Strange Days: Fabulous Journeys With Gardner Dozois

by Gardner R. Dozois

  But the real enemy was time. Thomas was acutely aware that the inexorable clock of celestial mechanics was ticking relentlessly away . . . that soon the optimal launch window for the return journey to Earth would open and that they must shape for Earth then or never get home at all. Whether the storm had lifted yet or not, whether they had landed on Mars or not, whether Thomas had finally gotten a chance to show off his own particular righteous stuff or not, when the launch window opened, they had to go.

  They had less than a week left in Mars orbit now, and still the sandstorm raged.

  The waiting got on everyone’s nerves. Thomas found Johnboy’s manic energy particularly hard to take. Increasingly, he found himself snapping at Johnboy during meals and “happy hour,” until eventually the commander had to take him aside and tell him to loosen up. Thomas muttered something apologetic, and the commander studied him shrewdly and said, “Plenty of time left, old buddy. Don’t worry. We’ll get you down there yet!” The two men found themselves grinning at each other. Commander Redenbaugh was a good officer, a quiet, pragmatic New Englander who seemed to become ever more phlegmatic and unflappable as the tension mounted and everyone else’s nerves frayed. Johnboy habitually called him Captain Ahab. The commander seemed rather to enjoy the nickname, which was one of the few things that suggested that there might actually be a sense of humor lurking somewhere behind his deadpan facade.

  The commander gave Thomas’s arm an encouraging squeeze, then launched himself toward the communications console. Thomas watched him go, biting back a sudden bitter surge of words that he knew he’d never say . . . not up here, anyway, where the walls literally had ears. Ever since Skylab, astronauts had flown with the tacit knowledge that everything they said in the ship was being eavesdropped on and evaluated by NASA. Probably before the day was out somebody back in Houston would be making a black mark next to his name in a psychological-fitness dossier, just because he’d let the waiting get on his nerves to the point where the commander had had to speak to him about it. But damn it, it was easier for the rest—they didn’t have the responsibility of being NASA’s token Nigger in the Sky, with all the white folks back home waiting and watching to see how you were going to fuck up. He’d felt like a third wheel on the way out here—Woody and the commander could easily fly the ship themselves and even take care of most of the routine schedule of experiments—but the landing party was supposed to be his command, his chance to finally do something other than be the obligatory black face in the NASA photos of Our Brave Astronauts. He remembered his demanding, domineering, hard-driving father saying to him, hundreds of times in his adolescent years, “It’s a white man’s world out there. If you’re going to make it, you got to show that you’re better than any of them. You got to force yourself down their throats, make them need you. You got to be twice as good as any of them . . .” Yeah, Pop, Thomas thought, you bet, Pop . . . thinking, as he always did, of the one and only time he’d ever seen his father stinking, slobbering, falling-down drunk, the night the old man had been passed over for promotion to brigadier general for the third time, forcing him into mandatory retirement. First they got to give you the chance, Pop, he thought, remembering, again as he always did, a cartoon by Ron Cobb that he had seen when he was a kid and that had haunted him ever since: a cartoon showing black men in space suits on the moon—sweeping up around the Apollo 58 campsite.

  “We’re losing Houston again,” Woody said. “I jes cain’t keep the signal.” He turned a dial, and the voice of Mission Control came into the cabin, chopped up and nearly obliterated by a hissing static that sounded like dozens of eggs frying in a huge iron skillet. “. . . read? . . . not read you . . . Plowshare . . . losing . . .” Sunspot activity had been unusually high for weeks, and just a few hours before, NASA had warned them about an enormous solar flare that was about to flood half the solar system with radio noise. Even as they listened, the voice was completely drowned out by static; the hissing noise kept getting louder and louder. “Weh-ayl,” Woody said glumly, “that does it. That solar flare’s screwing everything up. If we still had the laser link”—here he flashed a sour look at Johnboy, who had the grace to look embarrassed—“we’d be okay, I guess, but without it . . . weh-ayl, shit, it could be days before reception clears up. Weeks, maybe.”

  Irritably, Woody flipped a switch, and the hissing static noise stopped. All four men were silent for a moment, feeling their suddenly increased isolation. For months, their only remaining contact with Earth had been a faint voice on the radio, and now, abruptly, even that link was severed. It made them feel lonelier than ever and somehow farther away from home.

  Thomas turned away from the communications console and automatically glanced out the big observation window at Mars. It took him a while to notice that there was something different about the view. Then he realized that the uniform, dirty yellow-white cloud cover was breaking up and becoming streaky, turning the planet into a giant, mottled Easter egg, allowing tantalizing glimpses of the surface. “Hey!” Thomas said, and at the same time Johnboy crowed, “Well, well, lookie there! Guess who’s back, boys!”

  They all crowded around the observation window, eagerly jostling one another.

  As they watched, the storm died all at once, with the suddenness of a conjuring trick, and the surface was visible again. Johnboy let out an ear-splitting rebel yell. Everyone cheered. They were all laughing and joking and slapping one another’s shoulders, and then, one by one, they fell silent.

  Something was wrong. Thomas could feel the short hairs prickling erect along his back and arms, feel the muscles of his gut tightening. Something was wrong. What was it? What . . . ? He heard the commander gasp, and at the same time realization broke through into his conscious mind, and he felt the blood draining from his face.

  Woody was the first to speak.

  “But . . .” Woody said, in a puzzled almost petulant voice, like a bewildered child. “But . . . that’s not Mars.”

  The air is thin on Mars. So thin it won’t hold up dust in suspension unless the wind is traveling at enormous speeds. When the wind dies, the dust falls like pebbles, fast and all at once.

  After five weeks of storm, the wind died. The dust fell.

  Revealing entirely the wrong planet.

  The surface was still predominantly a muddy reddish orange, but now there were large mottled patches of green and greyish ocher. The surface seemed softer now, smoother, with much less rugged relief. It took a moment to realize why. The craters—so very like those on the moon both in shape and distribution—were gone, and so were most of the mountains, the scarps and rills, the giant volcanic constructs. In their place were dozens of fine, perfectly straight blue lines. They were bordered by bands of green and extended across the entire planet in an elaborate crisscrossing pattern, from polar icecap to polar icecap.

  “I cain’t find anything,” Woody was saying exasperatedly. “What happened to everything? I cain’t even see Olympus Mons, for Christsake! The biggest fucking volcano in the solar system! Where is it? And what the fuck are those lines?”

  Again Thomas felt an incredible burst of realization well up inside him. He gaped at the planet below, unable to speak, unable to answer, but Johnboy did it for him.

  Johnboy had been leaning close to the window, his jaw slack with amazement, but now an odd, dreamy look was stealing over his face, and when he spoke, it was in a matter-of-fact, almost languid voice. “They’re canals,” he said.

  “Canals, my ass!” the commander barked, losing control of his temper for the first time on the mission. “There aren’t any canals on Mars! That idea went out with Schiaparelli and Lowell.”

  Johnboy shrugged. “Then what are those?” he asked mildly, jerking his thumb toward the planet, and Thomas felt a chill feather up along his spine.

  A quick visual search turned up no recognizable surface features, none of the landmarks familiar to them all from the Mariner 9 and Viking orbiter photomaps—although Johnboy annoyed the commander
by pointing out that the major named canals that Percival Lowell had described and mapped in the nineteenth century—Strymon, Charontis, Erebus, Orcus, Dis—were there, just as Lowell had said that they were.

  “It’s got to be the sandstorm that did it,” Thomas said, grasping desperately for some rational explanation. “The wind moving the sand around from one place to another, maybe, covering up one set of surface features while at the same time exposing another set . . .”

  He faltered to a stop, seeing the holes in that argument even as Johnboy snorted and said, “Real good, sport, real good. But Olympus Mons just isn’t there, a mountain three times higher than Mount Everest! Even if you could cover it up with sand, then what you’d have would be a fucking sand dune three times higher than Everest . . . but there don’t seem to be any big mountains down there at all anymore.”

  “I know what happened,” Woody said before Thomas could reply.

  His voice sounded so strange that they all turned to look at him. He had been scanning the surface with the small optical telescope for the Mars-Sat experiments, but now he was leaning on the telescope mounting and staring at them instead. His eyes were feverish and unfocused and bright and seemed to have sunken into his head. He was trembling slightly, and his face had become waxen and pale.

  He’s scared, Thomas realized, he’s just plain scared right out of his skull . . . “This has all happened before,” Woody said hoarsely.

  “What in the world are you talking about?” Thomas asked.

  “Haven’t you read your history?” Woody asked. He was a reticent man, slow voiced and deliberate, like most computer hackers, but now the words rushed from his mouth in a steadily accelerating stream, almost tumbling over one another in their anxiety to get out. His voice was higher than usual, and it held the ragged overtones of hysteria in it. “The Mariner 9 mission, the robot probe. Back in 1971. Remember? Jes as the probe reached Mars orbit, before it could start sending back any photos, a great big curtain storm came up, jes like this one. Great big bastard. Covered everything. Socked the whole planet for weeks. No surface visibility at all. Had the scientists back home pulling their hair out. But when the storm finally did lift, and the photos did start coming in, everybody was jes flatout amazed. None of the Lowellian features, no canals, nothing—jes craters and rills and volcanoes, all the stuff we expected to see this time around.” He gave a shaky laugh.

  “So everybody jes shrugged and said Lowell had been wrong—poor visibility, selector bias, he jes thought he’d seen canals. Connected up existing surface features with imaginary lines, maybe. He’d seen what he wanted to see.” Woody paused, licking at his lips, and then began talking faster and shriller than ever. “But that wasn’t true, was it? We know better, don’t we, boys? We can see the proof right out that window! My crazy ol’ uncle Barry, he had the right of it from the start, and everybody else was wrong. He tole me what happened, but I was jes too dumb to believe him! It was the space people, the UFO people! The Martians! They saw the probe coming, and they whomped that storm up, to keep us from seeing the surface, and then they changed everything. Under the cover of the sandstorm, they changed the whole damn planet to fool us, to keep us from finding out they were there! This proves it! They changed it back! They’re out there right now, the flying saucer people! They’re out there—“

  “Bullshit!” the commander said. His voice was harsh and loud and cracked like a whip, but it was the unprecedented use of obscenity that startled them more than anything else. They turned to look at him, where he floated near the command console. Even Woody, who had just seemed on the verge of a breakdown, gasped and fell silent.

  When he was sure he had everyone’s attention, the commander smiled coldly and said, “While you were all going through your little psychodrama, I’ve been doing a little elementary checking. Here’s the telemetry data, and you know what? Everything shows up the same as it did before the sandstorm. Exactly . . . the . . . same. Deep radar, infrared, everything.” He tapped the command console. “It’s just the same as it ever was, no breathable air, low atmospheric pressure, subzero temperatures, nothing but sand and a bunch of goddamn rusty-red rocks. No vegetation, no surface water, no canals.” He switched the view from the ship’s exterior cameras onto the cabin monitor, and there for everyone to see was the familiar Mars of the Mariner and Viking probes, rocky, rugged, cratered, lifeless. No green oases. No canals.

  Everyone was silent, mesmerized by the two contradictory images.

  “I don’t know what’s causing this strange visual hallucination we’re all seeing,” the commander said, gesturing at the window and speaking slowly and deliberately. “But I do know that it is a hallucination. It doesn’t show up on the cameras, it doesn’t show up in the telemetry. It’s just not real.”

  They adjourned the argument to the bar. Doofus the Moose—an orange inflatable toy out of Johnboy’s personal kit—smiled benignly down on them as they sipped from bags of reconstituted citrus juice (NASA did not believe that they could be trusted with a ration of alcohol, and the hip flask Woody had smuggled aboard had been polished off long before) and went around and around the issue without reaching any kind of consensus. The “explanations” became more and more farfetched, until at last the commander uttered the classic phrase mass hypnosis, causing Johnboy to start whooping in derision.

  There was a long, humming silence. Then Johnboy, his mood altering, said very quietly, “It doesn’t matter anyway. We’re never going to find out anything more about what’s happening from up here.” He looked soberly around at the others. “There’s really only one decision we’ve got to make. Do we go on down, or not? Do we land?”

  Even the commander was startled. “After all this—you still want to land?” Johnboy shrugged. “Why not? It’s what we came all the way out here for, isn’t it?”

  “It’s too dangerous. We don’t even know what’s happening here.”

  “I thought it was only mass hypnosis,” Johnboy said slyly.

  “I think it is,” the commander said stoutly, unperturbed by Johnboy’s sarcasm. “But even if it is, we still don’t know why we’re having these hallucinations, do we? It could be a sign of organic deterioration or dysfunction of some sort, caused by who knows what. Maybe there’s some kind of intense electromagnetic field out there that we haven’t detected that’s disrupting the electrical pathways of our nervous systems; maybe there’s an unforeseen flaw in the recycling system that’s causing some kind of toxic buildup that affects brain chemistry . . . The point is, we’re not functioning right; we’re seeing things that aren’t there!”

  “None of that stuff matters,” Johnboy said. He leaned forward, speaking now with great urgency and passion. No one had ever seen him so serious or so ferociously intent. “We have to land. Whatever the risk. It was hard enough funding this mission. If we fuck up out here, there may never be another one. NASA itself might not survive.” He stared around at his crewmates. “How do you think it’s going to look, Woody? We run into the greatest mystery the human race has ever encountered, and we immediately go scurrying home with our tails tucked between our legs without even investigating it? That sound good to you?”

  Woody grunted and shook his head. “Sure doesn’t, ol’ buddy,” he said. He glanced around the table and then coolly said, “Let’s get on down there.” Now that he was apparently no longer envisioning the imminent arrival of UFO-riding astronaut mutilators, Woody seemed determined to be as cool and unflappable and ultramacho as possible, as if to prove that he hadn’t really been frightened after all.

  There was another silence, and slowly Thomas became aware that everyone else was staring at him.

  It all came down to him now. The deciding vote would be his: Thomas locked eyes with Johnboy, and Johnboy stared back at him with unwavering intensity. The question didn’t even need to be voiced; it hung in the air between them and charged the lingering silence with tension. Thomas moved uneasily under the weight of all those watching eyes. How did he
feel? He didn’t really know—strange, that was about the closest he could come to it . . . hung up between fear and some other slowly stirring emotion he couldn’t identify and didn’t really want to think about. But there was one thing he was suddenly certain about. They weren’t going to abandon his part of the mission, not after he’d come this far! Certainly he was never going to get another chance to get into the history books. Probably that was Johnboy’s real motive, too, above and beyond the jazz about the survival of NASA. Johnboy was a cool enough head to realize that if they came home without landing, they’d be laughingstocks, wimps instead of heroes, and somebody else on some future mission would get all the glory. Johnboy’s ego was much too big to allow him to take a chance on that. And he was right! Thomas had even more reason to be afraid of being passed over, passed by: When you were black, opportunities like this certainly didn’t knock more than once.

  “We’ve still got almost three days until the launch window opens,” Thomas said, speaking slowly and deliberately. “I think we should make maximum use of that time by going down there and finding out as much as we can.” He raised his eyes and stared directly at the commander. “I say we land.”

  Commander Redenbaugh insisted on referring the issue to Houston for a final decision, but after several hours of trying, it became clear that he was not going to be able to get through to Earth. For once, the buck was refusing to be passed.

  The commander sighed and ran his fingers wearily through his hair. He felt old and tired and ineffectual. He knew what Houston would probably have said, anyway. With the exception of the commander himself (who had been too well-known not to be chosen), de facto policy for this mission had been to select unmarried men with no close personal or family ties back home. That alone spoke volumes. They were supposed to be taking risks out here. That was what they were here for. It was part of their job.