Geoffrey Landis - Mars Crossing

“This is it, Brandon,” Trevor said. “This one is us. For certain.”

They both concentrated. It was going to be one them. It had to be one of them. But which one?

They called out the winning ticket number, and then an instant later, checked the name against the data bank. It was some lawyer in Cincinnati.

“Oh, man, Brandon,” Trevor said, when his description and picture were flashed across the world. “Look at that fat slob! Just look at him! How could he win, and we don’t?”

“It sure doesn’t seem fair,” Brandon said. “Don’t seem fair.”

“All that money,” Trevor said. “And what did we get? Nothing. Not a damn thing.”

That night they got drunk on beer stolen from Brandon’s mother’s refrigerator.

“No sense staying inside and moping, boys,” Brandon’s mother said the next day. “Moping isn’t going to do you any good. You boys get outside, go play. Climb your rocks or something.”

She had no idea how they felt, Brandon thought. No possible idea.

Trevor looked at him. “You want to go climb?”

Brandon shrugged. “Might as well.”

Trevor went out to get the gear and bring the car around, so Brandon took the time to log in to the outside world and check the news.

The lawyer had washed out, for undisclosed reasons. Because he’s a fat slob, Brandon thought. He’d never make it to Mars. The news was just breaking on the television and VR channels. They had made a third drawing. The ticket number was posted on the net: 11A26B7.

The insides suddenly dissolved away from Brandon. They hadn’t yet checked the database and announced the winner’s name, but they didn’t have to. He felt numb, like he wasn’t really present in his body, as if there were a sudden void where his body should have been, or as if he had been suddenly glued in place. He sat down.

He knew that number. All the tickets they had bought had been 11A series. That tagged the sale to eastern Arizona.

And 26B7 was his brother, Trevor Whitman.

Ryan told them to leave everything that they didn’t absolutely need behind with the rockhopper. Even so, the pile of stuff to be taken with them was enormous. The trailer towed behind the dirt-rover bulged out, three times the size of the dirt-rover itself. The vehicle looked like an ant attempting to pull an enormous beetle behind it.

And so they began to walk. On foot, the land seemed a lot less flat. In a few minutes the rockhopper was hidden behind the folds of the terrain. When they crested a small ridge, a mile farther along, Brandon looked back and saw it. It was almost on the horizon. It looked like a toy, abandoned in the sand, the only patch of a color anything other than red in the entire landscape. He knew that they would never see it again and wanted to say something, but couldn’t think of anything worth saying.

Ryan looked back at him. “Come on, Trevor,” he said. “We’ve got to keep the pace up.”

He looked back at it one more time, then turned forward to the long road ahead.

A day later, the dirt-rover failed. They were on foot.

They went through the pile again and cut it down by ten percent. It was still too much to carry. There were too many things that they needed: The inertial navigation system, for one. Repair parts for the suits. Vacuum-sealed ration bricks. Electrolyte-balance liquid for the suits’ drinking bottles. The habitat bubble. They went through the list again.

“What if we backpack some of the load?” Tana said.

Ryan thought about it. “We might be able to carry thirty, maybe forty kilograms,” he said. “The life-support packs are already twenty kilograms, so that’s not much extra.”

“We could carry more than that,” Tana said. “I’ve backpacked more than that on Earth.”

“Maybe. But we don’t dare let the load slow us down. Better to travel light and travel fast.”

“The gravity is lower than Earth.”

Ryan nodded. “Low, but not that low. But it will help some.”

“It will help a lot,” Tana said.

“I figure we should target fifty kilometers per day,” Ryan said. “I’m counting on the low gravity helping a lot.”

“Thirty miles a day,” Tana said. “Should be doable.”

“If we’re not overloaded, yes. Barring another accident, it will be twelve days to reach the Agamemnon .”

Brandon didn’t tell Trevor. Nor his mother, nor anybody else, but especially not Trevor.

Later, he couldn’t precisely articulate why he didn’t tell. Perhaps he wanted one more day together with Trevor, climbing rocks with his twin brother, before Trevor suddenly became the most famous boy in the world and they were ripped apart by the pressure of training for the mission. Brandon knew that, no matter how Trevor said that they would always be brothers, things would be different, and Trevor would never have time for him again.

It wasn’t much of a rock, really; just a small sandstone wall five miles outside of town that they sometimes liked to go practice on. It was barely thirty feet at the highest pinnacle.

It wasn’t technical climbing at all, just something for them to do to keep their bodies active, while Trevor tried to forget that they had not been selected to go to Mars, and Brandon tried to think of what he should say to his brother. You’re going to Mars, asshole, he thought. You don’t even know it.

You’re going to Mars, and I’m not.

Maybe it was the hangover. Maybe they were lax. Maybe Trevor didn’t inspect the equipment well enough. They had been using the same rope for two years and had had more than a few falls; it was due for replacement.

In any case, Trevor shouldn’t have slipped in the first place.

Brandon was on belay, and when Trevor suddenly called out “falling,” he knew what to do. He braced himself, firmed his grip on the rope, got ready for the sudden tension as the rope hissed through the anchor nuts.

The rope caught Trevor in mid-fall, and stretched. Trevor jerked to a stop in midair, windmilling with his arms to stop his tumble. He looks like an idiot, Brandon thought. The rope slacked, bounced, stretched, and suddenly snapped.

The free end whipped upward like an angry snake. Trevor screamed as he fell.

The scream stopped with a sudden thud when he hit the rocky ground below.

For a moment Brandon was paralyzed. “Oh, shit. Oh shit. Hang on, Trevor, I’m coming.” He scrambled down the cliff as fast as he could. He was hyper-aware of his every movement, suddenly afraid of falling. “Hang on, hang on.”

His brother’s crumpled body lay on the ground below, one leg twisted impossibly around, a coil of climbing rope spilled over him like a scribble. Brandon saw one arm move. He was alive.

“Hang on, you’ll be all right. I’m calling an ambulance. Hang on, damn it, hang on!”

It took ten minutes for the ambulance to arrive. On the emergency ride into town, the news of the Mars selection had played. The back of the ambulance was cramped and filled with equipment, but Brandon insisted on riding with Trevor. The paramedic had made only cursory objections.

“Wow,” the paramedic said. He was watching the news with half of his attention, while immobilizing Trevor’s leg with the other. “I don’t know who that Trevor Whitman is, but”—he deftly set an intravenous drip of some clear fluid—“I tell you, he sure is one lucky son of a bitch. Wish I could change places with him.” He looked down at Trevor critically. “Hell, bet you wish you could trade places right now, too.”

Trevor’s leg was broken in five places. Brandon could still see the jagged ends of white bone sticking through the skin. Trevor wasn’t going to Mars. Trevor wasn’t going anywhere but to a hospital bed, and to a long, painful recuperation.