Geoffrey Landis - Mars Crossing

“Right here,” he said.

“Okay. Stay listening on this channel and ready to fetch me in case I have mechanical difficulties.”

“Copy,” Ryan said. “You expecting problems?”

“Just going by the book.”

The rockhopper set out, the legs rolling up and down with the terrain with a weirdly organic floating motion. Ryan watched it climb up the nearby dune, vanish into the valley, and then reappear on the face of the next dune.

Then it was out of sight.

“Come on,” Estrela said. “You’re supposed to keep listening, the boss said, he didn’t tell you to just sit there. Now, come on. You drive like a baby. First, you have to learn how to get traction. Watch me. When you start up, you lean over like this …”

Once again, Trevor thought, the commander has told him to stay inside while the others—the adults of the expedition—went outside and were doing the fun things. He was afraid, he said, that Trevor would slow them down or get in the way.

Trevor was beginning to hate the commander. It seemed to him that Ryan and Estrela were having the time of their lives riding the dirt bikes, and piloting the enormous rockhopper vehicle looked like it would be a blast. He had practiced it enough times in the virtual reality simulation; he bet he could pilot it a whole lot better than the commander could. But, no, he had to stay inside while the adults played.

Tana was inside with him, but that hardly made it any more fun. She was wearing a set of headphones to monitor the conversation from the outside, and meanwhile was calling up Mars maps from the computer, seated at the copilot’s station with her back to him. Quite pointedly ignoring him.

So screw her.

Yeah, if only he could do just that. Tana was, in fact, a bit reticent about showing off her body to the men on the crew. Quote unlike Estrela, who sometimes seemed to be deliberately showing off her curves. Nevertheless, in the months together on the ship, when he thought she wasn’t looking, he had seen plenty of Tana’s body while she was exercising or changing. Lean and muscular, with dark brown skin that was—when she was exercising, anyway—shiny with sweat, he could just imagine her legs wrapped around him, his hands caressing the slippery chocolate skin—

Yeah, sure. As if she had ever looked at him twice. Not likely. Time to think about something else, guy. Think about music, how about.

Trevor sang stomp songs inside his head. The stomp lyrics were as if they were spoken directly to him, only to him. Negative Ions was his favorite band, and no one else could ever understand how their songs were beamed directly to him:

That’s me, Trevor thought. I’m Abbas abd’el Sami; wandering with the wind.

“Stop it,” Tana said without turning around.

Was she talking to him? “Stop what?”

“Stop your bouncing around. You’re shaking the whole spacecraft.”

He had been tapping his toes to the music in his head. Well, he’d been dancing, just a little. Yeah? So, suffer, he thought, but he knew better than to say it. Tana outranked him on the crew—everybody here seemed to outrank him—and it would be unwise to cross her openly. If he did, he might never get a chance to ride one of the dirt bikes.

Trevor knew that he was, in fact, the celebrity on board. Estrela had her half-hour recording session every day to send her messages to her fans in Brazil back on Earth, and Chamlong had recorded his messages in Thai and in Cantonese to send back to his supporters, but as for the rest of the crew, whenever there was an interview, Trevor got more questions than the rest of the crew put together. Even the potatoes born in the last century knew who he was, not to mention the fame he had among the stompers and the bubblerazz generation. If things got really bad, he might be able to use his popularity back on Earth as a tool to get what he wanted. But he wasn’t ready to try that quite yet.

The others had gotten onto the expedition due to hard work, exhaustive training, and study. Trevor’s place on the Don Quijote was the result of luck.

After the catastrophe of the Agamemnon expedition, there had been a series of investigations and a sharp backlash against space. The public pressure to shut down the program meant that there was no possibility of paying for a launch with public funds.

But the ships for a second Mars expedition—the ships that would later be named Don Quijote and Dulcinea —had already been built. Dulcinea was already waiting, already on Mars; it had been launched to Mars at the same time as the Ulysses , a backup in case of a failure. And Don Quijote was all but finished and ready for launch.

The result had been a compromise. The ship could be completed and outfitted for a second expedition, as long as no government money was used.

As a result, the Don Quijote expedition was an unusual mixture of high and low technology. The expensive one-of-a-kind payload of the Agamemnon expedition had not been duplicated. There would be no billion-dollar Mars airplane such as the fragile Butterfly that the Agamemnon had taken to Mars but never used. Instead, the rockhopper and dirt-rover vehicles had been designed and donated by Mitsubishi America and by Mercedes-Ford. But even with such donations from around the world, the expedition needed almost four billion dollars in hard currency to launch.

Thailand, the economic giant of Asia ever since the collapse of the Chinese government in 2011, had contributed a billion dollars in exchange for their participation. Brazil, poorer but still ambitious, had contributed an equal amount. The remaining money had come from a lottery.

One crew slot on the expedition was allocated for the winner of the lottery. Anybody could enter. If they were over twenty-one and under sixty, could pass the Class IV pilot’s physical, and could make it all the way through the training process, the grand prize winner would get to be picked to go on the mission.

A ticket in the lottery cost one thousand dollars. Nearly two million tickets had been sold. Trevor Whitman and his little brother Brandon had each bought thirty.

The winner of the lottery had been a fifty-seven-year-old woman from Long Island. She had been given a ticket as an anniversary gift by her grandchildren. When she was told that the prize was not transferable, and she couldn’t let her son take her place on the expedition, she chose to take the ten-million-dollar second-place prize instead. “Goodness,” she had said. “It’s quite an honor, and I’m sure that it would be a lot of fun, but two years away from my home and my family? I couldn’t possibly.”

The second drawing picked a personal-injury lawyer in Cincinnati. He failed to pass the physical: He was overweight and had a minor heart arrhythmia, either of which factors would have precluded him from flying. He was given another ten-million-dollar consolation prize, and a third drawing was held.

The winner of the third drawing was an adolescent from Scottsdale, Arizona, named Trevor Whitman. Over the course of an hour, he went from being an obscure rich kid to being the most famous boy in the world.

If there was any person who seemed born for the expedition, it was Trevor Whitman. He was an Eagle scout, an adept horseman, skilled in rock climbing, and an amateur musician. More important, he was in perfect health. Despite this, though, through the whole training sequence he had felt that the rest of the crew viewed him as not really qualified for the mission—an impostor. None of the other crew members said anything of the sort, of course, but he knew what they must be thinking it. Every time he screwed up a suit check, or crashed the ship in one of the emergency scenarios that they practiced continuously (not that they would ever let him fly the ship, even in an emergency)—whenever he failed a task, he could imagine them watching him, judging. He was an impostor. They were waiting for—even expecting—him to tail.