Mars Crossing

by Geoffrey Landis

  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 attention 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 sho
uld 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.

  He was nowhere to be found.

  By nightfall they realized that Brandon was not coming back.

  25

  SENSE OF WHERE YOU ARE

  By nightfall Brandon realized he was not going to find his way back.

  He had been walking for hours. He remembered running blindly and screaming, only coming to his senses when he tripped over a fracture in the sandstone. His sense of direction, always infallible on Earth, had betrayed him. He had no idea where the others were, one mile away or a hundred, or even whether they had decided he was gone and left without him.

  At last, too tired to go on, he climbed to the top of one of the endless maze of buttes. In every direction, nothing but empty Mars. Even the sunset was a disappointment, a slow dimming of the light into brick red haze.

  There was a fracture line running down the middle of the butte; one half of it was two feet higher than the other. It made a natural seat. Without any sense of wonder, without even a sense of irony, he reached out and touched it. Embedded in the layered sandstone exposed by the crack, it held a perfectly preserved fossil. It looked like a cluster of shiny black hoses, clumped together at the bottom, branching out into a dozen tentacles at the top. In the same section of rock, he could see others, of every size from tiny ones to one three feet long. There were other fossils too, smaller ones in different shapes, a bewildering variety.

  "I name you Mars Life Brandonii," he said.

  There was not much he could do. The suits needed service, he knew. Every night Ryan changed out the oxygen generators. He wasn't sure quite what was done to make them keep on working, but he knew that the oxygen supply wouldn't run overnight. He could even remember, with a near-hallucinogenic clarity, the lessons that they had been given about the suit's life-support systems. The briefing technician had told them that twenty hours was an absolute, complete, do-not-exceed design limit for the suit's oxygen generation capacity. The technician had chuckled. "Of course, you won't ever have any reason to put in more than a quarter of that."

  The water recycler had already quit on him, and his throat was dry and hurt like hell.

  He was going to die on Mars.

  With the geologic hammer that Estrela had given him, he scratched into the stone beside the fossils. It was soft, as easy to carve as soap. BRANDON WEBER WAS HERE, he wrote, and then tried to think of a witty line. He couldn't. At last he added I DID IT.

  It would be his tombstone, he thought. The idea seemed vaguely funny, nothing to be taken seriously. But tombstones need dates, so he added: 2010-2028.

  And then, he wrote: SO LONG, STOMPERS.

  Brandon Weber sat down, rested against the sandstone ledge, and stared into the dark toward the sunrise he would never live to see.

  26

  SEARCHING

  Estrela had been silent for almost a week. Her throat hurt too much for her to talk. She wanted to say, stop searching, it's too late, he's dead. We need go get moving. But she had no voice.

  But Ryan was adamant; they wouldn't abandon one of the crew.

  They continued the search the next day.

  It was afternoon when Ryan thought he saw something on top of a mesa. It was the same color as the rocks, but the shape was different, and something seemed to be reflecting skylight. One side of the mesa had crumbled away to form an easy ramp to the top. He climbed up to look.

  It was Brandon.

  "I've got him," he said. "Tana, Estrela, I found him." They were about five kilometers away from where they had camped. Over the horizon; it was hard to believe that he would have wandered this far. What could he have been thinking?

  Tana's voice over the radio. "Where are you?"

  Ryan walked over to the edge and looked around. Estrela and Tana were visible below, only a hundred meters away. "Up above you," he said. "Look up."

  In a few moments they had climbed up to reach him.

  Brandon was sitting on the top of the fractured mesa, his back against a low wall. His body was covered with a fine layer of dust, and at first it looked like just a different shape of stone.

  "You found him!" Tana came up beside him. "Is he okay?" She reached out and shook his shoulder. "Trevor! Trevor, are you okay?"

  Brandon leaned over, and slowly toppled onto his side.

  "I think we're too late," Ryan said. He knelt down, brushed the dust away from Brandon's faceplate, and peered inside, trying to see. Brandon's eyes were open, looking at nothing.

  Tana was trying to take a pulse, a nearly hopeless task through the stiff suit fabric. Ryan checked Brandon's suit pack. The lite-support system said it all. The oxygen traction was too low to breathe; the carbon dioxide level up to nearly twenty percent, well above the poison level. He checked the electronic readout. Brandon had not drawn a breath for seventeen hours.

  Estrela had reached them now. "How is he?" she whispered.

  Tana shook her head.

  Estrela knelt down across from Ryan and reached down to the body. She undipped something from the suit, looked at it, handed it to Ryan.

  It was Brandon's emergency beacon. Ryan examined it, turned it over. Nothing visible seemed to be wrong with it. The thermal battery was unused. It was disconnected from the beacon. Had Brandon taken it apart, trying to fix it? The beacon was supposed to be unbreakable. He replaced the battery connections, broke the arming seal, and pulled the activation tab. The thermal battery grew warm in his hands, and a red light started flashing in his suit indicator panel, showing the direction and strength of the emergency signal.

  The beacon was working perfectly. So why hadn't Brandon used it?

  Ryan looked up, and for the first time focused on the wall behind Brandon. There was writing there, crudely incised into the soft sandstone. BRANDON WEBER WAS HERE. I DID IT. 2010-2028. Underneath, in smaller letters, it said, SO LONG, STOMPERS. He knew he was going to die, Ryan thought.

  But that didn't explain it, he realized. The inscription didn't make any sense. Why would Trevor Whitman sign the name Brandon Weber? Why had he demanded to be called Brandon at all? Why were the dates 2010-2028? The last date was correct, but Trevor had been born in 2007. What did he mean, he did it?

  He looked at it. There was only one answer. Ryan Martin didn't like it, but it seemed to stare him in the face. Trevor Whitman was not, had never been, the person he said he was.

  27

  HARD QUESTIONS

  Once back in the hobbit habitat, they went through Bran
don's things.

  Brandon Weber, Tana thought. Not Trevor Whitman. All this time he had deceived them.

  It had taken only a few minutes to find where Brandon had written down the password to unlock his communications. Brandon had saved just a tiny clip of his incoming mail, but it was enough. The boy who stared out of the picture looked just like Brandon.

  Ho, Brand. Man, I hope you're having a ball up here. I can walk on the leg now, but it still hurts some, mostly when it rains. I wish I stayed back in Arizona. Oh, man, I wish I could have made it. I just hate you, you know that? Nah, don't worry, I'm not going to tell our secret. Hey, I hope you've got into the pants of that Brazilian babe by now, she's hot. Do good stuff out there, okay? Kill 'em for me. Trevor signing off.

  The picture of the two of them together, geared up in climbing harness, was uncanny, a mirror of the same person twice, one slightly older, one slightly younger.

  It took an hour of sleuthing through Brandon's effects to piece together the story. When she found out about Trevor's climbing accident, Tana gave out a long, low whistle. Wow.

  She called to Estrela. Estrela looked up at her, questioning.

  "Climbing accident," Tana said. "Broken rope. And Brandon Weber gets what he wanted. Sound familiar?"

  Estrela nodded.

  Tana was remembering something now. She was remembering how many times she had seen Brandon alone with Commander Radkowski. He was begging, she realized, pleading with Radkowski to pick him when it came time to choose who would go home on the Brazilian ship.

  Radkowski hadn't made a choice. It wouldn't be like him to choose before he had to. But Tana wondered if maybe he'd said something that Brandon had interpreted to mean that he had made the selection, and Brandon wasn't it.