Geoffrey Landis - Mars Crossing

Brandon leaned over and whispered into Trevor’s ear. “You’re Brandon Weber,” he said. “Brandon.”

Trevor’s face was white and covered with sweat. His teeth were clenched tightly together. Brandon couldn’t tell if he had heard him.

“Brandon.” Trevor’s free hand reached out and grabbed him by the shirt. Brandon’s heart jumped. “You’re going to Mars. Make me proud, little brother. Make me proud.”

A broken rope had given Brandon the chance to go to Mars. So, a year later and a hundred million miles away, when Commander Radkowski’s rope broke, Brandon Weber knew what it was like to be the one who watches. Trevor had given his slot to Brandon.

It was cruel to think of it, but Radkowski had been the commander. Trevor knew that when the final moment came, Radkowski would want to go himself. Putting aside sentimentality (and Brandon had never really liked Radkowski), thinking with nothing but cold calculation, Radkowski’s death had opened the door for one of the crew to go back.

Estrela was in a bleak foul depression—a depression that had followed her around for days, like sandpaper rubbing against her brain.

Knives tore at her throat with every breath she took. She sucked down the water bottle in her suit within a few minutes of when she put it on, sometimes before she’d even made it outside of the bubble, and it didn’t help. She couldn’t speak, could barely croak sometimes.

But the others didn’t seem to notice.

She plodded methodically across the surface, not looking at the landscape, trying not to even think. Oh, that would be the best, if only she did not have to think! If only she didn’t know what was happening and could just be mindless, a piece of wood that walked on legs of wood and didn’t have a past or a future.

Sometimes she pretended to herself that she was already dead. But somewhere inside her was a terrified animal, an animal all teeth and claws, a vicious biting thing with beady red eyes that said no, I’m not going to die. Whatever it takes to do it, I am going to survive. Other people die, but not me, never me, never never never me. She wondered that the others didn’t see it, that they didn’t flee in terror, that they somehow continued thinking her a civilized human being, and not a cornered rat-thing.

She was going to survive.

Estrela plodded across the Martian land, not thinking, not feeling, clenching her teeth to keep from paying attention to the pain in her throat and the claws ripping into her heart. All she knew was one thing. She was going to survive.

The territory became increasingly rough and broken.

As they traveled, the wind began to increase. It was very odd. Brandon could hear the wind, could hear a high-pitched whistling, almost (but not quite) too high to hear, but he could feel nothing. There was a gale blowing outside, and there was no force to it. He spread out his arms, and felt…nothing.

“The subsolar point is moving north,” Ryan said. The northern hemisphere was turning from winter to spring. They were still deep in the Martian tropics, not that far from the equator. On Mars, the tropics still meant weather barely above freezing at noon, and well into the negative numbers during the middle of the night.

At noon the sun was directly overhead. This made him feel completely disoriented. His sense of direction had gone bonzo, and with no shadows he had no clue which way was which.

They were walking across sand today. The terrain was flat enough that, had they still been in the rockhopper, Brandon would have thought that it was perfectly level. On foot, he found how deceptive that was. The land had minute slopes to it, up and slowly down. The rims of craters, Ryan explained. The craters had formed, and eroded, and been buried by sand, and all that was left was the faint change in slope at the buried rim.

It was in the afternoon that Brandon first noticed something moving. At first he caught a glimpse of motion out of the corner of his eye, but when he turned to look, there was nothing there. Your eyes are playing tricks on you, he thought. There’s nothing there. Then, later, he saw it again. This time he refused to turn to look. If I’m going crazy, he said, I don’t want to know.

The third one was too close to ignore. At first he saw the movement, and he looked involuntarily. There was nothing to see. But then he noticed that, even with nothing there, there was a shadow moving across the land.

And then he looked above it, looked at the sky, and saw the twisted rope of sky, a rotating column of a darker shade of yellow curling upward, writhing into the sky. It was—

“Tornado,” he shouted. “Look out!”

It turned and suddenly darted away across the land. Brandon craned his neck back. There was no top to it, not that he could see. It was hard to tell how far away it was, whether it was right next to them or a mile away.

It turned again, and darted right toward them. He threw himself on the ground, spreading himself flat. “It’s coming!” he shouted. “Look out!”

Nobody else moved.

There was no place to take cover. He hugged the ground. A few inches in front of his helmet, two grains of sand started to move. They quivered, danced a few steps to the left, made a tiny circle, and then settled down.

Brandon looked up. The rest of the group was looking at him. The tornado was retreating, staggering like a drunkard off toward the horizon.

“It’s a dust devil,” Ryan said gently. “We’ve been seeing them for an hour or so.”

“That one came right over us,” Tana said. “I could feel it when it passed.”

“They’re not dangerous?” Brandon felt incredibly stupid. Dust devils. He had been afraid of a dust devil.

“Don’t think so. Must be a wind of a couple of hundred kilometers an hour, maybe.” Ryan shrugged. “But with the thin atmosphere, it’s no big deal.”

“They’re pretty, though,” Tana said. “Break the monotony.”

What had made it hard to see was the fact that the dust devils were precisely the same shade as the sky, only a tiny bit darker. Now that he knew how to look, they were easy to spot. By the afternoon there were two, sometimes even three dust devils visible at any one time. Brandon wondered if this was natural, or if something was wrong. He could remember that the briefings had talked about dust devils, but were there supposed to be this many? But after his embarrassing dive to cover, he didn’t want to ask.

The radio and the television and the VR stations had all converged at the front of the house. Brandon slipped into the back and quickly changed into Trevor’s favorite orange silk shirt, then put on the turquoise bolo that Trevor had gotten as a gift. Checking in the mirror, he was surprised at how much like Trevor he looked.

“I’m Trevor Whitman,” he said, testing it out. “I’m Trevor Whitman. I am Trevor Whitman.”

It was surprisingly easy to step into Trevor’s place. The instant that the announcement had been made public, Trevor’s life had changed completely, even before he went off to Houston to train. It was a surprise, really, how few people really had to know.

Brandon had been a virgin when the lottery had selected Trevor Whitman as the boy who won the trip to Mars. Not that he would ever possibly have admitted to it. But being the most famous boy in the world has its advantages, and Brandon took them. He could walk into a coffeehouse or a cabaret and say, “I’m Trevor Whitman, I’m going to Mars,” and half a dozen girls would tell him that they found him “fascinating” and wanted to know him better. He figured that if a girl wanted to know him for no other reason than the fact that he was famous, well, that meant that he had every right to take advantage. And he did. The first one, he was nervous, certain that she was going to tell him, hey, you’re too young, you can’t be Trevor Whitman. But after the first few, it was easy.