by Neil Clarke
A huge dust devil sprouted on the plain out past the edge of the settlement. They were common when Mars was near perihelion and its surface warmed up. Steuby and Bridget watched it grow and spiral up into the sky, kilometers high.
If that dust devil was a sign of a big storm developing, they were going to be in trouble. The rocket’s engines themselves wouldn’t be affected, but a bad dust storm would slow the recharging of the batteries by, oh, ninety-nine percent or so. That put the full charge of the rocket’s batteries, and therefore their departure, on the other side of their teeny-tiny launch window.
They could get into the rocket either way and hope it was charged up enough for its guidance systems not to give out before they achieved orbit, but that was one risk Steuby really didn’t want to pile on top of all the others they were already taking.
Steuby knew he was getting tired after a dozen runs back and forth to the rocket, and the hours spent working on machines without eating or sleeping. His ears rang and he was losing patience with Marco, who was saying maybe the rocket’s placement was for the best because this way they wouldn’t have to worry about the rocket’s exhaust pulverizing anything important when they lifted off.
Steuby just looked at him.
Oh, right, Marco said.
“Steuby!” Bridget shouted, and Steuby snapped out of his daydream. “That’s freaking me out. I’m alive. You want to talk to someone, talk to me. You want to go crazy and have conversations with dead people, do that after we’re on the rocket. Okay?”
He didn’t answer. She walked up to him and rapped her glove on his faceplate. “Okay?”
“Okay,” he said.
She took a step back. Over their local mic he heard her sigh. “Let’s get these batteries covered up.”
It only took them a minute, but the dust devil was coming fast, and before they’d started the tractor again, it swallowed them up. Winds of this velocity would have flung them around like palm fronds on Earth, but in Mars’ thinner atmosphere it felt like a mild breeze. The sensory disconnect was profound. You saw a powerful storm, but felt a gentle push. Your mind had trouble processing it, had to constantly think about it the way you had to plan for Newton’s Second Law whenever you did anything in zero-G. In space, instincts didn’t work, and on Mars, they could be pretty confusing, too.
Steuby froze and waited for it to go away. It was only two or three hundred meters across, and passed quickly. But as the day went on, there would be more. Steuby looked at the sky, to the west. Phobos had risen. It was all Steuby could do not to mention it to Marco. He’s dead, he told himself. Let him be dead.
“Another hour going to be good enough for those batteries?” he asked. They got on the tractor and headed back toward the shop.
“Do we have more than another hour?”
“Not much.”
“Then there’s your answer.” Bridget paused. She swiped dust away from her faceplate. “Look, Steuby. We’re ready, right? There’s nothing else we need to do?”
He parked the tractor. “Soon as the last tank of NTO is onboard, that’s it. That’s all we can do.”
Bridget was quiet the whole time Steuby backed the tank into the airlock, closed the outer door, uncoupled the tank and pushed it into the shop, and closed the inner door. Then she said, “While you’re filling the tank, I need to borrow the tractor for a minute.”
“Borrow it? Why, do we need milk?”
“No, we need Marco.”
He dropped the hose coupling with a clang. “Are you nuts?” “We have to bring him, Steuby. It’s the right thing to do.”
“Math,” Steuby said.
“Fix the math. Throw out what we don’t need. You said it yourself. If we don’t catch the freighter we’re going to die. What’s the point of having a month’s worth of food for a three-month trip? Or a three-hour trip? That might be all we need.”
“How the hell do we know what we’re going to need?” Steuby shouted. “Have you done this before? I haven’t!”
“I thought you hated quitters,” she said.
“I—” Steuby stopped. She had him. He looked up at the sky. Phobos was low on the horizon, maybe ten degrees up. Less than an hour until they needed to fire the engines. He remembered Marco talking about going back to Earth, and he knew Bridget was thinking the same thing.
“All right,” Steuby said. “Look. We’ll do it this way. You go get him. I’ll babysit the synthesizer. But if you’re not back by the time Number Nine is overhead, I’m going without you.”
“You will not.”
“Try me.”
She left without saying anything else. Steuby didn’t know if he was serious or not. Yes he did. He was serious. If she was going to make a dead body more important than two living people, those were priorities that Henry Caleb Steuben was proud not to share.
On the other hand, he couldn’t really climb up into the rocket and leave her to die. That wouldn’t be right.
On the other other hand, who the hell did she think she was, endangering their rendezvous with the freighter?
On the . . . what was this, the fourth hand? . . . it would be pretty ironic if Steuby took off without her and then missed the rendezvous anyway, so both of them got to die cursing the other one out.
There was also the entirely plausible scenario of them taking off on time and still missing the freighter, so they could die together.
While the synthesizer poured NTO into the tank, Steuby suggested to himself that he adopt a more positive outlook. Maybe we’ll make the freighter, he thought. It’s only six klicks to where Marco is. An hour out there and back, tops. Unless—
He called Bridget up on the line-of-sight frequency. She was just visible. “What?”
“So, um, you have something to cut that piece of the railing, right?” he asked.
“No, Steuby. I survived twenty years working in space by forgetting tools.” She broke the connection. Fine, he thought. Be pissed if you want.
Another dust storm rolled in maybe ninety seconds later. Figures, Steuby thought. Right when I have to go outside again.
One human-equivalent amount of mass had to come out of the rocket. Steuby stuck his head in the crew compartment. Dust blew in around him and he clambered in so he could shut the hatch. What could he get rid of? He started to panic. What if he threw something away and they needed it?
“Marco, help me out,” he said. Bridget wasn’t around. She couldn’t give him a hard time. He wished he’d been able to crunch all the launch calculations and see whether they had an extra eighty kilos of payload slack. Maybe he was worrying over nothing.
He wriggled through a tight hatch into the storage space below the cockpit. There were lockers full of crap back here. Five extra helmets and suits. He pushed three of them up into the cockpit. He found spare electronics and computer components. They piled up in the pilot’s seat. There were two water tanks. He took a deep breath and vented one of them even though he’d just filled it an hour ago. That saved almost a human’s worth of mass right there. Now that he’d started, though, Steuby couldn’t stop. What if one more thing thrown out the hatch was the difference between making that five point oh three kilometers per second and making a bright streak in the sky as they burned up on reentry?
He stuck his head into the cockpit and saw that the dust storm had blown through again. The suits, spare gear, and a bunch of other stuff went out the hatch, banging against the gantry before falling to litter the launch pad.
In the west, Phobos was high, nearly forty-five degrees. Steuby pulled empty metal boxes out of the storage compartment and threw them out the hatch. Then he had to head for the shop and make sure the last fuel tank was topped off with NTO, or nothing he’d done in here would matter.
When Bridget got back, Steuby was standing in the open airlock. She backed the tractor in and he hooked up the tank. Marco lay face-up in the small equipment bed behind the tractor’s seats. The whole front of his suit was soaked in blood and caked in dust. S
teuby climbed onto the tractor and Bridget drove them out to the rocket. “You connect the hose and I’ll carry him up,” Steuby said.
“This is Mars,” Bridget said. “He only weighs about sixty pounds. I’ll take him. You know more about the fuel system than I do.”
“Whatever,” Steuby said. He still had that teetering sensation that panic was right there waiting for him. He started the last fuel transfer and watched Bridget climb the gantry with Marco slung over her back. She pushed him in ahead of her and then climbed in. “Shut the hatch!” Steuby shouted. She couldn’t hear him. A few seconds later she came back out, shut the hatch, and climbed down.
They stared at the hose where it was connected to the NTO tank. “Think it’s enough?” Bridget asked.
The tank’s feeder valve clicked shut. “That’s all she’ll take,” Steuby said. “It’ll have to be enough.”
He disengaged the hose and backed the tractor away. “So how do we move the gantry?” Bridget asked.
“We don’t,” Steuby said. “The exhaust will do it for us.”
“Not ideal,” she commented.
“Neither was holding everything up to go collect a body.” Steuby looked around. “Anything else we need? Time is short.”
She was already at the base of the gantry ladder again. “Then let’s move.”
Steuby waited for her to get all the way in, then slid feet-first through the hatch. He turned and tried to push the gantry back, but it didn’t move. “Forget about it, Steuby,” Bridget said.
“I don’t want it to tip against the rocket and tear a hole in us while we’re lifting off,” he said.
She jammed herself into the hatch next to him and together they shoved at the gantry. It still didn’t move. “You think the exhaust will push it far enough away before it starts to tip?” she panted.
“If I thought that, I wouldn’t be trying to push it myself,” he said.
“I mean is it likely? Can we take the chance?”
“It’s the only chance we’ve got,” he said. He backed into the cockpit and Bridget closed the hatch.
They buckled themselves into the pilot’s and copilot’s seats, lying on their backs and looking at the sky. Old-fashioned, Steuby thought. Like we’re off to fight Ming the Merciless or something. By accident he ended up in the pilot’s chair. “You want to be the pilot?” he asked.
“There is nothing in the world I care about less,” Bridget said. She powered up the onboard flight-control systems and saw that their battery life read about four hours of full operation. Steuby saw it, too.
“Sure hope that freighter answers fast,” he said. “Where’s Marco?”
Bridget adjusted herself in her seat. “Down in the back. Get us out of here, Captain Steuby.”
“Blastoff,” Steuby said. He flipped the failsafes on the fuel-mixing system, took a deep breath, and pressed the rectangular button labeled IGNITION.
Liftoff was like nothing Steuby had ever felt. He’d never actually been in an old-fashioned rocket before. Every time he’d gone from Earth to space he’d used the space elevators out of Quito or Kismaayo. This was multiple Gs, what the old astronauts had called eyeballs-in, sitting on top of a bomb and riding it into orbit. Steuby was terrified. He couldn’t breathe, he couldn’t see very well, he didn’t know if they were going in a straight line or curving off into a fatal parabola . . . he wanted to start screaming but he was afraid if he did he wouldn’t be able to get a breath again. As it was he could only gasp in little sips of air that felt like they weren’t making it all the way down into his lungs. Bridget wasn’t making any noise either, which on the one hand comforted Steuby because it meant she wasn’t giving him a hard time but on the other hand upset him because she was solid and reliable and he wanted to hear her say something reassuring.
At first the sound was loud, overwhelming, but as the atmosphere thinned out it modulated down into a rumble they felt more than heard. The rocket didn’t shake itself apart. It didn’t shred from a hole caused by the gantry. It went straight up like it had been made to do, and if Steuby had been able to speak he thought he might have cheered. They’d done it. If they managed to live long enough to rendezvous with the freighter, people would be telling this story for decades. Also they might end up in jail, but at the moment that was fine with Steuby. Jails had air and food and water.
The thruster cut out. Their velocity was five point seven kilometers per second, plenty for escape velocity. They were nine hundred and sixty-one kilometers from Phobos, which arced away from them toward the horizon. They rose through its orbital plane. The rocket started to tip sideways, aligning its long axis with the direction of Mars’ rotation. They were curving up and out of its gravity well, and now they could see the vast reddish emptiness of the southern highlands. Storms tore across the eastern limb, where it had been daylight the longest. Olympus Mons peeked over the horizon far to the northwest, its summit high above the weather.
“We did it,” Bridget said.
“We sure did. There’s a little fuel left,” Steuby said. “Trans-Earth burn, or do we park here and wait for help?”
Bridget leaned over and activated the rocket’s emergency beacon. “Park it here,” she said. “We don’t really have anywhere to go.”
Steuby slowed them a little, right down to the edge of escape velocity. He didn’t want to get into a parking orbit in case the freighter wanted them to do a rendezvous burn. He looked toward the Tharsis plateau, now visible as their silver museum piece of a rocket rose higher and arced west, following Number Nine Moon. They would be coming up on the freighter if they were lucky. They’d already had a lot of luck, and just needed a little more.
“Hope somebody comes back,” Bridget said. “It would be a shame to let all this go to waste.”
“Somebody will,” Steuby said.
But it wasn’t going to be him. No, sir. He was done with everything that didn’t obey the gravity of Planet Earth. I might go back to the Moon, Steuby thought.
“You were right,” he said to Bridget.
“About what?”
“Bringing Marco. I gave you a hard time about it.”
She shrugged in her harness. “Doesn’t matter.”
The ship’s comm crackled. “This is Captain Lucinda Nieto of the freighter Mary Godwin. We are responding to a distress call. Over.”
Steuby toggled his mic. “This is . . . well, I don’t know what the ship is called. But we sure are glad to hear from you.”
“We have a fix on your location. If you are able, stabilize your altitude and stand by for rendezvous. How many on board?”
“Two,” Steuby said.
“Three,” Bridget said at the same time.
He looked at her. Then he leaned into the mic. “Sorry, three,” he said.
“And what the hell are you doing out there, exactly?” Captain Nieto asked.
“Not quitting, Captain,” Steuby said. “We sure appreciate you giving us a lift.”
Sam J. Miller is a writer and a community organizer. His fiction has appeared in Lightspeed, Asimov’s, Clarkesworld, Apex, Strange Horizons, and The Minnesota Review, among others. His debut novel The Art of Starving (YA/SF) will be published by HarperCollins in 2017, followed by The Breaks from Ecco Press in 2018. His stories have been nominated for the Nebula, World Fantasy, and Theodore Sturgeon Awards, and he’s a winner of the Shirley Jackson Award. He lives in New York City.
THINGS WITH BEARDS
Sam J. Miller
MacReady has made it back to McDonald’s. He holds his coffee with both hands, breathing in the heat of it, still not 100 percent sure he isn’t actually asleep and dreaming in the snowdrifted rubble of McMurdo. The summer of 1983 is a mild one, but to MacReady it feels tropical, with 125th Street a bright beautiful sunlit oasis. He loosens the cord that ties his cowboy hat to his head. Here, he has no need of a disguise. People press past the glass, a surging crowd going into and out of the subway, rushing to catch the bus, doing deals, making out, cursi
ng each other, and the suspicion he might be dreaming gets deeper. Spend enough time in the ice hell of Antarctica and your body starts to believe that frigid lifelessness is the true natural state of the universe. Which, when you think of the cold vastness of space, is probably correct.
“Heard you died, man,” comes a sweet rough voice, and MacReady stands up to submit to the fierce hug that never fails to make him almost cry from how safe it makes him feel. But when he steps back to look Hugh in the eye, something is different. Something has changed. While he was away, Hugh became someone else.
“You don’t look so hot yourself,” he says, and they sit, and Hugh takes the coffee that has been waiting for him.
“Past few weeks I haven’t felt well,” Hugh says, which seems an understatement. Even after MacReady’s many months in Antarctica, how could so many lines have sprung up in his friend’s black skin? When had his hair and beard become so heavily peppered with salt? “It’s nothing. It’s going around.”
Their hands clasp under the table.
“You’re still fine as hell,” MacReady whispers.
“You stop,” Hugh said. “I know you had a piece down there.”
MacReady remembers Childs, the mechanic’s strong hands still greasy from the Ski-dozer, leaving prints on his back and hips. His teeth on the back of MacReady’s neck.
“Course I did,” MacReady says. “But that’s over now.”
“You still wearing that damn fool cowboy hat,” Hugh says, scoldingly. “Had those stupid centerfolds hung up all over your room I bet.”
MacReady releases his hands. “So? We all pretend to be what we need to be.”
“Not true. Not everybody has the luxury of passing.” One finger traces a circle on the black skin of his forearm.
They sip coffee. McDonald’s coffee is not good but it is real. Honest.
Childs and him; him and Childs. He remembers almost nothing about the final days at McMurdo. He remembers taking the helicopter up, with a storm coming, something about a dog . . . and then nothing. Waking up on board a U.S. supply and survey ship, staring at two baffled crewmen. Shredded clothing all around them. A metal desk bent almost in half and pushed halfway across the room. Broken glass and burned paper and none of them had even the faintest memory of what had just happened. Later, reviewing case files, he learned how the supply run that came in springtime found the whole camp burned down, mostly everyone dead and blown to bizarre bits, except for two handsome corpses frozen untouched at the edge of camp; how the corpses were brought back, identified, the condolence letters sent home, the bodies, probably by accident, thawed . . . but that couldn’t be real. That frozen corpse couldn’t have been him.