Geoffrey Landis - Mars Crossing

It didn’t matter now. He had better get back to camp, pronto.

They were going to be mad as hell.

Ryan started the search by climbing to the top of one of the mesa formations nearby. From that height, he could see much farther, but no Brandon.

The dust storm was continuing at full vigor, but the suspended dust barely impeded his visibility. The wind had completely vanished, and there was no trace of motion anywhere to be seen. The sky was flat, as uniform as if it had been spray-painted onto smooth plaster no more than an arm’s length away.

From up here the horizon must be four or five kilometers away, but it was only slightly blurred from the dust. Brandon was nowhere in sight. The countryside was like a maze, Ryan thought. There were almost a hundred of the little mesas in view, and lots of places he couldn’t see. Brandon could be behind any one of them.

He tried the radio again. “Brandon! Come in, Brandon!”

It was impossible that he could be lost. He had an inertial compass. And, if he got completely lost, why didn’t he trigger his emergency beacon?

“Brandon! Report immediately! Brandon!”

For the last hour, Brandon had been thinking, with rising uneasiness, the habitat must be just behind that next butte. No, it’s the next one. The next one.

At last he stopped. It couldn’t be this far. He must have, somehow, walked past it.

Okay, don’t panic.

For the tenth time since realizing that he was due back at the habitat, he scrambled up one of the little buttes and looked around. For miles around, nothing.

Don’t panic, don’t panic.

The dust was like a smooth brick dome over his head, circumscribing the world.

He must have gone too far. It was easy to get confused here. All of the little buttes looked so much alike. He should have paid more attention to the landscape. Don’t panic, it will be okay.

He must have gone right past, somehow missed seeing it. Okay, he wasn’t lost. He’d have to backtrack. He still had his sense of direction. He looked up at the sun, but it was little help, just a slightly brighter patch of sunlight almost directly overhead.

Maybe he should to trigger his emergency beacon, he thought. It wasn’t an emergency, not really, but the others would be worried. If he triggered his beacon it would show them that he was all right.

And it would give them a radio signal to locate him.

No, it wasn’t really an emergency, but it would be prudent to be safe, he thought. They wouldn’t blame him for being cautious, would they? The emergency beacon was mounted at the back of his suit, where his hip pocket would be, if it had a pocket. The thermal battery required that you break a seal, then pull a trigger tab that mixed the chemicals that reacted to power the signal.

He could feel the emergency beacon, right where it was supposed to be, but he couldn’t find the trigger tab. He twisted around to look. The socket that should have held the battery was empty. Don’t panic, don’t panic. Brandon Weber began to run.

They searched all day, fanning out in widening spirals away from the base. Over and over Tana or Estrela saw what they thought were footprints, that on close examination turned out to be just weathered depressions in the rock. The hardpan soil did not take tracks, or if it had, the wind and the gently settling dust had erased them. And dust had settled over everything, erasing contrast, making the rocks almost indistinguishable from the soil or the sky.

After they had searched for a kilometer in every direction from the dome, they searched again, this time more meticulously, checking each notch between rocks, every narrow cleft, every crack, fracture, or ravine where Brandon might be lying injured or unconscious.

He was nowhere to be found.

By nightfall they realized that Brandon was not coming back.

By nightfall Brandon realized he was not going to find his way back.

He had been walking for hours. He remembered running blindly and screaming, only coming to his senses when he tripped over a fracture in the sandstone. His sense of direction, always infallible on Earth, had betrayed him. He had no idea where the others were, one mile away or a hundred, or even whether they had decided he was gone and left without him.

At last, too tired to go on, he climbed to the top of one of the endless maze of buttes. In every direction, nothing but empty Mars. Even the sunset was a disappointment, a slow dimming of the light into brick red haze.

There was a fracture line running down the middle of the butte; one half of it was two feet higher than the other. It made a natural seat. Without any sense of wonder, without even a sense of irony, he reached out and touched it. Embedded in the layered sandstone exposed by the crack, it held a perfectly preserved fossil. It looked like a cluster of shiny black hoses, clumped together at the bottom, branching out into a dozen tentacles at the top. In the same section of rock, he could see others, of every size from tiny ones to one three feet long. There were other fossils too, smaller ones in different shapes, a bewildering variety.

“I name you Mars Life Brandonii,” he said.

There was not much he could do. The suits needed service, he knew. Every night Ryan changed out the oxygen generators. He wasn’t sure quite what was done to make them keep on working, but he knew that the oxygen supply wouldn’t run overnight. He could even remember, with a near-hallucinogenic clarity, the lessons that they had been given about the suit’s life-support systems. The briefing technician had told them that twenty hours was an absolute, complete, do-not-exceed design limit for the suit’s oxygen generation capacity. The technician had chuckled. “Of course, you won’t ever have any reason to put in more than a quarter of that.”

The water recycler had already quit on him, and his throat was dry and hurt like hell.

He was going to die on Mars.

With the geologic hammer that Estrela had given him, he scratched into the stone beside the fossils. It was soft, as easy to carve as soap. BRANDON WEBER WAS HERE, he wrote, and then tried to think of a witty line. He couldn’t. At last he added I DID IT.

It would be his tombstone, he thought. The idea seemed vaguely funny, nothing to be taken seriously. But tombstones need dates, so he added: 2010-2028.

And then, he wrote: SO LONG, STOMPERS.

Brandon Weber sat down, rested against the sandstone ledge, and stared into the dark toward the sunrise he would never live to see.

Estrela had been silent for almost a week. Her throat hurt too much for her to talk. She wanted to say, stop searching, it’s too late, he’s dead. We need go get moving. But she had no voice.

But Ryan was adamant; they wouldn’t abandon one of the crew.

They continued the search the next day.

It was afternoon when Ryan thought he saw something on top of a mesa. It was the same color as the rocks, but the shape was different, and something seemed to be reflecting skylight. One side of the mesa had crumbled away to form an easy ramp to the top. He climbed up to look.

It was Brandon.

“I’ve got him,” he said. “Tana, Estrela, I found him.” They were about five kilometers away from where they had camped. Over the horizon; it was hard to believe that he would have wandered this far. What could he have been thinking?

Tana’s voice over the radio. “Where are you?”

Ryan walked over to the edge and looked around. Estrela and Tana were visible below, only a hundred meters away. “Up above you,” he said. “Look up.”