Geoffrey Landis - Mars Crossing

João helped her learn geology. Her growing up on the streets meant that she had preternatural senses, he told her. You have situational awareness; you observe with a detail that verges on suspicion, detecting every small detail is second nature to you. Turn that to your study and make it work for you.

She didn’t try to hide from João the fact that she had boyfriends. She hoped that perhaps he would become jealous, but he never did. Sometimes he gave her advice. Stay away from this one; when you’re not around he talks like you’re a piece of shit. That one’s violent when he’s drunk.

It is like he said when we met, she thought. I will never break his heart.

And then she thought, he has armored his heart so I won’t break it.

And then she thought, if he has armored his heart, there must be a reason; he is afraid of me.

Someday, I will capture his heart.

In the Martian evening, in the little amount of free time they had after the bubble habitat was inflated and before the sun had yet set, Trevor went out walking. Ryan Martin followed along with him. Trevor was pretty sure that the commander had instructed Ryan to keep an eye on him. It annoyed him—he was not a child and shouldn’t have needed a baby-sitter—but there was little point in complaining, so he made the best of it.

Besides, Ryan was one of the nicer ones. Ryan usually treated him like an adult, like a full member of the team, and not like a spoiled rich kid.

“Take a look at this,” Ryan said. He was standing of the lip of a depression, looking down.

Trevor walked over and looked down with him. It was an irregular pit, with a jumble of dark rocks, nearly black, inside it. “What is it?”

“Collapsed lava cave, I think.” Ryan bent over and picked up one of the pieces of rock. It was flat and curved like a shard of pottery. He looked at it, then handed it to Trevor. The outside was smooth, but the concave side was rough, almost sharp. “Doesn’t look two billion years old to me,” he said. “I’d bet there’s been recent volcanism here.”

That was interesting. “Recent?” Trevor asked.

“Less than a billion years ago, I’d say,” Ryan said. “Maybe even within the last million years.”

“Oh,” Trevor said.

“What, you were thinking yesterday? Get real, kid.”

Ryan turned and wandered off. That was odd, Trevor thought, if he was watching me. But he took his freedom as a chance to climb on some of the rocks and look around.

Desolate. This place was worse than Arizona; absolutely nothing green at all. If there were even one single cactus, or even a clump of grass—but there were only rocks and sand.

Ryan was saying something that he couldn’t catch, and he suddenly realized that Ryan was singing.

“—had a hammer,” he sang. “I’d hammer on Maars—”

Not real music, not stomp or even bubblerazz, but old stuff, some folk song from the previous century. It certainly was an odd thing to do.

“And if I had a rock—” he sang.

Trevor turned his receiver volume down.

And then suddenly the singing stopped. Trevor waited for a moment, then cautiously toggled the volume back up.

Ryan was just standing there, staring at the rock. Trevor walked over to see what he was looking at, but nothing was there, just a wall of rock.

“What is it?”

“Did you see that?”

“What?”

“It moved. That rock, did you see it? It flowed, just like water.” Ryan knelt down to put his hand on the rock. “It’s moving. I can feel it.”

“Where?” Trevor put his hand against the rock, but felt nothing.

“Hey, feel the heartbeat? This rock is alive. It’s not a rock at all, it’s an animal. I can feel it. Here.” He took Trevor’s hand and pressed it against the rock. “Can you feel it?”

It felt like rock. Rough, pitted, volcanic rock.

Abruptly Ryan got up and walked away. He was swaying, unsteady on his feet. Could he possibly be drunk? Now he was listing to one side as if he was about to fall over.

The rocks couldn’t possibly be alive. Trevor pressed his hand against the boulder again, and closed his eyes and held his breath to better feel the surface. When he concentrated he could feel his own pulse in the tips of his fingers, but the rock was still just a rock.

“Maybe a dinosaur,” Ryan said. “It’s sleeping, though. Say, kid, you know something? I’ve figured it out. We’re not on Mars. It’s all a hoax. We’re somewhere in Nevada, not on Mars. Look, I bet that’s Vegas right there over the horizon.” He put his hand up to his visor to shield his eyes from the sun.

“Stupid suit. Why the hell do we have to wear these things, anyway?” He put his hand up to the helmet ring-fitting, but then dropped it. “Kid, they tricked us. It’s a training mission. Look, take a look at the gravity.” He picked up a rock and dropped it. It fell, taking a second or so to hit the ground. “Look, was that slow, or not? Was that Mars gravity? I couldn’t tell.” He picked up another rock and dropped it. “Maybe it is. How do they fake that, I wonder?” He picked up another rock, but then seemed to forget what do with it.

“Hey, this rock is carved,” he said. “Carved, I tell you.” He dropped it and tried to pick up another. “Look, it’s a bowling ball.” He tried to pick it up, and couldn’t.

Trevor was seriously frightened now. Was Ryan psychotic? Was he going to go off on a killing spree, like a psycho killer in the movies? He looked around, but they were out of sight of the rest of the party. In fact, he wasn’t quite sure exactly where they were in relationship to the habitat.

Ryan sat down with a thump that Trevor thought he could hear even through the thin atmosphere, and picked up a handful of dust. “If I had a bowling ball,” he sang, “I’d go bowling—”

Trevor walked up to him. Just under Ryan’s collar, in the control section of his suit, was the switch that turned on the emergency broadcast frequency. Trevor reached over, flipped up the protective cover, and tapped it. When it didn’t light, he hit it again, this time hard.

“Hey, what are you doing?”

“Brushing off some dirt.”

“Yeah?” Ryan looked down at his suit. “Say, the suit is dusty, isn’t it. You think I should take it off?”

“Uh, no, I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

“Okay.” Ryan went back to his singing, changing tunes. “I was lost, and now I’m found—”

From over the ridge across from them, a figure in a bright purple spacesuit came racing up the hill toward them.

Ryan looked up. “Tana! Hey, Tana, join the party! Where’s the beer?” He started to get up.

“Stay right there!” Tana commanded. “Shit! Kid, how long has he been like this?”

Ryan staggered to his feet, but seemed to have trouble staying upright. His voice was puzzled. “I think I’m drunk. That’s funny, I haven’t had any beer yet.”

“Hold still, hold still, damn it!” She had a cylinder of compressed oxygen out, and was fumbling with the pressure fitting on Ryan’s backpack. “Trevor, hold him steady.”

Trevor held onto Ryan with both hands. He had never been so glad to see anybody.

“Say, Tana,” said Ryan conversationally, “have I ever told you how cute you are? I’d really like to—” He cut himself off. “But you don’t want to. No, you’d probably die.”

“Hold still. You’ll be okay. Hold still, I’ve gotta purge you.”

“Of course,” Ryan continued, “you’ll probably die anyway. Did I tell you that only three of us can fit on the ship? Little teeny ship. Those Brazilians were little teeny guys, too. Maybe just two.”

Then the oxygen purge got into his life support system, and his voice trailed off. “Kid,” he said. “Kid, I’ve been really really dumb.”