Geoffrey Landis - Mars Crossing

“Don’t get too far ahead,” he radioed to her.

“Relax,” she said. “No problem.”

A few kilometers down the trail, Ryan stopped his dirt-rover atop a small rise and got off. He had told himself that he would not look back, but after five minutes, he couldn’t help himself. Don Quijote stood on the side of a small dune, surrounded by the deflated airbags and tilted at a drunken angle, looking as if it would topple over at any moment. Behind her in the distance was Dulcinea . From here, it was impossible to guess that anything was wrong.

It looked so forlorn. He knew that he would never see them again. He had a sudden urge to turn back, that there must be some way to fix the problem, but he knew it was impossible.

Ryan got back on his dirt-rover and started the engine. The next time he looked back he was ten kilometers away, and the Don Quijote had disappeared over the horizon. There was nothing but gentle undulations of sand stretching as far as he could see.

Estrela’s dirt-rover had vanished ahead of him, but he could tell where she was by the plume of dust hanging in the air. He concentrated on following the tracks of her rover, distinct enough in the sand to follow easily. From time to time her voice would come in over the radio to remark on a possible obstacle or an interesting landmark, but for the most part they rode in silence.

The flatness of the terrain was broken by the occasional crater. At first he detoured around them, but after a while he saw that Estrela’s tracks didn’t deviate at all, and he started following. Up, teeter at the crest, and then down like a roller coaster to the flat, sand-covered bottom, then again at the other side.

During the drive, he mulled over their situation. Slowly, he began to convince himself that it might not be as bad as he’d thought. The Brazilians had surely put some margins of safety into their return ship. Engineers always plan for a worst case. If they would shave every single ounce of excess weight and rely on using up all of the safety margin, it was quite likely that they would be able to fly five back on the Jesus do Sul . He would work the numbers again as soon as he got a chance. He had been right, he told himself, not to alarm the crew by bringing up the problem of who should return. Hell, it would be a jinx to dwell on the possibility, but it was not out of the question that one of them might die on the trip north. It would be a tragedy, but surely the Jesus do Sul would be able to launch four. Four might be no problem at all.

“Rover one, Radkowski,” Commander Radkowski’s voice came over the radio. “Anything to report?”

Ryan slowed down and cued his radio. “The way has been fine,” he said. “Mostly compacted sand. A few rocky outcroppings and some boulders, but nothing we haven’t been able to go around.”

“Got it. Okay, we’ve packed up here and we’re setting out. Stay in touch.”

Behind them, the rockhopper set out.

At first Trevor found it exciting. All through the morning, there were constantly new vistas, every mile a new planet, fresh and exciting. The occasional dry voice of Ryan or, less often, Estrela, broke in on the radio to apprise them of landmarks ahead. The six-wheel suspension kept the rockhopper level, and it moved over the sand with a motion more like a boat than a wheeled vehicle.

For Trevor, the drive was disconcerting. It continually seemed to him that they had made a mistake, that they had circled around and were heading south, instead of north. He would look at the inertial guidance readout on the rockhopper’s console, and think, That’s wrong. We’re going the wrong way. But then he would look at the sun, and realize, no we’re going the right way. And then the entire planet would seem to spin around him for a moment until he was reoriented.

Mars confused his sense of direction.

Three of them in the cabin of a Mars rover designed for two was one too many. They were crammed together so tight that Trevor could barely move without hitting one of the others with his elbow.

After a while watching Mars was almost hypnotic. It didn’t really change. One ridge of yellowish stone would dwindle down to a wall no higher than his waist and then disappear, and be replaced by another just like it. When they got closer to a ridge, he saw that the surfaces were smooth, blasted by millennia of sand to a soft, pillowed surface.

The sky was a sheet of hammered bronze.

“That one looks like a bear,” he said.

No one answered him. It was a boulder the size of a small house, half-buried in the sand, with a rough, dark gray surface, almost black. A chunk of lava that had been thrown out by one of the enormous volcanoes? Trevor wished that he had paid more attention in training to the geologists. When they had gone out on the training field trip to El Paso, the geologists had been ecstatic to point out minute details of the shapes and textures of the rocks they saw, but Trevor had forgotten most of it.

It did look like a bear, crouching with its head turned away.

Trevor hummed, softly so as not to attract unwelcome attention from the others. It was too cramped to tap his feet, but he cracked the joints in his toes to the beat of the music in his head. The rockhopper’s wheels bumping over Martian rocks set up a syncopated percussion line, and inside his head, Negative Ions accompanied it with a stomp soundtrack:

It was all his fault.

John Radkowski thought about his brother like a dog worrying at a wound, knowing that it hurts, but unable to keep from chewing at it.

Karl had been a hero, not him. In the moment of truth, he had failed to speak up. He had run.

And now, he had not run far enough. The expedition was failing; his leadership was failing, and it was all his fault.

It was his fault.

His fault.

To the others in the crew, the expedition to Mars was the fulfillment of a dream. From childhood they had wanted to see the small blue planet dwindle to no more than one bright star among a million others, and know that they were on their way, part of something larger than themselves, the expansion of humanity into the cosmos.

John Radkowski had not looked at the stars. His brother Karl had told him what to do: Get out of the projects, get away from the gangs, go as far away from here as you can get and don’t ever look back.

To John Radkowski, leading the expedition to Mars was nothing more than following his brother’s instructions. And, driving across the desolation, he had only one thought:

What would Karl do?

Estrela drove her dirt-rover as far and as fast as she could. She barely paid any attention to the scenery, and she had turned her radio to the “emergency only” setting, where only a priority-one page would beep through to her.

Estrela had some thinking to do.

When Ryan Martin had proposed his plan, she had instantly noticed the huge and disturbing fact that Ryan failed to present to the rest of the crew. She knew the Jesus do Sul very well. She, more than anybody else, knew that at its heart Brazil was still a poor country, and that the mission had no luxuries, nothing extra—not even the capability to return more than few grams of Martian dust.

The margin that Ryan Martin had been counting on did not exist.

The Brazilian Mars mission hadn’t been designed to carry samples back. Perhaps once, in the optimistic days when first the mission had been designed, the sample return had been real. But by the time that Jesus do Sul was being built, Brazil was in the slow process of national bankruptcy. There was no money for extras. Jesus do Sul was, first and foremost, a public-relations mission, designed to show off the expertise of an insolvent nation in a desperate attempt to attract investors from outside, richer nations. The well-publicized two hundred kilograms of rocks to be returned, the weight that Ryan had counted on leaving behind, was a carefully crafted fiction.