rope hissed through the anchor nuts.

  The rope caught Trevor in mid-fall, and stretched. Trevor jerked to a stop in midair, windmilling with his arms to stop his tumble. He looks like an idiot, Brandon thought. The rope slacked, bounced, stretched, and suddenly snapped.

  The free end whipped upward like an angry snake. Trevor screamed as he fell.

  The scream stopped with a sudden thud when he hit the rocky ground below.

  For a moment Brandon was paralyzed. "Oh, shit. Oh shit. Hang on, Trevor, I'm coming." He scrambled down the cliff as fast as he could. He was hyper-aware of his every movement, suddenly afraid of falling. "Hang on, hang on."

  His brother's crumpled body lay on the ground below, one leg twisted impossibly around, a coil of climbing rope spilled over him like a scribble. Brandon saw one arm move. He was alive.

  "Hang on, you'll be all right. I'm calling an ambulance. Hang on, damn it, hang on!"

  It took ten minutes for the ambulance to arrive. On the emergency ride into town, the news of the Mars selection had played. The back of the ambulance was cramped and filled with equipment, but Brandon insisted on riding with Trevor. The paramedic had made only cursory objections.