Kim Robinson: Red Mars

Then there was a noise that was somehow different: desperate cries, serious screams. “What’s that?” Maya said.

“A fight,” Frank replied, cocking an ear. “Something done on the spur of the moment, perhaps.” She stared at him, and quickly he added, “Maybe we should go have a look.”

The cries intensified. Trouble somewhere. They started down through the park, their steps getting longer, until they were in the Martian lope. The park seemed bigger to Frank, and for a moment he was scared.

The central boulevard was covered with trash. People darted through the dark in predatory schools. A nerve-grating siren went off, the alarm that signaled a break in the tent. Windows were shattering up and down the boulevard. There on the streetgrass was a man flat on his back, the surrounding grass smeared with black streaks. Chalmers seized the arm of a woman crouched over him. “What happened?” he shouted.

She was weeping. “They fought! They are fighting!”

“Who? Swiss, Arab?”

“Strangers,” she said. “ Ausländer .” She looked blindly at Frank. “Get help!”

Frank rejoined Maya, who was talking to a group next to another fallen figure. “What the hell’s going on?” he said to her as they took off toward the city’s hospital.

“It’s a riot,” she said. “I don’t know why.” Her mouth was a straight slash, in skin as white as the domino still covering her eyes.

Frank pulled off his mask and threw it away. There was broken glass all over the street. A man rushed at them. “Frank! Maya!”

It was Sax Russell; Frank had never seen the little man so agitated. “It’s John— he’s been attacked!”

“What?” they exclaimed together.

“He tried to stop a fight, and three or four men jumped him. They knocked him down and dragged him away!”

“You didn’t stop them?” Maya cried.

“We tried— a whole bunch of us chased them. But they lost us in the medina.”

Maya looked at Frank.

“What’s going on !” he cried. “Where would anyone take him?”

“The gates,” she said.

“But they’re locked tonight, aren’t they?”

“Maybe not to everyone.”

They followed her to the medina. Streetlights were broken, there was glass underfoot. They found a fire marshal and went to the Turkish Gate; he unlocked it and several of them hurried through, throwing on walkers at emergency speed. Then out into the night to look around, illuminated by the bathysphere glow of the city. Frank’s ankles hurt with the night cold, and he could feel the precise configuration of his lungs, as if two globes of ice had been inserted in his chest to cool the rapid beat of his heart.

Nothing out there. Back inside. Over to the northern wall and the Syrian Gate, and out again under the stars. Nothing.

It took them a long time to think of the farm. By then there were about thirty of them in walkers, and they ran down and through the lock and flooded down the farm’s aisles, spreading out, running between crops.

They found him among the radishes. His jacket was pulled over his face, in the standard emergency air pocket; he must have done it unconsciously, because when they rolled him carefully onto one side, they saw a lump behind his ear.

“Get him inside,” Maya said, her voice a bitter croak—”Hurry, get him inside.”

Four of them lifted him. Chalmers cradled John’s head, and his fingers were intertwined with Maya’s. They trotted back up the shallow steps. Through the farm gate they stumbled, back into the city. One of the Swiss led them to the nearest medical center, already crowded with desperate people. They got John onto an empty bench. His unconscious expression was pinched, determined. Frank tore off his helmet and went to work pulling rank, bulling into the emergency rooms and shouting at the doctors and nurses. They ignored him until one doctor said, “Shut up. I’m coming.” She went into the hallway and with a nurse’s help clipped John into a monitor, then checked him out with the abstracted, absent look doctors have while working: hands at neck and face and head and chest, stethoscope. .

Maya explained what they knew. The doctor took down an oxygen unit from the wall, looking at the monitor. Her mouth was bunched into a displeased little knot. Maya sat at the end of the bench, face suddenly distraught. Her domino had long since disappeared.

Frank crouched beside her.

“We can keep working on him,” the doctor said, “but I’m afraid he’s gone. Too long without oxygen, you know.”

“Keep working on him,” Maya said.

They did, of course. Eventually other medical people arrived, and they carted him off to an emergency room. Frank, Maya, Sax, Samantha, and a number of locals sat outside in the hall. Doctors came and went; their faces had the blank look they took on in the presence of death. Protective masks. One came out and shook his head. “He’s dead. Too long out there.”

Frank leaned his head back against the wall.

When Reinhold Messner returned from the first solo climb of Everest, he was severely dehydrated, and utterly exhausted; he fell down most of the last part of the descent, and collapsed on the Rongbuk glacier, and he was crawling over it on hands and knees when the woman who was his entire support team reached him; and he looked up at her out of a delirium, and said, “Where are all my friends?”

It was quiet. No sound but the low hum and whoosh that one never escaped on Mars.

Maya put a hand on Frank’s shoulder, and he almost flinched; his throat clamped down to nothing, it really hurt. “I’m sorry,” he managed to say.

She shrugged the remark aside, frowned. She had somewhat the air of the medical people. “Well,” she said, “you never liked him much anyway.”

“True,” he said, thinking it would be politic to seem honest with her at that moment. But then he shuddered and said bitterly, “What do you know about what I like or don’t like.”

He shrugged her hand aside, struggled to his feet. She didn’t know; none of them knew. He started to go into the emergency room, changed his mind. Time enough for that at the funeral. He felt hollow; and suddenly it seemed to him that everything good had gone away.

He left the medical center. Impossible not to feel sentimental at such moments. He walked through the strangely hushed darkness of the city, into the land of Nod. The streets glinted as if stars had fallen to the pavement. People stood in clumps, silent, stunned by the news. Frank Chalmers made his way through them, feeling their stares, moving without thought toward the platform at the top of town; and as he walked he said to himself, Now we’ll see what I can do with this planet .

“Since they’re going to go crazy anyway, why not just send insane people in the first place, and save them the trouble?” said Michel Duval.

He was only half joking; his position throughout had been that the criteria for selection constituted a mind-boggling collection of double binds.

His fellow psychiatrists stared at him. “Can you suggest any specific changes?” asked the chairman, Charles York.

“Perhaps we should all go to Antarctica with them, and observe them in this first period of time together. It would teach us a lot.”

“But our presence would be inhibitory. I think just one of us will be enough.”

So they sent Michel Duval. He joined a hundred and fifty-odd finalists at McMurdo Station. The initial meeting resembled any other international scientific conference, familiar to them all from their various disciplines. But there was a difference: this was the continuation of a selection process that had lasted for years, and would last another. And those selected would go to Mars.