by Angel Wedge
But now, they really were out of touch. Those radio frequencies didn’t carry through the Martian magnetosphere, so they’d have no freedom to chat until the rest of the ships arrived here. Still, it would only be weeks. They could wait that long. And there was a lot of preparation work to be done in the intervening time. Exploring the area, finding details that weren’t on their flyover photos, making sure they knew the terrain. Building. Preparation. And exercise, lots of exercise, to make sure they were fit to function properly in gravity as soon as possible.
There wasn’t much time for socialising in the first few weeks. But that was fine, because the first ship had all the frontiersmen, the loners, the ones who wanted to focus on their tasks. They were the ones who could set up the foundations of a new colony and make sure everything was ready, so the other crews would have a safety net while their bodies got used to being planetside again. Jasper Grade had never seen himself as a loner, but he threw himself into the exercise programme in the last three weeks before touchdown with so much vigour, because he knew it was expected of him. He’d done double the required hours in the centrifuge, and on the treadmill, and had cut down all social activities as much as possible out of fear of failure.
In the days since they’d landed, he still didn’t think of himself as a loner. But his physique had bounced right back. He was the fittest qualified engineer to adapt the aeroponics vats for positive-G operation, and he couldn’t bring himself to relax and chat when there was work that needed doing. So two weeks after touchdown, he wasn’t finding himself out of breath every time he climbed the stairs anymore. He wasn’t exhausted from dragging a hab module down to the right place on the map of their new village and hooking up all the tubes. He was fit, and ready for anything.
Maybe he was a bit isolated from the people around him, but Jasper didn’t care that much, because he had work to do. Now that everything was set up where it should be, he was assigned to explore the area around the landing site, checking for unexpected hazards so that they’d know where to unload everything as soon as the second ship was on the landing strip.
* * *
Elle von Planck got a few jokes about her name. The ones from the scientists were at least different from the ones she’d got as a kid, but she would rather people thought about her as a person than an amusing label. Ironically for a social scientist, she didn’t tend to socialise much. She enjoyed studying the dynamics of social groups and cultural phenomena on a computer screen, more than interacting with her crewmates face-to-face. Over the last couple of years, it was almost like they’d exhausted every possible conversation, so now the small talk was all repetition of things she’d heard a hundred times before. Exploration was a perfect duty because it meant she didn’t have to talk to anyone except her assigned teammate, and even then there was bound to be something they could talk about. Even if it was just rock strata, it was better than uncomfortable silences or endless repetition of the same meaningless gossip.
This one day, Elle had set off on her own rather than wait for a colleague she fully expected to be a half hour late. Their first objective was spectral analysis on a part of the cliff wall, with mountains so tall they would never be climbed stretching up above. She could check the cliff face in half an hour, and bring the buggy back before Dr Marten even showed up; it would be more efficient that way.
She hopped out of the buggy, with a tiny axe to take rock samples. She looked at the cliff wall. She looked down, and turned her head slowly. She looked at the buggy’s tyre tracks. She looked at her feet. And then she screamed. She screamed in silence for what felt like an hour, and then, struggling to catch her breath, she pressed the contact to activate her suit’s radio. She tried to call for someone else to assist, but she could barely form coherent words after the magnitude of the surprise. She sobbed into an open channel, so confused after the shock that she didn’t know what to say, and unable to get her emotions in order.
Jasper was the first person to hear the barely coherent babbling. He was immediately worried, and he didn’t care what everybody else was going to say or do. Half the crew were still getting used to gravity again, wheezing or struggling under the weight of their own bodies. He was free, he was on the closest side of the settlement, and he was going to help. He didn’t wait for a free buggy either, just set off running across the packed, fine sand. Red dust flew up around him, but he didn’t think about that, he didn’t care. All he thought about was that there was someone he could help. And there she was, standing beside a buggy and pointing in horror at the ground beside her.
“What’s wrong?” he asked, switching to the same radio channel she’d been calling out on before. But she wasn’t saying anything now, maybe she didn’t hear him, or maybe whatever had hurt her had been too much to cope with. So he walked up to her slowly, made a slow, wide gesture to make sure she knew he was there and he wasn’t going to surprise her by being too close. And in response, she held up one hand. ‘Stop’.
Simple sign language was pretty much a universal skill down here. Even if the Martian air carried sound well, your voice wouldn’t be heard through two environment suits and all the active fans and filters they needed to keep running. So if you didn’t know what radio channel someone was on, you used the signs to get their attention.
Jasper stopped. And then the figure in front of him pointed down at the ground. He didn’t see the problem there, just buggy tracks and a mess of footprints, where she’d walked back and forth while exploring. But he stopped and looked, and then waved his hands back. ‘Problem? Talk?’
Elle quickly indicated a radio channel, and they both switched over.
“The tracks…” she gasped, “They go…” She still wasn’t managing to make complete sentences, but the frantic waving made it clear this was the thing that was bothering her. Jasper looked along the buggy tracks she was pointing at. They followed the cliff edge, under cover of the overhanging rock, off into the distance. Nobody should have explored that far away from camp yet, so either this scientist had decided to jump ahead of schedule to do something she found more interesting, or…
“They don’t match,” it was enough of a surprise that he said it out loud as soon as he realised. The tyre tracks weren’t quite the same tread pattern as the the ones left by Elle’s buggy. The grooves were at more of an angle, and the two tracks were slightly closer together. It was unlikely in the extreme that anyone had used their personal luggage allowance to bring a different set of tyres, that would be an extreme amount of effort for any prank. And for the tracks to be closer together, they would have needed to modify the vehicle quite heavily, possibly needing more custom parts.
Now he looked, the footprints around their feet were wrong too. Everyone had two sets of boots, as part of the standard equipment provision. They were perfectly fitted by central supplies, to make sure that there were no blisters or corns in the crew. And every pair was stamped with a crew number on the heel, beneath the half-star of the mission logo. In theory this was to make it easier to find any lost equipment, as well as to make it possible to follow tracks if someone was missing outside the camp. Just look for boot prints showing the right number in the fine sand.
The prints here didn’t have numbers on. They didn’t have a half star. They had a circular indentation in the middle of the tread, with three stars inside. This had to be some kind of joke, but it was one that would have taken an awful lot of effort to set up. He tried to think of how it could have been done, but every option was too complex, too labour intensive. Vacuum formed overshoes could be used to leave a different set of tracks, and maybe the buggy tracks were actually just from two people pushing wheels. But to get the right depth, for all the tracks to look natural, that would surely have taken a lot of thought. Nobody in the crew had that much time to mess around, not when they were still acclimating and recovering from the reentry.
“I don’t get it,” he continued after a few moments thinking, “Why would anyone go to so much effort to mess with o
ur heads? They must know they’re facing a disciplinary, at least.”
“Or we’re not alone,” Elle gasped, “Is it even possible?”
“Of course n–” he started, but then cut himself off. “Why not? Most of the technology to get us here dates back to the turn of the century. The atmosphere suits have been revised again and again since the twentieth century, made better and lighter, but there’s been no real innovations. The guidance computers have got better, we could find a faster route now, but that’s not some stroke-of-genius development. It’s just constant iteration. The tech gets slowly better, step by step. If someone had found the money, and ignored all the objections about cabin fever and psychology, we could have launched this mission forty years ago. Even longer.”
Elle closed her eyes, whispered a few words to herself in the privacy of her helmet. She was coping now, recovering from the shock. It had just been the sudden revelation, she hadn’t known what to think. But as she thought about it, she knew that she couldn’t just panic. They had to think about this, they had to decide what to do with it. Screaming wouldn’t help anyone.
“I’m okay,” she muttered, voice still shaking a little, “Just surprised. So someone beat us to it? Caldwell won’t be happy.” Jasper laughed at that, a sardonic chuckle, and then Elle found that she could see the humour in the situation too. Dr Frank Caldwell, geologist, had put in hundreds of extra hours training to prove his dedication, attended all kinds of auditions to prove that he could play well on camera, had permitted the sponsors to dig through his social media history and into every aspect of his family life. He’d given up all privacy, the cost of being the first man to set foot on Mars. And he’d devoted every moment of his youth to this goal; first gaining a military rank and then using every free hour to study for his doctorate. It was a great honour, one that would see his name recorded in the history books and maybe remembered as long as humanity survived. But now, these footprints suggested he might not have been the first after all. The strait-laced and serious Dr Caldwell, who had made being first the single goal of his life, was really not going to be happy. And there were more than just two people in the crew who would take a little delight in seeing him knocked down a peg or two.
“We’ve got to report this,” she said, when the moment of laughter had passed. Schadenfreude was just the medicine she’d needed to start thinking clearly again. “And we’ve got to find out where they’re going. Is there some antiquated ship lying on the desert somewhere, a couple of explorers who came up here to die? Why didn’t they send a signal back home? Or have they left records for us, hidden somewhere under the sand? An advance party, leaving a monument in the hope someone would find it and remember them?”
“Maybe we’re going to find Wallace’s boots,” Jasper giggled again, imagining the headlines the news sites would have to run with. It was such a ludicrous idea that nobody would be able to keep a straight face. Until he thought again, and realised that the implausible conspiracy theory might have some grain of truth at its heart. All the people who’d said for years that Wallace went to Mars, they’d have a tiny shred of credibility again, just from the proof that it was possible to come here.
Two explorers hopped onto the buggy in silence, minds racing. They were equally isolated from the rest of the crew by the way their minds had reacted to the change of circumstance on landing. They’d coped in different ways, but both ended up as some kind of loners. And if they reported what they’d seen back to the expedition committee, they probably wouldn’t see these tracks again until someone had combed over every inch of them. Their eyes met, behind tinted visors, and they knew they were both thinking the same thing.
“Let’s see how far these tracks go,” Jasper said it first, “We’re supposed to be out here exploring in any case. I’ll report back that you were surprised, and we’re okay to continue with the assignment. Just to make sure there’s not a medical team waiting for clearance to come and rescue you. And I’ll file a partial report on the computer, pictures of the tracks, but not submit it yet. So if anything goes wrong, there’ll be a record that we were first to find it.”
“Yeah,” Elle nodded, and waited a minute while Jasper’s fingers flexed rapidly, typing with the switches inside his thick gloves. Then he nodded, and her thumb depressed the buggy’s start button.
As they rode along, her mind was still on Emmanuel Wallace. Something of a celebrity in the 2020s, he’d found a media platform protesting that humanity was stagnating, that the space programme had stopped because there was no money in it, and business interests were crushing humanity’s natural desire to learn and to grow. A crazy, middle-aged man with spikes of hair jutting out like a mangled paintbrush, he had been eccentric enough to be worth watching, and had enough credibility to convince the general public of his scientific background. In the end he’d started appealing for donations to run a private mission to Mars, saying that he had ‘trailblazers’ who were willing to make the four-year trip even if it was a suicide mission. He made millions, some said even billions, and then disappeared without paying any tax on all those donations. The popular opinion was that he was a con artist, he’d gone and bought an island somewhere and lived the rest of his life in luxury. One alternative was that the money had been funneled into organised crime, or even terrorist groups, and the front man had been buried under a bridge somewhere when they no longer needed him. Nobody believed the man had been for real, but he’d captured people’s imaginations so well that even today, most people would have seen enough archive footage to recognise him on sight.
But still, the hardcore believers said that Wallace had gone to Mars. There was no record of a launch, but his fans said it would have been easy for a single rocket to have slipped through the radar grid, before satellites were so closely monitored. Everyone knew they were crazy, the name of Wallace was a convenient shorthand for people out of touch with reality, like chemtrails or an immortal Elvis might have been in a previous generation. There were some who still said Wallace was living on Mars, even though he would have been more than a hundred years old by now. The slightly less crazy ones thought that he’d gone to Mars, taken a photo, and had himself buried there just to prove that he was right. They never seemed to talk about about who had buried him.
They were the crazies, the crowds in the background of a TV cartoon holding up “Wallace lives” placards at a protest. But they might have a grain of truth in their arguments. Elle didn’t know how she was supposed to feel, how the scientific community would think of her if she was the one who discovered that Wallace had in fact managed to send some luckless individual to die on Mars, or one of his imitators had used his publicity to raise more money than anyone realised. It was impossible, she was sure, but the facts were right in front of her, a pair of buggy tracks saying that beyond any reasonable doubt, someone had landed on Mars.
The tracks skirted the cliff edge. All around the area they’d landed, there were almost sheer cliffs with an indentation around the base, a metre deep in some places, up to three metres in others. The overhang would possibly shield an exploring team in an emergency, if they needed to hide from solar radiation. Different experts had different opinions now, about whether the sun could be harmful here even through the strange atmosphere, and they recommended different limits on the time that anyone spent outdoors, even with the bulk of the environment suits. So they’d all received the lecture, if you started to feel weak or dizzy, call for help and then head for shelter at the cliff base if you couldn’t get back to camp.
Now, they turned into a much deeper cave structure, that could have been formed by the same natural process as the rest of the cliffs’ bevelled edges. The tracks they were following moved in a straight line now, not weaving to follow the ragged edges of the cliff.
“Were they paranoid about sunburn?” Elle tried to make a joke, “Seems like whoever was driving was determined to keep out of the sun at any cost.”
“Or they didn’t know if we’d be watching. They didn
’t want to leave a mark that could be seen from orbit, and didn’t know how much our telescopes could have advanced while they were en route.”
“You’re sounding like a Wallace believer again.”
“Maybe. But someone on Mars in secret? Whether it is an earlier expedition, or if it’s someone from our lot deliberately trying to hide– Would the load on the air cyclers have revealed a stowaway? It sounds crazy, but we should check.”
“Every possibility sounds crazy now. When your observations are crazy, your theories will be too. But, what were you saying?”
“Yeah. Whoever they are, we can assume they didn’t want to be seen. So keeping rock above you is a sensible strategy. That’s true if they’re some group trying to make a name for themselves when the world’s governments were still arguing about the legality and morals of sending explorers who couldn’t return. And it’s even more true if they’re a stowaway on our ship, because they’d know the orbital module has hundreds of cameras broadcasting back to Earth.”
Elle nodded. He was right, of course. She didn’t say anything else, but urged the little buggy forwards. They went deeper into the caves, and turned on the lights to illuminate the path ahead. Another example of the mission using old technology wherever they could: on Earth, lights were automatic and would fade up slowly, so visibility was constant when you were driving from a well lit road into a cave. But the sponsors didn’t want these ships to carry anything that hadn’t been rigorously tested through decades of use in every possible situation. So not only were there no advanced prosthetics in the crew, no retina-implant messengers, and no personas to ease communication between crew and computers; you even had to turn the lights on manually. It was the simplest things that always served as a reminder how far away from home they were.