Geoffrey Landis - Mars Crossing

“Well, something, then. At least we could stop and look at it,” Brandon said.

“Why? How’s it going to look any different than any other spot? It’s just an imaginary line—there’s nothing to see.”

“I don’t know. Just because.”

Ryan checked the time, and the readout from the laser-gyro navigation system. “We should reach the equator in about twenty minutes, if we keep up our average rate. Well, it’s nearly time to stop somewhere for the change of shift anyway. If you really insist, then we’ll stop at the equator.” He radioed ahead with instructions to Tana, who was piloting the dirt-rover, to stop and meet them for the change of shift.

The land was rough where they stopped, low broken hills and loose rock. At Brandon’s insistence, Ryan found a spot where sand had accumulated in a small hollow, checked the navigation, and drew a line in the dirt. “Okay,” he said. “There it is.”

“Are you sure?” Brandon asked.

“As best I can figure it.”

Brandon stood just south of the line, and with great ceremony stepped over it. Then he stepped back. “One,” he said.

“In olden times, sailors used to pierce their ears the first time they crossed the equator,” Tana said. “You want we should pierce yours?”

“Already pierced,” he said. He stepped over the line again, and back, and then did it again. “Two. Three.”

“We could do it again,” Tana said.

“Already pierced again,” he said, stepping across the line again. “And again. Five. Six.”

“What the heck are you doing?”

“Nine. Ten.” Brandon kept on stepping back and forth over the line. He looked up at Tana. “Setting a record, what do you think? Most equator crossings on Mars.” He gave up on stepping, and started to hop from one foot to the other, each foot coming down on the opposite side of the line. “Fourteen fifteen sixteen seventeen eighteen nineteen twenty.”

“Shit,” Tana said. “I don’t believe it.”

Ryan shook his head. “Well, at least he’s getting rid of his excess energy,” he said.

After a few minutes, Brandon stopped.

“That’s it?” Ryan asked.

“I think so. A hundred and twenty. You think that record will last?”

Ryan nodded. To every direction, the landscape was barren, sterile rock. Nobody was here. Nobody had ever been here before, and if the expedition failed to reach the return rocket, probably no humans would ever return. “Yes,” he said. “I expect it will last quite a while.”

The riverbed they had been following had merged into another, larger riverbed, and other riverbeds had joined it, until it was the dry course of some enormous river, a Mississippi of Mars. Under the ubiquitous dust, the riverbed seemed to be made of some form of dried mud, smoother than the surrounding terrain. It flowed in approximately the right direction, and so they drove along it, grateful for the highway.

Until four days later, without warning, the rockhopper broke down.

This time there was nothing they could fix. The entire right side had completely frozen, and there were simply no longer enough parts to cannibalize to repair it.

“We’re dead,” Brandon said. “We’re dead.”

Ryan was working on the dirt-rover. He had taken off one of the rockhopper wheels and was disassembling two aluminum beams from the wheel-frame truss of the rockhopper to use for a makeshift trailer that could be pulled by the dirt-rover. “No.”

The riverbed they were following had widened out until it was a broad, flat plain. There was nothing to see from horizon to horizon in either direction except pale yellow-orange dust. The rockhopper lay on its side, where it had tipped and skidded to a halt, the pressurized cabin crumpled in on one side. The unbreakable carbide window hadn’t shattered, but it had buckled free of its frame and was half-embedded in the sand where it had hit. They were all clustered around Ryan, working on the dirt-rover as if there were some way that, by continuing to work, he could put off the inevitable.

“Don’t lie, I can read a map,” Brandon said. “It’s over three thousand miles to the pole.”

“It is too far,” Estrela added. “Even if we were athletes.”

Ryan pressed down on the wheel, looked at the amount of flex in the joint, and lashed three more wraps of superfiber around it. “So we go to plan B.” He looked up at Brandon. “It’s been obvious that we were going to have to make a change in plans for days. This just makes it official.”

“What?” said Brandon.

“What is this plan B?” Estrela said.

“You never talked about any plan B,” Tana said.

“Six hundred kilometers,” Ryan said. “Six hundred kilometers to go.”

“You are crazy,” Estrela said.

“I can’t do kilometers in my head,” Brandon said. “How far in miles?”

“About four hundred,” Ryan said. “A little less.”

“You’re completely crazy,” Estrela said. “We can’t get to the pole in six hundred kilometers.”

“We’re not going for the pole,” Ryan said. “Acidalia. What we have to do now is get to Acidalia.”

“Acidalia?” Estrela asked.

Tana replied for him. It was obvious to her now. “Acidalia Planitia. Of course, the Acidalia rim. Where else could we go?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Estrela said. “Where?”

“The landing site of the Agamemnon .”

All that summer before the Mars lottery, Brandon and Trevor spent together in Arizona. A ten-million-dollar consolation prize might have been a big temptation to some other boy, but for Brandon and his brother, there was only one prize: the trip to Mars.

They both knew that, even if they won, they would still have to make the final crew selection cut. It would mean nothing if they won the lottery, and then at the final cut, the mission commander—

Brandon and Trevor studied the fine print of the lottery like they had studied for no other exam in their lives. And there was a lot of fine print. The mission commander, as they discovered, had the final decision in the choice of crew. Trevor could win the lottery, and pass all the health screenings, and go through all the training—and if the mission commander said out, he would be out. There would be no appeal.

The expedition had already named the mission commander, some old-fart war hero, name of Radkowski. It was the mission commander that they would have to impress, and it looked from the dossier that this would be difficult. He was a hardnose, or so it seemed, one of those types who did everything by the book and expected everybody else to do likewise. Lots of flights to the space station, including one that they couldn’t get any information on. Apparently he had done something, broken some rule or other, something to do with the leak on the failed Russian Mirusha space station. It had apparently earned him some sort of reprimand. But they couldn’t find any details.

They spent the summer working to make sure that their credentials were so solid that he would say yes. Brandon finished his Eagle scout work, the sort of thing that would impress an Air Force guy. They worked out in the gym together and practiced rock climbing, and survival skills, backpacking for days in the desert.

They followed the first lottery drawing on an ancient television; the cabin in Arizona was too primitive to have the bandwidth for a good VR connection. They knew the odds, but still, with the number of tickets that they had bought between them, it just felt impossible that they could fail to be chosen. At first with hope, and then with disappointment, and then with rising glee, they watched the winner be drawn, and then accept the second place prize instead.