Geoffrey Landis - Mars Crossing

He hesitated on the ladder, looking across the surface. He’d seen Mars a thousand times in virtual reality simulations, of course, but this was different. The sunlight was brighter than he’d expected. This far from the sun, he’d expected the surface of Mars to be dim, but the light was as bright as any afternoon on Earth. The helmet had a visor, and he slid it around to give him some shade.

He had to do something. He jumped, a six-foot drop to the ground, and almost lost his balance when he landed. Then he tried a handstand. It was a little awkward in the suit, but after one false try he managed to balance. After thirty seconds he started to lose his balance, tucked in and rolled in a cloud of dust, then stood up.

Everybody was looking at him. It wasn’t as if he had done something actually dangerous; the transparent silicon carbide of the helmets was for all practical purposes unbreakable.

“Shit, kid,” was the voice on his radio. “You sprain an ankle, we’re not going to carry you sightseeing, you know.” It was Tana’s voice. She didn’t sound like she was mad, so he decided he could ignore her. Everybody else went back to what they were doing; examining the soil, chipping at rocks with hammers, digging little trenches. Boring.

“Mars, I love you,” he shouted, ran up to the top of the nearest dune, and then slid down to the bottom on his butt.

Mars was great.

Tana Jackson wanted to run, to skip over the surface, to hop like a bunny. Adrenaline sang in her blood: I’m here, I’m here.

The Mars landscape was just uncanny. It looked hyperreal, the horizons too close, the mountains too small, the sky looking like dirty paint. She could run to the horizon in a few minutes.

She sat down on the surface and tried to scoop up a handful of the sand. It was surprisingly hard to scoop. There was a crusty layer on the surface, and when she scraped through that, the soil underneath was fine powder, like rouge, sticking together into clods that broke apart into nothing in her fingers.

Commander Radkowski stood watching them all patiently. When he had given them all time to stretch out their legs and adapt to the surface, he went back to the lander and retrieved a small chest. Then he called them to gather around a boulder. The rock he had chosen was about chest high, dark in color, carved by the wind into almost a cubical shape. “Ryan, are you getting this?”

From inside the lander, Ryan’s voice said, “I’m taping, Captain. Go ahead.”

Radkowski opened the chest and removed a plaque. The plaque was a small rectangle of black-anodized aluminum, inscribed with seven names in gold. He turned to Estrela Conselheiro.

She reached into the chest and took out a second plaque, identical in size and color to the first, but with only two names on it.

Together they bent over and laid the plaques against the rock. This time Radkowski did not hesitate over his lines. “In honor and in memory of the explorers from the first and second expeditions to Mars, we place these memorials on the surface of Mars. As long as humankind dream of exploration, you will never be forgotten.”

Estrela repeated the words in Portuguese, and then added, in English. “Mars is for heroes.”

Commander Radkowski took a step back. “A moment of silence, please.”

Tana bowed her head and looked at the ground.

“All right. As you were,” Captain Radkowski said.

Mars was just as beautiful, the colors still as intense, but after the memorial it seemed a little more sinister. If anything went wrong, they were a hundred million miles away from any help.

Two expeditions had been to Mars before them. Neither one had returned to Earth.

Tana suddenly shivered, although there was nothing wrong with her suit heater. She had known for a year that, if there was a failure on this mission, there would be no rescue.

Mars was for heroes. But she was suddenly not so certain that she liked being a hero.

Commander Radkowski returned to the ship with the cloud of aimless disappointment still hanging over him.

Ryan Martin and Chamlong Limpigomolchai were in the cabin. Out of habit, the first thing he did was to check the viewport, to see how his outside crew was doing. Tana and Estrela were working together on rock studies, Estrela chipping the outer surfaces off of rocks and Tana pressing the portable X-ray crystallography unit onto the freshly exposed surface to map the microcrystalline structure. He was glad to see them collaborating; during the voyage they had been at each other with their claws bared almost every week, and he had worried that they would be unable to work together. Chalk it up to confinement syndrome; now that there was some space to breathe, they were apparently getting along fine.

Tana Jackson was a biologist, not a geologist, but they had all cross-trained at each other’s specialties. Radkowski could see that they had taken the SIMS unit—the secondary ion mass spectroscope—out of its storage bin, but they had not yet set it up. He tuned to the general frequency, but they were apparently communicating on a private band. As commander, he could listen in, of course, but from long experience he had learned that it was best to give a crew its illusion of privacy unless there was a definite emergency.

Trevor Martin was somewhere out of sight, possibly behind the dune-form. Radkowski worried about the kid; sometimes he acted as if he were younger than his twenty-one years. Still, the enthusiasm and sheer joy of living that the kid exuded—when he was caught unguarded and forgot to be sullen and uncommunicative—was almost contagious, a drug that lifted the spirits of the whole crew. Radkowski had opposed the whole idea of bringing a crew member as young as Trevor along, but he seemed to be working out, and his presence definitely gave the crew a lift in morale. Although they pretended not to, and possibly didn’t even realize it themselves, everybody liked the kid and wanted the best for him. As long as he didn’t manage to kill himself by being impatient, impetuous, ignorant, aggravating, and generally clumsy—in short, acting like an adolescent instead of an adult—he’d be fine.

John Radkowski could hardly blame the kid for acting like a kid. When he was young, he had been a lot worse. It was only by a miracle of God that he had straightened out. Certainly none of his acquaintances, not even his own mother, would ever have guessed he would one day be the commander of the third expedition to Mars.

There are good neighborhoods in Queens, but the one John Radkowski grew up in was not one of them. The Harry S. Truman public-assistance housing unit was an incubator for raising junior criminals, not young scientists. By the time he had reached age six, Johnny had already learned that you never show weakness, and you stay alive by being just as mean as the other guy.

One time, when he was fourteen, he had been hanging around the apartment with his gang. It wasn’t a real gang with colors, just the bunch of kids he hung around the neighborhood with. They kind of watched out for each other. Stinky and Fishface had been there, he remembered. His mother was gone, probably at work at one of a series of interchangeable jobs she held at fast-food restaurants. They were bored. They were usually bored.

John and his older brother, Karl, shared a small bedroom. Karl was gone, probably hanging out with his gang—he was a member of the Skins, a real gang, the local white-boys’ gang. Karl was way cool, but he never wanted Johnny to meet his gang buddies; said he wanted Johnny to have something better out of life.

Stinky was smoking a cigarette he’d found in Johnny’s mother’s cupboard, and Fishface was sitting on Karl’s bunk bed. Karl would have gone ballistic if he’d seen one of Johnny’s friends on his bed, but Karl wasn’t there, so fuck him. Fishface was picking at the wall, the cheap plasterboard coming loose from the studs. One end was already free, and Fishface, bored, wiggled and pried at it until he worked it loose enough to pull out and look at the ragged insulation underneath.